🌊This post is part of this year’s ongoing depth study 🧩This post explores the definition of depth as the middle of a time
The Middle of a Time by Maria L. Berg 2025
This year’s depth study is coming to a close, but there are still some definitions I want to look at. One that I find fascinating is “the middle of a time.” For some reason the examples I’ve found use the plural of depth such as: the depths of winter, the depths of the depression, etc. And though we are past the middle of the year, when it comes to this study, I would say we are in the depths of depth.
While contemplating depth and its relationship to time I came across several interesting concepts: Deep Time, Time-depth, and Time Depth. Let’s take a look at each.
Deep Time is the vastness of geological time. It spans billions of years which is hard for humans to grasp due to our short existence in comparison. PBS has a video called Time: It’s Like, So Deep that talks about how to teach deep time to young students. I also found this interesting article: The benefits of deep time thinking by Richard Fisher for the BBC which includes three short films by Adam Proctor.
In geophysics, a time-depth conversion takes sound-wave velocity (time) data and converts it to depth. Sound waves move through different substances at different speeds. The conversion uses velocity models to account for variations in the speed of the waves. Understanding Time-Depth Conversion (from Seisware)
In oceanography, time-depth plots show salinity, density, temperature, and currents at a certain depth over time. Time-Depth Gridding (from NOAA)
Time Depth
In Merriam Webster, Time Depth is defined as: a period of time during which a culture, language, or group of languages has been undergoing independent genetic development.
Historical linguistics uses comparative methods of sound, shared core vocabulary, and typological features to trace languages through time.
Writober 2025: Day Thirty-one Halloween>Response Post
🔗Links in the Table of Contents are Jump links to my responses to each of the challenges 🐦⬛This is original work created by Maria L. Berg and this post counts as copyright. All rights reserved.
These are my responses to the prompt post for Day 31 of Writober: Happy Halloween
It’s the end of another Writober. Congratulations to everyone who participated. This month has been quite a journey. Thank you for sharing your poems, stories, and pictures. I enjoyed them all. What a great way to share the Halloween Spirit.
Now for my final creations to send you off into this Halloween Night.
OctPoWriMo
Halloween Lives (in the squirrels)
Tonight the streets will fill with monsters each mask coloring history’s sins: impostors begging and threatening where the unknown wanders under porchlights’ glow
After each of our fears embodied comes alive we’re sorted into those who thrive and who hide As the hours slip through darker things show darker sides treats run out, leaving tricksters
But true demons aren’t the eggers or armed with toilet paper not even the goblins that smash the pumpkins are as depraved as the one that returns day after day and nibbles and scrapes at a jack-o-lanterns face
Writober Flash Fiction Challenge
Muddy Footprints
Beatrice was so sick of the gardener coming in the house and muddying up her clean floors. He seemed to think his work was more important, and she could just rewash the floors, as if her efforts and time had no value. Her frustration and anger grew every single day. Even during a drought he managed to have mud on his shoes, and from the smell it wasn’t always only mud. The man was a menace.
The ghost of the lady of the house had been coming to the end of her bed at night. She had always liked the lady of the house. Her sudden disappearance had been explained as a mishap, a fall from the cliff where she liked to walk to clear her mind. But the nightly visitations had convinced Beatrice that there may have been foul play.
Beatrice shared her frustrations with the mistress who nodded, but she was always nodding. Her head appeared to be almost severed from the back, but Beatrice ignored that and took the nodding as commiseration.
On Halloween when the veil was thinnest between the worlds of the living and the dead, Beatrice saw the mistress in the glass of the door as she mopped the floor. The gardener must not have seen her. He appeared to walk right through her as he stomped into the room, but he only made a couple muddy steps before his eyes went wide; he gasped and grabbed his chest then fell flat on his face on her shiny, clean floor.
Beatrice smiled and clapped a couple of times, she hummed a tune she had never heard before as she went to work making it look like he tripped and hit his head. The floor was wet, she had been mopping, after all, and he never watched his step.
