Imaginary Worlds - Rewriting the Script on Audio Fiction

Episode Date: January 15, 2025

Lauren Shippen is one of my favorite creators of audio dramas. In 2015, she burst on the scene with The Bright Sessions, which was about young people with supernatural abilities who are in therapy. The show was so successful, she used it to create an audio drama network called Atypical Artists, which produces her work and other indie creators. As a writer, Lauren combines a steady stream of revelations and plot twists with an ability to write deeply human characters that keeps me bingeing. And she’s given herself great roles to play as an actress. I talk with Lauren about her creative process, and her newest shows, the post-apocalyptic road trip Breaker Whiskey, and New Year’s Day, which is about two rival magicians who are immortal. This week’s episode is sponsored by Remi and Hims. Get up to 50% off your custom-fit mouth guard at https://www.shopremi.com/IMAGINARY Start your free online visit today at Hims.com/IMAGINARY Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. I'm Eric Malinsky. Around eight years ago, I heard about this new audio drama series that was getting a lot of buzz. It was called The Bright Sessions. Most of the episodes were presented as therapy sessions recorded by a character named Dr. Bright. She specialized in treating young adults with supernatural abilities. They're called atypicals. In the first episode, Dr. Bright meets a patient named Sam. She tells Dr. Bright that she has the ability to go back in time, but only when she has a panic attack. And then Sam has one of those time traveling panic attacks during

her first therapy session. When I'm not actually disappearing, I'm worried about disappearing. I'm worried about being caught, about hurting someone, about not coming back. When I go away, I'm nowhere. I'm invisible. I'm no one. And it's not better here where I have no life, no friends. I don't exist anywhere.

I'm so scared of everything and I'm starting to lose my mind. Sam, Sam, you do exist. You're here right now with me. You are important and you are a part of this world. Even though it seems like you can simply vanish, you will never truly, Sam, are you all right? You look very pale. I don't believe this. Of all the times.

Oh god, I'm so sorry about that. Sam was played by Lauren Chippen, the creator of The Bright Sessions. The Bright Sessions was so popular, it spawned spin-off shows and YA novels about the characters, it was optioned for television, and there's a big community of fans who create fan art and fan fiction about the characters. Lauren also used the success of The Bright Sessions to launch an audio drama network called Atypical Artists that have been able to fund really innovative audio dramas by other creators, like a show called In Strange Woods,

which is a musical in the guise of a true crime podcast. This career that she built as a writer, the executive producer of audio dramas, has been a bit of a surprise for her. Her initial goal was to be an actor. You know, I'd grown up writing little short stories or half finished novels. I was really into fantasy as a kid. So, you know, I've got a bunch of old floppy disks of like terrible

half-finished fantasy novels that I wrote when I was 11 or whatever. But I hadn't ever actually written a script before writing The Pilot of the Bright Sessions. And the whole conceit of that show is very much I want something to act in, and I've got these amazing colleagues in acting class with me who, you know, I just want to see act more. If there's one thing that is kind of the meat and potatoes of your trade as an actor, it is two-person scenes and two-person exercises and two-person interactions. It was really natural to kind of take that kind of practice that I'd been doing for, I mean, at that point, like 15 years, right? Sort of starting an acting camp in middle school and turning that into writing a single

scene that goes from end to end and doesn't really stop or doesn't really get interrupted and it's just two people. And that is still kind of my comfort zone. Every time I start one of Lauren's audio dramas, I'm amazed at how quickly I get sucked into the worlds that she creates. The high concept ideas are intriguing, the storylines unfold with just enough revelations

to keep me binging, and as a writer and as an actor, she brings a lot of warmth and humanity to the characters. So I was excited that I got a chance to talk with Lauren about her creative process. And we discussed two of her latest audio dramas, which are fascinating experiments in storytelling. The Bride Sessions deals with a lot of teen angst, which I can still relate to. I remember when I was in college, I'd develop bruxism, where you grind your teeth at night. It's related to stress, and I damaged my teeth to the point where I needed a mouthguard, which was expensive, even back then.

