Podcasts about Edgar Allan Poe

Paranormal investigator, television personality, podcaster and bestselling author Amy Bruni returns to The Paranormal Podcast to discuss her new book, Cuisine to Kill For: Recipes and True Crime Stories from the World's Most Haunted Places. Amy explains how the success of Food to Die For led to this follow-up, which features 60 recipes connected to haunted locations with true crime histories, including destinations outside the United States. Amy takes us inside the Paris Catacombs, the Tower of London, the site of H.H. Holmes' Murder Castle, the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum and other locations featured in the book. We also discuss Amy's theories about why tragedy may leave an imprint on a place, why she tries to remember victims for how they lived rather than how they died, and some of the recipes that surprised her most, including Shrimp Wiggle, Edgar Allan Poe's beloved eggnog and baked cod from Boston's Omni Parker House. You can find Amy's new book at Amazon: https://amzn.to/4bvSNCx Thanks Amy! --- VIRTUAL CAMPFIRE GROUPJoin our FREE online community at ⁠https://virtualcampfiregroup.com⁠EVENTSHope to see you soon at one of Jim's live events: https://jimharold.com/eventsYOUTUBE CHANNELBe sure to subscribe to Jim's YouTube channel at: ⁠https://youtube.com/jimharold⁠ JOIN JIM'S SPOOKY STUDIO PLUS CLUBYou can get access to Jim's entire back catalog of Campfire and a TON of exclusive content with the Spooky Studio Plus Club. Go to https://⁠jimharold.com/plus⁠ and signup to support the show and get access to our MASSIVE library of content!MERCHGo to ⁠https://jimharold.com/merch⁠ to get your Jim Harold T's, sweatshirts, mugs, hats and more! BOOKSGet all SIX of Jim's Campfire books here: https://jimharold.com/campfirebooks/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Johnny Mac shares a clip he believes is from Ziwe's 2025 interview show in which Kevin Hart is confronted for flying private and says he hasn't flown commercial in 17 years, arguing his schedule and need to sleep on planes. He then recaps a Baltimore Sun report from the taping of Stavros Halkias' special, including Baltimore-themed jokes about the Ravens name and Edgar Allan Poe, plus Halkias' weight-loss material and the logistics of recording four shows in the same outfit. Johnny notes Atsuko Okatsuka is developing a half-hour sitcom about modern marriage, highlights a Hollywood Reporter profile of Maria Bamford discussing self-acceptance, Al-Anon, and performing style, and summarizes a Guardian profile of Mary Beth Barone, including her comments on polarized comedy and criticism of Andrew Schulz. He also covers Nick Kroll's Comedy vs. Cancer benefit raising over $10 million and previews Montreal's World's Smallest Comedy Festival at Hurley's Irish Pub. 00:37 Kevin Hart Ziwe Clip01:53 Private Jet Confrontation03:32 Stavros Baltimore Special05:28 Atsuko Sitcom News06:01 Maria Bamford Profile06:54 Mary Beth Barone Guardian08:24 Nick Kroll Cancer Benefit10:00 Worlds Smallest Fest Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/daily-comedy-news-with-johnny-mac--4522158/support.Daily Comedy News is hosted by Johnny Mac and releases every weekday. Subscribe on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or your favorite app. Part of the Caloroga Shark Media network. For transcripts and show notes visit www.dailycomedynews.comDaily Comedy News with Johnny Mac is a daily podcast covering comedians, stand-up comedy, late night television, and the comedy industry. New episodes every morning. Follow on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.  Contact John at John@thesharkdeck dot com For Uninterrupted Listening, use the Apple Podcast App and click the banner that says Uninterrupted Listening.  $4.99/month John's Substack about media is free. 

Freak Family Favorites: Bat People, Moon Hoaxes, and Museums That Shouldn't Exist This Freak Family Favorites episode comes straight from the recommendations of the Freak Family, and it's packed with the kind of stories that remind us why history is often stranger than fiction. First, Kat unpacks one of the greatest media hoaxes ever printed: The Great Moon Hoax of 1835. Newspapers convinced thousands of readers that a giant telescope had discovered life on the Moon—including winged bat people, intelligent beavers that built villages, strange temples, and an entire lunar civilization. It spread across America and Europe before anyone stopped to ask whether any of it was actually true. Then Jethro takes a tour through some of the world's most bizarre museum exhibits. From Galileo's preserved middle finger and Thomas Edison's supposed last breath to necropants, human-skin books, serial killer relics, and anatomical displays that blur the line between science and the macabre, these are museums unlike any you've ever visited. If you've ever wondered how easily people can be fooled—or why museums sometimes keep the strangest souvenirs imaginable—this Freak Family favorite belongs at the top of your playlist. In this episode: The Great Moon Hoax of 1835 Bat people, lunar beavers, and the newspaper story that fooled the world Sir John Herschel's unwitting role in history's most famous astronomy hoax Edgar Allan Poe's unexpected connection to the scandal The world's strangest museum exhibits Galileo's middle finger, Thomas Edison's last breath, necropants, human-skin books, and more Weird history, oddities, curiosities, and unbelievable true stories Perfect for fans of: Weird history, historical hoaxes, Edgar Allan Poe, astronomy, museums, macabre history, curiosities, folklore, and the strange true stories that make the world wonderfully weird. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Nuevo programa de Par-Impar sobre dos serie B de terror directo a vídeo de los noventa: Castle Freak y El Pozo y el Péndulo, de Stuart Gordon. En esta nueva entrega del podcast de cine Par-Impar en esRadio, Juanma González y Dani Palacios nos sumergen en una sesión doble de auténtico cine de culto y serie B de los años noventa. El programa rinde homenaje al talento del director de culto Stuart Gordon y a la mítica productora Full Moon, capitaneada por Charles Band. A través de un análisis desenfado pero riguroso, los presentadores desmenuzan dos de las obras más singulares y físicas del realizador: El Foso y el Péndulo (1991) y Castle Freak (1995). Ambas películas personifican una época dorada del cine de terror directo a videoclub, donde las limitaciones presupuestarias se suplían con un desbordante ingenio visual y una entrega absoluta por parte de sus actores fetiche. La andadura comienza con El Foso y el Péndulo, una libre adaptación del célebre relato de Edgar Allan Poe que Gordon reformula para adaptarla a su estilo visceral y de terror físico. Ambientada convenientemente en el año 1492, la cinta retrata una visión delirante y lúbrica de la Inquisición española. El gran aliciente de la función es la asombrosa interpretación de Lance Henriksen en el papel de Torquemada, encarnado aquí como un fanático atormentado por sus propias represiones sexuales y delirios de poder. La película baila constantemente entre el terror gótico y un humor negro muy cercano a la parodia, ejemplificado en la hilarante escena del juicio a un esqueleto al que azotan hasta deshacerlo, un momento que los locutores comparan con un sketch de los Monty Python. La producción de este filme cuenta además con curiosidades memorables que enriquecen el anecdotario del programa de esRadio, como el brevísimo pero impagable cameo del legendario actor Oliver Reed interpretando a un enviado del Papa. Según relatan González y Palacios, Gordon le permitió que en sus dos minutos en pantalla se limitara a beber vino real, lo que facilitó enormemente el rodaje. El desenlace de la película, con una bruja que explota tras ingerir pólvora de forma literal, rubrica el tono desenfadado y macabro de una propuesta que, pese a sus costuras de bajo presupuesto, ofrece momentos visualmente potentísimos gracias a la notable dirección artística de la factoría de Charles Band. La segunda parte de este programa doble se traslada a la truculenta atmósfera de Castle Freak (1995), una de las cintas más oscuras y escabrosas de la filmografía de Stuart Gordon. Rodada en el propio castillo medieval que Charles Band poseía en la Umbría italiana, la película está protagonizada por la emblemática pareja del cine fantástico formada por Jeffrey Combs y Barbara Crampton. Aquí encarnan a un matrimonio sumido en una profunda crisis tras una tragedia familiar que hereda la fortaleza, sin sospechar que en sus mazmorras habita un ser deforme y martirizado llamado Giorgio. La crudeza de la propuesta, su sordidez sexual y el dramatismo gótico la convierten en una pieza de culto muy superior a la media de las producciones destinadas al mercado doméstico. Los conductores de Par-Impar analizan pormenorizadamente los elementos de terror físico y psicológico de la película, destacando el trágico trasfondo del monstruo y su perturbadora mutilación genital a manos de su propia madre. Asimismo, especulan con la posibilidad de que directores españoles de renombre dentro del género, como Paco Plaza y Jaume Balagueró, se inspiraran directamente en el aspecto visual de Giorgio para dar forma a la icónica niña Medeiros de la saga cinematográfica Rec. La música del programa concluye con una curiosidad familiar sobre la dinastía Band: la sintonía final corre a cargo de la banda The Calling, cuyo vocalista, Alex Band, es hijo del compositor Richard Band y sobrino del célebre productor de Full Moon.

“O retrato oval” é conto de Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), no qual o narrador inominado está machucado e, com seu criado Pedro, invade um castelo para passar a noite. Eles vão acomodar-se no torreão do castelo, que apesar de ricamente decorado, denota estar abandonado. Uma característica do ambiente é a presença de muitos quadros e a curiosa existência de um livrinho, com a descrição de todas as pinturas. O sobrenatural do conto acontece após a meia-noite quando, deitado na cama com franjadas cortinas de veludo preto, ele move o enorme candelabro à cabeceira do leito e enxerga, pela primeira vez, a pintura de uma jovem no alvorecer da feminilidade. O retrato oval que hipnotiza o protagonista tem uma incrível vivacidade e, num momento sobrenatural da narrativa, parece ser uma pessoa viva, aprisionada à moldura. Tudo no ambiente tem uma descrição exageradamente gótica. Boa leitura!✅ Torne-se MEMBRO do CLUBE LEITURA de OUVIDO: encontros virtuais mensais, com notas de rodapé ao vivo e interação entre os leitores e Daiana Pasquim. Para isso, faça um apoio a partir de R$ 20 mensais:

¿Quién no ha tenido la pesadilla de ser culpado de algo y no poder demostrar tu inocencia?, más aún cuando todas las pruebas parecen estar en tu contra. A pesar de que el gobernador romano Félix estaba convencido de la inocencia de Pablo, el apóstol seguía en prisión en Cesarea. Y en el capítulo 25 del libro de Hechos un nuevo procurador le sustituye, Festo. No tiene experiencia, pero como quiere estar a bien con los judíos, Pablo está en peligro, puesto que le piden que sea juzgado en Jerusalén, donde conspiran para matarle. El apóstol no tiene más remedio que apelar a la justicia superior romana que representa el Cesar. Los judíos no tienen prueba alguna de sus acusaciones contra Pablo. Él niega quebrantar la ley judía, pero la acusación concreta es de profanar el templo. No hay testigos, pero pretenden que actúa contra los intereses del Emperador, al fomentar el desorden en su provincia. Plinio el Joven se alarma de la extensión del cristianismo en Bitinia en el años 112 d.C., pero no hay reparos en actuar contra los que no son ciudadanos romanos. Parece extraño que Nerón le diera más confianza a Pablo, que su propio pueblo, pero estamos en los primeros años de su principado (54-49 d.C.), cuando está todavía bajo la influencia de su preceptor, el filósofo estoico Séneca y el prefecto de la guardia pretoriana, Afranio Burro. No habían llegado todavía los años del terror (64-65 d.C.). Si hay un tema que une todo el cine de Hitchcock es el del "Falso culpable", pero no hay película que lo haga más evidente que la película que lleva ese nombre en España, conocida en Hispanoamérica como "El hombre equivocado". Es la única además, que la relaciona claramente con su fe católica. Fotografiada en un esplendoroso blanco y negra, cuando ya había hecho algunos de sus mayores éxitos en color, la protagoniza un imperturbable Henry Fonda, como un músico de origen latino en Nueva York Tiene una vida ordenada y decente, pero tiene dificultades para mantener a su familia. Su esposa necesita un tratamiento dental y Manny acude a una compañía de seguros, para pedir un préstamo sobre su póliza, cuando creen que es un atracador. José de Segovia comenta la películas con escenas de la versión doblada al castellano. Muchos creen que la primera narración de misterio policiaco es la de Edgar Allan Poe en "Los crímenes de la calle Morgue", pero hay un relato detectivesco anterior, obra de un pastor luterano danés que escribe sobre un predicador sospechoso de asesinato, investigado por otro ministro protestante. Se trata de "El párroco de Vejlby" (1829), escrito por Steen Steensen Blicher (1782-1848), un librito que ha sido traducido ahora al castellano. Su personaje se enfrenta a la justicia por un caso criminal que pone en peligro su vida. La historia está narrada en forma de dos diarios, el del juez que examina el caso y el párroco que viene después. El proceso se describe en términos judiciales, sin partidismo alguno. El lector sabe lo que sabe el juez. No se adelanta, ni tiene trampa. Seguimos sus notas y las de su sucesor, que nos lleva a un final sorprendente, que da una luz muy diferente al problema que enfrenta el pastor. El enigma es si el ministro en un arrebato de ira ha matado al criado que sirve en la casa parroquial, hermano de un granjero que reclama al juez que haga caer todo el peso de la ley sobre el pastor acusado. Atormentado por la culpa y lleno de dudas, a veces nos parece culpable y otras no. No hay dudas sobre la inocencia de Pablo, pero tiene que apelar a Cesar,. El gobernador romano Festo queda aliviado, porque ya no está así bajo su responsabilidad, pero queda un problema todavía. Tiene que enviar un informe. Tiene los registros de las audiencias con Félix y la carta de Lisias (Hechos 23:26-31), pero no entiende nada de la religión judía. Es entonces cuando aparece Herodes Agripa II. Estaba en Roma, cuando muere su padre en el 44 d.C. Claudio está dispuesto a hacerle rey de los judíos, pero tenía sólo 17 años. Su actuación contra la revuelta del año 66 d.C. hace que Nerón le recompense dándole mayor autoridad. Agripa está su hermana Bernice o Berenice, como le llama Josefo. Su padre le había dado en matrimonio a su hermano Herodes, rey de Calcis, pero cuando muere, va a casa de su hermano Agripa, al que regresa incluso después de casarse con Polemón, rey de Cilicia. Los Herodes se casan entre sí en una continua mezcla incestuosa, pero tienen mucha curiosidad por lo que el apóstol pueda decir sobre "la esperanza de la resurrección".. Así que dicen a Festo que están muy interesados en escuchar a Pablo y lo que afirma sobre "un tal Jesús, que estaba muerto, pero que Pablo afirmaba que estaba vivo".

