Transcript - End of Season Q&A

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Bookmarks:

1.45: Are there any gods that you wanted to show or use this season, but just didn't find an opportunity for?

5.30: In terms of sound design, what was the hardest part to produce? What was the most fun?

10:20: Were there any scenes you were particularly pleased with the outcome of?

14.47: What was your Season Two moment where you just looked at the script and went, “Oh, that's a lot!”

25.35: Are there countries other than the Linger Straits and Peninsula?

27.39: How do you cope with managing an increasing number of plot lines and characters throughout The Silt Verses?

29.41: I love what Paige and Hayward have going on. How would you describe their dynamic?

33.00: Favorite line or favourite line read in Season Two?

41.26: Jimmie. How are you so good?

42.07: Are the hunter twins as young or younger than Faulkner?

43.20: Does Faulkner have combat training?

45.06: Is the Season 2 finale the last we'll see of Gage?

47.50: Was the Glooming Guest inspired by the UK miner's strikes?

50.56: If you could play any other character in this podcast or another one who would it be?

53.34: S1 was very monologue heavy, but especially toward the latter half of S2 we're taken less and less out of the immediate action to hear it narrated to us. Was this intentional?

59.15: Who is the coolest god? Which one could you get a beer with?

1.00.34: Is there a future where we can see side story episodes not tied directly to the story?

1.05.51: Talk more about the echo angel episode!

1.08.31: Is ethical necromancy possible under divine capitalism?

1.09.55: What resources would you recommend to aspiring podcast teams with respect to the production pipeline and showrunning? And are there any underrated pieces of advice that you could give us?

1.17.45: How did you come up with Paige's god?

1.18.07: Could you talk about your inspiration for the Cairn Maiden?

1.20.00: How did Méabh get into voice work?

1.23.50: A lot of horror audio dramas tend to reveal or overexplain — is it difficult to resist showing too much to the audience?

1.27.50: What parts of the new worldbuilding did you really want to get into for this season?

1.29.21: Jimmie – how do you feel about Hayward's journey from cop to rebel?

1.29.47: What inspired you to create Mercer, Gage, and the Beast Who Stalks In The Long Grass?

1.32.33: Is it possible that Carpenter’s behavior in season 2 is being influenced by the snare dog bite she got in season 1?

1.36.30: Daphne, what was your favourite scene to perform?

1.37.23: What was the thought process behind how Mercer and Gage's plotline wrapped itself up?

1.38.21: Did the way you think about Carpenter and Faulkner's relationship change between writing season 1 and season 2?

1.43.00: Are there any characters and or arcs that have been much better received than you expected, or conversely didn't get the expected love?

1.46.41: Could you talk a bit about the sound design for the final two episodes? (The battle)

1.52.17: Is Faulkner canonically trans?

1.56.49: Can we please have a very vague hint to the events of Season 3?

 

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TRANSCRIPT BEGINS.

 

A moment’s silence. Then we hear MÉABH, voice of CARPENTER, talking to an unseen PRODUCTION ASSISTANT.

 

MÉABH:

Hi, yeah. We've all signed the statement from my…the affidavit that I'm not, I'm not going to talk about the crab?

(Pause)

Have we all signed it?

(Forcefully)

I'm not going to talk about the crab. I'm not going to talk about the crab!

(Yelling)

I'm not yelling!

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Have you signed it? OK, thank you. Thank you.

(Pause)

OK.

(Pause)

Is that water tepid? Is it room temperature? OK.

​

 

A cassette tape is inserted. We hear it whir for a moment-

 

-then we hear light jazz music playing in the background and the murmuring of a crowd.

 

And finally, the voice of Mx William A. Wellman, of Hello From the Hallowoods.

 

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WILLIAM:

Ladies, gentlemen, and indescribable beings! This is not the podcast I belong in, but you may recognize me from stranger woods.

 

I'm William A. Wellman of Hello From The Hallowoods and it is my absolute pleasure today to introduce Jon and Muna for the Season 2 Q&A of The Silt Verses! Welcome back.

 

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MUNA:

Thank you for for joining us, and thank you for for spending some time with us today, William.

 

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JON:

If anyone who's listening to this has not heard Hello from the Hallowoods, please go check it out. It is a an imaginative tour-de-force; like us, it's a show that I think sits in the weird margins between weird fiction, fantasy, and horror and very much does its own highly original thing. So please do check it out!

 

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WILLIAM:

That, that is a space that I'm very happy to share, I think, with The Silt Verses! And really, you know, one of the things that I enjoy most about audio drama is how many sort of strange genre-bent shows can really, I think, go to places that I've never seen any story go.

 

And that's certainly something that we've seen with season two of The Silt Verses!

 

So we, we have some questions today from the fans.

 

From Prim (and Samakain), they ask:

 

Dear Jon and Muna - are there any gods that you wanted to show or use this season, but just didn't find an opportunity for?

 

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JON:

Yeah - there was, there was one actually, when I saw this question, that really came to mind.

 

So in the lorebooks between Season One and Season Two, we told an old war story. So obviously in Season Two, we do a lot of foreshadowing that there's gonna be war between the Peninsula and the Linger Straits.

 

And one of the stories we told was about a god of air.

 

And it's those elemental gods that you really try and figure out; “How can I use this in a scary way that isn't just, ‘oh my God, it's a fire monster!’?”.

 

So I had this idea of a god of air that hearkened back to the the real-life propaganda leaflet drops in in World War II, where a plane flies over dropping pamphlets saying, you know, “surrender.”

 

And I loved the idea of doing this in a, in a world where you have prayer-marks that can instantly transform people, or disfigure people, or do terrible things to people. So we have this story where a plane flies over a village dropping leaflets, and if you happen to catch one and read one, you begin to rise unstoppably into the sky.

 

So you could have this image of this entire village, filled with people just rising higher and higher helplessly until they stop struggling, and they'll die somewhere in the stratosphere.

 

Um, lovely image, and we had the idea that we could get a barman in to just tell this story to Dennis in one of the later episodes of Season Two.

 

At a certain point you realise that what you're trying to do with the season is…ridiculously over-ambitious and stupid.

 

We didn't have any more voice actors available! We'd used some people for three different roles already! So we scrapped that entire monologue, but I'm very sorry that we didn't have a chance to include that. Just to give a sense of, I guess, the tension between the two sides, and to work in a cool little extra god.

