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.

[Read more…]

Je ne blorbe pas.

I do not blorb.  I blorbn’t.  Ich schreibe keine Blorbogeschichten.

I was in my writing group sayin’ hm, don’t have strong ideas for what my road rage demons should be like.  I’m aeternally jealouse of Mr. Barker’s cenobites, the most iconic people-shaped monsters ever.  I suppose that these ones don’t need to be so cool, since they’re just jerks damned to traffic hell, but the longing is there.

So I say that to my writing group, and in the subsequent discussion, where people are making suggestions, one of my fellows said, “Sometimes blorbo wants to digivolve.”  I didn’t say anything, but I felt tainted by the suggestion that my monsters could be categorized in any way as blorbos.

Blorbo is a term that emerged from fan culture to describe a character, be they original or (more often) from a fan’d intellectual property, whose suffering you enjoy.  Not out of hate, but out of love.  Look at that middle-aged white man look like a drowned rat as he is beaten and humiliated.  Delicious, apparently.

This is a species of the sense of dysphoria I get when someone suggests that I am a nerd or a geek.  I would never regard one of my characters as a blorbo.  I don’t want to fold spindle and mutilate them for perv joy.  They are a vehicle to storytelling.  I just don’t get emotional (or horny) about them, not like that.  I was coming up with an idea for how to make some monsters interesting, not getting fannish about my own bullshit, and somebody had to tar me with the fan culture brush.  Filthy.

I suppose this is now a “U Might Not be Aware of…” post.  Blorboing.  Not even once.

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More BS for My RPG

Been putting in more thought on playable races for my TTRPG that is never going to be finished.  Since I cannot think of a single other thing to post about right now, I’ll share a slice of those thoughts.

My creatures were going to be categorizable by plane of origin, like elves are a kind of faerie from the Deep Wild, the first dwarves lived in the mountains under Heaven and could be considered holy.  What about creatures that originated on Gaya, my gay-ass world?  Humans of course, and halflings, some funky animal people…  I didn’t have a lot of ideas.  But lo, I have had a few, and they amuse me.

Halflings are humans.  Inspired by one of the weird cartoon adaptations of Lord of the Rings where Gandalf said hobbits are turning into humans, I decided fuck it, they just are humans, like the populations of real life people who share some form of dwarfism.  I was pondering, should other types of humans exist?  Same base stats but a notable feature of the local population hobbit-style?  And that turned to our cousins in the real tree of life, neanderthals.  I don’t want to get into fronting on realism with it, but why not draw some inspiration from that?  So…

Humans have variations, and a population can have more than one.  Halflingism for shorties (like the irl Twa), Gauntism for tall thin people (like the irl Dinka), Hairyism for people with ape-like body hair, for the fantasy vibes (hence not using the term for the real condition of hirsutism).  These can occur in isolated tribes anywhere in Gaya.  Sasquatchy type guys could have gauntism + hairyism, por ejemplo.  Hobbity guys could be from a paler northwesterly human tribe with halflingism.

I had two ideas for animal people.  One was animal-headed people, like the minotaur, but they can have almost any kind of animal head (ok, bit of bullshit, i’m thinking just tetrapods, to avoid questions about fish and bugs).  This is from ancient magic curse bullshit.  I didn’t think this would satisfy the furries tho, as much as I favor it, so I wanted to have some more animalish animal peeps.  What I had decided about halfling humans put some new notions into my mind.  So…

Naturally evolved humanoid animal people with some regional variation.  Dog people, cat people, lizard people, velociraptor people, and afrotherian people.  Dog people could look like different dog breeds or be muttley, cat people likewise.  Lizards I wanted to have more variety than would be feasible if I stuck within a species, so different regions could look like varanids, chameleons, iguanians, whatever, with some grading between.  Velociraptors could be inspired by irl birds, or differ in size like from microraptor up to utahraptor maybe, no strong opinions right now.

The afrotherian one came to me because I was thinking of animals I like and sengis / elephant shrews jumped out, but they seem so specific and odd compared to the others.  Then I thought, what if the baseline for them is something like a humanoid hyrax, but subpopulations could shade toward different members of the afrotherian clade?  Like some look more elephanty, some aardvarky, some sengi-ish, some dugong-like.  Hyrax is, to my eyes, the most morphologically conservative one.  As these are all the same species with an unreasonable range of local appearances, like the lizard people, they could have intermediate forms you wouldn’t see irl.  No living creature halfway between a sengi and an elephant, right?

