Hi there! My name is Blake, and in college I studied digital media and graphic design. In my media program, I covered nonfiction stories, writing about art censorship, campus issues, and local political happenings. But when it came time for my capstone project in 2022, the ideas I pitched felt like stereotypical stories I'd write - "I'm going to do a video story on drag queens and their relationship to music" - like some sort of BlakeGPT.
Earlier that year, however, I'd sat in my dorm room, inspired by folklore by Taylor Swift and Marvel's WandaVision. These two ideas merged (along with a love for Welcome to Night Vale and my being a raging homosexual), and I pitched my first fiction story - an eight episode audio drama about a girl in a coastal town, 1980s Rhode Island, who has a crush on the new girl at school. And I had one semester to do it all. I called it Cassette Tapes From August.
The first week back from Christmas break, I held a read through with my friends, only three episodes completed. That weekend, voice lines were recorded. If you listen to the production on season one, it sometimes sounds rushed (I daydream of remastering some of them when I listen back). We, by May, still managed to produce a queer story that sounded pretty alright.
The summer after I graduated, I moved to New York. Something I learned was that writing fictional characters is like being in love with yourself, but also you're hearing voices - the little characters in my head spoke to me and I giggled back. My thoughts were constantly being filtered through August and her friends, like a joke was something this character would say. It wasn't me anymore. I accepted that I missed the characters and began writing season two.
I took it slow this time, writing much longer and more detailed stories for the characters. In 2024, I released 6 out of the 9 episodes, but then I had to get a real job (yuck!). I have plans soon to release the remainder of Vol. II very soon, and in my research for promoting it, recently learned there's a major audio drama circuit here on Tumblr. I hope you absorb August's stories and love her, her friends, and her fictional town of Willowdale.
These... are cassette tapes from August. As in, the month of August, and August from Willowdale.
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