Director's Notes – Episode 13 (January Hiatus)

[There are no new episodes in January, so we're replaying a couple of old favorites. This one originally posted December 15, 2012.]

This episode started as a document in our shared Google Docs folder that I titled “A Story about You (an experiment in Night Vale storytelling)”. I had this idea of doing an episode with a completely different format from all the previous ones, but I didn’t know if it would work, so I stuck it in that separate document so there was no pressure for it to turn into a producible episode. What really ended up saving it was a disastrous beach vacation. My wife and I were staying in a beach house for a week, and both got really sick on the first day, so that we spent the week on the couch not doing much and feeling bad. It was this enforced week of having nothing to do but sit indoors in a beach house and be sick that I finally got this episode into shape.

Who are you in this story about you? Several episodes later it occurred to me that I really wish we had implied that you were Larry Leroy, out on the edge of town. But by then we had already done other things with Larry that contradicted that idea, so instead you are just some nameless Night Vale resident, now never to be seen again.

Originally the “dark planet of awesome size, lit by no sun” only appeared once in the story. It was an image I loved but didn’t know how it related to the story. So, on a second run, I restructured the story to center around the image. Once I figured out that the dead planet was the heart of the story, the rewriting into its final form was quick and easy. That planet has appeared very occasionally in later episodes and in the Night Vale novel. The dark planet has a very specific meaning and logic for me within the Night Vale world that I won’t spell out here or anywhere else.

A word about the music in this episode. I wanted the episode to center around a single musical theme, since it centered on a single story, and I found a Disparition track that for whatever reason I hadn’t used before called “Vortex Shedding” that was both distinctive and gorgeous. It’s a track I love and still try to use only for very special moments.

- Joseph Fink
January 15, 2016