S2E4 - Page Counts and the Embarrasssing Ordeal of Being Watched Creating

Foreign. Hello and welcome to behind the Locked Doors, a I don't know time where we get together and talk about our projects. I don't have a joke this time, so. I am Scott Paladin. I am working on a horny werewolf audio drama called It Takes a Wolf.

Hi, I'm Sam Stark. I'm working on AZ in West, which is a follow up to the actual play Unspeakable Distance.

Hi, I'm Jack.

I'm Jack. And I'm great at voices, as you can tell from my impeccable British accent. I'm just. I'm just really good at it. I'm also working on as in west, but mainly I'm just doing the voice work just because I'm. I'm such a professional at it.

Chaos Demon.

I wasn't prepared. I should have been. I should have been prepared, and I wasn't.

I can only apologize. I'm sorry.

Hi, I'm Mike. I'm here to cause problems.

Perfect. 10 out of 10, no notes.

Okay, well, on that case, let's check in.

Got it. Nailed it.

Yeah. See where we were? Let's see. I'll go. I'll start first. I said last week, when we were. We had melon, that I wanted to get a thousand words written, which I felt ambitious considering the chaos of my life right now. And I got about 500, 600, something like that, which I'm calling a success because it was. It's good stuff that I like. So I'm gonna. I'm gonna call that moving forward, and that's good. So.

Yeah, totally.

And, yeah, I think we're all in agreement that that is good progress.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Jack and Sam, you guys were sort of a joint thing, contingent upon each other. So how are you. How are y'all doing on yours?

Okay. So I wrote the first episode minus, like, probably 500ish, like, basically the ending. And then I was like. Then I got really sick. Like, really sick. Like, 102 temperature. Absolutely. Just. And. And Kira, my youngest, was. She. She had. She had a fever for, like, five days. And it was really rough, so I didn't. Yeah, I didn't finish. And then. Okay. So then last night, I was working on it a little bit, and I was like, okay, I think I have the ending. This is great. I'll be able to send this off to Jack tonight before we do record tomorrow. And then, like, inspiration struck, and I was like, wait a minute. And then I got this cool idea, and I was like, awesome. I only have to rewrite most of the episode, but I'm actually extremely excited about it, and I'm very, very. It's going well. It's one of those ideas that's percolated, I guess, long enough in my head that it's fully fleshed out now. So I'm very, very confident and very happy that I'm going to have something for Jack to read within the next couple of days.

Oh, good.

And I'm actually gonna be really excited about it. Really, really happy.

Sick. And Mike, how are you doing?

That's very exciting.

I mean, you know, clearly I'm spending most of my time just causing problems for people. I'm not really gonna have a time.

If that's your goal, then I know.

And you're doing exactly as you should be.

Yes. No, the problems I'm causing are mainly for myself, but with regards to kind of, like, previous progress and what I was talking about, I have reached the point, finished what was ostensibly the first episode as a vomit draft and realized that it's probably gonna be between three and four actual episodes because it's so long. It's so long. So I've taken the first section of this, which I'm currently deeming kind of like maybe episode one, maybe episode zero. I'm not sure, but it's about, like, 15 to 20 pages. I can't remember exactly how much about that. I've given that to someone who is an audio drama professional and they read it and their first feedback was, I love this. So I'm feeling very, very energized.

Awesome.

It's very much my introduction to the characters and also a bit of the exposition. So I was like, I need this to be endearing and also get across information. And it seems to have done that. So, yeah, awesome. Not done. But, yeah, I'm feeling very confident about it.

So, yeah, that's great. So I love the discovery of being like, type, type, type, type, type, type, type. Oh, dear. This is three episodes actually.

Low, dear.

It's great. But in a way that means you're further along than you thought you were because you thought you were doing one and now you're. You're actually well into others as well, a little bit.

