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Thank you, Janette!

Janette has kindly volunteered !!

Best wishes, Athelstone.

Good idea, Libby.  Hope someone might take it on.

That’s a great shame. All best wishes to Ath.

How about finding another judge?

Could anyone else reading this be willing to judge the comp? Five delightful entries. Then the winner can set the April comp.

Having heard Athelstone indisposed again, it’s unlikely he’ll be be judging  this any time soon

Damn! It messed with my formatting 🙁

The madness is all mine for thinking I could do this!

All words taken from Rod Judkins’ The Art of Creative Thinking.

DRIBBLES AND SPATTERS

Inner demons

chisel

creative confidence

Ideas so strange

wither.

Radiate defiance

Salvage mistakes with freedom

and

transform the message

Come alive!

Running

499 words

My sister’s boyfriend dumped her so she booked a day at a willow-weaving workshop – in the countryside, calming and therapeutic. She’d make a sculpture of a hare though she’d never seen one in real life. Ironic, I thought, as she’d never seen herself either.

I admit the dumping had been nasty. Sis waiting to meet the…[Read more]

You asked for mad?  Well, here’s the  slice of crackpot absurdity I came up with .

The necklace of tiny silver bells about her neck tinkled softly as she backed against the garden wall. ‘You’re all mad, you know,’ she muttered holding the sharp seed dibber, labelled ‘Mr Pointy’, like a knife at the advancing crowd.

At the front of the group,…[Read more]

Not yet mad enough …

Wine-heavy eyes and naked, she was cleaning her teeth in front of the bathroom mirror when he came in through the door behind her.   He stood behind her, serious-faced, saying nothing, but unignorably attentive.   She finished brushing. Spat, rinsed and spat a couple more times then put the toothbrush back in the glass on…[Read more]

Madness on the Ides of March

493 words excluding title

All those years ago she had been teased relentlessly by friends about her wedding date, the Ides of March.   ‘Beware!’ they had warned her.  ‘You must be mad,’ they said, laughing.

But here the happy couple of that March day were, celebrating a Big O anniversary and enjoying a holiday in t…[Read more]

Congratulations, Athelstone –  well deserved.  Peeked at your March challenge and looking forward to meeting it.   Sandra, I loved your intriguing extract from what I presume is a finished novel or one in progress?  Thank you Libby for the February competition which I enjoyed entering and for your kind comments.  Very interested in your inte…[Read more]

Thank you for such a satisfactory February topic, Libby, and for your generous appraisal! I loved the other two entries; they could easily have won.

Congratulations, Ath – more Teabreak always welcome, and well done Jill for so richly regarding the rules. Thanks Libby for appreciating my desire to take part, but this extract the only one I could recall which specifically mentioned ‘loving’

The February comp has drawn a delightful selection of stories.

@jillsted Jill, you do an evocative encapsulation of Isabel’s memories of different kinds of love. Her memories are compelling, a sense of her moving through a full life. The ending has a twist, if I’ve read it correctly, that adds a shiver to the story, a question of whether Lydia’s…[Read more]

Teabreak in love

Maureen Chapman. No, tell a lie, it was Chaplain, like a vicar. Her name, I mean—she wasn’t like a vicar. Anyway, Maureen Chaplain was perfect from my ten-year-old point of view. But I’m getting all jumbled up about how to start, so I’ll take a breath. See, it really began when the Brazells moved out from next door and the Cha…[Read more]