Halloween Photography Challenge
For today’s photographs I wanted to revisit a couple of the filters I cut this month that I really enjoyed.
🔗Post contains Amazon associate links (shown with Aal in parentheses) 🔗Links in the Table of Contents are Jump links to each of the challenges to navigate easily to the prompt of your interest: OctPoWriMo for poetry; Writober Flash Fiction for flash fiction; Halloween Photography Challenge for photography 🐦⬛Example poems are copied here for educational purposes. 🖼️I made these banners from my photos and free for commercial use fonts. Feel free to use them in your posts.
And another Writober has come to an end. I hope these daily writing and photography challenges have gotten you into a daily creativity habit that you will continue into the fall and winter. The prompt posts will continue to be available so come back any time to visit the ones you missed, or want to try again.
As humans we all move toward pleasure and away from pain. It is part of our physical make up to be motivated by survival and avoid danger and death. So when it comes to exploring our deepest fears, we are working against our nature. If we want to write deeply and explore our deepest fears, we need to convince ourselves we are safe, and that memories and imagination cannot hurt us.
We need to tell the voices from childhood that make up the reactionary rules of our subconscious, that we thank them for the work they did to protect us when we needed them, but now we don’t need them anymore. Writing is about living with our deepest fears every day. Facing our deepest fears doesn’t end on Halloween but is part of our writing practice with every word we choose to put on the page.
OctPoWriMo
Here we are, Halloween. Congratulations!! I hope you’ve felt inspired and had a lot of fun.
Standing above her open coffin, within that pestilent place, he stared at her colorless corpse and stared at her lovely face.
Sensing a sense of accusation, “Leave us alone,” he said, and the others left the mausoleum and left him with the dead.
He placed his hand at the top of her gown and broke the clasps apart, staring down at the purple scar above her silent heart.
Then he bolted the lid, locked the door, and saw in the lightning’s light three ghouls who craved her rotting flesh in the blackness of the night.
Maggots who dig up and eat the dead in the pits of no-man’s-land, who scented the scent of the newly-dead, who lunged and scratched his hand.
But he smashed them back with his walking stick, and they staggered from the shock, then slithered away from the dead one’s tomb, as he double-checked the lock.
But waiting near the graveyard gate, under the hemlock tree, a seductive vampyr smiled and said, “Come away with me.”
He saw the fangs and famished eyes of the tempting whore of pain, who swiftly moved into his path and touched his jugular vein.
But he lifted a hand of garlic flowers, and the creature jerked and hissed into the winds of the coming storm and vanished in the mist.
At the edge of town, he saw the monster nearing the torch-lit gate, looking for its human god, looking for its mate.
Enraged by the thunder’s thunder, it stepped away from its place, but calmly he grabbed the flaming torch and burned its ugly face.
Later he heard the werewolves howl, up along the ridge, as suddenly they blocked his path before the wooden bridge.
Ravenous, they moved to strike, but it was far too late; he lifted up a silver bullet, then his .38.
He fired at the alpha-wolf, hitting the vicious gray and blowing apart its little brain as the others ran away.
Nearing his gate, he saw the daemon, but never broke his stride, and when it saw his hollow eyes, it nodded, and stepped aside.
At last, the storm fell from the night, as he entered the house of pain, it fell in torrents, flashed and crashed, and pounded sheets of rain.
Upstairs he found the silent ghost sitting alone, undressed, with the sharp and bloodless knife protruding from her chest.
Being the one he’d just entombed, his daughter, the jilted bride, who’d come back home to nothing but a shocking suicide.
The specter pointed at her heart, but he stared across the room, into the mirror, into his eyes, each an empty tomb.
No wonder the creatures had cowered away, and surely they were right, those predators of human flesh, those vermin of the night.
For they could only murder the body, the part but not the whole, but he was a far more deadly thing: the assassin of his soul.
The storm fell down from the blackest night, over the house of pain, the torrents flashed and thunder-crashed and pounded the slashing rain.
~William Baer
Prompt: Write a narrative poem about a Halloween Night.
