Monthly Writing Challenges

Moon June 2026

Day 4: Shadow - @monthlywritingchallenges

For Moon June, I’m going to be writing excerpts from a current project of mine, The Language of Wolves. These are all out-of-order and -out-of-context; They’re mostly just to get my creative juices flowing. Keep in mind that they’re also unedited.

A twig snapped. Niv whirled around.

Something had appeared behind her. It moved slowly, liquid-like, circling her. A wolf. No, a fox. A squirrel. It took another step, and its paws had shifted between all three before they touched the ground again. A wolf again. But its snout was…wrong. Its gaze was wrong. It was more like a drawing of a wolf, something done sloppily by someone who had only seen the real thing once or twice. Lines in the wrong places. Shadows that fell the wrong way. Blurred, like something out of a dream. All of the larger components were right; Gray fur, white belly, pointed ears. But they came together like the shards of a broken vase that had been glued back into place.

A Shape Thief.

Regina Mills and Emma Swan (Find Each Other Again)

When Regina ends up in the Enchanted Forest, she curses the name of the Author.

She shouldn’t have had to give up Henry and Emma. Not now. Not when they’d finally gotten Henry back from Neverland, not when Regina had done everything that she could to prove herself, not when she has watched everyone that she has loved die.

They tell her that dwelling on Emma and Henry is picking a scab and keeping it from healing.

They’re happy, everyone says, They have the life that they deserve.

And Regina has lived long enough with such words to know that what so many people are thinking is they have a happy ending that would only be ruined if you showed up. That so many people believe, still, that once a villain, always a villain, that once the author writes your fate, that is all that you can ever have.

But Emma had the audacity to believe that Regina should get a happy ending, and so did Henry, and Regina has to believe in the two people she loves most in the world, right?

“Fuck this,” Regina says, “I should be able to get a happy ending. I’m done letting some ink in a story book determine where this story ends."

-aletterinthenameofsanity, i don’t care for your fairytale (the story needs some mending and a better happy ending)

Written for Day 4 of @monthlywritingchallenges' MoonJune: Shadow.

cruelparty

Moon June

Day 3: Silver

Tags: @monthlywritingchallenges @randomwriter23

Pairing: Eric Forman x Buddy Morgan

Moon June 2026

Day 3: Silver - @monthlywritingchallenges

For Moon June, I’m going to be writing excerpts from a current project of mine, The Language of Wolves. These are all out-of-order and -out-of-context; They’re mostly just to get my creative juices flowing. Keep in mind that they’re also unedited.

Niv fumbled around in her satchel. She hadn’t taken much money when she left; She hadn’t known how much her mother had left.

What she found was a handful of silver coins, each one engraved with the Olgravian seal. She held them up sheepishly.

The wagon driver raised an eyebrow, and Niv registered for the first time how strange she looked compared to the people of Kerest, auburn-haired and pale, with thin, angular features that made her gaze look all the more critical. She hadn’t realized quite how far she had traveled.

“That won’t get you far, here,” she said, her voice gruff. “You’ll need some of this,” she dug around in the pocket of her apron, “To get much out of anyone.” She held up a small rectangle of blue paper with a pattern Niv couldn’t make out.

Niv straightened, resisting the urge to smack her forehead. Of course she would need Thastan money.

The woman turned and made her way back to the wagon, and Niv sighed, preparing herself for the long trek ahead. But the wagon driver held up a hand and waved her over.

Perhaps she didn’t need Thastan money yet.

Quynh and Andromache (Reunite With a Crash)

Most days, Quynh feels far more like a storm raging through a human body, the crackle of lightning above the sea, the crash of salt through the ocean riptide.

For so long, her world narrowed down to just Andromache. To the knowledge that somewhere out there, in between the crash of water down her throat, the drag of life to death to life to death and back again, Andromache had to be searching for her. She had to be. That’s how their relationship works.

But instead, when she finally emerged from the sea, the iron finally rusting away after all of these years, she found that five centuries had passed.

And while she had dreamed, off and on, of a pale, unfamiliar man with a coward’s heart hanging above a frozen field, Russian and French on the tongues of those around him, she had convinced herself that it had to be nothing more than a dream.

Because in those visions, Andromache had abandoned the search. Had stopped her quest.

And that couldn’t be right. Andromache would never do that to her. They were sealed in steel and sugar, in blood and in wine, in arrows and axes, the bite of each other’s blood stolen from the lips, holy in the only way that Quynh knew after so long away from her family’s faith.

They vowed their marriage to each other on over a dozen battlefields around the world, died in each other’s arms, woke in each other’s arms with blood on their mouths, tasted dragon fruit and lychee from each other’s lips, breathed each other’s first and last so many times that Quynh doesn’t remember what it’s like not to have her oxygen entwined with Andromache’s.

It’s impossible to imagine that there was a lifetime in which Andromache ever stopped searching.

-aletterinthenameofsanity, you will finally understand (why storms are named after people)

Written for Day 3 of @monthlywritingchallenges' MoonJune: Silver.

starfullskys

Title: Bath Time

Rating: G

Fandom: Stargate Atlantis

Pairing: John Sheppard/Elizabeth Weir

Prompts: @juneofdoom: Blame, @monthlywritingchallenges Moon June: Midnight, @swoon-june: Bath or Shower.