 

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WILLIAM:

I regret that not making the cut too! That sounds, uh, dreadfully ominous.

 

And I, I think something I really enjoy about The Silt Verses is that you, you don't just have a god in the terms of like a big water elemental or something - but that there's a usually some aspect of capitalism, or kind of our socio-political landscape that ends up kind of informing the darker nature of the god as well, and it makes every one of these interpretations so fascinating.

 

So I, I hope that even if we didn't get to see it in this season, it's still canon out there somewhere. And, you know – maybe fingers crossed we can see some after-effects stuff further down the line.

 

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MUNA:

Jon has a really serious answer for this one and it's obviously really brilliant.

 

I think part of what we could do with The Silt Verses, particularly if we continue to expand out the world, or if we have some spin-offs, would be to also have a…have a bit of fun with it!

 

I think some of the comedic parts land really well, and I am a deeply deeply silly person - so for me, I would love to see a god…I personally like the gods that are in the margins of everyday life.

 

Like, you know, the god that Hayward speaks about, the god of lost things that are found again, and other gods like that.

 

I would love to see a chaos god or saint. One that turns up at the most crucial moments of your life. Just to, just to thoroughly embarrass you!

 

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JON:

There was another one we had in the lorebooks you just reminded me of where it's a god for…its entire purpose is to have a really satisfying name.

 

So that when you something bad happens to you, when you hit your thumb with a hammer or you fall off a ladder, you can say it – like, “oh, shit!” “Oh, fuck!”

 

But this god's name is just so satisfying to say that it feels even better, and more cathartic.

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WILLIAM:

I love these answers! Let's continue on.

 

So a question from both Samakain and regicidal-defenestration – what a name!

 

In terms of sound design, what was the hardest part to produce? What was the most fun?

 

I will say I'm very interested in this one, because the soundscaping for The Silt Verses this season is just…chef's kiss.

 

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JON:

On the first couple of episodes we were working with Sammy, who worked with us on Season One, who's fantastic.

 

And gradually I've started picking it up myself, because...I really wanted to learn how to do it.

 

I really wanted to - I guess - have that closeness to, to the act of creation that comes with doing your own sound design along with your own writing.

 

But the hardest thing, I discovered…

 

Everyone always says it's going to be footsteps. “Footsteps are so hard!”

 

I haven't found footsteps so hard. We use a basic FX machine where, you know, you press a couple of keys and it gives you some vaguely realistic sounding footsteps - it's infuriating, but what I found most difficult was the blocking.

 

You don't think you need to worry about blocking, because it's audio! There's no actual physical space, the character's just wandering around in thin air. Why would you need to worry about the amount of time it takes for Character A to get to Character B?

 

The problem is we have so many walking monologues this season! We never solved that conundrum, basically. So if you go back and listen to the season, when a character is walking and talking, keep an eye on it. Because almost always, they're walking down a hallway that's impossibly long, or they're going down some stairs to the cellar and there are way more stairs than any cellar could possibly have.

 

It's as if they've entered some kind of bizarre, twisted, cosmic hell-dimension, and it's just going on there in the background, because we gave no thought whatsoever to “how do we fit a, a chunky three-paragraph monologue into a trip down one set of stairs?”

 

So, yeah. That's my tale of woe.

 

Uhhh, most fun? I think there was a…there's a scene in Episode Three where Hayward is investigating the mansion of the evil, twisted rich sadists.

 

And he ends up running to hide in a cupboard, the lady of the house Mrs Kenzie comes out and confronts him, and he accidentally stabs her with a prawn skewer and she stumbles around and then falls down and that was the most fun.

 

Not because it's the best scene in terms of either composition or writing or sound design…but just because it felt like a lightbulb moment of,

“Oh! Oh, we can do this. We can have a scene where there's this slapstick element to it, where we’re going quiet, and then suddenly going very very loud.”

 

And that just…it felt so exciting, all these possibilities opening up when you realize what can be done.

 

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MUNA:

I'd, I'd agree on that!

 

The thing that impressed me the most - I think it's because I am aware of the process, and I hear the process through different stages before it reaches the finished product - that there are some scenes that I can hear the different layers that have been put on top of each other. So there's the scene, which I think it's episode 13 or episode 14, where Mercer and Carpenter are fighting and they rolled out a hill and then they splash into the water and they continue to fight in the water!

 

For me, it’s…the difficulty has always been, “How do you make all the different layers of everything that's happening in one scene sound seamless when you are layering them one on top of the of the other?”

 

And I mean, yeah, it's something that we're gonna have to continue to learn and Jon has just done…he's been very bashful, but he has done all of the mastering, sound design, the editing from I'd say episode…yeah, quite early on, I’d say.

 

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WILLIAM:

I'd say I think there's something very special about getting to, kind of, design the soundscape that goes along with one's own writing! And I do a fair share of that over in the Hallowoods.

 

And, you know, one of the questions people ask occasionally is, like, “Hey, if you were going to make, like, your workload as a podcaster more efficient, would you ever outsource the sound design?”.

 

And to some extent that is one of those things I would really want to hang on to, because it can inform and add so much depth and believability to the writing.

 

And to the, to the question of distance? Tolkien - I don't have the exact quote in front of me, but - he said something to the effect of, “it is easier to start with a map and then tell a story rather than start with a story and try to construct a map.”

 

And unfortunately I'm very, I'm very guilty of starting at the story and trying to construct a map!

 

There's a lot of walking monologues, a lot of times where characters take an indeterminate amount of time to get between point A and point B, so that I don't have to figure out how many exact miles they might have traveled.

 

But, you know, I think with audio drama in particular you can get away with a lot! Because often you're getting these monologues that are these, you know, internal manifestations of the characters’ thoughts that we are privy to hearing. And especially The Silt Verses - I think you you have a number of these sort of internal narrations.

 

So you know, in a sense it's kind of like that anime thought-freeze where everything's in slow motion. You know, you're just going down one stair at a time, and you can take half an hour doing that.

 

(Laughter)

 

JON:

That's awesome! That's a great justification.

 

WILLIAM:

Exactly. Exactly! Haters, back off.

