You heard the story. Now you're those who were involved in making a come
to life. Join us as we build behind the Door. Good evening,
roomies, and welcome back to another episode of Behind the Door with the Gray
Rooms podcast. I am your host, Brooks Bigley, and with me tonight
is Stephen Prouse, the author of season four, episode eighteen, entitled Entitlement.
How are you this evening, Stephen? I'm great. How are you?
I just realized doing that intro, how much of a tongue twist,
that is to say, the entitled entitlement. I didn't even think about that.
I'm doing well. I'm glad. I'm glad you're you're here to answer
all of our space questions because this is going to be a very scientifically themed
episode, right, Oh lord, I hope not. Yeah, I'm just
I'm just kidding. As most writers, I'm just pretending. So you know
it works. Just google a couple of things here and there right while you're
writing it. Absolutely, Hey, where are you located at right outside Columbia,
South Carolina? So yeah, on the edge of the Bible Belt,
I suppose. Oh okay, interesting, Yeah, you got a tiny little
accent there that I detect. I don't know. I'm sure I sound like
I'm the one with the accent being out here in California. Well, no,
I m. For my semester I lived out in LA. My roommates
would feed me all sorts of alcohol to make the accent really come out.
So there you get. I find that like certain adults, not that you're
trying to hide accents, but you definitely will admit that it comes out more
often when alcohol is present. We don't discuss our accent much in polite company,
but it comes out thick when we're not so polite. How's the weather
where you're at? Uh? Really nice right now? Actually I thought it
was. We were expecting a few more storms, but uh yeah, really
nice, really hot. It was about one hundred earlier this week, so
oh I'm here. I thought I was, you know, chilling in the
sun in California and being the only one. It's like ninety five at its
peak today, but you are already experiencing trouble digits in the heat index.
Yeah, and the humidity. I mean we have a thick, wet,
wet blanket on top of us for humidity. Oh that's right, yeah,
yeah, we have really dry heat out here. You've you've got a completely
different setup out there. Man, Well, how how hot do you think
it is hanging out outside of a hyperion? I would assume quite chilly.
Um, but you know who knows our commander. We'll have to let us
in on that secret if he ever comes back there. You go, Well,
speaking of, let's let's get into it here. So I'm super excited
that we got another space story. It's been kind of a while since we've
had a bit of like a true kind of sci fi futuristic story like this,
you know that takes place not on Earth, and and you had so
many cool themes kind of interspersed within this story, just about aliens meeting humans,
and like, to me, I thought the ultimate message here was kind
of, you know, regardless of what this alien thought about humans, was
really trying to get into the brain of our of our narrator and what he
thought about humans. Ultimately, the story didn't exist one day and then you
came along and wrote it, Like, how did that all happen for you?
Well, Um, as far as the writing goes, and before we
fully jump in, I have to disclose my own little bit ahead. Kennon
the Voice, the voice itself was never actually there. It literally was in
the head of our commander the entire time, so there was no monster.
But um, you're letting it out early. Yeah, I got to throw
that one out there because it may color the conversation a little bit later.
Um. But as far as how I got to this one, I was
in the middle of writing another space story. Um, Primarily I'm a huge
fan of Star Trek, but I like the early stuff where maybe they haven't
quite gotten out in out of the atmosphere or excuse me, out of the
Solar System, and um, you know, the early ZEP from conquering days,
And I like that concept of space as the great future of human society.
This this goal, and I decided I want to write a bit of
a horror story in those early days where we're still trying to find our way
into the into the interstellar space. Hmm. Yeah, the Final Frontiers the
Captain mccaroud always say in the beginning, or did kerk also say that?
I believe. Yeah. The Strange New Worlds and all was originated with the
Kirk voiceover. But I'm not the biggest Star Trek nerd, so some some
folks will call me on this. I love this a little bit, just
yeah, enough to be dangerous, never enough to be great. So so
how then did you start to hammer this together? You see kind of picture
setting, you know, and you thought, okay, this is this is
kind of where I want my characters to interact. But then what ultimately got
you into this plot of you know, this human kind of like seeing his
own truth basically, Well, I uh, you know, you're right what
you know. And I'm a political fiend, I suppose social justice sort of
fiend, and and I wanted to look at this spaceship as a microcosm of
society, diverse crew and this guy that just couldn't get along with everyone else.
