FYI.... I share this email because... I want yall to see what I am saying to others about us. I want your consent to explore the futures for this work. I want us to have consent, transparency, shared understanding about this action and our possibilities. I invite you to improve upon this letter... for the next one. I sent it to: Bob Carter at The Neighborhood Studio Atlanta. [email protected]. Also, as I mentioned in our meeting tonight, I produced this letter while dictating to my cell phone while walking, so it has shortcomings. - Caitlin

Subject: advice and pricing on an audio drama production

Hi Bob, 

Matt (who is a mutual friend with Mickey Desai) recommended that I contact you. 

I am part of a social media group called Social.Coop.  We own our own social media site, run over Mastodon. Our purpose is to promote communication among people interested in cooperatives.

We have a reading group. At the beginning of the pandemic, we became a writing group. We agreed to write speculative fiction about distributive cooperative organizations (DisCO’s), which are a form of cooperatives. Our story is set in an alternate Montana. Our characters are part of a food coop. The story highlights aspects of cooperative values.

We met for two hours every Sunday for many weeks. We have 19-20 sections or episodes of the story. We are doing table reads right now (meeting on line). Each section takes only 5 or 10 minutes to read out loud. The plot hangs together for those 20 sections and has a conclusion at the end.

As an amateur writing group, we want to continue our table read right now, with each of us rotating the character that we read for. Yet, if we don’t do something more with the story, it will rot in the ether of the cloud. None of us have ever written for radio drama before, yet we feel our writing would work well for that medium.

To get to my question. What do we do next? How does our radio drama script find a producer and voice actors and an outlet?

I imagine there is a place where scripts live. Somewhere, there is a radio drama producer looking for our script. How can we make this match?

The story features cooperative values and techniques, such as feminist economics. The characters are intersectional and modern. The semi-omniscient narrator is an artificial intelligence. The writing quality and the story are at minimum decent.

In one vein of thought, we would release the script on the Internet, and hope that a producer picks it up. Or, we could fundraise to pay a producer to make it with voice actors. Then, we can throw it up on the Internet as a finished audio production.

I am guessing that the whole thing, upon sum, would be under 2 hours.

We have recorded a few of our table reads. 

- Caitlin Waddick

Proposal: publicize these sessions as "social co-op table reads," recruiting people for each role and sending them the script a week before. 

Future Session agenda:

• quick intros

• re-cap

• read a scene or two

• discussion.

Desired outcome from each session:

• fun

• small edits to make scene tighter

• way to collect notes on what the scene made them feel

Future direction of the project:

• Hand off project to production team and actors after we do an initial run of table reads? 

  • a starting off point that others can remix and develop

  • co-op production people -> Josh to write a proposal to a listserv he's a part of

  • other production options: NightVale? Wolf 359? 

What do we want? 

• Emi wants to know what happens next: season 2 :)

• This project to turn into something :)

• indefinite timeline is ok

Note to self: save archive of all episodes to now so we can keep a record of the creation process

Episode recording from Nov. [--] https://share.mayfirst.org/s/AaoKfMLZxqqp97b

Is it too late to join in on the Oct 11 session? 😀