 

Jon and Muna, were there any scenes you were particularly pleased with the outcome of?             

 

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MUNA:

Probably the chase scene in Chapter Six where Shrue, our politician, is in a car driven by Jeff and they are being chased by the saints of love.

 

And it was just such an inventive use of music! You know, if anyone has listened to this episode, Shrue puts on a pair of headphones and they listen to classical music and a voice sort of telling them, "stay calm, this is an emergency tape," while in the background you hear the crashing kind of of the car through sort of the woods and the the underbrush, all overlaid with Jeff shouting and grunting and it was just…you know, when I first listened to it, I thought it was just such a brilliant use of various noises.

 

And it's probably one of the very few episodes that I listened to and didn't go, “…you could make a few changes here.”

 

I was, I mean, I was really blown away when, when Jon kind of put it together and sent it over to me.

 

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JON:

For me, I think, both episodes and individual scenes…it’s the ones that come in the back half where it's Paige and Hayward, working towards creating their new god together.

 

And I think I'm proud of how they turned out, because in the in the prep for Season Two we were doing lots of mapping out the expectations from Season One. So we naturally assumed, “OK, we’re, we are still a horror show - kind of - but we're delving now more into the politics of the world. We're telling more of a straight-up dramatic story. So we need to make sure that we're (still) having these big punchy scary episodes with a monster, and having plenty of them, and not too many quiet episodes which are just talking and nothing really happens.”

 

And both because of the the acting, and just…it was really reassuring and thrilling to get to these episodes and realize that people were enjoying Paige and Hayward's journey together just as much as they were the big splashy episodes.

 

And so I think we had some lovely scenes with them where it's just them in the fields, having quite emotional conversations. And so…yeah, again, I'm proud of those from an acting perspective, I think that the writing worked out OK, and then also just doing doing a lot with a little with soundscaping.

 

So I, I really feel like I've got a bit of a theory that…audio drama is a limited medium, but those limits start to fall away once a bit of pattern recognition comes into place.

 

Once the audience knows what a sound is meant to mean, once an audience knows what the space is meant to be like, you can start to accomplish almost anything.

 

And there's a scene where they're just hocking stones into the water. And so you have a a throwing sound, a splash, the voice actor grunting - and when you do that a couple of times, and the audience understands it's two people by the side of a pond hocking stones…

 

…then you can really start to play. If a character pauses for a moment longer. If they throw a stone particularly hard. If they don't throw at all.

 

All of that subtext can start to come out, and you can do almost as much as you could if you're watching a film with those voice actors on screen in front of you.

 

So, yeah! Those are the the segments, actually, I think I'm most proud of.

 

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WILLIAM:

I like that your favorite moments of the of the season come down to which sound design you've gotten to play with the most!

 

And definitely I think when it comes to audio drama, these…although it may feel (otherwise), sometimes especially for new folks who are just getting into audio editing, there's not like a, a class you go to for soundscaping often!

 

And so I think these little details and these questions of, “what are these two people doing during this extended conversation?”

 

You know, these can really help you give the audience something to latch on to with their imagination.

 

I think it's much more interesting to get, you know, this big long conversation of exposition during a scene where they're chucking these stones and kind of adding that extra aspect.

 

So, yeah, I think that's one of the really fascinating things you can do with audiodrama, and there's a, there's a craft to it for sure.

 

A question for anyone and everyone in The Silt Verses cast: what was your Season Two moment where you just looked at the script and went, “Oh, that's a lot!”

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MÉABH:

Oh, my God, this whole season has been absolutely wild. It's been wild.

 

Uh, I mean…I was reading through scripts and there were so many things that even in the first couple of scripts I was like, “Wow, this season is so ambitious. I love it!”

 

You know, um, you're talking about the span of events. The events themselves. The characters. The emotional arcs we were having, y’know. Which characters were meeting each other. The showdowns, confrontations. The insights we were getting into each character.

 

Just those things alone were incredible. But then…the actual events within the storyline itself! The drama, the drama, you know?

 

So like, the, uh, the axe murder rampage in the laboratory! That's a whole…that, like, that is something that happened!

 

That, it's a lot. And it's such an incredibly dark moment for Carpenter and it really demonstrates the extremes of our character…but as an event in and of itself,

(Excitedly)

There was an axe murder rampage in a laboratory!

 

That's a lot. Wow, this season is ambitious. I love it, you know?

 

So I'm still reading, I'm still reading…and then I get to the shootout at the holiday village! A shoot-out! And I'm like, “wow, this season is ambitious, I love it,” and then the explosive crescendo of a finale! We end with a full-on battle! A full-on, actual battle via audio!

 

Season was wild. I love it. Uh, it was incredible. It was a lot, it was all a lot in the best possible way.

 

And I was reading the scripts, thinking, “How are we gonna do this?” But it was great because I didn't actually have to do anything! It was all Jon and Muna, and they nailed it, and I got to scream and shout and be violent a lot…which is all I ask of any script.

 

So thank you, Jon and Muna, thank you very much.

 

I think, personally, to bring it way back down to me, as an individual actor…definitely, I suppose, it's got to be the episode where Carpenter is trapped in her childhood trauma reliving the same night over and over.

 

You know, I did read that, and I went, “Oh, this is…I'm gonna push the boat out for this one.”

 

Which I hope I did! Uh, it was a…it was an incredible privilege to be able to flex my acting muscles like that.

 

Again, terrible notion-y thing to say. Didn't like saying it; you didn't like hearing it, but you know, it's happened and we all need to move on.

 

But it was, and it continues to be, a privilege to portray Carpenter, and have the opportunity to really reach those emotional highs and lows! And that was a script where I looked at it and went, “Oh, that's a lot and I'm delighted.”

 

So all I can do is thank Jon and Muna for having faith in me to pull it off.

 

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B., voice of FAULKNER, cuts in.

 

B.:

OK, this is gonna sound wild - but it was actually the ending of Season Two! Like, this show is perpetually a lot. That's our whole thing.

 

But oh, good lord. When I got to the last episode, like the ending of the last episode? I hollered. I hollered.

 

That…it was crazy. I loved it, but oh my God. That was so much. 

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JIMMIE, voice of HAYWARD, comes next.

 

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JIMMIE:

“Was there a moment in the script when you were like, ‘Oh, that's a lot?’”

