SHORT STORIES FOR STRESSED GROWN-UPS

Short Stories for Stressed Grown-Ups are part meditation, part bedtime story. Created by Devon based writer Neil Bebber, they're designed to help your body relax, while letting your brain explore the beauty of this world and the wonders beyond.

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Keep scrolling down to read a blog by Neil, telling us more about what inspired the stories and the creative process behind them.

BEHIND THE SCENES WITH NEIL BEBBER

There’s something about a short story. A bite-sized morsel of escapism. A quick literary fix. Fast food for the brain. From an early age, reading horror shorts, I knew I’d found something engaging, which would cater for my often limited attention span…

In March 2020, everyone’s normal life changed. Maybe forever. My life did too. What I thought was my safe space, was quickly revealed to be lined with a welloiled rug, which could easily be tugged away. Suddenly, I was in freefall, but what I didn’t realise at the time, was that it was towards something solid and ultimately truly life affirming. Everything was going to be OK.

Fast forward to January 2021. It’s been five months since I’ve watched the news and I’m renting a desk in a co-working space in Devon. I’m also working fourteen hour days, ploughing the experiences of the previous ten months into what I hope will prove an invaluable literary legacy.

By day I write corporate copy, powered by copious amounts of raw vegetables and houmous, as part of my new clean living drive. By night, face lit by the stayawake blue glow of the screen, I hammer away at more overtly creative work, accompanied by the distant sounds of a cheerleading owl.

And, every now and again, by way of a reminder of the existence of others, I have a Zoom call with a friend, or a text from a family member, and they all have one thing in common. While I collapse into bed every night, exhausted, but contented at this constant flow of inspiration, this never-ending winter lockdown, and the pandemic in general, is affecting people’s ability to think, relax and sleep. The new normal is undermining the security we’d previously taken for granted, a punctured can of Coke creating an increasingly sticky residue of anxiety.

I spoke to my friend Simon one evening, our chat occasionally punctuated by agreeable distant hoots. He suggested I should do it all myself. We’d previously worked on some corporate projects together and he reassured me that my voice wasn’t exactly fingernails-down-a-blackboard irritating, and that, with the right microphone, I could record and sound-design it myself.

So, while waiting for the right microphone to arrive, I researched what else was “out there”. There were mystical meditative podcasts, with the sounds of whales and rainfall and gongs combining to create a crystal-coerced route to a sleepy stupor.

There were short stories, with engaging beginnings, intriguing middles and satisfying endings, read in voices so velvet-rich, you’d dream of being wrapped in theatre curtains.

But there didn’t seem to be anything that combined both. A meditative beginning, to help you breathe away all distractions, followed by an immersive story, for your now relaxed mind to gently float in.

And what would these stories consist of? What were the subjects that would help a world of anxious humans drift into a dreamy sleep?

So, what better time to call on these powerful themes? And, if I were to combine them with a sense of nostalgia, maybe they could help unlock our memories and lead us back to our previously hidden happy places.

One morning my new, beautiful, matt-black, carefully-researched mic arrived. All I needed to do now was actually write something. Should I just tell the story? Or should I introduce it? Should I play a character, a bedtime storyteller, or just be myself? The beauty of writing something and giving it over to someone else to read or perform is that it creates a level of separation, a layer of anonymity. But if I was going to read these in my own voice, I’d have nowhere to hide!

And how should it look? How many stories would there be? Was just one story going to be enough? Or would it be a series? What would the series be called?

I decided on “Short Stories for Stressed Grown-Ups”, well, because that’s what they were going to be. And, having been a graphic designer for years, I set about creating a virtual cover for my “book” of escapist tales, as well as a design theme for each story. I’d not even considered how much work would need to be done on the look of the whole thing, creating various graphics for social media and the podcast.

The first of these stories, Across the Universe (the only story with more than one word in the title!), deals with returning to a special place and imagining a journey from that place, through space and time, to a parallel world. Have you ever returned to a place that made you feel comforted, or imagined yourself there?

There are now ten short stories, read by me, in my (very) makeshift studio. If you can make it through a whole one without dropping off (I defy you), you’ll discover that throughout, the expanse of human emotions is explored - love and grief, birth and death, but all of these subjects are handled in a hopeful way. In a way that leads us to believe that, whatever happens, everything is going to be OK.

And, as well as that message of hope, if the stories have done their job, you’ll find that the world looks like a much better place after a decent night’s sleep.

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