BTB Storytellers LOST SIGNALS part II

Day 2 and some more insights into this great horror anthology. Yours for today only 99c at Amazon. Today I have contributions from Betty Rocksteady, Joshua Chaplinsky, Paul Michael Anderson and Michael Paul Gonzalez. As yesterday I have included each of the stories with their accompanying artwork from Luke Spooner.

Desert of Wounded Frequencies

by

Betty Rocksteady

“The Desert of Wounded Frequencies” went from conception to finished story in two days. It’s probably the quickest story I’ve ever written. I knew I wanted to submit to Lost Signals but I kinda left it to the last minute, and when I decided to go for it, I wrote quick and hard.

I knew immediately I wanted it to be about a car radio and an endless stretch of desert, inspired somewhat by movies like Dead End and Dark Country; full of dusty, lonely feelings. Mood is always one of my foremost concerns when writing. I wanted you to be able to taste the desert air.

I’ve always loved “unlikeable characters.” Especially in short stories, I think you can get away with not going for a heroic character necessarily. Not only are my characters flawed, sometimes they’re downright irredeemable. The character in this story starts out with an attitude problem, but I think you still emphasize with him enough to be startled by the reveal of exactly what he is capable of.

As far as the radio part of it, rather than just a haunted radio or a spooky radio, I wanted the supernatural part of the story to feel very personal and surreal, so the strange sounds coming from the broken down radio start to break down reality itself.

Find out more about Betty Rocksteady here.

All That You Can’t Leave Behind

by 

Paul Michael Anderson

“All That You Leave Behind” can be blamed on becoming a parent and Lauren Beukes.  Somewhere in her novel BROKEN MONSTERS, she throws off a line about a “ghost heartbeat” on a sonogram and the phrase fired off a Roman candle in my head; I thought of the terror going through my wife’s pregnancy–is everything all right? what’s going to happen? what does THIS [insert any THIS you please] mean?–and it spun into a what-if: What if a couple, expecting a child, lost it?  What if that couple had to pick up the pieces and were failing miserably at it?  What if, in the midst of this, they began to hear ghost heartbeats, briefly at first and then more and more?  If the story works, if it’s the gut punch I was hoping for, it’s because I focused heavily on the would-be mother and father, who they were when they were thinking they were becoming parents, and who they were after that dream died.  The supernatural elements became an amplifier, a shot of adrenaline into their turmoil.  Right now, it’s one of my favorite pieces, personally.  Writing it was difficult as hell, emotionally, but the process itself was ridiculously easy–which makes me wonder how easily I can go to those dark places.  It makes me wonder a LOT.

Find out more about Paul Michael Anderson here.

Feedback Loop

By

Joshua Chaplinsky

The idea for my story “Feedback Loop” started with Kubrick. Or maybe, also, with Stephen King, but I remember the movie version of “The Shining” better than the book. Anyway, a friend of mine likes to impersonate Shelley Duvall saying, “KDK 12 to KDK 1”, so that’s really where it all started. That and I wanted one of the characters to be an electrosensitive. And no, I hadn’t yet seen “Better Call Saul”.

Although I don’t directly quote “The Shining”, the character does, and I did worry about that for a hot minute. I know you technically can’t quote song lyrics without getting permission/paying royalties, and I know it’s the same for quoting a passage from a book, but this was sort of a gray area. Since it was the impetus for the whole story, I figured what the hell, and Max (Booth III, “Lost Signals” Editor) never said anything about it, so now it’s his problem.

The rest I pretty much discovered as I wrote.

Joshua Chaplinsky is the Managing Editor of LitReactor.com. He is the author of ‘Kanye West—Reanimator.’ His short fiction has appeared in Zetetic, Motherboard, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Thuglit, Dark Moon Digest, and multiple print anthologies . 

Find out more about Joshua Chaplinsky at  joshuachaplinsky.com

How The Light Gets In

By

Michael Paul Gonzalez

How the Light Gets In came to me in fragments after a visit to the Salton Sea. I was lucky enough to get out there before they renovated the North Shore Yacht Club, so I got to see it in all its derelict glory. There are corpses of buildings and houses all over the area, and the stench is something that must be experienced to be understood. And it’s wonderful! It’s a giant, sprawling, angry, dead beast. The fine white beaches are made of razor-sharp fish bones, the houses that aren’t rusted out or burned down are covered in amazing graffiti, full of used syringes and rotten furniture and shards of televisions and refrigerators. Somehow, there are still people living there. The first time I went with my wife, she wandered off to take photos and I was trying to talk to her from not-too-far away, and I couldn’t hear her, or rather, I could only hear her in waves. It was strange, probably a trick of the wind, but strange seems to be the norm out there. When I saw a call for submissions about Radio Signal Horror, it got me thinking about the nature of communication, long term relationships, the things we say that we shouldn’t, the things we want to say that we never do. There’s an odd sacrifice of self, where you lose part of you to become part of someone else. What better place for that to converge than under the empty skies of the Salton Sea?

Find out more about Michael Paul Gonzalez here.

Only one more day to get this anthology at 99c!!