Possible Form: Quatrain stanzas with an XAXA rhyme scheme, or Freeverse.
Click on the link and take a look at the image. How might this image relate to today’s theme? Write a piece of flash fiction, anything from a six-word story to 999 words. Feel free to bring in the OctPoWriMo prompt and the Photography Challenge prompt, anything that inspires your story.
Halloween Photography Challenge
Prompt: Take a picture of your favorite thing about Halloween.
Thank you so much for joining me for this year’s October challenges. Remember to support each other by visiting and commenting on as many links as you can.
If you enjoy these posts and the work I do here, please head to my buymeacoffee page and show your support! Thank you so much. Every bit helps keep this site going.
Writober 2025: Day Thirty Eldritch Horror>Response Post
🔗Links in the Table of Contents are Jump links to my responses to each of the challenges 🐦⬛This is original work created by Maria L. Berg and this post counts as copyright. All rights reserved.
These are my responses to the prompt post for Day 30 of Writober: Fear From Out of Space
OctPoWriMo
The Slip Over the Edge
Tentacles of multi- dimensional reach ancient elusive dark where time and space tear the explorer must mind his mind or find it lost in eternal spirals of deepening madness helpless solitary lost the logical in battle with the illogical the known engulfed by the unknowable recruiting the possible to convince the masses of the impossible amoral unfeeling giant the senses are use- less when encountering the incomprehensible slithering around the cranial folds while in deep space and occupying an island only discovered by the shipwrecked
Writober Flash Fiction Challenge
Fear Feeders
The car stopped suddenly and our neighbor screamed, “Get out! Get out now!” Perry and I were so confused we just looked at each other. Our neighbor got out of the car which he left running, grabbed our bags out of the trunk and threw them in the ditch under a sign that said, “Don’t Feed the Fears,” on a post of a barbed-wire fence around a dead and dried up field. The pastel lights danced in the sky over the field, touching down then rising again.
We got out and fetched our bags. “How would you even feed a fear?” I yelled after our neighbor as he drove off at high speed. Once he was out of sight we looked at each other. “Why did he do that, Perry?”
“I don’t know. It must have been the fears. What are we going to do?”
“What if no one else comes along? This place looks completely deserted. There’s nothing out here.”
“What if we can’t find any food or water?”
“What if the fears are everywhere, and there’s nowhere to go?”
With each question the lights got brighter and closer.
“Perry, I’m scared.”
“Me, too.” Perry pulled his sunglasses from his bag.
“Dang, I forgot mine. I’m afraid I’m going to go blind. Why is the light getting so bright? Do you hear it whispering? Perry? Perry? Where are you?”
Halloween Photography Challenge
For today’s photographs I decided to finish yesterday’s idea: I finished cutting the third filter, then cut all three filters in three moveable sections then folded and combined them in different ways until I came up with an eldritch horror that would cause madness if ever encountered.
🔗Post contains Amazon associate links (shown with Aal in parentheses) 🔗Links in the Table of Contents are Jump links to each of the challenges to navigate easily to the prompt of your interest: OctPoWriMo for poetry; Writober Flash Fiction for flash fiction; Halloween Photography Challenge for photography 🐦⬛Example poems are copied here for educational purposes. 🖼️I made these banners from my photos and free for commercial use fonts. Feel free to use them in your posts.
“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy” ~William Shakespeare Hamlet(Aal)(Act 1, Scene 5)
Our deepest fear, after we have faced every fear and conquered or made friends with it, is one that we can never know. That is why poetry is never dead no matter what anyone says, there is always something more to explore that cannot be answered. We can say that fear is what happens to our thinking mind that defines us after we die, or it can be what is going on in all the simultaneous dimensions we aren’t experiencing, or it can be the ever present question, Do we have free will? What it all adds up to is The unknown.
Though in Lovecraftian horror these creatures from the unknown cause madness in their witnesses, as writers we see the unknown as the playground of the imagination. Yes, write what you know in terms of exploring sensory details and imagery. Then use those specific details of experience to describe the surprising or even the impossible. Compare and contrast known sensory experiences with those life-changing events that can’t be explained. Take the leap from the daily mundane that everyone can relate to, to those fantastic moments that we can barely believe happened even though we experienced them.
