Today is SBR's fifth birthday!
Crazy to me that I first started putting this show out half a decade ago. A lot of things have changed in that time. On SBR's first day, it had 22 downloads. I remember how exciting it was to see it showing up on Apple Podcasts. Now, it's a bad day if SBR only gets 22 downloads an hour.
SBR was my first project that I conceived of specifically for audio drama. My first show, Clockwork Bird, was written as a (bad) prose manuscript before, so writing it was an adaptive process. SBR was the story I came up with when I thought about the benefits of what an audio medium has to offer; when I thought about how I wanted to challenge the medium's boundaries; when I tried to make something that made use of all of those things.
I had quite big dreams for SBR when I started making it. I conceived of it as something that would be my flagship, the stepping stone that would allow me to create weirder things. And it has been that, in a lot of ways. The show has just shy of three quarters of a million downloads. It was a big part in helping my work progress by being a place for me to share new shows with SBR's audience, and it's a big part of the reason all my shows now release as part of the Rusty Quill Network. That's something I never even imagined would happen at the start.
It means so much to me that so many people love this show. That it has reached so many people. That I still get comments to this day from people telling me how this show has helped them through a dark time in their lives. All of that is humbling and beautiful and makes me feel things that are difficult to put into words.
Sometimes I feel quite guilty that I don't really advertise this show anymore, that I don't spend much time talking about the impact it's had on me and other people, and I only really end up talking about it at times like this, when it hits a big milestone.
The truth is, I find it quite difficult to talk about SBR. Not because I don't love it or don't appreciate the love other people have for it. Not even because I know if I were making the show now, it'd be a better one; I owe the writer, sound designer and performer I am today to the one who made SBR and Clockwork Bird, after all.
It's a bit more complicated than that. I started medically transitioning about halfway through the show's story. It was cool to have Sam transitioning alongside me, but it did make the whole journey a little more... strange. Something I've not talked about much publicly is how complicated it was for me to be playing Sam at this time. Sam's a deliberately happy-go-lucky character; he's got limited life experience and this causes him to behave in ways that are immature. This was something I'd deliberately written into the show, and it was interesting to see people picking up on those aspects of his personality, and choosing to criticise them as a mistake in the writing of the story rather than as a character flaw I'd put there on purpose.
These things were particularly difficult because some people in the audience seemed to have a tendency to conflate Sam and I. I understand why that happened; I was Sam's voice and Sam's writer. We were transitioning at the same time. When I made promotional images for the show, they often featured my face representing his face. His milestones with how his voice were changing were my milestones, and I spoke about that quite openly. But it did lead to a situation where people would sort of talk about me as though I was Sam.
That was hard, because behind the scenes things were very difficult. Not because of arcane forces or because I was naive about my place, or because my dad was an extradimensional being who wanted to undo the universe. They were difficult because I was making next to no money; was essentially going through puberty again; was losing people I was close to because of my decision to medically transition; having the way people on the street perceive me radically shift; watching my own reflection change in the mirror; learning to be myself in this new context; trying to work out what the next steps in my career were going to be.
And then in 2023 my crowdfunder for SBR's final season happened to start a couple of weeks before the crowdfunder for the return of one of the biggest shows in the business. I had tens of people send me messages apologising for cancelling their pledges to spend their money on that other show instead of SBR. None of them were mean or malicious, and I don't think any of them were wrong to choose to spend their money. But it did leave me feeling like my work was always going to be a second choice for most people.
What was miraculous was the people who wanted to see that last season SO much, who told me how much the show mattered to them, who showed up every week to live-blog their listen to new episodes, who made fan art and wrote head canons and asked questions in my ask box. People who loved the show so much it seemed to have become a part of them, the way my favourite media has become a part of me. And really, there is no higher honour than that.
In the end, I had to make SBR's final season half the length I'd planned it to be. I stand by the decision to just end it there. By then, my feelings about making the show, and especially about continuing to play Sam, had become so emotionally complex that trying to extend the show's run on half of what I'd hoped to raise would have been soul destroying.
Deciding to continue to make Not Quite Dead throughout the end of SBR's run allowed me to find my way back to being in love with SBR by the time it ended, and I think you can feel that in the show's final episodes. Maybe it's slightly twee, but the show ends on a sense of hope about the future and what comes next.
I want to thank every single one of you who has ever supported my work, whether through Patreon or donating to a crowdfund; by shouting about it on social media; by making fanworks; or by listening quietly on your own and feeling something.
Happy birthday, Spirit Box Radio. You changed my life, for both better and for worse, and I am so proud of you. <3
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