Outro Exterminator –
Hello, my survivor friends,
The sun is setting now in behind the protective ring of iron hills as we wend our way down the slick shale to the village. It glows orange in the opaque, ravaged horizon. As we approach, we see there is an old man squatting on his haunches in front of a warming fire. He turns to us with yellowed eyes and says “Welcome, we’ve been waiting for you…”
So that was the 3rd episode of the 3-episode arc of the Exterminator’s Apocalypse Read by Austin and adapted for the apocalypse by Patrick.
It’s been fun working with these guys. They are real creatives that love what they do. And I think we need that as the world continues to sync into mediocre machine generated content.
We are transitioning the feed over to this new story telling format. And I like the 3-episode format because it gives enough room to tell a story and introduce the characters, for you, the listeners.
It also compels a disciplined cadence on the writers. You probably won’t believe this, but for most of the independent creators I have worked with, their challenge is not coming up with more words, their challenge is coming up with the right number of words. So by me imposing a 2500-word cap on the episodes it forces them to rethink their story telling.
This caps off the Exterminator series for us, for now. I know Patrick is deciding where he is taking the overall story. Be sure to check out his Reddit page to find more of his work and where he is taking these characters next.
I got Pat and Austin on a Zoom call and we had a great chat about their creative processes and the Exterminator story. I’ll edit that up and post it next week.
It’s still early days for this Apocalypse Café format, but so far, I like the 3-episode format followed by a debriefing call with the authors. I’m going to let us get a few more episodes out and then probably create a separate feed for this series.
Next on the schedule is a love story. But it’s a love story with monsters. And it’s written by my friend Jesse. I’m settling into a 3-week publishing cadence, meaning a show every 3 weeks. We’ll keep an eye on that, maybe I can speed it up but I’m dependent on the writers, the audio performers and my financial ability to support them.
I have been beavering away at several related projects in the background to support the infrastructure of the shows.
First, I have loaded every episode of the original 5-season arc up onto Patreon as stand-alone digital audio products. If you go to the Patreon site for after the apocalypse, you can either subscribe or outright purchase all of the original recordings from the Products page. There should also be an independent podcast feed that you can subscribe to as well that will present all of them into your existing podcast players without any commercials.
I set all this up in August and I’m curious to know if it works.
I am going to lean into the Patreon experience a bit more going forward. I still need to catch up on the posting but if you want to support the show, so we can continue to fund quality creatives, Patreon is the place to do that. If I can get enough Patrons to pay for the production and upkeep of the shows I can afford to do more and rely less on those annoying automated ads that Acast pumps into the shows.
Next is I refreshed and moved the Oldmanapocalypse web site, and I will continue to update that with all of this information independently. I have a contact form there id you want to get in touch.
Thirdly I created a new site, ChrisRussellAuthor.com, that is a consolidated landing point to get to all the stuff I’m working on if you’re curious. That is still a work in progress, but it is live.
Finally, Thank you to all the people who are buying the first book in the After the Apocalypse series. I’ve been unable to focus on that this summer, but now that I have some of these other pieces in place I can return to that work and get the next book out.
It truly is a labor of love but it takes time and capital to get them done. I have a few boxes of physical books in my office if anyone wants a signed copy. I’ll tell you what, you buy a signed copy and we can have a Zoom call to talk about it!
I’m one of those weird introvert/extrovert types – I love meeting people – but then I need to go for a long run in the woods with the dog to recover.
This has been a long show already, so I won’t keep you any longer.
The last embers sparkle against the heat-cracked rocks. An ash flake floats like feathery down on a breath of wind, circling through a moonbeam, and off into the night.
The old man rising from his squat expelling breath in a grunt and motions us towards the thatch long-house.
It’s time to sleep.
In the morning there will be a new day in the village for us.
A new place.
A new life.
And for us the chance to keep surviving.