This year, James Wyman of Burlington Writers Workshop is offering a poetry 101 course, for free. When he sent out the syllabus he recommended we read Perrine’s Sound and Sense(Aal). It’s a wonderful, intense “Introduction to Poetry,” and I wish I had read it years ago. The title is from a poem called Sound and Sense by Alexander Pope.
A poet has a full tool box to for commanding the sounds of language to imbue each line with mystery and emotion. The work of the poet is to use these tools to match sound and sense: to make the poem sing with its meaning.
The oaks shone gaunt gold on the lip of the storm before the wind rose, the shapeless mouth opened and began its five-hour howl; the lights went out fast, branches sidled over the pitch of the roof, bounced into the yard that grew black within mintes, except for the lightning—the landscape bulging forth like a quick lesson in creation, then thudding away. Inside, as always, it was hard to tell fear from excitement: how sensal the lightning’s poured stroke! and still, what a fire and a risk! As always the body wants to hide, wants to flow toward it—strives to balance while fear shouts, excitement shouts, back and forth—each bolt a burning river tearing like escape through the dark field of the other.
~Mary Oliver
How do the sounds of these words in these lines convey the meaning of the poem?
Prompt: Think of the onset of a specific fear. Write a poem using short, punchy phrases to express the immediacy and speed for which we feel fear.
Click on the link and take a look at the image. How might this image relate to today’s theme? Write a piece of flash fiction, anything from a six-word story to 999 words. Feel free to bring in the OctPoWriMo prompt and the Photography Challenge prompt, anything that inspires your story.
Halloween Photography Challenge
Thank you so much for joining me for this year’s October challenges. Remember to support each other by visiting and commenting on as many links as you can as we explore our Deepest Fears in anticipation of Halloween.
If you enjoy these posts and the work I do here, please head to my buymeacoffee page and show your support! Thank you so much. Every bit helps keep this site going.
Writober 2025: Day Twenty-nine Other-worldly>Response Post
🔗Links in the Table of Contents are Jump links to my responses to each of the challenges 🐦⬛This is original work created by Maria L. Berg and this post counts as copyright. All rights reserved.
These are my responses to the prompt post for Day 29 of Writober: Other-worldly Monsters
OctPoWriMo
Codependency
What good is gravity when at any time a bright light be it blue, eerie green, or white can shine down from over our beds or through the trees in a dark wood or over a lonely mountain road and it, gravity, has no power at all to hold our bodies to the earth doesn’t put up a bit of fight against the beam of light collapses in awe of the other-worldly and lets it, the beam, suck us up into the hull of some far-traveling, hovering object semi-disguised as a cumulus cloud until it reveals itself and strikes? And why so rude, really, these travelers completely disrespecting our gravity that perhaps we take for granted but in a cozy, familiar, loving way most of the time: I mean, we need it like we need clean water . . . Well, maybe not the best example Probably why the travelers come: they either want our water, or want to warn us that polluting our water is leading to global destruction. Either way they’re going to be disappointed. Seems like a waste of time and resources to travel to distant planets and disrespect their planetary forces to abduct and scold random people. But it does beg the question: Is this relationship with gravity misplaced energy that will only lead to heartbreak?
Writober Flash Fiction Challenge
Gravity’s Mistress
At this point Sharon wished she had never created an anti-gravity machine. The university had sold it to the highest bidder which was a tech giant that sold it as a mass-market gizmo: a toy for the rich and famous. And of course, with all the money from the sale, the university now attracted the brats of the rich and famous. Without fail, during her office hours she would end up floating around her office with her books and papers fluttering about mid-air while some snickering undergrad with gravity boots looked up her skirt. Why did she keep wearing dresses to work? They called to her when she shopped. She liked lace and frills. She liked to feel pretty. And shopping was about the only thing that kept her mind off of her regrets.
