Pod-casts?

Pod-casts might be happening! Isn’t that exciting? I think so.

It turns out that with the revitalization of this place some of the will to do our various group projects has returned. We’re once again talking about making pod-casts and movie shorts; though I don’t think I can ever stress how poor of an idea it would be to make promises concerning them. That sort of stuff has always been an endless pet project that never comes to fruition for us. It falls into the same bin as all the other crap we’ve tried our hand at, like game and movie reviews, fan forums and creating a full on news site for gaming culture. Theoretically we could do any or all of that, we’re just lazy sods. I may have mentioned that at some point before.

We’re going to take another stab at it though, and I don’t have bundles and bundles of other shit going on in my life at the moment, so I’ve elected to talk about it here. Once again; no promises.

I’m hoping to make an interview to go through the basics of Josh’s little world as a second test run for my pod-casting equipment. You know; the shit I’ve owned for several months and used less than a dozen times. The first run ran into problems in structuring which was compounded by distractions and interruptions. We were trying to do a pod-cast about how we write the blog, but since we virtually never made those posts I’m not certain what we expected to happen. This was supposed to couple with what the post was actually about; the various cultures in Josh’s world. It took us about twenties minutes of pissing about while we were being recorded to finally realize we wouldn’t be able to fit all the information Josh had on his people in one post and keep it within any manageable size.

This isn’t an exaggeration; I’m pretty certain the man could talk about his world for about four days straight - assuming you kept the questions coming to remind him about all the little details he’s collected. That’s his specialty from what I can tell. He really likes the world-building process and thus has a frightening quantity of detail put into the society he wants to write a story in. He could spend entire evenings covering just one section of his people with all the quirks and history he’s cramming into them – and that’s not even getting into whatever ideas he’ll probably hammer out or come up with on the spot if you give him a chance to review his own creation.

The end result of this combination is we decided we’d have to tighten the scope of what we were talking about. We opted to focus purely on broad definitions of the people in his world. This also failed, mostly because his world is bloody crowded. The post I made on the 22^nd contained what I dredged out of that interview in written form, and it doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface. We may one day go back to that and write out the ‘peoples’ in the detail they deserve, but, well; review my promise policy. I’d like to sit down with Josh and have him narrate everything he’s created for each society while I try and cram it into type, but we’re talking about a page or two at least for each group here. It’s a lot of god damn work, and our time isn’t limitless.

Given that the first pod-cast went the way it did, I figured I’d actually put some effort in to the next one and see what I can do to stream-line the process. First and foremost is getting a question list entirely sorted out before hand. I already know the topic, or topics rather; the major building blocks of the world. Yeah, a bit vague, I know. What I mean is the larger over-reaching elements such as how the magic system works, what person he intends to write from (and why), and what scale of a story he’s hoping to build. Is he hoping to write a single series on a continuously flowing story line, or a number of different and entirely independent lines? I’d like to also dig into what writing style he thinks he will focus on or excel in, such as banter between characters, plot-lines or description. However, I suspect we’ll only find that out after he’s written considerably more of the actual stories, rather than reference material.

The written component of the post is going to be done entirely after the pod-cast so as to not confuse the two. Mind, I may still be typing madly away as he talks, but it’ll just be note taking – I hope it won’t interfere with how things roll. We had a nasty habit of long irritating pauses in the last attempt. If it proves too much of a distraction I’ll simply cut it in favour of regular conversation and we’ll have an entirely separate one for the post off-air. All in all, I’m hoping this one will turn out better than the last and may even make its way on to the internet if we can find a damn place to host them before the lethargy strikes. Or slouches I suppose.