Director's Notes – Episode 122

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

Hello from a jetlagged writer. I flew home from Sydney, Australia yesterday. We existed within February 15 for 43 hours, which is a disquieting number of hours for a day to last. My wife and I looked at each other with shell shock last night. “How is it still Feb 15?” we asked. “How is this nightmare possible?”

As we often say in Night Vale, time is weird.

We were in Sydney because we were performing on the main stage of the Sydney Opera House. I started this podcast in 2012, in a studio apartment with a caved in ceiling and a heating pipe that would often leak an unidentifiable black ooze, having just been fired from a job I hated. I did it because I really loved the podcasts I listened to, and I wanted to join in on that conversation. And I did it because I knew some very talented people, and I wanted to make something with them. After putting the test episode that would become (with no further editing) our first episode, I remember saying to Meg, “I think this might end up turning into something.” I could not have imagine that it would lead to both Meg and I performing our own original work in arguably the most famous theater in the world, hand in hand with all of our friends. The moral to this story, as always, is “podcasts”.

This three parter is a real opportunity to do a deep dive into two characters who have been around since almost the start of the show, but who have never been particularly featured. That kind of writing is definitely something that interests me. The joy of having a community of fictional characters is that there are always new corners to zoom in on, always people who haven’t had their whole stories examined.

The other thing that this arc has allowed me to do is just some old-fashioned, straight forward horror writing, which I really enjoy diving into. Often we cut our horror with humor, but sometimes I like to tell a straight up spooky story. Writers of horror are often asked if we are ever scared by our own writing. But the answer is that all of this is already existed in our heads. We’re just sharing our own fears with you. You’re welcome. 

My life is much busier and more hectic than my life when I started this show. But my interest is the same. I want to tell the kind of stories that I would want to listen to, and I hope that someone else out there might want to listen to them too.

Thanks for being that person. I couldn’t have imagined you were out there in 2012, but I hoped you were.

- Joseph Fink
February 16, 2018