Halloween Photography Challenge
For today’s photos I started out thinking about the exquisite corpse game and making filters that could intertwine, but ended up thinking about what might evolve on other planets and came up with these other-worldly ideas.
🔗Post contains Amazon associate links (shown with Aal in parentheses) 🔗Links in the Table of Contents are Jump links to each of the challenges to navigate easily to the prompt of your interest: OctPoWriMo for poetry; Writober Flash Fiction for flash fiction; Halloween Photography Challenge for photography 🐦⬛Example poems are copied here for educational purposes. 🖼️I made these banners from my photos and free for commercial use fonts. Feel free to use them in your posts.
Space aliens are fear of the unknown, creatures with more intelligence, different intelligence, better than us, more progressed than us evolutionarily and technically, a combination of giant insect, mermaids, were-creatures, future tech, etc. Fear of aliens has also mashed up with religious fears: what if angels and demons were actually visits from aliens? What if the first humans were actually aliens, or created by aliens. What if all life on Earth was seeded by aliens? Ideas of alien life are the ultimate game of What if and what if, but why, in our stories are visiting aliens usually out to kill us. They either want to eat us, steal our planet and enslave us, or both?
Many say as writers we are the god of the worlds we create. Even if we are not writing sci-fi or fantasy, we create the life in our stories, we create the nature, the relationships, the stumbling blocks, the impossible choices, everything. We create the fears and what effects those fears have.
If you read a lot of older poetry, you may notice that many poems didn’t have titles, only numbers, or were the same as the first or last line. These days, titles are expected to not only grab a reader’s attention, they are expected to do work. How does a title do work? A title may:
Orient the reader: in space and time, or introduce the character or speaker and what they’re doing
Allude to a story or myth
Set the tone
Offer interpretive framework
Create a Striking Contrast
Provide a revelation about what the poem is about that the reader won’t understand until they’ve read the poem
With all these ideas in mind, after you write your poem, don’t just throw your first idea for a title at the top. List as many possible titles as you can think of and go for the one that makes the reader re-read the title, say “Aha”, and want to read the poem again.
Example poem: “The Abduction” by Stanley Kunitz from Poets.org
The Abduction
Some things I do not profess to understand, perhaps not wanting to, including whatever it was they did with you or you with them that timeless summer day when you stumbled out of the wood, distracted, with your white blouse torn and a bloodstain on your skirt. “Do you believe?” you asked. Between us, through the years, we pieced enough together to make the story real: how you encountered on the path a pack of sleek, grey hounds, trailed by a dumbshow retinue in leather shrouds; and how you were led, through leafy ways, into the presence of a royal stag, flaming in his chestnut coat, who kneeled on a swale of moss before you; and how you were borne aloft in triumph through the green, stretched on his rack of budding horn, till suddenly you found yourself alone in a trampled clearing.
That was a long time ago, almost another age, but even now, when I hold you in my arms, I wonder where you are. Sometimes I wake to hear the engines of the night thrumming outside the east bay window on the lawn spreading to the rose garden. You lie beside me in elegant repose, a hint of transport hovering on your lips, indifferent to the harsh green flares that swivel through the room, searchlights controlled by unseen hands. Out there is a childhood country, bleached faces peering in with coals for eyes. Our lives are spinning out from world to world; the shapes of things are shifting in the wind. What do we know beyond the rapture and the dread? ~Stanley Kunitz
What work is the title doing for this poem? Without the title, would you have understood the poem differently?
Prompt: Write a poem about hearing someone else’s monster encounter. Do you believe them? Or just play along? What convinces you, or doesn’t? End the poem with an open-ended question?
Click on the link and take a look at the image. How might this image relate to today’s theme? Write a piece of flash fiction, anything from a six-word story to 999 words. Feel free to bring in the OctPoWriMo prompt and the Photography Challenge prompt, anything that inspires your story.
Halloween Photography Challenge
Thank you so much for joining me for this year’s October challenges. Remember to support each other by visiting and commenting on as many links as you can as we explore our Deepest Fears in anticipation of Halloween.
