A Wild Journey

Originally published October 17, 2023.

It really has been a wild journey. A lot of hard work went into this. Successes are built on disappointments, and there were a lot of disappointments that led to here and now.

My very first audio drama was called The Way of the Bear. It was a retelling of Cassandra’s story, a princess of Troy cursed with prophecies that no one believed. The play was set in 1946 Romania, on the eve of the king’s forced abdication and the subsequent Soviet takeover. It was a supernatural, political thriller, and I was very proud of it.

I found a home for it at a small production company I won’t name. They accepted it in 2018 the day before my birthday. It was to be broadcast that November.

And it was. I was so excited!

And it was broadcast. It went over the radio waves, mostly in the USA, but parts of Canada too.

It was awful.

No seriously. It was terrible. My stomach dropped. A huge part of it was the script. This was my first radio based script. Another big part of it was the production itself. Horrible, hammy Eastern European accents. Terrible music. Terrible sound design. Terrible acting. But worst of all, a terrible script.

It just sucked. Everything sucked. The words sucked. The scenes were garbage. You could have taken the whole thing out to the trash and you would’ve been charged for the illegal disposal of toxic waste. It was a very bad script.

Thankfully, no one heard it. A few people may have caught it when it aired but let’s hope they’ve forgotten.

I kept writing audio dramas after that but I focused more on my first love, short prose. Started a few novels (all in limbo, for now).

The audio dramas never went anywhere, even though I submitted them to countless places. All rejected. Not interested. Not a good fit. The usual rejections you get when submitting a story or a novel. It’s all the same line.

Then this opportunity to write a brand new script for this brand new indie audio production company came along in January of this year.

They offered to pay.

Sure.

So I tore my heart open and let the pages soak it up. It’s very violent, isn’t it? Art is violent. Visceral. Makes you feel alive. This cauldron of sci-fi, eldritch horror, Russian literature, friendship, divine inaction, all bubbling into this single brew that you know as Red Odyssey.

It almost didn’t happen. Production woes abounded. It almost didn’t happen. But then it did. There was a cast and crew. They didn’t do the stupid hammy Eastern European accents. They could actually act. They felt the lines and more importantly they make us feel them. How did we ever find such amazing actors? The music, so moving, so raw. The sound design, so crisp and perfect and loud and subtle and vicious and intimate. Everything is so, so good.

Sometimes I think I’m dreaming. When you have so many people take notice of something you poured yourself into, it’s overwhelming. We’re nearing 9K downloads, and only five episodes in. It’s not a big show. We only have three more to go.

And then? Then we keep going. There are so, so many more stories to tell. What comes after Red Odyssey?

I think, I hope, something amazing.