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to my brother-in-law who does need it, and he found the whole process really easy and convenient. Remy is for anyone dealing with nighttime grinding, clenching, or jaw pain who wants an affordable solution to protect their smile and say goodnight to jaw pain and headaches. Head to shopremi.com slash imaginary with the code imaginary. Give your smile a break without breaking the bank with Remy. The world of The Bright Sessions built gradually. Over the course of several seasons, Lauren added more characters, more locations, and brought in other writers. Dr. Bright's patience

expanded to include a character who can enter people's dreams. People can't control what they dream about, so sometimes I drop in on someone's nightmare or something, and then the next day I have to decide whether or not I tell them that I know they're afraid of ducks or whatever. It's awkward. I can understand it might be uncomfortable to see someone's subconscious like that. And there's a devious patient who can manipulate the desires of other people. I know I can't technically control a person's mind, but I think it's safe to say I can do the next best thing, impose my will or whatever it is you always say.

Impose your want is probably a little more accurate. But it all started with Samantha, or Sam, the time traveling character that Lauren played. Writing and performing as Sam was a therapeutic experience for her. It genuinely totally was. It's funny, I think, you know, you listen to the Bright Sessions and you might think like, oh, okay, this is a person who maybe has direct experience with therapy and has been in a couple of therapy sessions. And the truth of the matter is I started to go, I started going to therapy myself in February of 2016, about four months after the Bright Sessions launched, because I was like, huh, this seems to be helping Sam.

Maybe I should give this a try. Oh, wow, that's so interesting. Yeah, I mean, I really was just coasting. My sister, who I thank in all of the credits, Elizabeth Laird, now she works primarily in humanitarian aid, doing a lot of things. But she has a psychology degree. She's worked in various clinical settings

throughout her early career. And so she read every script and gave me notes of, a therapist wouldn't say this, or they might frame it this way, or you could try this technique, or what have you. And so that helped to lend, I think, a degree of realism to the therapy sessions. But I hadn't actually experienced therapy myself until I was in the process of writing Sam and realizing that

the act of, I think the biggest thing for me was, you know, Sam has panic attacks in front of Dr. Bright. And at that point in my life, I had never really had a panic attack in front of ever, anybody. Anytime I sort of like would feel one coming on, I would sort of isolate myself. Like I found it like a very like, in some ways the idea of somebody witnessing a panic attack was more terrifying than the panic attack itself. Because I started having them when I was 10.

So by the time I was like a teenager, I was sort of like, this is just what life is. It's just having this happen to you, you know, sometimes. And you just kind of have to like retreat and go into a corner like a sad cat and just like wait it out. And I think that acting those moments out with Julia, who was like one of the most just like incredible

giving actors that you could ever be in a scene with. And she played Dr. Bright. She played Dr. Bright, yeah. Kind of like broke the seal for me on like, oh, this isn't, the world hasn't ended by me being vulnerable with this person in this way. Yeah. I mean, I know you've told the story many times before, but it's such a fascinating story. Could you talk about how the bright sessions came from a health crisis? Yeah, gosh, I had I have

I've never heard a sort of like in those in the that exact phrasing before and it and it did and sort of actually now that I'm thinking about it came kind of a little bit from two health crises, right? Because on the one hand, I'd been having these panic attacks for a really long time. And they were particularly bad, sort of my early 20s. And that was sort of one health crisis. And then the more direct one was that in almost like exactly 10 years ago, it'll be 10 years ago this March, which is kind of crazy to think about. I got incredibly ill of strep throat

and strep throat can occasionally be like incredibly virulent and dangerous and it turned into scarlet fever. My which I didn't know was a disease that you could get in the 21st century. Yeah, exactly. But you can, I've had it. And then my jugular vein hemorrhaged and I was bleeding internally in my neck for about five days without realizing it. And so I was hospitalized and you know, the whole thing.