If you enjoy these posts and the work I do here, please head to my buymeacoffee page and show your support! Thank you so much. Every bit helps keep this site going.
Writober 2025: Day Twenty-eight Golems>Response Post
🔗Links in the Table of Contents are Jump links to my responses to each of the challenges 🐦⬛This is original work created by Maria L. Berg and this post counts as copyright. All rights reserved.
These are my responses to the prompt post for Day 28 of Writober: The Monsters We Make
OctPoWriMo
The Poetics prompt at dVerse Poets Pub is to start the poem with a line from a list of lines from horror films. I chose the line from Psycho (1960).
Monster on a Mission
We all go a little mad sometimes
How else could I explain the monster I made? I didn’t have any clay so I started with muck from the drain
then added from gathered recycling cardboard, glass jars, cans and things held the body together with fabric and string then filled it with ire until it could sing
We all go a little mad sometimes
With the magic symbols held in his mouth he mindlessly stomped all over town hunting down liars and breakers of vows finally going around to their house
Where he sat with them silently making them nervous, denying them privacy but not being curious. He’d gesture violently if they tried to leave, and eventually they didn’t get up from their sleep.
We all go a little mad sometimes or so Norman says, but it doesn’t help when a giant garbage monster messes with your head.
Writober Flash Fiction Challenge
Revenge on a Sleep Walker
Brandon was no stranger to sleep walking. He felt quite helpless when he woke up in just his boxers in his neighbor’s back garden, or on his own front stoop. That’s why he installed alarms on all the doors, and all his locks needed keys even on the inside. So imagine his surprise when he woke up, standing in his living room, surrounded by every glass he had, carefully spaced on the floor, with no furniture in sight except his empty hutch against the wall. How had he not kicked over any of the glasses, stepped on any of them? He felt so lucky and yet, thoroughly confused.
The room smelled earthy, like silt from a stream. He suddenly remembered he had been dreaming he was playing along a stream, poking a stick at a fish that kept swimming off but coming back. He had seen something sparkle in the water and thought he had found gold. He was sure he was going to be rich, but then the fish swallowed the nugget, so he was about to drop a large stone on the fish when he woke up downstairs in his empty living room, surrounded by glasses.
He had stolen every glass in his house from his neighbors over the years. At first it had been an accident, walking home with someone’s glass, but then he started looking for matching glassware, or something that caught his eye that would look nice with his other glassware.
He squatted down and looked closer at the glasses. There were gray smudges of finger pads, but no fingerprints on every single one. Most of the smudges were along the rims, some on the base of the stems. Who could do this? Then he saw the streak of clay on the wall under the window. He looked around the room, but the crystal goblets were gone. He knew they had been a risk, a family heirloom or something, but they were so sparkly. He had never imagined Rachel would send a golem.
Halloween Photography Challenge
For today’s photos I wanted to continue trying to build my monster from yesterday’s stone cutting. I had imagined the stone having moss on it, so I played with the Partial Color filter in my camera set to green.
🔗Post contains Amazon associate links (shown with Aal in parentheses) 🔗Links in the Table of Contents are Jump links to each of the challenges to navigate easily to the prompt of your interest: OctPoWriMo for poetry; Writober Flash Fiction for flash fiction; Halloween Photography Challenge for photography 🐦⬛Example poems are copied here for educational purposes. 🖼️I made these banners from my photos and free for commercial use fonts. Feel free to use them in your posts.
A golem is a giant humanoid made from clay, imbued with life, and sent on a mission of revenge. The golem is about needing a monster for personal power when we feel helpless.
As writers we can create a golem or persona to give us the power to fight our fears and write things that we may be afraid to write.
Create a persona: When facing fears in our writing, it may be easier to create a persona, an imagined person, not ourselves, someone braver, stronger, more daring that’s doing the writing. What does that person look like? Smell like? Do you have a piece of clothing or a perfume/cologne you could wear to help you become the persona when you want to be more daring in your writing?
