It’s November 1st, which means another 13 Days 13 Shorts has come to a close. I want to thank everyone who signed up, everyone who participated, everyone who shared or commented, and everyone who celebrated.
Halloween is a very special time of year. It’s a time when we let imagination take over. Yards become haunted forests. Rooms because portals to other dimensions. Clothing becomes costume. It’s also a time when we don’t fight the unknown but embrace it. Moving shadows, mysterious animals, unexplainable creaky noises. Halloween is when we aren’t intimidated by what we don’t know but instead are fascinated by it all. We take our fears and create.
That’s what 13 Days 13 Shorts is all about.
This year we had beautiful collages and fantastic short films and inspiring yoga videos and moving haikus and transcendent visual poems and hilarious scripts and so much more. From all over the world, folks contributed to the Halloween spirit of ghoulish whimsy and mischievous creativity.
It is such a blast getting to run 13 Days 13 Shorts. In an era when every company on the planet is making pumpkin spice everything [nod to a previous year’s theme], it’s so great to have a Halloween haven where there’s no money involved, no advertising, no gimmicks, just good ol’ arts and crafts.
We’ve done 13 Days 13 Shorts for twelve years now. Twelve. Which means that next year is, yup, you guessed it, our 13th year! Our 13th 13 Days 13 Shorts! And Halloween will be on a Friday so it’ll be a Friday our 13th 13 Days 13 Shorts Halloween!
Because of this we’ll be stepping up the festival by hopping off of Tumblr and onto our own website where it’ll be so easy to see the calendar, sign up, post, share, and interact. Next year we’ll have a theme selection party, a handful of live events, and so much more! It’s going to be amazing!
So thank you all again for all of your unbelievable art, for all of your support and for keeping this festival going for twelve years. Get some rest, take time to reflect, crack open that NaNoWriMo and then, after a well deserved break, feel free to start brainstorming because the countdown to next year’s 13 Days 13 Shorts starts now.
And I cannot wait to see what you all do.
Thank you for a wonderful year and we’ll see each other for our 13th.
- Omar Najam