Slow and Steady May Win the Race but We're Impatient Bitches

My peaking is now happening at negative 60p. That doesn't just. It's gonna bug me forever now.

So weird.

Yeah.

I wish I had answers for you, but I don't.

Yep. Okay. Well, hello and welcome to behind the Locked Doors, a podcast where I forget to come up with a joke sometimes, and it's just a thing. So we're just here.

I am Scott.

It's just one of those days. I am Scott Paladin. I am working on a crime, werewolf noir drama. Audio drama. Thing called It Takes a Wolf.

Go ahead, Mike.

No, no, I'm not. Sorry. I'm not gonna. I'm not gonna impersonate you this time. No. It's best done in small doses, Jack. You know, when you least expect it.

You can go anyways. But now I'm scared.

No. Oh, hello. I'm Interiority. I am working on a audio drama, a sci fi audio drama called Sundered. And I also have Sam locked up in my basement.

Yeah, because we don't. The rest of us don't know where Sam is, so for all we know, that could be real. Hi, I'm Jack. I'm working on Azin west, which is a spin off of the actual play, Unspeakable Distance.

Cool. So we'll start off with our check ins.

I'll go.

I'll go first.

My.

This thing I set for myself was a thousand words. I did not hit that. I think I got about 5, 600. Only. It's only that high because we're recording a day late and I, like, was rushing some of my homework last night, like, take the opportunity. So, yeah, I'm still. I'm still sort of struggling with, like, actually getting stuff down, and I'm not sure how much of that is, like, the disruption to my life that, you know, is still, you know, the fallout is still falling out and all that stuff, or if it's like part of it might also just be where I'm at or some combination thereof. But, you know, progress is progress, so we'll call that a moderate success.

Progress is progress. And so many factors can combine to create blocks to the progress happening. So.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Total sense. Go ahead, Mike.

So, Mike, how are you doing?

I am doing pretty all right. I can't remember exactly what I said last time, but I think I was very kind of, like, bold and ambitious and thought that I would have the full set of scripts. My first arc, which is gonna be three or four episodes, haven't quite decided yet. Done. I'm ready to show to someone not Quite there yet. I've increased the word count slightly, but most of it has been rewriting and polishing. But I have got to about 40 pages polished and ready to show to people. I've given the first 35 to someone a couple of days ago and just we start recording this. I had my feedback, so, yeah, so I'm feeling pretty good about it. Like, most of the stuff has been. Has been really positive. Like, comments include, like, heartwarming, funny, and harrowing, which is exactly the kind of the zone I'm aiming for. So I feel like I locked in a bit there, which is.

That feels like your vibe.

Yeah, yeah.

Simmons stuff in Unspeakable Distance was all like that.

Yeah, well, yeah, exactly. It's my brand. Sorry. Scott is distracting us with a very.

Very cutest dog I've ever seen.

Ye. Like, I just.

He ran over to the window, like, oh, my God, I have to bark at something. So I'm like, well, you're getting picked up then.

Well, air jail for baby.

Yeah, yeah. The other thing I've done is I've locked Sam away and I'm forcing him to write more on the draft in order to get more progress. So in a way, I'm helping out. That might be the way with the progress.

That might be the only way. I'm sorry, Sam, you're not here, so we are gonna rag on you a little bit.

Yeah, that's only a lot.

That seems like a lot's going on.

Yeah. I got the draft of the first half of the Azen west pilot from Sam earlier this. I don't remember if it was this week or last week. It was recently. And I've begun working on the second half of the pilot. So we actually did make forward progress this time. I don't know what my, like, word count is on this pilot 0.2 draft right now, but it's probably like 500ish words or something. I. I put down a couple. I bang, bang, banged a little bit at work the other day on the clock. Because capitalism.

Yay.

Hey, time theft is good. And we encourage everyone to as much of a podcast.

Yeah, you're not committing time theft. You probably should be.

Yeah. Okay, cool. Well, so we've. We've all made. We're all in. None of us stagnated. We all made at least a little bit of forward progress, which is great.

We love that.

