Hey, all!! I’ve been working on a podcast script for quite some time now, and am just about finished writing Season One (with the next two seasons fully plotted out as well.) I’ve got everything voice-cast and am sorting out production/distribution details at the moment as well. In the meantime, I was hoping to get some critiques on the first draft of my paranormal mystery “true crime parody” podcast.
What it’s about:
In 1996, grad student Friday Thompson went missing without a trace. She reappeared in 1999 in perfect health, with no memory of the three years she’d lost, seven months pregnant, and rambling about The Smallest Summit and The Big Big Place, a pair of linked conspiracies that are immensely well-known and highly speculated about. Though upon regaining her usual mental state Friday vehemently denied any connection to The Big Big Place and The Smallest Summit—going so far as to denounce the conspiracies’ existence entirely—her case quickly caught the eye of news channels across the world, and Friday Thompson’s life was briefly lost to a media frenzy.
In 2023, Friday dies in a car accident, and her child Luca is left to deal with all the crazed conspiracy theorists threatening the unsteady peace their family had managed to built following Friday’s reappearance. Luca, like Friday, is firmly against the notion that either The Big Big Place or The Smallest Summit are real. The podcast itself is Luca spending ten days discussing everything they know in the hopes that, once they’ve said as much as they can, they’ll be left alone and can mourn their mother in peace.
Season One is 10 episodes, each around 3K-4.5K words long. The whole thing’s on Google Drive.
What I need:
Along with basic critiquing—logic/plot hole fixes, grammar and sentence flow, readability, that sort of thing—I want to make sure the episodes work cohesively, as a whole. I wrote the first episode, and the first maybe 500 words of episodes 2, 3, and 7, on a plane ride maybe three years ago following a strange dream I had that served as inspiration for the story. Then I sort of forgot about the story until maybe a month ago. I ended up writing the rest of the episodes completely out of order, so I just want to make sure they all have that sort of episodic continuity to them in a way that makes sense.
What I can offer:
Pretty much the same thing as what I need—beta-reading and critiques, matching the word count. I’ll read works on Wattpad but I don’t particularly like leaving a bunch of small individual comments—I prefer to analyze chapters/works as a whole once I’ve read the allocated amount. If it’s something of interest, I can also offer a shoutout/promotion during the actual podcast once it gets produced.
I’d prefer beta-readers who are familiar with fiction podcasts, because this story isn’t being told just as a book being read aloud—it’s an audio drama, written as a transcript and everything. It’s similar to a crime podcast, as well as fiction podcasts such as The Magnus Archives, Limetown, or Alice Isn’t Dead. I’d also prefer people willing to commit to the entire season, since a big part of what I’m after is a critique of how it all works as a collection of episodes. Of course, that’s a lot to commit to right away, so I’d also be happy to start out with an exchange of just a couple thousand words each to see if it’s a good fit.
I’m really excited to be working on this project, and it means quite a lot to me. If you’re interested, let me know, and we can work something out!