Reader Question Wednesday #3!

Happy Reader Question Wednesday! We had four questions this week... all from the same person... but that's okay. That's nearly 35% of our readership. (Okay, not really. But I'm really bad at math and prone to hyperbole.)

Anyhow - thanks for the questions! I've set my Pandora radio to a "music to blog to" station, so let's get right down to it. Answers will come in the order the questions were received:


1) What DOES Jason want for his upcoming birthday, now that you mention it?

Jason is a little busy right now, as he is getting married in a little over two weeks - and has been extremely busy pulling together all of the last minute details. However, I made a few not-so-subtle threats that I would make up a birthday list for him that included expanding his Precious Moments collection - aka, horrifying figurines of sad-eyed children. And no one wants that.

(Did you know that there's actually a Precious Moments chapel? And it's in Missouri... where Jason happens to be from. Connection? You decide.)

Unfortunately for me, my threats worked. Here's his actual birthday list:

"Jason's greatest desire, of course, is for world peace and understanding, so if you can hook that up, that would be great. As an alternative, funny t-shirts from www.thinkgeek.com are always welcome."


2) What's the timeframe on the podcast? When can I expect to hear an episode, in other words? I'm droolin' here!

Well, wipe yourself off. That's unseemly. And may I remind you that patience is a virtue?

I would love to say that you would be able to download an episode by Labor Day... but I've always been one for unrealistic dreams. (Ergo, I'm writing scripts for an audio drama podcast.) But if we manage to pick up the pace again after Jason and his lovely bride are married and sufficiently recovered from their wedding... I would hazard a guess that we will have the first episode sometime this winter. Watch the blog for a casting call sometime in the near future if you'd like to audition to be a part of it!

3) So what sort of music would Alex listen to? How about Viper? What's on their most-frequently-played list?

I've been racking my brain all day to come up with something to answer this question, and I'm embarrassed to say that I haven't been able to pin Alex down. I'm hoping Jason has some ideas - and that he might post them.

Viper, though... assuming you could even find his apartment, and then crack his encrypted files to get to his music collection - would probably have the following playlist:

• When he's hacking a government agency or financial institution, I think he plays electronica á la VNV Nation or something that makes him feel powerful.
• I think he has a special playlist for "the ladies" that includes Barry White, among others. He hasn't played anything off this list in at least two years.
  
• But I really think what he loves to listen to when no one else is around... maybe not even Alex... is anything off of Dr. Demento's playlist. If you go back far enough in the archives, there's even a song called "If You're a Viper" ... coincidence?
  

(Actually, yes. Totally a coincidence... but cool, no?)

4) What's Alex's sign anyway?

I'm thinking Taurus. Alex is a little slow to act at the outset of our story ... but once he sets his mind to his task, he displays an inordinate amount of perserverance.


Thanks for the questions! As always, feel free to ask us questions or make comments at any time.

So there's this guy, right?

I have always marveled at writers who become consumed with their characters. I've heard story after story from authors who claim their characters begin to speak to them on a regular basis - and then their stories begin to write themselves. I don't think we're necessarily at that point - although the story has definitely begun to take on a life of its own, and I certainly have started to develop quite a soft spot for some of our main characters. Admittedly, these guys tend to hang around in my brain for a while after one of our writing meetings. I have only recently begun to experience the whole "characters talking to me" thing in a couple of other writing projects I'm working on, and I'll be honest... it kind of freaked me out. I never 100% believed in it before ... but it happened. And now I am really looking forward to the day that it happens with the podcast.

Maybe it's already started. Who knows? What I do know is that I like our characters. I want them to succeed. Not that I want to make it easy for them, because how boring is that? But I'm pulling for them.

Our main character is a guy named Alex Kirunov. Mid-twenties, Chicago native, although at the opening of our story we discover that he's been out of town and out of touch with the family for a while. And even though the other characters play some pretty major roles, this is ultimately his story.

And as I've said before, I like Alex. Were he a real person I think we'd be friends, although I think I'd probably worry a bit about his lack of ambition. But he's a good guy nonetheless. We have a little bit in common... we both love Reuben sandwiches. Remarkably, we both use the same rating scale. We have both spent a lot of time in Omaha, some of it against our better judgment. We both have many Slavic relatives. Mine are Czech and his are Russian - but let's not split hairs. We both know enough Russian to be dangerous - although I bet he knows more than I do, and I think he could teach me some choice words. I'm sure he's been sworn at more than once by certain family members. And we both have seriously geeky friends.

He also sounds remarkably like Jason. It's weird.

I mentioned before that we have a handful of scripts written, and Alex is starting to become a real person to me. I'm really looking forward to seeing how he continues to develop, and who he's going to become when this whole mess is over. If it ever truly ends. And if we ever truly get off our asses and start recording.

Which we will. We promise.

Backstory and the impending apocalypse

We've all done things we regret. I know I'm making a gross generalization here, but I'm willing to bet that everyone reading this has at least one, if not hundreds of moments in the past that you wish had gone a bit differently. I'm even willing to go out on a limb and say that for many of us, a large percentage of these moments happened before the age of 20. I know that for me, there are lots of things I wish I could hop in the Wayback Machine and go back and at least attempt to make a different choice. Still, many of the moments in my past shaped who I am today -- and without them, I wouldn't be sitting here in Chicago, writing a blog about writing a script for a podcast. And when I put it that way, perhaps I am not the only one who should be regretting those choices. My apologies, dear readers. But I digress...

Chances are you didn't make a choice at age 13 that could potentially impact the very balance of the universe and cause a future apocalypse. (But hey, I'm willing to be wrong. Hope you worked it out if you did - and if not, let us know. It would save us a lot of time trying to figure out which recording equipment to use if the world is going to end in a few days.)

Our main character on the other hand, did make a rather stupid choice when he was a teenager. He has only just become aware of how something as innocuous as writing his name in a place he probably shouldn't has unalterably changed the course of his life, and has the potential to impact millions of other lives. I won't give away too much here - but the story itself is about an ordinary guy who finds himself in an extraordinary situation, and has to come up with some pretty creative solutions to get himself out of a mess he didn't even know he created.

Herein lies one of our more difficult challenges: backstory. There's a lot of it. We have managed to construct a pretty complex plot - which, while admittedly I think it's pretty cool, is damn hard to reconstruct in a way that doesn't sound completely contrived and boring. I mention this because one of the motivations for embarking on this little project was listening to another audio drama podcast currently in production that does the whole backstory thing very, very badly. (Which Jason and I will both completely own as our own opinions, even though I won't name any names.) I remember saying in a very haughty and arrogant voice, "We could totally do a better job than they ever could." And thus, we got on this crazy rollercoaster ride.

And I have to admit, it's no small feat. I find it particularly challenging to tell a story that requires a bit of exposition to make sense, when my only storytelling tool is dialogue. I really don't want any of my characters to be in the middle of an action scene... for instance... a zombie attack... and suddenly stop to say, "You know, this reminds me of that time three years ago when..."

But oh, the danger looms. I actually relish the challenge however, and I'm enjoying the opportunity to hone my writing skills by working hard to make the dialogue count. The last thing I want to do is insult our listener's intelligence with unnecessary and unwieldy monologues about events that have only a passing relevance to the current scene. So far, I think we've managed to avoid the *insert name of bad podcast here* style of writing - but I can see how easy it would be to slip into that mode.

Just something to keep us on our toes.