Outro S2 E10
Hello my survivor friends.
Had some interesting irony this week. I started reading ‘The Stand’ by Steven King. I’m 2 weeks and 700+ pages in. It’s a big book and takes a long time to build. I’ll have more thoughts on it when I’m finished.
If I ever finish.
The ironic part is that I picked up a cold over Christmas from my 87-year-old Mom. Which is ironic in itself because we’ve been trying so hard to protect her from the actual pandemic and she turns around and gives us all a bad cold.
I was hoping to get a lot done in my week off – and that statement right there tells you a lot about me and my neuroses – but I was sick and spent a lot of time reading and resting, which was good timing to tackle the oversized tome that is The Stand.
Here’s the ironic part; I’m lying in bed reading about all these characters who think they only have a cold actually having a superflu that wipes out humanity. At the same time I’m writing a story about a pandemic apocalypse where everyone dies from a virus and listening to the news about a raging pandemic.
Talk about meta! I’m a character with a sore throat and a runny nose during a global pandemic, reading about a global pandemic apocalypse and writing about a global pandemic apocalypse.
That was my week.
We are 10 episodes in to Season 2. I’m still planning to do 5 seasons of 20 episodes. Some of this I wrote before as stand alone episodes when I was playing around with this universe. That’s probably a good tip for you aspiring writers out there – if you have an idea for a universe write a couple chapters and see how it feels.
Consider it a test or in my professional world we would call it a ‘proof of concept’. Then you can either have a nice, tight stand alone short story or re-use it later when you get around to fleshing out the longer arc.
‘Flesh out’ is a 19th century abbreviated version of the older phrase or concept of putting flesh on something, meaning to add to it or expand it. That is different to ‘flush out’ which is to forcefully remove a blockage or clean out.
Hopefully you are happy with me sneaking a little Billy Shakespeare into the story this week.
I was not forced to read Shakespeare exhaustively like a British school boy, but I did read a fair amount of it for coursework in college and I do have my original, dogeared copy of the Pelican Shakespeare, still on the shelf for reference.
Would it be gluttonous of me to mention that ‘dogeared’ is a phrase that started specifically with books and came into use in the 1600’s as books became more ubiquitous and that is around the same time Shakespeare was writing his plays and poems?
You’d be amazed at how many of our common, modern, English idioms come from Shakespeare in one form or another. In no particular order some of his treats for us are "Puking", "Vanish into thin air", "There's a method to my madness", "Wild-goose chase", "The green eyed-monster", "Break the ice", "Wear my heart upon my sleeve",and "Swagger"
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Any how! Welcome back from your mid-winter’s night dreams into the second half of season 2.
How are the numbers looking? Our tribe has over 58,000 downloads for 2021, we are clipping along at around 11,000 downloads a month which is something like 400-500 per day.
We had a surge in growth in the fall. I think because some of the download apps were recommending us. It’s leveled off a bit in December. I’ll be interested to see how January does. Historically there’s a jump in downloads in January for podcasts in general because people get new devices over the holidays or start new habits in the new year.
This growth is all organic, meaning we haven’t done any advertising. Which means that you, my survivor friends, have your hands on the controls, so to speak. Help us all by recommending to a friend or tow, post the link to your social media, go into whatever app you use to listen and rate us, maybe type in a quick review.
Apparently, that makes the algorithms, and, more importantly, our alien overlords, happy.
We’ve got 82 members in our Facebook group as of this morning. We have been talking about Apocalypse books and the Stand.
The big news, I suppose, is that I was able to create an After the Apocalypse store on TeePublic. The link is in the show notes and I’ll give it here as well https://www.teepublic.com/stores/after-the-apocalypse.
I had a starving artist create multiple color renderings of the After the Apocalypse Old Man logo that you can get on shirts, mugs, stickers etc. I get a cut of anything that sells on there. Go check it out. If you want something special, I can resize and recolor the graphic very easily for you or add text. So if you have a fantastic bespoke or custom idea I can probably manage it and we’ll make it available for everyone.
If anyone out there has any other great ideas on expanding our reach let me know – I’m all ears. One of my Goals for this year is to grow After the Apocalypse.
If anyone needs anything let me know. Happy New Year!
And as we move into this new year – Keep surviving!
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