That's. That's. I love that. For us. I normally try to bring, like, a topic to these kinds of discussions. So we have a little bit of Something.

I had one. I had one.

Oh, good, good.

Because I was saying I didn't.

Okay, I had a target, which is for all of y'all who are script writers. What is your favorite script writing software to use? Slash, is there one that's better when you pay for it, that's worth paying for it? Slash, Is there one that's better when you're trying to collaborate and share scripts with somebody else or like, you know, make edits to each other's scripts? Because generally I use Google Docs for almost everything, which is not totally ideal, but it does make it really easy to comment on other people's stuff and make edits or suggest edits and move the text around fairly easily. So what do y'all use?

So for basically all no three or four seasons on Breathing Space, we predominantly used a program called Writer Duet, which is an online only or almost entirely online service. You pay X number of dollars a month and it does have collaborative stuff in it. So it is pretty good for sharing out, which is in fact probably the best feature about it. I don't know if we'd used a ton of. I would share a script that was in progress and somebody would go in and write their own sections of it. But what it has is a pretty robust commenting system. So when you share out a link on Writer Duet that says, here's my progress, here's what I'm working on. Can you make comments somebody without even making an account, I think you can just go through and add comments to. I want to say something about this section. I want to say something about this section that is super useful for when you're getting feedback from people because it really easily ties where somebody wants to make a comment to what it is. And then you can go in and you can have a little conversation. You can go back and forth replying to their comment. And then you know, like it's got a thread thing on that. And then also when you resolve a comment, you can say mark resolved and like clear them out and stuff like that. That's really great. That being said. And it has a free tier, but it's like you can work on one script at a time if you're doing free tier.

And I think you get three total because I'm like at my script limit in free tier right now.

And so. And there's ways you can like offload your scripts. You can export them as like an editable format and then re import them later if you want to work on. But they want you to pay for it. If you're working on like more than one script. And I think it's one of those things where like, you know, I did my calculation for how many subscriptions I have right now, even after I went through and killed a bunch of them. And I'm spending you know, several hundred dollars a month on various services and things. And so like every one of Those little like $10 a month, $20 a month things all add up. And so I switched recently to a program called Fade in which I really like. It does all of the format stuff really well and it works, it's entirely local, it works to your, to just files on your desktop which is really nice. And in fact it's also got a really good Android app as well. And if you happen to use Dropbox or I think one of the other services, if you have your documents living in there, then it like auto syncs your stuff to your, into your mobile device if you're using it that way, which I found particularly useful. But I haven't done any sort of collaboration on it.

Oh.

So I don't know if people.

So we don't know if that works. Okay.

Yeah. How about you Mike?

Yeah, well, generally speaking I tend to use a program called Arc Studio Pro which is another one of these subscription writing systems. It can be web based, it has various apps, saves all your stuff into the cloud. It's quite easy to use as script software goes just for single use. I've predominately written most of my stuff in there and it's a nice easy, no brainer method to do stuff. But it does cost the free tier. Well the free tier I think kind of like does a similar thing as Writer Duet, as in like you're restricted about the amount of stuff you can do. And then there are a couple of tiers above that I don't like the way like a lot of the stuff is kind of like sliced in terms of like keeping some of the advanced features away from you because they've got some really kind of like cool like story beats and kind of like you know, idea vaults and things like that that you can add in and kind of use to tell you functionality when you're trying to flesh out a script or a series or something like that. And a lot of those are behind kind of, you know, a paywall to get to which I'm not too fond of. I do have Fade In. I have tried it. I do like takes a little bit of getting used to coming from somewhere which has kind of like quite a modern and Web based sort of layout and functionality. It's a gear change to move into, to Fade in to use and I need to kind of force myself to use it more because I'm just basically following the path of least resistance. I'm not too sure it's the best way to go. Also Fate Fade in has got great support templates which I think Arc Studio does. But you know, theoretically, like there's a lot more out there for Fade in and I'm especially interested in the. The radio format scripts, the BBC radio format scripts in particular. Just because. I'm just interested to try them out because. Because they are formatted in a way which is meant to help actors cold read. Because at least in the uk, kind of like a lot of the audio acting stuff kind of like follows the same sort of traditions that began with the radio plays. But also like sometimes you find in like you know, video game voice acting and stuff now where it's. The expectation isn't that you get the script in advance and you memorize it. It's you turn upon the day, you've got it on a podium and you're just reading like you'll give a couple of takes but then you'll go through. So the layout for that makes it more intuitive for people to be able to understand exactly where their lines are within the script and be able to just read cold from it. So I'm kind of interested in trying out and seeing if that has an effect on my actors, whether they favorite or not. So yeah, I think, you know, to do that I will need to use Fade in. But interestingly the paid work I'm doing for Bloody FM previously like Pacific, who's the head of content there, has been a big fan of Fade in and continues to be, but because of collaborative things that we need to do, has recently switched into Arc Studio Pro. So it may end up. I end up using that anyway for that sort of thing. Hopefully get access to the higher paid tiers just through work. So that'd be great. It's probably going to be a mix of the two, but those are the two tools I tend to use.

