It's hard to capture the exact alchemy that happened this weekend, because no one part of the day was some keystone perfect moment. For me personally, it was incredible to even just be in the same room as so many of my closest collaborators and people who have made art that has deeply moved me; but then, there were also a good number of audiodrama fans who showed up and kept things from getting too "let's all talk shop." The vibes, so to speak, were immaculate, with people all coming together to appreciate each others' expertise and artistry - and that is NOT a given!
I think the thing I was most struck by, consistently through the whole day, was the spirit of generosity and community from setup at 7:30 a.m. (when more volunteers showed up than Tal planned for) to 8:00 p.m. (when the venue coordinator seemed genuinely shocked by how helpful everyone wanted to be putting the space back together). I had constructive, inspiring conversations with titans of the field and new artists under 20. I learned about how people brought their own loves to their work: linguists, teachers, musical gear distributors, used bookstore owners, ex-marketing firm full-time writers, experts in Greek history, civil rights history, marine biology. And not once - genuinely, seriously, taking account of the whole 12+ hour day - did I feel a single shred of selfishness, competitiveness, or jealousy in any room or conversation I was in. Acknowlement of our egos? Sure! But never indulgence in shit-talking, never a single person saying "that show is so overrated" or "that actor didn't earn that part" or "[whatever] should have been successful instead" and that is *remarkable*
In the closing presentation on how to keep making art in our dark, dark days, Lauren Shippen was asked "what gives you hope?" She thought for a brief moment, and said what I'd been thinking all day: this. This gives me hope. This community that refuses to be cruel to the naive, refuses to be lazy about inclusion, refuses to look away from the pain of the world and yet writes, sings, acts, designs, creates, creates, creates. Dear listener, I did tear up. I did feel that lump in my throat. To be in a room of 200 people who love so fiercely the creative act was nothing short of a spiritual experience for me.
I don't know if it's possible to catch this lightning in a bottle again. There will be a TAFCon 2, and I will do nearly anything to be there, because I loved being so indulgently immersed in our so-often atomised community. It reminded me how powerful our stories are, how essential. So thank you to each and every person who gave me even a minute of their time at the @re-dracula table, who told me about their weird, wonderful pet project, who joined me and @chemicallywrit for the script clinic. It was one of the best days of my adult life. Long live the creative act and the spirit of giving. Long live audio fiction.
I had an incredible time over at TAFCON this weekend! It was a privilege to be able to talk at length about our niche industry with so many talented folks and I sincerely hope that more conventions of this nature will crop up in the States.
Thank you to everyone who took the time to chat with me and check out my show! And if you like this show, check out the other participants!
I've put together a playlist of audio dramas where at least one creator will be at TAFCON 2026, either in person or virtually.
Did I intend for it to be 34.5 hours long? No. Will I be shuffling it on my road trip to Colorado? Yes. Will you also be shuffling it in the coming weeks? I hope so.
There are going to be a lot of creators at TAFCON and I think it'd be nice to know a little about their shows if you meet any of them (like at the New Creator Meetup or Producer Networking or Wandering Around and Making Friends).
There's a couple of shows here I'm excited to introduce Alexander and Edie to and plenty more I haven't listened to that I'm hoping come up in my shuffle.
The playlist lives on Spotify but here's the exported list for all you non-Spotify people.
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.
We have a long overdue update available over on the patreon as a free post! Lots of exciting things on the horizon, so please stay tunes and thank you for your ongoing support!
Much Needed Updates by Soul Operator Pod on Patreon. Join Soul Operator Pod's community for exclusive content and updates.
okay but what about a FEMALE podcast protagonist who whimpers throughout the whole thing and is always on the brink of death and thinks she's a monster for the things she's done and saves so many people and hurts so many people and fucks up and tries again and has so so so many scars. could you be normal about her or would the misogyny prevail
okay but what about a FEMALE podcast protagonist who whimpers throughout the whole thing and is always on the brink of death and thinks she's a monster for the things she's done and saves so many people and hurts so many people and fucks up and tries again and has so so so many scars. could you be normal about her or would the misogyny prevail
We have a long overdue update available over on the patreon as a free post! Lots of exciting things on the horizon, so please stay tunes and thank you for your ongoing support!
Much Needed Updates by Soul Operator Pod on Patreon. Join Soul Operator Pod's community for exclusive content and updates.
Jeremy is the soppiest wettest little guy. He pretends to be mad at everything but inside he is extremely soft and squishy.
Angriest little rat man in existence, forced by his job to babysit a secret facility of vampire thralls when vampires are his absolute lest favourite thing ever. Possessed by the ghost of Jonathan Harker, a man 1000x nicer and sweeter than he is. Swears as much as he breathes. Born to write terrible poetry, forced to lock in and wear terrible grey suits while carrying Dracula's severed heard across the Yorkshire Moors.
I am sending in propaganda for Jeremy Larkin. I mean, just look at him! Put in a situation totally against his will with a woman he hardly knows, two ghosts, and the severed head of Dracula?? Then, to top it all off, he constantly gets the short end of the stick. He has to trek for miles, can't get anyone in his company to care about him, is possessed by a ghost, and just wants to be respected. Get this wet cat a warm blanket and a cup of coffee.
