The other day…
I posted the next round of submissions for our long-running short fiction podcast, The Other Stories. We’ve been running it for seven years now. That’s several lifetimes in podcast land.
So yes… it was me.
I was the one who loaded the pistol. I tightened the noose. I boomerang’d the candelabra into Colonel Mustard’s groin. And I put up the submissions… specifically Volume 100 — THE END.
That’s right.
We’re coming to the end.
Ready your lighters.
I’ll bring the jerry cans.
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If you’re subscribed to this newsletter, I’m assuming you’re aware of The Other Stories but if not… it’s a weekly short story podcast that I and a few friends started in 2016. It’s The Twilight Zone meets This American Life… with an unhealthy dose of Heavy Metal Magazine. Some people liked it! So we kept on doing it. More at TheOtherStories.net.
***
So…
I and The Other Stories team (TOSsers, for short) got together for our 7th anniversary hang. It was lovely. I drank something called lager and ate sesame chicken strips. It was a potent mixture. It makes one both loud and ponderous.
“Seven years,” I mused, beer in left hand, chicken in right hand. “It won’t be long before we’re celebrating our 8th anniversary… and then our 9th… and what then? 10th!? No way!”
Time, as we all know, gets much more slippy the older it gets. Seems when you’re young you can almost grab the fourth dimension by the tail… but then it gets greasy, erratic, and all you can do is watch it flit by with increasingly blurry spasms.
There it goes again.
And again.
Now it’s in the loft!
No, it’s over there… in the neighbour’s garden…
Pissing on the flowers.
There’s no stopping it now.
As I and my fellow TOSsers talked about what we’d achieved with the podcast, it got me thinking about where the show is currently and how it runs. If it were a car, how tuned is the engine? If it were a game, how far are we from the platinum?
I drank more of the beer… ate more of the chicken… and slowly I understood the truth of it.
I love what we’ve made at The Other Stories.
Before the podcast, I would be lucky to get more than a handful of people to read my work. Somehow, we nipple-crippled the universe, forced it to give us our own little space… and we’ve since published over 500 stories, from 200 different writers… giving a platform to many an under-appreciated storyteller.
And me… I learned how to write. I mean I already kinda knew how to put words together but I learned how to write to a brief, within a word count, and to a strict deadline. I’ve written 48 stories for the podcast. I’m not the same writer I was back when we first started.
I believe that we have done some good work.
But with the beer, came truth.
We are at a crossroads.
Something has to die.
So that something else can be reborn.
The Other Stories must end… for it to begin again.
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If you’d like to help us in this painful flaming rebirthing process, then I’d love for you to fill out a short survey. It’ll only take you a hot minute.
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Five recommendations.
1. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3 — I’m a James Gunn fanboy and this is one of his best.
2. John Wick 4 — Watching action movies with my dad is something I hope to never grow out of.
3. Big Magic — A perfect reminder of why I write in the first place.
4. This Is Not A T-Shirt — An inspirational business book all about getting down to business.
5. Possession — There’s nothing quite like a weird horror, and as weird horror goes, this is fucking bizarre. Good stuff.
6. Tampopo — I try to watch a Criterion movie every month and I loved this. Ridiculously lovely.
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With all that said, I’ve never been more excited about the pod. We’ve been busier than ever. Have you checked out our most recent special — Tragic Kingdom? Our first audiobook, Territory? Or perhaps taken a gander at our premium offering, TOS+?
Until next time,
Luke & family.
P.S. Currently, I only send a newsletter every three months. This flies in the face of newsletter science. Am I doing it wrong? Would you like to see more, less?
Monthly newsletter or more :P