(NOTE: As always, Director's Notes contain spoilers)
I first encountered the writing of Brie Williams on the wonderful podcast Getting On with James Urbaniak. I asked her if she would be interested in writing something for Night Vale, and she sent us the beautiful piece of writing that is today's episode. If you enjoyed it, I recommend he...
2018-07-26 16:39:52 +0000 UTC View Post(NOTE: As always, Director's Notes contain spoilers)
My wife and I got married a few months after we got engaged. We were married in a short ceremony that took place in our apartment, officiated by Carlos-voice/delightful person Dylan Marron, and attended by only our immediate families.
Thinking about episode one hundred, we discussed the idea of Cecil and Carlos getting married. We didn’t want this to be a lengthy multi-episode plotline. A wedding does not always have...
2018-07-26 16:37:53 +0000 UTC View Post(NOTE: As always, Director's Notes contain spoilers)
It's hard to remember exactly where you're from.
Even if you still live in your hometown, there's always change. Buildings are added and removed. People die, move away, or (even better/worse) change. Memories change, too, because memories are just narratives, not tangible events, and narratives are memorable because they are compelling, not necessarily because they are accurate. And thus they must be malleable to...
2018-07-26 16:36:37 +0000 UTC View Post(NOTE: As always, Director's Notes contain spoilers)
We generally write the podcast well in advance, assuming that we haven’t gotten horribly behind, so we had no way of knowing that this bummer of an episode would happen on this bummer of a week.
But maybe that’s ok. Maybe sometimes art shouldn’t be about escapism but about focusing the feelings that are overwhelming you, and giving you an outlet in which to really feel them. I hope so anyway, because it was too l...
2018-07-26 16:35:51 +0000 UTC View Post(NOTE: As always, Director's Notes contain spoilers)
I inherited some money many years back from my grandmother, Elnora Rey. It wasn't a lot of money. There was no estate or property to divvy up. But thankfully there were no debts either. She lived alone in an apartment, my mother and uncle (her children) nearby. She was happy to the end, the most loving woman I knew. She also had her affairs in order, so burial and services had been pre-arranged. She still had some savings le...
2018-07-26 16:34:57 +0000 UTC View Post(NOTE: As always, Director's Notes contain spoilers)
It’s sure been a while since we’ve heard from Tamika or Dana. I have a little spreadsheet showing me when we last used each guest voice, so I can tell you that we last heard Dana’s voice in episode 77, almost a year ago, and the last time we heard Tamika was in episode 65, all the way back in April of 2015 (!!!).
And that’s a crime, because Jasika Nicole and Symphony Sanders are truly great performers. The prob...
2018-07-26 16:34:00 +0000 UTC View Post(NOTE: As always, Director's Notes contain spoilers)
I grew up watching a lot of late night TV. I was around for the tail end of the Johnny Carson era, so for a while that was it. Just 3 network channels and PBS. Whatever you got, that was it.
I sat through a lot of Dallas and Murder She Wrote and Hill Street Blues and Magnum PI and local news. Sometimes we watched Mork and Mindy or The Greatest American Hero or Designing Women, but mostly my family liked crime dramas.&n...
2018-07-26 16:32:52 +0000 UTC View Post(NOTE: As always, Director's Notes contain spoilers)
Are you doing all right? Good, then let’s begin.
We are always looking for new ways of telling stories both within the world we’ve created, and within the medium of podcasting. There have been arguments on the internet (surprising, I know) about whether podcasting and radio are different forms of media or just different forms of distribution. I maintain firmly that they are different in form, and it is episodes lik...
2018-07-26 16:31:36 +0000 UTC View Post(NOTE: As always, Director's Notes contain spoilers)
In 1999, I watched the US Women's National Team win the World Cup on penalty kicks against China. I've been watching the Williams sisters kick ass in tennis for almost 20 years, and before that Martina Navratilova.
Every Olympics, I watch women's gymnastics, figure skating, diving, etc. I've recently begun watching the WNBA (and as of this writing my NY Liberty are in first place, so take a hike Atlanta Dream).
A...
2018-07-26 16:30:00 +0000 UTC View Post(NOTE: As always, Director's Notes contain spoilers)
The basic description we often give for Night Vale is “a town where every conspiracy theory is true”. And there are few conspiracy theories more pervasive and American than those about the assassination of President Kennedy. It was only a matter of time before we had to write about him.