I will say also, I don't know if I mentioned but Fade in does have a paid tier, but it's a flat fee and I think you get multiple devices off of it too.

So it's imagined.

Yeah. Which is one of the reasons I want to try it because I want to support that business model if I can.

Yeah, yeah, it's nice. You just give it. You just give them 80 bucks. And you just. And then you apply your license and then you get. And they don't lock any of the features behind. If I recall, they don't lock any other features behind their paid version. It's that they have a nag for you. If you. It's like every time it auto saves like 10 minutes, it's like, hey, you're using a free version, that's fine. But we would like you to pay us. Which is annoying. But like also it does mean that you get the full experience and you really can look at all of the stuff. I know that and I will also recommend. One thing I really like about Fade in is that it's got a really robust reporting system. There are a lot of statistical reports out of Fade in that are really cool and a way to generate different types of scripts exports like PDFs based off of various parameters that you set. Like you can do just an export of one character's dialogue specifically you can do particular. You can do. I think there's even a version that's like it's everybody's dialogue but it's only the scenes that a particular character's in. So you really can break things down and give people just the sides they need.

That's amazing.

And that, that's. That's really nice. But yeah, the. I think it really is geared towards somebody I think working alone rather than collaborative, which may not be perfect for all situations.

Yeah.

Now we. I should look into because we as. There's pro. We as. As an organization library, of course Knowledge has a online database repository of files and stuff called nextcloud and nextcloud's one of those environments where people build integrations and build apps on top of it. So I should look because there might be a. There might be script writing stuff for that as well.

Oh yeah, worth checking.

Yeah, worth checking because I already did all the work to set it up. So which I set up another layer on top of that that might be good because it's basically that program is trying to be Dropbox and Google Docs and it's trying to be Microsoft Teams. It's trying to be OneDrive. It's like trying to do all of the things that all these cloud services do but while being open source and self hostable. And I bet there's some sort of writing stuff on there or hopefully there's script writing stuff specifically. So I'll look into that too while we're. While the. Now that you've brought it up because that'd be worth doing.

Yeah, not that I'm like terribly opposed to drafting in Google Docs and then like reformatting, moving the text somewhere once it's been like, you know, looked at on a first pass, whatever. But yeah, Google Docs is not very good for formatting anything.

When, when I first started trying to do scripts, I wrote my first, I wrote the very first thing I, I wrote very first thing for breathing space in Google Docs, just like character name, colon, blah, blah, blah, do the whole thing. And after that I was like, oh, what if. I know there's gotta be people who use Google Docs for script writing. And I looked up and there are templates you can download that will like help help auto format, but because it's having to work on top of that Google Docs layer, it doesn't do some of the stuff that's super useful in other software, like understanding that dialogue is paired to the character name above it and stuff like that, which allows you to figure out like, get a report that says, here's how many words each character says, which is super useful.

Very useful.

Yeah. And like Google Docs just doesn't understand what that means. And so it, it, it's, it's, it will totally work for you, but it, you are missing features for not using.

