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Weekly Wonderings - W 3 Entries

Check out this week's entries and vote for your favorite!

Good morning 🙂 Here are this week’s entries. Check them out and vote for your favorite using the poll below! Kid Stuff by Bill Engleson“Pass the salt, will ya?” he asked from one table over. I gave him a quick glance, saw no condiments on his table, and handed him the shaker.”“Thanks, buddy. Service here ‘s been goin’ downhill for weeks…”“So,” I said, “You’re a regular…”“Nah. First time…

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Weekly Wonderings - Week 3

Another week, another prompt!

Another week, another prompt! The Rules: Responses must be between 150 and 500 words. Responses (or links if you post on your own blog) must be left in the comments of this post and include the word count. Feel free to drop your social media handles/anything you want to promote as well! Deadline is Tuesday at 11:59PM Eastern. I’ll consolidate the responses in another post on Wednesday…

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Fan Favorite Friday - Week 2

Happy Friday! Shout out to everyone who has shared and participated in our Weekly Wonderings Writing Prompt! You guys are the best 🙂 This week’s poll was a tie, so I’m tasked with being the tie-breaker vote. So, the winner is… Cat’s The Pajama Excerpt by David A Ludwig! Cat's The Pajamas Excerpt by David A Ludwig (@davidaludwig.bsky.social)Melody Fayth appreciated having her own cell. It was…

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Weekly Wonderings - W 2 Entries

Check out this week's entries and vote for your favorite!

Good morning 🙂 Here are this week’s entries. Check them out and vote for your favorite using the poll below! It Was the River by Bill EnglesonNow, as time was slipping away, as he had always expected it would, even when, as a younger man, there was still plenty of it to look forward to, when the options of youth, his youth, were still shiny bright, he had sensed the limitations.Not his…

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most important part of the writing process actually is when you loop a single song on max volume and stare at the word document and imagine the characters doing things for 14 hours. this is known as getting in the zone

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Weekly Wonderings - Week 2

Another week, another prompt!

Another week, another prompt! The Rules: Responses must be between 150 and 500 words. Responses (or links if you post on your own blog) must be left in the comments of this post and include the word count. Feel free to drop your social media handles/anything you want to promote as well! Deadline is Tuesday at 11:59PM Eastern. I’ll consolidate the responses in another post on Wednesday…

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In the midst of war, stories are born—some from the noise of bombs 💥 and cries of fear 😱, others from a mother’s tears 😭 as she watches her children , not

only from the dangers of weapons 💣 but from hunger 🍞 and disease 🤒.💔🌧️

In a small neighborhood in Gaza 🏘️, I live with my four children: Qusay, Jouri, Mohammed, and Adam. Poverty and hunger aren’t the only wounds in our lives; there’s another wound that burdens me and deepens our suffering. It’s the skin disease 🦠 that has affected me and my children, making each day feel like a new punishment ⚖️ added to a long list imposed by the harsh realities of war. I see the effects of the disease on my children; I see their innocent eyes 👀, weary from tears and pain 😢, their small, thin bodies 👦🏻👧🏻 weakened by malnutrition 🍲, and the innocence that is slowly vanishing under life’s cruelty.😞🩹🍞💔

Our suffering isn’t simple. War has shut the doors 🚪 of hope in my face. Many times, I’ve tried to find treatment for my children 🏥, but each time, war’s hand ✋ reaches out to deny us even the dream of good health 🛑. My heart 💔 aches as I look at them, feeling helpless 😔—an emotion I had never known before.

Qusay, my eldest at twelve 👦🏼, is a determined boy. He loves studying 📚 and dreams of becoming a doctor 👨‍⚕️ to one day relieve children from the pain he witnesses daily. But like all of us, he’s been caught in the clutches of war. He can’t even attend school 🏫 regularly and doesn’t feel safe in our small home 🏠.📚🏫💭

As for Jouri, my seven-year-old daughter 👧🏼, she doesn’t understand what war means, but she knows her days aren’t like other children’s. She feels pain when she looks at her small hands 🤲, irritated and itchy, and when she asks me why she’s hurting, I have no answer.💔🩹😢

Mohammed, my four-year-old son 👦🏽, has become mostly silent 🤐, speaking only a little, as if war has stolen both his voice 🎙️ and his childhood 🎈.🌧️😞����

And finally, there’s Adam, my ten-month-old baby 👶, too young to understand anything, yet crying constantly 😢. His life is already filled with hunger 🍽️, pain 💢, and sickness 🤧.🍼💔😢

I stand at night 🌙 beside my children as they struggle to sleep 🛌, lifting my hands to the sky ☝️ in prayer 🙏, asking for God’s help. I have nothing for them but hope 💫 and prayers, and I am left only to wait⏳—waiting for a day when peace 🕊️ and mercy 💖 will come. A day when I can see my children laugh freely 😂, without fear 😨 or pain.🕊️🙏💔

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Hanan(@hanangaza1), her husband, and their three children(Lana, 10 years old, Abdul Karim, 7 years old, Adam, 2 years old) need help.

