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Breaking up is hard to do
25/4/20 10:48I've been producing the Story Grid Editor Roundtable, a reasonably successful writing podcast, for the past couple of years. We've made 115 episodes, 95 of them fully scripted hours. I've edited them all. I'm proud of our work. We put it out there in less-than-perfect state, improved as we went along, and broke a lot of new ground in our subject area.
Our long-range purpose was to give away the store: generously share our fiction-editing expertise and thereby slowly build our platform and our "social proof," and attract paying clients. This has worked fairly well--better for some of us than for others. Me, I'm unapproachable and scary, so my clientele has grown slowly, but I get the scary, serious people, and that's how I like it.
Now signs are pointing to my leaving the show behind. The first sign was a bit of a rearguard action a week or two ago that seemed intended to undermine my own contribution to the show. The second was Kim announcing her intention to leave at the end of our current 12-episode series. The third was my own inability to even think of a contribution to the episode we recorded last week--to the point where I made no contribution at all. This pandemic situation robs me of about nine-tenths of my mental battery most days.
Naturally in a group endeavor some in-fighting is bound to emerge. Differences in style, goals and personalities have become more marked in this time of unprecedented stress. What's more, nothing lasts forever, and it's okay to let a good thing go when it no longer feels like fun.
Still, I've got a considerable investment here. If I walk away, I cede the platform we've built together. There's no obvious way to carry any of that social capital away with me.
So I proposed to the group that instead of recording an episode in our usual Monday morning slot this week, we have a meeting to discuss refreshing the show's format and trying new things as a way of salvaging it. My proposal met with near-silence, so I imagine that Monday's meeting will result, after all, in my leaving.
I'm not sure I care. Right now (and the mood is extremely variable these days) I feel only relief at the thought of no longer having to produce an episode a week. But next week, who knows?
Our long-range purpose was to give away the store: generously share our fiction-editing expertise and thereby slowly build our platform and our "social proof," and attract paying clients. This has worked fairly well--better for some of us than for others. Me, I'm unapproachable and scary, so my clientele has grown slowly, but I get the scary, serious people, and that's how I like it.
Now signs are pointing to my leaving the show behind. The first sign was a bit of a rearguard action a week or two ago that seemed intended to undermine my own contribution to the show. The second was Kim announcing her intention to leave at the end of our current 12-episode series. The third was my own inability to even think of a contribution to the episode we recorded last week--to the point where I made no contribution at all. This pandemic situation robs me of about nine-tenths of my mental battery most days.
Naturally in a group endeavor some in-fighting is bound to emerge. Differences in style, goals and personalities have become more marked in this time of unprecedented stress. What's more, nothing lasts forever, and it's okay to let a good thing go when it no longer feels like fun.
Still, I've got a considerable investment here. If I walk away, I cede the platform we've built together. There's no obvious way to carry any of that social capital away with me.
So I proposed to the group that instead of recording an episode in our usual Monday morning slot this week, we have a meeting to discuss refreshing the show's format and trying new things as a way of salvaging it. My proposal met with near-silence, so I imagine that Monday's meeting will result, after all, in my leaving.
I'm not sure I care. Right now (and the mood is extremely variable these days) I feel only relief at the thought of no longer having to produce an episode a week. But next week, who knows?
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