And I just really wanted to explore that mindset. I mean again,
coming from this part of the country, I'm shrouded in in this ideology,
and I wanted to explore that as a subtlety and watch what happens with this
character in society. Yeah, it's it's fun that well, I don't know
if funds the right word. It's it's great that authors can use storytelling and
writing, you know, to explore these concepts. And we've talked many times
in past behind the doors about the importance of horror, that it's this lens
that you can use to kind of focus on important issues going on in society,
you know, and lets you kind of unravel it in a more of
a safe area where you can kind of explore different three themes and whatnot and
see. So you're right that you even though you kind of blew it early
by letting us letting us know that this is a wall ahead. None,
No, it's nothing wrong. I was gonna get to that and be like,
okay, so as the author told me. But yeah, I always
do enjoy the ambiguity of like was it in his head or it was it
really an alien? You know, and you're just saying right away it was
in his head. But still something affected that right, Like we can kind
of tell he's a bit of a miserly old I don't know how old he
is, but he's he's just a bit of a he's got a chip on
his shoulder, it seems like, just based on the certain ways that he
responds to things and and kind of narrates about what he's seeing on the ship,
something about them, you know, doing that that that hyperdrive jump to
leave Saturn's moon to go towards uranus, like something activated in his brain,
a switch, I guess right, Like it was that the impetus kind of
what you wanted to get everything going. Was that what was supposed to start
at all for him? Or was he already doomed to have these these hallucinations?
Basically now it really and again, all my stories are a mix of
everything that I'm reading, watching whatnot. And at the time I was reading
Understanding Power by Noam Chomsky, and he starts talking about how we as a
society tend to gravitate toward authoritarian strongman sort of figures when we're when when we're
unsettled, when we're afraid, turmoil, uncertainty, that sort of thing.
And so this little thing that happens to the ship that ultimately doesn't do anything
to the ship or really anyone on it has him so frightened that he slips
into this I've got to take control an idea, right, like, take
control of the ship, take control of the people on the ship. Yeah,
really act out on his sense of entitlement to command, to be in
charge, and he needed to deal with his own inner demon, let's say,
and step up and take command rightfully, in his mind of the balance
of his crew, right and ironically in the end, you know, he
refers to the rest of the crew as being the entitled ones, and he's
just kind of like the normal, the savior that would have, you know,
made everything better. You know, at least that's what he's telling himself,
or that voice, the alien that he was projecting out. I guess,
man, this does change the way the story goes by you telling telling
us right away. I had to throw it out there because you know,
we would pursue this the intent of the being, and I'd be sitting on
it and I'm not good with secrets at all. So let it all hang
out. Absolutely. Yah. Yeah. Yeah. My kids get their their
presence early always because I can't just hold on to it. So you're one
of those parents. Goddamn one of those guys. Yep, Christmas starts on
the twenty third, twenty fourth, Who cares? Oh yeah, we do,
uh, we do. The Icelandic book flood. I have to give
away books for Christmas Eve. So that's uh, that's that's that sounds like
something funny. What you what is that? The Icelandic what the book flood?
Um, it's and I'm going to butcher the pronunciation but Yola book of
flood. It's the so Iceland. Per capita is the largest publisher of books
in the world, and on Christmas Eve is their biggest book exchange. They
give books, they drink hot chocolate and eat cookies and stay up all night
reading. So it's a wonderful thing. That's amazing. Now, when you
say the biggest of a publisher, like in terms of the concentration of authors
putting stuff out, or just in terms of how many books are being released,
it's the number of books and again per capita, So there their population
being smaller than ours. Obviously their numbers of books aren't that huge, but
they are globally like and especially in the fall and winter months, they start
putting out tons of books because they they do this book flood every Christmas Eve,
and they cuddle up by the fire and hopefully read horror stories. It's
every horror author's dream come true. Yeah. Well, and does that mean
that out there? I mean, forgive me, I don't for not annoying
the geography that well, but is it higher up in the northern hemisphere or
you know where like the days are like you know, seven hours long,
and it's mostly night or vice versa during the other times of the year.
I'm thinking of the sphere, but yeah, it's it's definitely north of the
US. I'm not sure how in relation it is to Canada, but yeah,
these are the very very long nights during the winter. Yeah, that
makes sense, right, right, So they're society has kind of grown around
this idea of these very long I mean, they're probably even call him nights.