 

Oh, man, that's like…that's like every single beat!

 

Uh, I guess, when the whales got impaled upon giant spikes and got lifted out of the water.

 

I've seen some of the art that people have done just of that scene – amazing! If you're listening, to those of you who have done the art, and there's - there's a couple of you that have done different forms of art - you're all amazing!

 

I feel so bad for the whales. They're just like,

(Whale voice)

“We're gonna migrate south! It's gonna be fine! You know, water's warm. Ted, I'm telling you, the beaches are beautiful. You're gonna love it- uh! Giant spikes! Uhh, it was a nice one, guys. I guess the crab monsters win or whatever new monstrosity this is!”

 

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Then DAPHNE, voice of MERCER.

 

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DAPHNE:

This is…let's see…there…there are a lot of moments in Season Two, let's be honest!

 

But I remember the first one that I ever was like,

 

“…oh, oh, this is the kind of person Mercer is!” That moment for me was…I won't go into too much detail, because it's a little, it's a little scary. But it involves industrial-grade drain cleaner, and not using it for the purpose that it's intended to be…

 

That was a moment where I was like, “Oh, oh, this is…damn. Yeah.”

 

(Laughs.)

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MUNA:

I think I'm gonna have to go with Episode Three again, you know? When I first listened to Hayward plunging the prawn skewer into Mrs Kenzie's mouth, and the sounds of her…sort of tongue being pierced, and…yeah!

 

I read that and I listened to it and I thought, “…this is really disturbing.”

 

I mean, really, you should…a lot of the times when I first read the scripts, my face is quite shocked, and then - you know - the first iteration of it, I often go…

(Worried and uncertain noise.)

 

WILLIAM:

You, uh, shuffled all the prawn skewers out of the house after that!

 

MUNA:

Basically! No more prawn skewers, no more chopsticks. None of that.

 

JON:

The irony is, I'm, I'm quite soft! And when we did I Am In Eskew, even though that was just me and Muna reading stories out loud, there were often scenes where I'd go…

 

“…ohh, I think we went a bit too far, though. That's a little bit mean, isn't it ?”

 

But this season is meaner than Season One, I think! In Season One, there are maybe only a couple of occasions where voice actors would be playing a character who is horribly transformed, or who dies under upsetting circumstances.

 

Whereas, yeah - Episode Two, where Cole Weavers of the Town Whispers is playing someone who's getting bleach poured down his throat and gets horribly drowned, I thought,

“Ah that's a a bit mean, isn't it? I don't know if I like that.”

​

Pip Gladwin having his stomach ripped open and hot coals being stuffed inside his stomach.

 

And then the poor political aides in the episode where they're getting hypnotized by the the Love Saints, and then something very horrible happens to them.

 

When you, when you list this stuff, you go,

 

“Yeah, I've got a problem! This is, this is pretty…pretty grim, isn't it?” So, yeah, those are my answers.

 

MUNA:

Did-

 

JON:

Lots of scenes made me go-

(Blows out cheeks in shock.)

 

MUNA:

-did you forget when we also killed Jonny Sims?

 

JON:

(Protesting)

But he was just set on fire. I didn't see that as particularly grisly or gruesome. That was…anyone can get set on fire!

 

 WILLIAM:

(Laughing)

 Just a casual arson!

 

JON:

That was great fun, though, doing it with with him! And we…we've made a habit of killing off horror podcasters.

 

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WILLIAM:

I noticed!

 

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JON:

It’s not…not trying to send a message or anything like that!

 

It is, uh, it is just…I think we've really started building up a really lovely informal network of folks who are helping each other out with guest voice acting.

 

And for us in particular, we have an endless stream of relatively small roles that are there to get horribly murdered.

 

And so being able to call on the talents of some lovely, friendly folks who can help us out with that…it's just, yeah. Massively appreciated.

 

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WILLIAM:

One of my favorite things, especially, as I get to know this community more and more, is getting to have the people who really, like, make shows that I think in some way or another are fairly transformative for the genre…and, you know, getting to have them in bit parts.

 

 I certainly enjoy it, you know, over in The Hallowoods and I'm just delighted every time I see another familiar face crop up in The Silt Verses! Because in some ways, you know, while it's a catalogue of saints and horrors, it's also a catalogue of, like, most of the modern faces of horror podcasting!

 

And so it's, I think, you know, it's a, it's a journal on multiple fronts.

 

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JON:

In that sense…well, you had you had Steve Shell as a demonic train, didn't you? Which I thought was inspired casting!

​

 

WILLIAM:

It was a little bit of a Ghost Rider type, yeah!

 

And, uh, the – I was, again, like, the other thing is that when you bring in these talents that have done so much creative work on their own shows, I think, and maybe you've experienced this with your kind of bit-part actors, but I, I think they find ways to surprise you, you know?

 

This role for instance, with Steve, I pictured as, you know, kind of a menacing, you know…sort of like that trope of the Spawn character!

 

You know, this thing that comes out of hell, and grabs souls and pulls it back.

 

And Steve brought such a softness of the humor to this character that caught me completely out of the blue. But it made that scene work so much better, it added so much depth to the character, and I think, like, it's lovely to see what someone else's imagination can do with the canvas that you've written.

 

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MUNA:

I think if it's a character you haven't written, you, you…actually, there's almost more freedom with it, because you can have more fun with it and you can really interpret it in a way that the the writer or the podcast, they just didn't see it going in that direction at all.

 

So, yeah, it can give you a lot of freedom!

 

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JON:

Actually, you did that yourself with us, William! So when you, you played one of the disciples in the Echo Angel episode –

 

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WILLIAM:

Mhhm.

 

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JON:

-I never said this to you, but it really surprised me. because I'd written them all as these fairly generic callow young things who are having their first mission, and they're all gonna get killed.

 

And you did this lovely gruff voice for it, that had…it was a bit older, it sounded a little bit more world-weary and wise, and suddenly I was thinking, “Oh, well, maybe this one disciple actually has been around for a while. Maybe they've seen some stuff,” and I was imagining a backstory that hadn't been there before! So, yeah, you were very much part of that.

