Episode three of the Dean and Cordelia Series – “It’s not Patchouli”

Hello my survivor friends…

Thick, oily, toxic mist rises from a crack in the village center.  The bone crushing coldness has caused the turf to dry and die.  The earth below contracts and splits to reveal its deathly inner workings.  All is cold and death.

Yup, that’s pretty much the way it is at my house too.  Winter and darkness have rolled like an exhausting dystopian ghost over the land.

What’s new survivors?  Today I’m going to talk about the Dean and Cordelia series and what we’re doing next on the feed and I’ll give you a fun book review I wrote for my new book club.

I suspect I’m going to go a bit longer – so you might want to refresh your smokey old fashion with a shot of bourbon.

For those time-travelers playing along at home you can mark your bingo card for the middle of November 2025.  It has been 3 weeks since our last confession, or episode, depending on how you look at it.

This time of year always threatens to make you question your life choices, doesn’t it?  It seems to get very busy and stressful.  I try to coach people to expect it and roll with the punches, because, as the old wise sage said to the sultan, “This too will pass…”

Today marks the final chapter of the Dean and Cordelia series by Jesse.  I hope you enjoyed it and we would love some feedback, good, bad or indifferent.  Leve a comment or shoot me a message.  I check the Spotify comments, the Patreon interactions and am fairly active on our Facebook group.

If Jessie is listening, thank you for playing along with me, you’re a good storyteller and I appreciate you.

And as a reminder – Jesse is a tree-climbing Virgo with an amazing whistling ability. He can often be found at the peak of a mountain with his dog and wife in tow. He enjoys story telling, drawing, painting, and creative endeavors of all types. He is working on a fantasy novel with a creative take on classic monsters and a unique magic system, hoping to get it out and into the world within the next couple of years.

Currently, Jesse has a non-fiction book out through Storey Publishing focused on tabletop game design, titled Make Your Own Board Game. Look to his website, PiedRaven.com, for more information on his other work including Hibernation, a bear-centric card game that is available for purchase, and Between Realms, a celtic-mythology themed, worker-placement card-game coming soon.

And a big thank you to Shannon for reading these into audio for us.  I could tell it was hard for you to squeeze us into your busy schedule and we appreciate you for doing so.  I think you really captured the essence of Dean and Cordelia’s relationship.

Shannon Stockwell is a professional grant writer and a lover of storytelling. She recently received her Master of Arts in media studies from The New School in New York, where she specialized in comedy theory and sound design/podcast production. She loves reading and watching television and particularly enjoys sitcoms and fantasy/sci-fi, but she is liable to become deeply invested in any kind of page-turner regardless of genre or medium. In her spare time, she likes kickboxing, weightlifting, sexuality education, and noodling around with a random craft for a few months before she gets sick of it and moves on to another craft. She lives in suburban Massachusetts with her mother, father, and five cats.

And if I had the energy to do outtakes, you could hear Shannon wrestling with the cats as they attempted to get in on the recording process!

In this last episode of Dean on Cordelia, Jesse starts to reveal the magic universe that his new novel is based in.

What I liked about this series is I saw it as primarily a love story.  And that was the theme the ran through it.  The monsters were part of that journey, like Christmas Town is part of a Hallmark movie love story.  This coupled with Jesse’s writing style makes it a sweet adventure.

So, take a few seconds and let Jesse know your thoughts.  Another great strength of Jesse is he processes feedback really well.

Next up on the feed.  First, I’m going to try to wrangle Jesse and Shannon together to record a wrap-up episode.

Then I’ve got two stories for you from the writing contest that Patrick and I participated in a couple months ago that I’m going to drop with commentary on that process.  I’ve got Austin working on them right now.

I’ll break this Apocalypse Café series off at the beginning of the year and give it its own feed.

Remember, you too can contribute a story and I will pay you and produce it for you.  Then you will become rich and famous and spend the remainder of your pitiful existence floating around the Mediterranean, lonely and hungover on a yacht.

After that I am challenging myself to edit up a 3-story arc of my own, based in the After the Apocalypse Universe.

So, still plugging away over here at the apocalypse headquarters.

…This is where I am going to read you a piece I wrote this week about my new book club and Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles.

Link here.

That’s it for now survivors.  Dig into the smoking cracks in the turf with your corroded trowels.  Wrap peppermint scented bandanas around your face to cut the stench.  Lift the old technology from the trench and wonder what happened to the civilization that built the ruins under your village.

Ponder the cycle of life and death and dystopia… and keep surviving.