Spooktober 2026, Day Nine

SPOOKTOBER DAY 9 – POSSESSION
OPTIONAL CHALLENGES:  STALKER, INSOMNIA, PACT WITH EVIL
TAROT INFLUENCE:  ACE OF WANDS, UPRIGHT

TITLE:  THE FLAME OF GOD

Premise:  Jim put it all together, somehow.  Seeing the writing on the wall in junior high, he plotted and schemed to get around all the laws and societal pushback coming down on trans youth.  He conspired with some cool diablos online to secretly get puberty blockers, unfortunately a little too late to prevent some amount of breast, and started hustling his own money to pay for transition proper when he got old enough and out from under his parents’ control.  He had enough money for top surgery stashed and everything, college just around the corner…

The Villain:  But he had a stalker.  Older boy Francis (STALKER) was obsessed with his own narrow vision of Jim as a special little girl.  In stalking, he discovered the top surgery arrangements, and in an effort to save tha boobs, he ratted Jim out to his parents.  Enter the horror…

Horror Element:  Jim’s mother Christa is remote, quiet, very deeply involved in scholarship.  One wouldn’t expect her to be a theofascist, but all that research was geared toward learning the power of miracles.  She had become convinced in youth that the reason miracles no longer happen is because people forgot the true methods of them – holy magic – and strove to learn those arts for herself (PACT WITH EVIL, frankly).

Her time has come (ACE OF WANDS).  With help from Francis and the hubby Mike, she traps Jim in a magic circle and summons the flame of god to possess him (POSSESSION).  Now whenever he tries to be true to himself, he is subject to burning agony.  Visions of heaven and hell obscure his sight.  He has to wear bras and dresses to ease the pain, can’t sleep at night (INSOMNIA).

You fascists bound to lose.  No way I can write this story without the jesus people getting proper fucked.  It’ll happen.
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This year I’m using AI tools from goog and openai plus photopea to make my covers.  The tech feels close but still has some maddening irritations to it.  Didn’t have time to make the art for the basis of this one, or fuss over this at all.  I used gemini to get the composition and openai to make it more convincing.  Still had to tweak the final a lot in photopea, but less than painting something original from scratch, boy howdy.  Making the source art, no matter how crude, helps make these more distinctive / less generic; hope to do more drawings for them soon.

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Spooktober 2026, Day Eight

SPOOKTOBER DAY 8 – DEATH ITSELF
OPTIONAL CHALLENGES:  LIVE FEED, WRONG PLACE / WRONG TIME, MYSTERIOUS VOICE
TAROT INFLUENCE:  TEN OF SWORDS, REVERSED

TITLE:  OBSERVE

Premise:  I got an idea, but it’s not something I’d actually like to write, and I’d really prefer these all be ideas I’d be willing to write.  I’ll just get it off my chest.  Guy is in some altered state when turned into a zombie and gets locked-in syndrome while his body is doing zombie things – turning his girlfriend, eating his neighbors.  Try to have it be a metaphor for the way many of us feel the loss of control over our bodies as we’re dying.  It’s just too much of a nightmare for the main character, not something I want to imagine enough to spell it all out.

Ambiguously gendered person is in an endless series of low-key nightmares, using weak guns against buff werewolves, running from implacable killers, trying to hide after showing up for class naked (WRONG PLACE/TIME), etc.  The dreams have that end of the night feeling, when your narratives are consumed by the need to draw things to a close – to wake you up – but this just leads to waking up in different dreams, that subsequently get worse, fall apart, etc.  Through this all there is a sense of this being observed in third person (LIVE FEED), a narrator (MYSTERIOUS VOICE) who identifies closely with the main character, whose consciousness can sometimes be felt by them.

The Villain:  Gradually a sense emerges that there is another force in the dreams – a villain behind the buff werewolves and misfortunes.  Can the dreamer remember enough from one dream into the next to piece together the identity of the mysterious malefactor, and to beat them?

Horror Element:  Yes.  The narrator lives on another level of reality, watching all these dreams in third person, and knows the dreamer is both hero and villain in every scenario.  But the dreams get more intimate with them, until they realize it’s their own dreams they’re looking at – they’re every character that’s been seen thus far in the story.

