Radio Chthulucene 87.9 FM

I’ve gotten a lot of interesting feedback from my peers. Many of them wanted to see more world-building, but I have a lot of conflicting ideas about how that’s going to work within this piece. First of all, I’m going to change the setting from hell to purgatory. Professor Carroll made a really good point that hell and purgatory are completely different beasts. I think it would make more sense for the radio station to be operated by members of purgatory, some of which eventually move to heaven or hell, or whatever other realm exists out there. That complicates some things, since now I have to figure out whether people in purgatory know about hell, at least enough to create these weird stories and strange phenomena within purgatory. 

I had some fun in an earlier draft with the idea of a vortex that stops all perceived time and light, which I could probably pair with the idea of members of purgatory passing on to another realm. It could be that everyone just has to pray that they’ll still be there when the vortex disappears about a week later. This would also open the story up to transmissions from hell to this radio station, like music or other stuff. Just because 121.5 is the first radio station in purgatory, doesn’t mean that there aren’t other radio stations within other realms. I don’t imagine we’ll get very many angels or demons within this story, since I want to keep it contained to purgatory, but we may get some spillover of their culture. Maybe specific music from hell, or recorded meditations from heaven (which are indecipherable to the listeners, in some kind of celestial language). That would be a cool way to incorporate more code-switching and multiple languages. 

I do want to go forward with another idea that I came up with, which is that Clara’s narrator (reading the stage directions and descriptions for what’s happening within the studio) is actually her living self, who has different beliefs and a whole different personality compared to now dead Clara. Living!Clara is probably more optimistic, maybe she gave up smoking years ago. She’s probably weirded out by all of this. Dead!Clara is probably cynical, went right back to smoking since it doesn’t matter anymore. Dialogue between them could be a cool way to reveal more about Clara’s death, and how it affected her.