Welcome to the site, the story, and our show.
When I started writing, I had no idea the story would keep going. I had no notion of starting a podcast. I wanted something new and old, some new-old friends to go out with, to have dinner, and to have some adventures.
The first book, The Ambassador, takes place in the present day – for her. It’s the far future for us. A better future. We’ve managed to figure out most things. Nobody has to do without or go hungry. It’s not a perfect future. It is a hopeful future. As the story progresses, the characters develop their friendships and grow older. The interplay between the older characters and the younger ones is as important as the balance the middle age characters develop.
Producing a full theatrical version of the first chapter took considerably more effort than reading it. But it does what I couldn’t do alone: brings the characters to life.
My reading skills are good. I have good tone, rhythm, and cadence. I can keep my voice steady. But I couldn’t interrupt myself. I couldn’t change voices to give all fifteen (15) of the main characters their own voices. I had good dialog. But it wasn’t a script. It was a story.
Creating the first script was an adventure in formatting. I did not realize how important formatting is for scripts. I also didn’t pay enough attention to what the audience was going to hear. So many things to learn. Even if I left the script with the visuals, it wasn’t a good script. I wanted it to be. But it wasn’t. So I looked at some classic scripts, got a script editing tool called Trelby, and started again.
One of the things the tools do is to give me lists. I can get a list of scenes and a list of actors with their line counts. So? When I was trying to schedule rehearsals and set up the scenes, it was so very useful to be able to bring in just the actors for those scenes (and for me to know who to call). Another thing they do is to set up the dialog, action, and actors so that it’s easy to know approximately how much time a scene or the entire script needs. If I want a 50 minute show, I need to have about 50 pages of script.
Once I had a working script, we could start rehearsals. Working online is much different than being in the same room. Yet some things are still the same. I found that having the visual feed mattered even though we were only recording audio. We’re human. We respond to each other and take cues from each other visually that we don’t get otherwise.
Much work and many, many hours later we had a finished show. I’ve left out the initial trouble I had with asking for drawings. There is no omniscient view when you have only two dimensions to work with. Learning how to set up those images is fundamentally what I’d be doing with a camera if I had that kind of budget. That’s a longer comment for another day.
We have completed the first episode. It’s about 120 minutes of fully produced audio.
Each episode matches up with a chapter in the books. Book 1 has 8 chapters. I’ve published five books and written three more. I’ve added material for the actors, too.
We have no shortage of talent, scripts, or initiative. Funding we could use. Sales would be better. Happy to chat about both.
Thanks for reading
Terri Morgan
Producer/Director