When a beautiful cigar shop girl is found dead under mysterious circumstances, a troubled Edgar Allan Poe becomes obsessed with solving the real-life crime—turning tragedy into fiction in a desperate search for truth.EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/PoeCigarGirlFEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: I'm sharing a chapter from the book “Nevermore: The Haunted Life and Mysterious Death of Edgar Allan Poe” by Troy Taylor, which I narrated the audiobook for. But this chapter by itself was so interesting to me that I thought it would make a great episode of Weird Darkness – plus, it gives you a little peek into what you might get if you purchase the book itself. I've left a link to the book in the show notes below. This is the true story about the murder of a girl who worked in a cigar shop, the investigation of it by law enforcement, how Edgar Allan Poe saw it as an opportunity to escalate his career and name… and how it all almost blew up in his face, even with some claiming Poe was the murderer of the poor girl! LISTEN ON PODCAST APPS: Look for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and other podcast apps. Get a list of free listening apps here: https://weirddarkness.com/wdapps*No AI Voices Are Used In The Narration Of This Podcast*SOURCES and RESOURCES:“Nevermore: The Haunted Life and Mysterious Death of Edgar Allan Poe” by Troy Taylor: https://amzn.to/41e7BxJ(Over time links may become invalid, disappear, or have different content. I always make sure to give authors credit for the material I use whenever possible. If I somehow overlooked doing so for a story, or if a credit is incorrect, please let me know and I will rectify it in these show notes immediately. Some links included above may benefit me financially through qualifying purchases.)WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.Originally aired: March 2022Weird Darkness devotes this episode to the unsolved 1841 murder of New York shopgirl Mary Cecilia Rogers and its strange collision with the unraveling life of Edgar Allan Poe. It opens with the July 28, 1841 discovery of Rogers's body floating in the Hudson River near Hoboken's Sybil's Cave, tracing her path from a Connecticut-born clerk at John Anderson's Tobacco Emporium on Manhattan's Nassau Street to the local celebrity known as "the beautiful cigar girl," then following the search led by her fiancé, cork-cutter Daniel Payne, and former suitor Alfred Crommelin, through the police suspicion cast on Payne and on Anderson, the September discovery of her bloodied clothing in a Weehawken thicket, and Payne's own laudanum suicide at that same spot that October.From there, the episode moves to Philadelphia, where Poe was following the case from a distance while his household came apart around him: his wife Virginia's sudden pulmonary hemorrhage during a parlor performance on January 20, 1842, the day after Poe turned thirty-three, marked the onset of the tuberculosis that would eventually kill her, and the strain bled directly into stories like "The Masque of the Red Death" and "Eleonora." It follows Poe's collapse at Graham's Magazine, including his refused request for a salary advance on an $800-a-year wage, his failed bid for a Philadelphia Custom House post that ended with a fumbled meeting tied to President John Tyler, and his abrupt exit from the magazine after being passed over for associate editor Charles Peterson.Next comes Poe's attempt to solve the Rogers case through fiction, recreating how he pitched a sequel to "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" to Baltimore editor Joseph Evans Snodgrass and Boston's George Roberts before selling it to William Snowden's The Ladies' Companion as "The Mystery of Marie Roget," transplanting the murder to Paris and casting the sleuth C. Auguste Dupin as the man who would name the killer. It details the disastrous timing by which Weehawken tavern keeper Frederica Loss, shot by her own son on November 1, 1842, gave a deathbed account claiming Rogers died during a botched abortion, undercutting Poe's carefully built naval-officer theory just as his final installment was headed to press.The episode closes with the suspects who have circulated around the case ever since, from the hanged Somers mutineer Philip Spencer, floated by biographer John Ingram, to Daniel Payne and Alfred Crommelin, to tobacco magnate John Anderson, who lived out his final years in a Tarrytown mansion behind steel-lined shutters, convinced his cook was poisoning his roast beef and claiming to speak with Mary Rogers's spirit, and it ends on the long-running question of whether Poe himself carried knowledge of, or any personal connection to, the murder he spent his career trying to solve on paper.

Join us on a brief but fun side quest with the horror adjacent film THE RAVEN (1963) from Roger Corman! Loosely based off the Edgar Allan Poe poem, and featuring horror icons like Vincent Price, Boris Karloff, and Peter Lorre, the flick is a fun albeit silly time at the movies. Context setting 00:00; Synopsis 23:21; Discussion 31:14

Agradece a este podcast tantas horas de entretenimiento y disfruta de episodios exclusivos como éste. ¡Apóyale en iVoox! Acceso anticipado para Fans - En este episodio exploramos El gato negro, una de las obras más inquietantes de Edgar Allan Poe. Analizamos sus símbolos, la psicología del narrador y los temas que esconde el relato, antes de disfrutar de una lectura dramatizada del texto. Puedes encontrar este audio en su versión con vídeo en el canal de youtube: https://youtu.be/joDJmodcHOc Muchísimas gracias a todos los fans que con vuestra aportación hacéis que esto siga siendo posible. Los más veteranos quizá os deis cuenta de que YA había grabado este relato antes, pero creedme, ni punto de comparación con esta nueva versión, como comprobaréis cuando lo escuchéis.Escucha este episodio completo y accede a todo el contenido exclusivo de MARC R. SOTO (Divergencia Cero). Descubre antes que nadie los nuevos episodios, y participa en la comunidad exclusiva de oyentes en https://go.ivoox.com/sq/666521

La directora y guionista Berta García Lacht presenta La vida es Verdi, un documental que recorre la historia de los cines Verdi de Barcelona y reivindica estos espacios como lugares de memoria, encuentro y resistencia cultural. Conversamos también con Jaume Ripoll sobre la 16.ª edición del Atlàntida Mallorca Film Fest, que reúne 91 títulos y estrena la nueva sección oficial RAW. Además, visitamos el ciclo de cine al aire libre Las Gandulas del CCCB, dedicado este año a la representación de la belleza en el fantástico, la ciencia ficción y el terror, y viajamos hasta Asturias para descubrir Néxodos Candamo, la bienal de creación contemporánea que une arte, territorio y cambio climático. Completan el programa Xaviera Torres, que revisita la faceta más desconocida de Edgar Allan Poe a partir de Eureka, y Carlos García Fernández, que nos lleva hasta el Turín de Friedrich Nietzsche.Escuchar audio

Manuel Carballal revisa e investiga como distintos artistas han logrado plasmar en sus obras fenómenos naturales y experiencias que los artistas quisieron inmortalizar: eclipses, cometas, estrellas, volcanes en erupción. O también escritores como Edgar Allan Poe o Julio Verne que escribieron historias donde un terrible remolino de altamar conocido como Moskstraumen de Noruega, que existe realmente se llegó a convertir en una especie de mito, como se recoge en "La Odisea".

paypal.me/LibroTobias Horacio Quiroga está considerado uno de los maestros del relato corto en español. Comparado a otros grandes cercanos al horror como Edgar Allan Poe, Quiroga comenzó su carrera literaria ligado a la poesía tanteando los estilos de la época, como eran el simbolismo o modernismo. Narración: Asier Menéndez Marín Diseño logo Podcast: albacanodesigns (Alba Cano) Escucha el episodio completo en la app de iVoox, o descubre todo el catálogo de iVoox Originals

 The scariest monsters are the ones that lurk within our souls.Believe only half of what you see and nothing that you hear.There is no beauty without some strangeness.I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.The believer is happy. The doubter is wise.Those who gossip with you will gossip about you.Years of love have been forgot, In the hatred of a minute.I remained too much inside my head and ended up losing my mind.Never to suffer would have been never to have been blessed.If a man deceives me once, shame on him; if he deceives me twice, shame on me.If a poem hasn't ripped apart your soul; you haven't experienced poetry.All suffering originates from craving, from attachment, from desire.A lie travels round the world while truth is putting her boots on.A wise man hears one word and understands two.To die laughing must be the most glorious of all glorious deaths!The past is a pebble in my shoe.My Video:  Edgar Allan Poe Quotes https://youtu.be/lWV-EQS3BggMy Audio: https://divinesuccess.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/Podcast5/Edgar-Allan-Poe-Quotes.mp3

by Edgar Allan Poe (read by Brenda Ijima) Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In this episode a story of terror at sea. Brings back memories of personal experience. Any reproduction of Robert Crandall's voice for any purpose including Artificial Intelligence is prohibited. All Rights Reserved. Thank you for listening.

A murderer insists he is perfectly sane, even as he explains in careful detail how he killed the old man and hid the body beneath the floorboards.EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/mitm-telltaleheartWeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.Midnight In The Macabre (MITM), originally aired: July 21, 2026

"E nem os anjos do céu lá em cima, Nem demónios debaixo do mar, Poderão separar a minha alma da alma, da linda que eu soube amar." Assim narrou sobre Annabel Lee, Edgar Allan Poe o mestre da literatura de terror. Escute o episódio da semana. Obrigado.

What could be worse than dying? Waking up after everyone has already buried you.Weekly Spooky presents a complete reading of “The Premature Burial” by Edgar Allan Poe, a claustrophobic gothic horror story built around one of humanity's oldest and most terrifying fears: being buried alive.Tormented by a medical condition that can make him appear dead, a man becomes consumed by accounts of premature burial. He studies coffins, graves, crypts, and horrifying cases of people awakening beneath the earth. As his obsession grows, he takes increasingly desperate precautions to ensure that he will never open his eyes inside a sealed coffin.But fear has a way of following us into the darkness.This classic Edgar Allan Poe audiobook is perfect for listeners searching for buried alive horror stories, gothic horror, classic scary stories, macabre fiction, claustrophobic horror, literary horror, and complete Edgar Allan Poe readings.Tonight, the most terrifying place imaginable is not a haunted house.It is six feet underground.

It's the Entrance of The Niche! At long last, in this special “regular” episode of the Not Quite Write podcast, Ed and Amanda unpack the (Not Quite) Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe. Join us as we delve into Poe's Single Effect Theory and what it means for flash fiction and short story writers, then stick around as we share our favourite Poe pieces. At the end of the episode, we cap it all off with a dramatised (and somewhat emotionally invested) reading of Poe's epic tale of revenge, ‘The Cask of Amontillado'. If that's not enough for you Poeverts, enjoy as we launch our new Patreon bonus show, aptly titled ‘The Niche'. It's so much fun, you'll be bricking shits! Become a Poevert by joining our Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/NotQuiteWrite Reading Recs for Poeverts: https://notquitewritepodcast.com/reading-recs-for-poeverts/ Edgar Allan Poe Museum: The Poe Museum – Richmond, VA Enter the Not Quite Write Prize for Flash Fiction: Not Quite Write Prize for Flash Fiction

Probably the most recognized name in horror.  You may think you know Poe … but this is more proof on how the most creative minds are usually the most tortured.  His interesting, and mostly sad, life.  Strange death … and the ghost that still haunts the City of Baltimore.---COMMENT AND READ ARTICLES CONTACT FORM*INTRO/OUTRO MUSIC BY ANDREW MROZOWSKI