 

Jonny Sims, though, was funny, because obviously you've got a huge, huge Magnus Archives crowd, and there's there's a a fair bit of crossover. And so you could see people reacting to the episode in real time, going,

 

“Oh my God, Jonny Sims! I-

 

…oh no, never mind, he's dead, he's dead.”

 

(Laughter)

 

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JON:

Because it's such a short role that they couldn't even get over their surprise before he was horribly immolated.

 

​

WILLIAM:

Is there part of you that thinks… “Huh. Maybe I should have let him live a little bit longer and drive up some clicks?”

 

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JON:

(Regretfully)

That might have been, you know, savvy in a marketing sense, a promotional sense…no, we just we murdered him without a second thought.

 

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WILLIAM:

That’s what we love to hear.

 

All right, wrap tape, we got it.

​

Are there countries other than the Linger Straits and Peninsula? Or are those two simply the only two that have organized on any real scale?

 

​

JON:

It’s a funny one, because I haven’t gone into – in my head, a big Risk-style expanded map of countries.

 

And partly that’s because for me that’s almost besides the point. All the characters in the various nations in The Silt Verses are living under the same system.

 

The whole joke of the Linger Straits and the Peninsula is that there are no real significant differences between them. The characters talk a lot about different cultural practices; sports, foodstuffs, the long shared history between them. But really, besides the different gods that are worshipped in each country, the point and the joke is that they’re meant to be pretty much the same.

 

So in a sense, I particularly didn’t want to keep coming up with extra countries to make that same joke over and over again, which is why we’re really honing in on these two, just to make the point.

 

​

MUNA:

Yeah, and I think you end up having the Game of Thrones issue, isn't it, where you have to rush from country to country or land to land? Checking in here!

 

OK, what's happening here? - and yeah, our show is relatively long for audio drama, you know?

 

40 minutes…30 to 40 minutes in Season Two, and in Season One some of them were 60 minutes long…so there comes a point where you kind of have to prune it back, because there is already so much happening in in the plot itself.

 

​

WILLIAM:

I am constantly amazed, in writing 30/40 minute episodes, how fast that time flies! And it's like…it's because when you're reading something aloud, like, you know, you can get through a page quite quickly in your, in your head, reading off paper.

 

But when you're presenting, out to an audience, it takes time to get through, you know, every piece of text! And so I find even with 40/50 minute episodes, I am still at the end of like a, a season, but fighting for elbow space for, like, all the different storylines and ideas, and, you know, characters and plot threads I'd like to pursue.

 

Um, I'd like to ask a question that's not in our roster but…

 

How do you cope with managing an increasing number of plot lines and characters throughout The Silt Verses?

 

Because, as you said, it has expanded over time, in scope.

 

​

MUNA:

We're quite practical in the way that we plan it out!

 

We get a bunch of post-it notes together, we have a whiteboard at home on the wall, and we kind of go through a very rough outline of what should be happening in each episode. And then as I kind of have the first read of the, of the scripts as they come in…I can be quite ruthless!

 

I can say, you know, “this isn't exciting enough,” or “there's too much happening; it's not necessary for this, you know, detour for the characters,” so it is about just keeping it really, really tight.

 

I obviously do the producing and the directing, and I'm not as emotionally close to a lot of the characters as he is. So there are…there is some headbutting!

 

But it is about making sure that we are just sticking to the core story and always thinking about, you know, “where do these characters need to end up? What are their motivations? Why are they taking this detour?” and, and really asking the why each time. What do you think, Jon?

 

​

JON:

It's interesting, because with indie audiodrama, you have so many natural inhibitors. If you start to have too many voices, people are starting to…are going to start losing track much more quickly than they would in a visual medium, where they can put a face to a name.

 

You also obviously have no money, so you can't afford that many voice actors anyway! So you're always feeling constrained! In Season Two, I think it's interesting that - to me - it felt like we were on the edge of it being too expansive, even though ultimately we only really had four or five plotlines going on throughout the season.

 

So we're following Carpenter, following Faulkner, Paige and Hayward are together most the season, and then Mercer and Gage.

​

 

MUNA:

And Shrue!

 

​

JON:

So, yeah, it was really interesting to me that for a novel that might…that might have felt quite cramped, actually! But it definitely felt like we wouldn't want to go any bigger, necessarily, than we have.

​

 

WILLIAM:

Well, while we're talking about them...A Spooky Red Lobster asks,

 

I love what Paige and Hayward have going on. How would you describe their dynamic?

 

​

JON:

I saw someone online talk about the, “the paladin and the prophet.” Which I think is a really nice way of looking at it!

 

Whereas I saw them as two people who…both of them have come to the end of the road in their old lives.

 

Paige obviously knows that she's never going back to the the job that she had, Hayward has lost everything, and they're desperately looking for someone and something to keep themselves afloat. And so you have Paige who really needs a disciple, and Hayward who needs a cause, and so they, they're coming together in this way!

 

As two people that are taking very different things from each other, but nevertheless are forming into an eccentric but basically functional team, in the same way that we've seen with Carpenter and Faulkner.

 

I think maybe there’s also an implicit question there about whether there’s something romantic going on – maybe I’m reading into it, but that is something that’s on my mind a lot, so I’d love to talk about it more.

​

Because shipping is fantastic and it’s wonderful and it’s cool, but as a writer who’s way too online in a parasocial world, I’m really wary of how I respond to it and how I process it.

​

I personally, I don’t like writing fictional characters where the most important moment in their narrative arcs is when they get together with the person they were always meant to get together with.

 

Generally, it’s just a bugbear of mine in fiction and I’m not sure I agree with the underlying message.

​

But I think if any writer who’s way too online sees, hey, people are getting excited about these two characters hooking up and falling in love and they keep coming back to this idea of them hooking up and falling in love, there’s a real rodent voice in the back of your head whispers, "give the people what they want. Get those likes, get that fanart."

​

Which is the wrong response! Because we don’t understand that maybe people are just having fun exploring these characters or their own interpretations of these characters, we think they must be anticipating a pay-off from us.

​

And again, I think it can send you in the wrong direction, one that ends up being essentially flattening – we don’t think, "if these characters hook up, OK, what new opportunities does that give us to explore them, to understand them in greater depth?"

 

Instead we think we need to perform a climactic moment of love and comfort and happiness to get the audience’s approval. Which can be very much to the detriment of the complexity of the characters, but also, afterwards, where do you go with it?

