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It definitely leans on those improvising skills. Even though you may prepare your ideas and stories and know what's behind door one, know what's behind door two. But you have to be prepared that your players will invent the roof and then climb through skylights. But I couldn't go to university. In the end, I had to stay behind to help take care of my parents. So I became a nurse. For a little while, I did nursing assistant stuff. I've done almost every job except being a literal nurse. And then after that I moved on to become an engineer. It's been a very good uptick in my life being able to switch pretty much full time to this, give or take a few things. I have to occasionally go pour some wires in a house, but pretty much full time. And yeah, it's given me immense joy and been able to like really help me out and I think tell better stories, which is kind of what I really always wanted to do.
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Hi, I'm Claire. For this podcast, I chat with people who have found or refound their creativity as adults. We'll explore their childhood experiences of the arts, discuss how they came to the artistic practices they now love, and consider the barriers they may have experienced between the two. We'll also explore what it is that people value and gain from their newfound artistic pursuits. This time, I'm chatting with Hem Brewster. Hello, Hem, how are you?
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I'm doing great, Claire. It's fun to be chatting with you properly.
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Tell me first of all about your current creative outlet.
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Currently I am lead producer at Blighthouse Studios and we make fiction podcasts and the story that we are kind of in the process of rapidly editing and trying to get out in a mad, mad rush of a grand mad experiment is called Varúd, which is an anthology horror actual play podcast set in Iceland. Because that's where I live, that's where half the cast are from. And I was like, well, let's do some horror in anywhere Iceland. Because you see anywhere uk, anywhere, America settings, I'm like, let's just do a good old fashioned role playing game set in the real world, but in Iceland.
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That is something that for many people, including myself, who have been listening to the Iceland one, I'm not going to say it is a very. It's a very different and new experience. So I'm really excited to speak with you. When you were younger, did creative activities of any sort play a part in your life at home or in education?
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When I was younger, I read a lot. One of the things that helped me get Away from all the stresses of stuff. But I actually have something. I met my niece a couple of months ago and she gave me a gift, which is a mouse mat that has a picture of me, my niece and my nephew because we were all the same age and, and we used to record little radio plays. That's just kind of like part of what we used to do growing up. We had a tape recorder, I had a microphone that my parents gave us and yeah, we used to call little radio play. So we did that a lot when we were very young growing up. And it wasn't until she gave me this, I had a sudden, oh my God, you're right. We did this Memory unlocked. So we used to do that a lot when we were youngsters. And then I moved on to role playing games through forums and then I did Dungeons and dragons. I did NaNoWriMo at one point, which is like, write a novel in a month. And I did that for a couple of years. So for me growing up, writing and not exactly performing, but creating and making things is like always been a big part of who I am. Just hanging out in the background. Yeah. So it's been there for a while.
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Yeah. It's quite funny that that radio business, that wasn't at the forefront of your thinking now and what you do now, isn't that bonkers when you look, it
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was like she, she came with this thing, my niece, and she was like, oh, hey, do you remember? We used to do these things. I'm like, my life has gone full circle. What is this?
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Brilliant. Tell me a bit about. Because you were playing the role playing games when you were younger, as you just mentioned. So tell me a bit about how you discovered those and please, how you actually play them.
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Yeah, no worries, no worries. So I started role playing games through by forums, you know, the old school. Like you post something, someone post back. So we used to play a lot through that. And then a friend of mine came back from university between terms and she's like, hey, do you want to play Dungeons Dragons? What the hell is it? Yeah, she, she turned up, she ran a couple of games for us and I've kind of never stopped playing since. Not Dungeons Dragons to play all sorts of games. And it's just been a part of my life since I was probably like 17. So I realized the other day, I've been doing this for two decades, like, what? But to actually play a role playing game. I will describe a scene like, hey, we're in an inn and there's rushes on the floor and A fire crackling over there's the bar maid spitting into the cup and cleaning it out with a rag. And it's loads of patrons around. And you're sitting there at the bar with your drink and your friends next to you. And a hooded stranger walks into the inn. Everything goes quiet. They look at you and they offer you a job. What do you want to do? And then you would respond in turn, I want to say hello, I want to punch the stranger in the face. Because they look like an ex boyfriend or something. Whatever you want to do, you'd be able to do. And if there's ever any point where you could fail, for example, you could fail punching a stranger in the face. Right. You would roll a dice. And your character sheet, which has a bunch of numbers on it, will help determine whether your dice roll was good or whether your dice roll was bad. And depending on those results, as the gm, the game master on my end, I will narrate what happens. You're like, I want to punch him in the face. You either do it or you don't. And I say, hey, you managed to punch him in the face. He falls down and cries, weeping that he ever broke up with you. Or like, you miss and he laughs at you and steals your beer. That's kind of a role playing game in a nutshell.
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Brilliant. So the actual story starts from the games master's imagination.
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Yep.
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Yeah. And then it gets led a bit along the way by the roll of a dice and then how the other people react. Like improv that I used to do.
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Yeah, if you're comfortable with improv, it's a lot like that. But there are just some additional rules to make it more game. Like role playing games, like use the drama that's in dice rolls to figure out whether something does or doesn't happen. And I like to think of it as the person who kind of creates the story that my players are in. My players are my plot twists. I never know what they're gonna do. And if you're writing, for example, you're writing a story, you can go, oh, they go through the second door on the left. But my players will invent doors on the left, which I may or may not decide are real. But sometimes like, oh, well, I don't want to go through the door, so I'm gonna bust through the window. I'm like, I never prepared the window. It's chaos, but it's the good kind of chaos. And if you have the right group together, you can tell some really, really fun stories. You can tell some really, like, heartbreaking and wrenching stories. You never know what you're going to get until you play it. And it definitely leans on those improvising skills. Even though you may prepare your ideas and stories and know what's behind door one, know what's behind door two. But you have to be prepared that your players will invent the roof and then clothe through skylights. These things happen.