Christina P is back touring! Check her out in Chicago September 18th and 19th. Get your tickets at https://christinap.com/pages/tour-dates SPONSORS: Visit https://www.sleep.ME/YMH and never fight with your partner at bedtime again. Get $80 off your first month with promo code SPACE80 at https://Talkspace.com/mom Sign up for your $1 per month trial and start selling today at https://shopify.com/ymh What's up there, chomos! Tom's out. Christina P is holding down the Mommy Dome with Ryan Long, Canadian sketch comedian, content creator, and a man who recently received a cease and desist from a testosterone clinic over a joke photo. Ryan opens talking acting and shares one of his sketch videos, Doyle the OnlyFans pimp who thought he'd be living the life and spends 90% of his day rating strangers' dicks. They also open the show with Alec Baldwin fully losing his mind at over a missing bag in a video that feels like a parody. From there: Ontario passed a law allowing all women to go topless in public, the tits you actually see at the nude beach are not the ones you pictured, and Austin has a shirtless jogging epidemic with zero enforcement of chest hair standards. Plus, a cool gal accepting boyfriend applications on TikTok and Christina and Ryan do their civic duty to find her a man. They also review Cowboys for Angels, a straight male gigolo site that Ryan correctly points out uses completely gender-neutral language. Then a Tulum trip story ends with Christina inserting off-brand suppositories into her hotel mini fridge so they'd stop melting before she could use them, and the cleaning staff tidied the wrappers and put them in a glass jar. She would like you to know they were unused. Finally, Christina's TikTok Curations: a weather reporter who unexpectedly quotes Edgar Allan Poe, a body percussionist who is simply not ready, a man posting his phone number who specifically says not to ask for money, a woman who attempts parkour and lands on her face then immediately says "I'm fine," and a leg hair identity video. Enjoy! Your Mom's House Ep. 867 https://tomsegura.com/tourhttps://christinap.com/https://store.ymhstudios.comhttps://www.reddit.com/r/yourmomshousepodcast Chapters 00:00:00 - Intro 00:04:37 - Opening Clip: Alec Baldwin 00:14:53 - OnlyFans Sketch 00:17:36 - Canadian White Trash 00:28:57 - Lets Help Jenny 00:39:31 - Love for Hire 00:44:21 - Swingers Resorts 00:54:30 - Hairy Canadian Woman 00:59:32 - Christina's Curations 01:11:53 - Closing Song - "How You Say Cucumber" by Micah Akervold Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Matthew Ehret is back with roughly 50 slides and zero patience for the AI doom cult, whether they're pitching machines as gods or demons. This episode zooms out from last week's Tesla debate to ask a bigger question: is technological progress really a trade for personal freedom, like the transhumanists insist, or is that just repackaged Malthus with better marketing? Expect a wild tour through mechanical history, from ancient Greek automatons to Vaucanson's pooping duck to a tiger that eats British soldiers, all building toward the real showdown: Edgar Allan Poe versus a fraudulent chess playing machine, and Beethoven versus a music box that tried to steal his symphony. It's part detective story, part music history, and part warning shot at anyone ready to hand over their mind to a "singularity." Come for the automatons, stay for the takedown of Darwin's favorite influence.

