Every new project, be it writing, podcasting, woodworking or whatever, has a teething period where everything isn’t quite perfect. That has certainly been true of all my past projects and it is proving to be true with my current writing/podcasting project.

The project I’m talking about is my new GalaxyBillies story/podcast.

To give you some history, I first came up with the rough story idea a year or so ago. I came up with the plan to write comedy MUCH farther back than that (say four or five years farther back, if not more) so this project wasn’t something I just sat down to write one day on a whim.

The first two drafts were less than… ideal, I suppose is the politically correct way to say it. Non-PC would be “they sucked major A**”. That was mostly because I hadn’t ever written comedy before and my story kept going the direction of my past works. That is to say, not funny, but serious.

I think I threw out about three drafts of the first episode. But I eventually realized my mistake and I wrote the first episode and, after some editing, I had something I was happy with. I recorded the episode, added sound and viola’, the story was ready to test.

My alpha audience liked it (you know who you are) so I bravely (foolishly?) posted the pilot episode on December 24th. My intention was to get a proper feed created for GalaxyBillies and have a second episode ready for January.

The feed is proving to be more tricky than anticipated. I ended up switching my podcasting plugin for WordPress (you will most likely notice some relics from my old podpress plugin in the posts – I’m using powerpress at the moment) and I think (operative word here) I have it working more or less the way I want it to. The graphic isn’t showing up yet and the title isn’t perfect but it is a separate feed.

I’ve even got the next episode well on its way to being written. The recording of the pilot went well enough that I’m not completely worried about it, but I’m not foolish enough to expect it to be perfect when the next recording session happens.

At this point in the story you are probably scratching your head wondering why on Earth I would put my first episode of “GalaxyBillies” out when I haven’t even written the second one yet. After all, many of podcasting’s seasoned warriors tout the wisdom of having a minimum of five episodes written, recorded and mixed before ever putting a single one out into a feed.

Well, you see dear friends, it’s like this. I am a BIG fan of Douglas Adam’s masterwork “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”. I love the humor, the irreverence of it all and I especially love the organic nature of the story.

That organic nature was achieved in a very simple way: Douglas Adams was writing it as a radio play for the BBC and didn’t know from one week to the next what was going to happen.

I wanted to capture some of that feeling in my story.

I have some basic plot elements worked out. I’ve put some thought into the main characters and I have considered the setting. I have NOT prewritten the entire plot for the story so I know where it’s going and how it’s getting there.

That will be some of the fun (I hope). But it also means I’m figuring stuff out on the fly, both technically (i.e. podcast feed) and literarily.

I can’t plan everything, now can I? And it is a fun, if somewhat stressful exercise to walk the high wire without a net. I dare you to subscribe and hear how I fare.

Personal Update

Contests have been entered (a flash fiction and a YA novel contest) and the pilot episode of “GalaxyBillies” has been recorded and posted. I will be cutting a promo for GB soon as well as the next episode.

That’s enough on the plate for now, isn’t it?

Tags: douglas adams, drafts, Galaxybillies, hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy, projects, wordpress, writing