How On Earth Did We Make a Radio Series – And How Can You Do It As Well?
The last episode of our 5-part sci-fi comedy Space Station Zeta released yesterday! This is a big deal for us, and I hope you’ll check it out. In this article I’ll talk about how we did it and how you can write your own – how to develop the initial idea, how writing a series is different from a one off, how to record your own series and the pros and cons of a series compared to one off plays.
Before that, you really should listen to the plays – first, there are major spoilers in the article, second, it’s funny, I promise! So here it is: Space Station Zeta, All Five Episodes, about intelligence, love, and Chairman of the Federation Ronald Dump. Once you’ve listened, come back after the break to find out how to do it yourself.
I hate to do this, but I need to ask all our subscribers to re-subscribe. And encourage anyone not subscribed to subscribe, because it’s awesome. I promise it’s for a good reason.
After the huge response to our competition and the massive increase in audience both for About Writing and Little Wonder, we’ve been having some logistical problems. Basically, Microsoft thinks we’re a spambot. Many of our mailings are getting rejected, bounced, chucked in junk bins or just going where they’re not wanted.
Giving you a better service (or, erm, any service at all)
To fix this, we are switching back to the Jetpack/WordPress subscription system. The good news is that it will let us be GDPR compliant, make posts you receive easier to customise, and make it more straightforward to unsubscribe if you don’t love us any more (sob).
The bad news is that means we have to unsubscribe everyone then ask you to re-subscribe. Manually. Uurgh. If you are on our current subscribers list, you should receive an email in the next couple of days asking you to confirm that you want to be subscribed. Please click confirm! If you don’t receive the email, or you aren’t subscribed and want to be, then fill out the subscription box to the right or at the bottom of this email. Hell, as long as you’re here, just stick your email in the box. Better safe than sorry. I strongly recommend this if you are taking part in the competition/are interested in are radio shows or writing articles/if you want the good karma that comes with doing nice things to writers. You can see a picture of what it looks like at the top of this post (don’t try to fill in the picture. It won’t work).
The other bad news is that we won’t be able to do our monthly newsletters anymore. I’m going to put our last roundup in this post, and after that you’ll get more prompt notifications when we have new content (lets face it, I was never very prompt.) So, if you’d like to hear more about stuff that happened this month, press more. And please do subscribe!
On Thursday night our Radio Short competition closed with a whopping 298 accepted entrants. Thank you everyone for your hard work and enthusiasm taking part. And huge thanks to the BBC Writers Room for promoting this event.
The last hundred entries were submitted within the last 24 hours, which has created some small (but happy) logistical problems for us. As a result, the timetable for results and resubmission will be as follows:
Metaphors are more complicated than you think (oh boy!)
What are metaphors? What happens in a reader’s head when they see a metaphor? How do we use this knowledge to improve our writing? In this post I discuss the research of Gibbs RW and Matlock T into how readers understand metaphors by mentally simulating the activity, and what understanding the cognitive process of interpreting metaphors teaches us at writers. Don’t worry, I’ll try throw in some jokes.
Oh boy, critiquing one of my own plays. You may have noticed that the articles analysing our radio plays stopped at “Voices” a few weeks back. This is why. Talking about my work feels like driving nails into my feet. But long-time followers of the blog know it is supposed to be a reflective journal. Self-critique is a way to improve my writing by thinking about writing. So, I can’t get out of this one. What was right, what was wrong, and what was interesting about Mine?
Just in case you haven’t listened to it yet, here’s the audio link, the iTunes link, and the YouTube version with subtitles. Thorough, aren’t we? This article has mega spoilers for Mine, so I’ll see you after the break.
The last episode of our 5-part sci-fi comedy Space Station Zeta released yesterday! This is a big deal for us, and I hope you’ll check it out. In this article I’ll talk about how we did it and how you can write your own – how to develop the initial idea, how writing a series is different from a one off, how to record your own series and the pros and cons of a series compared to one off plays.
I hate to do this, but I need to ask all our subscribers to re-subscribe. And encourage anyone not subscribed to subscribe, because it’s awesome. I promise it’s for a good reason.
On Thursday night our Radio Short competition closed with a whopping 298 accepted entrants. Thank you everyone for your hard work and enthusiasm taking part. And huge thanks to the BBC Writers Room for promoting this event.
Oh boy, critiquing one of my own plays. You may have noticed that the articles analysing our radio plays stopped at “Voices” a few weeks back. This is why. Talking about my work feels like driving nails into my feet. But long-time followers of the blog know it is supposed to be a reflective journal. Self-critique is a way to improve my writing by thinking about writing. So, I can’t get out of this one. What was right, what was wrong, and what was interesting about Mine?