This has sort of become my general blog for the show and writing progress in general. So, for the next entry, something I put on the webpage.
"Your iPod is Not a Page
Hey guys, Will here, chief sound mucky muck. I spent some time yesterday fretting over two things.
1) The way we've been writing the story, it will not translate to paper form without a LOT of rewriting. Some sections are completely audio based. Some sections are underwritten because a layer of ambient or SFX becomes the second storyteller.
2) I keep missing my deadlines by a day or two. Nothing serious, but if I dropped the SFX, and even some of the voice casting, I could much more easily hit deadlines.
Then I remembered something I was told back in the days of webcomics. A very smart man once told me "Don't draw a page, draw a MONITOR. If you're doing webcomics as a back door into comics, you're half assing both YOUR chosen media, and the media you're hoping to get into. If you wanna draw or write paper comics, do that, and submit based on those rules. Don't try to take a shortcut."
He's right. Monitors aren't shaped like pages, and neither are iPods. Drawing a paper comic and making people scroll down to read it just so you can hopefully resell it later does a disservice to your reader, the same way that us altering the story to make the process easier or more book friendly does a disservice to all of you. It says your listener (comic reader) is a stepping stone to "legitimate" work. It takes all the audio format spice out of podcasting and just makes your listeners beta testers.
I'm not saying folks like Scott Sigler or JC Hutchins should rewrite their stuff, their novels were written with "legitimate" publication in mind, and when that didn't work out quite right they moved to podcasting (and Scott does a great job of adding a few SFX for spice, especially in Infection(Infested? Whatever it is now, chicken scissors FTW.)) But ours wasn't. It was meant to be a podcast.
When the three of us sat down for the first story meeting in a hamburger restaurant sadly named "FudRuckers" we talked about ways podcasting could tell the story BETTER. For me to puss out and start making adjustments so I have to do less work or to try to push a square peg into a round hole is both lazy and disrespectful to all of you who come here for audio horror that's different.
So, we may miss deadlines, maybe by a few days. But I promise, it will always be to make the story better. A voice wasn't right, a sound effect didn't sound like what I wanted it to, or what we wrote had so many continuity holes you could use it as a colander. If Cristian doesn't like a voice, we don't drop the episode. If Chris isn't happy with his read, we don't release. I'll run myself ragged to get it done as close to every Monday morning as possible.
But I promise, it's to give all you guys the best story possible.
-Will Ross
Sound Guy."