Welcome, dear readers, to Forged Bonds! I am your humble narrator, Calliope, here to talk you through our show. Starting out with what this is: Forged Bonds is a myth-bending retelling of the story of Aphrodite and Hephaestus. In traditional mythology, they are forced into a marriage together leading to Aphrodite cheating with Ares. What if Aphrodite and Ares were best friends forced into a political marriage? What if Aphrodite started to fall in love with Hephaestus? What if Hephaestus was a trans woman who had been isolated from Olympus in the attempts to protect her own heart? This show strives to answer all of these questions while also taking a look at the love stories and politics of Olympus as a whole.
Hello dear listeners! We have a special announcement that has just gone live on our feed! Our next mini series is launching very soon and in the meantime we've got our q+a open for y'all which you can find here
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i keep seeing people who are surprised that there is a new season of Alice Isn't Dead, and other than these occasional notes of surprise i see very little mention of it at all.
the new season has been out since mid-April and we are already halfway through it. i know the WTNV team has been posting about it on their social channels for months leading up to it. i dont think we are doing anything differently, promotion-wise, than we did with the first three seasons which seemed to find their audience much more quickly.
personally i find it rather frustating given the amount of work we put into this show, but im not really sure what to do about it. i know part of it is down to the fact that audiofiction is a far more competitive field than it used to be, and there's also so much noise and chaos in the world these days that its hard to find anything, and so many terrible problems that fiction feels less important.
these are obviously not all issues that i or anyone else on the team can solve but i am still curious if anyone has thoughts about why it seems to much harder to get the word out now
Hey! As someone who was really deeply inspired by the original run of Alice Isn't Dead and then went on to make their own show with some degree of success (top 25 in the apple fiction charts but not higher), I have some thoughts about this.
First and foremost, the ways in which shows are shared online have fundamentally changed since the original run: the advent of short form video has been catastrophic for spreading this kind of information. Part of that is audience behavior but more of it (in my opinion) is that people are no longer curating their sources of information because the tiktok, reels, and shorts algorithms do it for them. I think this is why we've seen so much emphasis on moving to email lists again as a common piece of advice - there's just no way to guarantee that your own fans are even aware of what you're up to otherwise. This is a huge problem especially for Alice Isnt Dead because it's been a while since the initial story ended, and I have not personally heard anything about the new story outside of "it exists!" For me personally that's enough to check it out, but if that's what *I* know as an active fan of the project, I imagine many people know even less.
On a story level, I also think you're probably fighting an uphill battle because the initial run ended fairly definitely; because it's so hard to get that hook out into the world of what the show is even about, you're also fighting people's sense of satisfaction with the ending. Audiences who were avid fans when it was first active may not feel the urgency to come back without that essential intrigue, and they may not be getting exposed to the intrigue at all given how hard it is to spread across the siloed and atomised internet.
All of this combines to mean that the old strategies for promotion are 100% less effective! It's not just you! The solution isn't even as simple as "hire someone to make a bunch of short form videos for it" because from what we can tell shorts don't even consistently convert into full listeners. What works for commodity advertising doesn't seem to work as well for audio fiction. It's a nightmare out here.
In my experience, having made this show fully after the death of Twitter and in the midst of the current ecosystem, the things that have been most helpful are traditional trailer swaps for shows on networks and from individual programs that are close to the niche I'm in. Nothing else has come close to moving the needle to that degree because news just doesn't move like it used to.
I have no idea if any of this helps, or if it matches your experience, but I completely understand the frustration and feeling of putting something legitimately worth listening to out into the world and watching it be passed by. I hope the new season starts to find its audience, and I personally can't wait to dive in.
As we continue working towards Season Two, and on the anniversary of Season One, please enjoy our second minisode! Titled "1985"
Find it at the link below, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Content Warning: Static, themes of captivity and surveillance, and implied torture. Listener discretion is advised.
The Holmwood Foundation is a Found Footage Horror-Fiction Podcast, a modern-day sequel to the gothic novel Dracula.
We follow Maddie Townsend (Rebecca Root) and Jeremy Larkin (Seán Carlsen), two co-workers at the Holmwood Foundation: a secret organisation that has been maintaining and studying the remains of Count Dracula for the last 130 years, as they are possessed by the ghosts of Jonathan and Mina Harker, and embark on a nightmare road trip, carrying Dracula's severed head across the UK, in an effort to stop him once and for all.
