Director's Notes – 150 – The Birthday of Lee Marvin

(NOTE: As always, Director's Notes contain spoilers)

This is our 7th anniversary episode. A lot happens in it, and I’m very proud of the storytelling we do here and have been doing all year. It is such a gift to still get to be excited about writing for this world so many years in. It never feels like an obligation. I think the moment that it did, we would stop. But even now there are concepts we are excited about we still haven’t found time to write yet. 

But I’m not going to talk about this episode. Instead, I want to discuss the seven years that led to it.

March, 2012. I was 26 years old and had recently been laid off from a job I hated. I was drawing unemployment, paying expensive Brooklyn rent, and unsure what I was going to do next. One day I sat down and I wrote a paragraph about weird lights above an Arby’s. I didn’t know where it was going, but rereading it, I thought “huh, I think this could be something.”

June, 2013. The first anniversary of Night Vale. An early fan of ours worked at Webster Hall in the East Village, and so we managed to get a small bar in the venue for free to stage our party. One hundred and fifty people came. It felt amazing. That night I fell down the stairs at my apartment and broke my tailbone. One month later, the podcast would blow up on Tumblr and we would have over 10 million downloads in two months.

January, 2014. We went on our first tour, starting in Seattle. The entire touring party was me, Jeffrey, Cecil, and my wife Meg. We drove together in a mini-van. Our musical guest Jason drove himself in his car, following along. We had no idea what we were doing. In Portland, we forgot to order dinner before the show. I called for pizza as the show started. The delivery guy tried to deliver it to Cecil onstage. We sold out every room we played, and met all of these strangers who had been affected by what we were making. I felt like I was just slightly outside of reality the entire time. I felt like I was floating.

October, 2015. My lifelong dream has always been to release a novel. And finally we did. I remember holding the Welcome to Night Vale novel in my hands. I couldn’t believe my dreams had a shape and a weight. On the first day it was published I went to my local bookstore and couldn’t find it anywhere on the shelves. Bookstores don’t care that much about book release dates, and so they just hadn’t bothered to get it out yet. We would end up debuting number 4 on the NYT Best Sellers list, just behind JK Rowling and two spots above James Patterson.

October 2016. In London we played a West End theater. 2219 seats, sold out. We did a preshow ritual backstage that dates back to the New York Neo-Futurists and the days of black box theaters with 99 seats. In this ritual, you gather around in a circle, arms around each other. You give a pep talk. Deep breaths are taken. Eye contact is made, everyone making eye contact for a moment with everyone else. And then the final question: who are we doing this show for? The answer is different every time. Sometimes the answer is a joke. Sometimes the answer is serious. Either way, we chant the name, and then we go do the show. That show in London was the first time we did this ritual at a Night Vale show. Now we do it every time.

February, 2018. We play the main stage of the Sydney Opera House. Before the show, our composer Jon (Disparition) and our musical guest Erin McKeown duet Coldplay’s “Clocks” on a piano backstage. We spend the day in a strange daze. 

June, 2019. Jeffrey and I are working toward the deadline for our next Night Vale novel. We released our 150th episode (ok, it’s actually probably our 160th or something if you count bonus episodes, and ones that went outside the numbering system, and other stuff like that). I wrote you this message.

When we started I was 26, living in a studio apartment in Williamsburg. Now I’m 33, living in a house in the woods. But the people around me, the people I love, the people I make this show with, they’re still there too. And that’s the best part of it all.

Thank you for seven years.

- Joseph Fink
June 19, 2019

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