But it also creates some structural issues I'm gonna have to go back and fix because I. I'm a blowhard. I keep going on about, oh, like, like, you know, like, episodic structure is something that's. That's not really prevalent in audio drama. Like, you know, people just make a movie and divide it up into pieces, and you Know, episodes need to be kind of like, satisfying and have the kind of, you know, they are gonna pay off and something thematically they're talking about. And I've gone and done the exact opposite of what I'm preaching about. So I need to go, just, sake of my pride, if nothing else, go back and actually try and do what I preach. So.

Yeah, well, yeah, I mean, but that's. What draft number, not draft zero. I guess you're the next. Whatever the next draft is.

Yeah. Then the next one down the line.

Yeah. Next one where you go back and add structure and you're like, you go back and things that you establish. Four episodes later, you're like, oh, I need to go back and add that. I need to set this up and all that stuff. Yeah, that's what it's for.

Imagine foreshadowing on purpose. My God.

Yeah.

Considering it was like a first episode in my head, it has very much turned into a first arc. And it's probably gonna be about 10,000 words.

Yeah. For just that chunk. Yeah, that's definitely. Yeah. I mean, but it's. It's not uncommon, even on episodic stuff, for that first arc to be a more contained thing. I mean, like, the double length pilot episode is a very common aspect of even very episodic shows sometimes.

You got it.

Yeah. I mean, like thinking of, you know, Star Trek, Next Generation, where they're like, oh, yeah, let's start with a movie basically. And then.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So that's. Even if you. Even if you can't make the episodic thing work at the beginning, sometimes you just need to get it all out. It just is the way.

I have a question coming from prose and like book prose and novel length writing and stuff, or short story, whatever. It's completely different than screenwriting. And I've noticed that when people are talking about short stories and novellas and novels and things, we talk about word count. And I don't have the faintest idea, like, how many pages certain things are. But people that work in screenwriting always talk about pages. Yes. Can you guys give me an idea of like, Mike, I think you said 10,000 words or something. How many pages is that if it's a screenplay? Screenwriting.

Yeah, I think that's the thing. It very much depends because my tool picks up the word count based on the dialogue. So it's how many words are spoken. So it doesn't take into account the actions, the various sound cues. I'm giving you my sound designer and the various parentheticals and stuff like that come up as well. So it does vary at the moment. It's looking like about 56 pages at the moment for the 10,000 word count, which kind of roughly tracks with some of the stuff that I've written in the past. But yeah, that is kind of.

Does that roughly translate into like an.

Hour of audio or about an hour? Probably about 60, 65, 68 minutes, I think.

Cool.

Okay.

Yeah.

Okay.

The. The general rule. Yeah, the general rule is the way. Because that's what. Like, there's a specific format for screenplay, the scripts and the way that's set up is generally you can estimate about a minute a page. That's not, in my experience with our stuff. At least with. With at least with what I write and what I've also seen other people write, it comes out to be more like a minute 20 per page. Just because the way the pacing is all worked out, you probably can't just be saying, yeah, yeah. And so, like, I can give you an example here I am looking at one of my guys. So 7,000 words on this episode. So, like. Yeah, 7,000 words in this case, translated to about 32,000 or 32 words or 32 pages. Excuse me. So 7,000.

Okay.

Or more to about 30 pages. That may be a bit off because I have this particular thing is very, very narrator heavy. So there's huge sections where there's just one person talking. And so that can really skew your page count to word count thing. But that's just as one data point for you.

It was just something that I was thinking about when I was writing this episode because, again, I write, you know, as long as it needs to be whatever, to, you know, I have word count. And I wasn't thinking about, like, how long it's supposed to be for, like, how many pages or whatever. But I think it's. I think it's gonna be fine. I think it'll work out fine.

Well, and if it's, like, longer than we want it, we can edit it down. It's no biggie.

Yeah. And you can always split things, again, two parters and stuff like that. Yeah. The other translation that we. I've typically used in the past that goes directly from word count is 3,000 words. Total is about half an hour usually. At least when we were doing Breathing Space, that's pretty much a pretty good rule of thumb for the type of stuff we were doing. But that can vary wildly. If you're Aaron Sorkin and you're cramming as many words into Every second of screen time as possible, then that can be way off. And if you're doing a really slow, very calm, contemplative thing with lots of ambient noise and log pauses and stuff, it can go much longer, too. I would be fascinated to hear more of the why, of why that developed as the convention of using pages versus word count. I'm presuming it's just because it was an easy thing to work with back when things were actually typed out and you would swap certain pages out rather than other sections.

