Off the rails

My partner and I cut all ties with our regular Thursday night routine and went to the theater. (I love my city because that’s a thing we can do here. Just show up at a theater downtown and buy tickets.) We saw Bullets Over Broadway, a musical based on the Woody Allen movie. The first act was solid: funny songs, talented actors, an engaging story. But the second act went off the rails in a disturbing way. The night turned weird when (Spoiler Alert) the audience gleefully cheered after a gangster shot a show girl. All we could do was look at each other with our mouths agape. From there, the weirdness crescendoed into an all-company rendition of “Yes! We Have No Bananas” for absolutely no reason.

We joked on our way home that night that we’d get home and find our cats in shock that we’d left them for so long. We expected the kitchen to be torn up from the kitten hunting for food. We’d be home 2 whole hours after their dinner time, after all. But when we opened the door, we found our cats, who are normally contentious because of blinding jealousy, bonding over an apparently fascinating corner of a plastic grocery bag that was sticking out underneath a closet door. They barely noticed we walked in, and later that night we found them asleep on the couch only two feet from each other. It was a miracle.

Speaking of getting along, make sure to review the submission guidelines before you press Post. If you’ve found some other yeah write writers you dig, why not ask them to be your writing partner? Everyone needs another set of eyes to point out the typos, content errors, and ungainly phraseologies in our posts.

Prompt up!

Prompt up is our optional weekly writing prompt for the fiction|poetry challenge! Here’s how it works: we choose a sentence prompt from last week’s winning nonfiction post and announce it in the kickoff. It’s your job to use that prompt in your poem or story and then run with it. The prompt is just a springboard, though: feel free to use it as your first sentence, move it, change it, or float down it to other territories.

Marcy told us how NOT to ride a horse in her post Cantering: As Easy as Falling Off a Horse. This week’s Prompt Up is: I looked at the horse standing a few feet away, twitching its ears at me.

May poetry slam: the rondeau

We don’t usually do two similar forms back-to-back, but this month we’re building on the bop with another “song” poem, the rondeau. There’s a few more rules to the rondeau, some rhyming and some scanning you’ll have to do, but it’s a lovely and lyrical form that uses skills you already have and then shakes them up in fifteen lines and a refrain. Give it a try! If you’ve been feeling intimidated by the poetry slams, this is a perfect time to get your feet wet and get some feedback with the unmoderated grid.

Check out Sunday’s post which kicked off the week here at yeah write. Our email subscribers can also join us in the yeah write coffeehouse at its home on Facebook.

Yeah write #264 fiction|poetry writing challenge is open for submissions!

Basic yeah write guidelines: 750 word limit; your entry can be dated no earlier than this past Sunday; fiction or poetry only.

How to submit and fully participate in the challenge:

1. In the sidebar of this week’s post, please grab the code beneath the challenge grid badge and paste it into the HTML view of your entry
2. Follow the InLinkz instructions after clicking “add your link” to upload your entry to this week’s challenge grid
3. Your entry should appear immediately on the grid if you don’t receive an error message
4. Please make the rounds to read all the entries in this week’s challenge
5. Consider turning off moderated comments and CAPTCHA on your own blog

Submissions for this week’s challenges will close on Wednesday at 10pm ET. Voting will then open immediately thereafter and close on Thursday at 10pm ET. The winners, as always, will be celebrated on Friday.

Thank you for sharing with us your hard work! Good luck in the challenge…