William
Good evening. This is your loyal host William A. Wellman. In addition to creating Hello From The Hallowoods every week, I write novels, read horror stories and tune in to the work of other podcasters in the horror fiction space today. Sometimes I invite them into my dimly lit parlor for an armchair conversation about horror. In this bonus episode, I sat down with Jon Ware and Muna Hussen to talk about their profoundly imaginative audio dramas about darkly weirded societies. This is the Skull Sessions: The Silt Verses.
*theme music plays*
William
Jon and Muna, how would you describe yourselves to the average dinner party conversationalists?
Muna
Well. Do we have dinner parties? No, I’m joking. I would probably describe myself as a writer who is finding interesting ways to stop herself from actually finishing a novel. Which is why I end up you know, sort of careening between poetry and short stories and now audio fiction, so. Yeah, a procrastinator, really.
Jon
I describe myself as a guy with a really cool wife. And then probably I just shove Muna in the direction of the other dinner party guests so she can keep up the conversation—exactly, like ‘there you go, there you go!’ and then I can stand in the corner eating canapés or something, I don’t know. In writing terms, I’m a horror slash weird fiction writer. I guess I see myself as a bit of an absurdist writer, I like doing stuff that is less about causing scares necessarily, and more about people placed in horrible absurd situations trying to make sense of their existence and trying to find a path forward.
William
The Silt Verses, I think, had just been coming out for a little while by the time that I first discovered audio fiction, and I was like ‘oh wow, there’s all these wonderful shows out there’... what was the point where you were like, I will do anything except write a novel, audio drama it’s going to be?
Muna
*laughs*
Jon
It’s a long and rambling answer so I’ll try and keep it short. We went to university together, we’ve always wanted to be writers, so we did a creative writing degree in the UK at Warwick University. In many ways it was a really wonderful experience, and in others I think it could be quite challenging, in terms of both the inspiration that we found there, the different influences—the first few years I think we both found it was a lot of the very standard white western canon, but also you would really start to get a sense of how hard it is to get traditionally published in the modern era.
So there’s nothing more disheartening than when you are eighteen, massively narcissistic about your work but also deeply naïve about how the publishing industry works… there’s nothing more disheartening than having an industry professional come in and say to you, ‘okay so you need to network well enough that you can get in through an agent’, because most agents these days are not accepting unsolicited submissions except in very tight periods and under very tight briefs.
That agent needs to like your stuff, the agency needs to agree it’s worthwhile to proceed with your stuff, you need to work your way through the publisher to the bookseller, and whoever’s designing your cover art needs to be good enough that someone at Waterstones really wants it on their table.
But this was also before the rise of really Amazon self-publishing, it was long before The Martian a huge hit, so there was that sense of oh god, we’re doomed, publishing is completely saturated, and we have no chance of becoming successful as writers without being very well-connected socially. But there was also the sense of inherited snobbery; that you can’t just go out there and do it yourself, that that is the loser’s way out basically. Is that a fair starting place, Muna?
Muna
Yeah, absolutely. I’d probably add to it the fact—just want to expand on what Jon said about the canon that we had to study. You know, I am a woman of color, I grew up Muslim, there are amazing authors from I guess, like, particularly for me the continent of Africa, or anyone who doesn’t identify as a straight white man, which is a lot of what we were studying.
And I felt as if the stories I had to tell just wouldn’t be published unless they fit within a very narrow understanding of the experiences I wanted to talk about, which would be through that straight white man gaze, you know. And so I wrote a lot about the diaspora, about the refugee and immigrant experiences, whether that was fiction or nonfiction, because those are my experiences.
And I was just constantly told, you know, you needed to have more suffering, more poverty, all of that. ‘Twelve Years A Slave’ lens, so to speak. And I just didn’t want to write those things? And so I felt well, that’s the only way the publishing world will accept me, and that’s really what stopped me from pursuing it in a more traditional route.
Jon
And just to continue, one thing that did happen in the final year of university that was quite cool was we had a guest tutor who was the sci-fi author China Miéville, and that was in some ways really refreshing because having someone come on from that background of weird fiction, of the New Weird, meant that we were being introduced to lots of new texts and interesting authors. Hans Henny Jahnn, Dambudzo Marechera, we were both were introduced to and have gone to really really love.
