It’s that time of year again — an art and writing prompt challenge for May.
Monstrous May was first established in 2021, and I’ve arranged prompts for each May since — for each day of the month of May, there is a prompt involving and invoking the monstrous.
Create art, sculpture, write fiction, poetry, make whatever you feel inspired to! Create for as many or as few days as inspire you, collaborate with friends, and have fun.
Fan creations are just as welcome as original ones, and naturally, erotic and adult creations are as well as SFW ones!
And of course, if you’re creating original erotic works, you are more than welcome to submit them to Trans Erotica if you’re a trans creator and they meet our submission guidelines!
Have some questions? Here’s the FAQ from 2021. Otherwise, feel free to reply with any questions or HMU with more of them!
Want to see prompts from previous years?
May 1st: The Tentacle Beast
The beast is a swirling mass of tentacles, shining, scaly, or perhaps slick and gelatinous; perhaps they’re covered all over in suckers or little teeth; perhaps the tentacles are formed of metallic arms, or the stretching, slithering limbs of an alien beast, of an ancient cephalopod, of a ghost, a demon, or something else entirely.
What are their intentions? What are they reaching for — or whom?
May 2nd: The Harpy
The harpy is a striking beast, feathered hair around her ears, her eyes sharp and shining — she screams, she caws, and she flies into the air before she dives down again. Where do the feathers stop and the woman begin — is that blood on her claws, around her mouth, stained down her naked breast?
May 3rd: The Mushroom
The mushroom visible, with its bulbous head and its stalks, is just one part of the expanse of the mycelial network beneath the soil, the outstretching and ever reaching fungal spread. What does the mushroom do — what does it want, communicate, hunger for, crave? What are the effects of its spores?
May 4th: The Shadow
The shadow dances and shifts on the wall, on the floor, on the ceiling. Perhaps it seems to move when you turn your head, or even when you don’t, even when you look at it directly, watch it. Is it growing? Expanding? Shrinking and slithering into the cracks where you can’t watch it, but still know it’s there?
May 5th: The Serpent
The great serpent moves and shifts, the light shining off its scales as its coils move and twist — it’s cool to the touch, and its teeth glisten with the moisture inside its maw… Is it venomous? Does it bite? Constrict? Where does it hide — and when, crucially, will it strike?
May 6th: The Lion
The mighty beast walks confidently, its head held high, its paws on the ground — and yet it’s bigger than it should be, more dangerous, has a dark and frightening air. A hungry, bestial thing, with its eyes on you, perhaps.
May 7th: The Creeping Vine
The vine seems to move and twist before your eyes, is dark and green, shifts its leaves as it creeps along the wall, around the trellis, around a log, across the floor, wanting further purchase, wanting light, wanting fuel, wanting to feed… on what?
May 8th: The Faerie
They’re there, and they aren’t, at once. They stand there between planes — they dance, sway, laugh, and it’s a peal of dangerous bells, a harbinger of doom and danger — their touch a promise of magic to come. Eat their food and you’re theirs; drink their wine and you’re theirs; say the wrong thing and… Oops. Too late.
May 9th: The Wolf
One lone wolf howls in the distance, or perhaps one starts and you hear the symphony of its pack come to join it; its paw prints are huge on the ground, that of it and the whole of the pack; its long teeth, its slavering jaws, its eyes in the darkness, lunging from the shadows for its prey.
May 10th: The Vampire
The thing is dead and alive at once: no longer truly living, it hungers now most of all for the stuff of life, and craves the blood it will cut from its next prey’s neck, its thigh, any part of it it can reach. What else does it hunger for — power, money, sex, fame? The light it can no longer stand?
May 11th: The Sphinx
She blocks the doorway, blocks a tunnel, blocks a path, perhaps just settles back on her haunches in the middle of the room, motivated by something higher than hunger, than rage — it’s her intellect that drives her, her need to deliver a challenge and have it responded to, grappled with, answered.
May 12th: The Lightning Flash
It’s a sudden, blinding burst of light that fills the horizon, and as happens in darkness anything can happen in that light, in the electricity that bursts out from it as it chases its next quarry, as it moves closer, suddenly shifts closer, inescapable.
May 13th: The Beetle
It chitters as it runs across the floor, its legs moving rapidly, the chitinous armour of its shell shining iridescently under the light; when it opens its wings, they’re leathery beneath, and beneath that, shiny, thin, and scaly, and its mandibles open and then click shut.
May 14th: The Ogre
His feet leave the ground tremoring with each powerful, stamping footstep, and he looms over all, his skin grey or green or stony, a great club over one shoulder, ever ready to swing and smash the life out of whatever he needs to… Or at least, smash the resistance out of it, so he can get on with what he wants to.