Or like being, you know, handing an actor a stack of scripts and being like, this is so and so many pages.

You got to have, you know, physical pages.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I've got a question for y'all, because I have been in this new space for about a month, and we don't do visuals on this thing, so the audience won't know. But in the past, my behind me, people would have seen a wall with a big stuff. And now I'm in the openness of all spaces. You can see my very messy apartment behind me.

This is like your entire living room and kitchen.

Question mark.

I think I see your fridge in the background.

Yeah. So my wife is in the bedroom, which is behind the wall that this computer is on. And then I have this giant space here. But that also means that I'm used to writing in a closed off, little private space, a sanctum. Right. And being able to wait till the right moment when stuff strikes me and pace around the room and talk aloud and stuff like this. And I find that much harder to do in the space. I am finding the actual. How do I, like, make this work? And so I want to know what the actual environment of y'all writing, what that works out for you, what works best for each of you. Like, where can you be. Can you just be on the couch?

Sam, what is funny?

Sorry. I have children and that's always like a thing that makes everything hard. And when I wrote my first book, we were kind of in the middle of moving and we lived with my in laws for a while. We were very unstable in our housing for a long time. Like right when we got out of the military. So we had a baby and we had people around all the time. And I really depended on my laptop, so I could like go and sit in the bathtub or I would go in the bedroom and sit on the floor like in the corner or something. But then as time went on and there was just. There was always people in our apartment. And then we got a house and there was more kids and life, and there's no room, really, to have my own space. And my laptop turned into what I'm using to record, so it never moved. I had to just sort of learn how to write with people in the background. And so the latest novel that I wrote, I actually did it in the middle of the living room, like, at my gaming computer, with people behind me and interrupting me and talking to me.

Okay.

So I think I just trained myself to be able to write anywhere. Okay. But I absolutely prefer being able to sit somewhere quiet where people aren't gonna. And actually, I don't even need quiet. I just need people to not, like, talk to me. I need to have people leave me alone. And so writing this, as in West Episode, in my booth, where I can lock myself in here, is kind of been amazing. The only people that bother me now are the cats.

So not bad.

And then how about the rest of y'all? How do you. How. What's. What do you. How do you find it? The actual, like, experience of. Right. Like, how. Where do you do. What do you go?

What do you do? Mike, you want to go? I'll go if you don't.

Yeah, I can go.

Please.

So I've. I've been someone who works from home for about 15 years now, so I've always had, like, at least some semblance of, like, a home office. For a lot of the time, it was a desk at the foot of my bed, because in London, spaces at premium. And actually, you know, having a separate space is difficult, and it's not something I would recommend, but it's something that. That worked for me, and I did. But also because, you know, I was living and working quite away from my family, I did have a laptop. I. You know, I would kind of, like, aspire to use it to write. But the thing is, because I was such a. And I'm very embarrassed to admit this, a gamer. You know, quotation marks around that. In my earlier days, my laptop was a gaming laptop because, you know, I would go home, I'd visit family, and I'd want to be able to, you know, like, do some recreation when I'm back there. So the laptop would weigh several tons. It would have a fan that sounded very much like a jet engine on takeoff, and it would have an exhaust pretty much similar to that as well, possibly on afterburner. So, like, being able to use it as a writing device was very, very difficult. Like, you know, I had multiple laptops, and they're all the same problem as in, like, it would roast my lap, render my genitals unuseful for anything in the future. But, you know, didn't really turn out to be a problem. But, you know, like, it was just very, very unpleasant. Like, you know, like, keyboard would get hot. It was always, like, constrained, you know, like, the key travel was always bad. So I would invariably always just work at my compute computer, which is where I'll be doing my, you know, my day job. And that kind of made it difficult. Like, it was. Because it was, like, great. I finished the day of, you know, writing a lot for my job. I'm now going to remain in exactly the same position and try and write, like, for pleasure or for art or whatever I need. And that put me off for a long time. Like, it is a little bit better now. I have, like, a, you know, their separate space for home work. It makes it a little more pleasant to do. I also have, like, a MacBook Air that I can use, and it does not have a fan, and it doesn't get really hot, and I can sit down and kind of use it. And, you know, I made the leap into home ownership. And I own a house that has multiple fireplaces. So in the winter evenings, I've been able to, instead of having the fire burning directly in my lap in a, you know, you know, a suitable setting, kind of like, you know, very aesthetically pleasing in front of me while I kind of of, like, type away in an armchair and, you know, give in to delusions that I'm an actual proper writer, which, you know, like, you've painted.