And then about a month after I was like out of the hospital, the strep sort of came back and prompted post strep sort of came back and prompted post-strep arthritis, which is a thing that you can get. And all my joints blew up and I had to use a cane for several months. And it was just, it was, you know, most of the first half of 2015 for me was spent in a great deal of pain.

And not only have I never heard that happening to anybody, but somebody so young too. Yeah. And I feel like someone's so young, but No, but you're young. No, it was really it was Yeah, I was I was 23 when I was admitted into the hospital. And it took me 12 minutes to get out of bed every morning. Right. It was it was it was like truly disabling for like a brief period. And then it's something that I still live

with. Now I have arthritis and it doesn't flare up that often, but when it does, it's incredibly painful. Oh, I didn't realize that this was a lasting. Yeah, it's not supposed to be. I mean, I shouldn't say that. It's the reality is, is that like, what happened to me was incredibly unusual. And the real consequence of that, other than, you know, having certainly a shifted perspective on chronic illness and on disability and all of these things was the fact that I had been living the classic LA life of working in a restaurant and auditioning.

And that meant I was on my feet most of the day. And my doctor was basically like, if you want to be able to continue to walk, you need to find a job where you can have your feet up all day. I found a remote job that allowed me to work from home. And at the same time, I was experiencing a new kind of physical alienation, because anybody who's ever had panic attacks

knows that it's incredibly physically alienating. And anybody who has chronic illness or chronic pain knows that that's incredibly physically alienating. And I was sort of experiencing this new dimension of being in my little bone prison. And I'd had this idea for this podcast for about a year. I wrote the first episode in 2014. I just suddenly had sort of the time and the wherewithal

to do it because I wasn't sort of exhausted after a full shift at a restaurant at the end of every day and having to prepare, you know, auditions for the next day because I wasn't really doing anything. I was like kind of on bed rest. So I mean, of course, you know, The Bright Sessions is not just about people in therapy. Everyone has superpowers. Or the way often described to people is it's kind of like if the X-Men weren't fighting Magneto, but they just were dealing, they were in therapy. Totally. So what was it like in terms of each character

has emotional, you know, maybe clinical problems, and then they have superpowers as well. What was it like kind of figuring out, okay, if this is this person's, the reason why they went into therapy, what's the superpower that matches this? And how do I use that to play it out? Like Sam's anxiety, she pops back in time. Like that, you know, it could have been anything. I mean, you could have had had anything be the side effect of it. Yeah, I mean, using the first

three patients as various illustrative examples, because I think that they, yeah, they each have sort of contrasting or complementary to their sort of the thing that they're struggling with or the people that they are. And that was very intentional with Sam, I think, going back to that idea of physical alienation, that somehow I am like both trapped inside of it and outside of myself watching myself have a panic attack, right? Like it's this weird dissociative state. And so I just thought about like, well, what would be the physical manifestation of that? It would be like being ripped from the present moment.

Cause that's also the thing with anxiety, right? Is that so much of anxiety, if you, if you experience it, a lot of it can be about fear of the future and fear of the past and the sort of inability to stay in the present. That's something I worked on a lot in therapy is how to be present.

And so I liked the idea of her being literally physically ripped from the present and then thrown into a situation. Crucially, Sam is time traveling, but she cannot affect or interact with the past in any way. She is a invisible observer. That really felt real to me too, because so much of having social anxiety especially is just existing in the world, but you're not really in it.

You are seeing it take place around you, but you are incapable of pushing your hand through that film that sits between you and everybody else. That's true for the other two characters as well. It's like, what is the thing that they're experiencing? What is their personality? And what is the thing that they're experiencing? What is their personality? And what is the worst possible scenario for them? For Chloe, who, yeah, is played by Anna Laurie,

Anna Laurie was the one original cast member who I did know very well at that point. We'd met at a UCB class in 2014 and become best friends. And so I wrote that role specifically for her. Anna's an incredible person to, like, be in the world with because of the way that role specifically for her. Ana is an incredible person to be in the world with because of the way that she interacts with it. She's just incredibly curious, incredibly friendly. She puts everybody she talks to immediately at ease.