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That is brilliant. I love it when we would play improv games. Say we're going around in a circle, and some people further along the line have planned what they're going to say based on what someone two steps behind them said. But when you get to that point, what that person two steps behind said is not relevant now. And you need to move with the person next to you.
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You can't plan it.
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I love that.
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Well done, you. Thank you. It's a lot of fun to do. Yeah.
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Yeah. Brilliant. Okay, so now I understand that. Let's talk about your life. When you left school, did you have a plan for what you wanted to do in the future?
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I did. When I was at school, my plan was, I'm going to knuckle down. I am going to study English, history, and law. I was very good at maths, but I was like, what am I going to do with maths? Become an accountant. I don't want to be an accountant. I don't want to become an actuary. And all I'd be able to do is teach. And I don't really want to do that. So I decided to do English and history, and I wanted to go to London to learn how to be a lawyer. That was my plan. But I couldn't go to university. In the end, I had to stay behind to help take care of my parents. So I became a nurse. For a little while, I did nursing assistant stuff. I've done almost every job except being a literal nurse. I've done home care. I've done hospice care. I've done retirement home care. I've done being a nursing assistant in a hospital. And then after that, I moved on to become an engineer, got an apprenticeship as a mechanical engineer. And I did five years at that job learning how to be a design engineer, which was hilarious, because even though I'm technically trained as a mechanical engineer, I know a lot more about electrical engineering because that was the specialty of the job that I was doing. And then I quit that and became an audio book narrator.
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Why caring? While you were caring for your own parents, why do you think you took
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on those Roles, there wasn't a whole lot of options. If I was going, for example, to work at Tesco or Asda or something, I was considered too qualified, the same as McDonald's. I had too many qualifications, my grades were through the roof. So the only job that I could get quickly and easily to maintain myself when I wasn't going to university, because that was no longer the plan, was caring. Because technically I had at that point when I was like 18 or 19, I probably had 10 or 11 years of caring experience. So it's fairly easy to be like, hey, I've done this basically my whole life, give me a job. So I managed to switch between those for quite a while.
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Got it. Understand? And then engineering. What, Who, Why?
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I quit my caring jobs because I just needed to take time out and I was lucky in a place where I could like take a few months out. And then I was like, well, I need to get a job again and I don't want to go back into caring. I'm completely burnt out. And, you know, that aspect of my life is kind of behind me now. So I started looking around at jobs and I started thinking about what I want to do in my life moving forward. I'm like, well, I want a job that uses other parts of my brain that I haven't really used before. And I found that apprenticeships were open, which is not a big thing that was offered to us. When I was at school, it was always like, go to university or you're a failure. But I found apprenticeships and they were like, okay, we're going to pay you basically nothing. Except when it came to engineering, they paid twice as much as everyone, but it was £2.50 an hour. However, I was older, which meant the law applied differently to me compared to the 18 year olds who were applying. About 22 at the time. And I still had to be paid minimum wage according to my age. Because I was older, it was assumed I had more financial responsibilities, which was true. I was a house that I had to keep in charge of. So, yeah, I took the apprenticeship for engineering because it paid the most at the time and was a different kind of work. And I've always been into how do machines work, how do they go together, how does this work? I really love the kind of science and the physics of everything. So yeah, I slipped into that job and I enjoyed the hell out of it for many years.
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So what were you physically doing?
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I was a mechanical design engineer for a gradient coil, which is basically what tells the computer in an MRI Machine what part of the body it's slicing through, and, like, kind of help determines how much energy is put in to turn all the atoms the specific way so it gets the signal back to the radio frequency shield. So I basically did a lot of design work for that. Part of my apprenticeship was also learning how to physically do those jobs. So I may design this beautiful coil and I may put all these pipes in there for cooling, but I also know how to do that. I also know how to actually attach the pipes. I actually know how to put the resin into the machine. I spend a lot of time physically learning how to do it. I spent a lot of time in my apprenticeship learning how to quality control, which is one of my favorite things, and then ultimately how to, like, design these machines.
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Amazing. While you're doing this work, whether it's during the caring and during the engineering, are you doing any writing or are you getting any creative effort in?
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Yeah, when I was caring, it was kind of more like it's a hobby, right? It's a hobby that I play role playing games. It's a hobby that I do a little bit of writing on site. When I finished my apprenticeship and while I was working full time at the engineering company, I started doing more role playing games. I started writing my own system, my own set of rules with a very good friend of mine, a guy who's basically a brother in my heart. We started writing that together. And then I decided, okay, well, I want to take things more seriously. I want to play more serious games than the let's get drunk and play games attitude that we had at home. And I went on Reddit for the first, only real time. I found people who were looking for voice actors who could happily play characters in a podcast. I'm like, I can pretend to be Scottish. I can do this, I can fake it until I make it. And I joined that podcast and I met some incredibly good friends there. And, yeah, we've been making podcasts ever since, really. So while I was an engineer, I was learning how to quality control sound. I was learning how to play the game. I was learning, like, what being a podcaster actually meant and the specific jobs involved. Yeah, so I did that alongside doing the engineering stuff. I did that for a long time.
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And then. At what point did you leave the engineering role?
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I left for about five or six years, I think it was. And it was basically down to I no longer enjoyed it. I didn't enjoy the company I was in, and I was really itching to do something else that made me really happy because I was quite depressed when I was there for quite a while. And writing, performing, role playing, all of these things made me really happy. So I threw my hands in the air and said, I'm going to give this audiobook thing a crack and I'm going to do that alongside. Trying to get my podcast to be, like, slightly bigger. And then, yeah, I did audiobook narration for about a year and a half until I moved to Iceland. And then I had to get a real job so I could maintain my visa, which really sucked. But at that point, I had to stop being an audiobook narrator when I moved to Iceland. So I was working, doing a lot of stuff on acx, which is the audiobook publishing side behind Audible for Amazon. And they do not pay you if you live in Iceland. They will only pay you as a book narrator if you live in Canada, Australia, the us, the uk. And since I was moving to Iceland, I've basically had eight years without royalties. And yeah, I came to Iceland. I hounded a poor woman who worked at the Beluga Sea Life Sanctuary until she gave me a job. I harassed her for, like, weeks on end. And I became, over time, over, like the three and a bit years that I was there. I eventually became the duty manager. So I did everything except take care of the animals. And I mean, literally everything. And that whole time, I was still working on my podcasts, I was still working on the stories. We started telling a new story. We started making a whole bunch of other stuff. Yeah. So it was a lot of juggling to get to the point where I am now, where I no longer have to have a primary job to take care of some of the stuff I'm doing?
