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Happy Friday

from Carol! So many, many good freewrites and rewrites and contest entries have resulted from this week's prompts.

Some questions about using the #freewrite hashtag

arose, but that can wait until the end of this post. First, who got nominated this week?

Several nominations were inspired by the weekend "Halycon" prompt:

Two prompts are used halcyon days and happy days (oder glückliche Tage). For those who do not read German (falls Du kein English lesen kannst hast Du Glück!) this is your lucky day! No need to translate. This freewrite is written in both languages by @mariita52. If ice cream and music help, you need to find out yourself.

Partiko link:

@wakeupkitty

I admit I am one of these freewriters who do not know what "halcyon days" stand for. Even reading freewrites using this prompt did not enlighten me. So if you have no clue and google translate is not making you any wiser you can read what @fitinfun wrote about it.

Partiko link:

I still need to think hard after reading her freewrite

and my internet connection is too slow to follow all links, so if you ask me it was Shakespeare who invented the expression. What do you think?

@fitinfun

I have two this week from the Sunday prompt of "halcyon days":
@preparedwombat managed to get a great historical adventure tale out of this insane prompt:

All of the discordant points are here for your reading pleasure. Never has one phrase meant so many unrelated and odd things. We also get a footnote with more random facts. This post has it all!

@fitinfun

And next up, poor @richardfyates gets this one for his very first freewrite! I hope he will be back after this, since he did such a good job with it. Click to read a very funny story a la 1984, and then find a preface and afterward MUCH longer with all kinds of interesting tidbits of @richardfyates (halcyon) dancing days.
Good one @freewritehouse! You keep me entertained :)

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(Note from Carol: I love Richards's photo of the handwritten freewrite! I tried doing that once but didn't have the patience to keep downloading photos and getting them over to Steemit.)

@carolkean

Speaking of @richardfyates, I had already found his "My Second Freewrite" post and read that before the first one, and had planned to nominate him before I saw that @fitinfun already had--for the first, not the second. Sounds like he might need a wee bit of encouragement anyway. Richard, you could be on a roll if your third, fourth, and all successive freewrites get nominated every week!

Awesome freewrite! I love the photo of the handwritten page, the accompanying thoughts and explanations, and the freewrite itself. The emperor was born, then crafted; his wife, then her wife; there's so much trickery and spin and back-pedaling, it seems, like the news media presenting a candidate to us and revising the "facts" until we get caught up in those " cosmic crossing-points." I like your view of freewriting, expanding, "all fun and games until quantum-entanglement comes along and collapses everything into a super-massive black hole… It’s a moral as old as time…" and I'm thinking you and @owasco would be great at the next#WeWrite partner writing. You both have that grasp of math I always wanted but it kept slipping out of reach, for me.
You do sound like me (sad to say) when you "my natural self-destructive tendencies kicked in" -- you were ready to walk away, but you came back for another freewrite, after all. We're glad you did!

@kaerpediem

I love reading Weekend FreeWrites. So many FreeWriters do a great job of making the 3 prompts fit. This round I recommend reading @stinawog's. She tackles the fear and paranoia that comes with one misstep in life. And then, suddenly everything becomes an obsession that leads to that fear. Every thing, as random as it is, chips away at what's left, little by little.

@wonderwop

I found a #freewrite from a new Freewriter @justatouchfey, today that turned out to be three poems that made me start thinking about how much power an Emperor had over their people. All three poems are thought provoking and must be read to truly understand the meanings, as I am but a mortal and cannot transcribe these words. Now go read them please. 🙏

@chireerocks

@freewritehouse Team, Kindly find below Freewrite piece which is shared by @elizacheng.

Steem Fest 4 coming to Asia in November and brought all the excitement once again and in my opinion till now we are completely not gone through from the Steem Fest 3 stories and now one more memorable event is arriving. I am really excited.

