Welcome everyone, I’m The Li-Bury-An, and today we have a spotlight on Mocha Pennington
Mocha Pennington is so glamorous, but she can also knock out one hell of a heart pounding, broken-nails-dragged-across-rotting-wood, white-knuckle-grip horror story. Her submission, “Liked” blew me away, and quite frankly, was one of the best stories in the book. Mocha is the co-host of the successful Youtube channel, Tea Time, a celebrity entertainment channel with the tag-line “All is fair in love and gossip.” (Makes you want to run out and subscribe, right? I know I did!) Her career in entertainment gels perfectly with her story in The One That Got Away. “Liked” is about an Instagram influencer named Cassandra who is stalked by an obsessive fan. Used to being adored by many strange individuals, Cassandra pays the fan no attention– that is, until the day he kidnaps her and imprisons her in what Mocha describes as “a small, crude cabin haphazardly erected from decaying wood, decorated in mounds of dust and black despair.” And if that line doesn’t make you want to read the story….
“Beyond the tiny fissure between the dilapidated cupboard doors where she hid, she could just make out his figure moving stealthily through a room of gathering shadows and shapes made ominous by dusk. It was a tall and bulky figure, the grace that it moved with menacing, ghostlike with its fluidity. He had a body made to be uncoordinated, a body that could easily leave shattered glass and upturned chairs in its wake..”
From “Liked” by Mocha Pennington
Today, Mocha talks about how she came up with her story “Liked” for THE ONE THAT GOT AWAY : Women of Horror Anthology Volume 3. Out now from Kandisha Press:
“My short story “Liked”, started off as an idea for a novel. When new ideas for novels come to mind, I like to let them hang out in my head for a bit to see if I build onto them or let them disappear. I kept thinking about that idea. I had a pretty good sense of who the protagonist and antagonist were and the bones of the story. Not long before I decided to sit down and write, I saw a trailer for The Invisible Man starring Elisabeth Moss.
The plot for the movie was too similar to the plot for my novel. As much as I knew the two would have more differences than similarities, I thought it would be best to abandon the idea and not invest my time and emotions into the characters and their story. When I saw Kandisha Press’ call for submissions for The One That Got Away, my thoughts revisited the way I wanted that abandon novel to open. It was then that I knew I had a short story that would be a perfect match for the anthology.”
MOCHA PENNINGTON lives in Kansas City, Missouri. She studied journalism with a minor in creative writing at UCM. Her short story, “Cedar Road,” was featured in Secret Stairs, which saw #1 on Amazon in the horror anthology category. She is the co-host of Tea Time, a YouTube channel that currently sits at over 6,000 subscribers.
Twitter: @mocha_writer
Instagram: @mochapenn
KANDISHA PRESS 
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