Something that's more dedicated, very basic. Okay, well, thank you lads, that was extremely helpful to me.

Thank you for bringing it up because it's reminded me that it's, I do need to find an excuse to, to really kind of like dive into, fade in and give it a go. I should have done it this. I decided to write porn script just unbidden away from my normal projects. But yeah, I could give more context to that. I might not. Who knows? That's fine.

No context required. Just leave that sitting there.

Yeah, well, and I am ostensibly, as the head of the network, in a position to help you guys out with some of that stuff. So if it turns out that fade in is something that you want to use, or if we need to move to a more extensible system, let me know. That's a thing that network is here for. So if it's, if it's something you want to have, but want to, you know, for monetary reasons or whatever, or you want to make sure we're all standardized on something, we can, we can talk about that as well.

Yeah, well, because also like when me and Sam were like, we got to bring in Mike, blah, blah, blah, like, it would be useful if the three of us were working in a format that was like easily editable. And shareable with each other, which Google Docs is so easy for that. But it is so bad at.

But it's not. It's not good at the script part. It's good at the collaborative part, but not the script part.

There's got to be something that's good at all of them, but I don't know what it is.

Yeah, I'll have to remind me. Remind me at some point when I'm not in the middle of a workday, and we can try passing back some Fade in scripts.

Okay.

Just like, literally, if I just hand you one that I've edited and you can see if you can make changes and stuff like that, because maybe that. Like I said, I don't know how good it is for collaborative stuff. I just have never. Because it's obviously geared in a way that isn't really. It's not designed for that from the ground up, but it might be good at it. I don't know. We just haven't tried, so. But that being said, knowing that Bloody FM moved off of it for more collaboration obviously does indicate that maybe is not what it's perfect for. But it's certainly worth exploring because we.

Well, yeah, it may be worth exploring for us. A team of like four or five people versus Bloody fm, which I believe is a much larger. Larger.

And also Fade in provides no infrastructure for sharing, so you would have to have that on top of something else. Dropbox or one of those other services. And we've got some of that infrastructure built in as well. So it might be. Maybe it's one of those things where if we're all in nextcloud and the Fade in documents are living in nextcloud, maybe it's okay to do some work in there and stuff. We'll have to experiment. That's a good thing for us to check out. Yeah. Cool. Well, thank you. That was a great question. All right.

It was one that's been eating at me.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's set some goals for the next couple of weeks and we'll see how we do. One second. I'm going to check because I just got a ping from Sam. Oh, they are here. Okay. Jump in if you want.

Like, you hear just in time for the closing segment. Let's do it.

That's fun. Yeah. This podcast is scuffed. It's fine. That's like.

Yeah, it's like four.

It's for the high chaos moves and stuff.

Which is why it's a good thing we got Mike on. Because I feel like the Chaos meter has, like, shot up.

Yeah. I'm sorry.

You've been here. Which I love personally.

Yeah, no, it's great.

Anyways, Star Wars Extended Universe podcast when.

Oh, my God. Don't freaking tempt me.

It's like.

Audience. We were talking about this before we started recording today.

I have no. My desire to replay the X Wing games is so high right now. I loved those games back when I was younger, and they're canon in my head. That's part of.

It's really like that.

Yeah. The amount of knowledge I have retained about the strategy guides for the X Wing and TIE Fighter, which had a narrative in between the, like, here's how to beat the mission. They would have this little story about the nameless person that you're technically playing as. And that's one of my favorite Star wars pieces of media for some reason, because I was exactly the right age for it. Great.

Right? It hit you.

Hello, Sam.

Hi.

Could not record Insert Sam noises here.

It's all good.

It's fine.

Sam life update.

Yeah. Could Sam get a breather for two seconds? Mayhaps?

Oh, yeah. I think we'd all like a breather, but it seems like we. You more than some of us.

God, I keep thinking like, oh, wouldn't it be nice to just have a week where I did not have obligations, like, where I could actually rest and, like, I don't know, clean my house and, like, catch up on my life?

Yeah, that would be great.