He just call him long dark periods because if it's like nine in the
morning but it's still dark out, you don't call that nighttime, it's still
morningtime. They gotta they gotta follow the clock. Yeah, good morning,
it's a dark day out. Yeah, yeah, exactly. That's awesome though.
That well, anyway, we're getting we're getting off topic, but not
really, because hey, books, I love books. We write, that's
what we do here. Books are awesome. Maybe our narrators should have read
more books while he was on the spaceship. Anyway, anyways, helped the
outlet. So as you were plotting along, Okay, got the setting,
got this disgrunt told character designed, Like what then were you trying to portray?
You know, with your themes were you wanting him to. I mean,
you clearly didn't want him to become aware of his own falsehoods, you
know, because he didn't. I mean even the end he dies, he's
like, I don't want to talk about my ship anymore, and he basically
just fades off into nothing. That's yeah, that that mindset, that um
resistance to change. I mean, I wanted to tell a story that focused
on a microcosm of human society stepping out into this future where they would have
been successful cooperating, uh, living you know, in unison and that sort
of thing, and his refusal to do that ultimately gets him ejected from society.
These are ideas that that cannot be tolerated. They're a danger and and
that's that's really the the crux of what I wanted to go for with it.
But I wanted his bigotry, his sexism, his racism, his you
know, um and and there are other parts of the characters and we shaved
off because obviously I use some more rough language with him early on. But
his homophobia and his transphobia, you know, all these things that he really
clung to because he couldn't accept others is ultimately what made him dangerous and ejected.
Yeah, I totally see. Now you know how this is, you
know, representative of kind of a microcosm, you know, of of planet
Earth basically, you know. And it's nice that you didn't have I guess,
or maybe there was enough time because there's a shorter story, but you
didn't have like the crew attacking him, you know, for being you know
what he was at least, um, you just had him reacting I guess
in it all along, they were hallucinations like you know, seeing the dog,
hearing the dog, the child, where those just you know, the
things that sprouted from his brain because he was he just addled with whatever the
fuck went wrong in him. That was spurred on by I guess maybe the
stress or the anxiety of you know, having left you know, the Hyperia
or wasn't then Yeah, the moon is called Hiberian. Yes, I just
feel like what started everything was somehow that strange shake up as they went into
their like hyperdrive thing and then came out of it. And then that does
seem to be where he's like, listen, like nobody was doing what we
should be doing here. We need to like we need to be doing this
instead. Yeah, that's when he starts to take on that guys of like,
I should be the one in charge here, I should be the one
calling the shots. Yeah. Yeah. And the crew did what the crew
would do. They did scientific tests, they did biological tests, they searched
everyone, they searched the ship. They found nothing wrong. When he still
had issues, the captain researched the ship and retested everyone in the crew,
immediately believing him and trying to find a cause, but ultimately not finding that.
So the crew essentially, for me, was reaching out and trying to
make it get better for him, but he was ultimately rejecting everything. Yeah.
Yeah, he's digging, you know, further down into his own his
own feelings, which I feel like happens a lot with people. You know,
when when someone is really just so sure that what they think is the
right way and everyone else is crazy and and not listening, you know,
they they just will dig deeper as people try to help. Yeah, it
became a conspiracy against him. It became this everyone's out to get him,
and the science is all obviously wrong. There's something else here right right right?
Excellent? Excellent, I mean it was, it was a fantastic story.
Um, you know, aside from thinking of the ambiguity of like was
this an alien or not? You know, at least I even thought that
too. I wasn't like absolutely assure you know that that there was a being
interacting with him, but I was kind of for for a moment thinking like,
well, this this alien is just prompting him, this alien, this
alien is trying to figure out humans and ultimately just putting a mirror in his
face and just making him confront you know, who he is. And so
it's even cool that I could get that own, you know that inference myself,
you know, from your story, which is a sign of a well
written story that you can have people pull from it, you know what they
believe that could even be, you know, in addition to merely how you
wrote it. Basically, bravo to you, no thank you. I'm thrilled
to even be a part of the Gray Rooms. I kind of stumbled onto
the podcast, I believe mid or early third season, and I have been
following ever since. Excellent. Well speaking up, So how then did it
feel then when you first hit play and got to hear your story turned into
this epic space drama. It was one of those goose bults moments. You
know, I listened to the podcasts in all my drive to and from work
and just to start hearing the character speak UM. And you know, I've
listened to to other behind the doors, and you know, everyone's like,
that's exactly what I had in my head, That's exactly what I had in
my head. And it wasn't exactly what I had in my head. And
it was better, um to an extent, because I love that interpretation UM,
the ability of other creative forces to come and collaborate on a story and
making something completely unique. So it being different than what I had in my
head, I really enjoyed. And so I drove my entire drive home,
my thirty minutes or whatever in the in the car, and my arms just
had goosebumps the whole time. It was a wonderful, wonderful experience. And
are you familiar with David Cummings, you know, being from the No Sleep
podcast. I have to say, I haven't listened to the Now Sleep.
I'm old. But you've got new stuff to listen to, my friend,
new stuff to listen I've got so much much UM. But podcasts are not
you know, obviously my even my ignorance with discord here. Um, I
haven't listened to a ton of podcasts, so there are so many that I'm
finding I need to catch up on. Um and No Sleep's one of those
that's that's definitely on the list. Yeah, it can be daunting because they've
they've got so many seas. I think they're only season seventeen or sixteen or
something like that. Well, then, how did you find The Gray Rooms?
I was. I spend you know, most of my gen X time
on Facebook, and something popped up that The Gray Rooms was open to submissions,
and I'm like, okay, well let me go listen to this.
And I went and found you guys on Spotify and started listening. I'm like,
I'm down, I could. I would totally love to submit to this.
And it it this acceptance or that, you know. When when this
script was picked up, I was in the middle of writing a couple of
things, but I was coming out of a very long, long writing slump
and uh, this just kind of helped pull me out and kept me moving
forward. So it was just awesome stumbling upon and kismet made right. Yeah,
that's awesome. I love when that synergy is felt. Especially when you
know authors and writers, you know, feel proud of hearing, you know,
something they've written turned into an audio drama. And especially for you that
if you're not very familiar with audio dramas, that's got to be a superstellar
feeling inside. Like you said you had goosebumps. I mean, that just
must be such an amazing feeling, maybe akin to someone writing their first script
for a television show and then seeing actors be like okay, picking up their
script and then acting it out. That's that's a level above just knowing people
read your story. I suppose, Oh, it's totally enjoyable. And my
ideas of audio dramas, to be fair, were colored by listening to the
shadow and you know, the older radio plays. Um, I was a
vinyl collector, so I enjoyed that and then stumbling, you know, hearing
about the gray rooms and podcasts like this. I'm on a journey now to
get into a new world of things that I enjoyed years ago, but in
a completely new format, a digital format, which is which is wonderful.
Yeah. When I when I was little, I grew up listening to Joe
Frank, and Joe Frank would had this very steady, deep voice, and
we're talking like late eighties, early nineties, and he would write his own
stuff. I just really short stories that maybe lasted ten fifteen minutes, and
he'd read them and they would just be like a steady driving like hum in
the background, some kind of slight melodic whatever or not. But his stories
were just fantastically out of the ordinary, and there was something so just pulled
me in. I just I just I'd hear him telling the story and my
brain would just be firing at me all of these visuals of what was happening.
It was so unique to me, especially in the nineties. And then
I turned on like a cartoon and my brain would just shut off and I
would just watch you know, Ren and Stimpy, You're hitting each other with
mallets, and it just it wasn't the same, you know. So then
when podcasts came out in I mean for me, I didn't discover them to
like, you know, the twenty tens, I was like, oh shit,
this is just like my childhood, this is this is amazing, and
I jumped right into into podcasts, you know, especially audio drama. It's
just such a unique platform I think for delivering a story so welcome aboard.
It really is. And I was thinking about this actually, I was listening
to the episode again today earlier this morning, and the cinematic effect that I
got from the entire show, one of the key points at the very beginning,
we have the narration of the commander and then we transition to the bridge
and the music that carries us where I felt like it was any other space
film, like it was. We have a shot of a guy floating out
into space, and then we roll the camera through the endless black of space
and then focus right there on the ship and then cut the bridge, and
it just from the sound alone carried me inside this, this cinematic imagery.
