What's Kraken with Jo Szewczyk

Cosmic horror author Bert S. Lechner joins Jo Szewczyk ahead of the October 7th release of his debut collection, The Roots Grow Into the Earth — nine occult cosmic horror stories and novelettes, three of them previously standalone Kindle releases. They get into where the Lovecraft obsession actually started (Dungeons & Dragons, not the classics), why titles sometimes arrive before the story does, the habit of jumping between projects when one stalls out, and the 250-suggestion proofread that turned out to be 242 missing commas. Bert also breaks down running his own ARC program through BookFunnel and BookSirens, and the advice he wishes someone had given him before he started: ignore the people who tell you the odds.

KEY MOMENTS

* Dungeons & Dragons, not Lovecraft's own novels, was Bert's actual gateway into cosmic horror.

* The Roots Grow Into the Earth collects nine stories and novelettes, three of which started life as standalone Kindle releases.

* A professional proofread came back with 250 suggestions — 242 of them were misplaced commas.

* Bert runs ARC copies through BookFunnel and BookSirens to front-load reviews before launch day.

THE TAKEAWAY

Asked what he'd tell a brand-new writer too shy to start, Bert didn't say "write more" — he said stop listening to people who tell you the odds. He'd been discouraged once by someone telling him to keep writing "just a hobby," and losing time to that voice is what he wants other new authors to skip. Do it in baby steps: one platform, one habit, one story at a time.

THE ROOTS GROW INTO THE EARTH

A collection of nine short occult cosmic horror stories and novelettes by Bert S. Lechner. Releases October 7, 2023 in ebook and paperback — available now for pre-order.

GUEST LINKS

Website: bertwriteshorror.com

Instagram: instagram.com/bertwriteshorror

Amazon author page: amazon.com/author/bertlechner

Goodreads: goodreads.com/author/show/23933748.Bert_S_Lechner

The Roots Grow Into the Earth

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The Gold Rush trio is back, and this time the road trip went continental. Corine Carey, Leanne Sallenback and Kelly Ireland sit down with Jo Szewczyk ahead of the T+E premiere of History's Most Haunted to talk about hauling gear across North America, the tech that finally caught up to the work, and the one island that nearly ended an investigation before it started. Along the way: the Ovilus, REM pods, stick-figure spirit mapping, a Montreal winter that beat everyone's boots, and the crew agreement that says the second anybody feels fear, everybody leaves.

KEY MOMENTS

• Haunted Gold Rush was a trail. History's Most Haunted is a continent — San Antonio to Bell Island, with planes instead of highways.
• Bell Island, Newfoundland was the first location where the team genuinely wondered whether they could keep going.
• Montreal in winter: sheer ice, the wrong boots, and gear behavior nobody could explain away.
• The safe word rule — if one person feels fear, the whole team walks. It has never been triggered on camera.

THE TAKEAWAY

Corine's answer to "what's the one thing you took away" wasn't a location or a piece of evidence. It was that for the first time since she was three years old, she's being her authentic self everywhere — abilities and all. As she puts it, ghosts are people too, and the work only functions if the living show up as themselves first.

HISTORY'S MOST HAUNTED Premieres Friday, September 8 at 10 p.m. ET/PT on T+E, during the channel's nationwide free preview event. Six episodes: Montreal, Newfoundland, Salem, New Orleans, Charleston and San Antonio.

GUEST LINKS Corine Carey, Leanne Sallenback and Kelly Ireland investigate as Beyond the Haunting.

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In this episode of What's Kraken, Jo Szewczyk sits down with Nicole Luttrell — Haunted MTL writer, speculative novelist, and the person behind the audio drama AA — for the first installment of the author series. Nicole walks through AA: a woman looks for a meeting after a bad marriage and finds aliens instead. Season 2 pushes that found family into the dark corners of Earth, the Avant-vir in the shadows, and the government shop hunting them. Listen to Season 1 first. It's nine short episodes.

Then the craft and the business. She recast Stevie and rebuilt Season 1's lines with Maddie. She records the same scene five times across time zones and pastes a radio play together by hand. Off the Bone with Jam Brannock was nonfiction; AA is a different animal. On the page: Station 86's Nova, the Woven relaunch, Smashwords / Draft2Digital instead of KDP exclusivity, and a first publisher that purged non-romance authors for "not promoting." Her line on that is the one that sticks.

Site: https://paperbeatsworld.com

The Takeaway:

Nobody promotes your book like you do. Keep the rights. Do the work you hate.

Key Moments:

• AA, decoded: not that kind of meeting — Josie, Stevie, the MIG, and why Season 1 before Season 2
• Recasting Stevie, rebuilding Season 1, and making a radio drama from five takes and a sound-effects folder
• First publisher, Broken Patterns, the romance purge, and why she is taking Woven back
• Station 86's Nova on paperbeatsworld.com, Smashwords over KDP lock-in, one writing hour five days a week

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https://paperbeatsworld.com

Most people know Joe Bob Briggs from MonsterVision and The Last Drive-In, sitting in a trailer with Darcy the Mail Girl explaining why a movie nobody respects is actually great. Fewer people know he's John Bloom — UPI's New York bureau chief on September 11, a three-time National Magazine Award finalist, an Edgar Award winner, and the author of nine books. Jo gets him on the Texas years, the stand-up years, the Chain Saw obsession, and why a real investigative reporter went looking for the movies the newspapers were actively hostile to.

