Moonlight Musings: the Interactive Edition, #3

Change storms in, grabs life by the ankles, and drops it on its head. When feeling extra spiteful, change steals everything we know and love, and leaves us in an empty room feeling lost (and often screaming).

But there are times, when the change that wrecks the world gives us a reason to rearrange (redecorate?) our living, when finding ourselves holding empty hands pushes us to fill them (with all kinds of wonderful).

For our 3^rd, and last, Interactive Moonlight Musings, I invite you to write an article (in 369 words or fewer) inspired by the Positive Side of Change.

Since we’re speaking of change, we should change something. So, if your muse is in no mood for article writing, do feel free to respond to this prompt with a story or poem.

photo by Ramiro Martinez, on Unsplash

a couple of wee notes :

- Starting November 3^rd, Sanaa and I (Magaly) will be hosting on Sundays. These features shall remain unprompted, but participants will be able to link poetry or prose (stories, essays, articles).

- As mentioned above, there will be no more interactive musings (aka Friday prompts). However, we will continue to have Friday features. Next week, our Sherry will delight us with another episode of “I Wish I’d Written This”.

Please, add the direct link to your new article, story, or poem. Visit other writers. And react to their positive-change-inspired words.

Moonlight Musings: the Interactive Edition, #2

Our last interactive Moonlight Musings was all about negative criticism. This month, we shall trek into the tricky realm of “That’s Not What I Meant”. Or, those times when readers interpret our writings in unexpected (peculiar, bewildering, enlightening,  and even humorous) ways which have very little to do with what we intended to convey.

Let’s write articles about misread words that conjure hysterical interpretations, about grammatical errors (horrors?) which change the meaning of a piece, about descriptions (which we thought brilliant) that end up filling our readers’ minds with images we can hardly recognize.

I particularly would love to read about how you, dear word lover, handle this sort of situation. Do you get irritated? Do you pretend that it isn’t happening? Do you laugh until your rib cage hurts?

Our new articles—written in prose—should be 369 words or fewer.

Add the direct link to your contribution to Mr. Linky. Visit other writers. And if you can, have fun (goodness knows the world needs more of that).

 

the face I make when I’m trying to figure out why (and how) a reader could see something in my writing, which I can’t even begin to glimpse

via

Moonlight Musings: the Interactive Edition, #1

Greetings, word lovers. For quite some time, Poets United has offered Wednesday and Sunday prompts. That won’t change. We’ll just have a 3^rd prompt on the 3^rd Friday of every month, too. I hope we can use it to explore writing, reading, books, publishing... I wish us to share thoughts on the art, the craft, the magic (and business) of words.

The idea for this prompt came to me after an exchange on Instagram, about the following elfchen:

Hard

times turn

into easy grinning,

when love shows itself

thoughtful.

Through the comments, you can see that many people enjoyed it and found they could relate. Someone liked it so much that they reposted it. In the repost, someone else commented, “Sounds like a pipe dream… If I only could not choke on the smoke!”

Some of my Instagram friends were beyond outraged. They messaged me to show their support. One of my friends was so upset, that she informed me she was ready to “open a cyber-can of woopass”. I asked her to lower the can opener, and to let me deal with the issue. I did. The commenter’s attitude towards the poem changed, but the hostility didn’t decrease much—bitter people often stay bitter, methinks.

After my friend read the whole exchange, she asked, “How can you be so calm about this? They insulted your writing, belittled your relationship… And you didn’t even correct them!” My friend’s reaction made me wish for a place where I could discuss these sorts of topics with other writers and readers. And out of those thoughts, the Moonlight Musings: Interactive Edition was born.

I summarized my response to my (feisty) friend, in this poem:

So, for our 1^st Moonlight Musings: the Interactive Edition, I invite you to write a short article (in 369 words or fewer), which explores negative criticism. 

Add the direct link to your article to Mr. Linky. Visit other writers, read their thoughts. Let us critique each other’s words, constructively.

Please remember that this is a prose prompt, in article or essay format. Links to poems and short stories will be removed. We can get creative with it, even use quotes from our own work to make a point (as I did with the prompt itself), but our responses should be in article or essay form. Thank you!