Community icon courtesy of Brumeier

Every October a writing community I belong to on Dreamwidth runs a monsterfest. The mods give a number of prompts and the members can write to those, rec appropriate things they’ve read or watched or just discuss the monster/legend in question. All the prompts concern fantasy creatures of one kind or another.

I don’t always write but this year I did and my contributions – all short ficlets – are now on AO3. At least one will be expanded and turned into a novella (or even a novel) eventually.

I find writing drabbles and ficlets to prompts a very good writing exercise. Everything has to be finished quickly, must stand alone and should be accessible to readers with no prior in-depth knowledge of the topic. That’s harder to achieve than it sounds.

Some members write fanfic responses. All mine are inspired by various fandoms but are not specific. The pieces reference well known legends, and none contain any sex or violence. The last paragraph leads back here, to the short story I gave you for Halloween.

So here’s the link for anyone who’s interested.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/35085676

You can follow the link to my contribution but if you like monsters I suggest you also check out the collection because there are a lot of good stories there from this and previous years.

https://archiveofourown.org/collections/Shoobie_Monster_Fest