KEY MOMENTS

• The other career — He was UPI's New York bureau chief when the towers came down in his own neighbourhood. He filed the eyewitness account, then a series over the days that followed. Same man, different hat.
• Why he picked the trash — He was an investigative reporter first and hated the grind of reviewing mainstream releases. Joe Bob Goes to the Drive-In started as a column about exploitation movies at a moment when newspapers weren't just ignoring them, they were opposed to them.
• The commentary is longer than the movie — He loves The Texas Chain Saw Massacre enough that his Last Drive-In commentary, breaks and intro and outro included, runs longer than the film itself.
• Why he won't teach — Both parents were teachers. He did two years at UT Dallas on the history of exploitation film, decided the paperwork wasn't for him, and got out.

THE TAKEAWAY

He didn't back into this. A Vanderbilt summa cum laude who'd been filing sports copy since he was thirteen looked at conventional film criticism, decided the grind wasn't worth it, and went to cover the movies everybody else called disposable trash. Forty years on, the disposable stuff is the canon and he's the authority on it. Cover what nobody else will and eventually you own it.

GUEST

Joe Bob Briggs — https://joebobbriggs.com The Last Drive-In on Shudder — https://www.shudder.com

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Corine Carey and Leanne Sallenback are sisters. Kelly Ireland met Leanne in high school and spent years as the skeptic in the back of the room. Together they're Beyond the Haunting, and T+E sent them up 650 kilometres of British Columbia's Cariboo Gold Rush Trail — Yale to Barkerville, through a canyon the floods hadn't finished rebuilding — to find out why the calls suddenly started coming. Jo talks to all three about where it started, what they won't do to a client, and how they decide it's time to walk out. Haunted Gold Rush premieres Sunday, October 30 at 9 p.m. ET/PT on T+E.

KEY MOMENTS

• It started with a car accident — Corine was three, her grandmother unconscious outside the car, and a man standing there telling her it would be okay. She saw him again that night. He turned out to be a grandfather who died in the sixties.

• Why the trail woke up — The pandemic, wildfires that erased whole towns, floods that took out the Fraser Canyon roads. Their read is that all of it unearthed something, and the calls started stacking up.

• Knowing when to leave — One of them goes quiet or gets a look, the other two clock it, and they pull the pin. If a spirit wants them out, they go. Footage doesn't win that argument.

• The truth and the deep truth — One location's owners told them one story. What the team came out with was different, and when they sat down together a family thing nobody had said out loud finally surfaced.

THE TAKEAWAY

Before they go in, they re-centre and remember their why. Corine grew up being told there was nobody there until she suppressed it by nine, so none of them will leave a frightened kid worse off than they found them. Don't poke the tiger, don't put on a show, and remember that when the crew packs up, the family still lives there.

GUESTS

Beyond the Haunting — https://beyondthehaunting.ca

Haunted Gold Rush on T+E — https://www.tandetv.com/shows/haunted-gold-rush/

Haunted Gold Rush is produced by Small Army Entertainment in association with Blue Ant Media, for T+E. Two-part documentary, premiering Sunday, October 30, 2022 during T+E's Halloweekend.

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Andrea Perron was twelve when her family moved into the Arnold Estate in Harrisville, Rhode Island. They stayed ten years. Four decades later she wrote it down — three volumes of House of Darkness House of Light — and then sat for the most extensive interview her family has ever given, for T+E's two-part documentary Bathsheba: Search for Evil. Jo talks to her about the writing, about what Hollywood cut, and about the three words she gives people who tell her their own stories. Bathsheba: Search for Evil premiered Monday, October 11 at 9 p.m. ET/PT on T+E as part of Creep Week.

KEY MOMENTS

• Why she waited until forty-eight — She spent four decades feeling like an accidental tourist on the planet. The book only started when she stopped caring what anyone thought of her.
• Written in third person on purpose — She plays narrator, observer and participant. She couldn't put herself back inside the twelve-year-old and stay standing, so she built the distance in.
• One correction in three volumes — She interviewed every member of her family and expected the memories to contradict. The only change she made was a season: spring to fall.
• What Hollywood took out — The Conjuring screenplay went back seven times, once for every member of her family, with instructions to redact. It got an R anyway. The note said it was too scary.

THE TAKEAWAY

People find her at conferences and tell her things they've never told their siblings or their spouses. She says the three most powerful words she can give anyone, other than I love you, are: I believe you. That's the whole reason for the books and the documentary — not to prove anything, just to hand people the key to their own cage.

GUEST

Andrea Perron — author of House of Darkness House of Light, Volumes One, Two and Three Bathsheba: Search for Evil on T+E — https://tandetv.com/show/bathsheba-search-for-evil/

Bathsheba: Search for Evil is a two-part documentary produced by Cream Productions with Blue Ant Media for T+E, directed by Sunny Grewal and featuring paranormal investigator Erin Goodpipe.

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