It was thrilling. Yeah. JM is a beast when it comes to composing,
and it's well, that's why we are so lucky that we have this
team where Jason can produce and put together the sounds, you know, the
audio, and put everything together. You know, as he always says,
fly on the wall. He wants you to be in the story experiencing it.
And then jam comes along, He's like, hey, let me fiddle
around and on the keyboard and put some music to that too, Like we're
just we're just surrounded by talent. I gotta tell you a quick story.
Jason was telling me in the team when he was doing some of the scenes
where you know, I guess like we're outside the spaceship or whatnot, you
know, like you're talking about and then we go inside. He was he
was trying to work with like different tones to put in the background because you
know, clearly if space there's no sound in space, right, So that
doesn't work well for an audio drama. If there's no sound, there's no
story, there's no there's no show. So you kind of have to fudget,
like you know, like on Back to Star Trek. On Star Trek,
you always hear the home of the spaceship itself when the camera is outside
the spaceship, you know, as the spaceship floats past the camera. Basically,
So he was experimenting with tones, and he says he put himself to
sleep at the computer because he must have hit just the right frequency, you
know, like those binural beats that people listen to to fall asleep at night.
He straight knocked himself out with the headphones on. Just it was just
like plugging away like in the sound. And that's awesome, totally totally passed
out in the middle of producing your story, so that that is wonderful.
That is wonderful. I fall asleep to the sound of the Enterprise some nights
that there's like a ten hour loop on YouTube and I'll just play it and
get to sleep. So is that perfect frequency? It definitely like lulls you
into a into a slumber. It reminds us I guess of being in the
womb or something like. That's what I'm told the psychology is. I'll buy
it. I'll take that. Yeah. So hey, so as a writer,
you you have said about other things that you've written, like what what
do you do? What is your style? What do you write? Um,
well, I'm all over the place. Like I said, I had
quite the hiatus, but in the early two thousands I was publishing comic books.
UM did a lot through eight or three studios. Had a book kind
of a quirky little love story with a woman and her robot friend through Arcanic
Comics, and actually had a issue of the Ride come out through Image.
So I love experimenting with a sup for natural the horror aspect, science fiction,
those sorts of things through comics and I do a few screenplays. Um,
recently, I've actually just wrapped my second draft of another one. So
I enjoy writing those things. And then, of course I have a children's
story and another horror short on Amazon that came out of my Yola book of
flood Celebrations. I decided to start writing for my kids each year instead of
just giving them other people's books. So, um, that's been fun.
Yeah, that's that's that's definitely cool. I'm that's so you're used to You're
he used to writing things? Then it sounds like you're used to writing things
that are picked up by a team of other people and turned into something more
than just words on a piece of paper. Oh yeah, I've worked with
some amazing artists that would convert words into sequential illustration, you know, the
comic pages and that sort of thing. And it's it's always been an amazing
experience to watch someone else take your story and not make it their own completely,
but turn it into something that they really have a strong influence over.
And it's just it's it's amazing. I don't even know how better to state
it. You know, I went through film school and managed to write the
scripts for our little student films, and while they weren't phenomenal or good in
general, they were they were fun because you get to hand this thing off
that you're really close to as a writer, you're really close to your stories,
and you hand it to other people and it's a trustful you know,
it's okay, this is my baby, and it's not going to come out
exactly the way you thought. But I mean that's all parentage. Your kids
never come out the way you think, and your stories and never do either,
even if you had full control. And you write an entire novel,
hand it to the public and it becomes something completely different when they read it.
So um, it's just wonderful to see the stories grow up and make
their way into the world. That is the realest thing I have ever heard
of. Writers say, Man, if we could quote behind the Doors for
Days to come, you just earned your very first quote right there. That
was amazing. Absolutely, ah yeah, a trust fall knowing that, like
you're offering this up and it's going to be interpreted, you know a certain
way. That's amazing because some writers might be like, no, no,
no, I don't want that character to sound that way. Now knew,
I don't like the way you made that sound like, well, I'm totally
like that, but you know, I'm totally like that. But at the
same time, you know, it's it's the reality. It's it's you know,
you sit back and and we write because we're fairly narcissistic and we have
our ideas we have to share with the world. But the reality is is
that last part of the statement share with the world. It's something we're putting
out there, but the world's going to take it and make it their own.
And I think that's a magical, a magical thing that that we're touching
people in ways we never never could fathom a on a just a conversational level.