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So did you have some trouble with the balance if he were doing the job at the center and doing the podcast stuff? And how did you. Did you get around that or did something have to give?
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It was really difficult. I originally started at the Beluga Sanctuary. I originally started as the receptionist. Hey, welcome to the Beluga Sanctuary. This is how much it costs to enter. You're doing a great job for charity. That was originally what I did. But I got bored after, like, two days. I was so bored. So I started just looking through stuff. I started fixing stuff in the building. I started, like, reorganizing things. I started learning how to order stuff. And over time, I ended up doing everything from it to health and safety, to ordering things, to, like, building maintenance, to keeping care of the shop and the entrance and their exhibits. Like, I basically did all of that. And it Got to the point where I took two weeks off of work to do something fun. I wasn't even leaving the island where I live. I was still just doing something fun for two weeks. And I got called every single day on things that genuinely required my attention. And I didn't realize how much I was working until I tried to take two weeks off. And at that point I'm like, all right, I am neglecting some of the podcast stuff I need to do because I have to keep answering work stuff. So, you know, I was like, all right, in that case, I'm going to work for my husband as he's a electrical apprentice because he's a master electrician, because obviously I know a lot about electrics too. So I'm basically his second pair of hands for many, many years after I left. And that gave me enough time to learn how to help him do his job because he's self employed as well, because sometimes you just need a second pair of hands to pull some wires. And gave me more time to actually focus on podcasting stuff. And yeah, for a while it was work, work, work and very little podcasting. We went over a year and a half without recording anything, which is really bad for us. Luckily, we had a backlog when I finally quit the last of my regular work. I finally had time to actually get on to podcasting stuff again. But it was touch and go for a while of, like, work is dominating everything I do. And I just, I couldn't keep up on the podcasting side. And I was like, all right, back to the thing that actually makes me happy. Helping my other half out. Occasionally pull wires through an electrical house stuff and writing things and making shows.
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Yeah, before we get to that bit, you did have another unemployed role, I think, didn't you?
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Yep.
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What was that?
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I work for a company called Quest Portal. They are a virtual tabletop. So we're talking about the roleplaying games. You traditionally played them in person, like around a table with like your little minis and everything wandering around.
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Your little minis?
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Little minis, yeah, little characters that.
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Are you all right? Got it.
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So, yeah, we have these little miniatures running around on a map. So if you're doing that at home, that's how you play. But for basically the longest time, I've only ever been able to play online because most of my friends are either in the States or they're back in the uk. And that means you sometimes want a virtual representation of the tabletop so you can move tokens on your screen and everybody can see Tokens moving on your screen. That's a really simplified version of what a virtual tabletop can do. And I was working for a company that did that. They are Icelandic. I've known them for quite a while and I got really active in their discord when we started using it as a friends group. Got really active in it when I was like, oh, hey, we're starting a new show that uses a virtual tabletop. Do you want to sponsor us? And they were like, yes. And then they called me up one day, they were like, hey, can I call you? I'm like, sure. And he offered me a job on the spot. And I drove to Reykjavik the next day after getting my tires changed. And I worked for them for about a year, but I was working by the time I finished, about 16 hour days, seven days a week. And that really was the killer for podcasting. I was like, I have to step back, I going to get you past the finishing line on implementing a really big project. And I gave it my all. And then the second we were done, I gave it until the Friday of that week. And like, I'm sorry, buddy, I know you're sick, but I'm leaving. I'm giving him my three months notice. And he was gutted. And I maintain contact with them. There's never any bad blood between us. It was just like, I really want them to succeed, but I really have to do something for myself otherwise I'm going to lose my gourd.
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Yeah. And what does that actually involve? How do you go? Right, this is what I'm going to do all the time and I'm going to make it a success. I mean, I don't know how you judge it or what, you know, where you get your value from, because we can all get different value. What did that look like for you?
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For me, a lot of that looked like being able to sit down and actually do the things that we'd always wanted to do. So, for example, being able to run a new show in a very different way, which is Varúd or Varud if you're English. It's enabled me to do the things that we need to do to start pushing ourselves in the space. We've been in the podcasting sphere for nearly eight and a half years. By the time I decided that's it, I'm going to try and do my best. We've never been able to do SEO management on our own website because that's never been a thing we've had time to do. I've sat down, I've learned a lot about SEO during my work at Quest Portal, so I put that to good use. YouTube. Yep. I sat down and figured out how the algorithm picks us up best. Do we have a unique channel? Do we have separate channels? I started reaching out and making more contacts with people, like maintaining our network connections, not just hi one and done and moving on sort of thing. It allows me to do things like, oh, yeah, let's get the transcripts sorted out. Let's get them all up in a place that works really well. Let's get all the episodes we have tagged correctly and in the correct order. Let's make sure that Patreon, who has been by our side for the last six or seven years, let's get them everything we promise we actually want to do and more so that they actually feel that they're getting value for money. It allowed us, allowed me more specifically to do the things that actually help get more ears on our show and actually say thank you back to the people who actually pay us money, our patrons. And do we get more ad money? Yep. That's how we do it. Are we going to get more sponsors? Yep. I'm going to pull out all the things I can to get that sorted and reach out and get sponsors. Yeah. And at the moment, going in full time also allows me to do things like, okay, I need to figure out this artist grant from Iceland, because if you're an artist, you can get a salary from the government. How do I make that work? I have at least two of us, possibly three, if I can make it work, all based in Iceland, we could get grants to literally just create stuff. What does that look like? Because that is a very involved process. This is my plan. This is how we're going to make money. This is what it's doing for, like, the Icelandic language. I'm so sorry, I'm ruining it, but I have Icelanders. I swear. I swear they're real. Apart from giving us more time to actually create, it also gives me more time to actually business, which is the less fun part. But it is the thing that makes someone go from being relatively unknown to being an overnight success. And I'll use really big air quotes around that because there is really no such thing as overnight. There's always years of work behind it somewhere.