This family has been through a lot. Their house was bombed while they were inside, they lost their source of income, the children are terrified, the tent they live in doesn't protect them from the weather. Hanan just wants to be with her family again, and they need money for survival. If you can, please donate to their GoFundMe, even if it's not much. If you can't, then please share it. This fundraiser has been vetted by @gazavetters and @90-ghost Thank you for reading!

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Hey they didn’t ask me to do this but there’s a bookstore in the Fresno Chinatown area that focuses on selling diverse, unusual, and banned books called Judging by the Cover that does ship if you don’t live in the area and just want to support a local bookstore. They’ve got books in English and Spanish and a couple in other languages.

Their whole thing is selling books you won’t find in mainstream bookstores so if you wanna diversify your reading habits it’s really interesting. They also sell zines and chapbooks.

I just think they’re neat. If you’re in the Central Valley and can make it to Fresno’s Chinatown they’re worth a visit. There’s not a ton of local stuff left around here and I like seeing the places we do have doing well.

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"How do you write such realistic dialogue-" I TALK TO MYSELF. I TALK TO MYSELF AND I PRETEND I AM THE ONE SAYING THE LINE. LIKE SANITY IS SLOWLY SLIPPING FROM BETWEEN MY FINGERS WITH EVERY MEASLY WORD THEY TYPE OUT. THAT IS HOW.

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Fan Favorite Friday - Week 1

Fan Favorite Friday - Week 1

Happy Friday! Shout out to everyone who has shared and participated in our Weekly Wonderings Writing Prompt! You guys are the best 🙂 The people have voted and crowned Bill Engleson as Week 1’s Fan Favorite. Check out his entry below and show him some love! WAR by Bill Engleson (@billmelaterplea on X)Waiting in the darkness, not wanting to spook his quarry, expecting everything to go sideways,…

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Weekly Wonderings - W 1 Entries

Check out this week's Weekly Wonderings entries and vote for your favorite!

Good morning 🙂 Here are this week’s entries. Check them out and vote for your favorite using the poll below! WAR by Bill Engleson Waiting in the darkness, not wanting to spook his quarry, expecting everything to go sideways, keeping his pistol close at hand, thinking the wiser course might be to head back home and avoid what was probably the unavoidable, Danny remembered a moment some months…

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Weekly Wonderings - Week 1

Welcome to #WeeklyWonderingsWritingPrompt! #WritingCommunity

As promised (and long overdue) I’ve decided to revamp my weekly flash fiction writing prompt series. The old format just wasn’t sustainable for me anymore, unfortunately. So, as much as I’ll miss #SwiftFicFriday, it’s time for a new beginning! In true pantser fashion, all the ideas I had for the revamp have more or less lost their shine/I’m just not feeling them anymore. So instead of the three…

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Books are Political.

We, as women, are only able to read and write because the women that came before us (BIPOC women especially) have fought tooth and nail for our rights. Our very existence in intellectual/book spaces is political.

Things have been…rough the past few days. If you either know me IRL or have been around my online presence long enough, it’s not difficult to figure out where I lean on the political spectrum. I know I’m not super active on here, and I intend to change that. So to start, I’d like to talk a little about something I’ve seen swimming around on BookTok and BookTwitter. A lot of women who look like…

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#ThursThreads - FOMO

Prompt: “She’s missing.” Maybe I should be trying to enjoy myself, but I can’t help the uneasy twisting in my gut. The crowd is larger than I anticipated, with revelers dancing to the upbeat music making it difficult to keep track of Celeste and Kieran. My nerves are beyond frayed at this point, and the only thing keeping me from retreating back to the safety of the palace is my sister’s refusal…

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Hello? Testing, one, two...

Can’t believe how long it’s been (almost a year, holy crap!) since the last time I posted anything, but this is me attempting to commit to bringing this blog back to life. First things first, life update… Parenthood has been both exciting and exhausting, and Sophie has fully entered her chaos gremlin era. Despite this, we’ve established a pretty good routine, which leaves me some room to pick…

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Huh. So another W from Macklemore.