What happens to your creativity when you're in pain or sick, and can you ever get it back? How can you find and sharpen your author voice? J. Daniel Sawyer talks about voice mastery, writing with chronic pain, and building an eclectic author business. In the intro, leaning into your Strengths and deciding what you want to achieve by the end of the year; and Bones of the Deep by J.F. Penn. Today's show is sponsored by ProWritingAid, writing and editing software that goes way beyond just grammar and typo checking. With its detailed reports on how to improve your writing and integration with writing software, ProWritingAid will help you improve your book before you send it to an editor, agent or publisher. Check it out for free or get 15% off the premium edition at www.ProWritingAid.com/joanna This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn J. Daniel Sawyer is the author of over 30 books across science fiction, fantasy, crime, short stories, and nonfiction, as well as being a podcaster and filmmaker. His latest book for authors is The Pitch-Perfect Author: Voice Mastery for Writers. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below. Show Notes Writing fiction through chronic pain and re-emerging into health after surgery How your physical health shapes (and darkens) your fiction Rebooting an author business around a weekly Substack column What author voice really is, and why it's fundamentally about sound The building blocks of voice: functional vocabulary, dialect, and musicality The “crossing the line twice” trick for hearing your own voice objectively You can find Dan at JDsawyer.net or on Substack. Transcript of the interview with J. Daniel Sawyer Jo: J. Daniel Sawyer is the author of over 30 books across science fiction, fantasy, crime, short stories, and nonfiction, as well as being a podcaster and filmmaker. His latest book for authors is The Pitch-Perfect Author: Voice Mastery for Writers. So welcome back to the show, Dan. Dan: Hello, Joanna. It's good to be back. Jo: Goodness me, you have been on the podcast a few times, but actually, the last time was April 2017, which is crazy. It's nine years ago. When I saw your book, I was like, “I can't believe we haven't talked for that long.” For anyone who doesn't know you, tell us a bit more about— What does your creative and author business look like these days? Dan: Oh, well, these days it's in a state of recovery because it basically ground to a halt while I was dying a few years ago. It turned out I had an organ disease from the time I was a kid that I didn't know about, and it just progressively got worse and worse, putting me in more and more pain. I hit a point around about 2020 or so where I was in so much pain that I couldn't write fiction. I continued to write nonfiction, but when you're carrying around a lot of physical pain, there comes a point where so much of your brain's activity goes into coping with it that you actually lose the ability to model other people's emotional states—or at least well enough to write fiction. So I was very frustrated, and I was despairing that I was ever going to be a novelist again. Then suddenly, what I was sick with went acute. I went to the emergency room, and they're like, “Oh, if you don't have surgery in the next 24 hours, you're going to die.” So I went and got surgery, and there was one bed in the whole state. There was a three-hour drive to get to the one that was available in the time window. I get there. They wheel me into the OR. I wake up afterwards, and I realise that I'm not in pain, and that I had never felt that before in my adult life. Jo: Wow. Dan: Just the walls of my whole reality came caving in. Two weeks later, I was back up and working, and since then I've been slowly reacquiring my ability to write fiction. So now I've got four novels going again, like I used to have going all the time, as well as doing a weekly column and all sorts of other stuff. Jo: I think a lot of people will be interested in this. A lot of writers have chronic pain issues or chronic health issues, and yours sounds like it was a sort of down, down, down, down—and then more of a sudden up. Maybe just talk a bit more, because I feel like a lot of the time people are too hard on themselves about, “Oh my goodness, if I can't write fiction, is it the end of everything?” So how did you adapt to that, with the mental health aspect of dealing with that change in circumstance? Dan: Well, it was happening so gradually, and it happened at the same time that a whole bunch of other weirdly stressful things happened, like COVID and a couple of family emergencies that derailed my whole life for a couple of years. I assumed it was just really bad stress that would pass with time. So I had the despairing feeling, because when you write fiction, it tends to occupy a central place in your self-concept. I'd also been through very tough times before, so I was like, “Well, got through that then, maybe I'll get through this now.” I just made sure to keep writing something, because at least you keep the discipline of the words flowing. There was still thought going on, so I would have ideas for novels and write them down. There were good days and bad days. Occasionally I would sit down and be like, “I feel like fiction today,” and I would write a couple thousand words, and then it would be 10 months before I could do that again. When you work with your mind, it is really easy to develop or sink into the delusion that your mind is not your body. Now, if you're paralysed or you're missing limbs, you can still write—but your mind and your body are a single system, and eventually, if something terrible is wrong with your body, it's going to affect your cognition, your emotive abilities, and all the things that we depend on for creativity. That doesn't necessarily mean that if you're sick or injured, or you've got chronic health problems from birth, that you can't write. It just means that it really is one of the factors that goes into shaping your experience of the world, that goes into shaping the way you process things and they come out on paper. When there's a massive change in your health, it's going to show up in your fiction somehow. If your health goes way down, especially if you get into a lot of pain or you have a terminal illness, your fiction's going to get darker. One of the reasons—I discovered this after I got my surgery—one of the reasons is that the sense of impending doom is actually a medical symptom of organ death. Jo: Well, don't say that to a dark writer like me. I have a sense of impending doom the entire time. Dan: Well, there's a cognitive sense of impending doom that you get if you're modelling systems and you see how things can go wrong. But the sense that you feel the claws of demons grasping at your heart all the time—that can be a medical symptom. So pay attention to that. I didn't know that until afterwards, or I'd have gotten looked at a lot sooner. Jo: That is really interesting. You mentioned there you are reacquiring the ability to write fiction, or that's what you've been focusing on. You also talked about having to reboot the business. So what are some of the concrete things you're doing to rebuild? Dan: Well, the first thing I did is I allowed myself to get talked into doing a weekly Substack column a couple of years ago, and that's worked out really well. Pay is pretty decent. I've been posting most everything for free except for some previews of upcoming books, but I'm now learning the art of paywalling, so that also helps. Getting paid for the weekly column is quite nice, and a side effect is that it does drive people occasionally to the fiction, even though I'm writing nonfiction. It more frequently drives people to the nonfiction books, but it gives me a good place to announce new releases, to promote book bundles, Kickstarters, and all that sort of thing. It's a very good place for that because the people who are subscribing there—especially the people who are subscribing and supporting—are interested enough in what I'm saying that they want my email every week. So it's a good filtering mechanism for building the email list as well. Jo: You used to do a lot of audio. That's how we connected way back, like 17 years ago, I think, when we first connected. So are you still doing a lot of audio? Dan: I am not at the moment. It's not because of a decision to drop the audio. It's because I am now building my house, and I don't have a place that's quiet enough to record dependably. I'm living in a little RV at the moment while I build the house. In the deep winter, everything is quiet enough in the forest to record some things, and so I do audiobooks for clients, and I work on audiobooks of my own that are coming out. It's not quiet enough to podcast, and it's not quiet enough to be recording any other time than when the whole world is asleep. Hopefully by next year I will have the recording studio building built, and then I'll be back at it. Because boy, I miss it. Jo: I know. So you mentioned there bundles and Kickstarters and things, and we reconnected because I bought a StoryBundle, and your new book, The Pitch-Perfect Author, was in the StoryBundle, which was part of why I bought it anyway. So let's get into the book and what's useful. Let's start with— What is author voice anyway, and why is it important? Dan: Author voice. Everything about the way that you write is part of your author voice. The themes that you gravitate to, the way that you turn a phrase, the way that you tell a joke, the way that you handle dramatic tension. When all of that combines, it creates in the reader's mind an emotional fingerprint, a gestalt that says, “This is a Joanna Penn book. This is a Dan Sawyer book,” or whoever. When you bring the focus down further, author voice is fundamentally an auditory phenomenon. You can see this if you look at the careers of writers who had major worldview shifts during their career, or who shifted genres. If you read an Isaac Asimov mystery, and you read Asimov's Guide to the Bible, and you read Isaac Asimov's The Robots of Dawn, they're all Asimov. You can hear him talking to you through all of those different venues. So author voice is not a genre thing. It's not dependent on content. It has to do fundamentally with how your brain processes language and how it comes out of your mouth. That, in turn, is based on patterns that were laid down when you were pre-verbal as an infant. You learned language by mapping the music of the conversations around you, and then gradually learning that the sing-song you were hearing corresponded to ideas. That's how the brain bootstraps itself into language. So when you start writing, just like when you start speaking, you wind up imitating a lot—unconsciously—the people you've read and heard, because that's how you develop your voice. There comes a point at which all the various influences on you, and who you are, and how they pass through you, crystallises into something definite. By the time you're a moderately competent writer, and you're finishing novels and short stories well, your author voice is pretty well established. But that doesn't mean it's sharp, because most people don't actually concentrate on learning to hear their author voice, so they can't tell when it's off. This is why new writers who revise a lot tend to revise their voice right out. When they write, they're using language as feels right to them, but when they read, they're reading it like an English teacher, or through the lens of someone who has very definite ideas about how grammar should work in all circumstances. So they tend to smooth the quirkiness out of their voice, and what you get is something flat. It doesn't feel alive. It may convey information, it may tell a good story, but it doesn't feel like you're entering something that's living. Jo: I think this is so difficult, especially for people who are new to writing. Because I remember very much spending the first few years going along to writers' conferences, and there were always sessions on “you must find your writer's voice.” You must find your author's voice, and we publish books because of the voice, and all this. It was very, very confusing to me. As you say, it has to emerge somehow, and yet that emergence seems to be very hard to accept. So what are some of the ways we can perhaps think about voice? You mentioned there some patterns. You talk about music. So what are some of those angles? In the book, you have different chapters on all of these things, but maybe just talk more about some of the elements. Dan: The first and most obvious is functional vocabulary. This is not the number of words that you know. These are the words that you can reach for in the moment. You can expand your functional vocabulary by deliberately using more words—burnish your inner thesaurus. The greater your functional vocabulary is, the more your personality is going to come out through your voice. When you've got more options to do something that's just the way that you want to do it, the closer it's going to be to the way you want to do it. So there's functional vocabulary. There's your native dialect and accent. You, being British, have a different set of preferred terms for everything than I, being a West Coast American, do. One of the great differences that's always visible between an English writer and an American writer is that you guys have a different way of speaking. When you speak of a difference between one thing and another, you talk about how this car is different to that car. And Americans say this car is different from that car. It always marks out a British writer versus an American writer. There are 100 little things like that. They happen not just between major countries, but within regions in every country. You could tell on paper the difference between someone from Yorkshire and someone from London, just as I can tell on paper the difference between someone from the West Coast and someone from Mississippi. Even if they're highly educated, the idiom, the preferred turns of phrase, the preferred imagery—all of that is going to be a little bit different, and it conveys that regionality. There's also the musicality of the language. This is the actual rhythm of the words with which you speak. When you learn to analyse poetry or to write poetry, you learn something called scansion. How a poem scans is—what are the beats of the lines, how are the beats of the lines related to each other, and how does the rhyme move in and out of that? A Shakespearean sonnet, or a sonnet from the Elizabethan era, has a specific metre, a specific number of lines, and a specific rhyme scheme, and the metre is iambic pentameter. An iamb is “bum-bum,” if I remember right. It's the rhythm of the heartbeat. It's “bum-bum, bum-bum, bum-bum.” And you can hear it in the name of the metre, the iamb. The iambic pentameter is where the stressed syllable is the second syllable and the unstressed syllable is the first syllable. All of Shakespeare is written in blank verse, which is unrhymed iambic pentameter. The pentameter is five feet per line, so one iamb is “bum-bum”—that's one foot—and five of those makes one line of Shakespeare. We all have inherent rhythms like that in the way we naturally speak, but we can also tweak those rhythms on purpose to achieve dramatic effect. The iamb has the sound of the heartbeat. It's a very reassuring speech rhythm. The trochaic is a much more rapid one—it mirrors the rhythm of a rapidly beating heart. So you see this a lot in Edgar Allan Poe, especially in his frenetic poems like “The Bells,” how they jingle, jingle, jangle on a hoary moonless night. There's a rushing sound to that metre. You're going to find that you will automatically do a little bit of this, just the way that you'll automatically have picked up the convention of breaking sentences up into shorter lengths during really exciting or suspense-filled parts of your book. Once you know what it is, you can start to use it on purpose. Quite a lot of developing your voice is learning to recognise these latent, existing qualities in the way you communicate, and sharpening them up and making them conscious tools that you can pull in whenever you want. Jo: On the one hand, there are a lot of technical words there that are really interesting, and maybe poets know a lot more of those words than most other writers. The book is really interesting in that way—kind of learning about these different things. I guess I want to reassure people as well that, as you said, some of this can be unconscious. So often when I'm self-editing and I'm reading a sentence to myself, there's something that doesn't feel right about it. So I will rewrite that sentence so that it feels right. Sometimes we do something that might be grammatically less correct, but it sounds better than it did before. So many of these things we almost know instinctively, just from reading so much. Dan: Oh, yes. From reading so much and talking so much, and again, from the way you acquire language. That gives you a template in your head of what sounds right. Language is inherently musical. So if you've ever listened to a song—especially one that wasn't recorded by a professional, but someone singing in a church choir, or your kid practising for a recital, or you practising for a recital—you know that feeling that happens when someone hits a wrong note. There's that little wince down in the core of your being, and then the song carries on and you forget about it, unless there are too many of them, in which case you just sort of cower and ooze out of the room. That feeling of “Ooh, someone just hit a wrong note”—that's exactly the feeling you get when you're reading through to edit your work and something is off in the technical layer of your voice. You should pay attention to that and rewrite so that it feels good, or feels great, which is even better. You've got the opposite of the wince, which is that sense of rapture and joy if you're listening to a professional musician and they go on an amazing guitar solo, or a flautist does an incredible trill that just sends shivers up your spine. That sense of excitement and joy—that's what happens when you're reading and the author does something with the language that makes the whole piece fly. So you want to be paying attention for those too, because those you'll commit without intending to. When you're reading back and you find those, you want to make note of them, because that's you seeing where you are at your strongest with your voice. By learning both where you're making mistakes and where you're being brilliant—just like with anything else—you can start to advance towards being brilliant more often and making fewer mistakes. Jo: Then there's a difficulty around where the line is, especially when you're an early-stage writer. Many people work with editors, and you mentioned the problem of revising your voice away, and that may also happen if you're working with an editor. Like you said, as a Brit, I work with an American editor, Kristen, and she's excellent. She's very, very good at letting my voice be my voice, and then fixing things that make it better. But a lot of people don't feel that way about their editors. So how can people understand where those lines are between being well-edited and becoming a better writer, and then needing to hold the line on their voice? Dan: It really helps if you understand where you are weak. Why are you hiring the editor in the first place? I'm a big believer in the utility of having other eyes on the manuscript, but it's really important to know what you're looking for from them. You and I have both been to the Oregon Coast writing seminars, back when that was a thing. Jo: Mm. Dan: One of the things they would talk about with editors is when you've got a story editor or a beta reader who says, “Hey, something here didn't work in the story for me,” you usually don't want to look at that point. You want to trace back from that point to figure out where you set the wrong expectation. Any editorial feedback is going to have a gap between what they notice and what really needs to be fixed. As a writer, learning to interpret the feedback properly so that you actually elevate the material, instead of interpreting the feedback like you're trying to do customer service for an employer, where you just want to make the customer happy, is a really important skill to develop. That's regardless of whether the feedback has to do with voice or plot or characterisation or whatever. Some editors are really good at back-tracing and actually spotting the real problem. Editors make their money, or get hired, or get picked by you to volunteer, because they're good at being an audience—not because they're good at being a writer. So learning to interpret the editorial feedback is a really important step in that maturation journey. Jo: Yes. I think “maturation journey” is a good way to put it. Personally, I think it was around book five when I really felt, “Okay, now I see what my voice actually is.” Like, it had to be five novels, and then I was like, “Okay, now I know.” I just didn't get it before then, and then finally—I don't know—a penny dropped or something. Maybe I grew into it, grew more confident, that kind of thing. Dan: Yes, and that's actually about right. If you look at writers with a big catalogue, five books in is usually where they start really sounding like them. So that's a pretty normal maturation curve. There is a way to speed it up, which is to read your books aloud—or even better, make audiobooks and then listen to them a thousand times. Listen to them until you are sick of them, and then listen to them until you start to like them again. Jo: That's a lot. Dan: It's a lot, but there's a really specific neurological mechanism at work. You're familiar with the comedy term “crossing the line twice,” right? Jo: Not really. Dan: Okay. Have you seen the Monty Python Spam sketch? Jo: Yes. Dan: Okay. So for those of you who have not seen this—in the Monty Python Spam sketch, there's a couple, they're in a diner, and everything on the menu has spam in it. They say the word “spam” so much that you just want to shoot your television. But they keep it up, and then suddenly, at some point—it's a different point for everybody watching—they keep it going on long enough that everybody gets there. At some point, the word “spam” itself becomes hilarious, and you can't stop laughing, and you don't know why, because it shouldn't work, but goddammit it really does. It's so funny that we named junk email “spam” after this sketch, because it's a whole bunch of stuff that you don't want, but it keeps showing up anyway. That's crossing the line twice. What's going on is that your brain is getting accustomed to a sound. It has extracted all of the meaning it can, and so it's doing what it does with all sensory input. When it thinks it's got it mapped out, it's trying to filter it. Unless you are going to sit and concentrate on it, you can't feel the texture of the fabric of your clothing on the back of your legs, because your brain—despite the fact that it's getting that input all the time—is filtering that out, because it needs you to have your resources free for thinking. When you experience something over and over and over, no matter what it is or how complex it is, the brain habituates like that. But if that signal refuses to be filtered, and the input keeps coming, and it keeps getting more intense, or it stays persistent and it's too complex to filter easily, your brain starts to think, “Oh, maybe I shouldn't be filtering this out.” “Maybe there's meaning here that's important for my survival that I hadn't extracted.” And so suddenly it starts searching for meaning to associate with that sensation—and that's the point at which the joke becomes funny again, or you start to experience your voice as if it's somebody else's. When you begin to experience your author voice as if it's somebody else's, you can hear it as a distinct, objective style, rather than just as an echo of the voices that are in your head. That's why music students practise over and over and over, even on a piece they know cold. They're doing the same trick that I'm advocating with listening to your audiobooks until you're not sick of them anymore. Jo: I mean, I think that's terrifying, because I just don't want to listen to my books over and over again. I think it's very interesting that you think it could shortcut that voice process. Staying on audio—since we last spoke, I have done a lot of my own audiobook narration, mainly for nonfiction, but also my short stories. I haven't done my full-length fiction. What I discovered in doing this is that what read fine to me when I was self-editing my own work on the page—and obviously I'm hearing it in my head—when I perform the audiobook, I actually have to edit things again. So what are some of your tips for how we can bridge that gap? Because that's kind of strange. Dan: So what's happening is that there's a much wider latitude of things that work on the page than what works with voice. The reason is that with voice, all of those rhythmic elements I was talking about before are really pronounced, as well as all the sensual elements. Basically every word and sound has a mouth shape. The mouth shape affects the emotional valence of the sound. Stuff that's unpleasant tends to have a really close-in feel—I'm trying to scrunch my face up—where you would grit your teeth and scrunch up your face if something is unpleasant. And if something is really pleasant, it tends to have a rounded feel, and our language reflects it. In fact, all languages reflect this, because language is a physical thing that's based on the sensuality of the body. So, like, in all cultures “mama” is the word for mother that babies first say, regardless of what it is. It has a round feel, because babies associate their mother with roundness. A lot of language is built up that way, from baseline sensual cues. When you're working just in text, that aspect is not nearly as obvious to you. When you're reading, it's not as obvious to you. It's still at play, but when you go to do something verbally, and you go to read a text, all of those sensual cues come in at the same time. Then the rhythm comes in hard, and you suddenly realise that—hey, that conveys the thought, but it doesn't feel right. So you wind up retooling a bit. There's also occasionally tongue twisters, which you have to work your way around. So that's why that happens. Jo: Then I guess another thing—I hear quite often, people say, “Oh, I don't like my voice.” And they mean, “I don't like speaking out loud. I don't want to be on video. I don't want to be on audio.” I wonder— Does that sort of resistance potentially affect their writing voice? Are there ways people can get over that feeling? Dan: Yes, for sure. There are a few things that go into that. One is basic self-loathing. A lot of people carry it around. Most people learn to make a decent life even though they kind of secretly suspect that they're not worth anything, or they secretly find themselves revolting. That kind of thing you can't really fix with exercises. That's something you fix with — Jo: Therapy. Dan: Psychological work, or spiritual work, or that kind of thing. Jo: Yes. Dan: But the not liking the sound of your own voice—that's easy to fix. Here's why it happens. When you're listening to your voice as you speak, the bones in your head are amplifying the bass signals and attenuating the treble. It's kind of like if you were to shout in another room and your spouse hears you, but they can't make out the consonants. That's because all the consonants are being filtered out by the wall in between, but the bass is being resonated through. The same thing happens in your head. So when you get on a microphone—especially if it's an accurate microphone—you're suddenly hearing what everybody else hears when you speak, and it sounds thin and tinny and unpleasant compared to what you're used to hearing. The really easy way to get around this is to get a microphone that is tuned for singers. The condenser mic that I have isn't made anymore, so I can't really recommend a good condenser mic. If you're on a dynamic mic, the Shure SM58 is the one to use. I podcasted with that for years before I could afford an upgrade. It is tuned for singers to sound as good as possible without any other help from the sound engineer, which means that the baseline sound for that microphone is what you're hearing in your head. If you use the right equipment, you get around that problem really quickly, to the extent that you can technically. Then after that, it's just a matter of crossing the line twice. You listen to yourself enough that you stop hearing, “Oh my God, I'm talking,” and you start hearing, “Oh, that voice is making this sound.” And once you hear, “Oh, it's that voice making this sound,” you don't have that problem anymore, ever again. Jo: Oh, good. Well, hopefully that's fixed it for people. And of course, there are lots of brilliant things in the book, The Pitch-Perfect Author. Before we finish up, I did want to return to your Substack. I was having a look at it, and it includes some really interesting things. Like, you're doing this metalwork, which is really cool. It felt coherent to me, because I know you, and you're a polymath, and you're interested in so many things. So your Substack kind of stood out to me as quite eclectic, compared to, say, other writers who are going on Substack to try and sell specific books. So is this a deliberate marketing choice, or is it just be an interesting person and you will attract people who are interested more generally? Dan: Well, I suppose it kind of winds up being the latter, but basically it's that I get bored easily. If I'm going to be writing every week, I need to stay interested in it. One of the books I wrote when I was really sick—that's not out on the market yet, but it is serialised on Substack—is a guide to self-education. It'll be coming out later this year on the general market. It's called Reclaiming Your Mind: An Autodidact's Bible. I talk in there quite a bit about the illusion of discrete areas of knowledge. There is a level of learning at which the silos of information start to collapse together. Woodworking and writing have a lot to do with each other. A lot of the terminology we use in writing is pulled from the trades—especially woodworking, and metalworking, and gunsmithing. As you begin to spot these connections between different areas of knowledge, it becomes really easy to slide between them for your hobbies, for your writing, for just your personal gratification. As I've gotten older—and also as I've gotten access to a little space that's not contained within a teeny little apartment—I have just gone with it. As I've discovered, “Hey, this thing is tangentially connected to this other thing over here,” I'm like, “Oh, well, I'm going to go over to this other thing and see what's over there.” It's tremendously creatively fertile. Since a lot of the things that our language connects us to have to do with trades and crafts and nature, it gets you out in the open air, which is really good for any writer—because sitting at a desk all day is worse than smoking three packs of cigarettes a day for 40 years. Jo: I love that. Dan: My curiosity is the chief feature of my Substack, and it kind of works for me as a writer, because it's also one of the chief features of my fiction. Jo: Me too, and I was actually quite inspired by your Substack. Because I think this happens when you've been in the writing industry long enough. Substack has become the sort of trendy place to be now. People are going into specific niches, very much like blogging did, and then podcasting had to be on a specific niche, and all this. Of course, we know logically that, marketing a book—you know, if you had just a Substack on voice mastery, then for sure that would be a better marketing vehicle. But, as you say, how boring. Dan: Well, it depends a lot on what you're trying to cultivate as an author. If you're a single-genre author with a very narrow niche, and you're really happy writing that kind of stuff, then a narrow column supporting it is not a bad idea. Especially when you serialise old novels, once you've got 20 or 30 under your belt. That's not a bad idea, because you're trying to attract people who want one thing and want it regularly. If I were to get a reader who wants one thing and wants it regularly, and finds it, say, in my Clarke Lantham mysteries, and then they hop over to my science fiction—oh boy, are they going to be pissed. If they're not there for my voice, and they're just there for the way I write a mystery plot, then not only are they not going to get what they're looking for—but they're going to start to doubt whether they can trust that they're going to get what they're looking for in my next mystery. Whereas if they're coming to me through something where the multiplicity of what I'm doing is on display—whether that's this Substack, or whether that's what I used to do on The Every Day Novelist when I was podcasting that, or whether it's what I did with all the after-shows on my fiction podcast when I was doing that—then they kind of know what they're in for. The people who stick with me are more likely to be people who are in it for the experience of my voice. And for my bibliography, that's what I've got to offer, because I'm all over the place in terms of genre and subject matter. Jo: Yes, which is why I find you interesting. Dan: Oh, why thank you. Jo: So where can people find you and your books online? Dan: Well, you can find pretty much everything at JDsawyer.net. I've got the weekly column at jdanielsawyer.substack.com. At jdsawyer.net there's a page with all of my podcasts on it, and there's also a store with all of my books on it. Of course, everything is also available on Amazon and just about everywhere that the distributors take you. Jo: Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, Dan. That was great. Dan: Thank you, Joanna. It was great to talk to you again.The post Author Voice Mastery, And Rebooting an Author Business With J. Daniel Sawyer first appeared on The Creative Penn.