As a follow-up to this poll, we are now doing a full bracket asking just who is the Wettest Cat (gender neutral) in all of podcasting?
Potentially Asked Questions:
What is a wet cat? I define it as a character that is in a miserable situation and is maybe not doing everything they can to make it better. But you the voter might have a different interpretation.
Where is David Ward? Despite being the inspiration for this bracket, nobody submitted him. Even after I asked (and got Khoshekh submitted instead). At least David Ward fans won't have to watch him lose again?
Did I miss anything? Normal Oak was deemed too normal and was eliminated in the preliminaries.
How was this bracket seeded? Doug Eiffel, Caspar Scott, Jeremy Larkin, and Pluto are in the top four spots because they each got two submissions. From there I went in descending order based on how popular I thought the podcast currently was on Tumblr. The final four positions were seeded by the podcast's score on Listen Notes.
When does Round 1 start? Uhhhh…. in the future. I'll get back to you on that. I still haven't made graphics, let alone polls.
Where can I submit propaganda while waiting for the polls to start? To the askbox!
Round 1:
Doug Eiffel (Wolf 359) vs Castor Woolf (Twigs and Hearts)
Mike Walters (WOE.BEGONE) vs RJ McCabe (The Strange Case of Starship Iris)
Pamela Winchell (Welcome to Night Vale) vs Sam Bailey (The Sheridan Tapes)
Peter Nureyev (The Penumbra Podcast: Juno Steel) vs The Obituary Writer (Death by Dying)
Pluto (Wanderer's Journal) vs Walt Tremblay (Episode One)
Ron Stampler (Dungeons & Daddies: Odyssey/Quest) vs Sherlock Holmes (Fawx & Stallion)
Jonathan Sims (The Magnus Archives) vs Mateo Smith (Mx Bad Luck)
Keisha (Alice Isn't Dead) vs James Hayward (The Silt Verses)
Caspar Scott (Midnight Burger) vs Jean-Paul Valley (Batman: Bump in the Night)
Tony Collette (Dungeons & Daddies: The Peachyville Horror) vs Antigone Funn (Wooden Overcoats)
Khoshekh/Silas the Thief (Welcome to Night Vale) vs Colette Geise (The Kingmaker Histories)
Samama "Sam" Khalid (The Magnus Protocol) vs Sasha Racket (Rusty Quill Gaming)
Jeremy Larkin (The Holmwood Foundation) vs Tessa Whitlock (Soul Operator)
Terry Jr. Stampler (Dungeons & Daddies: Odyssey/Quest) vs Jedidiah Martin (Camp Here & There)
Arthur Lester (Malevolent) vs Bellamy Pink (Killjam XXX)
The Black Spider/Magic Brian (The Adventure Zone: Balance) vs Adjudicator Temerik Shrue (The Silt Verses)
This has been an incredible year for our little show. We are so grateful for all the love and support that has been thrown our way. Thank you for everything, and we can't wait to share Tessa's story with you in season 2. Now, while this is only reflective of spotify, please enjoy this fun data!
This past weekend, we had our first meetup of the Seattle-area Audio Drama Creators group.
It turns out, there's a ton of us up here in the PNW! Some shows represented include:
Metropolis (by us!, i.e. @luxradium)
Two Thousand and Late (by @atypicalartists – you are listening to Two Thousand and Late, right!?)
Brittle Tourniquets (by @notreadyforopsecplayers)
Oz 9
A Paladin's Bargain
Hoot's Motionless Palace
Spirits and Monsters of Old Seattle
Dead Seattle
And some other shows that'll be joining us for the next meetup:
Soul Operator (by @totcoc0a)
Dirt, an Audio Drama
Reshapers
There's a lot of seriously incredible stuff being made in our neck of the woods! If you know of anyone else in the Seattle area who is making AD (or thinking of making AD) and looking for community, give us a shout! It's really inspiring to be around so many great creators, and that inspiration can keep you going through all the tough parts of making a show (i.e. most of it 😂).
We are so honored to be among the inaugural selection for the Intrepid Web Fest's 2026 Winter Selection.
In their own words, "Intrepid Web Fest is an experimental web festival that aims to celebrate and uplift the art form of Actual Play. We are especially interested in showcasing APs that push the art form to expand and that feature stories and performances from marginalized communities."
We are extremely grateful to be considered among so many other incredible shows! Please check out the other nominees on the website.
Intrepid Web Fest is an experimental web festival that aims to celebrate and uplift the art form of Actual Play, particularly AP that exempl
This crossover takes place in the Soul Operator universe but with Wanderer's Journal characters. Here we got Pluto, standing as protagonist in a similar role to Tessas; new member of the neighbourhood, kind of paranoid and more reclusive, cynical, really wants to find a way out
Merging the styles was intetesting, fun and a bit complicated, but i kinda like how it turned out :]
Next up in the @wanderersjournalpod and @souloperatorpod crossover, Marigold!!
Marigold was in the habitrails from earlier, and they didnt feel like she fit in and really wants a way out. So, before Pluto arrived to the neighbourhood, they left. Marigold has been wandering outside the neighbourhood since; at one point they found a walkie talkie that she now uses to comunicate with Pluto
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