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And talking about creative, the creative fix, do you feel that? And also how do you feel your overall well being has maybe been improved? I'm hoping improved by. By this change. Otherwise that's not the right ending for this podcast.
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Oh, God. Pivot. Pivot no, like. So I've suffered a lot with my mental health issues. I always have done for a very long time. And I find that when I'm not actively creating, I get more and more depressed. So I try and be busy all the time. I try and be over busy. And I know the things I can say, all right, I'm too busy for this right now. And then if I'm like, I need to do something, I have something to do. And creatively, I love telling stories. I love telling stories with my friends. I know where my weaknesses are. I know where my strengths are. I know my weakness is scripting. So I'll never write anything scripted ever again in my life. But I will forever write more stories that a lot of people can have their voices into, shaping the form of how the game goes. Character arcs, surprises I throw at them and that they throw at me. It gives me an immense joy to know that after, for example, 10 years, which is the podcast that started it all for us, we recorded the finale for that almost a year ago, and everyone at the table were in tears because we didn't want to say goodbye to it. And when I finished, I had the GM blues, as it's known, but it also had such a, oh, thank Christ, it's done. We actually finished. Because before that point, the idea of not finishing that story gave me a genuine lump in my stomach. I felt really sick and cold thinking, we're never gonna be able to finish this. So I'm super happy we got to finish stuff. I'm super happy that we got to start new stories and start and finish an entire new story over the last year, which has just been incredible. And it's definitely given me more time to actually be a better storyteller. And one of the key things about being a better storyteller is absorbing other media, either in your sphere or more importantly, outside of your sphere, so that you can bring new ideas to the day. But you have different inspirations, and a varied inspiration often tells a better story. So I have time to actually sit down and not only just absorb or watch, but actually analyze. Oh, this is good story. That's bad story. Ooh, I might want to include something like this. Oh, I'm just going to wholesale rip this idea. This is incredible. These sort of things that inspire. I have time to actually be more analytical about that, which I think has made me a better storyteller. I'm not at three in the morning trying to panic, think of something, because I've only been able to prep a game for one hour, I've been able to think about it and prep it for like more hours, the actual time it deserves to have. So, yeah, for me, it's. It's been a very good uptick in my life being able to switch pretty much full time to this, give or take a few things. I have to occasionally go pull some wires in a house, but pretty much full time. And yeah, it's given me immense joy and been able to like, really help me out and I think tell better stories, which is kind of what I really always wanted to do.
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Well, that's lovely. That's rounded things off very well. And pulling wires through walls is not a great sacrifice, is it, with your husband every now and then?
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We recently had to rewire an entire house for someone we actually know. And we were there for like seven days. We worked 14 to 16 hour days and it was fun. We had music going all the time. The guy we knew was also a nerd, so we could talk about nerd stuff with him. And yeah, I only got electrocuted once through my thumbs, which was really bad. So I climbed down the ladder. I'm like, oh, God, wow. So I've had my first electrician's real shock in the house. So I, I feel like I've done my. I've done my time now. I know how to rewire plugs and I had to put sockets in the wall. I know how to cut wires, I know how to pull them. I feel much better about myself. But now I officially have my mark of like. Yep, you've done it. You've been electrocuted.
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Yeah, brilliant. I think.
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Yeah, it's like, it's not a bad sacrifice to be able to do the things that I want to do. Occasionally I'll get electrocuted. It's no big deal.
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Yeah, I've never heard that from a guest before. Brilliant. It's been absolutely super chatting with you today. You can give me the names of your shows, the ones that's finished and the new one, and any other ways that people can connect with you.
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Yeah, sure. So role playing games, if you put them in podcast form, it's called an actual play. I have the Lucky Die, which is our coming up on its 10 year run of a singular story that we have told. It's called the Lucky Die. It's a dnd actual play podcast, Dungeons and Dragons. I also have the sprouting, which I am also the storyteller on, which is Call of Cthulhu. It is plant based apocalypse using the call of Cthulhu system and it's called the Sprouting, which is ongoing, hasn't finished yet and we have definitely not finished recording the story of yet. I also have Counterbalance, which is the T shirt I'm wearing today. If you're looking at the video, which is actually written by a good friend of mine also under Blighthouse and it is a high fantasy audio drama so it's not a role playing game and it's about a hole in the weave of magic that has to be fixed by three people who do not like each other. It's romp, it's really good, it's really intense and I love it. It's run by Kessa and the newer projects that we worked on that we recorded in nine days and we got 48 episodes out of releases October 1st releases every single day until November 18th and 19th with a bonus episode coming out about an hour each. That is a zombie apocalypse following a family of survivors who are mostly Icelandic with one American. And yeah, they decide to cross Iceland on foot in winter during a zombie apocalypse. And that is a basic role playing game and that is called Varúd V A R U D if you're using an English keyboard.
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Brilliant. That's the one I listen to because I do like a zombie apocalypse.
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Oh, me too.
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Thank you so much Hem. It's been really lovely to chat.
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Thank you, Claire.
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I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you did, perhaps you'd like to financially contribute to future episodes at buymeacoffee.com/creativityfound There's a link in the show Notes. If you are listening on a Value for Value enabled app such as Fountain, TrueFans or Podcast Guru, feel free to send a few sats my way. And if you have no idea of what I'm talking about, you can find out more by listening to my sister podcast called Podcasting 2.0 in Practice.