May 15th: The Living Stone
It gets its prey unexpectedly, when they rest their hand on the wrong tile or stone, step on the wrong brick, lean against the wrong wall — it creeps and moves like a living, breathing thing, forming crystalline structures as it spreads and thickens like a mould, and captures, inescapably, anything it can reach, until they’re buried in stone or crystal.
May 16th: The Elf
They stand tall and lithe and touched by magic, armour on their back or robes hanging from their shoulders, long-eared, bright-eyed, impossibly graceful and just slightly distant, untouched by time or even the breeze, even their heart beating with magic. They’ll outlive you and everyone you know, for better or worse.
May 17th: The Cyclops
He roars with frustration as he walks the bounds of his territory, shepherding his flock of sheep or other animals, goes about his day — he’s a giant, one-eyed and perhaps horned, weapons hanging from his belt, shoulders rippling. He swings at a movement — hits or misses?
May 18th: The Bear
It’s a great and powerful thing, ripples with muscle under its thick and shaggy layer of fur and fat, a huge head on its mighty shoulders, great paws that leave heavy imprints in the ground when it walks, and sharp, sharp teeth. It roars, and the windows rattle.
May 19th: The Undead
It’s a shambling thing, rotted from within and without, its teeth falling away from its barely connected jaw, moving with what remains of the impulses shooting from its desiccated, half-eaten brains; its eyes are popped and bulging if they linger in its skull at all; when it tries to talk, all that comes out is a rattling, awful groan.
20th May: The Flickering Light
It’s far and away in the distance, a flicker, a shimmer, a little flash that seems to be coming closer, that seems to always be visible when your eyes close, when they open, and then it’s there, flutters, flashes in a quick burst until its inside your ear, your nose, until its inside you and still flashing behind your eyes.
21st May: The Headless
It walks, it runs, it rides, it carries a blade and swings it, it stands in one doorway or the next and blocks the way — what doesn’t it do? Eat? Drink? Think? Want? What does it have left, with its head cut off at the neck, with its will removed?
22nd May: The Bat
It flies and swoops, silent until it screams loud and harsh, its leathery wings spread wide and its beady little eyes forming red beams in the blackness, its teeth sharp, every shadow showing in the wrinkles of its face, its tipped ears, its sharp claws. It bites.
23rd May: The Blooming Flower
It’s a dangerous thing because it’s beautiful, because it smells sweet on the air, its pollen clinging, a shining golden dust on the air as it blooms and draws you in closer, closer. Its petals spread wide, and they’re so soft to the touch, gossamer soft and silken until the petals clasp shut around your hand and pull you in deeper.
24th May: The Spider
She’s a beast of many legs and many eyes, hair all over her heavy abdomen and around her head, and venom drips from her mandibles — already, you’re touching silk and it’s sticky, impossible to escape from. Before a moment has passed she has you between her front legs, bundling you in more ropes of silk than you could even imagine, tight.
25th May: The Gorgon
The woman stands facing away from you, her hair a nest of snakes, shifting on the air as she looks, frozen, into a mirror. She’s so still, so unmoving, as to be like stone as she studies her reflection, her eyes and her own hundred others examining herself… You see her stiffen at your movement, and pray she doesn’t turn to look.
26th May: The Bird
He’s a beautiful thing, all colourful plumage and long tail feathers and a razor sharp beak — and his feathers glisten with oil and dust as he moves forward, flaps his wings, takes to the sky, and then you’re on the floor and he’s on top of you, surprisingly light and yet impossible to fight against. His claws are in your guts.
27th May: The Mirror Image
It moves as you do, a perfect doppelganger, steps where you step, raises its hands as you raise yours, tilts its head as you tilt yours, and with each mirrored movement it comes closer. Is its face… slightly off? The eyes wrong on one side, or the expression somehow incorrect? It’s so close, now. Too close.
28th May: The Imp
It’s a tiny little thing, small and leathery and fast, all teeth and scales and sulphuric smoke as it suddenly bursts with sparks and moves across the room — and then there’s not just one but dozens of them in a dangerous, laughing swarm.
29th May: The Pounding Rain
You see it out in the grey darkness between the streams of water ratcheting down from above, moving in between the steel-grey streams and seemingly made up of them, too, a silhouette that moves closer, and then suddenly you’re soaked with cold, wet rain, and it seeps inside you.
30th May: The Minotaur
Who is he, in the darkness, or what, perhaps? His great horns stick out from his head, sometimes dragging on the lower parts of the ceiling, his breast made up of muscle, his shoulders rippling with them too, and all over his body is a layer of thick, dark hair. He chuffs, huffing out warm air that blows back your hair — his grip around your waist is tight.
31st May — The Dragon
It’s an impossibly huge beast, all scales and sudden movement, wings, teeth, a tail, horns — what does it hunger for? Meat, gold, power, light? It doesn’t matter what it wants for — it will have it. Who or what could deny it, fight it? Nothing in all of creation.
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