And for me, Thomas Ligotti. China Miéville had us read one of these Ligotti stories, and for me it really was comparable to the works of absurdism that I really enjoyed. I could understand how this was a horror story, but it was also a descendent of Beckett and Kafka and all of these authors that I really love. And that was something that stuck in my mind.
And then years and years and years down the road, in maybe I think 2015 or 16, a friend of mine were just sending… we were doing little flash fictions to each other, where the idea was that these were missives and job adverts and personal pages from the most horrific city in the world, and taking on that real Ligottian pessimism of this is a world where the horror is something that is accepted and ignored and treated with apathy by everyone that dwells within it. And that’s where the real horror comes from.
So we did that for a while, and I can’t remember if there’s a more interesting part to it than this, but I just said to my friend, I’d love to make a go of this. I don’t think it’s a short story but I’d love to maybe try recording it as a podcast. And he said, yeah, please go ahead. I’d done, when I was very small, I used to love playing around with writing a script and getting some friends and having them record into a single microphone on someone’s living room floor. And we’d end up with a tape cassette that I’d just listen to and replay over and over again. Terrible sound quality, our sound quality is now at least now slightly better… but that was something that I’d always grown up with and loved the idea of doing, so it made sense for me to try and do it again with I Am In Eskew.
William
Remind me, Muna… did you feel roped into that project? Or were you one of the people to be like ‘yeah, we should do this, we should do it this way’...
Muna
Yeah definitely! I really… I mean, I’ve always, as you would do with your friends, with your partners, have always tried to encourage John, and tried to push him into kind of writing what it is that he wants to write. Because honestly, who cares about the gatekeepers anymore? You know, the internet can be a very horrible place, but it can also be an incredible place that allows your community wherever they are to find you, and for you to find your own community. And I thought it was just so deserving—his work was just so deserving, of finding that community.
So yeah, when he started writing I Am In Eskew, I was doing what I now still do with Silt Verses. Which is read it over, make suggestions… I say make suggestions because to be honest, neither of us are very good at taking suggestions from the other person? It’s very much like, ‘no, this is my craft, how dare you’. But we got there in the end. And I was also, and I use this very loosely, a voice actor. There were two of us who were doing the narration because it’s a narrative audio drama, and uh, yeah. I listen back to it and I’m like, it’s not good. But uh… or at least, I’m not any good. But yeah, that’s kind of how I, I guess, got roped into it.
William
Many of the kind of contemporaries that I look around to in the horror podcast space are still essentially working on their first show. A lot of them have made a long run of it, but I don’t see a lot of contemporaries that have already finished and completed one show, set it to the VHS tapes of history, and then moved on to go create something new.
Over the course of creating I Am In Eskew, what did you find that you wanted to carry with you when it came to making the next show? Were there any points through that where you were like, ‘huh. We’ve done it this way, this is how it works for this show, but next time I want to do something different.’?
Muna
I’ll let Jon particularly speak about the writing side of it. I do remember us discussing the fact that we are terrible voice actors, and we should definitely not continue to be the main voice actors any more. And look, I’m going to be honest, we had absolutely no idea that people would—that the work we wanted to do and make would resonate with people. We very naively put a call out on our website and on our Twitter and said, look, we’re writing this new thing, here’s the first chapter, does anyone want to audition for it?
And we got something like seventy or eighty people auditioning for it, which was absolutely brilliant, but not at all what we expected. So, you know we’ve said this before, but we were so naive in what we were doing. We didn’t know what we were doing, and we didn’t know what we didn’t know. So we just headlong carried on. But we definitely knew we wanted to create something that had more than two voices, that was less narration, that was more perhaps plot-driven, and yeah. I’ll hand over to Jon so he can speak more about the I guess, crafting and the storytelling side of it.
Jon
Yeah, in writing terms I think there were a few things that we took forward. One of which is just how key character is in this medium, even more so than almost any other medium, because an online fandom is all about the characters. They’re gonna fall in love with the characters, they’re going to invent new futures for them, they’re going to find new visual ways of describing them and depicting them, and they’re going to take it off and run with it.