This leads to a pause in torment (TEN OF SWORDS, REVERSED) when they turn off the monitors.  Are they actually waking up now?  No, but as they realize monitor world is just another dream, they meet a very sad woman who they sense is actually another real person.  They ask sad woman, “I know it all now; I know this is a dream.  What can I do?”

She says, “Just be glad you have a chance to try again.”  Implication: the choice is this perdition or nonexistence – they’re in a state akin to (DEATH ITSELF).
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This year I’m using AI tools from goog and openai plus photopea to make my covers.  The tech feels close but still has some maddening irritations to it.  Didn’t have time to make the art for the basis of this one, or fuss over this at all.  I used gemini to get the composition and openai to make it more convincing.  Making the source art, no matter how crude, really does help make these more distinctive.  I hope to do more drawings for them soon.

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Spooktober 2026, Day Seven

SPOOKTOBER DAY 7 – COSMIC HORROR
OPTIONAL CHALLENGES:  ADDICTION, SECRET CODE / PUZZLE, WASTELAND
TAROT INFLUENCE:  TWO OF WANDS, UPRIGHT, from a card including image of Janus

TITLE:  SEVEN STARS

Premise:  I’ve often said the thing that worked best for me about j’brahms cinematic ouvarie is the grand apocalyptic visuals that hearken to dreams I’ve had of seeing multiple suns in the sky, or volcanoes, or supernovae.  Maybe it’s time to use that.  Thinking about disaster at that scale plus the sub-theme of addiction naturally calls to mind Galactus from marvel comics.  Tryin’ not to bite too much…

A world exists in a cluster of seven stars, close enough to each other that they’re all visible in daylight of Merouffi VIII.  We’ll say this exists in the Josefina & Blasfemia universe, where the supernatural exists as a natural phenomenon, the spirit world a parallel dimension whose qualities are informed by different fundamental particles which respond to and reflect the collective imagination of thinking creatures.

The descendants of the colonists on this unfortunate world are plagued with time-space deformities and supernatural problems, which they have adapted to through descent into barbarism.  Many are mutants or hybridized with incarnate spirits, none pleasant.  The closest thing that the world has to scientists are the Priestesses of Taroth, who have developed a belief – now prophecy – that when all seven stars are visible on the same day, their world will end.  They know enough of astronomy to model this and know exactly when it’s going to happen – within sixty-six years.

The Villain:  King Sissif IV has a scheme to become the savior of his people by taming the stars.  This is against the will of Ta’roth, a god-like spirit who emerged from the collective struggles of Merouffian colonists, seen as the embodiment of the inexorable movement of the heavens.

Saving the world is good, right?  He has created a fascist system where the masses must work to construct ziggurats and machines, working unto death, or being used as ritual sacrifices (TWO OF WANDS / EXCHANGE).  If the ceremony works, whoever wears the king’s crown can control Taroth, and thereby the stars themselves.

Horror Element:  Sissif is right that the entity of Taroth can be controlled with a complex and massive enough ritual (SECRET CODE / PUZZLE) but he is wrong that the powers of the astral realm can control the movement of the stars in long space.  The suffering he’s causing is for nothing.

The priestesses of Taroth view people who want to save the world as slaves to their desires (ADDICTION) and use that rhetoric in their sermons.  The heroes are a mixed bag of doom-loving Taroth faithful, nihilists, and freedom fighters.  They’re fighting against saving the world – fighting to end the world – for their own personal reasons.  Good is bad and bad is good (JANUS).

In the spirit of undercutting the horror of it all, I might end it with the prophecy coming to pass, but the world isn’t fully destroyed – just its current configuration.  Maybe all the pure humans are killed by radiation but the hybrids and mutants, but life goes on in the world that remains (WASTELAND).
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This year I’m using AI tools from goog and openai plus photopea to make my covers.  The tech feels close but still has some maddening irritations to it.  Didn’t have time to make the art for the basis of this one, or fuss over this at all.  Not intolerable for just a few revisions, but yes, terribly generic.  Also yes, I used Elric in the prompt.