That'd be great.

Insert Sam noises here.

Oh, we don't have things yet. So do you want to give an update or do you just want to set goals?

Sam says some stuff.

Thank you for doing that. I'm making hands at you.

Then we're going to get into goal setting then. Cool. So let's see. I think I normally start these things, so it seems dumb to just be like, I'm going to do the same thing I did the last couple of times because it didn't work the last couple times. So I'm at a. I'm at a particular conversation that I am finding difficult to finish because I. It's.

It's.

It's with a character that I'm not sure I completely understand in my head yet.

Oh, sure.

I might just skip ahead. I am. I'm seriously considering just going to the next part of it and then I can come back to that other stuff later.

I'm clapping and cheering. This is how I always do.

So. So that's. Yeah, I'm just gonna say that's my Goal. I'm gonna go ahead and move one scene ahead to the big. The part that makes me hoot and holler.

Yes.

And we'll see how far I get from there. Let's do Mike next.

All right. So, yeah. So same sort of thing. Do I just repeat the same goal from last time? Possibly. Yeah, you can. Yeah. I'm still aiming to kind of get this first arc of episodes done and sorted. I think I'm about 15 pages away, like, from having it fully done. Like, most of those pages are written in a vomit style. Like, there is just words on a page. None of them really make any particular sense. The editing's fun, but, you know, like, it's gonna. It's gonna take a while. Because that is the most sketchy part of the whole first arc that I've done is that last bit. Yeah. I have made progress in that. I've kind of, like, I've had a conversation with a few folks about, you know, my ideas and whether it actually makes sense, because I had quite a few sleepless nights of just, like, staring at the ceiling going, I've been thinking about this for a very long time. It makes sense to me, but I don't think that's necessarily the case for every other human being in existence. So it's been very good actually talking to someone about it and kind of going, oh, actually, yeah, I can write this and have the confidence to put it on the page, and it's going to actually make some sort of sense. So, yeah. So armed with that confidence, I'm going to hopefully go into it and say, yes. By the time we connect together, hopefully that this will be done another piece and I can give it to someone for full, final feedback and, you know. Yeah. And then make a decision about where I'm going to go from. From there with it.

All right.

Yeah, we're all nodding enthusiastically.

No, no, I feel you. Yeah.

Yeah.

Jack and. Or Sam. Who wants to go ahead?

Sam.

Insert Sam noises here now.

Now it's my turn to have to do the homework.

Insert more Sam noises here.

Oh, good idea.

Even more Sam noises.

Yeah. I was, like, reading through Sam's draft of the first half of the pilot going, okay, I'm. I personally don't remember what I said as his flight number was, but I don't think this was it. But I don't remember it. So, yeah, there's a bunch of those little details we gotta go back and check.

Well, and just going back and listening to your inspiration material, for lack of a better. Because it's not always source material or whatever, but that's also just sometimes good once you've gotten a few dozen drafts in something to go like, oh, yeah, the thing that this source is from. How far have I drifted from it?

Right. Yeah. It's like, are we still on vibes for it?

Yes.

And my plan is to continue and hopefully finish drafting the second half of the pilot and get that back to Sam to look at before next time.

Okay. I'm actually going to add a second goal because we. Sam, while you weren't here, we talked a lot about writing software. And so I'm going to get with probably you, Jack. I'll probably send you some, like, if I can have you download Fade in as a demo and then we can try trading some files back and forth and just see how well that might work. That'll be pretty quick and easy for us to test, and that'll give us some data on whether or not that's something that we. That would be useful for you. And if that's something totally how the collaboration works. And if not, we'll.

Okay, sick.

All right, cool. Well, it was lovely to have the. Lovely to have. Lovely to see you guys again and talk. Brain's gone. I don't know. And we will catch you and the audience in two weeks.

Yeah. Have a good one, guys. Bye.

Sam says bye. Thank you for joining us for this episode of behind the Locked Doors. If you would like to learn more about us or our projects, you can find more info at our website, www.librarydoorhorse. or if you want to give us money, go to patreon.com cursed knowledge but by.