Halfway To Back Again + Drachtober Returns + Short Story Challenge

We're halfway through the Award Ceremonies for the 3rd Annual Silmaril awards! And what a fun event it's been. Ugluk threatened everyone, Merry and Pippin set off fireworks, Tom Bombadil regaled us with another epically humorous poem, we spent a lovely afternoon at the Green Dragon with our beloved Samwise, and Bilbo went off adventuring, leaving Frodo in charge, which was absolutely lovely.This morning, we kick things off with some words of wisdom from Gandalf, and I can't wait to find out who the rest of this year's winners are, can you? If you haven't been following along on and reading the Award Presentations, you should definitely go do that! You won't want to miss out on the cleverness and hilarity that has been ensuing! I'm keeping a running list of links to each award presentation HERE in case you've missed any of these, they have all been fabulously entertaining!For me, September has been slipping by with a speed I did not think possible! The Silmaril Awards have been a blast, and I'm sad that they are almost over, but I am so grateful to you, dear Readers! You have once again made this event a huge success and so much fun. With dozens of nominations and over 200 votes recorded across the ballots, this year's Awards have absolutely blown me away.But there is no rest for the weary, and the fun isn't over yet, because #DRACHTOBER is just around the corner! Back by popular demand from last year, below you will find the list of dragon-related prompts for October! This year, as a bit of a change, I'm only doing prompts on weekdays. You can play along on Twitter/FB/Instagram/Etc, or feel free to take a prompt or two (or all of them!!!) and make a blog post or several. The only rule.... HAVE FUN!I am also going to be reviving the SPOOKY story contest for the third time, because it's a blast... with a couple of slight changes this year:First of all, this year's challenge is to write a SPOOKY STORY in under 1,000 words! Yup, flash-fiction time! Instead of a prompt or a line you have to include, the challenge is to write the spookiest story you can in 1,000 words or less.Second of all, every blogger who accepts the challenge and posts their spooky story before October 31st will receive a PRIZE of an exclusive Behind The Scenes short excerpt from the world of The Minstrel's Song. Authors will get their pick of 3 options: The Adoption of Kiernan Kane, The Fall of Haeronymous, or the Appendix Of Kiernan and Leila. None of these are polished, but they do give some larger sneak peeks at back-story, and maybe a glimmer of things that occur after the final page has been turned, and all of them have the potential of being polished up at at some point and turned into a volume of "Minstrel's Tales" at some point, an idea I got after writing DRAGON WARD for the Mythical Doorways anthology.So put your thinking caps on! I'll be posting the rules and linky-list sign-up on October 1st.Here is the graphic and list of prompts for #Drachtober