And for me, very much with I Am In Eskew at the start, I saw David Ward, our main character, as very much he’s just a generic neurotic cosmic horror protagonist. His job is to very twitchy and nervy, and to lose his mind over the course of thirty episode. And over time you start to realize that there’s more to him, you start to pull out the depth. And I Am In Eskew only picked up an audience when it was already over. We certainly for the first year didn’t see any fanart, any real mass engagement to the scale which we do still to this day which is so, so lovely.
It took a long time to realize that people were really invested in this character, and how deep they related to him. So thinking very heavily about it being character-first, about making sure our characters had interiority to them, and then it was about variety and diversity and storytelling. Something that audio drama is very good for, and something we really lucked out with I Am In Eskew, where the whole point is it’s an ever-shifting cosmic horror city, where the protagonist can find himself in any situation at the start of a new episode. It was kind of like a horror Quantum Leap, where there’s always new opportunities for storytelling because there can be a different monster or a different concept around every corner and in every episode.
So something we really wanted to take forward, and we had to work really hard to find ways of fitting into the new show, was when it’s more of a linear plot. When it’s more grounded in terms of the storytelling, the characters are in Spot A and they have to get to Spot B, how can we make sure that there is still diversity in the storytelling? And diversity in the episode concepts? And that we are surprising people and delighting people episode on episode by bringing them very different concepts.
Muna
One of the reasons that maybe Eskew actually took, yeah, as John said, a really long time to get going. I remember that when The Silt Verses really started taking off, I can’t quite remember but I think maybe by Episode 2 we’d reached the same number of listeners of like, Episode 18 of Eskew? I Am In Eskew is 30 episodes, so it’s quite a long—in hindsight, maybe we should have had like two seasons—but it’s basically like, one long show. And one of the reasons is because we were so worried about it not working that no one knew who we were. You know, we were releasing it under the name David Ward, and then under the name Riyo, who was the character I was playing. And until the very last episode, I don’t think we kind of explained that we were British and that we—well, I guess people could hear in our accents that we were British. But yeah, that we were a couple, and…
Jon
I still preferred that, to be honest.
William
*chuckles*
Jon
William, you’re so good at putting yourself out there… but every time I see my name mentioned on Twitter or on Tumblr, I feel… it feels strange and invasive. And it’s being seen. Like a light being shone on me, as I’m the beetle under the rock that’s just being lifted.
William
In the old-fashioned traditional publishing, you write a book, and it takes a year of your life. And then you send it out, and that takes a year of your life. And then by the third year, when it actually hits the shelves, you’ve written two more books. It’s a memory of the past. When people start reacting out to the book that’s on the shelves, a lot of time the author is like, oh yeah, I’d almost forgotten I’d written that. Glad you’re enjoying it. You’ll like what I’ve cooked up in the year and a half it’s taken for that to get published.
Where as in audio drama, there is this—something of a pressure—for you the creator to be as accessible as the work itself. And that in order to gain an audience, it has to be the spotlight on you the creator, and what you do and the writing that you are capable of, and you become a little bit of an internet celebrity in a way. And when people react to things, they’re reacting to what you wrote for them this week on social media. It’s a very odd space to be in.
Jon
Yeah. And they’re parsing their emotions, and doing so in a very internetty way, where there are layers of irony and shared hidden jokes to all of it. And so I think it was, I saw Harlan who does Malevolent a little while back saying that he finds it really tough when people are saying, ‘Hey Harlan, fuck you because that was such an emotional twist, it really hurt me!’
And of course, they’re trying to pay a compliment. But it’s in a very internetty way where there are layers of aggression that you have to ignore because you have to understand that they’re not to be taken seriously. But still that has an impact, when there’s a stranger saying ‘fuck you’ online to you.
Muna
I couldn’t agree more. And the temptation of editing things, I guess, live? Because as you said William, once you write that book and you give it to your editor, your publishing house, and they tinker with it, and then it wraps. And that’s it, you cannot make any changes. So if someone leaves you a Goodreads review or a tweet and they say, you know, I really didn’t like this plot aspect… you can’t unpublish this book. It’s published. It’s done.
