Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Different Frequencies
    Different Frequencies
    Different Frequencies
    Ebook80 pages1 hour

    Different Frequencies

    By Lydia Westing

    4.5/5

    ()

    Switch to audiobook
    Read preview

    About this ebook

    Margo Sixx loves radio. As a kid, she listened to her father, a legendary local radio host, play soft rock hits until way past her bedtime. After his death, she vows to protect the station at all costs from profit-hungry media scions like Jamie, who wants to "globalize local radio" ... whatever that means.

    But when Margo finds out that Jamie might become her new boss, she's even more determined to convince him the station doesn't need to change. What she doesn't realize is that he also has an agenda of his own. Will they be able to find a way through the signal noise to hear their true feelings for each other?

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBryant Street Shorts
    Release dateJun 16, 2020
    ISBN9781094411002
    Author

    Lydia Westing

    Lydia Westing is usually a comedy and pop-culture writer for websites like Reductress, Bunny Ears, Cracked, and The Modern Rogue. She has a small dog and a large husband, and they all live together in Nashville, Tennessee. She played roller derby for several different teams on and off for over five years. She’s much better at writing than she ever was at roller derby.

    Read more from Lydia Westing

    Related to Different Frequencies

    Related ebooks

    Contemporary Romance For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      THE ghost FILES

      Jul 6, 2020

      THE ghost FILES
      1 min read

    • Article

      Post Office Hotel, Maude

      Dec 19, 2018

      Post Office Hotel, Maude
      6 min read

    • Article

      For a Good Time, Call

      Sep 30, 2020

      For a Good Time, Call
      15 min read

    • Article

      ‘In the Country of Women’: Featured Nonfiction from Susan Straight

      Nov 19, 2019

      In our latest edition of featured nonfiction, we present an excerpt from National Book Award finalist Susan Straight’s new novel, In the Country of Women, out now from Catapult. The post ‘In the Country of Women’: Featured Nonfiction from Susan Strai

      8 min read

    • Article

      Epithalamium

      Jun 1, 2023

      Epithalamium
      16 min read

    • Article

      A Story for Your Daughters, a Story for Your Sons

      Mar 3, 2020

      The war had closed much of the city, cut off many of the smaller towns. Unable to trace his usual routes, the hat merchant headed into the mountains to try his luck. His father, before he died, had circled a small mountain village on his map, had not

      5 min read

    • Article

      Book Club

      Jan 6, 2021

      REVIEWS ANNABEL LAWSON It’s only January but this will surely be my best novel of 2021, and it’s Alderton’s first. Nina has a dream job, owns a bijou flat in North London. She had a good relationship which lasted seven years. Her ex lost no time in m

      2 min read

    • Article

      Manhattan, 2035

      Mar 26, 2021

      There were problems with being the daughter of a former it girl. First of all, the designation, which, as her mother grew older, warped slightly across the society pages, affecting her mood. Most people remembered her mother’s modelling stints, brush

      4 min read

    • Article

      The Beauty Of Detours

      Feb 25, 2022

      The Beauty Of Detours
      4 min read

    • Article

      Our literary HEROINES

      Aug 27, 2020

      Our literary HEROINES
      5 min read

    • Article

      A Touch Of HOLLYWOOD

      Jul 5, 2023

      My sister Debs had barely opened her front door when the words came tumbling out. ‘Have you heard?’ she said. ‘Have I heard what?’ ‘Johnny Depp is buying a house just outside town.’ ‘Who on earth told you that?’ Debs paused on the stairs, turned, and

      3 min read

    • Article

      A summons FROM AUNTIE

      Jan 25, 2023

      ‘I know a fat old policeman, he’s always on our street,’ sang Mr Dear at the top of what I suppose we must call his voice. ‘A large and jolly red-faced man, he really is a treat.’ Then, suddenly, the only sounds were the gentle hum of the engine, th

      3 min read

    • Article

      AUNT MAUD’S SECRET Part 1

      Sep 1, 2021

      “WHAT! SERIOUSLY?” “Settle down, Martin,” said Ms. Phelps as she poured herself a second mug of coffee that morning. She sat down at the kitchen table, gently blowing on the steam. “Aunt Maud is so excited about her visit and really looking forward

      6 min read

    • Article

      Take a Writer Like Him: My Complicated Love Affair with Kingsley Amis

      Aug 24, 2018

      1. As much as I may rack my brain, there are 15 minutes or so in the dark that I can’t account for and that I’ll never get back—15 minutes during which, I have to think, that creep’s hands were touching my body. It’s a weird thing to think about all

      12 min read

    • Article

      STRIKE IT RICH ... With This Gem

      Oct 15, 2020

      STRIKE IT RICH ... With This Gem
      7 min read

    • Article

      Shanda

      Jan 1, 2024

      Shanda
      13 min read

    • Article

      Pride Of Peckham

      Nov 4, 2021

      Pride Of Peckham
      7 min read

    • Article

      Origin Stories: On the Value of Comics

      May 18, 2022

      The world is vast and I'm unsure of how it works, but this comic is mine, and that's enough. The post Origin Stories: On the Value of Comics appeared first on The Millions.