And then what would be the monkey's paw of that? Well, you can read everybody's mind. You actually can see inside of everybody's head. And that would be kind of terrible. And I think for Chloe specifically in the way that she views the world, it's like when you want to have hope for humanity and when you want to give everybody the benefit of the doubt and be curious,

it would be sort of cut you off at the knees to hear everybody's unkindest thoughts and to understand stuff about a person before you actually get to interact with them. In one of the early episodes of The Bright Sessions, Dr. Bright discovers that she is also vulnerable to Chloe's mind reading. Who's Mark? Chloe, please, I would like to maintain some semblance of doctor-patient confidentiality.

You really mean that? Of course I do. Well, you're the one thinking about him. You really mean that? Of course I do. Well, you're the one thinking about him. You don't have to. The other main character in the first season is a teenage football player named Caleb. And then of course for Caleb, you know,

macho kid in high school, what's the worst thing you could possibly have? The ability to feel everybody's feelings, right? And then I put Brigham Snow in that role and he kind of morphed into something a little bit more complex, I think, than just that, which is true of all of the characters, right? You get an actor into a role and all of a sudden the character has life to them that you could never have breathed into them alone. You were saying you were nervous when Adam came to the game? Yeah, and so is he. I mean, that's the weird thing. I could feel him over the whole

team. I could feel how nervous he was, but it was really strange because he was nervous for me. As Lauren built out the world of The Bright Sessions, she introduced an antagonistic force, a secret government organization called the AM. The AM keeps watch on the atypicals and sometimes does more than just watch them. We also learned that Dr. Bright's brother, Mark, is an atypical who was imprisoned and experimented on by the AM. Eventually, Lauren got the opportunity to fund a spininoff series called the AM Archives. The premise is that Dr. Bright and some of her former patients, including Sam, have joined the AM, thinking they

might be able to reform it from the inside. It was interesting because sort of season three into season four was the Bright sessions really starting to get a lot of great attention. You know, I'd gotten a book deal out of it. It was being developed for television. You know, we had hundreds of thousands of listeners. Like it was it was a big moment. And I sort of realized like I could get addicted to this particular feeling and I could ruin this show by continuing it forever because I am such a huge fan girl.

I there are so many, you so many TV shows, book series, whatever that I've loved. And that, I mean, we all are thinking of a show that we love that did this. Just went on a little bit too long because it was really successful and because the network wanted to keep it going when it really should have ended in like season five.

Yes. And I just think of Vince Gilligan coming off of the X-Files and making Breaking Bad. That was literally the show I was thinking about. Yeah. And being like, Breaking Bad is going to be five seasons and then we're done. I'm not letting that happen again.

And as a result, Breaking Bad is one of the greatest pieces of television ever made. But in the back of my mind, I sort of had this idea about the AM percolating of like, that could be the better colesal of the Bright Sessions, right? Where this world is doing well, people do want more of it, but like I won't ruin the Bright Sessions by making a completely, like basically a completely separate show.

In this scene from the AM Archives, Dr. Bright talks with a colleague about the dark history of the organization. You know, I've never been inside any of the organization. I need to face it, but I just can't bring myself to go inside. Sometimes I'll come here to look and just will myself to cross the threshold, but I never have. Yep. Can I say something? Go right ahead. Joan, trying to fill your brother's pain won't take away what he went through. I know that.

Do you? You know, the AM Archives is heavily scored, right? And it's a thriller. It's not really like a sort of two people sitting in a room and having conversations. I mean, obviously, there's a lot of that. But it's also grappling with completely different ideas, where I don't know when this would have been. But I was listening to an NPR podcast. I'm forgetting exactly which one. It may have been Code Switch or Embedded or one of those.

