Introducing Weird Writes Wednesday

There are stranger things hiding in your head than you have been giving them credit for.

An image you cannot explain. A sentence with no story attached. A question that becomes more interesting the longer you refuse to answer it. A creature, machine, place, person, impossible memory, broken law of physics, or fragment of another reality that appears for a moment...

and then vanishes because you were busy doing something sensible.

We would like to give those things somewhere to go.

Obscura Fantastica is launching Weird Writes Wednesday, a weekly creative-writing series devoted to strange ideas, imaginative experiments, and the simple pleasure of making something unexpected.

Every week, we’ll offer a new prompt under #WeirdWrites.

What happens next belongs to you.

Write a sentence.

A poem.

A hundred words of microfiction.

A Bluesky post or thread.

A dialogue fragment.

A scene from a novel that does not exist.

An artifact from another universe.

The opening paragraph of something you suddenly realize you need to finish.

Or make something that refuses every useful description we could give it.

There is no required word count. No competition. No single correct interpretation.

In fact, we hope you misbehave with the prompt.

Take it literally. Take it metaphorically. Turn it inside out. Follow one insignificant detail somewhere we never intended. Disagree with the premise. Change the genre. Make the ominous thing funny. Make the ridiculous thing devastating. Ignore half the prompt because the other half opened a door you needed to walk through.

The prompt is only the door.

You decide what waits on the other side.

What Does “Weird” Mean?

We mean it broadly.

Weird can be uncanny, speculative, surreal, cosmic, grotesque, folkloric, absurd, metaphysical, science-fictional, fantastical, intimate, theological, ecological, technological, dreamlike, comic, tender, or impossible to categorize.

It can unsettle you.

It can also delight you.

Bewilder you.

Break your heart.

Make you laugh.

Make you wonder why nobody has ever considered the ethical implications of a refrigerator developing opinions about its owner.

A #WeirdWrites prompt might begin with a ghost. It might just as easily begin with impossible technology, a bureaucratic rule governing dreams, a message from outside time, a planet behaving incorrectly, an animal that understands something humans do not, a theological inconvenience, or a love story complicated by the laws of reality.

Obscura Fantastica has plenty of room for dread, horror, the grotesque, and the things moving just beyond the firelight.

But weird does not strictly mean horror.

The territory is larger than that.

We are interested in the ordinary world with one fact wrong.

The impossible thing everyone has somehow agreed not to mention.

The discovery that changes what a character thought reality permitted.

The enormous thing glimpsed only through its shadow.

The tiny thing whose existence implies an entire universe behind it.

Estrangement. Transformation. Impossible systems. Altered realities. Mystery. Wonder.

Sometimes the strange thing should frighten you.

Sometimes it should make you want to follow it.

Sometimes both.

How Weird Writes Wednesday Works

At the beginning of each month, we’ll publish that month’s upcoming #WeirdWrites prompts so anyone who likes to work ahead can let an idea simmer.

Each Monday, we’ll bring that week’s prompt back into the spotlight.

Then Wednesday belongs to the weird.

Write whenever inspiration arrives, but on Wednesdays we’ll invite everyone to share what they’ve made using #WeirdWrites, making it easy for other participants to find you.

And then comes the part we care about just as much as the writing:

Go exploring.

Read somebody else’s response.

Reply when a line surprises you.

Follow the writer who took the prompt somewhere you never would have gone.

Watch twenty people walk through the same door and somehow arrive in twenty different universes.

We’ll be wandering through the hashtag too—reading, replying, reposting, and celebrating the strange things growing there.

There are no winners.

The point is not to determine who wrote the “best” response.

The point is to make things.

To experiment.

To discover writers you might not otherwise have found.

To discover something in your own imagination that might never have appeared without a small invitation arriving at the right moment.

Because not every piece of writing needs to begin with a plan.

Sometimes it begins with:

What if?

That’s impossible.

Wait.

Unless…

And a few seconds later, something exists that did not exist before.

That is the territory #WeirdWrites is meant to explore.

A small weekly ritual devoted to curiosity, invention, creative play, and the strange consequences of giving an idea a little more room than good sense recommends.

Every Wednesday, we’ll open another door.

Follow #WeirdWrites. Bring back whatever you find.