Whereas with us, if someone gives us either a compliment or a comment, a constructive criticism… which everyone is allowed to do, you’re allowed to feel the way that you want to feel or have to feel about the work that we’re creating… it’s so tempting to go, oh, that didn’t quite land right. And we have to stop ourselves. Unless it’s very important. Again, we were so naive, we didn’t put trigger warnings initially in the first few episodes of Eskew, so that’s something we learned. So yeah, if there are changes that we need to make, we’ll go ahead. But it’s hard to rein in once, I guess. Insecurity and ego? And not make those changes.
William
Speaking of Harlan. In our last conversation with him on The Skull Sessions, he had a compliment to pay you in the way that The Silt Verses often changes its narrative in a very free-flowing way? It’ll go from this inner thoughts first-person monologue to external dialogue to snippets from the world. And it’ll do that kind of seamlessly throughout the episode. I was curious how you landed on kind of that narrative frame for the show, and how that very intuitive means of storytelling came about? In a world where a lot of podcasts choose, like, oh, I’ve got a cassette tape and it’s all from this cassette tape. Or, I’ve got my one dream narrator and he says everything.
Muna
Hubris. That’s what happened. Absolute and utter hubris. No, I’m joking, Jon go ahead.
Jon
I mean, that’s so lovely of him. And I think everyone knows of course that Malevolent very much came across the perfect way of conveying exposition without requiring a tape recorder, and having the shadowy demon inside your head who’s telling you what he can see. So it was a couple of things, and I think like many artistic decisions that turn out quite well, some of it was accidental and some of it was deliberate.
The accident was that we were moving from I Am In Eskew which was purely monologue format to a full-cast show. I was still feeling out how much can we deliver via dialogue, how much do we need to be sticking to this monologue format that I was familiar with. But then as well, this was meant to be a story about ideologies, and people with secrets who have their own private perspective on the world which is very different to what we’re seeing in dialogue.
And so having the characters able to step aside and deliver almost a confession to the audience about what they’re really thinking about the situation was so, so important. And equally with the worldbuilding. The world was such a complex thing to try and convey, where it’s okay, we’re doing The Wicker Man but industrialized. There would’ve been far too much to get across without it being ultra-clunky in dialogue. So having that extra space where we could step away from what the characters were saying to each other and just get into their heads was so so vital.
We’ve done probably less of it on average as the two seasons have now gone on, but we always wanted to keep coming back to it, always have it as an opportunity for where there’s a character who hasn’t had much of an interior space shown to the audience. We can always step aside and hear a bit from them, step into their past, step into their thoughts, their fears, their secrets, and always have them available to us.
William
By the time that you were done writing I Am In Eskew, and that was kind of set out to the world, a completed story more or less… What did you still have unsaid that needed to go into The Silt Verses?
Jon
It’s interesting, because often when I see people talking online about the two of them, they act as if they’re completely different shows. And they go, it’s such a departure from what you did with I Am In Eskew. And for me, they’re very very similar. When I started out thinking of The Silt Verses, I was imagining very much that I Am In Eskew is Inferno and this is Purgatorio.
We’re moving from depicting modern life as the isolated individual who can trust no one, trust nothing around him, he is in a world that is going to devour him and keep devouring him and he is going to atrophy every day he remains in this existence. And that that’s the worst thing he can possibly face. That any cosmic horror monster or a vision of Cthulhu would be a relief compared to what Eskew does to him day after day.
And so for The Silt Verses, it felt like we’re moving from that lone view of the modern world as horror, to a much wider view, where we’re looking at individual factions within this same world that is essentially devouring the people who live within it. It didn’t feel for me a departure so much as an evolution of what we were already thinking about, but we wanted to explore that with a bit more fantasy, a bit more folk horror than we’d had with I Am In Eskew. And just open that up in new directions.
But in many ways, there are similar riffs, so maybe we have nothing new to say. We have brainstorming workshops in both shows, we have creepy rich people, we have museums and art galleries, we have artists… there is a lot that just echoes and repeats if you’re a fan of both of them.
