Back in 2013 I had an idea for a story based on an old episode of Goosebumps which was in turn based on a book I presume that was called Say Cheese and Die...Again! (My sister and I like to put a weary sigh into the "Again" part, like Ugh, here we go saying cheese and dying again. Anyway the gist of that episode was there was a haunted camera or some shit and when this kid's picture was taken he got really fat and his friend got really thin.In my story "Photobomb" a midde-aged woman and her annoying friend go out to a bar after a 25 year class reunion. They're taking a selfie on the annoying friend's phone and in the mirror this ugly old woman shows up in the background--photobombing them. The annoying friend makes some snide comments and the old woman overhears. It turns out she's a witch and she puts a curse on them that whenever they get their picture taken, they go back in time.
The first time they go back to college at a very dark moment for the main character. Then they go back to high school, then junior high, then a fat camp, then first grade, and finally day care. Along the way the main character learns some things about her life and finds out things aren't quite as she remembers them.
It wasn't a terribly long story, so I came up with a few more. The story "Carousel" was inspired by Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury. In particular there was a part when someone went on a carousel and regressed to like 12 years old. In this case there's a teenage girl and her annoying mom who go to a carnival and at the carousel meet a creepy carnie. The next morning the mom seems younger but her daughter doesn't make much of it. Then the next morning her mom is a teenager about her age--and less mature. That night the daughter tracks her down to the carnival and hears weird music that's like the carousel music played backwards. Eventually she finds out that every night her mom has been getting on the carousel and as it goes backwards it makes her younger. And mayhem ensues.
The third story, "Coven" was inspired by the Tales of the Scarlet Knight books. In the later ones a witch and her lesbian girlfriend produce a baby they name Renee. In this case that's somewhat true, though the identity of the father is changed. Anyway, Renee is a little kid who hears a voice calling to her from a forest behind her aunt's house in the French countryside. She finds a tree that seems to have a face. It tells her that it used to be a witch who went against Renee's mother's coven. Renee frees the evil spirit of the witch, which encourages her to challenge her aunt. Renee finds she has the power to suck a witch's power out of them. She uses it to turn them into powerless little kids. There's kind of a Kill Bill-type thing going where she travels from one place to another to challenge each witch of the coven, until at last she comes back to her own mother. Lots of mayhem ensuing.
You can get the full book of all three stories free just for today. Of course if you have Kindle Unlimited you can get it free all the time. Or I guess if you have Amazon Prime you can probably rent it for free too.
There was a fourth story, Race Against Time, but it ran so long that I spun it into its own book. That's about a police detective (Lottie Donovan of the Scarlet Knight books because I'm meta like that) who is trapped in a sadistic virtual reality game with her kidnapped daughter. There are a bunch of bizarre challenges that also reference other things I wrote (meta inside of meta!) and for each challenge they fail, Donovan gets 2 years younger and her daughter 1 because she's 36 and her daughter is 18 so do the math. And yeah there are 18 chapters (plus an epilogue) so guess what happens?
Originally I published both books under the PT Dilloway name but later I decided they worked better as Eric Filler books. Neither has any gender swapping involved, which is maybe why they don't sell as well as other books.
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