Disclaimer:
This story deals with themes of bullying, revenge, retribution, and harm to others.
About Camp Black Hollow
Camp Black Hollow started as a placeholder storyline for a different creative outlet I briefly ventured into:
I was going to try to develop an app.
I love the idea of gamifying productivity and mental wellbeing, particularly through apps similar to Finch.
I tried Finch, but was a little put off by the cartoonish-ness of it. I looked for other apps that might fit my style but never found anything quite right.
Soon, I developed an idea for a horror themed productivity/mental wellbeing app called Survive the Day. The idea was that, like Finch, you would set a daily to-do list then, as you complete your tasks, you would be granted access to pages of a comic book-style story, namely a horror-themed comic book in the same vein as the old EC Comics or Tales From the Crypt or Creepshow.
With the help of ChatGPT, I got the bones built and the functionality dialed in, all that was left was the art.
The problem is, I can’t draw comic book style art to save my life.
I toyed with the idea of hiring it out but knew that would get expensive in a hurry and with no promise of any kind of financial return on the app, the idea was quickly abandoned.
In the midst of developing the app, I simultaneously began thinking up some storyline ideas to use for future stories. With a prompt from ChatGPT, Camp Black Hollow was born. We tinkered with the storyline until I landed on the final form we see here.
Now, I am not a writer, in any sense of the word. I have no formal training beyond whatever creative writing we did in high school English classes. I love to read, particularly Stephen King, Dean Koontz, Scott Nicholson, and the like, but never dipped my toe into the actual act of writing.
But with this story, and the dozens of other stories I dreamt up during the development of the app, rattling around in my brain, I couldn’t contain it any more.
Now, I have no delusions that this story will see the light of day outside of this blog, and with exactly zero visitors coming here (this blog is for me and no one else. If anyone happens upon it, great, more power to ’em, but feel the wrath of the untrained writer), otherwise, it’s more of a personal diary than a travel blog.
And now, it acts as a creative dumping ground, a place to release from my head these stories in prose.
As of this writing, I have around 30 or 35 ideas banked and I find new ideas triggered by the smallest things, I don’t expect to drop them as quickly as I think them up, but as long as this space exists for me to get it out of my head, I’m OK with it.
So, thanks for stopping by and checking out the story. If you are here by some weird accident, leave a comment and tell me how you stumbled upon it, what you thought of the story, or, just rip me a new one for wasting 90 minutes of your time… 🤣
Watch out for my next one, Infinite Playground, out soon.