February 11, 2022

Building pressure in the pipeline

All right, luvvies? I wrote and scheduled this a week and a half, two weeks or so ago, because I'm busy right now when it's arriving in your inbox. This makes me feel very organised and on top of things.

Coming right up

1. Project Tallneck pilot draft DONE

2. What stories are bringing us all joy this year?

3. Merely Roleplayers production continues

4. Badge luck

Project Tallneck

reached a major milestone: I finished the rough, longhand first draft of the pilot episode!

This being a first draft, what I have doesn't really resemble a real episode yet - more a collection of disordered scenes, notes and scraps of dialogue. Notably, I've left out a lot of the narration, which is going to have a big influence on the feel and flavour of the show.

One of the narrator's jobs is to bridge scenes, and which scene goes where is a second draft problem. But also, there's something about her voice that just seems to demand to be composed on screen, instead of on paper. It's weird. I've always liked longhand for drafting and on-screen for editing and polishing, but I'd never really considered before whether there might be voices or styles of dialogue that just ... come together better through a keyboard than a pen.

Anyway, next step is to transfer the draft from page to drive and hammer it into better shape in the process. It's not as simple as transcribing and then editing; I edit and add things and notice stuff that's wrong in the process of typing up, so there are lines in my notebook now that will never appear in any version of the typed script.

Let's share what we're enjoying this year

• I log all the books I read (and want to read) on the Storygraph. It's like Goodreads, but with a nice user interface and not owned by a monopoly! What it's lacking for me right now is a community, so don't be shy about adding me if you're on there too!

• I do the same for movies on Letterboxd (and some TV series - don't ask me why Word of Honor is on there but The Expanse isn't, for example).

• I'm tracking all my 2022 reading and viewing (including theatre, which isn't covered by Storygraph or Letterboxd) on my Instagram highlights.

Merely Roleplayers

is progressing towards returning to air.

We've recorded the next Vigil production, Quarry. I'm a bit over half way through the dialogue edit on the story itself. Once the dialogue edit's done (ums and ahs tidied up, uninteresting table talk cut out, pauses timed for maximum drama, etc), it'll go to Helen for sound design. While that's happening, I'll do the dialogue edit on the Backstage episodes. Once the sound design comes back, I need to add music, intros, outros, interval chat, promos if we're doing them ... and then we'll be ready to get back out there.

Speaking of Backstage: we'll have a new strand of Backstage episodes starting partway into this production.

So, we released the 200th episode of Merely Roleplayers last year and didn't really mark it at all. I realised it was coming up a bit too late to do anything special (plus it landed midway through Vigil: Bad Dog; Act 4 of 5 or whatever didn't feel like the right episode for a big celebration!). But I did mention it to the players, and it set some cogs turning in Josh's head.

The result of those turning cogs is the Merely Roleplayers Replay: a series of episodes where Josh and I look back through all our past productions, starting with The Blackshaw Saga: Ariadne. We'll be talking about the evolution of the podcast and the players, focusing on memorable and significant moments, and poring over old notes and plans to discover what could have been. Plus, after I made the players judge each other on air by choosing each other's stat lines for ten productions, Josh finally gets to turn the tables on me!

We've recorded episodes on Ariadne, Five Stage a Rescue, A Town Called Amnesty, Let's Get Gideon, and Codename: Mosaic so far, and they're all on my editing to-do list along with Vigil: Quarry. I'm also thinking about what our next Studio production will be, and aiming to get another Vigil recording scheduled soon. Until now, we've always been a decent distance ahead of ourselves, with a couple of future productions being worked on while the current one airs; I'm hoping we can get back to that position, although if that's not possible (and who knows what's possible here in chilly Covidia), I wouldn't be against us taking a couple of weeks off between productions so we're not rushing anything.

Would you have a preference? A longer hiatus now so we can get back on an uninterrupted schedule, or a couple of off-weeks after the end of each production? You can reply to this email if you have strong opinions either way.

Badge luck

Left: a black and white enamel pin of a domino, with a lil smiley mouth turning a two-dot face into a cute smiley face. Not entirely unlike the Merely Roleplayers logo! I could have sworn I had a record somewhere of who made this, but I'm not turning anything up. I know it was a gift from Strat.

Middle: a ginormous enamel pin of a flaming skull with nails in its eyes, the icon of Sithrak from the (NSFW) webcomic Oglaf.

And right, a pink and yellow enamel pin of one of those arrow-shaped neon signs you get on dodgy hotels, pointing to "HELL", from HEIHO. I'll be honest, I was a bit disappointed with this one - the yellow is a lot muddier in reality than it seemed in the online shop. That's just the chance you take, I suppose...

Play on,

Matt x