But I wasn’t interested necessarily in going over the details of a real person’s death. Instead I looked to another American o...
2018-07-26 16:29:02 +0000 UTC View Post(NOTE: As always, Director's Notes contain spoilers)
I met James Moran at GeekyCon in Orlando last summer. He was onstage doing a live Tumblr Answer Time. I was there because I was going up on stage right after him.
He was hilarious and quick-witted and charming - and I might be remembering this wrong, but I think he also had bright stars and rainbows and bluebirds shooting from his eyes and fingertips.
I am wordy and self-serious in interviews, so I w...
2018-07-26 16:27:38 +0000 UTC View Post(NOTE: As always, Director's Notes contain spoilers)
Joseph and I talk a lot about flying. We both deal with flight anxieties while having to fly a lot for our job.
In talking about why flying is scarier than driving despite being overwhelmingly safer, I said "I suppose it's about control. You can control a car, but not a plane." Joseph countered that flying removes all illusion that we have control over our lives. There's an important distinction in his point. Illusion ...
2018-07-26 16:26:23 +0000 UTC View Post(As always, don’t read these until you’ve listened to the episode unless you don’t care about being spoiled in which case la di dah, aren’t you so above it all.)
I love beagles.
Let me back up. I love dogs. But of all dogs, I love hounds best. It’s their dumb floppy ears, you know? And of all hounds, I love beagles best.
Beagles are my everything.
When I was a small child, I used to hang out with my neighbor’s beagle, Romeo, in their drivewa...
2018-07-26 16:25:22 +0000 UTC View Post(NOTE: As always, Director's Notes contain spoilers)
PHONE TREE:
I have slogged through quite a few automated phone trees in my time, repeatedly pressing Zero or shouting "Representative" or slumping over in my chair and sobbing. Usually one of these "life hacks" works.
In the internet era, it's not hard accessing your account balance or looking up a frequently asked question or paying a bill on a computer. So phone trees can be frustrating, not only for the ...
2018-07-26 16:24:05 +0000 UTC View Post(NOTE: As always, Director's Notes contain spoilers)
The trial of Hiram McDaniels has mostly been played for a laugh. But we always knew where it was going.
The world of Night Vale is a surreal one. It’s sometimes silly and it’s sometimes creepy. Rarely is it mundane.
Because of that, mundanity has a special power in the writing of Night Vale. It’s something we deploy only when we really, really mean it.
The verdict in this trial is mu...
2018-07-26 16:22:56 +0000 UTC View Post(NOTE: As always, Director's Notes contain spoilers)
Molly Quinn has done several live shows with us. She's an absolute delight to tour with. I'm always telling people: work with Molly Quinn. She's great. I tell this to other writers, baristas, police officers, birds, anyone who'll listen.
Last year on our US tour, Molly joined us for a two-week stretch, but the character she plays in the podcast - Fey, the voice of the local numbers station WZZZ - didn't really fit at a...
2018-07-26 16:20:54 +0000 UTC View Post(NOTE: As always, Director's Notes contain spoilers)
Hello,
I’m writing to you from the Secret Night Vale Tour Rehearsal Location, in rural New York State, where the touring party has gathered to look at goats and horses, watch the sun move over the Catskills, and maybe even rehearse the live show that we are about to tour around the country.
This episode is a sequel to ...
2018-07-26 16:19:44 +0000 UTC View Post(NOTE: As always, Director's Notes contain spoilers)
I played one season of little league in Garland, TX. We were the outlaws. I played catcher. My batting average that season was .000. (If you don't follow baseball, then good, because I don't need you knowing just how terrible a batter I was.)
One thing I was pretty good at doing was catching the ball and throwing the ball. I was bad at doing either of those things while moving, so catcher seemed to be the one thing tha...
2018-07-26 16:16:13 +0000 UTC View Post(NOTE: As always, Director's Notes contain spoilers)
When planning out the plot for the second half of year 4, we talked about this episode and how we wanted to approach it. How do you write about the difficulties of merging cultures without making it a direct commentary on the refugee crisis or the current Republican race or any number of other serious problems of our time? Those are all things very worth talking about, but they are so weighty we thought it would likely quick...
2018-07-26 16:15:09 +0000 UTC View Post(NOTE: As always, Director's Notes contain spoilers)
When I was between 3 & 8 years old, I spent my summer days at Classic Day Care Center in Mesquite, TX. It no longer exists. It's a plumbing supply company now.