More America 250 adventures, from Edgar Allan Poe's home and old churches to TSA lines filled with Ranch dressing. Featuring audio from KYW Newsradio in Philadelphia, WCCO News Talk in the Twin Cities and KCBS Radio in San Francisco.

More America 250 adventures, from Edgar Allan Poe's home and old churches to TSA lines filled with Ranch dressing. Featuring audio from KYW Newsradio in Philadelphia, WCCO News Talk in the Twin Cities and KCBS Radio in San Francisco.

More America 250 adventures, from Edgar Allan Poe's home and old churches to TSA lines filled with Ranch dressing. Featuring audio from KYW Newsradio in Philadelphia, WCCO News Talk in the Twin Cities and KCBS Radio in San Francisco.

More America 250 adventures, from Edgar Allan Poe's home and old churches to TSA lines filled with Ranch dressing. Featuring audio from KYW Newsradio in Philadelphia, WCCO News Talk in the Twin Cities and KCBS Radio in San Francisco.

More America 250 adventures, from Edgar Allan Poe's home and old churches to TSA lines filled with Ranch dressing. Featuring audio from KYW Newsradio in Philadelphia, WCCO News Talk in the Twin Cities and KCBS Radio in San Francisco.

More America 250 adventures, from Edgar Allan Poe's home and old churches to TSA lines filled with Ranch dressing. Featuring audio from KYW Newsradio in Philadelphia, WCCO News Talk in the Twin Cities and KCBS Radio in San Francisco.

More America 250 adventures, from Edgar Allan Poe's home and old churches to TSA lines filled with Ranch dressing. Featuring audio from KYW Newsradio in Philadelphia, WCCO News Talk in the Twin Cities and KCBS Radio in San Francisco.

More America 250 adventures, from Edgar Allan Poe's home and old churches to TSA lines filled with Ranch dressing. Featuring audio from KYW Newsradio in Philadelphia, WCCO News Talk in the Twin Cities and KCBS Radio in San Francisco.

More America 250 adventures, from Edgar Allan Poe's home and old churches to TSA lines filled with Ranch dressing. Featuring audio from KYW Newsradio in Philadelphia, WCCO News Talk in the Twin Cities and KCBS Radio in San Francisco.

More America 250 adventures, from Edgar Allan Poe's home and old churches to TSA lines filled with Ranch dressing. Featuring audio from KYW Newsradio in Philadelphia, WCCO News Talk in the Twin Cities and KCBS Radio in San Francisco.

More America 250 adventures, from Edgar Allan Poe's home and old churches to TSA lines filled with Ranch dressing. Featuring audio from KYW Newsradio in Philadelphia, WCCO News Talk in the Twin Cities and KCBS Radio in San Francisco.

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Summer horror gets radioactive, gothic, mechanical, and undead in this episode of This Week in Horror History, covering the week of June 29 through July 5. This time, we're crawling through giant insect mayhem, modern gothic literature, Japanese cyberpunk body horror, George A. Romero's underground zombie apocalypse, and one deeply twisted Italian gothic shocker from the early 1960s. Inside this episode:June 29, 1977 — Empire of the Ants opens in New YorkA radioactive drive-in creature feature turns Florida real estate, toxic waste, Joan Collins, and giant ants into pure summer horror chaos. June 30, 2020 — Mexican Gothic is publishedSilvia Moreno-Garcia's modern gothic landmark sends Noemí Taboada into a poisonous mansion where family secrets, sickness, inheritance, and fungal horror take root.July 1, 1989 — Tetsuo: The Iron Man releases in JapanShinya Tsukamoto's black-and-white cyberpunk nightmare turns the human body into metal, noise, panic, rust, drills, and unforgettable industrial body horror.July 3, 1985 — Day of the Dead receives its New York/limited releaseGeorge A. Romero traps the end of the world inside a military bunker, where zombies own the surface and the survivors may be more dangerous than the dead.Deep-Cut Spotlight — The Horrible Dr. HichcockBarbara Steele stars in Riccardo Freda's morbid Italian gothic horror film about obsession, death, forbidden desire, and a mansion where the past refuses to stay buried. Horror Birthdays This Week:Dan Aykroyd, Larry David, Tom Cruise, and Gloria Stuart all land in this week's horror-adjacent birthday roll, from paranormal comedy and classic Universal horror to vampire films, alien invasion, and anxiety comedy.Weekly Recommendation — Tales of TerrorRoger Corman, Edgar Allan Poe, Vincent Price, Peter Lorre, and Basil Rathbone bring classic anthology horror, gothic dread, revenge, madness, and candlelit old-school atmosphere to this week's recommendation.From Empire of the Ants and Mexican Gothic to Tetsuo: The Iron Man, Day of the Dead, The Horrible Dr. Hichcock, and Tales of Terror, this week in horror history proves that summer is never safe from monsters, machines, mansions, zombies, or the dead things waiting underground.

In this episode, Jocelyn talks with Cynthia Lee Wong about how she incorporates visuals and animations into her music as a way to invite audiences in.    Companion playlists: Youtube, Spotify   Support us: Buy Me a Coffee  Follow us: @composelikeagirl on Instagram and Facebook Learn more: Compose Like a Girl   Episode Transcript Performers on "Moon" from Six Gupta Songs: Ashley Stone, mezzo-soprano Christina Wright-Ivanova, piano Relevant Links:   Cynthia's Website Cynthia's Youtube Carnival Fever In the Blink of An Eye composed for ROCO Chamber Orchestra  Fates and Furies Piano Quartet inspired by Edgar Allan Poe's story “Ligeia” Six Gupta Songs   Juilliard Journal  League of Composers/ISCM Milton Babbitt David Del Tredici Samuel Adler  New England Conservatory Preparatory Division    Python coding Blender (3D animation program) Apple Motion  Stable Diffusion (AI image generator)   Jocelyn's The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci and filmmaker Isaac Gale 

A late-night experiment meant to impress a room full of scholars turns humiliating when their ancient guest begins judging the modern world instead. A scientific curiosity becomes a razor-sharp battle of egos, where every proud claim about progress risks another devastating laugh. Some Words With a Mummy by Edgar Allan Poe. That's next on The Lost Sci-Fi Podcast. There have been a few Edgar Allan Poe stories featured on the podcast. Like H. P. Lovecraft, Poe wasn't originally an author we planned to include. But we pay close attention to your feedback, and many of you have asked for more Lovecraft and more Poe—so we're happy to deliver. And speaking of feedback, we always love hearing from you. If there's a story, author, or type of science fiction you'd like us to feature, send us an email at scott@lostscifi.com and let us know. Your suggestions help shape the future of The Lost Sci-Fi Podcast. Let's go back in time more than 181 years and open the April 1845 publication of The American Review to page 363, Some Words With a Mummy by Edgar Allan Poe… Next on The Lost Sci-Fi Podcast, A breakthrough drug gives two men access to a world where ordinary life appears frozen, turning a quiet seaside afternoon into something almost impossible to comprehend. But once they begin treating time itself like a playground, a dangerous problem emerges that neither of them anticipated. The New Accelerator by H. G. Wells. Lost Sci-Fi Premium - https://lostscifi.supercast.com/ Buy Me a Coffee - https://lostscifi.com/coffee =========================== Newsletter - https://lostscifi.com/free/ Facebook - https://lostscifi.com/facebook YouTube - https://lostscifi.com/youtube X - http://Lostscifi.com/x Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/lostscifiguy Bluesky - https://bsky.app/profile/lostscifipodcast.bsky.social Merchandise - https://lostscifi.creator-spring.com/ =========================== Thanks to Our Listeners Who Bought Us a Coffee $200 Someone $100 Tony from the Future $75 James Van Maanenberg $50 MizzBassie, Anonymous Listener $25 Fintan Quigley, Curious Jon, David Bell, Steve, Miriam, Someone, Someone, Eaten by a Grue, Jeff Lussenden, Fred Sieber, Anne, Craig Hamilton, Dave Wiseman, Bromite Thrip, Marwin de Haan, Future Space Engineer, Fressie, Kevin Eckert, Stephen Kagan, James Van Maanenberg, Irma Stolfo, Josh Jennings, Leber8tr, Conrad Chaffee, Anonymous Listener $15 Every Month Someone $15 Steve, Someone, SueTheLibrarian, Joannie West, Amy Özkan, Someone, Carolyn Guthleben, Patrick McLendon, Curious Jon, Buz C., Fressie, Anonymous Listener $10 David, Anonymous Listener $5 Every Month Eaten by a Grue $5 Tammy, Owen, Bruce, Someone, TLD, David, Denis Kalinin, Timothy Buckley, Andre'a, Martin Brown, Ron McFarlan, Tif Love, Chrystene, Richard Hoffman, Anonymous Listener Listen without commercials and enjoy exclusive bonus episodes every month with Lost Sci-Fi Premium—start your free 7-day trial today. https://lostscifi.supercast.com/ Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

On today's episode, the crew checks in with Dwayne live from a chocolate farm on Roatán, jokes about getting “stranded” on a cacao-covered island, and then pivots back to politics with an “Apprentice update” on whether J.D. Vance or Marco Rubio is now the inside favorite to be Trump's running mate based on their roles in the Iran memorandum of understanding. They unpack reports of internal turmoil within Iran's IRGC as Israel hammers Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, discuss SpaceX's “Starfall” demo for point‑to‑point orbital return capsules, and talk about using micro‑nuclear plants to power massive AI data centers while tiptoeing around anti‑nuke activists. Other topics include the collapse of Democratic fundraising after USAID money spigots were reportedly shut, the DNC's debt versus the RNC's cash pile, Tulsi Gabbard's exit and her parting shots tying Fauci and “the scarf lady” to gain‑of‑function work, and Bill Pulte's rumored role as a “weed whacker” for deep‑state employees inside the intelligence community. The conversation closes with a wide‑ranging critique of Sharia enclaves, Dearborn‑style local takeovers, the incompatibility of Islamic law with American women's rights, and the historical lesson of “cooping” in Edgar Allan Poe's day—used here as a metaphor for how modern voting changes in places like California dismantle hard‑won election safeguards. Don't miss it!

Poe: father of American horror, pioneer of the macabre, and — according to at least one theory — a man who caught rabies from drinking bat blood at a Satanic ritual before his final, chaotic hours in Baltimore. Unfortunately, the official data also suggests 66.6% of poets are child molesters, and Poe is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that statistic.This episode, Satan Is My Superhero shines its black light on one of gothic literature's most influential weirdos. We cover the Faustian bargains, the occult obsessions, the time Satan literally refused someone's soul because Hell was already well-stocked, and the genuinely unhinged theories about how Poe died. We also cover the cousin. We cover the cousin extensively.Tightly scripted. Fully produced. Deeply uncomfortable about poets as a category.Look, if you've made it this far, you already know you're one of us — the kind of person who started this episode thinking "interesting literary history" and ended it reconsidering the entire genre of poetry.Patreon supporters get two bonus episodes a month, early ad-free access, plus exclusive extras including music videos, audiobooks, and behind-the-scenes content that probably contains more facts about dead creeps than anyone needs.(Satan is contractually obligated to inform you that 66.6% of Patreon members are NOT child molesters, and the ones who aren't poets are definitely fine.)

