INFODUMP 34 - The Whisperer In Darkness

View this email in your browser

This is INFODUMP 34.
The Evil Has Landed.

This isn’t a full version of INFODUMP, so much as a shameless plug for the new podcast series THE WHISPERER IN DARKNESS. Most of you will know that I’ve been working on this since the spring and that it’s the sequel to THE CASE OF CHARLES DEXTER WARD (listen to that first, if you’re new to the whole thing).

This new series is very much a second act to the story, continuing a lot of what was set out in the first series and opening up into what we hope will be the conclusion of the story, after a fashion, next year. The Whisperer In Darkness also broadens the universe out, and the deep-divers amongst you will find references to other radio plays I’ve done and may note a concerted effort to knit everything together into a “universe” which I’m intending to use as a sandpit for lots of other stories across audio and TV.

But if you don’t care about any of that, then it’s just a scary story with some awesome acting by an amazing cast, great sound by David Thomas and brilliant music by Tim Elsenburg. The show was produced, as is the case with all my audio work, by the tireless and needlessly indulgent Karen Rose.

Miranda Sawyer has written about the new series in today’s Observer HERE

If you have BBC Sounds, the link is HERE

If you’re on foreign shores or just prefer to use your regular podcast app, the Apple link is HERE

There are three episodes (of eight) up at the moment and there will be more coming tomorrow (Monday 9th December)

If you enjoy the show, please talk/shout/tweet about it - the more ears we get on this, the better chance we have of making more.

Briefly, in other news, I finished a screenplay this week, the title of which I’m not allowed to tell you yet (yawn). But I hit some bumps moving from Act Two into Act Three and found that transferring the whole thing out of Highland 2 and into Causality (which has come on in leaps and bounds since I last used it) really helped. Causality works more like a piece of non-linear editing software than a screenplay app and it allows you to see your whole story mapped out in a linear timeline, which really helps to break it apart. Act Three of this screenplay was basically one long action sequence and Causality allowed me to keep track of what each character was doing and to intercut their sequences just by dragging and dropping them around the timeline. I don’t think it’s great for everything, and it has its share of irritations (it thinks it can export to Fountain, but it really can”t, so you have to use dreaded Final Draft files as safety back-ups) but it’s worth trying out if you need a new perspective on your story.

Please bookmark or subscribe to the INFODUMP blog.

I am no longer active on any form of social media but I'm about to radically overhaul the juliansimpson.uk site to make it into a hub that will lead out to the various things I'm doing and the various places online where I do spend time.

And I'm on Goodreads, if anyone is into that: goodreads.com/juliansimpson.

You can email me by just hitting REPLY to this letter.

Having resisted it for a long time, I finally binged the first two seasons of Succession in about a week and a half and am now watching again because I loved it so much. I’ve also recently got into The Crown (again, late to the party) and can’t recommend that highly enough either; it’s beautifully made and a really engaging record of late twentieth century history.

Currently midway through season one of Jack Ryan on Amazon. John Krasinski is great and I’ll watch Wendell Pearce in anything (check out his Desert Island Discs from a few weeks ago, which is the best bit of radio I’ve heard in ages).

Since last we spoke, I’ve read a few more of the Jackson Lamb books by Mick Herron and they just get better and better. I also read the latest Orphan X book by Greg Hurwitz, which was tons of fun. I’m now into my first ever reading of Lord Of The Rings, and I don’t expect to be done with that this side of Christmas.

That's all from me. It's election week here in the UK or, as Succession would have it, "Shit Show At The Fuck Factory". I hope we all make it out the other side.

Fuck it. Send.