And they were doing an interview with a guy who had just written a book about prison abolition. And by the end of this interview with a guy who had just written a book about prison abolition. And by the end of this interview with this guy, I was completely convinced. I was like, this is a fascinating concept to me. I think I agree with it 1000%. And I'm going to now read a lot more about this. And so I did. And that is sort of what the AM Archives is? It's me working through my own logic problems of prison abolition and like, what do you do when you have people who maybe actually cannot integrate back into society safely? And what are the wrong ways to do it? You know what I think? I think the AM

is absolutely an example of the wrong ways. And then yes, also like, is it better to burn the thing down and start a new thing, or is it better to, as they do in the show, go inside the belly of the beast and try to change a system from within it? To be clear, the AM Archives does not answer any of these questions. But it's very much me grappling with those particular philosophical ideas.

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Prescription products require an online consultation with a healthcare provider who will determine if a prescription is appropriate. Restrictions apply. See websites for full details and important safety information. The scope of Lauren's storytelling has continued to expand, and she has two new shows going on that push the boundaries of audio fiction. The first one is called Breaker Whiskey.

The story is about a woman driving across America after an apocalyptic event wiped out almost everybody on earth. She's not sure what happened, but she knows of only one other survivor. And after years of living with this other survivor, they can't stand each other anymore. So the main character has hit the road looking for other people.

Also, it's the mid-1970s. Lauren is the only actor in the show, and she recorded everything on a CB radio. She put out episodes every weekday for a year. The episodes were short, sometimes just one or two minutes. I discovered the show just as she wrapped up the main storyline, and instead of being daunted by over 200 mini-episodes, I could not stop binging them. It was almost like there were bite-sized candies in a bowl, and I was like, I'm just gonna have one more.

Okay, just one more. Just one more. Breaker, breaker, W-A-R-1-9-7-4 on the line, currently eating some jerky on the side of I-76. Even though the show is really simple in terms of its format, I was able to imagine this whole entire world outside of her daily dispatches. If anyone is out there, would you mind tuning in just to tell me if there's a working gas station in this state? I'm acquiring gas just fine at the moment, but I'd rather not have

my first encounter with the world in half a decade be getting busted for siphoning gas. I started ideating it at a time where, you know, this would have been early 2023. I was coming off of several years of a lot of work for other people. And a lot of that work for other people was incredibly rewarding, right? Getting to make Bridgewater with Aaron Menke or Surviving Hawkins for Stranger Things for Netflix, like things that were really, really fun, where someone kind of gives me a world and gives me a structure and then I get to play around with it. But I, you know, it had been a couple of years since I finished the Bright Sessions

because we really did wrap that in 2020, and then my last book came out in 2021. I'd also been doing some work for other people that was less fun. I'd had a really bad sort of toxic work situation in which I just did not feel like my expertise was being respected by the fact that they had hired me for my expertise, and they were disrespecting some of my colleagues as well.

And I ended up sort of leaving that job and being at a weird odd end of like, well, I don't have another job. And I don't really know what to make next. And I don't really know. Like, I think that, you know, this happens periodically when you're like a freelance creative, right?

Where you sort of have the feeling of like, can I do this? Can I actually make a career of it? Can I survive on this for another year? Fiction Podcasting was in a funny stage where all of the big money had come in and now was starting to leave again. And I just thought, I want to get back to my roots.

I want to stop trying to chase big budgets by pitching my originals around town. I want to do something that is low-lift that I can consistently do. And I kind of want to prove to the powers that be that the thing that audio fiction needs and the thing that storytelling needs specifically is consistency. Because I, like a lot of people that I know, have gotten very sick of here's an eight-episode season and five years later here's another eight episode season. And that's if you're lucky to get another season of a show, right?