@carolkean

I love all things @owasco, and her love of math is a rare delight in fiction. How many math-brained people also have the gift of fiction writing? Whose brain is equally balanced between right (logic) and left (creativity)? Hers!

This week her geometry haiku led into some fascinating insights on her part about the writing process. E.g., she writes,
This is my entry to https://steempeak.com/haikucontest/@bananafish/mizu-no-oto-every-image-has-its-haiku-edition-31-english-1558051204
It's the very first one I wrote and I it comes closest to saying what I am trying to say. Below are, in the order I wrote them, my further attempts. I just kept adding them on, and I wish I had put more of the weather in, which I feel is a storm brewing.
If you follow the comments, you'll see how she distills the freewheeling (freewriting!) series of haikus to these three,

---

man's geometry
can not tame the sea
or stop the squall

man made boundaries
would have us turn away
from the sea

Man prefers
geometry
to power

---

"This reads to me like a math proof," she adds. (And I love that!)

---

But read the original post and all the versions that preceded this one trio of haikus.

@carolkean

Not to focus overly much on one writer, but the "Window" prompt yielded a number of awesome freewrites, including this one by @owasco:

Mixed in with my somewhat-valuables is a lot of bonafide memorabilia. And that's where time stands still, a window is opened, and off to back then I go. Today it was an old never-once-used gift that cast the spell….All these gifts required a large task, which was to be done by me, in order for all of us to enjoy them.”

---

@owasco I hear you!!!
I'm a curmudgeon, but those who know me know I mean it when I say PLEASE, no gifts. Your voice on the phone, your face to face presence, is the best present you can give. On the rare occasion I set foot in a store, I'm amazed and horrified at the vast quantity of useless stuff for sale, for people to give as token gifts, or to clutter their own homes with. It's free enterprise and capitalism, yes, and Madison Avenue marketing at its worst. Look at Shaker homes and pioneer sod huts on the prairie and think about Climate Change and the local landfill and all the ways we contribute-- we love to blame Big Corporations for pollution, but every one of us is that single grain of rice the emperor in Disney's Mulan so memorably describes: "A single grain of rice can tip the scale. One man may be the difference between victory and defeat."

Back to #freewrite and other hashtags...

Last year when I was active in another Steemit writing group, posting a weekly roundup, struggling with formatting and hyperlinking and checking the dates, I often forget to check hashtags as well. I would nominate a great story that, oops, didn't include the group identifier. So I checked to see if Marianne is ok with me calling attention to this (not necessarily entering it in the drawing for SBD):

@blueeyes8960

is an accomplished writer who came to my attention for the first time when she posted a reply to my own “Prompt: Window” freewrite (I know, I know, what all I overlook month after month!). Her comment was so insightful, I thought, “I hope she’s in the Beta Readers group.” (Then realized in horror I haven’t searched my gmail account for links to the latest manuscripts. Oy ve!) One link led to another. I found her story at narrative.org before I hunted her Steemit wall and found it there as well. She hadn’t linked her flash-fiction/freewrite gem under @mariannewest’s Day 577 Prompt: Window post, so I did, after Tweeting links to the story and praising it to the moon and back.
In her words,

This is a microfiction story with a 250 word limit and the prompt of "window". It is written for @jayna's microfiction contest. If you'd like to try this yourself and enter her contest, here is the link to her post. Even if you aren't planning on entering the contest, head over to her post anyway. Each contestant posts a link to their entry in the comments of that post, and you will find some very fascinating microfiction stories for your reading pleasure!

---

As for the hashtags,

@mariannewest replied:

Let’s say that we like people to use the tag and it is probably best to pick from posts that have linked to the prompt. But you know how we roll. If you like it (Carol notes: "it" being a story by a freewritehouse Beta Reader who didn't hashtag this post as a freerite) to be included, go for it. If you think it best to only include posts with the tag, that is fine too. This particular one might not have been a freewrite but a carefully crafted piece. We don’t know...