The whole of aquatic life should also have a few examples of more humanoid intelligent animal guys, with similar collapse into a smaller number of species with a large variety of physical appearances possible.  I don’t care as much about marine zoology so I was kinda punting notions around, some obvious and some less so.  Gotta have crabs for the carcinization jokes.  Whatever.

This is when I remembered nymphs.  I had so many ideas for how nymphs could work in my setting that I could rename my game Nymph: The Nymphening.  The basic idea is they’re embryonic divinities born by spontaneous generation.  In my initial conception, they looked like morphologically conservative humans – not too tall or short skinny or fat or buff, etc.  But now, if dog people cat people etc evolved naturally on this world like humans, why wouldn’t nymphs just as easily look like one of them?

And so the idea of nymphs just became a lot more baroque.  They can look like lizard people or hyrax people or whatever.  In keeping with the morphological conformity of human-like nymphs, I think no sengis or borzois or sphynx cats or chameleons.  Animal people nymphs should look like shorthairs, wolfish hounds, hyraxes, fence lizards, whatever – but you know, with an internal glow and ineffable nature and nascent divinity, etc.

Then I remembered my crab people, and envisioned a 19th century painter like Bouguereau doing the whole “flying swarm of scantily clad youths in celestial light,” but as a bunch of crabs.  I hope you can imagine it as well.

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backherts

low key threw my back out.  this is different from fully throwing back out, where one is utterly crippled and barely able to perform basic functions of life.  i was able to do several hours of activities with a back brace.  and excedrin.  and oxycodone.  but at the end of the day?  just sitting here hurts.  soon i will be relieved of the low key torment under the black velvet curtain of sleep.  indeed, i keep nodding off mid-sentence, whether i’m reading or writing.  very ready for it.

thinking back on the several months where i’d been able to write one post a day, ending a lil over a year ago, and wonder, how did i have so much to say back then?  there may have been bad reasons for that i’m going to choose not to reflect on.  well.  beddy-bye now, back brace groceries in the morning.

if y’all have any ideas for things you’d like to see more of from me, hmu.

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The Midnight Collection, Volume the Last One Ever

The Midnight Collection is FUCKING OVER!  After considerable misfortune-related delay, my man Joseph Kelly has concluded the run of these compilations of dark fiction (that I’ve previously mentioned).  You have a few options on how to read it – and one is completely gratis.  I’ll explain that later.

This final installment of The Midnight Collection is themed “The Metamorphic Sacrament.”  Blame me for that name.  The collection is produced without profit.  Not non-profit like charity, just that sales will never ever be commensurate to the effort that went into it, which is why it’s a run of four.  I’m not pimping it for money because that ain’t happening.  I’m just really curious what reviewers, casual or serious, will think of all the stories.

At last, I will cop to the reason I’m so curious.  Some of the writers involved are very amateur, and some are world class.  Admission was open to anyone in our top secret writing group, which has an extreme range of skill levels going on.  And you won’t know just how unconventional or raw a given author is until you’re partway through reading a given story.  I know what that project looks like from the inside.  What will it look like to someone who doesn’t know us?

And just what the fuck is a Metamorphic Sacrament?  It’s a mysterious grimoire whose immortal curse takes many forms, as described by our many authors.  A little tour of the table of contents:

VARIOUS POEMS – Brenda M. Barros and Brett Elijah Shelton
Barros has come out swinging on the first volume they’ve contributed to -our last ever- allowing us to go out with a bang.  There are a number of intriguing poems throughout the book.  Also my brother was still here, apparently.

OUR VISITS – Damian Golfinopoulos
Usually the only 100% cishetbro in these collections, Damian’s contributions must evidence some secret queerness.  Our Visits may be his best story yet, and they’ve all been very strong.  I don’t know what they’re putting in the water down in New Zealand, but you can feel something elementally distinct about this guy, some way that he is different from the rest of us that goes beyond his basic bitch gender/attraction configuration.

NOSTALGIA – Becquerel McLeod
This story is about a children’s book changing hands, in more ways than one.  Hey-o! I got a million of ’em.

DEVOTED SERVANT – Kate Bledsoe
Originally this volume was set to be released in early spring three years ago.  A deadline was established, and more than one contributor reduced the length and number of submissions to make that deadline.  Even though the actual release happened long after, in theory more could have been added, in practice, hell no.  Formatting these things to the established standard is a lot of work.

Why do I say all of that here?  Bledsoe was one of the authors who pared down her submissions, and she’s strong enough I would love to have seen what else she had for us.  My cookie is crumbled.  Enjoy this short piece of historical fiction, to its surprising and grisly conclusion.  The grizzle isn’t surprising after three other volumes of this stuff, but elements of it certainly are.

