Spooky Short Story 2024

I'm super sleepy and have work in the morning but luckily last night I was too sleepy to put up the introductory blogpost to this year's spooky short story, so I'll do that today and tomorrow finish off editing the story itself and everything, get it into publishing shape (it's already basically written.) Just, push it all back a day.

It's called Dream Journal. Here's the part where I tell you what inspired it: it basically happened to me for real, except for the scary bits, which didn't happen to me; the rest of it however caused me to think "oh, you know what would be scary here?" 

The idea of a dream journal is something that I have mixed feelings about; a lot of my best ideas come straight from dreams, but as I've, just gonna fudge it and say "matured as an artist" or some b.s., matured as a thinker, I've grown less enamored of the idea that your sleep can be something productive for you. Not everything needs to be productive, and once you start viewing things under those terms there's virtually no way of going back.

Neoliberalism, the defining ideology of everyday life, is an all-encompassing machine under which absolutely everything is commodified, even art. Even, getting back to the topic of sleep and resting, taking a break from the system is a commodity: taking a break, after all, makes you a more productive worker. And getting back to dreams, not to spoil the story or anything: as an artist, your dreams can fuel your art which can fuel your "brand." It's a horrifying miserable way of looking at the world. 

Not that it's bad to dream, or be inspired, or to make art. Even compromised art is better than no art; there's no such thing as uncompromised art (but that's a separate discussion.)

That's all background radiation, though. Neoliberalism isn't the monster in Dream Journal, not really. After all, the scariest stories aren't the ones in which the protagonist is hopeless before the monster. The scariest stories are the ones in which the protagonist has agency, but it's deeply ambiguous what the best course of action is with that agency, in the face of monstrousness.