Part 1
This is part of an ongoing series I have about how I wrote my podcast, Sunward Sky. If you’re interested, I’d suggest starting from the start at the above link.
So in mid to late 2020, in the middle of the pandemic, I’d managed to work a story about a spaceship. Unfortunately for me, that story which was originally about just some cool stuff on a spaceship had turned into a tale that revealed a lot about my politics. Not that my politics are bad, but I’d wanted to write a light-hearted, carefree story. I hadn’t planned on writing something that was directly political.
As a matter of fact, I hadn’t planned anything at all.
The story went out, and it was listened to a little, and I started to think about what to do for the next arc of the story painted a bunch of Warhammer figurines and went and hung out with my friends.
That’s not entirely true. By the time I got back to writing the story, I had a pretty good idea about a few things. I knew exactly how it was going to end. I knew what the overarching theme of it was to be. I knew who was going to die, and who wasn’t. The final scene, and particularly the final sentence, were burned into my brain as an endpoint for the show. So all I had to do was write it, right?
Well, you’d be right. At the end of January 2021, I released “Adrift”, the first episode of season two. I had, however, decided to make some changes to the schedule. I was going to write to a fortnightly release. I was going to record earlier than midnight (lol), and I was going to make sure that I had adequate time to do at one edit pass before it was released (double lol).
Keep in mind, at this point the entirety of the podcast only had a couple hundred plays in total. I’d posted to reddit and my near-followless twitter account, to absolutely no discernable result. I mention this because in reality, there was no reason for me to stick to such a tight schedule. Nobody had contacted me, and nobody cared, save for one guy who messaged me on reddit to tell me about how GPS satellites worked (they work differently in my story. Critical research failure).
At the time, Melbourne was in between Covid waves, and after a year of being stuck inside a long way from friends, I was really enjoying the opportunity to catch up, drink beer, go do exercise, go to parties, and basically spend as little time as possible away from the house.
The writing was a drag. I remember sitting at my computer the night before each episode came out, cursing myself for this self-imposed schedule, wishing I could just go and do something. Instead, I was living with the fruits of my own procrastination. I was writing each episode at the last minute, not editing it, and recording it late into the evening and generally just hating the process.
What’s worse is that the planned story arc that I had for the season was barrelling along a lot faster than I’d intended, because quite frankly I’d underestimated how much story I had to tell. I didn’t know what to do to slow it down, and I wasn’t dedicating the time to untangle the corner I was writing myself into, and I was just exhausted with it all. I sort of hated it. I’ve never had that with a story I’ve written before. I’ve recognised the flaws in a story, appreciated that more work needed to go into it, or that I didn’t have the skills to tell the story I wanted to at that time. I’ve criticised my own work before. I’d never hated it.
These posts are supposed to be a bit of a guide to writing stories in a serialised manner and I think one of the main things to keep in mind is this: It’s your story. It’s supposed to be fun. This was a hobby for me, and I wasn’t getting paid (and I’m still not, though I’m open to it, if you wanted to donate to my ko-fi).
By March 2021, the project was causing real mental health concerns for me. Nobody was listening. I was spending a lot of time worrying that I should be working on it, or hating the time I was spending on it. The story was still good, and I had this goal of completing it, but I didn’t know how or when.
So I dropped it.
I posted on reddit that it was going on hiatus. One person responded (complaining about the mouse clicks in the audio). It sank into the ether, and I put in the back of my mind that I should finish it someday, but I had no idea when. Alyssa and Healy and Meg and the rest of the crew were hanging by a cliffhanger, and I just left it there.
Nobody seemed to care about their fate anyway.
Then this happened:
Join me next time as we explore how Sunward Sky found its audience, how I got back on the ship, and what’s happening next.
I write about my experiences with writing fiction, as well as my thoughts on current events and technology. If you are interested, I have all my previous works at the following Linktree.