I just need to pause and take a breath. My podcast theatre production is reaching a huge milestone. We are nearly ready to release Act I of E-Vatar, and just yesterday, we released the Act I (calling it a season) trailer. This is a new sort of thing for me. I’ve never written a play, but this isn’t a normal sort of play because it’s really a “radio” play (podcast in this case). So there is no stage direction, etc. I have a narrator, sound music, and dialogue to tell the story. When I listen to the final product of an episode, I can see the scene in my head so easily, but I don’t see it on a stage; I see it in real life!

The other thing we’ve had to do, which many other production companies do for tv shows, etc, is use the Agile methodology. I’m a software engineer and this is commonplace. It is a way of building software (or a musical) in small chunks of work called stories in short spans of time called a sprints. I proposed that we use this because it became clear that this was becoming too big of a project to just wing it.

I built a Trello board and we began breaking down the show into small tasks for the director, cast members, the writer (me), the songwriters, and the sound engineer. Backlog, sprint planning, in progress, review, done. That’s the process that each story goes through in our process. It has taken the stress out of it and made us much more organized. It’s not easy to convince creative people to use such a business kind of method, but I think it’s catching on and working!

I’ve never been very successful at marketing, but I’m counting on this to go bigger than my other projects. I hope to have tv, newspaper, critics, ads, posters, mass email, and whatever else I can get to make this the success it deserves to be. There are some very connected people on this production who can make so much more happen than me.

To be totally transparent? I’m anxious. People have put serious work into this, but in a sea of indie art, it’s really hard to gain visibility! I’m counting on the more well-known artists to help me make this happen. But what if it never catches on? Sure, we would have produced something extraordinary to be proud of, but with no audience? That doesn’t feel good.

But to those of you reading who have the courage to put your art out into the world, you understand. You know that you do it anyway. And you keep on putting it out there because you believe in yourself and your art…and I definitely do.

And to those of you are not artists? Support us! You need us!