Muna
I don’t know, I think you’re doing yourself a disservice there. I think as writers, I think we are often fascinated with one theme, and lots of writers across the ages have always been fascinated with one theme. I think it’s about just giving yourself the grace to play with that theme, and see how far you can take it. I mean, before I Am In Eskew, you worked on an ever-growing changing city, but it was multi-narrative, and it was a novel length. And I think it’s just something that you enjoy working on. And it’s okay to not… you don’t always have to reinvent the wheel. You don’t always have to come up with a completely different genre to dive into.
I mean, I’m fascinated by the same concept, which is generational trauma and inherited familial trauma and the immigration and refugee experiences. I write about that in so many different ways, and there’s so much to say about it. So I wouldn’t say that you don’t have anything new to say.
Jon
I understand. I think it’s very easy to fixate on doing something original, when again you’re in audio drama, there are so many different shows. In horror audio drama, there is so so much going on. And the need to try and do something new isn’t just a personal neurosis, it is trying to understand what is the place for what you’re creating in this vast vast ecosystem with only a limited number of listeners to go around.
Muna
But then listeners get so attached to characters, to storylines, I mean. Even [The] Magnus [Archives], which ran for four years? Five years? Five seasons? You still have listeners really excited and wanting it to continue. And gosh, this is a really silly example, but the first time I read the Narnia books, even though there were seven books… I think I was about twelve at the time?... Even though there were seven books, I still thought, I wish there was an eighth or a ninth or a tenth. So you know, I do think that listeners are passionate about the same topic if you are a good writer. Which you are.
William
What do you want people to hopefully walk away from The Silt Verses with, by the time this third season is done?
Muna
Oh gosh. That’s a big, that’s a big question.
Jon
If you’d asked me maybe at the end of Season 1 or the start of Season 2, I’d have probably given a very different answer. Because for the people that have come all this way, you obviously want them to feel deeply satisfied with where the characters have ended up. If that’s a tragic place, if that’s a horrific place, if god knows any of them might get a happy ending, that it feels earnt for the characters, it feels true to the themes of the series. So that’s my largest preoccupation right now, is how do we tie up everything, in a way that is satisfying, that doesn’t betray ultimately what we have, what we’ve been talking about with themes of doubt, uncertainty, mystery, the impossibility of ever truly knowing anything. Doing that and also delivering a thoroughly satisfying finale is a hell of a job.
For the show itself, I don’t know, I think it’s a complex show and I’d like them to come away with a complex feeling. A little unsettled, a little touched by the characters, a little entertained by some of the satirical things we’re doing with the state of the world and the ideologies within it. And I’d like them to come away with that feeling of, I really enjoyed that and I can’t quite put my finger on exactly what that was.
Muna
Do you know what, I’m going to speak from kind of like, maybe not to listeners, maybe to other podcast creators or someone who’s listening who hasn’t had the confidence to go for it. And just to remind you all again, we had no idea what we were doing, and for the most part still don’t. So I think what I’d like people to take away is that we had a lot of fun with it. We have a lot of fun with it, you know. Coming up with inhumane sounds and new formats and just the freedom to be able to go, well right, this episode is going to be full narration, and this episode is going to have a whisper. I think it’s that kind of freedom that we gave ourselves because we didn’t know what we were doing. And I really hope anyone who is listening to this, who listens to The Silt Verses, and thinks that there’s a huge team behind us… there isn’t, it’s still just the two of us working on it. So go for it. Really go for what it is you want to do, and it’ll work itself out.
Jon
That sense of play you mentioned just then Muna, I think is so true and so lovely. It’s really weird to think that we’ve been around doing two shows for a little while now, and William you said that right at the start. I don’t feel like some kind of ‘elder’, we’re just a couple of idiots with a mic. And it’s really exciting and really lovely to see some of the new shows that have been coming through in 2022. Some of the ones have said that ‘oh, I was really excited and the Silt Verses was a bit of an inspiration to us’. It’s fantastic, when actually they sound much more polished than we do. Badlands Cola is one that came through that I’ve really enjoyed. But again, it’s weird fiction, it’s very playful, it combines some narration and some dialogue, and it’s fantastic to feel that hey, we inspired that with our thing that’s kind of held together with gaffer tape and boards hammered into the windows…
Muna
And string!