​

And after we released maybe one episode of The Silt Verses, I saw a couple of folks online going ‘oh, god, I hope this isn’t going to end with Carpenter and Faulkner hooking up,’.

 

And you go, "oh my god, I hadn’t considered that as a possibility for a second, that’s not who they are and that’s not what the relationship is here" - but of course all of us are primed for it, that enemies-to-lovers thread that is so common.

​

So what was really freeing with writing Paige and Hayward this season was having them be more emotionally open and connected and direct with each other than I've ever allowed characters to be; they’re playful with each other at times, they’re sometimes a little bit flirty with each other, and Lucy and Jimmie just do have great chemistry as performers.

​

Because it was freeing because after Season 1, nobody is expecting or hoping that Hayward gets together with anybody. No-one wants that particularly!

​

So it felt like I could introduce a connection there and we could see a different way that they begin to be around each other that hopefully feels like it’s adding new dimensions to both of the characters without me looking over my shoulder going, “Am I in danger of turning this into something a bit stock by turning it into quite a straightforward romantic situation?”

 

​

WILLIAM

Alrighty! A question from mielebit, and this is a question for everyone on The Silt Verses team.

 

Favorite line or favourite line read in Season Two?

​

​

JIMMIE:

Oh, favorite line? Oh, man, I have one that just sticks with me that isn't one of Hayward's.

 

And it's simply because it's so peacefully human, I suppose. There was one line very early in the season that Acantha gave, and it was, “Do you think you could be happy, living here in the garden?” And it caused Carpenter to, like, pause for a second.

 

And if I personally was Carpenter? I would have taken it too. Because everything Carpenter had gone through at that point…I personally would have been like, “You know what? This is a good simple life.”

 

And it just…it's even one of those lines, it's not as profound as it seems. There's no huge plot reveal. There's nothing crazy that happens.

 

It's just one of those things that sits with you, and it's still a line I even contemplate, like, when I'm driving in my car. Maybe I've been watching too many of those van-life or live-off-the-grid videos!

 

As for my favourite Hayward line, it is definitely, definitely, “We keep plowing on through the dark and polluted waters - my prophet and me!”

 

When I was doing the line for the first time, I actually started to choke up a little bit!

 

​

MÉABH:

Oh, you know, the favourite line has got to be I'm taking the axe.”

(As a Greek chorus)

Yeah, she's taking the axe! I wonder what she'll do with it.

 

It's pretty clear and I do love it.

 

​

DAPHNE:

Let's see… favorite line, slash favourite read, from Season Two?

 

Those are…it's so hard to pick a favourite, but there's there's a couple instances where I do say this, it's in multiple scenes…

 

…but when I'm when I'm shooting a target, Mercer goes,

(As MERCER)

“Mine.”

 

And it's just, it just sends chills down my spine, it's so cool! Like, Mercer is so cool.

 

And so evil, oh my gosh.

 

​

B.:

“Isn't my daughter clever? Isn't my daughter something?” Ohh, that one had me, y'all.

 

 Oh, my goodness, Graham was out here making me cry.

 

​

MUNA:

OK, my favourite line has to be in chapter 11, and it's spoken by Dennis. He's speaking to, to Paige, and he's being quite emotive, and he says, “I know why you hate me. I get it, I use you all the time. I use your brilliance for all it's worth. I ask you for money when I need it because I know you can't say no. But the thing is, kid? Brilliant people, they get eaten up every day.”

 

I know that's more than one line, but…I just love that! And, and the delivery of our VA Graham was just so powerful, quietly devastating, that…yeah, I would definitely say that's my favourite line.

 

​

JON:

Mine…mine is actually Dennis as well.

 

Uh, so Dennis was a really interesting character, because we knew we wanted to introduce Paige's dad, and we wanted to walk this really difficult line of…Paige is right to hate him. He is, he's a bad man! He's a difficult man!

 

But nevertheless, we can empathize with him without it feeling like one of those dreadful forced redemptions that you get with villainous characters - Skylar in Heroes - one of those characters where we go, “OK we need to make him the goodie now, so time to forcibly do some narrative lifting so that we don't hate him as much.”

 

So we wanted to have this journey where, by the end, we kind of appreciate him and we're very sorry when – spoiler - he dies, but we don't forget what he's done and the complexity of who he is as a person.

 

So that was a huge journey we wanted to get someone to do in just three episodes, and Graham Rowat just does an incredible, incredible job - amazing person to work with.

 

And there’s the final line he gives, where he's lying bleeding to death in a basement, and just for the first time he really stops thinking about himself, stops working the angles and trying to come up with an eloquent way of getting himself out of the situation.

 

And he just, in his dying moment, focuses on his daughter and says, “My daughter came up with that. Isn't she brilliant? Isn't she something?”

 

And that final line gave me a lot of pause. Because at first, it made a lot of sense to me that he's running out of words. He's not even trying to be eloquent anymore, he has no way to describe his daughter other than just…she's not just brilliant, she's indescribably brilliant.

 

And that made sense to me and then I read it back and I was like…

 

“…she's something? What the hell does that mean? That's so vague, that's so weak!”

 

And then we got the lines back from Graham, and he delivered it so perfectly that you go, “Yeah, of course! Of course it makes sense that he says, ‘She's so brilliant, isn't she something?’”

 

So, yeah. I love that line. I love his delivery of it.

​

 

WILLIAM:

Oh, that's fantastic! And, and that is something that as a storyteller, I really value as well.

 

Because so often any truly evil and miserable character in a narrative, sort of, sees the light!

 

There's this transformation, and they get to redeem themselves by the end, or at least - you know - hoard a couple sympathy points before they, you know, are killed by The Narrative.

 

It works in certain situations, but I think there is an art to a villain that is does not want to be redeemed as well.

 

And so I think especially in audiodrama, I get to see these wonderful characters that are really, I think, loathsome but at the same time don't have to, I guess, be remedied by the narrative.

 

​

JON:

I was really interested in the idea of a character who come to the acceptance that you may not understand your daughter's attempts to overthrow society…but you can support her.

 

And, you know, giving that sense of hope for…actually, a parent who comes around to understanding that maybe not everything in the generation beneath them is for them, but they can still care and make an effort and be kind.

