I Started a Podcast!

Since I haven't been blogging, I never posted about it on here, but back in November, I started a podcast! My friend Jennie and I had been on the lookout for creative opportunities somewhere, though not necessarily together, and then I came up with a podcast idea and asked her to join me.

The podcast, called Somebody Write This, is based on a writing game I used to play with my sisters, where we'd randomly generate a character, a setting, and a plot action from lists I had on the computer, and then we'd have like half an hour to write a short story featuring that.

I put together a more elaborate (and often more difficult-to-work-with) random plot generator online, and at the beginning of every episode we generate one and then spend 15-20 minutes talking it through into a possible actual story. Sometimes this gets complicated -- in one episode, our protagonist's main action was "unwittingly comforting" someone. In another, an MI5 officer and a gentleman rat were apparently solving crime together. Others lend themselves more naturally to full-length stories, so we get to get into the details a little bit more.

At the end of each episode, we put out a call to the listeners to take any piece of the story that may have inspired them and turn it into something. Any listeners who do write something based on our goofy brainstorming can share their output with us and, with their permission, we'll share pieces of it on-air and publish it or a link to it on our blog. To our delight, we've gotten a couple responses! Our first two episodes yielded a one-act play and a sonnet from our listeners, respectively.

If you're interested in listening, it's available wherever you get your podcasts, or you can check out our host page on Anchor.fm here. We also put up transcripts on the blog so our hard-of-hearing subscribers can be part of this too, so check that out! Subscribe, and if you use iTunes, which seems to be the only place you can review podcasts (get with the times, Spotify), go ahead and give us a review, because that boosts our visibility.

I shall leave you with three random synopses from our generator. You may see pieces of these popping up on the show in the future, who knows?

• A biography of a group of friends, who must follow a clue.
• A Canadian intelligence officer and the Jedi Council face life in a drab police state, looking for a nerve gas attack and a Walkman.
• With a special heritage, the brother of a prominent district attorney is brainwashed to want a book.