Pump Up The Volume: Podcast Edition

I got big into audiobooks when I packed up my life in LA and drove cross-country alone to relocate back to my hometown on the east coast.

I’d been reading a lot of Kresley Cole, ‘cause her books are just good, dirty fun, and I grabbed myself an Audible subscription, downloaded one I hadn’t cracked yet, and got on the road.

Hours flew by like minutes as I sped through the great, flat expanse that is the entire middle chunk of the country.

I thought podcasts would be a lot like that. Pop one on. Get lost in the audio drama. Make mundane tasks bearable.

Reader, it is not like that. I am, apparently, violently picky about my fiction podcasts.

I dig people expressing themselves. You have a story in your heart and access to a mic? Go right ahead and podcast. That’s what I’m gonna do (more on that later).

Give me single-person narration or full-cast immersive drama. Give me anthologies. Give me serials. Give me boxes of letters found in an attic that drive you to solve a mystery (please, give me more of that I’m such a sucker for it).

But the writing’s gotta be there. And so does the acting.

Some of y’all are ditching craft and thinking you’ll sail through on enthusiasm and vibes.

I can’t tell you how many pods I’ve followed, only to pop on the first episode and unfollow within three minutes.

I want to love you. Please, let me love you. Level up and then publish.

Here are some* that have really worked for me. Maybe you’ll like them, too.

*Hopefully all of these are straight created by humans with no AI horseshit. I’m doing my best, here.

All descriptions below taken from each podcast’s website.

“Follow the collected records of a repair team sent to Outpost Fristed in the vast white wastes of Svalbard and unravel what lies waiting in the ice below.”

“A weekly horror fiction anthology podcast examining what lurks in the archives of the Magnus Institute, an organisation dedicated to researching the esoteric and the weird. Join new head archivist Jonathan Sims as he attempts to bring a seemingly neglected collection of supernatural statements up to date, converting them to audio and supplementing them with follow-up work from his small but dedicated team. Individually, they are unsettling. Together they begin to form a picture that is truly horrifying because as they look into the depths of the archives, something starts to look back…”

“Three women. Three centuries. One haunting. Mirrors is a sci-fi horror audio drama podcast from ZoomDoom Stories.”

“Palimpsest began in 2017 as passion project made by friends to kill time between theater productions. As the story of Anneliese and her sister Claire unfolded, the creators knew they had discovered a new favorite way to tell stories. Subsequent seasons traveled to different times and places, but always within the same house, and always centered on a woman who may or may not be what she seems.”

“On the night of May 10, 2007, three boys entered a cave in Mantawauk County, Tennessee. Only one made it out alive. The other two were found ten days later. They had been attacked by someone - or something. The investigation that followed revealed town secrets as old as the caves themselves and put a third teenage boy, James Fincher, on death row. This haunting narrative follows Julien Solas, an amateur writer and James’ friend who’s been haunted by the events ever since. Now, with Fincher’s execution looming, Julien returns home to reconcile his past and uncover the truth behind the killings.”

“Something has been found at the bottom of Earth’s ocean. An ancient artifact that can only be described as a giant door, inset into the sea floor. It becomes known as the Vault. A gigantic enigma, buried and forgotten...nineteen thousand feet down. To study the artifact, the galaxy’s most powerful corporation, Maas-Dorian, has built a massive, self-contained, secret laboratory base surrounding it, named FATHOM. It’s objective: unlock the secrets of the artifact and discover what it holds.​ But some mysteries should remain buried. And some doors should never be opened....The story of DERELICT begins with season one, FATHOM, a narrative podcast experience from award winning science fiction author J. Barton Mitchell, and produced by Night Rocket Productions.”

Enjoy!

***

Distraction from grunt work aside, I’ve also been listening far and wide to podcasts because I’m writing my own and want to immerse myself in the world before I dive in and create something.

I’m trying to focus on what I like most about the stories in this medium - found analog media, a mystery that leads to a journey, diary/letter-type entries - and also make it work on my budget, which is zero.

Plus, there’s something really attractive about making something totally myself, aside from the graphic design* and music*, which I’ll have a couple of collaborators work on since I am not good at it.

*Photos / illustrations / songs will all be created by humans. Fuck AI, and fuck you if you ChatGPT / Sora / OpenAI yourself into finished work. I don’t care if your banner photo is a stick figure with a side-pony because that’s all you can afford and all the skill you have. It’s better than burning the planet to steal from artists you should be paying.

Ahem.

Writing eps of the podcast now. Will be recording them shortly and hope to drop them early in 2026! Hope you’ll tune in. It’s a spooky little idea that I’m having a lot of fun with, and really, that’s all I can ask.

And if the writing sucks (it won’t) and the acting is terrible (it might be), well, at least I’ll have enthusiasm and vibes.