 

But we wanted to do that while also being accepting of the fact that we've set up this character as someone that gaslights, and causes trauma without being openly abusive, and how that is a form of abuse, too.

 

It was a very, very hard line to tread, and I think Graham really really helped to make it happen.

​

 

WILLIAM:

I think that's exactly it! The balance between, you know, the humanity that can be part of a character while also not conveniently forgetting about the atrocities they've committed in the first half of the narrative.

 

And I think Silt Verses in particular does a wonderful job with that complexity of people and I think, especially…

 

…not that you should be listening to this QnA before you've gotten into the series!

 

But one of the things that continually sort of astounds me about the storytelling, is that the longer you spend with each character, the more layers you begin to understand that they have.

 

And that rarely - I hate to say it, Jon - but rarely is anyone in The Silt Verses a good person. I feel like beneath every smile there is, like, some veneer or some plots or some scheme that people have.

 

​

JON:

(Taken aback)

We've got to have one good person, though! Surely. If we think back…I don't know…

 

Brother Wharfing in Episode Four? The guy who's literally dedicated to the god of pustules and boils and is falling apart to try and help people? I think he's, he's pretty morally…

 

​

MUNA:

Really? But why is he worshipping…?

​

 

JON:

(Peevish)

Because he takes the diseases away from sick people, okay? It's, it's all...

 

​

MUNA:

In order to be rewarded by the god!

​

 

JON:

OK, well, by that logic none of us are righteous-

​

 

MUNA:

Exactly!

​

 

WILLIAM:

There is a rich theological discussion that gets into...that is perhaps beyond the scope of this Q&A!

 

Kiri asks,

 

Jimmie. How are you so good?

​

 

JIMMIE:

“How are you so good?”

 

You - you really are too kind! Thank you, thank you so much, I'm really glad that you're enjoying this.

 

But the, uh, the truth of the matter is that…um, my roommate is the Watcher In The Wings.

 

 

(The sound of flapping wings that absolutely is not Jimmie with a sheet of paper.)

 

​

JIMMIE:

(To the Watcher, annoyed)

What? No, I didn't eat your audience. Why would I eat your audience? I don't eat people, you eat people - check in the back of the fridge.

​

 

(Flapping wings.)

 

​

JIMMIE:

(To the Watcher, annoyed)

Look, I'm at least a decent roommate. If I ate your audience I would at least replace the audience. How did you even fit an audience in the fridge?

(Normally)

Anyways, so they've been giving me lessons.

 

​

WILLIAM:

Are the hunter twins as young or younger than Faulkner? And why did you decide they should be as young as they are?

 

And I love these kinds of questions that are just…”Why did you decide to do this?”

 

​

MUNA:

Sometimes the answer is, “…I'm not sure.”

(Uncertainly)

No, uhh, they're definitely younger!

 

I…don't know.

 

Why did we decide that they should be as young as they are, Jon?

 

​

JON:

Uh, a few reasons! So originally they were written in the script as older. We were going to have them as people in their 50s or 60s.

 

And I think you realise a couple of things – uh, one of which is the VA community around audio dramas is by and large quite young, so it's much harder to find - we find, certainly - an older voice.

 

But also…I didn't know what good that would do, making the characters these grizzled old wolves, other than the imagery of them being such.

 

And the more I thought about it, the more interesting it was if these are, effectively…these are two horrible kids who are the end result of the system.

 

They are orphans whose parents were sacrificed, and they've ended up coming up with their own utterly awful god, and they are now loose in the system, because there's no one to take care of them.

 

So, yeah - it felt like we could do a lot more with making them feel like they were younger, because then they could be the the end product of this awful, awful setting we've established.

 

​

WILLIAM:

I think that's excellent!

 

Marceline asks,

 

Does Faulkner have combat training? He whips ass more than anyone in the Verses, well beyond what the skill of the Parish's training is implied by other devotees.

 

Are his talents taught? Is it religious fervor powering him like adrenaline? Is he just a healthy country boy who got and gave his licks with two older brothers?

 

​

JON:

I actually had to go back and check this because I wanted to make sure I wasn't mistaken!

​

I, I think, Marceline, you are overplaying the amount of arse-whipping that Faulkner does.

(Pedantically counting)

So in the the entire second season, he…obviously at the very end of the finale, he attacks Mason and Thurrocks.

 

In Season One, he knocks out the motel owner from behind, and then he manages to uh knock down Carpenter who is already horribly wounded in the leg and using a crutch.

 

I don't think he does that well for himself! By contrast, Reverend Toes knocks him out in this one. Mercer takes him by surprise and beats him up - lots of surprise attacks happen in The Silt Verses - and of course he gets beaten up by a giant crab monster in in Season One.

 

So I think on average he he's about 50/50 for success and failure when it comes to physical combat! I didn't see him as being particularly combat-savvy or certainly disciplined.

 

I think in those scenes we’re just meant to take it that people underestimate him! He takes them by surprise, and he gets the upper hand, because he is full of fervor and self-love enough to be rather reckless and aggressive when he needs to be.

​

​

WILLIAM:

Speaking of the finale:

 

A question to Jon and Muna:

 

Is the Season 2 finale the last we'll see of Gage? With the parallels and foils that Mercer and Gage have with Carpenter and Faulkner, I can't help but feel like there's a similar 'journey' to speak of that Gage would embark on to discover who they are.

​

 

MUNA:

So this is an interesting one!

 

And we've actually gone back and forth over this quite a few times even, before Season Two ended, and now that we're planning for Season Three…it is a difficult one because it harks back to what we were just saying earlier about keeping the season a little bit tighter, keeping the script contained, because there are already so many different plot lines.

 

You disagree, don't you, Jon?

​

 

JON:

Not necessarily! So this is something we're still mapping up for Season Three, but I think I'm very much aware that we have a few fan favorite characters who are AWOL but definitely not dead.

 

And I know that there's going to be some people who are really hoping that we'll see them back in the the final season…and I want to be very careful that we we pick our moments carefully with those and it doesn't turn into cheap, easy fan-service.

 

You know,

(action movie voice)

“I'm getting a team together! Everyone's coming back! Charity, Sid Wright, all these characters are going to converge!”

 

So…yeah, I'm not certain if Gage is going to come back.

