Pre-Production.

About a year after the release of Magical History, I knew I wanted to start work on another show. I’d been talking to James Currie, one of the other head writers on that project, and we both agreed that we liked the serial format and the writers’ room pitch sessions, so we’d like another team-effort show. We started reaching out to friends and colleagues whose writing we really like, trying to cast a wide net and work with some new people.

We quickly wound up with a fantastic team — ourselves plus Sarah Schnebly & Ríoghnach Robinson — and started pitching show ideas. Ríoghnach pitched the logline for Still Lives, and we all took to it pretty quickly. After a few meetings to break down the overall plot and several dozen story structure diagrams, we got to work writing two episodes each — I wrote episodes three and eight.

Writing this show was a fun challenge. Still Lives is genre fiction, in a sense — it is post-apocalyptic, and there’s some sci-fi and worldbuilding here and there — but for the most part, this was my first attempt to write “literary fiction,” as it’s often called. Still Lives scripts were always heavy on subtext, tension, and important things left unsaid. It was a totally new direction for me as a writer, and one I really enjoyed.

Production.

With the scripts written, it was time to start actually recording, which meant we needed actors and money to pay them. A while back, I’d talked with one of the founders of Tapeble, an app designed for listening to serialized narrative audio, later expanded to include short films. I got back in touch with him and negotiated a sponsorship contract, where Tapeble would help fund the show in exchange for an early release on their platform.

We handled casting completely online, with auditions form all over the world. We’d initially imagined the cast entirely American, but some of the auditions really blew us away, and we wound up really broadening our search. Our final cast was a mix of remote recording and local actors. The creative team crashed at my place for a few days, and we recorded the whole show here in Raleigh, patching remote recorders into speakers in the recording booth so our actors could still bounce off each other in the process, and so we could direct them along the way.

Post-Production.

I handled sound design and audio editing for six of our eight episodes, and our trailer, while James handled the remaining two. We’d both worked together editing The Magical History of Knox County, which called for big, bombastic, almost cartoony sound design at times. We spent a good bit of time discussing the sound of this show, mapping out locations the characters frequented, and swapping sound effects we’d recorded to make sure our final episodes had a sound that matched both the other episodes and the emotional crux of this show. A number of our reviews on iTunes and elsewhere online have really praised the sound design and production quality.

Once editing was underway, we needed to start publicity leading up to our release. We started promoting the show on Twitter and building up a preliminary following. Sarah handled community engagement wonderfully, and I lent a hand in developing our social media strategies and giving some insight into the broader audio fiction space. At the same time, Sarah and I started to work on developing the show’s visual identity. She sent over a few hand-painted pieces inspired by the show, and I worked on incorporating them into our album art and web design. I heavily modified existing typefaces to give the show’s branding a hand-lettered, organic feel. Many people thought the lettering was part of the original painting, which tells me that I did my job well.

We knew from the start that the branding for this show needed to feel cozy, but desolate — we’d started referring to Still Lives as “pastoral post-apocalyptic” pretty early. That’s a difficult balance to strike, but Sarah’s art and my designs tried to emphasize cool dark colors, big empty spaces, and small points of light. I made sure that came through in our web design, as well as in the publicity materials for the show.

Release & Reception.

Still Lives released an episode a week for an eight-week run. That was a new experience for me — we’d released all of Magical History at once, and generated a lot of buzz that way, so I was interested to see what the longer release schedule would do to reception. All told, it was definitely the right move. It was great to watch our audience row week by week, and really incredible to see people’s reactions on Twitter, Tumblr, and Reddit as new episodes came out. Jack Pevyhouse, writer and producer of Crossroad Stations, tweeted that it was “both a poem and mystery” — I remember reading that and knowing we’d actually achieved what we set out to do.

Reviewers, both professionals and listeners on Apple Podcasts and similar services, were incredibly kind to Still Lives, which was fantastic to see. We got a very complimentary write-up in The Onion’s A.V. Club very shortly after release, and made Bello Collective’s Best of 2019 list. We were also nominated for a number of Audioverse Awards.

We spent most of our eight week run — and quite a few weeks after it — between number ten and twenty on the fiction podcast charts, which meant our $800 production was almost always sitting between shows starring big-name award-winning film & TV actors. At present, the show has over 125,000 downloads, and averages between 100 and 200 new ones daily.

Of course, by far my favorite review of the show was from Twitter user @ElizaaLeigh, who said it made her cry in a McDonald’s drive-thru. What more can a writer ask for?