Five years in the making...
Five years kind of sounds like a lot of time to put toward developing a small sci-fi adventure podcast. The thing of it is, it wasn’t small when the idea first emerged. The working title for StarTripper!! I had at the start was
L I M I T L E S S * V E N T U R E S
and positioned Feston at the head of a multiverse-spanning underground gambling syndicate. Bets would be taken on outlandish challenges. Unknown alien parties woud make a tidy profit. Feston would be the center of attention they (Feston was a “they” at this stage) always wanted to be. The crew of Feston’s transdimensional space station would talk about them like a living deity. The show would be the center of a massive in-universe criminal conspiracy.
It was big and complicated.
I began writing a pilot soon after graduating Vassar College in 2013. I got as far as the bottom of page 2.
I read what I had so far, and looked at my hands like they had betrayed me.
Whatever this idea was, it wasn’t ready. In retrospect, it felt overly contrived, and worse, impersonal. I put LV on the back-burner, simmering it over a distance of two years and more than three thousand miles.
In Los Angeles, I spent my free time working with a number of talented creators on the mind- and heart-wrenching time travel audiodrama ars PARADOXICA. It was a beautiful two-plus years, seeing a community build itself with genuine fervor around this very sad thing we kept inflicting on your ears. It was a lot to process. Conceptually, emotionally, my mind would sometimes struggle to keep up. The rewards were obvious, so every time I got to write an aP script, I was having a great time regardless. Sally Grissom and the rest will be with me indelibly.
But then we entered the Bizarro Timeline. We watched the world begin to unravel around us at speed, with imagery befitting a scene from The Master & Margarita.
So I started to need StarTripper!! more and more. I needed a way to relieve a pressure I could feel building on a macro scale.
So I was essentially gifted the title of StarTripper!! from aP head writer Daniel Manning. The exclamation points were a critical component, he said, and I agreed. Suddenly we had a tone-setter you couldn’t deny. I removed almost every character from the show but Feston, who underwent a change from criminal mastermind, to a warm, genuine person with a humble goal. Since that point, the energy for this project has only increased, and your feedback has been amazing to behold.
I’m making the show I wanted to see in the world, one that I didn’t see coming from any other corner. Having you with us is a gift I get each time I wake up.
Thank you, truly, thank you for flying with us.
(This is a cross-post from our show Patreon, available for all to see! Check us out and check out our reward tiers, with more to come in the future!!)
turnnoffyourmind
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