Today’s story marks the beginning of Volume 3 of the Bedtime Stories for Insomniacs fiction podcast. As you know, I keep promising to release a print edition of the stories. My goal is to release them in collections of 26 tales. These are just the stories that I write. I’ve started using guest authors recently, so although I’m at #59, some of those were written by others and there are a couple early stories that won’t make it into the first volume. When all is said and done, there will be 14 Volumes (the latter ones having 27 stories) so that there will be a grand total of 366 stories, one for every night of the year (including leap years!).
So, even though I don’t denote the stories by volume on the podcast, you should see a new print collection ever 30 or so podcast episodes.
“The Blue Joker” started out as a story I was going to write to submit to an anthology that was seeking tales about clowns. My original idea included a somewhat clunky idea of having the joker on the card come to life and do the typical things that evil clowns do.
But as I was researching the history of jokers, I discovered that contrary to popular opinion that there are two jokers in a deck, there are French decks that have three jokers, which are used in the game, German Rummy. The Red Joker, the Black Joker and the Blue Joker. In German Rummy, like in some variations of poker, jokers are wild cards, standing in for any other card.
What if, I thought, a person had that power? Okay, not totally original. We’ve seen that ability before, in characters like Mystique from the X-Men, and the famous spell from Harry Potter that allows a wizard to disquise themselves as anyone else. But linking it to the Blue Joker felt like I could pull it off without it being too much of a cliché.
I won’t say any more about the story, I’ll leave it to you to discover how the Blue Joker manifests in the life of this week’s protagonist. But I will repeat my pleas for you to share this story and the podcast with anyone you know who likes audio fiction. You can post the link on social media, encourage a friend or family memeber to subscribe to this Snoozeletter, or just simply metion it in an old fashioned conversation. And please, if you haven’t yet, make sure you’re subscribed on your favorite platform and set it to automatically download new episodes so they’re ready for you when I deliver them. I’m changing the schedule to new stories on Tuesdays, and new novel parts on Thursdays. Apparently those are the best days to drop new podcast episodes.
Also, if you haven’t yet, please take a moment to rate and review the podcast. If the app you’re listening on doesn’t allow you to do so, hop on over to Apple Podcasts on iTunes, or Spotify or Audible and post a review there. It really helps!
And of course, I’d love if you let me know what you think here on SubStack.
Thanks again, and all the very best!