EPISODE CAST AND CREW:
Asset #6/Elena - Jackie Calistahhh
Young Jonathan Harker 3rd - Jonathon Carley
Scientist - Anusia Battersby
The episode was produced and written by Georgia Cook and Fio Trethewey.
Directing by Samuel Clemens.
Script Editing by Katharine Armitage.
Sound Design and Engineering by Benji Clifford
The Theme music was composed and produced by Duncan Muggleton, and the episode art was produced by Georgia Cook
For more information, as well as transcripts and further Cast and Crew details, please visit our official website:
As a bit of a heads-up for next week, in the final three episodes of S2, Leo’s voice is going to sound a little different…
There’s going to be a disclaimer at the start of the next episode, but the long and short of it is that my lines for these episodes were recorded quite a bit later than the rest of the season, and the result is… an out-of-character voice change that doesn’t really make sense for the timeline of S2.
BUT, if you’re all very kind and choose to Suspend your Disbelief for three episodes, I have written a time jump into S3 that allows me to introduce Leo’s shiny new t-voice diegetically, so I promise you won’t have to suspend that disbelief for too long!
And in exchange, you get some extra silly bloopers of me trying to put this new and unfamiliar voice to good use:
(plus, keep an ear out at the end of the next episode (S2 E23) for some additional silly bloopers resulting from me trying to re-record my own credits)
The Benefactor has forgotten what it feels like to be human. He yearns for someone to stand by his side and teach him again. Not Richard Henry. Not Mari. But…
Content Warnings: References to past murders, betrayal, threats
Songs used:
Send Me To The 'Lectric Chair
Devil's Gonna Git You
Sorry for the slow posting this week, WE’VE BEEN IN WHITBY.
After making it such a pivotal setting for the start of The Holmwood Foundation Season One, we took a little trip across the moors to say hello to one of the best-known Dracula locations, and the fictional home of Maddie, Jeremy and Arthur, as well as the destroyed Lucy Westenra building.
We’ve visited the Abbey, walked through St Mary’s churchyard - previously explored by one Mina Murray - and walked many a walking tour (also highly recommend checking out the Hand of Glory in the Whitby Museum, if you like a bit of dark folklore and you’re not too squeamish.)
Oh, and there might have been an engagement as well.
Next stop tomorrow: The Yorkshire Moors! As we chart the route walked by Maddie, Jeremy, The Harkers, and a head in a bag.
Is there anything you would like to know or see? Let us know!
We're spending the weekend going over season 3 scripts and I can't emphasize enough how close we are to actually being in a place to make this thing, which means (yay) we are drawing closer to crowdfund shenanigans. For our personal planning:
What crowdfund reward would be most interesting to you as a potential backer of F&S S3?
exclusive stickers
in-character thank you notes
audio thank-yous from characters
annotated scripts/holmes stories
access to our Patreon-only commentary tracks
invite to a backer-only early stream of the premiere with cast and crew
other physical merch options like shirts/pins
the ability to name a (small) character
option to send in audio of yourself or your pet to be used in crowd scenes
some secret tenth thing (we're open to it, tell us!)
ANNOUNCEMENT - Twig Lake Resort welcomes you, this summer.
Goldenrod - A Horror Podcast is an eight-part limited audio series. Episode 1 - NO SIGNAL, premieres on August 13th. Then, check back every Thursday for a new episode, wherever you get your podcasts. 🔥🖋️🌲
I keep seeing that one post that's like "the average podcast protagonist is a twink!!!" but if you think about it there aren't that many podcast protagonists whose body type has been mentioned or confimed as canon and ones I can think of are Mike Walters (fat), Sydney Sargent (also fat) January Johnson (ALSO fat) Warren Godby who is admittedly skinny but like whatever (also these are just examples i can think of of the top of mu head id didn't do much research) and the rest is just fans assuming they are twinks because of course so ACTUALLY the average podcast protagonist is BEAUTIFUL AWSOME AND FAT AND THAT IS THE FACTS RIGHT THERE !!!!!!!!!!
Happy Monday! S2 E21, Beg Forgiveness, is out now! You can find it haunting your local podcatcher, or you could try stalking a caravan site for a conversation with this week's ghost, voiced by the delightful Beatrice Vincent
A Love Story @forgedbondspod - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag