Behind the Curtain (Patreon)

So, I wanted to start with a little post about how the sausage (heh) gets made so you sort of understand my thought process.

I have a list of about 60 different episode ideas. Some are feasible and make sense, like an episode on Star Wars. Some are less feasible and more complicated like Comic Strips. I mean, are there enough meaningful characters? Would anyone want to listen to it? Do we want to talk about how Jon Arbuckle fucks?? It's a real conundrum.

That's the starting place. I should also say that I, MeganBob, am the only person steering the ship. I get advice and input from other people, but it's pretty much just me organizing it. That's totally fine, but it means that my decisions are just me weighing out a bunch of factors, not generally a voting situation. 

I spend a lot of time looking at the calendar! I try very hard to make sure that there's a real balance of stuff coming out. I don't want to do back to back superhero stuff or have two more obscure franchises covered one after another. I look at the list and consider if we haven't done anything with big name recognition in a while, we need to do that and try to rotate that with smaller weirder things like covering Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical Cats (December is going to be WILD, folks.)

From there it's gaming out who is available to do what and who is interested in what. I have a circle of podcast friends and acquaintances I can call on, but I also don't want to have the same set of people on every episode, so that also means there's a bit of shuffling of episode order so you're always getting a somewhat fresh and strange listening experience.

Once we settle on an episode (generally at least three months ahead of time) we start planning out the list. Sometimes it's a fight to see who makes the cut and other times it's fairly quick and painless.  Game of Thrones was, you'll be shocked to learn, was a bit cutthroat. Lord of the Rings was pretty simple and we knew our biggies almost immediately.

We're planning for the Musical episode in April and there's already some head-scratching about the best way to proceed. We've cracked it, but it's fairly idiosyncratic. And sometimes that's honestly the best way to proceed! 

The overriding philosophy of the show is that it works best when there's a mix of opinions and a mix of passions. You need people who care about the big hero character, either because they love or hate him and you need people who are aghast at one another's opinions. The chemistry is VERY experimental and messy! Sometimes it's instantly explosive and other times it's more of a slow burn.

Where you come into all of this is that you know things that I simply can't know without asking you. I genuinely have no idea how excited people would be about an episode covering The Transformers. I know *I'm* excited to hear it, because I'm excited about every episode pretty much, but that's not necessarily the best guiding principle.

Your perspective can help make this show better! For example, do you enjoy the episodes focusing on a single franchise, like Star Trek, or do you enjoy the chaos of multiple characters from different properties, like the Vampires episode?

I think both have different strengths, and maybe there's a balance there??? I can't believe I'm talking about the balance of a show about sex headcanons for fictional characters. Well no, I can believe it. I mean, I know who I am.

So, I guess all of this is just to say that this is how the show happens and this is stuff that I'm really grateful for your support and help with. I would probably do this show if only five people listened to it, but I can't tell you how affirming and joyous it is when you all are excited, horrified, confused, and delighted by the episodes. The show is intended to be an emotional roller-coaster of surprises that none of us gets to see coming and I'm so happy that you're willing to get on this ride with us.

Your support makes this show possible in a big way. The hosting fees are a thing that adds up over the year and I'm a slow (somewhat meticulous?) editor, so it would be nice to have a bit of money coming in that can help cover for the fact that sometimes I gotta buy pre-chopped vegetables or whatever so I can spend an extra hour editing.

There's a whole story behind the editing. I'll talk about that another time but the show can turn out a couple of different ways depending on the way the recording goes and depending on how I edit it.

Before I take off, if you can comment and let me know two things!

1) Is the periodic journal entry from the front lines of this weird thing of any interest to you? It's okay if you're not into it! It's really, really okay if you don't want to know how the sausage gets stuffed (heh) into its casing.
(Also, in my professional life, I'm used to people saying "nah, I hated this" so I'm okay accepting if you're not into stuff.)

2) Do you like franchise-focused episodes, theme-focused episodes (vampires), or do you like them both and are cool with whatever?