On today's episode, we discuss everything from Dwayne's “Popeye” cruise-ship breakfast at Emeril's Bistro to the latest adventures (and misadventures) with Tesla's full self-driving update, including a widely reported 90‑mph house crash that the guys strongly suspect was not actually Autopilot's fault. They dig into the human-factors problem of mixed human/AI control—how easy it is to forget who's really driving—and why some of them actually want a future Tesla with no steering wheel so liability is crystal clear. From there, the conversation moves to geopolitics and institutions: the collapse of USAID funding for left‑wing NGOs in South America, a Trump‑aligned win in Colombia that finished counting votes in a day, and California's slow, “legal but rigged” election systems that they argue effectively repeal old anti‑“cooping” safeguards put in after Edgar Allan Poe's death. They also cover Britain's political shake‑up after Starmer's resignation, a scathing report on mass grooming‑gang crimes against girls, and growing worry about resurgent antisemitism amid younger generations who were never really taught about the Holocaust. The show wraps with speculation that J.D. Vance is now the odds‑on favorite as Trump's running mate and potential tiebreaker vote for the SAVE Act, plus the customary PJ's Coffee plug—complete with detailed directions, pastry recommendations, and an invitation for listeners to email topic ideas. Don't miss it!

Step into the multiverse of characters with Jeffrey Combs, the legendary actor behind some of the most unforgettable roles in Star Trek and cult‑classic horror. In this exclusive Captains Quadrant interview, Jeffrey dives deep into his iconic performances as Weyoun and Brunt on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Shran on Star Trek: Enterprise, and his fan‑favorite voice roles in Transformers Prime and Justice League Unlimited.We also explore his horror legacy in Re‑Animator, The Frighteners, House on Haunted Hill, and his chilling portrayal of Edgar Allan Poe. Jeffrey shares behind‑the‑scenes stories, acting insights, convention memories, and the creative process behind playing eccentric, sinister, and comedic characters across sci‑fi and horror.Whether you're a Star Trek fan, a Jeffrey Combs super‑fan, or a lover of genre cinema, this conversation is packed with laughs, surprises, and deep‑cut lore.⭐ Chapters00:00 – Intro- From Trek Long Island MC Adeena! 00:45 – Becoming a Star Trek Legend how it started 04:10 – First Day on set with DS908:30 – Weyoun & Brunt meeting on DS912:55 – Re‑Animator & Horror Classics17:40 – Voice Acting: The Question JLU21:15 – Wine and Cheese 25:00 – Acting Philosophy & Character Creation29:45 – Final Thoughts from Jeffrey Combs30:00 - Delightful insight into his acting 35:00 - Fan Questions

Read the translations of these poems not he Modern Poetry in Translation website: https://modernpoetryintranslation.com/poem/three-poems-4/ Ági Bori writes in the translator's note: The poems presented here are a powerful sample of Anna T. Szabó's oeuvre. Translating her chiselled and daunting poetic voice has been a profoundly moving and humbling experience. Due to the increasingly strict dictatorship in Romania in the eighties, where Anna was part of the oppressed Hungarian minority, she moved to Hungary with her family at the age of fifteen. She started as one of the late intellectual successors of the legendary short-lived literary magazine, New Moon (1946–1948), and seems to agree with one of the authors in its circle, Géza Ottlik, who said: ‘Existence is my profession.' Anna presents experiences as if they are empirical observations. Her poems are often anchored in pain and suffering, both physical and emotional, revealing her awareness and responsiveness to the emotions of others. Her writings seem to encompass extreme psychic states. ‘Disgust' is a case study in what I will call ‘empirical observation of everyday horrors'. It charts the mental state of being lost in the world, hitting against the edges of existence. Disgust is distrust: it is losing the essential sense of security. ‘The Lake' echoes a feeling that was named in the short story, ‘The Imp of the Perverse', by Edgar Allan Poe: a compulsion to commit an act against one's own interests. In ‘Crossing, out' Anna tries to describe death. She was asked to write an elegy for someone she hadn't seen in over thirty years. The poem deals with the feeling of worldly alienation in which someone is thrown into an abyss: a place without language or direction, where everything earthly is negated, including logic and duality.

ARCHIVO MEXICANO DEL TERROR. Moscas (2012) La narrativa de Bernardo Esquinca (Guadalajara, 1972) se distingue por fusionar lo sobrenatural con lo policiaco. En Almadía ha publicado la Trilogía del Terror, conformada por los volúmenes de cuentos Los niños de paja, Demonia y Mar Negro; la Saga Casasola, integrada por las novelas La octava plaga, Toda la sangre, Carne de ataúd, Inframundo y Necropolitana; la antología Ciudad fantasma. Relato fantástico de la Ciudad de México (xix-xxi), El libro de los dioses y Asesina íntima. Las increíbles aventuras del asombroso Edgar Allan Poe recibió el Premio Nacional de Novela Negra de México en 2017. Su relato “Señor Ligotti” fue nominado al prestigioso Shirley Jackson Award 2020. Sus libros aquí: https://editorialalmadia.com/detalle/autor/bernardo-esquinca Novelas Belleza roja (FCE, 2005). Los escritores invisibles (FCE, 2009). La octava plaga (Zeta, 2011). Toda la sangre (Almadía, 2013). Carne de ataúd (Almadía, 2016). Los niños de paja (Almadía, 2008). Demonia (Almadía, 2012). Mar Negro (Almadía, 2014). Carretera perdida. Un paseo por las últimas fronteras de la civilización (Nitro-Press, 2001). Ciudad fantasma. Relato fantástico de la Ciudad de México (XIX-XXI), proyecto de dos volúmenes realizado junto a Vicente Quirarte, y publicado por Almadía en 2013. Podéis encontrarle en Instagram: @bernardo.esquinca Sonido y voz: Olga Paraíso Música Epidemic Sound con licencia premium para este podcast. 🛑BIO Olga Paraíso: https://instabio.cc/Hleidas Escucha el episodio completo en la app de iVoox, o descubre todo el catálogo de iVoox Originals

A routine cargo run turns into a relentless battle against a chain of biological surprises that no one bothered to translate correctly. As one problem breeds the next, a stubborn starship captain must decide how much misery he can endure before the cargo destroys him—or ruins an entire world. Cakewalk to Gloryanna by Joseph Wesley. That's next on The Lost Sci-Fi Podcast. Joseph Wesley made his debut on the last episode of the podcast and now he's back with another story about Captain Hannah and the space freighter Delta Crucis. From the June 1963 issue of Worlds of Tomorrow on page 105, Cakewalk to Gloryanna by Joseph Wesley… Next on The Lost Sci-Fi Podcast, A late-night experiment meant to impress a room full of scholars turns humiliating when their ancient guest begins judging the modern world instead. A scientific curiosity becomes a razor-sharp battle of egos, where every proud claim about progress risks another devastating laugh. Some Words With a Mummy by Edgar Allan Poe. Lost Sci-Fi Premium - https://lostscifi.supercast.com/ Buy Me a Coffee - https://lostscifi.com/coffee =========================== Newsletter - https://lostscifi.com/free/ Facebook - https://lostscifi.com/facebook YouTube - https://lostscifi.com/youtube X - http://Lostscifi.com/x Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/lostscifiguy Bluesky - https://bsky.app/profile/lostscifipodcast.bsky.social Merchandise - https://lostscifi.creator-spring.com/ =========================== Thanks to Our Listeners Who Bought Us a Coffee $200 Someone $100 Tony from the Future $75 James Van Maanenberg $50 MizzBassie, Anonymous Listener $25 Fintan Quigley, Curious Jon, David Bell, Steve, Miriam, Someone, Someone, Eaten by a Grue, Jeff Lussenden, Fred Sieber, Anne, Craig Hamilton, Dave Wiseman, Bromite Thrip, Marwin de Haan, Future Space Engineer, Fressie, Kevin Eckert, Stephen Kagan, James Van Maanenberg, Irma Stolfo, Josh Jennings, Leber8tr, Conrad Chaffee, Anonymous Listener $15 Every Month Someone $15 Steve, Someone, SueTheLibrarian, Joannie West, Amy Özkan, Someone, Carolyn Guthleben, Patrick McLendon, Curious Jon, Buz C., Fressie, Anonymous Listener $10 David, Anonymous Listener $5 Every Month Eaten by a Grue $5 Tammy, Owen, Bruce, Someone, TLD, David, Denis Kalinin, Timothy Buckley, Andre'a, Martin Brown, Ron McFarlan, Tif Love, Chrystene, Richard Hoffman, Anonymous Listener Listen without commercials and enjoy exclusive bonus episodes every month with Lost Sci-Fi Premium—start your free 7-day trial today. https://lostscifi.supercast.com/ Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

 We continue with our fifth collection. This week: "The Oval Portrait" by Edgar Allan Poe,

