Meet The Maniac IV Meet the Maniac

With the New Year, a new evolution of Meet the Maniac has emerged for your listening pleasure
Hello, everyone. I'm M.E. Beckley, but many of you know me simply as on Substack.
Today, I present to you Macabre Monday's first podcast episode, Meet the Maniac. Our first guest is the lovely , who writes Kindling. Kindling is a newsletter, as Shaina puts it, for people with boring lives and active imaginations.
Join us as we discuss how she joined Substack, Stephen King, horror, developing skills as an author, and who she's reading these days.
I hope you all have as much fun listening to this as I did when recording it. Feel free to tune in to the podcast above or read the transcription of the interview below—or both!
Enjoy!
Okay, so how about we get a brief introduction about who you are and what you do on Substack?
Yeah, so I'm Shaina Read and I have a Subtack called Kindling, where I, it's kind of a mixed bag. I review dark fiction. I cover issues of censorship, I write about authors and writing and I publish fiction.
So it's all fiction centered. Most of it's pretty dark, a lot of horror, but yeah, it's kind of my passion project, I guess you could call it.
So I'm a computer programmer by day, and, um, yeah, I have two kids and two dogs and I love the outdoors. I'm pretty funny, um, I think I like my jokes.
Thank you so much. Okay, so, I really like your Substack genuinely, but before we get into that, I would like to know how you got started on Substack and how long you've been on the platform using it.
Yeah, that's a good question.
I have, I have a couple of friends from high school, actually, and, you know, we don't see each other a whole lot anymore. but we keep in touch, and we were kind of like nerdy, artsy kids in high school. And so we've all gone on to, you know, we all have like our jobs that we have to do to support ourselves, but all of us are still doing art or writing or, you know, music, whatever it was, combination of those things.
So one of those friends, I had him over for dinner one night and he was talking about this new platform that he heard about. I think there were journalists that he liked that were writing on it and he said it's called Substack, and so I started getting his newsletter kind of just to support him and keep in touch with what he's been doing, and I got really curious.
So I started looking on the platform and I think I found L. Griffin, and saw that she was writing fiction. And I thought that sounds super interesting because at the time I'd been writing fiction for a couple of years, like I hadn't shared any story with anybody and wasn't really sure how to get kind of like feedback or a feeling of like how these stories would go over.
I was submitting them to magazines, but you know how that goes; it's a pile of rejection slips. So I thought I should just try this and see what happens.
So that was a little over a year ago, and I mean, I actually, I sat on it for about eight months. So I wanted to do it in January of 2022, and then I got really scared. So I finally published last August, I think was my first, my first time publishing, and I thought about quitting a handful of times since then. Just because it's the nature of the beast, I think.
But it's the people; I love the community of people on there. There's so many good writers. There's so much good fiction. So I'm kind of around just because I've made these really cool connections with other horror writers and horror fans and it was something that's missing from my everyday life.
So yeah, so I'm not going anywhere anytime soon.
It feels like being a part of a kind of the club you always wanted to join and in college or high school.
Yeah, definitely.
Yeah, so how did you get started writing?
Yeah, you know, I'm I, I always wrote like I had journals as a little kid. I was pretty shy so I read a lot and I think I started writing.
I read the Diary of Anne Frank in third grade, like didn't understand the majority of that book, but I