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It definitely leans on those improvising skills. Even though you may prepare your ideas and stories and know what's behind door one, know what's behind door two. But you have to be prepared that your players will invent the roof and then climb through skylights. But I couldn't go to university. In the end, I had to stay behind to help take care of my parents. So I became a nurse. For a little while, I did nursing assistant stuff. I've done almost every job except being a literal nurse. And then after that I moved on to become an engineer. It's been a very good uptick in my life being able to switch pretty much full time to this, give or take a few things. I have to occasionally go pour some wires in a house, but pretty much full time. And yeah, it's given me immense joy and been able to like really help me out and I think tell better stories, which is kind of what I really always wanted to do.
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Hi, I'm Claire. For this podcast, I chat with people who have found or refound their creativity as adults. We'll explore their childhood experiences of the arts, discuss how they came to the artistic practices they now love, and consider the barriers they may have experienced between the two. We'll also explore what it is that people value and gain from their newfound artistic pursuits. This time, I'm chatting with Hem Brewster. Hello, Hem, how are you?
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I'm doing great, Claire. It's fun to be chatting with you properly.
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Tell me first of all about your current creative outlet.
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Currently I am lead producer at Blighthouse Studios and we make fiction podcasts and the story that we are kind of in the process of rapidly editing and trying to get out in a mad, mad rush of a grand mad experiment is called Varúd, which is an anthology horror actual play podcast set in Iceland. Because that's where I live, that's where half the cast are from. And I was like, well, let's do some horror in anywhere Iceland. Because you see anywhere uk, anywhere, America settings, I'm like, let's just do a good old fashioned role playing game set in the real world, but in Iceland.
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That is something that for many people, including myself, who have been listening to the Iceland one, I'm not going to say it is a very. It's a very different and new experience. So I'm really excited to speak with you. When you were younger, did creative activities of any sort play a part in your life at home or in education?
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When I was younger, I read a lot. One of the things that helped me get Away from all the stresses of stuff. But I actually have something. I met my niece a couple of months ago and she gave me a gift, which is a mouse mat that has a picture of me, my niece and my nephew because we were all the same age and, and we used to record little radio plays. That's just kind of like part of what we used to do growing up. We had a tape recorder, I had a microphone that my parents gave us and yeah, we used to call little radio play. So we did that a lot when we were very young growing up. And it wasn't until she gave me this, I had a sudden, oh my God, you're right. We did this Memory unlocked. So we used to do that a lot when we were youngsters. And then I moved on to role playing games through forums and then I did Dungeons and dragons. I did NaNoWriMo at one point, which is like, write a novel in a month. And I did that for a couple of years. So for me growing up, writing and not exactly performing, but creating and making things is like always been a big part of who I am. Just hanging out in the background. Yeah. So it's been there for a while.
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Yeah. It's quite funny that that radio business, that wasn't at the forefront of your thinking now and what you do now, isn't that bonkers when you look, it
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was like she, she came with this thing, my niece, and she was like, oh, hey, do you remember? We used to do these things. I'm like, my life has gone full circle. What is this?
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Brilliant. Tell me a bit about. Because you were playing the role playing games when you were younger, as you just mentioned. So tell me a bit about how you discovered those and please, how you actually play them.
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Yeah, no worries, no worries. So I started role playing games through by forums, you know, the old school. Like you post something, someone post back. So we used to play a lot through that. And then a friend of mine came back from university between terms and she's like, hey, do you want to play Dungeons Dragons? What the hell is it? Yeah, she, she turned up, she ran a couple of games for us and I've kind of never stopped playing since. Not Dungeons Dragons to play all sorts of games. And it's just been a part of my life since I was probably like 17. So I realized the other day, I've been doing this for two decades, like, what? But to actually play a role playing game. I will describe a scene like, hey, we're in an inn and there's rushes on the floor and A fire crackling over there's the bar maid spitting into the cup and cleaning it out with a rag. And it's loads of patrons around. And you're sitting there at the bar with your drink and your friends next to you. And a hooded stranger walks into the inn. Everything goes quiet. They look at you and they offer you a job. What do you want to do? And then you would respond in turn, I want to say hello, I want to punch the stranger in the face. Because they look like an ex boyfriend or something. Whatever you want to do, you'd be able to do. And if there's ever any point where you could fail, for example, you could fail punching a stranger in the face. Right. You would roll a dice. And your character sheet, which has a bunch of numbers on it, will help determine whether your dice roll was good or whether your dice roll was bad. And depending on those results, as the gm, the game master on my end, I will narrate what happens. You're like, I want to punch him in the face. You either do it or you don't. And I say, hey, you managed to punch him in the face. He falls down and cries, weeping that he ever broke up with you. Or like, you miss and he laughs at you and steals your beer. That's kind of a role playing game in a nutshell.
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Brilliant. So the actual story starts from the games master's imagination.
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Yep.
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Yeah. And then it gets led a bit along the way by the roll of a dice and then how the other people react. Like improv that I used to do.
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Yeah, if you're comfortable with improv, it's a lot like that. But there are just some additional rules to make it more game. Like role playing games, like use the drama that's in dice rolls to figure out whether something does or doesn't happen. And I like to think of it as the person who kind of creates the story that my players are in. My players are my plot twists. I never know what they're gonna do. And if you're writing, for example, you're writing a story, you can go, oh, they go through the second door on the left. But my players will invent doors on the left, which I may or may not decide are real. But sometimes like, oh, well, I don't want to go through the door, so I'm gonna bust through the window. I'm like, I never prepared the window. It's chaos, but it's the good kind of chaos. And if you have the right group together, you can tell some really, really fun stories. You can tell some really, like, heartbreaking and wrenching stories. You never know what you're going to get until you play it. And it definitely leans on those improvising skills. Even though you may prepare your ideas and stories and know what's behind door one, know what's behind door two. But you have to be prepared that your players will invent the roof and then clothe through skylights. These things happen.