Me, like, a beautiful word picture right now of you in front of, like, a cozy little merry fireplace, tippity typing away in your armchair. Yeah.

I hate to admit it, but I have achieved the dreams.

I love that for you.

I love that for you.

You're living in a Ghibli film, basically.

Yeah, I can see it. Meanwhile, I do most of my writing on my phone curled up in a ball on the bath mat in front of the bathtub because I get the juice, like, while I'm in the shower, you know, and then I get out and I wrap the towel around myself because I'm cold. And I, like, crouch like a gargoyle on my bath mat and, like, on my phone, which I actually don't recommend. It's not good for your back. It's not good for your posture. But that is how I do, like, the majority of my writing. I feel like. Or after my wife has gone to bed at night. She is 99% of my impulse control. Re getting enough sleep. So if she's already gone to bed and there's no, like, there's nothing stopping me from staying up as late as I please. I'm out here tippity typing, like, I guess mostly I sit on, like, the couch or the daybed in the office. I don't often write at my desk for whatever reason. Mostly because there's always, like, craft projects on my desk, so I'd have to move everything to use it for that. But, yeah, I do a lot of my writing, like, perched about with my laptop and, like, a lap desk. I have one of those. Like, it's like a plastic. It's for children, really. It's like a plastic, like, tray with a little kind of beanbag cushion stapled to the bottom. Like, put that in my lap so that my laptop fan isn't, like, blowing directly onto my legs and.

Right there. Gotcha. So I'm definitely hearing a backing up of the idea that, like, seclusion and quiet is very helpful for all of you.

Yeah.

Except for when you've trained yourself out of it.

Yeah.

Yeah, Sam. More powerful than any of us. Just going, well, I've decided I don't give a fuck.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I'm. I'm gonna have to figure something out because I've only got this desktop. I don't. I have a work laptop, which I'm not going to use for this kind of thing. But I'm gonna have to figure something out because, like, the. The thing I was thinking about last night, and I realized, oh, this, this. It's an. It's not entirely psychological, but part of it is also I have a very large screen. It's in full view. So if I'm tippity typing away and my wife walks by, like, despite the fact that she's a very polite person who would not read over someone's shoulder. I do feel the eyes.

And then there is the alt tab. Instinct is so strong.

Yeah. The instinct that's still in me from when I was 13 of I need to not. Whatever I'm doing on the computer, I should not be doing it.

Because that's typically literally the same.

Yeah, it's like the instinct of, like, I should be.

Do not look at my Internet.

But also, there's a certain amount of. What's the way to put this? There's a certain amount of. The creative process requires a lack of self awareness. And once you are aware that you are a writer in front of a thing and that what you're doing Is kind of silly. There is a certain moment of freeze of like, oh God, what am I doing here? I need to. I shouldn't be observed while doing this.

Yeah, this is a wretched process.

Do not perceive it, please. It feels that way anyway. And then that is directly antithetical to creating and being creatively free and all of that. Um, so I'll. I'll have to come up with some sort of solution. Maybe I can just train. I can, I can just pull a Sam and train myself to not care. Um, but maybe I'll.

