CreepyGram and the Mourning Show - A Dead Podcast Gets New Life

In 2018, I wrote and produced a horror podcast show called "CreepyGram and the Mourning Show". It was well received by listeners and was fun to do, albeit a great deal of work. Each episode had a ghostly skeletal barker who hosted a trio of thematic stories called "CreepyGrams". 

A CreepyGram is a short horror story of exactly 365 words, or about two minutes each. It was my hope that this literary form would be popular as it was easily digestible yet long enough to have enough meat on the bones. The show ran a total of 104 episodes, twice a week, for an entire year. While it certainly wasn't perfect from a production standpoint, I was proud of it.

It no longer exists out there in the cyberscape for a few reasons. I had a dedicated website that I no longer use where the audio was hosted, for one. Another reason is that I hate the sound of my voice and it was a constant source for the "cringe" factor every time I heard it. The main reason, though, is that I thought it would make good material for a book.

I began editing and writing new material to tie those podcasts together in a large volume of the CreepyGrams called "The CreepyGram Compendium". I even reached out to an old friend of mine and asked her to pen the foreward for the book. Thankfully, Terry Castle (daughter of William Castle and a recognizable talent in her own right) accepted and did just that. 

After I compiled them all, included original content, and wrote a few "guides" to how the stories intertwined and how readers could navigate them, the end result was a behemoth. It was simply too big to fit into a single book. I set it aside and moved on to other projects.

While reviewing my file folders on the computer for another writing reason, I came across The CreepyGram Compendium and remembered how much work I put into it. The editing was nearly completed after several revisions. It seemed a shame that it would never see daylight.

Then, I had an epiphany of sorts. Why did the compendium have to be a complete singular volume? Why couldn't I break it down somehow and release it as a series?

Thereby came the birth of "The CreepyGram Chronicles". I broke it down into four segments, each representing a season. Since I had written them over the span of the year, the stories were already in chronological order starting with January first. A little reordering and I soon had Winter, Spring, Summer, and Fall Chronicles. 

The first edition, ironically coming out in the spring, is "The CreepyGram Chronicles, Volume One: The Dead of Winter". It is available in digital and print format on Amazon.com. 

It is my hope that the resurrection of the podcast in print form will be as popular or even more so than the podcast itself.