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That is brilliant. I love it when we would play improv games. Say we're going around in a circle, and some people further along the line have planned what they're going to say based on what someone two steps behind them said. But when you get to that point, what that person two steps behind said is not relevant now. And you need to move with the person next to you.
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You can't plan it.
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I love that.
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Well done, you. Thank you. It's a lot of fun to do. Yeah.
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Yeah. Brilliant. Okay, so now I understand that. Let's talk about your life. When you left school, did you have a plan for what you wanted to do in the future?
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I did. When I was at school, my plan was, I'm going to knuckle down. I am going to study English, history, and law. I was very good at maths, but I was like, what am I going to do with maths? Become an accountant. I don't want to be an accountant. I don't want to become an actuary. And all I'd be able to do is teach. And I don't really want to do that. So I decided to do English and history, and I wanted to go to London to learn how to be a lawyer. That was my plan. But I couldn't go to university. In the end, I had to stay behind to help take care of my parents. So I became a nurse. For a little while, I did nursing assistant stuff. I've done almost every job except being a literal nurse. I've done home care. I've done hospice care. I've done retirement home care. I've done being a nursing assistant in a hospital. And then after that, I moved on to become an engineer, got an apprenticeship as a mechanical engineer. And I did five years at that job learning how to be a design engineer, which was hilarious, because even though I'm technically trained as a mechanical engineer, I know a lot more about electrical engineering because that was the specialty of the job that I was doing. And then I quit that and became an audio book narrator.
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Why caring? While you were caring for your own parents, why do you think you took
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on those Roles, there wasn't a whole lot of options. If I was going, for example, to work at Tesco or Asda or something, I was considered too qualified, the same as McDonald's. I had too many qualifications, my grades were through the roof. So the only job that I could get quickly and easily to maintain myself when I wasn't going to university, because that was no longer the plan, was caring. Because technically I had at that point when I was like 18 or 19, I probably had 10 or 11 years of caring experience. So it's fairly easy to be like, hey, I've done this basically my whole life, give me a job. So I managed to switch between those for quite a while.
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Got it. Understand? And then engineering. What, Who, Why?
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I quit my caring jobs because I just needed to take time out and I was lucky in a place where I could like take a few months out. And then I was like, well, I need to get a job again and I don't want to go back into caring. I'm completely burnt out. And, you know, that aspect of my life is kind of behind me now. So I started looking around at jobs and I started thinking about what I want to do in my life moving forward. I'm like, well, I want a job that uses other parts of my brain that I haven't really used before. And I found that apprenticeships were open, which is not a big thing that was offered to us. When I was at school, it was always like, go to university or you're a failure. But I found apprenticeships and they were like, okay, we're going to pay you basically nothing. Except when it came to engineering, they paid twice as much as everyone, but it was £2.50 an hour. However, I was older, which meant the law applied differently to me compared to the 18 year olds who were applying. About 22 at the time. And I still had to be paid minimum wage according to my age. Because I was older, it was assumed I had more financial responsibilities, which was true. I was a house that I had to keep in charge of. So, yeah, I took the apprenticeship for engineering because it paid the most at the time and was a different kind of work. And I've always been into how do machines work, how do they go together, how does this work? I really love the kind of science and the physics of everything. So yeah, I slipped into that job and I enjoyed the hell out of it for many years.
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So what were you physically doing?
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I was a mechanical design engineer for a gradient coil, which is basically what tells the computer in an MRI Machine what part of the body it's slicing through, and, like, kind of help determines how much energy is put in to turn all the atoms the specific way so it gets the signal back to the radio frequency shield. So I basically did a lot of design work for that. Part of my apprenticeship was also learning how to physically do those jobs. So I may design this beautiful coil and I may put all these pipes in there for cooling, but I also know how to do that. I also know how to actually attach the pipes. I actually know how to put the resin into the machine. I spend a lot of time physically learning how to do it. I spent a lot of time in my apprenticeship learning how to quality control, which is one of my favorite things, and then ultimately how to, like, design these machines.
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Amazing. While you're doing this work, whether it's during the caring and during the engineering, are you doing any writing or are you getting any creative effort in?
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Yeah, when I was caring, it was kind of more like it's a hobby, right? It's a hobby that I play role playing games. It's a hobby that I do a little bit of writing on site. When I finished my apprenticeship and while I was working full time at the engineering company, I started doing more role playing games. I started writing my own system, my own set of rules with a very good friend of mine, a guy who's basically a brother in my heart. We started writing that together. And then I decided, okay, well, I want to take things more seriously. I want to play more serious games than the let's get drunk and play games attitude that we had at home. And I went on Reddit for the first, only real time. I found people who were looking for voice actors who could happily play characters in a podcast. I'm like, I can pretend to be Scottish. I can do this, I can fake it until I make it. And I joined that podcast and I met some incredibly good friends there. And, yeah, we've been making podcasts ever since, really. So while I was an engineer, I was learning how to quality control sound. I was learning how to play the game. I was learning, like, what being a podcaster actually meant and the specific jobs involved. Yeah, so I did that alongside doing the engineering stuff. I did that for a long time.
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And then. At what point did you leave the engineering role?
