Queer, indie horror audio dramas

Hello! We're a tiny team working out of Manchester, UK, making queer indie horror audio dramas. Clockwork Bird is a philosophical horror audio drama about a missing cyborg and the people trying to find him; it finished in January and is in the top 10% on Listennotes! Spirit Box Radio is a lighter immersive horror about a basement dwelling radio-host trying his best to do a job he wasn't prepared for as ghosts both literal and figurative intrude on his every day.
 

I've been a writer for years and I've listened to podcasts on and off for a really long time, but it wasn't until I got an office job in 2019 that I became properly obsessed. At the start of the COVID lockdowns in the UK, a friend of mine recommended a few audio dramas to me. Before that I'd been mostly into True Crime. But the potential for innovative storytelling in audio dramas was just too big and tempting for me to ignore. I finished Limetown, the White Vault and the Magnus Archives within days of one another and started looking for more. It was around then I realised that I didn't just want to be consuming these podcasts, I wanted to be making them.
I sent a draft script around to the people who would go on to become the cast for Clockwork Bird and within six weeks of that draft, we'd recorded our first five episodes and were gearing up to launch. In hindsight, I wish I'd spent more time planning!
 

We are self-funded at the moment, still being quite small, and it's a bit of a struggle. In the beginning I was fitting audio drama around a job and then around full time study, but the pressure of being the shows' only writer, director, editor and producer, as well as the main character in Spirit Box Radio, was getting a lot to keep on top of. I'd been saving up to go on a trip to the states in 2021 for a few years, but due to the on-going pandemic, that wasn't possible, so instead I decided to use my savings to keep myself afloat and try my hand at podcasting full time. Though I can only afford to do this for a few months I'm hoping that we'll see more support for the shows from our community, and if not, that's okay! I'm really enjoying being able to spend all of my time doing something I love even if it is only temporary, and I'm incredibly privileged to be able to do so.
 

Making audio dramas is a really enriching experience for me. I'd been trying to get novels published for years before trying my hand at audio drama, and not getting the support I needed from agents because of the kind of stories and characters I like to centre in my work. Taking on a debut author who writes almost exclusively queer characters but doesn't want to explicitly politicise their identities within their work is a risk that many agents can't afford to take. I'm not prepared to compromise on telling the kinds of stories I want to tell, and I want to see more people like me who are trans, queer and/or non-binary in media, and I want to hear stories told by people like me, too. I think it's too important to be shy about it. In the world of audio dramas, the people making the art are far more diverse and there is much wider range of voices to listen to because the barriers to entry are comparatively lower compared to other forms of media creation. It's an excellent space to be a queer creator in, and an excellent community for fandoms to spring up around queer characters.
 

Some parts of the process have evolved a lot since I started out, largely as a consequence of now managing such a big cast. Shows start out with what I call a 'sketch plan', where I roughly map out the plot and mark where on a time-line each of the big twists and reveals should be. At that stage I'm also scribbling rough conversations between characters and making note of any funny or creepy things I could include and storing them in a big continuous document. Because Spirit Box Radio has three planned series, I manage each season's sketch plan against the larger, multi-series arcs I have worked out. I'll get scripts out to actors between one and three months in advance of episode air dates, and we'll organise aroudn each other to have read throughs of those scripts online. All the actors record seperately and send their stuff to me be a pre-arranged deadline. I'll then spend time dialogue editing - this usually takes about two hours for a standard twenty minute episode. I'll then go through and add sound design and sound tracking to the episode, and finally master it. All in that process takes at least about three hours. Then I'll make any necessary adjustments to the transcripts and content warnings attached to the original show scripts, and schedule them to post at the proper time, usually at least two days in advance of each episode's air date.
 

This is a big challenge for us, having no budget. We rely on Twitter and Tumblr to get the word out and then on word-of-mouth between existing fans. This has worked pretty well for us so far, but it's one of the things I find the hardest as the showrunner. I sometimes feel that I am letting my shows down by not being able to do more for them marketing-wise. I spend a lot of time making nice graphics for Twitter and Tumblr, and I'm thinking of starting a TikTok though I'm not really sure what I'd do there!
 

If you love it, just do it! The best way to learn is by doing, and if you give it a shot, you have no idea how many people you might be able to reach. There are no guarantees with any creative endeavour, and there doesn't have to be to make it worthwhile. If you have fun making something, it doesn't matter if you don't have the biggest listener count or if you're not making any money, because you did something powerful and amazing that was important to you. Don't be afraid of making things in case they are 'not successful'. A lot of times, advice given to podcasters is unattainable because of the reality of the way people's lives are. Most people can't consistently post on a weekly or even bi-weekly schedule because they have lives and existing commitments to work around. But that doesn't mean they should feel they shouldn't try. Advice for new podcasters is usually also about getting more listeners for your show and I want to emphasise that there is no threshold of people interested in something that makes it worthwhile; if you want to do it, that is reason enough in itself.
 

We have loads of info on our website, hangingslothstudios.com, and you can find all 30 episodes of Clockwork Bird wherever you listen to your podcasts. The first 20 episodes of Spirit Box Radio are available on your favourite app, too! If you want to hang out with us, our twitter is @HangingSloths. If you want to support us, you can do so at patreon.com/hangingslothstudios, or with one-off donations at ko-fi.com/hangingsloths.