How can horror writing help readers — and writers — work through psychological trauma? Why does cross-genre fiction take longer to find an audience, but pay off in the long run? Is running a direct sales store actually worth the inventory, postage, and learning curve? And how can SubStack work for fiction authors? With psychotherapist and award-winning author P.D. Alleva. In the intro, thoughts on why in-person conferences are still worth it, even when they are a challenge for sensitive introverts! and tips for making the best of conferences [Self-Publishing Show]. Today's show is sponsored by Draft2Digital, self-publishing with support, where you can get free formatting, free distribution to multiple stores, and a host of other benefits. Just go to www.draft2digital.com to get started. This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn P.D. Alleva is the award-winning author of horror, sci-fi, thrillers, and fantasy books. He's also a psychotherapist. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below. Show Notes Why horror puts the human condition on display better than any other genre Emotional trauma as the silent psychological killer most people overlook The pros and challenges of cross-genre writing and finding your audience Practical lessons from running a direct store, including integration and signed-copy fulfilment How a 3 a.m. writing routine keeps the writing separate from the marketing and admin Serialising fiction on Substack, multiple newsletters, and avoiding paid subscriber promotions Why Facebook groups, TikTok Lives, and the three-to-one rule are working right now You can find P.D. at PDAlleva.com or on Substack. Transcript of the interview with P.D. Alleva Jo: P.D. Alleva is the award-winning author of horror, sci-fi, thrillers, and fantasy books. He's also a psychotherapist. So welcome, Paul. PD: Thank you very much. Thank you for having me. This is a great opportunity. I love doing interviews, and I love talking to great people. Jo: Oh, good. Well, first up— Tell us a bit more about you and how you got into writing and being an indie author. PD: So I've been writing since I was a kid, at least second grade and more than likely even before that. I've always had that creative itch. Getting into indie author publishing, I published my first book in 2011. At the time I was also operating my own business, which took up about 24 hours of my time every single day. Then I kind of got through that and sold that in 2016, and I'm like, you know what? The time has come. I'd always written books, poetry, short stories, but never really did anything with them because I just didn't have the time. So in 2017, that's when I really came out and said, all right, the time is now. Indie publishing was doing great. The one good thing I do love about Amazon is they allowed us to come out there and start showing our craft to people. So in 2017, I just started—let's do this. Let's write full time. Let's put books out there. Let's be creative. Let's really get those juices flowing. Plus, I was getting a little bit old, and I was like, now is definitely the time to do this. Since then I've been publishing consistently, and most of my books are horror books, but I dabble. I have a sci-fi series, and I'm starting to get into psychological thrillers too. I've got a new psychological thriller that'll be published in early 2027 called Girl on a Mission. For the most part, I'm definitely into the horror genre—books, short stories, all that good fun stuff. Jo: Right, so a couple of follow-ups. You said you're a bit old. Can you give us what decade you're in at least? PD: Well, I'm 51, so born in 1971. Jo: Oh, there you go. Same age as me. PD: All right, good. See that? So we're going head-to-head there. Jo: I don't think that's old at all. Also, you mentioned you sold your business in 2016. So what was your business before? Because I think business experience is so important. PD: Agreed 100%. So I'm a psychotherapist, and I had owned a treatment centre for mental health and addiction. That was started in 2011, and in 2016 is when it sold. Since then, my wife and I started a private practice. So I still, even to this day—well, about a year and a half ago is when I stopped. I specialise in trauma, PTSD, and addiction. Trauma mostly. Most of my caseload has always been trauma, PTSD, sexual abuse, psychological abuse, war-type trauma. I was doing that mostly individually since 2016 in private practice, and I'll still go into treatment centres and see patients there too, specifically for trauma. About a year and a half ago is when I started wanting to do writing 100% full time. I thought about becoming a professor, maybe going to college, but then I wasn't sure if I wanted to get into that full time, as far as a caseload and school and everything like that. So I decided to just do group therapy, group facilitation, and I've been doing that consistently since then. It may be 15 hours a week. I do love to give back, and to me, it's more what I teach. I specialise in neuro-linguistic programming, bilateral stimulation or EMDR, hypnotherapy, science of mind concepts, psychopharmacology, biological bases of behaviour—which is pretty much how your brain works—ancient wisdom, quantum physics. I do this in a drug addiction treatment centre mostly, also mental health. And of course, just living an addictive lifestyle is traumatic, too, in and of itself. So pretty much I'm teaching them. Behaviour modification is a big part of what I'm teaching during that time. You'll see that, too, if you read my books. There's two things you can figure out from my books. You can figure out how to murder people and get away with it, and two, you can figure out how to overcome trauma as well. The whole “murder people and get away with it” comes from my upbringing. I have a very sorted past, let's put it that way. My upbringing was very different than what most people grow up in. Jo: Oh, can you give us any more than that? Now everyone's like, “Oh.” PD: “What's going on with this guy, right?” So I grew up, let's say, quote unquote, “in an Italian New York family.” Jo: Okay. All right. PD: That might give people ideas, right? Jo: That's going to give people a lot of ideas. PD: If you've ever seen the movie Goodfellas, I kind of grew up in that atmosphere, and with even some of those people too. My family had connections to those people in that movie, which I find very funny. If you watch that movie with me, you get a very different perspective on what's going on in the movie. Jo: Wow. So you're an interesting guy with an interesting background, with a very interesting backstory job as well. Some people are like, “Well, of course he's writing horror because horror is just awful and full of slasher gore and all that.” I often have to say to people who don't read horror, “Look, it's not like that.” Maybe some of it is, sure. But most of it isn't. Could you talk about how reading and writing horror can also be psychologically healthy? How do these worlds intertwine for you? PD: Well, sure. It 100% can be healthy. Especially over the last few years, there's a trend going on out there right now where people are taking their trauma and putting it into a creative process through poems, short stories, and even novels. They're taking their trauma and giving it a face, like a monster, where people are overcoming that monster within the creative process. I always say that horror is the genre that puts on display, better than any other genre out there, the human condition. Why is that? When people are in a terrifying situation, you really see who they are. You get to the heart of the matter of who that person is by putting them in these horrific but undefinable situations where it's like, what are they going to come out as? That real true personality needs to come out, and that courage comes out. That's huge in horror, and I think horror gets such a bad name. Now, I know there's the extreme horror and the splatterpunk, and that has its kind of role too in what I'm saying, but that's where horror is getting its bad reputation out there with the over-the-top type of gore. For the most part, that's a small part of the horror genre. It's a subgenre for a reason. It has its readership, and that's fine. Nothing wrong with it. I read it all the time. I find a lot of joy in it, a lot of excitement. However, for the most part, any horror novel that is not completely with the gore and stuff like splatterpunk can be seen as a psychological thriller, and a lot of psychological thrillers can be seen as a horror novel. Look at books like The Silence of the Lambs, Red Dragon. That's horrific as well, but if you read the novel, it's in there. It just gets that bad rap right now, and it's not all gore. Most horror novels that I read today are psychological horror. It's tame on the gore, and the psychological aspect is there. I always see that psychological aspect—it's like psychological trauma. Most people, even in my industry, when people are out there and you mention trauma, PTSD, they're thinking about sexual abuse, physical abuse, or war-type trauma. The silent psychological one—I once wrote an article called “Emotional Trauma: The Silent Psychological Killer.” The one that's out there is the psychological trauma, the emotional trauma that is widespread. Most people go through that, and it could even be from parent to child, and most people don't understand that that's a traumatic experience. It's like a distortion of reality that you're experiencing that then creates a belief system in your brain, and you're constantly acting out that belief system. That's where the psychological component of horror really comes out. People breaking through that psychological belief system that was created through a traumatic experience by reaching courage and coming out through a horrific situation. Jo: Yes, it really annoys me, because with romance, of course people understand that romance is a huge genre. Something like a small town sweet romance is a world away from the bully romantasy, dark, or mafia. Mafia romance is a really big thing with very dark themes. I'm like, well, how can you understand that romance is a huge genre with all these different subgenres, and not think that horror or thriller or fantasy or sci-fi all have so many different subgenres within them? I personally read a lot of supernatural horror, but rarely the slasher gore kind of stuff. So I'm really glad you said that, and hopefully more people will open up a bit more. I did also want to ask you about what you write. You write all these different things. You write standalone—I mean, often horror is standalone—but you also have some series. How do you balance it? What are the benefits of cross-genre writing, but also the challenges of it? PD: Okay. So obviously I love cross-genre writing. To me, I use fantasy to explain the supernatural elements. I blend mostly a tad of fantasy to help explain the supernatural components in my supernatural novels. When I write sci-fi, specifically sci-fi, that has the fantasy element in it too, but there's also a tad of horror in there as well. It's just who I am. When I grew up, I had a lot of different influences. I had Star Wars on one side, and then I'm watching B-rated '80s slasher films on the other side. Those two mixes just kind of followed me throughout my life, and that's why I like putting them into my novels. As I tell my patients, don't limit yourself. Never limit yourself. If you're just limiting yourself to one genre, you're missing out on so much more that's out there. So I love the blend of mixing genres. It just gets my goat each and every time. It is a challenge though. I remember when I first started getting into indie publishing, I was never big into Facebook and social media up until I started becoming an indie author. Before that, with my type of upbringing, you don't advertise yourself. You don't advertise where you're going. That's a big no-no. So I always had this aversion to social media. I'll tell you a funny story. It was the late 2000s, probably 2006. I was a full-time single father at that time, and I was living in Florida. My family—brothers and sisters-in-law—were living in New York, and my sister-in-law said, “Get a Facebook account so we can see pictures of the kids.” I said, “Oh.” I didn't want to do it, but I said, “Okay,” so I did it. And I'm thinking, looking at this Facebook thing, “How do I put pictures on here?” So I figured out how to put pictures in folders. Then I phone called her, and I'm like, “Okay, so they're on there.” And they're like, “Well, where are they?” I'm like, “I put them in these folders. You can go and look at them.” She's like, “No, you've got to post them.” That to me was like, “I'm not posting pictures of my kids.” That was a big no-no. It didn't click. When I got on there finally in 2016, 2017, I'm like, “Okay, so I need to figure out social media. As an indie author, I need to be on there, so I need to get through this aversion and get on there.” I started noticing how people are so particular with their genres. If they're reading a romance, it had to be very specific with that exact type of romance, and if you deviated from it, they're not going to like it. So that was the challenge. I was like, “All right, number one, I'm not going to dilute myself” and say, “All right, take things out of my writing or out of my novel just so I could cater to a certain type of audience.” I'm like, “I'm not going to do that.” I know with me, myself, as a reader, I'll read everything. I don't limit myself to a specific genre. I'll read psychological thrillers. I'll read romance. I've been doing that all my life. So I'm like, if there's a person like me out there—and look at this, I just met like four other people who also read cross genres—then I know that there's at least another 30,000 people, and I know that at least then there's 300,000, then there's three million people out there. So just write the books that you're writing and find your audience. Now, that takes longer. So you've got to chip away. Chip away. You're going to find readers here and there, and then that reader kind of tells a few people about you, and then you've got a few more readers. Then you keep going, and you go on these Facebook groups, and you do a whole bunch of different things, and then you gather a few more readers. Then they're telling some friends, and then you've got more. The process takes a lot longer, yes, 100% agreed, but I would say be true to yourself and you can never go wrong. Jo: Yes, I agree. I write cross-genre as well, and I've browsed your collection. Golem was the one I was like, “Ooh, yes, I like that one.” I haven't read it yet, it's on my list. I think when you're cross-genre, my people come to my store as well, and it's like, “Okay, I'm interested in lots of things, but this is the one by this author that I'm interested in.” Whereas with other authors who only write one type of thing, then I might not like any of their stuff. So I think there are definitely pros and cons and different ways into our world. I also wanted to ask you about the differences in business. Obviously you ran this treatment centre and there were physical humans on all sides, and now you've got a business as an author. So what have you learned in business from what you used to do and what you do now? PD: Okay. You're right. The treatment centre industry is very different from what I'm doing now, but it's still people. Treat those people right, have integrity. If you say you're going to do something, follow through with it. My word is my bond type of thing. That definitely has fed into the writing and publishing industry that I'm in now in a huge way. Just connecting with people is, to me, the biggest part of it. I mean, treatment centres, you've got to connect with people. When I would market the treatment centre, where would I go? I would go to hospitals, residential facilities, detoxes, and talk to them about my programme and why they should be referring clients there. It's the same thing here. Why should you be reading my books? You get there through interviews like what I'm doing here with you. Other podcasts. You get there by doing Facebook Lives, TikTok. I haven't started TikTok Lives yet, but I actually love that platform. I'm falling in love with it. IG Lives, anything like that where you're talking to people and you're making a connection with those people. Through that, I've gathered so many different types of readers who are like, “Yes, I'll give this book a shot.” And then they read it and they're like, “Hey, this is really good, and I'm going to read another book.” With my books, I have very different books. Golem is my psychological horror novel. It's my slow-burn psychological horror novel, heavily inspired by Frankenstein and the Pygmalion myth. It's my first true horror book that I published. Then there's Jigglyspot and the Zero Intellect, which is inspired by B-rated '80s horror movies and the old grindhouse movies of the '70s, and it's mind manipulation. It's just wild and bizarre. And then The Sleepy Hollow Incident is my Gothic tale—it's like a dark romance mixed in with Gothic horror. So I always try to put something for everyone that's out there. To me, when I'm writing, it's got to be about depth, psychological depth. I always refer to my books to be like peeling layers off a Texas-sized onion. The more you read, the more in-depth you get into not only the characters, but the story. It's just something that comes out of me. It's part of me. That's the way I always have to do it. I always have to put that depth in there. To me, that's good storytelling. When I grew up, I read a lot of classic literature. Yes, Edgar Allan Poe, but also Dante's Inferno, Milton's Paradise Lost, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, the Brontë sisters. Keep going. Ray Bradbury, Ayn Rand, Daphne du Maurier, Shirley Jackson. Those to me are my books that I absolutely love. So there's a sweet science in today's fast-paced, social media type of world in marrying the depth of the old classic literature and the entertainment value that is required today for being an author. There's that sweet science behind it, and I love just hitting that nail on the head every time. Jo: So did you ever pitch traditional publishing, or have you thought about going that way? Because I also find that a lot of horror actually sits very close to literary. Like, I read a lot more literary horror than I do in some of the other genres. PD: Correct. So in the beginning, yes. Not in a long time. I maybe went to a couple of indie publishers, but as far as traditional, the Big Five publishers, I have an aversion to them for a big reason. I know people who have worked in that industry that have told me some pretty bad horror stories about those places. So I haven't sent anything to that type of place in a very, very long time. Maybe close to 20 years. Indie publishers, the small presses, yes, here and there, but even then, I'm always moving at a fast pace. So if I've got a book and I'm sending it out as a query letter, by the time that query letter is even read, I'm almost done publishing. I love that aspect of it. The control of my story, where I know where this character's going. And listen, I've got my beta readers, I've got my ARC readers. They're there to tell me, “Hey, maybe you should change this or change that.” Whether I take that advice or not, of course my editor too, is really up to me. I always put out the book that I know is the one I want to read. And to me, I haven't