Frequently Asked Questions

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Short answer: I stand on the shoulders of giants. I belong to a network of talented performers who enjoy eclectic projects. I am thrilled that they wanted to play in my sandbox.

Long answer: My best friend Jon writes rock operas. For fun. Seven of them, in fact. He and his partner Melissa wrote epic musical scores, using for lyrics the occult poetry of Aleister Crowley. I am not making this up. (https://ritesofeleusis.com/) Shortly after we met, Jon approached me to be in his first, The Rite of Luna. I put on some guy-liner and leather pants and rocked out with him, Melissa, and a dozen other people. I was hooked. A few years later, we did The Rite of Venus, and pretty much every two years after that until we had a virtual Solar System full of rock operas. Did he make money? Oh hell no. I doubt he broke even, but he loved it. Along the way, we met a bunch of people who enjoy being involved in theater and performing, but who also enjoy eating and sleeping indoors regularly. When someone from the cast had a performance somewhere else, we always tried to make it out to see and cheer and support their art. When The Muse finally knocked for me, all I had to do was go through my mental Rolodex (for those under 30 - my mental friends list) and say, “Hey, I’ve got this weird project. Wanna play?” and miraculously everyone said yes.

Short answer: "Only ever give as much as you can without resenting it."

Long answer: It sounds weird, but I am unaccustomed to what “normal” people do for hobbies (I don’t get out much.) I live in a place where people with hobbies I don’t understand will drop thousands, if not tens of thousands of dollars a year on stuff. So, when I began this project, I looked at my budget and made a guess as to how much I could spend without resenting it. At the end of the day, I hope to bring this in under $5,000. Might be more, might be a bit less. And it all came out of my personal pocket. 

Of that total, about $750 was for actor stipends. Yes, even for a shoestring production, I wanted to pay my actors something. The studio where we recorded was about 50 miles away, so some of that was for gas and ferry money. But I also wanted to acknowledge that people were working. Have I been on 100% free productions? Yes. Is my paying the actors a comment or criticism of that? No. It’s just how I roll. To borrow from another musical, "Money is like manure. You gotta spread it around and help things grow." I am privileged to live in a place where I can afford to do these things and I want to share that to the best of my ability. 

Why did we go to a studio 50 miles away? My best friend (of the rock operas) is a musician with a full audio studio in his basement and he had gratefully agreed to do the audio work for this project. What little research I’ve done for audio engineers and editors, that would cost me $1,000 an episode. Likewise, Melissa agreed to direct and wrangle and project manage everyone, and whatever directors get paid, it’s not enough. So while yes, Season One came in super cheap, it was because everything aligned in such a way to make that happen; it was lightning in a bottle.

Short answer: Because it was a hell of a lot of work and people should get paid.

Long answer: To use my friend Melissa’s words, Season One was the First Pancake. It was a labor of love and an experiment into "can I/we do this?". I wrote a story that I could be happy with; my friends and I made it happen. It was good and it was enough.  I am not crowd-sourcing Season Two so that I can run away to Tahiti. We all still have day jobs. I’m doing it so that people can get paid. 

And, along the way to making that first pancake, we all learned a hell of a lot about what it takes to make something like this happen. Perfect example: I looked at the script (three hours total) and assumed that since Rowan wasn’t monologuing for three solid hours, that it should take no more than three hours to record all his lines, including retakes. Wrong. As I write this, I have spent eight hours recording and we have about half of Rowan’s lines. Some folks with shorter line counts have been in and out in an afternoon. But for the most part, it’s taking significantly longer just to get the lines. Then add in production and sound and music and yeah, it’s going to be a while. If/when Season Two happens, we will know more of this and people can make their decisions whether or not to play. However, I have found that capitalistic as it sounds, offering people money often helps with situations like this.

For example, if Jon throws up his hands and says he doesn’t want to do audio work anymore, going to a professional would be $7k of the $10k I’m asking for. Or, I could, you know, pay my friend up front. And the director. And the actors. Me? This is my hobby. I’m paying myself simply by doing this. Of course, if a network wants to buy this and turn it into their own little animated fantasy series, I won’t say no to them paying me. A guy can dream, right?