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I left for about five or six years, I think it was. And it was basically down to I no longer enjoyed it. I didn't enjoy the company I was in, and I was really itching to do something else that made me really happy because I was quite depressed when I was there for quite a while. And writing, performing, role playing, all of these things made me really happy. So I threw my hands in the air and said, I'm going to give this audiobook thing a crack and I'm going to do that alongside. Trying to get my podcast to be, like, slightly bigger. And then, yeah, I did audiobook narration for about a year and a half until I moved to Iceland. And then I had to get a real job so I could maintain my visa, which really sucked. But at that point, I had to stop being an audiobook narrator when I moved to Iceland. So I was working, doing a lot of stuff on acx, which is the audiobook publishing side behind Audible for Amazon. And they do not pay you if you live in Iceland. They will only pay you as a book narrator if you live in Canada, Australia, the us, the uk. And since I was moving to Iceland, I've basically had eight years without royalties. And yeah, I came to Iceland. I hounded a poor woman who worked at the Beluga Sea Life Sanctuary until she gave me a job. I harassed her for, like, weeks on end. And I became, over time, over, like the three and a bit years that I was there. I eventually became the duty manager. So I did everything except take care of the animals. And I mean, literally everything. And that whole time, I was still working on my podcasts, I was still working on the stories. We started telling a new story. We started making a whole bunch of other stuff. Yeah. So it was a lot of juggling to get to the point where I am now, where I no longer have to have a primary job to take care of some of the stuff I'm doing?
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So did you have some trouble with the balance if he were doing the job at the center and doing the podcast stuff? And how did you. Did you get around that or did something have to give?
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It was really difficult. I originally started at the Beluga Sanctuary. I originally started as the receptionist. Hey, welcome to the Beluga Sanctuary. This is how much it costs to enter. You're doing a great job for charity. That was originally what I did. But I got bored after, like, two days. I was so bored. So I started just looking through stuff. I started fixing stuff in the building. I started, like, reorganizing things. I started learning how to order stuff. And over time, I ended up doing everything from it to health and safety, to ordering things, to, like, building maintenance, to keeping care of the shop and the entrance and their exhibits. Like, I basically did all of that. And it Got to the point where I took two weeks off of work to do something fun. I wasn't even leaving the island where I live. I was still just doing something fun for two weeks. And I got called every single day on things that genuinely required my attention. And I didn't realize how much I was working until I tried to take two weeks off. And at that point I'm like, all right, I am neglecting some of the podcast stuff I need to do because I have to keep answering work stuff. So, you know, I was like, all right, in that case, I'm going to work for my husband as he's a electrical apprentice because he's a master electrician, because obviously I know a lot about electrics too. So I'm basically his second pair of hands for many, many years after I left. And that gave me enough time to learn how to help him do his job because he's self employed as well, because sometimes you just need a second pair of hands to pull some wires. And gave me more time to actually focus on podcasting stuff. And yeah, for a while it was work, work, work and very little podcasting. We went over a year and a half without recording anything, which is really bad for us. Luckily, we had a backlog when I finally quit the last of my regular work. I finally had time to actually get on to podcasting stuff again. But it was touch and go for a while of, like, work is dominating everything I do. And I just, I couldn't keep up on the podcasting side. And I was like, all right, back to the thing that actually makes me happy. Helping my other half out. Occasionally pull wires through an electrical house stuff and writing things and making shows.
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Yeah, before we get to that bit, you did have another unemployed role, I think, didn't you?
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Yep.
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What was that?
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I work for a company called Quest Portal. They are a virtual tabletop. So we're talking about the roleplaying games. You traditionally played them in person, like around a table with like your little minis and everything wandering around.
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Your little minis?
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Little minis, yeah, little characters that.
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Are you all right? Got it.
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So, yeah, we have these little miniatures running around on a map. So if you're doing that at home, that's how you play. But for basically the longest time, I've only ever been able to play online because most of my friends are either in the States or they're back in the uk. And that means you sometimes want a virtual representation of the tabletop so you can move tokens on your screen and everybody can see Tokens moving on your screen. That's a really simplified version of what a virtual tabletop can do. And I was working for a company that did that. They are Icelandic. I've known them for quite a while and I got really active in their discord when we started using it as a friends group. Got really active in it when I was like, oh, hey, we're starting a new show that uses a virtual tabletop. Do you want to sponsor us? And they were like, yes. And then they called me up one day, they were like, hey, can I call you? I'm like, sure. And he offered me a job on the spot. And I drove to Reykjavik the next day after getting my tires changed. And I worked for them for about a year, but I was working by the time I finished, about 16 hour days, seven days a week. And that really was the killer for podcasting. I was like, I have to step back, I going to get you past the finishing line on implementing a really big project. And I gave it my all. And then the second we were done, I gave it until the Friday of that week. And like, I'm sorry, buddy, I know you're sick, but I'm leaving. I'm giving him my three months notice. And he was gutted. And I maintain contact with them. There's never any bad blood between us. It was just like, I really want them to succeed, but I really have to do something for myself otherwise I'm going to lose my gourd.
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Yeah. And what does that actually involve? How do you go? Right, this is what I'm going to do all the time and I'm going to make it a success. I mean, I don't know how you judge it or what, you know, where you get your value from, because we can all get different value. What did that look like for you?
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For me, a lot of that looked like being able to sit down and actually do the things that we'd always wanted to do. So, for example, being able to run a new show in a very different way, which is Varúd or Varud if you're English. It's enabled me to do the things that we need to do to start pushing ourselves in the space. We've been in the podcasting sphere for nearly eight and a half years. By the time I decided that's it, I'm going to try and do my best. We've never been able to do SEO management on our own website because that's never been a thing we've had time to do. I've sat down, I've learned a lot about SEO during my work at Quest Portal, so I put that to good use. YouTube. Yep. I sat down and figured out how the algorithm picks us up best. Do we have a unique channel? Do we have separate channels? I started reaching out and making more contacts with people, like maintaining our network connections, not just hi one and done and moving on sort of thing. It allows me to do things like, oh, yeah, let's get the transcripts sorted out. Let's get them all up in a place that works really well. Let's get all the episodes we have tagged correctly and in the correct order. Let's make sure that Patreon, who has been by our side for the last six or seven years, let's get them everything we promise we actually want to do and more so that they actually feel that they're getting value for money. It allowed us, allowed me more specifically to do the things that actually help get more ears on our show and actually say thank you back to the people who actually pay us money, our patrons. And do we get more ad money? Yep. That's how we do it. Are we going to get more sponsors? Yep. I'm going to pull out all the things I can to get that sorted and reach out and get sponsors. Yeah. And at the moment, going in full time also allows me to do things like, okay, I need to figure out this artist grant from Iceland, because if you're an artist, you can get a salary from the government. How do I make that work? I have at least two of us, possibly three, if I can make it work, all based in Iceland, we could get grants to literally just create stuff. What does that look like? Because that is a very involved process. This is my plan. This is how we're going to make money. This is what it's doing for, like, the Icelandic language. I'm so sorry, I'm ruining it, but I have Icelanders. I swear. I swear they're real. Apart from giving us more time to actually create, it also gives me more time to actually business, which is the less fun part. But it is the thing that makes someone go from being relatively unknown to being an overnight success. And I'll use really big air quotes around that because there is really no such thing as overnight. There's always years of work behind it somewhere.