IPSWICH MUSEUM, GLOOMY FEATHERS – Dominique Palma
Our lone ESL contributor drafts the first of a few non-fiction-styled entries to the lore with Ipswich Museum, and later brings those hints home with an almost poetic death march through the Sacrament in Gloomy Feathers.

THE BLACK CASTLE, DER STIEGLITZ UND ANDERE VÖGEL – Caesar Train Magenta
Usually Magenta just writes the closing Cryptkeeper-style segments of Midnight Collections, but this is the second long-form story in the book – and it’s so different from the first.  Who is this mysterious author, and what is wrong with him?  There’s a love trianglesque thing too.  He didn’t shirk his Cryptkeeping duties either, as we see in Der Stieglitz.

A CERTAIN KIND OF ARTISTE – Bébé Mélange
Hey, it’s a me.  In true middle child fashion, I dropped a ton of hints in this story to tie together the lore from other stories.  But did I raise more impossible questions than I answered?  A very short story, hopefully worth a chuckle.

MURDER BE SPOKE EPISODE 113: THE MYSTERIOUS MANUSCRIPT MURDER – Luna Raydue
Raydue demolishes the record for title length.  You have to respect the game.  Also, the story puts a fresh spin on the epistolary style.

THREE TEETH FOR THOMPSON GRATE, REHEARSAL NIGHT – Brenda M. Barros
Three Teeth is Brenda’s first prose to appear in the book.  It’s short, but changes form quickly within its few pages. (metamorphosis?)  Reminds me of that moment in the late 19th century when some authors felt the need to include a framing story even on short fiction, interesting in that.  Later we see their Rehearsal Night, which is much more ambitious in vision.

EXQUISITE DELIGHTS, WHAT WILL YOU BECOME? – Joseph Kelly
My husband the editor must occasionally step up to the author plate and show everyone why he’s the boss.  Exquisite Delights is definitely the best story in the collection -really stands alone- and that’s saying something, given how many of us brought our A game.  This lurid tale is inspired by the sheisty undercurrents of art history.  Later, What Will You Become? is a psychedelic little trip into the feelings of our theme.

A CROWNING ACHIEVEMENT – Lydia Moody
A Moody return.  This author has been in the collection from the beginning, and like Damian, saved her best for last.  A perfect short story reminiscent of Stephen King, and the only story with an illustration by the author.

SHADOWS OF THE SACRAMENT – James Hyde
Hey, the cishetbros are at it again.  James Hyde is new to our collection, just in time for the end, and brings a real spookhouse experience to the proceedings.

REEL ZERO – Christopher Scott Shelton
My pretentious high school self dusts off the cobwebs to bring the edgelordry.  I’m really proud of this fucked-up scenario, which is a bit of a prequel to Palma’s Gloomy Feathers.  And the web version has an extra ending not included in the print version.  How about that?

HOW DO I READ THE MIDNIGHT COLLECTION?

For the first time, the Collection is not available in ebook!  For reasons, making an e-book to a reasonable standard is painful as hell.  The print version is where the collection really shines, available at Lulu.  And lastly, as promised, you can just read it for free at the Collection’s website.

There’s one original work of art by an author, but most of the illustrations are lovingly curated from public domain resources.  At least small versions of (most of) the illustrations are available on the website, but yes, the best way to appreciate them is a hard copy.

I’d love to see reviews, either of the whole package or individual stories.  For lowest effort you can drop some general thoughts in the comments below this article.  You can also leave comments on the individual stories at the Midnight Collection‘s site.  Thanks!

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NOTE:  I didn’t realize the wordpress site for it has ads til I looked at it on mobile just now.  The price of free hosting.  Ad blocker recommended!  Those ads don’t give us a cut or anything.  Also the format is kinda janky on mobile.

Tap-outs

Man, it was a bad month for writing.  I was doing well enough when I wrote, but there were certain demoralizing circumstances that have been messing with me for a few years and were worse than average this month.  So.  Road Rage goes on indefinite hiatus.

I might fuck around and turn in random Josefina+Blasfemia chapters occasionally.  I know that’s no kind of way to read a story, so if you’re so inclined, wait until I end it, then go back to the beginning and read the whole thing.  That story is probably my magnum opus of being weird as fuck.  Centennial Hills, The Septagram, etc, they’re intelligible enough, I think.

Anyway, happy crammed in roman asswipe month part Two.  Maybe shitler will get a month before he’s done, whaddyathink?  A thirteen month year?  It’s time.

Oh, and if it’s time to vote for you, vote!  I’ll be doing that tomorrow.

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