 

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Spooktober 2026, Day Six

SPOOKTOBER DAY 6 – CREEPY KID
OPTIONAL CHALLENGES:  LONG LOST RELATIVE. SLEEP PARALYSIS, ACCIDENT
TAROT INFLUENCE:  THE DEVIL, UPRIGHT

TITLE:  THE FISH ARE JUMPIN’

Premise:  This premise is pretty much all descended from Turn of the Screw, right?  In that the kids were intermediaries for evil ghosts.  In others of this genre, the kid is the true creep.  What should I do? Hm…

Callie goes with her husband Hank to a family reunion, on a vacay where they have more time than plans, being spontaneous.  They meet some weird turbohillbillied cousins (LONG LOST RELATIVE) and he reminisces that he had spend a fun weekend at their cabin in the backwoods once, as a child.  They invite him to do it again and he accepts, dragging her with.

The Villain:  Environmental lead or something.  These people just ain’t right.  There’s a boating accident (ACCIDENT) and she wakes up in bed.  They tell her he had to be airlifted to the city hospital but they wouldn’t do the same for her, and they’ll let her go just as soon as she’s fit to drive.  They insist on keeping her in bed.  Water in the lungs y’know, caused some pneumonia, just a little longer.

Horror Element:  Is husband actually dead?  Supposedly the family don’t have phones and Callie’s and Hank’s were lost in the lake.  How did they get the airlift?  Shortwave radio out in the shed, but you ain’t fit to get to it, not now.  She wakes in the night with creepy kid sitting on her chest (SLEEP PARALYSIS).  He’s just trying to pump the water out of her lungs is all.

There’s a couple ways this would play out in a movie.  Yes, Hank dead, and edgiest option he was in soup they were feeding to her.  Or Hank not dead but in league with these devils, tormenting her for fun.  Hm… I like to subvert the expectation a wee bit.  Hank dead, kid saves Callie, helping her escape in an inner tube on a river.  The folks give pursuit (THE DEVIL) and get splattered or drowned in rapids.
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This year I’m using AI tools from goog and openai plus photopea to make my covers.  The tech feels close but still has some maddening irritations to it.  Didn’t have time to make the art for the basis of this one, or fuss over this at all.  Not intolerable for a single revision.  And yes, I used Fuseli in the prompt.

 

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Spooktober 2026, Day Five

SPOOKTOBER DAY 5 – BODY HORROR
OPTIONAL CHALLENGES:  HEAVEN / PARADISE, INFESTATION, IMPOSTER / IN DISGUISE
TAROT INFLUENCE:  KING OF CUPS, INVERTED

TITLE:  MAKE A JOYFUL NOISE

Premise:  One of those rapture predictions has people out on the hilltops waiting for a light to lift them out of earthly travail.  Maybe the hopped-up preacher (KING OF CUPS, INVERTED) who convinced the flock did have a line on some kind of cosmic truth, because a light doth come (HEAVEN/PARADISE).  But it doesn’t take anyone away.  They come back to town with a blissed-out expression and try to resume their lives where they’d left off.

The Villain:  Some kind of alien hive mind has designs on our tasty biome.  Monch monch.  It wouldn’t be much of a villain without personifying itself at some point, so I’d have it speak through its victims, show that it is intelligent.

Horror Element:  The hive mind has hijacked the faithful’s bodies (IMPOSTER) and is teasing their neurons and endocrine system into thinking everything is great – right up until the point where they move to the nearest crowd and erupt into a swarm of glowing moth-like alien organisms, which rush to infect as many people as possible (INFESTATION).  Their wings sound like an otherworldly chorus.
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This year I’m using AI tools from goog and openai plus photopea to make my covers.  The tech feels close but still has some maddening irritations to it.  Didn’t have time to make the art for the basis of this one, and the free version was unable or unwilling to do a basic-ass revision I wanted on this.  I chucked some filters on it and am calling it a night.

 

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Freestylin’

Spooktober is a project to help people break out of the belief that, in writing, ideas are everything – that you have to mine your brain for the most perfect and original idea ever, commit to it with a blood oath, and guard it like an IP dragon.  Ideas are, comparatively, the easy part of writing.  Yeah, you may or may not ever come up with an amazing one, but if you drop that requirement, you can come up with thousands.  If you come up with thousands, there’s bound to be something halfway good in the list.  And halfway is all you need, because writing is about writing, not about clever gimmicks.  The best idea in the world ain’t shit if it ain’t writ.