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And talking about creative, the creative fix, do you feel that? And also how do you feel your overall well being has maybe been improved? I'm hoping improved by. By this change. Otherwise that's not the right ending for this podcast.
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Oh, God. Pivot. Pivot no, like. So I've suffered a lot with my mental health issues. I always have done for a very long time. And I find that when I'm not actively creating, I get more and more depressed. So I try and be busy all the time. I try and be over busy. And I know the things I can say, all right, I'm too busy for this right now. And then if I'm like, I need to do something, I have something to do. And creatively, I love telling stories. I love telling stories with my friends. I know where my weaknesses are. I know where my strengths are. I know my weakness is scripting. So I'll never write anything scripted ever again in my life. But I will forever write more stories that a lot of people can have their voices into, shaping the form of how the game goes. Character arcs, surprises I throw at them and that they throw at me. It gives me an immense joy to know that after, for example, 10 years, which is the podcast that started it all for us, we recorded the finale for that almost a year ago, and everyone at the table were in tears because we didn't want to say goodbye to it. And when I finished, I had the GM blues, as it's known, but it also had such a, oh, thank Christ, it's done. We actually finished. Because before that point, the idea of not finishing that story gave me a genuine lump in my stomach. I felt really sick and cold thinking, we're never gonna be able to finish this. So I'm super happy we got to finish stuff. I'm super happy that we got to start new stories and start and finish an entire new story over the last year, which has just been incredible. And it's definitely given me more time to actually be a better storyteller. And one of the key things about being a better storyteller is absorbing other media, either in your sphere or more importantly, outside of your sphere, so that you can bring new ideas to the day. But you have different inspirations, and a varied inspiration often tells a better story. So I have time to actually sit down and not only just absorb or watch, but actually analyze. Oh, this is good story. That's bad story. Ooh, I might want to include something like this. Oh, I'm just going to wholesale rip this idea. This is incredible. These sort of things that inspire. I have time to actually be more analytical about that, which I think has made me a better storyteller. I'm not at three in the morning trying to panic, think of something, because I've only been able to prep a game for one hour, I've been able to think about it and prep it for like more hours, the actual time it deserves to have. So, yeah, for me, it's. It's been a very good uptick in my life being able to switch pretty much full time to this, give or take a few things. I have to occasionally go pull some wires in a house, but pretty much full time. And yeah, it's given me immense joy and been able to like, really help me out and I think tell better stories, which is kind of what I really always wanted to do.
00:24:21.288 --> 00:24:30.890
Well, that's lovely. That's rounded things off very well. And pulling wires through walls is not a great sacrifice, is it, with your husband every now and then?
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We recently had to rewire an entire house for someone we actually know. And we were there for like seven days. We worked 14 to 16 hour days and it was fun. We had music going all the time. The guy we knew was also a nerd, so we could talk about nerd stuff with him. And yeah, I only got electrocuted once through my thumbs, which was really bad. So I climbed down the ladder. I'm like, oh, God, wow. So I've had my first electrician's real shock in the house. So I, I feel like I've done my. I've done my time now. I know how to rewire plugs and I had to put sockets in the wall. I know how to cut wires, I know how to pull them. I feel much better about myself. But now I officially have my mark of like. Yep, you've done it. You've been electrocuted.
00:25:11.608 --> 00:25:13.848
Yeah, brilliant. I think.
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Yeah, it's like, it's not a bad sacrifice to be able to do the things that I want to do. Occasionally I'll get electrocuted. It's no big deal.
00:25:22.170 --> 00:25:38.170
Yeah, I've never heard that from a guest before. Brilliant. It's been absolutely super chatting with you today. You can give me the names of your shows, the ones that's finished and the new one, and any other ways that people can connect with you.
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Yeah, sure. So role playing games, if you put them in podcast form, it's called an actual play. I have the Lucky Die, which is our coming up on its 10 year run of a singular story that we have told. It's called the Lucky Die. It's a dnd actual play podcast, Dungeons and Dragons. I also have the sprouting, which I am also the storyteller on, which is Call of Cthulhu. It is plant based apocalypse using the call of Cthulhu system and it's called the Sprouting, which is ongoing, hasn't finished yet and we have definitely not finished recording the story of yet. I also have Counterbalance, which is the T shirt I'm wearing today. If you're looking at the video, which is actually written by a good friend of mine also under Blighthouse and it is a high fantasy audio drama so it's not a role playing game and it's about a hole in the weave of magic that has to be fixed by three people who do not like each other. It's romp, it's really good, it's really intense and I love it. It's run by Kessa and the newer projects that we worked on that we recorded in nine days and we got 48 episodes out of releases October 1st releases every single day until November 18th and 19th with a bonus episode coming out about an hour each. That is a zombie apocalypse following a family of survivors who are mostly Icelandic with one American. And yeah, they decide to cross Iceland on foot in winter during a zombie apocalypse. And that is a basic role playing game and that is called Varúd V A R U D if you're using an English keyboard.
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Brilliant. That's the one I listen to because I do like a zombie apocalypse.
00:27:06.588 --> 00:27:07.390
Oh, me too.
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Thank you so much Hem. It's been really lovely to chat.
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Thank you, Claire.
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