Podcast Story, Long Form, from Shelter-in-Place

Thursday, April 16th 2020

Day Thirty-One:

I dug around in the walk-in closet where I had recorded the “Ed’s Road Trip”, and found three notebooks. They were labeled “Indivisible Space, Ed’s Road Trip”. When I opened the notebooks I discovered that they contained all of my handwritten scripts. SCORE! Now at least I have the scripts. In notebook one, I noticed that episodes 1 and 2 were missing, the scripts started with episode 3. I then remembered that I did the first two episodes unscripted. I also remember that after not being pleased with those two episodes I decided to script them to make them better podcasts. I also got a new microphone, a pre-amp, and a small mixer. The new equipment, and scripting the episodes made a big difference. At a point Jessica’s boyfriend let me record some of his acoustic guitar works, and I used them as background music in future episodes. I also started adding nature, and ambient sounds to the mix, which really made them come alive. All of this started in episode 4, so from 4 through 15 the production values were pretty good. It took about ten to twelve hours to write, produce, and edit these twenty-minute audio stories.

At the same time Erin had had some health issues, and I was managing about 150 employees at my job. With all of this going on I didn’t have the time to produce these podcasts once a week, so it just stopped. I was getting pretty good hits on the Podbean site from all over the world, but to keep people coming back you had to produce. At that time it just wasn’t possible. So over time I lost track of the site, I changed my email address and missed the renewal notice, and the site was deleted. During that period my laptop’s hard drive crashed and I lost all of my work. Real bummer!