I miss like the 22 episode seasons and I miss kind of the consistent weekly release of a story and getting to take my time with characters, getting to take my time with a story. I just, I wanted to see if I could make that work. And so I thought, like, what's the most insane way I could do that while doing an episode every day? And every weekday, it's only five episodes a week. And they're, yeah, but they're between one minute and 10 minutes. But yeah, I did that for a year, 260 episodes in the span of a year. And it was so rewarding. And ultimately, you know, I don't really remember where the idea, like the actual story idea came from other than I

love post-apocalyptic stories, and I never told one before. And that's a very easy circumstance in which to have one single person. And I love road trips. And I didn't want to do a single narrator in the sense where you're hearing her in a monologue. I wanted her to actually be talking. And so I thought, well, who could she be talking to?

Okay, if she's on a road trip, it's a CB radio. And then I just bought a CB radio from 1976 off of eBay and recorded the whole thing on that. And so I had the premise of it's the 1970s. This thing happened seven years ago. She is alone. She's left a woman behind that she was living with. And that's, that's it. Everything that you kind of find out as you go along was all built as I was going. I didn't know what the post-apocalyptic event was until I was, you know, I don't know, 50 episodes in. I was gonna ask you about that because the reveal,

the reveals happened very gradually, you know, in terms of what, I mean, I don't wanna give anything away, but in terms of like whether there are other people out there, what anything away, but in terms of like, whether there are other people out there, what happened, and you said, like, Episode 50, you figured it out. But I think we don't learn this until maybe whale after after Episode 100. Yeah. So so like, how does that work for you in terms of when? Or also, how are you so patient to do that? Like, I feel like I would be so impatient to try and

figure everything out right away. It was, I have to say, it was less difficult for me to be patient around figuring it out for myself. I think because I am very much a character forward writer and plot is always secondary. And I say that to the, and it is to the detriment of a lot of my stories, right? Like I'm not a plotter, but I think that it helps me from being too panicked about it, right? Because I was like, the thing I'm interested in is like, what's this woman's deal? What's the deal that she has with this woman that she's left behind?

I know I kind of wanted to tell us like toxic, will they, won't they? And then yeah, then then you sort of as I hit various points in her journey and what she was saying about herself, I started thinking about, what's the most interesting reason that she could be alone, that the world is this way? And then in terms of rolling it out to listeners, that was hard because the pacing in general for that show was exceptionally hard.

Because I knew I wanted to do it for a year, and so I was like, I cannot rush this. I have to make sure that this is the slowest possible burn or otherwise I'm going to run out of runway. And so usually when I would, you know, get to a week, because I would sort of, you know, write the weeks in chunks, I, if I sort of was at a point where I was like, ooh, I really want to reveal this particular thing, but two weeks ago I revealed this particular thing and I need kind of, I would try to do like three or four weeks between any big reveals or

big piece of information. I would just go to Roadside America or something like that, which has just a map of all of the different weird roadside attractions in America. And I would just like see where Whiskey was on her route, kind of poke around and be like, okay, she can go here. That'll distract her for like, you know, a good week. And then I can reveal this thing next week. So was it, was there anything, you know, with the other work we talked about how it came from a personal place.

Did this, maybe it didn't start from a personal place. Was more of a creative challenge or did it start from a personal place? I think it was more of a creative challenge. And I think, I think it was coming from a personal place? I think it was more of a creative challenge. And I think I think it was coming from a personal place of some of the ideas that I was interested in creatively. You know, I I kind of wanted to tell a story in which a not great person doesn't necessarily get any better.

Right. Like whiskey is not she's not a she's not a terrible person by any means, but she's not a good person and she means, but she's not a good person. And she's not necessarily trying to be a good person. And I thought that that was really interesting, especially just sort of having a female lead character who's not necessarily likable and isn't necessarily trying to be likable. But I think through her vulnerability,

you end up connecting to her anyway. And that was true for the Bright Sessions as well, actually, because I wrote The Bright Sessions very much knowing it was coming from my anxiety, but not knowing that it and then not knowing Breaker Whiskey was coming from loneliness as well. And that really surprised me with Breaker Whiskey because I don't think of myself as a lonely person. I live with a wonderful partner who I love.