Jon
And string, and we’ve inspired something that’s actually more polished and exiting and I can’t wait to see where it goes.
William
How do you know when it’s the right time for a show to end? And how do you cope with those fan feelings? Because they definitely, if you released that Chuck Harm 8-part miniseries, they would be tuning in for that. How do you decide, okay, this is when this project—especially when this project is paying a portion of my bills—this is when that project is going to have its conclusion?
Muna
You look at your characters and you think, there is no more growth for the characters. In some their arc kind of completed in a previous season but they are still required for the rest of the plot, as far as we feel anyway. We probably could have another season, but you don’t want to end up in an escalation of villains. You know? There was a very silly sci-fi show that I watched called ‘Heroes’? I don’t know if anyone remembers this. But it was like, you know, the villain from Season 1 became one of the good guys in Season 2, and then in Season 3 he was a villain again. It’s very… you get to a point where you think, I cannot take this any further, because I’m just sort of keeping it alive for the sake of keeping it alive. I mean, what do you think, Jon?
Jon
It is always a really interesting conversation to have. Because one, I think when I was talking earlier about the need to be original? Part of that is just, I can’t stand not to get to the fireworks factory. I want every episode to be coming out with something different, and taking what I’ve molded out of play-doh and just scrunching it up and then building something new out of it. I hate the idea of creatively being stuck in one place, repeating the same conversations.
Which in podcast terms can very much be characters standing in a room, arguing about the next decision they’re going to make, never quite getting to where they need to go because everything is expensive and it’s easy to drag things out with lots and lots of dialogue. So for me, I’m always gunning to move on to the next thing, to end it, and so when I feel that a character has reached the end of their story arc, when I feel like the world has expanded as far as it can go, I’m probably overimpatient at saying ‘we just need to finish it’.
Actually earlier today, writing Season 3, I realized it was time. Because the same thing happened with I Am In Eskew, where suddenly I felt like I could explain what the show is trying to say in a sentence. So you know, when you’re starting out with a show, you have an idea of the themes, you know what you’re going to explore, what you’re going to play with, and then suddenly with I Am In Eskew I thought oh, well this is a story on one level about mental health, about the difficulty of trying to appear well when as far as you can feel the whole world seems to be deeply deeply fucked up and no one seems to realize it but you, this is a story about late-stage capitalism trying to force people into roles where they don’t belong, it is the story of cancer.
It’s the story of a city that is not really a city but is instead something tumorous and toxic that keeps spreading and spreading, but doesn’t… in the sense that cancer is trying to be a cell. I didn’t say it was a good or coherent sentence, but I could explain it in a sentence.
And so for me with The Silt Verses today, I was thinking of what’s this show about? And I was like oh, it’s about the fact that we’re living in a world that allows for a multiplicity of different narratives that all support the same establishment apparatus. And there are old ways of doing things that are opposed to it, but even those are built on the same foundations. How on earth do we find our way out of this and move to a new society where things are better?
And you go oh, that’s actually a really simple idea, that’s just a Marxist critique of ideology. Okay done, close the laptop, series is done. But it’s helpful when you’re coming to the end of a show to suddenly realize, oh that’s what we’re getting at, because then you know how it needs to end up. But if you have that thought at the start of a show, it’s gonna kill it, because then this just becomes dogma and a didactic work and it can’t really breathe. So for me, that’s how I know.
William
You’d had a quote the other day, and I really enjoyed it, which was: “When you’re two seasons into a show, and writing the third, you begin to feel like everything is plot.” And in a similar way, I feel like somewhere along the line it can be easy to fall into what was once sort of this fun, explorative thing, becomes almost like a product that you need to deliver on to a certain extent? You need to pace everyone’s character progressions, you need to get them all in the right place, you need to sort of line up all your ducks for the finale. As you are writing Season 3, how are you hanging on to that sort of sense of fun?
Muna
Okay. So I’ve consistently said, we don’t know what we’re doing. But we are learning as we go along. So I would say that, Season 2, particularly when we took the sound design in house and for those that don’t know, Jon does the sound design as well as the writing. There is so much more that we learned, and that has allowed us to understand the fun you can have with it. So I don’t want to speak for you, but I think you’re probably still having a bit of joy with it, I hope? Otherwise it makes me bursting in on you saying, ‘come on, I wanna see that chapter!’ just really painful.
