A to Z Challenge 2026 Reflections

A to Z Challenge 2026 Reflections

What My Muse Says…

This is my eleventh year doing the A to Z Challenge. The theme I chose was My Muse Says… All of the entries were based on story sparks or writing prompts that I received from different writing groups I’ve attended since 2018. I’m a pantser, so all I do when given a prompt is write the first sentence that comes to my head and continue wherever my muse tells me to go, hence the theme for this year. 

Some of the prompts allowed me to write complete pieces in the allotted time before we shared our writing in our writing group. For those pieces, I either revised what I wrote then for this Challenge or picked another prompt from that workshop that I hadn’t written about and created a new piece. Other pieces I used were ones that I had started in a writing group (A, H, M, & U), but never finished, so I completed the story in this Challenge that I had started, maintaining consecutive letter order so they were easier for readers to follow.

I hoped that I would get most of the writing done before April 1, but that was not the case. The continued stories – both Unicorn ones, Harbinger, and Clara’s Tale were easy to pick, but more difficult to finish with consecutive letters, because the words I chose for those letters had to fit those stories. The rest of the letters required me to go through over 8 years of story workshops to find a prompt that fit a letter. That took time.

In some cases, I played around with the sounds of letters to match a letter, such as “Wise” for Y, and eXpectations for X. I even got to play around with the sound of a word, as Z for Zoom Mews. That one was particularly difficult for I decided to create an image of a Zoom meeting including cats I’ve known and me. 

Z and Y weren’t completed until the day before they were posted. 

As in the past, with all the writing I was focused on and the books I was reading, I didn’t get a chance to read the writing of other participants in the Challenge. I did have a list of 11 other participants, whom I intended to read and hopefully will read on the road trip.

As to next year, I always try to do different things when I participate, and I do intend to participate. I enjoy the challenge and the writing. I guess you all will have to wait until March 2027, when my muse guides me as to where I will go.

See you on the Road Trip

The following is a hyperlinked list of all the pieces I wrote for the 2026 A to Z Blog Challenge: 

(A-E) – The Unicorn and the Lion; F – Face Change; G – Growing Pains; (H-J) – Harbinger; K – Kin; L – Lesson Learned; (M-P) – Clara’s Tale; Q – Quiet Time; R – Recipe to Remember; S – Stashed Away; T – Truth  Reigns; (U – X) – The Unicorn and Me; Y – Yalta Y’s; and Z – Zoom Mews 

Notable pieces – 

My short stories Clara’s Tale and Harbinger, Stashed Away (a Ronald Story), and Zoom Mews. If you choose to read the Unicorn Stories, read The Unicorn and the Lion before you read The Unicorn and Me.

You are also welcome to my Blog (www.hdhstory.net/storyblog), and can read any of the writing I do throughout the year or have written since I retired from teaching in 2006.