Hello my survivor friends.  For those of you dialing in from the future it in the beginning of April 2025.  This is the 16th episode of season 5 and we are rapidly careening towards a plot conclusion. 

These are troubling days.  First the radioactive pyroclastic flows swept over the bunker driven by the alien impacts.  Then the horrid wriggling assassin worms rose from the planet’s bowels to scour the land in filth.  Now we huddle together with our pointed sticks and listen to the rains sweep the toxics trees. 

…

I have two audio podcasts.  This one, After the Apocalypse and another, interview-based podcast about running called RunRunLive. 

I’ll give you a glimpse into the sausage making so you can have an idea of the the vastly different way you and I experience these productions!  Your watching the end result.  I’m laying the bricks and spreading the mortar!

The way podcasts work, for me anyhow, is that I write the episode.  This is the hardest part.  The big creative leap. 

This writing takes me 4-8 hours depending on how zeroed in I am on the scenes and plot.  I pass the draft by my volunteer editing team and they give me suggestions.  I read back through it a few more times and do some rewrites and edits. 

Then I send it off to Robert to do the voice work.  At this point, 5 seasons in, he and I are in pretty good synchronization.  He takes the script into the studio and records it and sends me the resulting audio. 

I then listen to the audio with the script open and catch any mistakes or adjustments.  In the early seasons we may have thrown out an entire recording, but we’ve gotten to the point that there may be no changes needed at all. I combination of me writing better material and him knowing what I want.

The resulting audio is what I put into the final show. 

In parallel I’m writing these outro comments.  I read those into audio and edit them.  Then I suck all the audio with the music up into my editing tool and string it all together.  The end result of this is the final MP3 digital audio file. 

I’m not quite done.  I take that MP3 file and add all the meta-data, the notes and the graphic.  This is why if you open the notes in your podcast player you will see stuff, and when you play it in your car it will show my name and the podcast name, etc.  That’s all the metadata.

Once I have that complete file I go over to Acast, where I host the show and post it up for release. 

That’s how it ends up in your podcast player where you experience it as a continuous story. 

The cool thing about this podcast is that it is ‘evergreen’.  Which means, even though you may be starting Season 1 today, your experience should be the same as someone who started season 1 five years ago or five years from now.  Point being, the content doesn’t go bad. 

That’s why it’s always amusing to me when I get comments on the early episodes. 

I’m not going to go off on comments in general because you know how that is.  I get the full range of haters to advocates.  I do my best to respond with authenticity.  We’re all on different paths and I’m not responsible for everyone’s emotional state. 

But, this week it struck me as funny that I got a comment on season 2 episode 3 – The Hungry River – where Bill jumps into the river to save Timmy.  Here’s the comment.

“I am soooo mad that Bill is gone…. I just can’t handle it. He was the best character in this whole book. And you just had to kill him off!!! I need therapy now. Thanks”

I just love how deeply connected people are to the dog.  This was doubly funny to me because I’m currently working on the season 2 manuscript to turn it into Book 2.  And I remember specifically writing this bit to get that response from people.  So it makes me kinda smug that my storytelling is doing what it is supposed to do. 

I’ve got a lot of personal stuff going on this week, (What?  You do something besides write podcast?)

Yes I do. 

Please wander over to the bunker commissary and buy a copy of the first book.  I would very much appreciate it. 

So my friends, grab one of those long shovels and get to work.  We need to clear the toxic mud from the bunker’s entrance so we can get outside and plant our crops.  Thrust your spade well into the crumbling dirt and keep surviving.