Ah yeah, it's an interpretive legacy, and it's a way for you
to kind of live on even past your own you know, meat suit falling
apart and being buried in the ground, that you'll be remembered as the writer
of something you know that you know that like the story of ours, right,
you know, as long as there is an internet, as long as
you know, we have electricity to keep the servers going a long past you
and I ever, living like your story will be part of the cannon of
the gray rooms. Right, you know, when we're hitting season twenty five
twenty six, please you know hopefully you know that that's amazing to kind of
leave that little bit of a legacy. Yeah, yeah, and and to
know that people can come along and take take it and listen to it,
and turn it about and stick it back on the table and look at it
in different ways from any way that you ever even thought was gonna was gonna
happen. It's absolutely beautiful, very poetic. So so what is horror to
you? Though, like you you dip into other stuff, but still horror
is kind of horror is my favorite genre. Yeah, and all sorts of
horror. I think that horror serves a lot of functions, and I think
you guys have dipped into this another behind behind the doors. But for me,
horror is a punk as fuck in the face of taboo, tearing down
social barriers to really confront those things that we find terrifying, whether it's physical,
whether it's supernatural or or social. We we take on topics more freely
in horror and in comedy, I think than than most anything else. And
there's no way I could ever write comedy. So Horror's my thing. I
dig that because you know, you think about primal man, that the humankind
survived, telling stories where not to go, what things not to eat,
what things to avoid from being slashed to pieces. You know, the things
that frightened us, the things that killed us. Horror was the birth of
human um, safety, human longevity, you know, And so I love
the genre. Yeah, it's the bumpers that keep us in our lane.
Absolutely yeah. And it knocks down, it knocks down barriers. You look
at UM, the Child's Play series, and people hated on when it came
out. You remember this, when when Seed of Chucky came out, people
were talking so much trash. Well, that story flew in the face of
normative gender roles back in the nineties. You know, it was I don't
know, I'm rambling again, so I apologize, but you're not rambling at
all. Those are the things about horror that absolutely adore, is that we
can directly face taboos and traditions and knock them down if they don't hold up
to um. What's what we feel is morally right, what's what's ethical?
Yeah, yeah, we've said it, like you said, everyone has said
it before on this show. That horror gives you that safe space to explore
that which is uncomfortable, you know, and you can you can pull back
if you don't like it. You don't have to listen to the story.
You don't have to watch the movie, but if you do, you're gonna
learn something, you know, versus just a regular Arnold Schwarzenegger action pack you
know film, like Okay, yeah, I maybe learned how to punch a
guy, but nothing, nothing really outside of that. But for sure there
are different ways, um that we just something deep. Like you said that,
it's still that primal person inside of us that gets touched by seeing something
scary and being able to experience it. But you're experiencing, you know,
adjacent to actually experience it in real life of course, because that just has
its own set of learning, you know, if you're really going through,
you know, some of the normal horrendous stuff that people on this planet unfortunately
go through. But anyways, yeah, horror gives you the ability to learn
and grow. And it's so funny because the average person, like I talked
to my mom, she won't listen to the Gray Rooms because she's like,
I just stab people and call people and there's blood and guts, Like,
well, you don't get horror than mom. I'm so sorry, it's it's
not for you then, But there's so many different types of the horrific too
that whether they you know, I talked to so many people that just horror's
not my thing. But then you talk to them about some of the things
they do enjoy, and they're pulling out you know, Beetlejuice, which yeah,
it was comedy, but it was a little horrific. You know,
it was dealt with death and that sort of thing. You Um, the
frightening episodes in Star Trek, Star Wars, and the the concept of the
rising fascism and theocracy that they faced, you know, I mean the Sith
and the Jedi were theocrats. Let's let's be honest. So you know,
these are things that, yeah, our stories explore those maybe not directly horror,
but with horrific tones that people gravitate to. Even if they think they
hate horror, they actually do love it. Right. It's an umbrella that
underneath it has has thriller, suspense, mystery, everything in between. Um.
Yeah, So I just think they're the people who have only topically interacted
with horror, and they just think that horror is just you know, a
Jason or Freddie movie and that's about it, you know, And not that
I feel bad for those people, but just whatever, choose what you want.
