Dear diary this list came to me in my dream! Looks like AU-gust 2026 is here. (For a longer, more informative post, find us on Tumblr as 'augustwritingchallenge'. Or see post and links below!)

Hello, AU-enthusiasts! I’m very sorry about the lack of content this year - unfortunately, I’ve gotten ill two weeks ago and have only been getting worse since. The daily posts arescheduled on Tumblr but that's all I can do. Apologies to all the BlueSky users as BS doesn’t have scheduling function.

Action and heartbreak - a perfect duo for this prompt. Someone might risk their life to find out the truth that you will reject anyway because if that were true, it would mean your whole life was a lie…

Who went with the space space, and who took a turn and explored a liminal space or a strange space on Earth? Is space exploration a lonely, soul-crushing job, an exciting new adventure, or a necessity? Taking a theme U-turn and jumping from medieval and healers to space and space ships!

Aquariums open up unusual possibilities in our stories, including being eaten alive by a shark in front of live audience, feeding your rival to the piranhas, completely nerding out about marine life, or meeting the love of your life while they mop up water from an aquarium you’ve just broken...

When the good becomes the evil, the story, naturally, changes. But what if the heroes are still heroes, just for all the wrong reasons? What if the villain just wants to have fun and doesn’t understand why everyone is so angry?

Healers is such a wide prompt - shamans, witches, gifted people, sorcerers who focus on helping others, or simply the good people in our lives who can heal a wound nobody else could.

*boo*

Rivalry running so deep that nobody today remembers why it started. Two powerful beings (or hundreds of them) fighting until only ruin surrounds them, and the fight is still undecided. What fool would be stupid enough to intervene?

From the summer camps of our childhoods, through adventure time of our adult years, down to sleeping rough with a medieval party on a campaign - this prompt invites a variety of genres! Which one is yours - fluff, drama or angst?

Is a world without wars and conflict perfect, or does universal peace come at a heavy cost that nobody talks about? There is peace now, but what came before, what will come after? What do heroes do when there are no monsters to fight?

One of the trickier AUs this season brings up folklore. Who meets a creature who leads them off the path? Who is this creature, why do they do what they do? Is there any truth in fairy tales?

From kingdoms at war, through knights fighting for glory, nobles falling in love with peasants, arranged marriages and forbidden romances, down to simple stories about common people and everyday struggles in the world of the past, I love them all!!! And what's your poison?

A ball is like a scene from a fairy tale. But it is also a great place for assassins to do their job! (Don't quote me on that.) Among other things, did anyone else's mind go right to the ball from Phantom of the Opera? When you don't know who is friend and who is enemy - that's a yummy atmosphere!

Now back to the angst! Lovers torn apart by a misunderstanding, a party of heroes breaking up because of their conflicting priorities, or something else? Send all the whump our way! (But we don’t mind the comfort part either!)

A metaphor for someone performing miracles, a reason for persecution in medieval times, or an unusual and hard-to-believe gift in the modern world? Where did this AU take you?

From A sick-fic, through Major Character Death, all the way to a Zombie apocalypse - this AU has hundreds of interpretations. Have you kept with the romantic theme of this season and sent a hero to search for a cure for their loved one or have you gone with something a bit smaller (or a lot bigger)?

Everyone's favourite mythical creature! (Along with unicorns, of course.) Not to be mistaken with wyverns. Dragons can spice up every story. Have you added them to the usual canon, or have you taken canon and thrown it at a dragon-populated world?

Unleash your inner nerd with a self-insert character rant about homemade bread baking and sourdough starter keeping, or find romance, hope, and healing in the romantic setting of a bakery. Or show us all the ways you can twist this prompt into something dark. I smell yeast and money laundering!

Add romance to a story to rise the stakes for the hero or to explain the difficult situation with the villain. Make your story read like a romance book from centuries past. Focus on the dynamic feelings and not the boring end of the world on the horizont. AUgust 1st is time for love to shine bright!

Hear ye, hear ye! Ye #AU_gust 2025 prompt list is here! (For a longer, more informative post, find us on Tumblr as 'augustwritingchallenge'. Or see post and links below!)