Director's Notes: 181 - C****s

Hello from the snow bound forest. As a child of Southern California, days like this where the sky goes tactile and the door gets barricaded with snow drifts are my nightmare. I wake up, look up from my bed at the plow going down the road, and just want to stay there all day.

But enough about me. How are you? Good, good.

This episode is a direct sequel to a minor bit in a very early episode, as we are prone to do. It is entirely likely you do not remember that bit, as it only happened once and was never mentioned again. It is from episode 15, which was released almost exactly 8 years ago. Transcript is here for those who want to check it out, but basically there is a little science lesson about clouds that is heavily censored. That’s all. But it’s a joke I’ve always remembered and enjoyed, so I decided it was time to follow-up and see how the censorship of clouds was going.

Now I am very aware that we have used the word “clouds” and references to clouds quite possibly hundreds of times in the ensuing years, and not always in reference to the Glow Cloud, which I did take care here to mention was exempt from the censorship. So the logistics and continuity of Night Vale’s cloud censorship is definitely in question. But I dunno. I wasn’t that worried about that, not when I thought it would make an interesting story here.

As I was finishing this episode, armed insurgents stormed our capitol in an attempted mass assassination and coup. The draft of this episode was written well before any of that, but in edits I couldn’t help but notice the unfortunate resemblance in my episode to the violent machinations of our nation’s right wing. I decided to leave it as is, but just know that this story is not intended as a commentary on that moment, only the accidental echo that keeps cropping up more and more as our world devolves into something too close to Night Vale for comfort.

Consider this passage from today’s episode: “We all want to be able to say all sorts of things, right? Me, I’d like to be able to say that the sky itself is a flimsy bit of plywood painted to hide from us the terrifying truth of what is really up there.”

And now compare it to a headline also from today:

What is writer of weird fiction supposed to do in a world this weird?

Apparently the answer is write some non-fiction. I’ve co-written a memoir with my wife Meg Bashwiner, who also plays Deb the Sentient Patch of Haze, is the voice of the credits in every episode, and is the emcee of our live show. It’s called The First Ten Years: Two Sides of the Same Love Story. Here’s what it looks like:

In it, we took each of the first ten years of our relationship and wrote our memories of them without consulting the other person. The result is a love story that is disagreed upon, misremembered, and deeply romantic in its own personal way. This book covers a lot of behind the scenes of the years in which Night Vale exploded in popularity and the two of us found ourselves touring the world with the live show. It comes out on May 11 but can be pre-ordered here if you would like to do that (pre-orders help authors TREMENDOUSLY).

Ok, back to glaring at the snow.

-Joseph Fink