Jon
It is, it is so painful.
Muna
*laughs in background*
Jon
No, the honest answer is I’m doing a lot more rewriting with this season than I have with any other season. And I don’t begrudge the time or the effort it takes to do that. Because yeah, like you said William, it’s more limited. The characters are now on the end stage of their journey. And so you can’t really go, well guys, we’re rushing towards our exciting climax where we’re trying to overthrow the established order, now let’s stop off at this mysterious diner by the roadside so we can have a little sidequest and a monster of the week adventure, and we do something different.
It forces you into a linear narrative, because the stakes are so high, and we all understand that we need to get to get to the big finale. So a lot of the writing has been going, this is doing what it needs to do functionally, it’s getting the characters from Point A to Point B, but it’s not fun, it’s not doing anything different for me, it’s going to feel very much like it’s just repeating old ground that we’ve been over before.
So what can we change to make it interesting, how can we expand the character in a new way or see a new location or side of the world that we haven’t seen before, without it feeling like we’re taking a massive unnecessary detour for the sake of originality.
William
Something that has been impressed upon me, at least, is that, a good story needs a good ending. And even when it comes to what I hope is a longer-term project like Hello From The Hallowoods, that is always something I’m always trying to keep in mind as we get there. Is that there is a destination that needs to happen.
Jon
I think it’s really interesting for us as podcasters. Because people don’t just judge us in real-time. So in the era of the mystery box shows that were meant to go on forever, Lost and what have you, where the idea is we don’t really have a perfectly coherent vision for the finale—sorry Lost, you didn’t—but we are going to keep teasing this along and teasing this along for as long as we can. In some ways that’s applicable to podcasters, because it’s a serial medium, because if you’re doing it in a format that is easy to produce, you can just have an episode of teasing new mystery after new mystery week after week and keep that going for as long as you possibly can. But people get to judge us retroactively.
William
*chuckles*
Jon
So we were talking the other day I think, William, about the fact that on Apple Podcasts you could get someone that leaves a five-star review, and then you look back two years later and they’ve said, ‘well I loved the first three seasons but then I think you lost it, so I’ve revised my rating from five stars to one star’. And so you get not just the fact that people say it’s gone downhill, but the fact that actually your reputation and your brand are ruined in retrospect by the fact that you’ve gone on too long rather than stopping when you needed to. Which I think is fascinating and very strange and quite upsetting.
William
Now, I know probably that you are not able to talk specifically about whatever is coming next after Silt Verses. But I am curious. As you’re coming up on the finale of this show, what are some things you would like to do next time? Are there any stories that have sort of germinating in the background, but you haven’t been able to do yet? Muna, are you going to get that novel done?
Muna
Oh god. What can I give away? Erm, can I say similar genres, with… maybe some dark comedy horror, is one?
Jon
I don’t know why you’re being so coy, I’m going to spoil everything.
Muna
You’re not supposed to spoil everything…
Jon
But this is our chance, this is to pitch. I wanna do this interview and then have people on the Hallowoods Patreon go ‘yeah I wanna see that!’ I wanna generate interest.
Muna
Okay, okay. Which one do you wanna talk about?
Jon
Well the one that I’ve had on my mind for a really long time is basically, I loved The Terror Season 1.
Muna
That was great.
Jon
Great great season of horror television. Absolutely adored it. And I was very mad that partly because of the reaction to Season 2, I don’t think we’re going to get more seasons of historical anti-colonial horror popping up anytime soon. So I really just wanted to take that ball and run with it. I would love to do a historical horror story about Septimius Severus, the Roman emperor who in his final years with his two warring sons beside him, who were plotting to murder each other, marched up into the north of Scotland hoping to unite the empire and in doing so unite his sons.
His men were massacred in great number, depending which historian you believe, by the Caledones who were the local tribe at the time. I would love to turn that into a piece of anti-colonial horror with a bit more of a cosmic twist to it. So that’s something I’ve had on the back of the mind a long time that I’d love to do. Shakespearean tragedy, it’s horror, it’s everything.
