DISCUSSION THREAD -- OCTOBER 2022 -- 75 Word Writing Challenge

Cat's Cradle said:
ps - @Starbeast, I think I may have won the Challenge right after your win. I still remember your story - it was three individual tales told in 75 words, if I remember correctly, all very funny. One of the ones I'll always remember (am I right, is that the one you won for?). :)
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Yep. I was in another of my silly moods that caused the Muse to visit me, then smooched me with a goofy idea.

I usually enjoy writing a positive and/or funny story. Something lighthearted to hopefully bring a little bit of sunshine to someone. There are times when the claws of darkness grab me with inspiration though.
 
Not sure if anybody understood my story. I wasn't really referencing Swan Lake, but Gothic doubles in general. Folie à deux is a mental illness that is shared between two people, with one developing it after the other. I meant it to be somewhat ambiguous, with both a supernatural interpretation and a psychological one being equally plausible.
 
Thanks all, and yes, I agree with @Victoria Silverwolf that @Daysman deserves equal acclaim. You know it's funny, on my first pass at ranking the entries I didn't even include Daysman's in my top ten, and upon my second reading of it, I thought, why on earth not? It was an excellent story, and quite moving in its plaintive way. But it goes to show that when we vote on these things there is a certain arbitrary element to it, a certain je ne sais quoi - it might be the mood we're in that day, or what we've been reading recently, or something jumps out at you while other, more subtle entries pass beneath one's radar. So we shouldn't get too down when we don't garner the attention we think it deserves - I honestly didn't expect much from my entry, but I enjoyed writing it, and it won. Hey ho.

In any case, thank you to @The Judge, @paranoid marvin, @JS Wiig and @Mon0Zer0 for their votes in the first round. You shall all be rewarded with shiny brand new shovels with which to excavate your loved ones and dance with them in the pale moonlight.

Ah yes, my story. I don't know if anyone noticed but I was unashamedly channelling Wuthering Heights, which @Phyrebrat convinced me to finally read earlier this year, and it really is one of the weirdest, most Gothic things ever. If you don't go in for the literary stuff, then perhaps you'd prefer my references to this.

Anyway, thanks all!
 
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Congrats @Dan Jones and worthy runner up in @Daysman.

I went back in literary history for mine. The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole from 1764 is regarded as the first gothic novel. I wanted to try and write a sort of modern echo of that, which failed. So I just nicked the names for the cat and the house. Anyone who has cats know how they often see and catch things that aren't there. Personally, I think they are doing it to spook us.
 
Congratulations, Dan! Commiserations, Daysman!

I'd had half an idea for this one, with a ship sailing into Whitby harbour in the dark of night (Whitby, of course, being the landing place of Count Dracula) but I couldn't get it to cohere, so in the end I sat this one out. I was pushed for time the other night, so didn't get around to making a shortlist, but if I had Daysman and Phyrebrat would have been included in it.
 
Congrats @Dan Jones!

A bit of the inspiration for my entry this month, for the classic metal fans out there:

 
Congratulations @Dan Jones.

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My poem was not inspired by anything so much as an ambition to paint a word picture of the evil that night symbolizes and the hope that comes with the light. --- I was very happy with my two votes and several mentions. It makes me think that I succeeded at least a bit.
 
The "inspiration"** for my story (if one can call it that) was something that happened a few hours before I wrote my entry: seeing a silver birch log that looked completely white (indeed, a rather unnatural-looking white) as I first approached it in the local nature reserve a few minutes walk from where I live. It was a rather odd experience.

As I got closer, and so began looking at it from an increasingly different angle, the cut wood "magically" returned to looking as it normally would (dark and soggy).


** - I was tempted to include "(based on a real event)" as a sub-title.
 
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