This is good news because they weren't very good at the "care" part of their title.
I mean aside from occasionally getting yelled at or smacked, Classic is where I learned to swim and and play soccer and make god's eyes. So it wasn't all bad.
... 2018-07-26 16:14:17 +0000 UTC View Post(NOTE: As always, Director's Notes contain spoilers)
Joseph and Jeffrey asked me to say a few quick words on the making of Episode 81, “After 3327.” This was a really fun episode to record for a number of reasons, the topmost being the chance to act with Maureen Johnson*. Intern Maureen is still trying to get those college credits from her old boss, who seems to be completely oblivious to poor Maureen’s situation.
When recording this section with (the real) Maureen...
2018-07-26 16:13:14 +0000 UTC View Post[There are no new episodes in January, so we're replaying a couple of old favorites. This one originally posted December 15, 2012.]
This episode started as a document in our shared Google Docs folder that I titled “A Story about You (an experiment in Night Vale storytelling)”. I had this idea of doing an episode with a completely different format from all the previous ones, but I didn’t know if it would work, so I stuck it in that separate document so there was no pressu...
2018-07-26 16:11:50 +0000 UTC View Post[There are no new episodes in January, so we're replaying a couple of old favorites. This one originally posted July 1, 2013.]
A couple months into Welcome to Night Vale, we started hearing from fans. We heard really nice things. We also heard descriptions of our podcast that we'd never considered. Such is the nature of an audience, of course, that the art you make must be received by other people, and those other people will react in ways you never considered. (As Gertrude St...
2018-07-26 16:10:29 +0000 UTC View Post(NOTE: As always, Director's Notes contain spoilers)
Joseph and I met the author Maureen Johnson on twitter a few years back. (She's @maureenjohnson. Go follow her. Do it now. You will not regret it.) She found our show about a year in and started talking about how much she liked it. We developed a twitter friendship with her, and that would have been a terribly confusing sentence for all of us just 8 y...
2018-07-26 16:08:50 +0000 UTC View Post(NOTE: As always, Director's Notes contain spoilers)
This episode was written with Zack Parsons, who last co-wrote episode 40 “The Deft Bowman”.
Zack is someone I’ve known and occasionally worked with for over ten years, and I love having him write on the show. He absolutely gets the Night Vale tone, and brings something dark and wonderful to his episodes that is very different than what Jeffrey and I do on our own. I asked him to talk a bit about this episod...
2018-07-26 16:02:47 +0000 UTC View Post(NOTE: As always, Director's Notes contain spoilers)
I watch a lot of cooking shows. As a child, I watched reruns of the Galloping Gourmet with my grandmother. My mother would sometimes watch Paul Prudhomme, and I would always stop down to watch with her. These days, my wife and I watch quite a bit of Chopped. (Alex Guarnaschelli is our favorite judge because we're not assholes.) I've noticed, though, that I rarely watch cooking shows alone. Food is only exciting when I'm with...
2018-07-26 16:00:19 +0000 UTC View Post(NOTE: As always, Director's Notes contain spoilers)
Have you ever read The Unexpected Guest by Edward Gorey? In spite of (because of?) its adorable simplicity, it's one of the most terrifying books I've ever read, and I would call the stranger in this episode a vague tribute to Gorey's guest.
The stranger here has no explanation, and like Gorey's guest, no perceived desires or physical action. I've always been fascinated with imperceptible movement in horror, like Dr. ...
2018-07-26 15:59:11 +0000 UTC View Post
Donor-exclusive bonus episode, released July 2018. Cecil, Carlos, the Faceless Old Woman, the Glow Cloud, Kevin, and Lauren Mallard answer your questions.
Send in your questions for future bonus episodes here: www.welcometonightvale.com/bonus-episode-questions
Donor-exclusive bonus episode, released July 2018. Cecil, Carlos, the Faceless Old Woman, the Glow Cloud, Kevin, and Lauren Mallard answer your questions.
Send in your questions for future bonus episodes here: www.welcometonightvale.com/bonus-episode-questions
2018-07-26 15:34:06 +0000 UTC View PostDonor-exclusive bonus episode, released April 2018. Cecil, The Faceless Old Woman, Carlos, Tamika Flynn, and Michelle Nguyen answer your questions!
Send in your questions for future bonus episodes here: www.welcometonightvale.com/bonus-episode-questions
2018-07-26 15:33:11 +0000 UTC View Post