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@carolkean's reply:

"Our Lady is not a bureaucrat" - as Catholics have said of Mary, we can say of @mariannewest. I love you and your laid-back, go-with-the-flow spirit, Marianne! @blueeyes8960 apparently wrote Heart's Desire on May 20 in response to the Window prompt. She posted it the same day. She is a member of freewrite's Beta Readers group. While her post doesn't mention @freewritehouse, she does link to Jayna's weekly Micro-Fiction Contest, where Jayna writes,
We collaborate with the #freewrite community and @FreeWriteHouse to give writers an opportunity to polish those freewrite fiction pieces and re-post the refined version. A thank you to @mariannewest for helping to spread the word!

Thank you, @Jayna, for your support and teamwork!

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Back to "Heart's Desire" now. I wrote in the comment section,

I love this story so much - love that you keep it in the 250-word limit yet manage to convey so much. I'm dying to know how much it resembles your first five-minute freewrite, or if you consider this a freewrite at all. You used Monday's Day 577 Prompt: Window for Jayna's weekly Micro-Fiction Contest.
Your story apparentlywas written and polished in one day. Is it any less of a freewrite if we don't get to see the first draft? I tell ya what, if this WAS a first draft, I'll feel like Salieri in the shadow of Mozart. :) (Off to see if I can kidnap your Muse and put her to work for me! bwa ha ha ha!)

@blueeyes8960 replied,

@carolkean Thanks for the kind words. No, I didn't start this as a freewrite. I just stumbled across Jayna's contest and went for it. But it really didn't take very long, though more than 5 minutes, because I went back through it and did some editing. Plus I had to trim part of it out because I was over the 250 words.
I like Freewrite because it just makes you write whatever comes to mind and in 5 minutes, just stop and leave as is. I like the 250 word challenge because it makes you go back and cut out the unnecessary details and try to get the story told in the most concise way. I never really noticed that you could take a freewrite and polish it up @jayna - that they are collaborating like that now. Very cool idea. I wish I could do a Freewrite every day, but I always seem to run out of day.🙄
@blueeyes8960 also wrote in the reply section,
yes the limit of 250 leaves a lot of the story to the reader's imagination as well. That's one of the things I love about Flash Fiction. You, the reader, are invited to join in and fill in the gaps in your own way. I had to trim the story down after I first wrote it to keep within the word limit. But there are a lot of ways I could take this further.

Several #freewrite members have participated in @Jayna's contest, by the way. Here are just a few:

Thank you to everyone who participated in last week's contest: @chireerocks, @felixgarciap, @niallon11, @botefarm, @universoperirdido, @redheadpei, and @adncabrera.
That, from

@jayna in fiction • 3 days ago

Welcome to the Micro-fiction Contest. The challenge is to produce a short story within the tight word limit of 250 words based on a one-word prompt....
The primary goal of this contest is to give Steem fiction writers a regular opportunity to write, and to encourage the practice of editing and refining our work. As an incentive, each week one author who writes a well-written and edited story wins 2 SBD.
...Contest entrants, be sure to review the rules below and include the weekly prompt word in your story.
Writing resources
If you are not sure how to write a compelling story, see my mini writing workshop series (tagged #writingworkshop). The latest post is What is the trouble with adverbs in fiction? and it includes links to all of the workshop posts. You can also have someone else read your story and help with your storyline, grammar and punctuation. There are multiple Steem writing communities to help you:
Inkubator
@FreeWriteHouse
#isleofwrite
#speculativefiction
@steemhousepub

And that's enough for one week from Carol!

Watch for a new post every Tuesday to nominate your weekly favorites:

Week 5/22/2019 - Win a Membership in Steem Basic Income - Tell us About a Favorite Freewrite

Check Out The @FreeWriteHouse Prompt Of The Day By @MarianneWest

• Look For The 5-Min #FreeWrite Daily Prompt On @MarianneWest’s Blog

Join us on Twitter to spread the word about Steem https://twitter.com/FreewriteHouse