Muna
I have been mulling over… this one’s really hard to describe in an elevator pitch. But it’s essentially a sci-fi that focuses on those themes that I’ve touched on earlier. And it is essentially an exploration of the pitfalls that immigrants and refugees can fall into where they are abused by the system. As well as the relationship between second-generation individuals, the children of the first-gen immigrants, and how there is a disconnect between those two cultures. So it’s a mother and daughter, and there’s lots of kind of bodies being used by the government for scientific purposes, and… yeah. That’s kind of where it is. It’s more sci-fi than horror, although there are lots of horror elements, I am much more into sci-fi than horror, she says.
William
You’ve just gotten kind of sidetracked into the horror as you’ve gone on.
Muna
Yeah I know, yeah exactly.
William
I think this is something important to keep in mind when it comes to fans being like, “Oh no, I’m so mad that The Silt Verses is ending! I love this show, I love these characters, I can’t believe you’re ending the story!” That although they go through this period of grief, as we all do when C. S. Lewis writes The Last Battle and puts a nail in the Chronicles of Narnia, there is still something new over the horizon, and everything that you loved from the story, and all the things that caused you to fall in love with the story, you will probably see some semblance of in the next thing that creator works on. And that creator will get to say something new with what’s coming next.
Muna
Absolutely. Beautifully put.
William
An adventurer, stalking along a misty rock beach, fogs rolling in the distance. They stop as a giant crab peels itself up from the rock, and goes scuttling backwards. Beneath the crab, jammed into the stones, are the skeletons of Jon and Muna! They tilt towards the camera, and whisper their last advice.
Jon
I honestly feel like I have none to give out. I don’t think any writer should give life advice. We are in so many ways as distant from life as can be; we are living in fictional worlds.
Muna
Okay, I am gonna say something, and Jon is obviously going to say that I’m being a nihilistic anarchist, which is basically the function that I fulfill in our life.
Jon
*laughs offscreen*
Muna
Look. The world is a dumpster fire. And every day there seems to be another reason to rage or despair. So if you want to create, go ahead. If you want to consume art, go ahead, and support the artists that you do, if you can. And essentially I guess the only bit of advice I’d give is again to fledgling writers and podcast creators and audio drama writers. Try not to see a finished product as your starting point. So remember that where you are, if you are wanting to start out, is probably already quite a bit further than where we were.
William
Absolutely. And Jon?
Jon
I’ve got nothing. I view life as a great and terrible mystery, and we are all just hopeless crawling things trying to make our way through it as best as we can. I think there’s something beautiful and something joyful in that, regardless of whether we succeed. I guess the one great act of play we have is to try to make sense of our existence. This is gonna be a really kind of fun, lighthearted Skull Sessions, isn’t it William? We’re killing this.
Muna
I was about to say, like, the Hussen—we’re killing this!—the Hussen-Ware household is a barrel of laughs, I tell you. Every day, every day barrel of laughs.
Jon
Live, love…
Muna
Laugh.
Jon
Burn.
Muna
Oh okay! Excellent.
William
Thank you so much both for making the time to impart to us, Live, Love, and Burn…
*Jon and Muna dying in background*
And so many other thoughts today, it’s been a true pleasure. And I cannot wait to see both the big finale for The Silt Verses, and to continue tuning in as you keep releasing amazing stories after this. You are both so talented and it was such a pleasure to talk to you today.
Muna
It was such a pleasure to talk to you, thank you so much.
Jon
Thank you so much William.
*credit music plays*
Credits:
Jon Ware and Muna Hussen write and produce podcasts like I Am In Eskew and The Silt Verses. You can find them online at thesiltverses.com. The Silt Verses follows Carpenter and Faulkner, acolytes of the forbidden Trawler-Man, as they make a dangerous voyage across a land filled with decrepit industry, deadly martyrs, and dangerous gods. After all, belief is more dangerous than anything.
Hello From The Hallowoods is produced by William A. Wellman. For first access to new Skull Sessions with other voices in the horror podcasting space, look to the Hallowoods patreon at patreon.com/hallowoods.