gone wrong in doing so. I know with traditional publishing, you sometimes get too many thoughts in the pot there. Let's put it that way. Jo: Okay, so coming back to being indie then. You mentioned Amazon earlier, but you have a store where you sell direct. Many authors are doing this now, but it can be a challenge. So what have you found are the pros and cons of your direct store? What's working? Any lessons there? PD: Okay. So I use a place called Big Cartel. They're the platform where the books are on. They're hosting my website, PDAlleva.com. The big challenge was actually just starting it. It was so overwhelming. How do I put this on there? At the time, I've got all these books, so how do I present them? I'm even going to be doing another revamp with it too, because I want better pictures—taking pictures of the books, stuff like that, instead of just having the covers on there. I also have a lot of shirts that I'm selling. So I think the biggest challenge is just getting on there and starting it. Then of course, you've got to learn a whole new platform, and the mechanics, and how people are going to be downloading, and how that's done on an e-book versus a print version of the book. So it's a huge learning curve that you've really got to put your focus on and give it time. What most people like in indie publishing is signed copies. It's a huge part of indie publishing, selling those signed copies. People love a signed copy, and that's primarily what my website is for. You can order signed copies from me. I also use a place called IngramSpark, and they're more like a distributor. They're used by everyone. They've been around for a very long time. Traditional publishing uses them too, and they're just distributing your novel. I'd say about a year ago, maybe two years ago, they started where you can sell your books on discount through them as well. So I have that on my website too, where you're just clicking on the book and you're pretty much going directly to their site and you're buying paperbacks and hardbacks at a discount. That's going well too. For the most part, people are definitely coming to my site because they want the signed copies. A good thing with indie publishing is limited editions, first print copies, special editions. That type of stuff really just takes off. People love to see that, especially in the indie community. You can sell them too. I go to a few different book conventions during the year, and the limited editions are there. Like I said, people love the signed copies. They love being a part of that and getting that signed copy. They treasure it, just like I treasure my books too. I'm not referring to my books that I've written, but books that I have as well. I love my e-reader, don't get me wrong, but I still prefer the physical copy—the paperback, and even more so than the paperback, the hardback. So people love those signed copies, and that's why I created the website, to sell on there for them. Jo: Yes, I mean, we're getting to a point now though where I think some people are questioning the pros and cons of it. For example, you doing the signed copies—I don't do that from my Shopify store because I don't want to hold stock and I don't want to deal with postage. So I only do it when I do a Kickstarter. I've just finished one recently, Bones of the Deep, and I'm going up to the printer, and I'm going to sign a couple of hundred copies and then they do the postage. That's the only way I'm willing to do it because of the pain of getting books to your house, signing them, getting them in the post. So how do you manage that practically? PD: Okay, so the inventory's there. I don't go and sign everything right away. I just keep the inventory. Once somebody buys the book, then I'll pull out the book, log it and all that good fun stuff, sign it, and then ship it out immediately. Here in my country, we get discounts at the United States Post Office because they're books. So they pass that shipping cost over to the reader too, so it's a little bit cheaper for shipping. I'll just take books once or twice a week over to the United States Postal Service and ship those books out. I don't sign them until I actually get that order. Jo: How many do you have in your house? It's the holding stock of all the backlist that is the problem. PD: Ooh, gotcha. All right. That's why I have a two-car garage. But here's the thing, I won't order 500 at a time. I'll order 20 at a time. Jo: Okay. Right. PD: When I see that inventory's getting low, I'll order another 20 at a time. Jo: And you get those from IngramSpark? PD: Correct. When the new one comes out, maybe at that time I'm just selling those, bringing those to conventions that I go to. Or maybe doing a sale on those books at that time to get rid of the inventory so it's not sitting around anymore. Jo: I think that's so important. Then like you mentioned, you do T-shirts or shirts. That is also really hard because of sizing. So is that all print on demand? PD: Yes. So I don't really hold the stock on the shirts. When I get an order, whatever the size is at that time, I go directly to the place and order it. I use a place called Sublimation Station that's here in Orlando. They do great all-over print T-shirts. They're fantastic. I just did one for The Sleepy Hollow Incident. So The Sleepy Hollow Incident is one long story, and it's broken up into four books. Each book has its own. The covers are fantastic. I use a lady named Cherie Foxley. She's a phenomenal cover designer. So the shirts are, like, book one is on the front of one shirt with book two on the back, and then the second shirt is book three on the cover and book four on the back. However, I can customise those. I just did a giveaway in my Facebook group and I let people know I could customise them, and she wanted book one and book four, so I just got that and sent it out to her. Now, if people go ahead and order that on the website, I can just order it right away from them, boom, and that place will get it shipped right then and there. Jo: Right, so they do the shipping. These are all sort of practical things that people need to answer because I feel like sometimes it's like, “Oh, yes, having a direct store is great,” but there's actually quite a lot of work that goes into it, isn't there? PD: There is. There's a lot of work. You're pretty much opening almost like your own brick-and-mortar store at that point. You just don't have walk-in traffic coming in—your traffic is all coming online. So there is a lot to it, but it's worth it. If you're a self-published author or even a small indie press, it's good to have. Because like I said, people love the signed copies. Jo: When you say it's worth it, is it worth it financially or just because you like to serve the customers in that way? PD: Both. Jo: Right. So it is financially worth it for you? PD: Yes. Jo: I was talking to a friend of mine and saying, are you valuing your time in terms of things like taking the books to the post office and stuff like that? Do you find it eats into your writing at all, or do you just manage it all separately? PD: No, I manage it separately. So I'm an early morning riser. I get up at 3:00 in the morning, and that's when I write my books or do editing or brainstorming. I'm about to write a new novella now called The Adam and Eve Story, which is actually based on a little-known CIA shelved book from the 1990s called The Adam and Eve Story as well. So I've been brainstorming that, and I was doing that this morning. I get up at 3:00 a.m. and I do my writing, and by the time the kids are up and by the time the wife is up, it's like 8:00 a.m. is rolling around and I'm pretty much done at that point. Then I have my days. Tuesday I'm completely working from home and I do my thing in the morning, and then the rest of the day is marketing, fulfilling orders, stuff like that. On the days when I'm going to do group facilitation, I'll of course still get up at 3:00 o'clock in the morning, and then I'll plan out the day. I've got an hour between this group and I can go ahead and do that, and I'm already there so it's not a problem. The post office is right around the corner. You kind of figure out all the logistics for yourself. There are some days, like on Monday, I don't facilitate groups until the afternoon, so I've got the whole morning to work on marketing and do other things, and fulfilment. Then of course Saturday's a big day for that too. Jo: Oh, that's good. I feel like people always need to know how to balance their time, but it sounds like you manage, because at 3:00 a.m., as you say, there's not much else to do other than write. You mentioned marketing, and you have a Substack, pdsalternativefiction.substack.com. Talk about that and serialising fiction and how Substack works. Because I feel like a load of people are jumping in but might not necessarily know how it works, especially for fiction. PD: Correct. It is becoming quite popular out there. I think the one before that was Patreon, and Patreon is pretty big for that too, kind of the same thing. I wanted to start something and just get the work out there. I was very interested when Amazon came out a few years ago with what was called Vella. They kind of started that. I was like, “This is kind of cool.” Couple chapters at a time. I'm writing the books anyway, so why don't we kick this off and see how it goes—a type of experiment. I had a lot of fun doing it. I started on October 4th, 2024. I've done four novels so far. One is still going, which is Volume 3 of my Dark Veil serie— that's a sci-fi series. I wrote three other novels. The Hypnotist, which is a thriller, heavy on the sci-fi and a tad of horror in there too. And then I wrote Girl on a Mission, which is my psychological thriller, and then Cat Fight, which is a horror novel—all within that time. I think I finished all three of those novels in January, and then the first week of February they were all pretty much done. Now what I'm doing is, I went paid recently on the Substack. It's like everything else that's out there—chip away, chip away. I fell into that hole where they say, “Hey, we can promote you and get people to sign up for your newsletter.” And I'll be honest with you, don't do it. It's not worth it. You spend money, and what happens is they're what I refer to as dead leads. They don't click. You wind up shuffling them off after three to six months, because they're just not clicking. Everybody gets a star rating, so you know—are they clicking, are they staying on, are they not? So I got rid of pretty much all of those people, and I'll never do that again. It's got to be done organically. That's why when you read my books, especially the new books, towards the end it'll say, “Sign up for my newsletter.” I do more with that newsletter too. If you're on the free tier, every month I do a monthly newsletter, which is just me talking about updates, things going on in the publishing industry, things going on with me. My daughter puts together a weekly Horror and Sci-Fi Chronicles newsletter, which gives what's going on in new releases in the industry—sci-fi, horror, books, movies, television. She does deep dives into industry tropes, historical tidbits, and a weekly quiz. I also do a monthly Terrors and Tales newsletter. I started this last year, and it was a quarterly newsletter. It's other authors who are new, upcoming, never been published before, looking to get published. It's a chance for them to be on the newsletter where they have a flash fiction story or poem or even a short story that I publish for them. It's called the Terrors and Tales newsletter. What happened is I would put out calls for submissions. And a place called Duotrope—I don't even know who these people are, but all of a sudden I got an email from them stating, “Hey, we found that you're looking for submissions, and we posted your link. We hope you don't mind.” I'm like, “No, of course I don't mind.” I got so many submissions from that one link. I'm like, “Okay.” Do I really want to deny people? I'm not like that. I want to help promote other authors. I know what it's like when you're new and upcoming, no matter what age you are, to say, “Hey, here's a platform for you to see your stuff in print.” Obviously, I read through them just to make sure they're up to a certain standard, but for the most part, if you submit, you're getting in there. With Duotrope, I'm like, I have enough here to put out one a month. So in May 2026, the first one goes out, and then I'll have one each month until December, and then who knows? In 2027 I might go back to quarterly. I might get enough submissions to just keep it going once a month. So that's the Terrors and Tales newsletter, and it usually comes out towards the end of the month—the last two weeks. I have nothing to do with it in terms of content. None of my stories are on there. None of my poems are on there. None of my flash fiction. It's all other authors, just for them to see their name in print, see their work in print, share it with their friends, and put something on their resume, and to encourage people to keep reading and keep the craft going. Jo: When you say in print, you don't mean in physical print? PD: Oh, I mean in the newsletter. I'm sorry. Jo: I think that's important, or you're going to get a lot more submissions, and you will need to do publishing contracts and all that kind of thing. I think that's the difficult thing with a Substack newsletter approach—it's difficult to know where to categorise it. Is it marketing? Is it publishing? It's all of these things, I suppose. A bit like this podcast, it's all kinds of things. In terms of Substack actually making money on its own or leading to book sales that make money, do you think it does serve that purpose? PD: I think I've gotten more book sales through it, and also ARC readers who are enjoying the books and giving reviews. As far as the paid tiers, that's kind of a little bit slow, and that's where I'm saying chip away at it. Keep it up there. Keep it going. Over time, you're going to build that type of audience where it's going to be like, “Hey, this is financially feasible for me to continue to do this.” That's the response that I'm getting out there. Jo: Yes. Before, you mentioned you were doing Facebook Lives and you're looking at TikTok, but— Is anything else working for you in book marketing? If people have a few books and they're like, “What is working for book marketing right now?”—what do you recommend? PD: Okay. For me, the thing that has made the most sense is making sure the reader knows the book is out there through some sort of social media. I've had really good success on TikTok since the beginning of this year especially. I started it about a year ago, year and a half ago, but then my father got sick and passed away, and it was a new venture and I put it off to the side. I really got the flavour going at the beginning of this year. February, March of this year. It seems to be going really well, and I've noticed an uptick in sales from just getting the videos out there and getting it in front of people's eyes. There's an event I'm going to in August called ShiverCon, which is a pretty big event. After that event, I'm going to look to see what type of inventory I have left over from the event, and I'm going to start doing TikTok Lives. I'm very comfortable being on camera. So I'm like, “Yeah, that seems like a good way to go.” I know there's a few other horror authors who are doing it and having good success with TikTok Lives as well. A guy named Jason Davis is doing really well with TikTok Lives, and a few other authors too. I'm like, “Yes, I could definitely do that.” I want to get up to a certain number of people, and I want these events. I'm going to one in July, and then ShiverCon in August. Once those are done, I'm going to have more time to do the TikTok Lives. As far as Facebook is concerned, what I've had really great success with on Facebook is being in the groups and meeting other authors. That's not always about my book per se, but whatever books I'm reading, I'm posting my reviews about those books in those groups and meeting readers. Then obviously, they always say the three-to-one rule. Post about three different books and then post about your own book, whether you're doing a sale or a new release or a re-release or whatever. I've found success through that just by interacting with readers. When they post a book, I'll comment, “Hey, I've read that book,” or, “Hey, that book looks really cool. I like the review.” Commenting on it so you start these relationships with people who are out there in these Facebook groups. I've recently started my own Facebook reader group. I kind of go with the same thing. Last night, we did a live reading for another author. I like other authors to be on there. I always like to think, what does the reader need? What do I want to see as a reader? I would love to hear live readings from authors. So I kind of learn about them, learn about the book, and get a live reading. To me, that's a good way to go. So I started that recently, and it seems to be going well. I've got a new folk horror coming out soon, and I put out a call for ARC readers and got a fantastic response from that. That kind of drives the sales anyway, because when you get those reviews, then people see it gives credibility to the book, and then other people see it, and then they're buying it too. So that comes from the groups. There's so many wheels to spin in this industry as an indie author when you're doing this, especially when you're doing 99% of it on your own. You've got to get out there. No one's going to know your book exists if you don't get out there and tell somebody about it. Jo: Brilliant. Well, tell us— Where can people find you and your books online? PD: All right. Perfect. So obviously I'm on Amazon like everyone. Most of my books are worldwide, so you'll find them in Barnes & Noble as well. And of course, if you want the signed copies or discount print books, I always lead people straight to my website, PDAlleva.com. Then, of course, if you go to my Substack, you'll get all the updates, and you'll get all the links to purchase or find out where they are on Amazon and Barnes & Noble and things like that too. Jo: Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, Paul. That was great. PD: Thank you very much for having me. It was great chatting with you. The post Writing Cross-Genre, Selling Direct, And Serialising On SubStack With P.D. Alleva first appeared on The Creative Penn.

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Edgar Allan Poe's gothic horror masterpiece comes alive in "Shadow, A Fable"—a chilling tale of death, plague, and ancient dread that feels disturbingly modern. Henrique brings his filmmaker's eye to Poe's most eerie fiction, crafting an immersive audio experience of supernatural terror as a group of men confront something unseen lurking just beyond the light. Perfect for horror fiction fans and Poe enthusiasts.Turn down the lights, my spookies… because in Poe's world, the shadow is never just a shadow.Shadow, a Fable — by Edgar Allan Poe

On this episode of The Horror, we'll hear two stories from Edgar Allan Poe as dramatized by The Black Mass. From September 20, 1964, here's A Predicament And The Tell-Tale Heart. Listen to more from The Black Mass https://traffic.libsyn.com/forcedn/e55e1c7a-e213-4a20-8701-21862bdf1f8a/TheHorror1281.mp3 Download TheHorror1281 | Subscribe | Spotify | Support The Horror Support your weekly hauntings by visiting donate.relicradio.com! Thanks!