      10 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Different Frequencies

    4.5/5

    10 ratings1 review

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 5/5
      Very good surprising not erotica just kind of funny. As would be expected from a nashvillian

    Book preview

    Different Frequencies - Lydia Westing

    Chapter 1: The Countess Makes A Proposition

    One time in college, a professor told Margo that radio is the most successful advertising medium because of the theater of the mind. When an announcer says your furniture will be sparkling clean with Mable’s Table Wash, you don’t see someone else’s furniture sparkling clean in your mind. You see your furniture, in your home. It’s a superpower, being able to put images in people’s heads. Sure, you can use it to sell things, but you can also use it to make people feel less lonely. That’s what Margo cared about.

    When she was a kid, she used to sit in her bedroom under Beauty and the Beast sheets listening to her dad play soft rock hits well past her bedtime. This was before everything was automated, so her dad, the legendary Bobby Sixx, was actually in the studio just a few miles from her childhood home, playing love songs for strangers. Fred has a message for Caroline; are you listening, Caroline? He seems like a nice guy. And hey, we’ve all had little Roman candle mishaps! He’ll buy you a new mailbox. What do you say? Here’s Fred, by way of Jim Glaser, asking you, Caroline: ‘Please Take Me Back,’ on WYMM Millburg.

    Every once in a while, he’d add at the end, To my sweet baby girl: If you’re still listening, it’s time for all little girls named Margo to go to bed. And Margo would reluctantly switch off her portable radio and slide it back under her pillow. She didn’t care for the music that much, but she could listen to her dad talk all night.

    She’d recorded her first radio spot when she was seven, for a locally owned Pizza Hut franchise. Her one line was, Daddy, can we go to Pizza Hut? If I bring my report card, I can get a free Personal Pan Pizza! When she stayed up to listen to WYMM after that, she wasn’t just listening for her dad; she was listening for herself. Mommy, I’m on the radio! she would yell every time the commercial came on. It was cute the first few times, but the ad ran for five months.

    The Pizza Hut closed in 2014, and the building was converted into a Unitarian Church that Margo’s dad always referred to as the temple of Pizza Hut because the outside of the building was pretty much unchanged, and every once in a while out-of-towners would still come by and try to order breadsticks from Jesus. Margo still had warm feelings when she rode by it on her bicycle.

    Bicycling had been her preferred method of transportation ever since the car accident that took her father from her when she was twenty-two. She was in charge of WYMM now; it was her voice that begged forgiveness on behalf of grieving boyfriends. It was what she’d always wanted to do. She just wished her dad could be here to see it.

    After her dad had died, Margo moved back in with her mom for a while, but when her mother started dating, Margo moved right back out. The last thing she’d wanted was to cramp her mother’s style. A station manager’s salary wasn’t fantastic, but she’d had enough in savings for a down payment on a two-bedroom cottage on the edge of town, and it had a small backyard big enough for her dog PigPig to roll around. It was an easy bike ride to work, the grocery store, wherever she needed to be.

    She was content with her life. The only shakeups occurred when the Countess came to town.

    Margo had known the Countess since she was born. There was a picture of her father holding her as the Countess peered at baby Margo in his arms with a look that said, How very nice, but no thank you, I will not touch it.

    Although Margo was the station manager of WYMM, she wasn’t her own boss by any means. There were two other channels in her cluster: WAYN, talk radio, and WCAT, a rock station. No station was solitary anymore. If you wanted to run a successful local radio group you had to give advertisers multiple audiences to sell products too.

    So, one used-car lot could buy advertising space with the station cluster and their ads could be used to sell minivans to working moms that listened to WYMM, first cars to teenagers on WCAT, and hearses to the old white men who still listen to talk radio.

    The three-channel group was overseen by the general manager, Godfrey Mackintosh, also known as Mack, a well-meaning but timid man whose most defining characteristic was his flaming red hair, which was now disappearing with age. He also had roughly a hundred children who were always popping up in the strangest places at the station.

    Above Mack was the Countess, the station owner. Every radio station owner was either very rich, very old, or very eccentric, but the Countess was the trifecta. Her parents had started WYMM, run the place very competently, expanded to add the other two channels, and invested wisely in a variety of other businesses.

    The Countess wasn’t as involved in her other ventures as she was with the Valley River Radio group. Since it had been her parents’ first operation, it was sentimental to her. This meant that when she blew into town twice a year to check on her investment, the radio station was her home, literally: She’d had a small apartment added to the rear of the building during the seventies.

    The apartment was legendary among radio staff. It was locked whenever the Countess wasn’t around, but more than one overnight DJ working alone in the building had contemplated

    Enjoying the preview?
    Page 1 of 1