Short answer: You’re probably right in that it is similar.

Long answer: "Creativity is the art of disguising your sources." - who said that originally? Elephino. 

In my neighborhood, there is a tree in which the owners have hung little trinkets, like keys and a ring. When I visited Devils Tower National Monument in Wyoming, I saw small pouches hanging from tree branches. The park ranger said they were prayer bags and I’ll leave it at that. Decades ago, I saw a comic book - if I remember correctly, it was Jim Henson’s Storyteller - where a character approaches a tree with masks hanging from the branches. The character then removes a mask, puts it on, and tells a story. Fairy tales from Ireland talk of the tradition of tying ribbons to a special tree branch for a wish, a prayer, or a gift of gratitude. Are my neighbors Irish (or neo-pagan)? Did Jim Henson go to Devils Tower? In creating the tree at Temple Pass, am I lifting from my neighbors, Jim Henson, the Irish, or the Crow/Cheyenne people?

I have spent my entire life consuming fantasy and speculative fiction (I mean, for my literal sixth birthday present, my dad took me to see this new movie that had just come out called “Star Wars.” A few short years later, he gave me the Hobbit and LotR boxed set). Back then, it was new and fresh and wow. When we grow up, we realize that Lucas borrowed from early pulps, European feudal knights and Japanese samurai, and frankly, lifted a non-zero amount from Dune. Likewise Professor Tolkien uplifted, rearranged, and rebranded Norse mythology long before Neil Gaiman and/or Marvel made it cool. Of course, Tolkien also went the - I do mean “extra”- mile and created multiple languages and about four thousand years worth of history to supplement his work.

The building blocks of a story are like a deck of playing cards. There are characters and situations that stand out as archetypes - cards in a deck - that I try to shuffle and shape into my own vision. So, an alcoholic “retired” paladin who’s seen some shit? Yeah, there are a dozen of those. And those with better recall than I can point out there are analogues of most of the other characters and situations, too. The extra nerdy among us will try to rebut by saying there are 8*10^87 different ways to shuffle a playing card deck.  And yet, through all those trillions of quadrillions of possibilities, people still manage to get pairs and straights and flushes. To lift from another lost and misattributed source, "History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does occasionally rhyme."

Unfortunately, I don’t consume as much media as I once did. Hell, only after I was halfway through the script did someone point out that there is a character in Baldur's Gate 3 named Shadowheart that some folks call "Shart." Am I going to say that my one unique contribution to fantasy at large is a long-lead dad joke punning short and shart? No, but I’ll take it.

Short answer: Thank you, and no.

Long answer: You may have noticed that the internet is full of people with opinions. I usually say that opinions are like assholes insofar as people need to get them checked regularly to see if there’s anything toxic in there. However, opinions are decidedly not assholes simply because people only have ONE asshole. I can spend hours scrolling through the new and improved (aka "enshittified") internet and find a plethora of people I don’t know holding up examples of what they think I should do. Their basis for that? Will it work? What do you get when you cross an elephant with a rhinoceros? Elephino. So thank you, random person on the internet for making suggestions on how I should do stuff to your liking. Instead, I am going with actual living, breathing people who I know and trust to advise me on this.

Likewise, the internet is also full of people who make a living at helping others achieve what they want. I’m thrilled that these consultants exist and wish them the best in their endeavors. And, again, I have no way to vet these people and frankly, I don’t have the time to do so. So, unless I know you or we have mutual friends? I’m distinctly disinclined to sign up for your service.

Short answer: No, and I never will.

Long answer: No, I never will, and fuck you for suggesting otherwise. 

I can go off for pages about why such stuff is a flash in the pan, headed the same direction as crypto and blockchain and IoT. Or I can simply say that GenAI is an insult to creative people and respond to an insult in kind. When it comes to fiction, I am an absolute amateur; I spent months agonizing over every scene in this script. Writing, re-writing, researching, writing more, editing, throwing it out and starting over. I made this. I would rather create nothing than pretend that a mediocre, plagiarized output of the lowest common denominator is good enough, let alone pretend that it’s my own.