So coming up with an idea a day every day for a month.  Weekdays smoke my life like a cigarette, not much left in the tank at ten PM.  Makes me feel like on the weekend, I should make up for that lost time and get ahead.  Feeling that more than usual at the moment for some reason.  However, I don’t know what the prompt is going to be until the day of, so how can I make use of the time I have today?

In the rap tradition of freestyling, one is supposed to compose your rhymes to the beat as it’s playing, to impress the audience with the speed of your thought.  That is as hard as it sounds.  I might be able freestyle to a modest tempo with an established formula, like adding verses to “American Pie,” but that fast shit?  Impossible.  Well, the rappers aren’t usually doing it 100% spontaneously either.  They come up with a bunch of rhymes that they can flex to match whatever music they’re presented with.  It’s still impressive, but less like sorcery.

Remembering this, what kind of idea elements could I come up with in advance, to copy-paste into future challenges?  We’re letting the group pull tarot cards to use as optional themes, but a lot of them are using non-standard decks, so even if I came up with an idea related to every card in the Rider-Waite standard, it wouldn’t help me every day.  Still, might be better than nothing.

I acquired a list purporting to be all those cards plus their most common interpretations, in very brief…

lol, no.  Turns out that was way too ambitious.  Weekend almost over.  Defeat!
Bleh, I’ll just keep freestylin’ jackass style for now.  Maybe next weekend.

If you draw the ten of swords
Sliced and diced to a pile of gore
Cartomancy should be ignored
The day the music died

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Spooktober 2026, Day Four

I would’ve queued this for tomorrow but it looks like FtB is riding on me & PZ today.  Have another one!

SPOOKTOBER DAY 4 – RITUAL
OPTIONAL CHALLENGES:  RETAIL, COMMERCIALS, HATE
TAROT INFLUENCE:  PRINCE OF FIRE, INVERTED (NON-R-W DECK)

TITLE:  I’M GONNA POP SOME TAGS LORD OF THE FLAMES

Premise:  Thrift shop (RETAIL) in a university area of a major city, the staff all disadvantaged and colorful queer types.  The neighborhood occasionally throws the usual urban menace at them – drugs, violence, chaos – but also, more disturbingly, fascism (HATE) crops up as well.  A transphobic street preacher (PRINCE OF FIRE, INVERTED) is crowding the street corner where they’re expected to hand out adverts (COMMERCIALS), and clean-cut cishet white boys from frats cast a shadow of potential hate crimes over them whenever paths cross.

The Villain:  The preacher is not the villain.  Or is he?  They keep taking donations and sales with sketchy runes in the pockets, that the store’s resident occult expert (a tiny autistic trans dude) translates as “The Lord of the Flames is coming.”

Horror Element:  Fire-related incidents keep happening.  Fratties throwing firecrackers, dumpsters and buildings catching fire, pyrotechnics at a club going awry, fire-eating street performers messing up their act, burned rats and pigeons showing up in the alley or on their doorstep.  This escalates to a multi-building conflagration in the neighborhood.

But the occultist was performing a ritual of his own, putting embroidered magic symbols into his homies’ battle jackets and hoodies.  The magic of the runes is turned back on its owner, who dies spectacularly in the street.  I think it should turn out to be a surprise, like, some minor character – not one of the fratties, nor the preacher.
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This year I’m using AI tools from goog and openai plus photopea to make my covers.  The tech feels close but still has some maddening irritations to it.  Had to recreate my font and my techniques were subpar, didn’t look well integrated.  Whatever, I’m callin’ it.
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Spooktober 2026, Day Three

SPOOKTOBER DAY 3 – GHOSTS
OPTIONAL CHALLENGES:  FOREST, TIME CAPSULE, FEAR OF HEIGHTS
TAROT INFLUENCE:  KING OF WANDS, UPRIGHT, AND THE HIGH PRIESTESS, UPRIGHT

TITLE:  FRESH FRUIT FOR ROTTING VEGETABLES

Premise:  Ancient priests of eldritch gods used to cast strange blessings on their peoples, or curses on their enemies.  One tribe was always known for returning as ghosts (GHOSTS) and avenging themselves against any who would kill them, by the power of their high priest.  A rival tribe from the mountains, knowing this, took them prisoner without killing them, and threw them from a great height (FEAR OF HEIGHTS) into a crevasse – en masse.  Using a power bestowed by their high priest, they shot enchanted arrows at the bodies, which in turn grew into trees, whose roots tied their ghosts down in the soil (TIME CAPSULE).

