Here you are, listeners, the fourth installment and final episodes of “Tiny Dreams.” We hope you’ve enjoyed listening to these audio tidbits and will take a bit more of your time to sample the longer audio dramas from ZBS Media. As I mentioned at the outset, the stories of Jack Flanders and Ruby, The Galactic Gumshoe, were important landmarks in my appreciation for the audio storytelling media. A great deal of new content has been developed at ZBS since my early days of discovery in the 1970s. While you can buy and download individual shows at zbs.org,  the serious listener [such as yours truly] will want to go to zbsmedia.com  for streaming media. Here you have access to everything we’ve ever done, for $5 a month, or $55 a year. Once again, Fictional Cafe hats off to…

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Dear FC audio aficionados: Return with us now to those thrilling episodes of “Tiny Dreams” we’ve posted here the past two weeks and partake of nine [count ’em, 9!] more. In case you missed Part 1 and Part 2, click. “Tiny Dreams” were commissioned from ZBS Media as a series of short pieces for a group of radio stations, what they call “Triple A,” — commercial rock & roll radio!  The challenge for the ZBS people was figuring out how to tell a story, take someone on a little adventure (or trip into dreamland), and bring them back again, and do it all in 90 seconds!  The stories were inspired by the strange movies that are projected inside our brains while we’re asleep.  They’re truly original in concept, and also good for a few smiles…

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Original art by Genevieve Shapiro, http://gentoons.com/ Welcome to Week 2 of “Tiny Dreams,” very short podcast stories which will appear here at the FC every Friday evening in July. I encourage you to visit the ZBS website, where you will find a treasure trove of fun listening. More about ZBS in coming weeks. A Short Introduction to “Tiny Dreams” by Tom Lopez, ZBS Earlier this year, we were commissioned to do a series of short pieces for a group of radio stations, what they call “Triple A,” commercial rock & roll radio!  And so our writer, M. Fulton, spent two days listening to one of their stations.  He woke up the next morning with an idea, a series of dreams that could be inserted between songs. The one restriction he was given – the pieces had to…

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We welcome a new podcast to Fictional Café which can hardly be called new. The folks at the  ZBS Foundation have been producing audio/radio stories since 1970, and I’ve been listening to them since those times as well. The brave, intellectual, spiritual adventurer Jack Flanders lives in my memories.  I’ve listened to many ZBS stories and turned many others onto them as well, perhaps notably my son Josh who shares my passion for audio drama. I hope you will too, beginning with a premiere taste of some new stories from ZBS: “Tiny Dreams,” very short pieces which will appear here at the FC every Friday evening in July. I encourage you to visit the ZBS website, where you will find a treasure trove of fun listening. More about ZBS in coming weeks. A Short Introduction to…

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Editor’s Note: Earlier this year, we were delighted to run the entire first season of “Mickie McKinney, Boy Detective,” a podcast written, produced and directed by Ruby Fink and delivered by her incredible Faux Fiction Audio actors. What Ruby and her people have done is extraordinary, creating a story of our times and producing it at the professional level of classic old-time radio dramas. Ruby writes scripts with a real twist: Mickie and his sidekick Sam [Samantha] are middle-schoolers, and their nemesis is the principal. They encounter and set out to solve various mysteries around their school. The Faux Fiction voice actors are terrific, and the sound effects discerning and clever. This is good stuff. We have the first two episodes from Season 2, which we’ll publish this week and next. We’ll publish subsequent episodes…

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