Okay, actually, hold on. I have a suggestion. And I've done this in coffee shops many times. If I'm going to be in a place doing creative work where other people are around, I find it very helpful to position myself in such a way that my back is to a wall and the screen is facing me. So people would have a very hard time coming around behind me. Then I at least feel like, oh, there's other people in this space being productive. Coffee shops especially. I feel like it's nice to around the energy of a coffee shop while I'm doing creative work. Like people are bustling in and out. People are ordering their coffees. They're having little conversations in the background which I can't really hear because my noise canceling headphones are canceling them, but I know they're there. That makes me feel like I need to be productive. But it also like if I. If I've like set up my screen in such a way that no one's going to look over my shoulder, I don't feel that pressure of like eyeballs on my work.

Yeah.

But I get all the benefits of eyeballs on the work.

I have to second that. I have to second that because that's how I began training myself. When I was in the living room and there were people there all the time. I back to the wall moved. Yeah, I moved the desks around. So I at least was almost like you would have to literally walk around a lot of steps to get behind me. And it helped so much that I knew people weren't behind me. Maybe looking at stuff.

Yeah. Unfortunately with this particular. I really. I vibe with all of that. Similar to coffee shops, I've also in the past gotten good use out of libraries. Libraries are a fantastic place that you can go and just like be without having to spend money. And then you know, if you bring a laptop or a tablet or something like that. But yeah, unfortunately the physical layout, I don't think I can move this desk. It's literally too wide to turn the other direction. So it's like the spot that it's going to be. Yeah. And I really didn't. Well, I don't know. Part of me is like, I shouldn't spend money right now. But part of me is also like, what if I bought a laptop? Can I get a new toy? Would that solve this problem? Can I solve this problem with money? Yeah. The American way to solve the problem with the money.

Well, okay. Also, listen, if you. All you need that machine for is the tippity typing, it could literally be like an iPad with one of those little mini keyboards. You know what I mean? Like, it doesn't even have to be an entire laptop. You just need it for work process.

And there are people out there. If I put the call out for somebody's old laptop, I bet I could get a hold of somebody's crappy one. All of mine degraded into dust over the last 10 years since I last bought one, where there was literally using a laptop until nothing on it worked anymore or wouldn't even turn on. Yeah, they did good. They died a soldier's death.

Pulled their weight, Lived a long life.

Okay, well, so that is excellent feedback from all of y'all. I feel warmed in the hearth fire of community in my struggles. So let's go ahead and set some goals. So we're going to meet again in two weeks. I'm going to set basically the same goal, which is I want a thousand words, which just to keep myself moving. That's my goal. That's my goal setting. So, Sam, you sound like you're feeling pretty good about the next couple of days.

Yeah, it's basically the same goal. I will have a rough draft of the first episode for Jack to read.

Okay.

Yay. I would like to read that draft, and then by the next time we meet, at least have, like, roughed through the second half of the pilot fingies crossed if I don't get that far. At least having read what Sam has and started working on the second half of the pilot would be enough for me this week and last week has just been a mess in this house. Also, my grandmother was having health issues. I was, like, driving an hour back and forth to see her multiple times a week. So it's just been crazy. But she's getting better now. We're gonna be fine. But I should have actual time to, like, dig into that in the next.

To crouch on your bath mat and towel.

Yes. Get some quality bath mat time.

Exactly.

All right, Mike, how about you?

Well, I'M going to try out the bathmat thing for sure.

Yeah, do it.

I expect that to take up at least a week of my time as I experiment with various kind of layouts and positions. Yeah, continue onwards. I want to get the second part of this first arc done and kind of sealed in, you know, to a point where I can hand it off to someone else. And I also want to do another polish run on the first part and give it over to someone who might want to help me produce it. Who knows? We'll see.

Awesome.

We'll see.

Cool. But, yeah, excellent. All right, then. That is our goal setting for the two weeks. And we will see. I will see all of you and we will hear from. Or the audience will hear us again then. So bye.

Bye.

Bye.

Bye.

Bye.

Okay, y'all, my dishwasher is going in the background, so I'll be quick. This was behind the Locked Doors, a production of the Library of Curse Knowledge. If you want to find us, you can probably Google that and maybe, you know, give us money on the Patreon or whatnot. Or just tell a friend. Anyway, bye.