I have lots of wonderful friends. But I think that you can feel the echoes of this in Breaker Whiskey, COVID obviously changed all of our relationships with everybody that we know and changed our relationship to the world and kind of put us in these in these isolated little bubbles of existence. And so that was really, I think, one of the things that I was grappling with with Breaker Whiskey is how do you go out into the world again after not being in it for so long? And how do you connect with people when everything is just a little bit fractured? Again, I don't think I've answered any of those questions, but it's certainly something

that I was exploring throughout. So Breaker Whiskey was a show that came out every weekday for a year. Lauren created another podcast with the opposite approach. The show is called New Year's Day and it comes out once a year on New Year's Day. It's about two magicians who share a secret. They're immortal and they keep meeting up in different decades. This is from episode 3, which took place in 1916. In our last conversation, I accused you of sabotaging my career.

I know, I remember. But you may have given me a great gift. After all, my career has never been better, and it seems I have unlimited time in which to improve upon it. You don't think that's ill-advised? What do you mean? Only that— Well, this was precisely why I came here tonight, and why I've hand-in-hawed over reaching out to

you in the first place. I wasn't certain how wise it would be for us to be seen together. Hardly a scandal for two conjurers to be in the same room, especially ones who have worked together. But might it not draw undue attention? It's one thing for you to flit about from continent to continent doing your shows and having your face on posters when the audiences change. It's quite another for those audiences to see us side by side. It would just be another illusion. There are some tricks that even the most ardent Magic fans will have a hard time justifying

as tricks. I've enjoyed seeing how these two men keep updating their ideas about each other in the world as time marches on, but their faces look the same. Lauren has said in the past that masculinity is a topic that she likes to explore in her work. So I asked her how that plays out in this story about these immortal frenemies. Oh, wow. This is such a great question.

Nobody's asked me this about New Year's Day specifically. So, yeah, I mean, just, like, briefly talk about the inception of New Year's Day as, like, a contrast to Breaker Whiskey. And, yeah, and to sort of the thing that I'm complaining about. You know, I was in the middle of writing Breaker Whiskey at the same time, so I sort of thought, what is the opposite of that? What would be the opposite of this that would still kind of be a deconstruction of the 13-episode season?

And it was a 13 episode season that takes place over the course of 10 years. Because we released three episodes in our first year. They're now backdated in the feed for fun, basically. But we released three episodes at once, just to kind of get the ball rolling on the story. And that'll be one episode until 2030. I can't remember.

2033, sorry, that's it. And I hadn't really been thinking about the masculinity of it all. I think because that wasn't, bizarrely, that wasn't at all where the idea had come from. But then in the course of writing the first three episodes, getting that ready for our first release last January, I did have that realization of, oh, OK.

I'm sitting back into one of the topics that I really love exploring in lots of different media. And I think the thing that's been most interesting for me, because along with every year, January 1st, a new episode comes out, the intervening 12 months, there's a newsletter that fills in the intervening 12 years because they meet every 13 years. So there's like letters and journal entries and all that kind of stuff sort of in this newsletter you can sign up for. Doing sort of the research that I've been doing about letter writing specifically, because obviously I want there to be a degree of authenticity to the newsletter,

is the ways in which men were writing letters to each other, or people were writing letters to each other in the 19th century was incredibly affectionate. One of the things that really struck or people were writing letters to each other in the 19th century was incredibly affectionate. One of the things that really struck me is that saying, dear Mr. Chambers, would actually be more informal than saying, my dear Mr. Chambers. And that I think is so indicative of the ways