Here’s an image I created of my persona:
She’s wild, free, and not afraid of anything. What does your persona look like? You might want to create an image and put it in your writing space. Some writers name their persona and use it as a nom de plume or alias.
OctPoWriMo
We’re getting close to the end of this wonderful journey. We’ve explored sensory detail, gone deeper connecting sensory detail with personal thought and memory, and then deeper connecting sensory detail with personal thought and memory and universal themes and symbolism. So today, let your persona take you even deeper, freeing you to explore the fears you’ve been avoiding. Let him or her sit with the discomfort and free you to write what you see, feel, want or don’t want. Let her or him ask the deep questions that you haven’t yet felt safe to ask.
Example Poem: “Neurotics” by Philip Larkin from Collected Poems(Aal)
Neurotics
No one gives you a thought, as day by day You drag your feet, clay-thick with misery. None think how stalemate in you grinds away, Holding your spinning wheels an inch too high To bite on earth. The mind, it’s said, is free But not your minds. They, rusted stiff, admit Only what will accuse or horrify, Like slot-machines only bent pennies fit.
So year by year your tense unfinished faces Sink further from the light. No one pretends To want to help you now For interest passes Always towards the young and more insistent, And skirts locked rooms where a hired darkness ends Your long defense against the non-existent.
~Philip Larkin
Prompt: Sculpt a protector with your words. What does it look like? Send it out to fight a fear, to get your revenge.
Click on the link and take a look at the image. How might this image relate to today’s theme? Write a piece of flash fiction, anything from a six-word story to 999 words. Feel free to bring in the OctPoWriMo prompt and the Photography Challenge prompt, anything that inspires your story.
Halloween Photography Challenge
Thank you so much for joining me for this year’s October challenges. Remember to support each other by visiting and commenting on as many links as you can as we explore our Deepest Fears in anticipation of Halloween.
If you enjoy these posts and the work I do here, please head to my buymeacoffee page and show your support! Thank you so much. Every bit helps keep this site going.
Writober 2025: Day Twenty-seven Giants>Response Post
🔗Links in the Table of Contents are Jump links to my responses to each of the challenges 🐦⬛This is original work created by Maria L. Berg and this post counts as copyright. All rights reserved.
These are my responses to the prompt post for Day 27 of Writober: Too Big To Fail
OctPoWriMo
Each Step
Is this pain, tearing and ripping, death’s clawed hand, and why does he linger in daily torture, sometimes merely poking, letting hope in for moments only to gnaw at me more the next hour?
Pain slurps up creative juice and spits it into oily sludge. It grows like a giant roused from decades of slumber, a mountain quaking the whole earth. With every step the known world erodes.
Writober Flash Fiction Challenge
Complete Anonymity
In this troll farm, anonymity is key. Each of us was issued a different animal mask before we arrived, and we could never take it off. We worked at our computers with them on, we ate meals together with them on, we slept in our dormitory with them on. We were known by our animal identity only, and though we might post on social media as John, Jane, Laura, and Patriot, away from the screen we were Pigeon, Squirrel, Owl, Pig, etc. Most people couldn’t take it for long. We had a high turnover, and strangely, the masks were not reused. There were always new animals appearing and others just disappeared.
Pig and I had been here the longest when Tiger and Fox arrived on the same day. They typed with mad speed, writing especially vicious comments that could have even convinced me they were real. At dinner, conversation lulled more than usual. I noticed neither Tiger nor Fox ate what was provided, they only pushed their meals around on the plate. I had never thought of our masks in terms of predators and prey before, but from the tension in the room, I think that was on a lot of people minds tonight. I don’t think there had been any other distinctly predator masks since I had taken the job as a full-time troll.
That night, when the lights went out, I distinctly heard a raspy voice say, “Yum. Yum.” Then the screaming started.
Halloween Photography Challenge
For today’s photos I cut a paper inspired by a picture of a large stone in the Seattle Japanese Garden. I wanted the layering and overlap of the stone shape to reveal a troll or giant. I think the photo below came close to my intention.
Experience Writing 