Summary: It was their little ritual. His way of pulling her back.

cruelparty

Moon June

Day 2: Nocturne

Tags: @monthlywritingchallenges @randomwriter23

Pairing: Eric Forman x Buddy Morgan

Moon June

Day 2: Nocturne - @monthlywritingchallenges

For Moon June, I’m going to be writing excerpts from a current project of mine, The Language of Wolves. These are all out-of-order and -out-of-context; They’re mostly just to get my creative juices flowing. Keep in mind that they’re also unedited.

Niv continued to duck her head long after she had slipped out of the tent, keeping her gaze fixed on the ground. She wasn’t trying to hide; Everybody in the village knew whose lodgings were whose. But it felt as if even the sky would judge her.

She made to lift the hood of her cloak, but her hands brushed against her hair. She hissed, then cursed herself for the noise. Ever since the incident, she had forgone the uniform. She didn’t deserve to wear it. She wasn’t her grandmother. And she was starting to realize that that wasn’t anything to be proud of.

Her feet tapped lightly on the cobblestones, beating a hesitant, deferential path. The village was starting to come back to itself. Vendors sat at their markets in the town square, waiting patiently, more cognizant than they might have been that there were worse things than spoiled goods. Children ran around in aimless circles. A man sat at the base of a tree with his lute, strumming out a soft, mournful nocturne. She slowed down. He paused in his music just long enough to spit at her.

I have got to stop writing these so late in the day 😅

cruelparty

Moon June

Day 1: Eclipse

Tags: @monthlywritingchallenges @randomwriter23

Pairing: Eric Forman x Buddy Morgan

Naerys Targaryen (Makes Her Bargain)

All Naerys ever wanted was to read and play the harp and enjoy the gentle night music, half-fulfilling the Lysene stereotype, half-rejecting it entirely.

But yet—

Here she is, trading her own daughter into marriage with some unknown Martell boy just for her own freedom.

She got on her knees, just like she was supposed to, prayed to the Mother and the Maiden and the crone and most importantly the Stranger as she was on her knees in the marriage bed, and she found her way to obey it all while carving her own path, for whatever it took to do so.

-aletterinthenameofsanity, my body's aching like a knock-down drag-out (it's ancient history that's bleeding out of me)

Written for Day 2 of @monthlywritingchallenges' MoonJune: Nocturne.

Moon June

Day 1: Eclipse - @monthlywritingchallenges

For Moon June, I’m going to be writing excerpts from a current project of mine, The Language of Wolves. These are all out-of-order and -out-of-context; They’re mostly just to get my creative juices flowing. Keep in mind that they’re also unedited.

Niv had been working for hours, and she still had no idea what Wolf wanted her to find.

Evening had fallen on the Forest of Shapes. It hadn’t come slowly; It had been dropped on her like a bucket of cold water, bursting forth from the day on a whim. She supposed that her fervor had eclipsed all else. The pittance of light the leafy canopy above had afforded her had slowly trickled away, leaving her sitting alone in a dim blur of silhouette and color. If she hadn’t been attuned to their energy, she wouldn’t have registered the flowers in front of her. She ran her fingers over them, letting her hand sink into the soft, amorphous blob she had been puzzling over for what felt like a century.

The few pieces of sky she could see through the trees had become an exuberant purple with explosions of marigold and nectarine at the horizon. Niv knew that it wouldn’t be long before someone started looking for her.

She sighed. She knew that she couldn’t stay there any longer, that a Shape could be upon her before she even had the time to realize what was happening. But she needed to know why Wolf had sent her there. She needed to figure out what he couldn’t. What was it about this patch of flowers that had drawn him in? What had he meant when he described its buzz to her?

Sitting on the forest floor with hardly any light to guide her, Niv was starting to think that there was nothing to know. Perhaps she’d been wrong. Perhaps he wasn’t as intelligent as she’d thought he was.

With a heavy heart, she unfolded her legs and rose from the ground.

The walk back to the village wasn’t long, and its character soon began to interweave itself with that of the forest. Through the thick patches of leaf and lichen, she saw light. Interspersed with the low growls in the distance were exclamations, clangs, screams of excitement. Cooking fires wafted through the air to her, although she didn’t smell meat.

She brushed aside a bush, and stepped into the world, the sky returned to her.

The world was burning.

ladyereschkigal

Time to get some closeness with Qifrey~

Dear lord, day two (nocture) and I'm already regretting half of my live choices. Chapter two is out now, yay!

MoonJune is in full run! Via @monthlywritingchallenges

Snippet:

If he were to come here, to your prison, to this tower, just to ask questions, that would be good enough. Then you could at least see him one more time. His blue eye and that handsome face and the pain in his expression because he trusted you.

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

Bree Davenport (Takes Off)

Bree Davenport's heart is a revolving door with no place to stay. She doesn’t know how to stay. She doesn’t know how to stop, how to brake, where the brakes even are—

Because who the fuck does? Who, with a chip in their neck and muscles built to crush and chop and burn but never break, would ever know how to stop?

-aletterinthenameofsanity, we can run on love for awhile

Written for Day 1 of @monthlywritingchallenges' MoonJune Day 1: Eclipse!

ladyereschkigal

Meeting Qifrey!

It's June and I decided to take place in MoonJune that I saw on @monthlywritingchallenges blog. Thank you for sharing it!

Day one is "Eclipse".

So how about we write a lovely letter to Qifrey? (Be careful, the story is rated explicit because there will be smut in later chapters.)

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

Snippet:

Dear Qifrey,

I hope this letter finds you well, if at all.

You weren’t expecting this, were you? Perhaps you even thought that everything to do with me would simply fade away eventually. But here it is. Letter twenty-eight, because all the others began with a lie. With “I’m sorry”.

But I’m not sorry.