in which people spoke to each other and wrote to each other 100 years ago, which is that my dear would actually be the formal way of doing things, not the affectionate way of doing things. And so I think the thing that I've gotten really excited for with New Year's Day is the most recent episode was 1929, the next one will be 1942, obviously a very interesting year to visit in America's history. Just between I think those like 1929 to 1942, there's going

to be some really huge shifts in masculinity, kind of leaving behind the last vestiges of the 19th century and moving into what we consider sort of 20th century American masculinity. And for two men who have the sensibilities, were adults in the 1890s and have now stayed adults and kind of changed with the times gradually, what is that going to look like for them? And especially when the only other person in the world that knows the truth of who they

really are and their mortality is this other man, there were only so many changes between 1890s masculinity and 1920s masculinity. Whereas I think now we're going to see a lot larger leaps. And so it's going to be it's going to get more complex, I think, as we move forward. I mean, it's definitely a broad topic in terms of, you know, American masculinity or masculinity overall. Why do you think you keep coming back to it? Why does it continue to fascinate you? You know, it's something that I have spent a lot of time thinking about is like, why is this so interesting to me? And why do I love writing male characters specifically

because of my fascination with masculinity? And there's at least a couple of factors that I've identified. And I think one of them is the fact that whether we like it or not, our world is ruled by ideas of masculinity, right? Like we, well, it's better than it was 60 years ago. It's a little bit worse than it was five years ago. But like we do live in a patriarchal society in which ideas of masculinity and ideas of gender roles

and things like that are driving a lot of behavior, a lot of what we see as power, what we raise up as power. And so I think as somebody who was born and raised as a woman, having this sort of construct of which I am not a part, but that still dictates every element of my life is just inherently fascinating. There's the need to understand the building that you live in, even if you don't have the keys to any of the doors, right?

You still want to know what all the rooms are. Huh. That's really interesting. Do you ever worry about running out of ideas? Oh my God, constantly. Really? Because you seem like you have this creative well that you're just like always dipping into. I know, like literally constantly. I worry about this. And I think part of it is the fact that like mostly I just like try not to think about it too much. I rarely prompt myself for well, no, I guess that's not true because, yeah, breaker whiskey and the brights and sort of came from a place of like what's something I can do on my own? What's something that, you know, I can do with the skill set that I have? Like, I often start with ideas from resources, right?

Like, what resources do I have in front of me? And what idea can I? Like a form follows function idea. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. But beyond that, I mean, it's really just like, oh, I had this like weird interaction today. And like weird interaction today. And that's made me think of something. Or my best friend is a priest, and I was at her bachelorette party. And I was like, this is the only bachelorette party that I'll ever be at where I'm outnumbered by priests.

And my sister was like, outnumbered by priests sounds like a fun, cozy murder mystery. And I'm like, you know what it does? It can be as simple as that, of just something silly that somebody says or that you say that then you stow away. And it's like, yeah, I would love to do a cozy kind of knives out mystery at some point. Maybe it will involve being outnumbered by priests.

Who knows? It can come from a lot of different places. But mostly, I just sort of let them come when they come and write them down and then don't think about it until I'm at a stage where somebody is like, hey, do you have any pitches? And I'm like, sure, I can. That is it for this week.

Thank you for listening. Special thanks to Lauren Shippen. I have links to all the shows that we discussed in the show notes. My assistant producer is Stephanie Billman. We have another show called Between Imaginary Worlds. It's a more casual chat show that is only available to listeners who pledge on Patreon. In the most recent episode, I talk with podcaster and game designer Drew Meyer about the newest tabletop role-playing games he's excited

about, especially ones that mix different genres. There was Sentai and Sensibility, which is a Regency-era romance social interaction game, but you're all Power Rangers, and within giant mecha suits. Oh my god, that's amazing. Between Imaginary Worlds comes included with the ad-free version of the show that you can get on Patreon. You can also buy an ad-free subscription on Apple Podcasts. If you donate to the show on Patreon, at different levels, you get either free Imaginary World stickers,

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