That's beauty of this planet. We can choose our vices, we can
choose our forms of entertainment. So no, you know, no, no
one needs to be shoving horror down anybody's throat, like no, you just
don't get it. You've got to do this instead. I'm so happy that
you are writing and putting, you know, your thoughts out as stories then
knowing that this is how you feel about it all because we just we just
need more writers and authors to come from that stance, I think, to
just kind of help grow the genre. I mean, horrors is worldwide anyways.
You know, we have many horror stories from other cultures. You can
go on, I love Shutter Somebody because it lets yeah, lets you see
how other societies and cultures, you know, turn their own mythos into something
scary. And it's far better than half the bullshit that America puts out.
Um. You know, you just have to know what you're looking for well
and on the statement of the foreign horrors better. Um, and I have
horror friends we've had these random conversations, but I think we find those more
horrific because their cultures, their societies are different, dealing with different traumas that
are foreign to us, and we are, as as a human animal,
terrified of the foreign. So we think foreign horror is so much better because
it's unique to us. Over there, not so much. It's it's commonplaces.
It's the stuff that they're used to seeing dealing with their own social traumas,
and for us, they're just not traumas we've necessarily directly interacted with.
But there are common threads that that frighten the hell out of us. So
yep, yep. And that just goes right back to saying how it's so
important to have that that that lends in order to focus on things and to
see, you know, societal taboos through and to ultimately work them out,
to parse through them and unlock them, you know, so more people can
understand just what the hell is going on? Very important. We need more
horror doctors to prescribe horror or do not disagree with that statement exactly. Hey,
So as we draw to a close, here, tell me your social
media is where people can find things that you write things that you feel,
things that you say. UM, well being being the elder of the generations,
there, Facebook is my haunt. I am. I am Tarta Ruckus
on quite a few things Facebook, Twitter, discord UM those sorts of things.
And obviously I've got um the Amazon author's page, which anyone can find
by searching out my name. But um, one of the really quick wanted
to throw this out there, the naming of my characters. I did want
to throw that out because there were specific reasons why I shows the names of
the characters. If we have time for that, UM, go for it.
So Mendisa the the gun and Engineer was named after Mendesa Lati for Thomas,
who is the president of Black Nonbelievers. She's a spokesperson and that sort
of thing. I respect her work for years. So I had to put
a character in there that was intelligent and self self contained and self sufficient and
for him to hate on. Jared Washington's based on a hip hop artist and
tattoo artist that I love, Jared Jenkins Lefty ends On band. And then
there's um Quintero. Captain Kintaro is named after a co worker of mine.
He's an amazing artist and designer out of Puerto Rico and Dak Bradley was more
conceptual trans man that was silenced throughout the entire script, only referred to as
a secondary character, but was named after Tom Brady, the All American.
But I wanted this trans man silence by society. That really is kind of
I wanted to play with that Washington and Bradley and and All American sort of
naming system there. So again, apologize for the rant, but I'm findable.
I'm sure I take off some people that they can direct message me on
Facebook and tell me how awful I am. I wonder love it. That
just means you're doing it right exactly. You gotta you gotta ruffles of feathers,
piss off a few people. That's gotta be the drive of writing,
right feathers. Yes, yes, yes, you know you're doing something,
You're you're touching someone some way. Yes. Well, it was great for
you joining us tonight, Steve, and I appreciate you taking the time to
sit and chat, and I thank you for sharing your world with us here
in the Gray Rooms. Absolutely, I appreciate the opportunity. I'm looking forward
to season five. Oh, we're all looking forward are we gonna get anything?
Well, see, did you submit anything to us for season five?
I did. I'm in season five. Ye. Yes, Okay, I
was like, I was like trying to go back through my list now because
we've we've gone through the submissions, we've figured out our stories. I just
at the moment couldn't pull it into my head. So anyways, I got
the email a couple of weeks ago, so I'm thrilled. I'm excited to
hear it. There you go. Yeah, our last our last author also
revealed on the show that they also got to say, Hey, congratulations,
you'll be back looking forward to God. Yeah, And as usual, the
biggest thank you goes out to our fans and followers who listened daily and spread
the good word of Bob. May you languish, lament, and loathe,
but always with love hashtag stay Gray, Take care and enjoy your evening.
Stephen you as well, Thank you, and good night. Folks. Back
join us each week after every episode for another intestion of behind Your