Sellouts in the fascist-capitalist regime have given all the farmland to corporations in exchange for gold-plated cocaine, telling the girls to just farm the rocky mountainside.  When the girls find the forested (FOREST) crevasse, they figure the lagomorphs and mountain cats need to take one for the team, and clear the trees to grow potatoes.

The Villain:  Him What Hath The Gnarliest Club (KING OF WANDS) is the god of the mountain people.  They went extinct, but he woke up and found colonizers to his liking, vicariously consuming their gold-plated cocaine from the astral plane.  He’s a mile long snake with a jaguar at each end and hummingbird heads sprouting along the serpentispiece like flower buds.  Don’t worry about it.

Horror Element:  The potatoes grow spectacularly into a rotting mass, which fertilizes huge, bizarre, sweet fruits.  Ectoplasm is not recommended fertilizer.  Alima takes a test bite and doesn’t die, so they take them thangs down the mountain to sell.  They hatch like eggs into monsters which grow in size by eating rich white people.  Once they’ve reached full size, they turn into confused people from a long-lost tribe, and have to get jobs at Ualmarto.  Alima is possessed by the priest (HIGH PRIESTESS) of the lost tribe and tries to get the band back together.  Maybe she’ll have to become a shift manager.
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This year I’m using AI tools from goog and openai plus photopea to make my covers.  This is gemini’s chance to shine, in its own goofy way, as it was more successful than openai’s biz at translating my abominable skench.
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Spooktober 2026, Day Two

A-spooktobring we still go…
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SPOOKTOBER DAY 2 – PSYCHIC
OPTIONAL CHALLENGES:  DOOMED/DEATH ROW, TULPA/IMAGINARY FRIEND, ALARMS & SIRENS
TAROT INFLUENCE:  THREE OF CUPS, UPRIGHT

TITLE:  MORE THAN A PARTY (OOH OOH)

Premise:  Life’s a party (THREE OF CUPS / SOCIAL GOOD TIMES).  Or is it?  Three people are having a good time at an endless weekend in a mansion, but they figure out they’re actually in a psychic prison of some kind, and struggle to escape.

The Villain:  The characters are two lovers and a third wheel type who is actually the gaoler of this pleasant prison.  He’s a psychic (PSYCHIC) villain who has captured a hero and intends to keep him until he dies (DOOMED / DEATH ROW).

Horror Element:  The hero’s lover is actually a psychic construct (TULPA / IMAGINARY FRIEND) of the villain meant to distract the hero and prevent his escape.  But she is real.  Should you die in a dubious love, or live for truth?  Furthermore, every time the hero thinks he’s escaping, he’s just entering another illusion, until he loses faith he can ever find reality.  Maybe he does escape but has to always live in doubt.  Then again, it’s fucken Inception innit.  I was thinkin’ of a thing where mysterious sirens (ALARMS & SIRENS) are manifestations of his hunger pangs as he’s starving to death, but now it’s just that big played out Inception note.

I don’t have a strong feeling about the genders of these characters, but changing them around could change the feeling of the situation dramatically.  To be considered, if I should ever write it.
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This year I’m using AI tools from goog and openai plus photopea to make my covers.  My goal was to always start with sketches of my own, but on this one I just used the Rider-Waite tarot’s three of cups and a lot of prompt verbiage.  Looks a lil generic but I rather like it, especially the spooky boy.

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Spooktober 2026, Day One

Hey it’s that time again…  This year I have the added personal goal of including a villain in every story.  I don’t know why, but that doesn’t come natural to lots of writers these days, including me.  Real life is full of villains, and the ones in fiction are actually fun, so why not?  Proceeding thus…

Oh, big-time content warnings today: incest, pedophilia, rape, suicide.  Hates to start on a down note but the prompt brought this immediately to mind.  You know what?  This one is horrible enough I’ll keep it under a fold – a practice I’ve largely not bothered with for a while.

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