 

And partly that's because I agree completely that they are now on a journey that's quite in parallel to Carpenter at the start of the season, but that journey is almost about figuring out how to do something that's away from this this violence and these mad gods and all these awful things. They talked about just having some time away to figure out what they’re good at.

 

And, so yeah, maybe they need to have their little moment away from this story of gods and violence, and that's where their their narrative should end.

 

​

WILLIAM:

There is a quote from Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End - of all things!

 

But it's always stuck with me, where this, this admiral who's been sort of shamed and humiliated as the antagonist of a couple previous films, he's finally in the dirt.

 

He's kind of hit his rock bottom, and he says to to one of these, one of these characters,

 

“My story is the same as your story - just a couple chapters behind.”

 

And I love seeing, you know, in in action when sometimes a character's story arc ends, they hit that rock bottom - and they realize that they are on, like, the same trajectory as someone who is already in the narrative, but just a little bit later on in that journey.

 

Very interesting to see when you begin to parallel your own story arcs, just sort of at different stages of development.

​

 

JON:

Absolutely, and that…that quote is a beautiful quote! That has to be up there with Steve Buscemi in Spy Kids 2 for ‘beautiful quotes in a not very good film.’

​

 

WILLIAM:

(As Steve Buscemi):

“Do you think God stays in heaven out of fear for what he’s created?”

(Normal voice)

Marcus asks:

 

Regarding the Glooming Guest, the way Grandmother Kensey spoke of it and the family legacy working in coal reminded me distinctly of the rhetoric surrounding the miners' strikes in England in the 80s.

 

Putting aside the fantastical qualities of the god, itself, just the sentiments of mining as being the more honest profession gave me the same sense of fierce pride I get watching documentaries about the strikes. Was the Glooming Guest inspired by this at all?

​

 

JON:

Yeah, he definitely was - in fact, the Glooming Guest is a concept that heralds back very directly to the Knockers or the Tommyknockers, which originally for miners were the sounds that you'd hear to lead you towards a rich seam of gold or whatever you're mining for…but over time as industrialization took over and the scale of mining increased it became more of a warning sign, giving an indication that the walls are about to tip in.

 

So yeah, absolutely very much directly inspired. But…when it comes to the sentiment, I do, I feel like we missed a trick with that episode.

 

Because the whole episode is about this generational kind of capitalism, where you've got Grandma Kensey, who was the old-school person who managed the mine directly, who was getting her fingers grubby, looking at her progeny who is now distanced from the product, and existing only as a kind of brand ambassador.

 

And she sees this as a betrayal, and obviously ends up bringing that old mansion down on top of them, and I felt like we never challenged the implicit idea there that Grandma Kensey is right to see a huge distance from...between what she does, and between what her son does.

 

Where she's critiquing her own brand of rapacious capitalism for becoming distanced from the the product and the material…but nevertheless, she's the source of all this.

 

So I wish we'd had a chance, really, to at least have a line or two in there that maybe pointed out that she's not quite so high and mighty and righteous when it comes to any of this stuff.

 

​

WILLIAM:

I think, you know, this is one of those things that I see fairly often with listener comments as well.

 

And often you can write something and commit it to paper and then send it out as part of the story, but whatever you do whether it's audiodrama or writing in general you know you've provided 50% of that experience, and then the person listening or reading takes another 50% from their own life and experiences and memories and knowledge.

 

And, you know, that becomes the experience of the story.

 

And so sometimes the connections that they're able to make based on their own knowledge and based on what they've been through to your work can lead to connections that surprise you!

 

And, you know it, you get people asking like, “Hey, this deeply interesting or personal thing for my life, were you talking about this when you wrote that?”

 

And sadly, y’know often the answer is,

 

“No, that that wasn't where I started…but I'm glad that I've written something that allows you to connect with the material in that way.”

 

You bring a part of your own meaning to, y’know, any story that you connect with, I think.

 

To the VAs:

 

If you could play any other character in this podcast or another one who would it be?

​

 

B.:

That's a very hard question! Could I be someone in Reverend Toes’ cult? Because Harlan, like, absolutely killed it, and he kind of had me convinced.

 

They seem like fun people to hang with. So is Buzzsaw Woman looking for a Buzzsaw Bud?

​

 

MÉABH:

Oh, my God, I just loved Mercer and Gage this season! Murder siblings. They had the most tongue-in-cheek dark humor to their lines - they had me absolutely cackling.

 

Oh, I love some good murder siblings! Would have loved to have had a crack at a couple of their lines. Just brilliant stuff.

 

And you know what? Buzzsaw Woman from chapter 10. Also a big favorite for me too.

 

MVP of the snuff cult.

 

Most…violent…partier.

​

 

JIMMIE:

I wouldn't pick another actor's role. What I would actually really like to do is get a little bit of training first, do a bunch of the monsters.

 

Hey, maybe, even voice, uh…maybe even voice the Trawler-man.

​

 

DAPHNE:

You know, I did work pretty closely with JV when we were doing some of our scenes, and it's so interesting to see Mercer and Gage go from like sharing the same mind to divergent, completely opposite from each other.

 

So I guess I would have really liked to play Gage, actually, just to kind of get into that …into that headspace, and see like, what, what made them change their mind, you know?

 

I think that would have been really fun to play.

 

​

WILLIAM:

(Taken aback)

…who…who would I play?

 

Hmm…see the thing is, I have a living character! Most of the horror podcasters you've injected into this show are not so lucky.

 

But Chuck Harm over in Nesh is doing well for himself at the moment!

 

So I I've envisioned, you know, that Chuck has a complicated, nuanced personality and life that we have not gotten to, you know, just barely touch the surface of in his newsanchor appearance.

 

I love taking a bit character and in a sort of a Dungeons and Dragons light, adding a complex backstory for that bit character! So, you know, I'll continue on with the news from Nesh.

 

​

JON:

William actually came up - I believe, didn't you? - with the name Chuck Harm, which was a perfect Silt Verses name! It was just silly enough.

​

 

WILLIAM:

I tossed in that line as, you know, just a throwaway! In the spirit of Anchorman, I had to do like some kind of signoff - and the the fact that you chose to accept this silly name as roughly canon for this character continuously amuses me.

 

Back to the good stuff!

​