Rather than Rod Serling my way through another introduction, I thought I might provide a little bit of back story as to how this new serial came about.
It’s based on a dream I had the winter after I graduated college. In the dream, my then girlfriend now wife, had decided to end her life through a government program. She was very casual about the whole thing.
The rest of the dream was me trying to find a way out of the contract. It was a Kafka-esque (a pretentious but useful phrase) journey into bureaucratic hell. Everything in the dream felt like Terry Gilliam’s Brazil. It played in my mind’s eye like a movie filmed with fish-eye lenses, extreme closeups, and Dutch angles.
The story became something very different from the dream. I originally intended it to be a single entry. As I was writing, it quickly became apparent that it would need to be longer. Thus, it became a five-chapter serial.
I hope you enjoy Chapter One of the Devil on Her Shoulder.
