A critical part of the artistic endeavour… any artistic endeavour… is incorporating feedback at some point of your process. Ideally at several points in your process, but at least once.
For me, I usually send out my work twice: once at the end of the second draft (no mortal eyes save my own see the first draft, ever), and then again right before publication. This lets me do moderate course-corrections early, and then a final layer of polish right before the end.
The issue, of course, is finding moderate-to-major course corrections in that final layer of polish. Some seemingly small, “minor” change that snowballs into multiple chapters of shifting narratives, or completely changing character designs, or something akin to that. It’s a risk, certainly.
In this case, I’ve been receiving (and appreciating!) feedback on my audio stories, but this is the Final Polish stage of feedback in a sense. Because these are part of a whole “thing” I’m going to keep doing for a while, any feedback now will change my future processes to make things both smoother for me, and better for the audience. But it means a lot of front-loaded work… trying to get everything where I want it and where the people listening will, ideally, not know how much work went into it.
Things like… one of the recordings takes place in a bunker. For a few moments I thought about adding an echo (like you were recording in a relatively small room underground), but then I realized that I was, in fact, recording in a relatively small room underground (well, half-underground, my basement is a split-level) so I didn’t need to do that. But I could add, like, dripping water or the sound of air circulation fans. Or I could add the sounds of an audience during key moments, get involvement from the fictional crowd watching the same show that my actual, real audience is listening to. Stuff like that. And who knows, I may still! That’s one of the lovely things about doing a series… I can try out different things, see what works, what doesn’t. That’s the plan.
There are problems, of course. The big one is time… if I want to release these weekly (and I do), that means figuring out an entire process that I can complete quickly enough that weekly releases are viable. And I can’t do too much ahead of time… but maybe I should anyway? I dunno. I think about 6 weeks worth of “next episodes” should be about right? Just to make sure I can stay on top of things…
Anyway. Today I spend the day incorporating some feedback into the episodes I have already recorded, and trying to figure out good systems to keep that flow going for future episodes. Exciting stuff!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!