Director's Notes Ep 234: "The Boy"

Well, now the boy's here. What's up with the boy? I bet we'll find out more later.

When guest writer Ashley Lierman introduced Tamika Flynn as a character, she was a brave 14 year old, striding out of the library with a librarian's head in her hands, ready to lead a teenage militia against invaders. But that was over a decade ago. Tamika Flynn is now in her mid-20s. She has a job. She has a home. She has responsibilities.

We get asked a lot: when will Night Vale end? I have no idea. We don't have an ending for Night Vale planned. Because, to us, Night Vale is not a story, it is a world. 

Another show I wrote, Alice Isn't Dead, was a story. From the start, I planned for there to be three parts. Very early on, I decided exactly how the whole thing would end. Writing the ending early on is often a good idea for a story. It gives you something to aim toward.

But with Night Vale, that's not what we're interested in doing. Our model is instead the brilliant comic series Love and Rockets, specifically the half written by Jaime Hernandez. In 1982, Jamie started writing a comic series about a group of teenagers in Southern California, as they went to punk shows, fell in love, argued, and reunited. And he is still writing about those same characters now. Except they are no longer teenagers. The characters have aged in real time (and in one recent breathtaking story, faster than real time). They are now middle aged, with boring jobs, reminiscing about their punk youth, and still falling in love, arguing, and reuniting. The slow steady movement of time is what gives Love and Rockets its power.

Seriously, if you haven't read Love and Rockets, go read it right now.  

I don't know if we'll still be writing Night Vale 40 years after we started, like Jaime Hernandez, but we are interested in letting these characters grow and age in real time, and seeing what a life is like as it is lived in these strange little town we've made for ourselves.

So now Tamika is in charge of the boy. What's up with the boy? I bet we'll find out more later.

-Joseph