| Kung Fu Action Producer UltraRob is offline Join Date: Jan 2008 Location: London, Ontario, Canada Posts: 837 |  Happy New Year? KFAT's New Direction in 2011!
Hi All,
Well, 2010 has come and gone, and with it a few small events for Kung Fu Action Theatre. Twin Stars finished it’s second Book with a bang, and we also presented a new little Gou story, updated an old Gou story, and participated in the Sonic Society’s grand Old Time Radio re-creation project with Sherlock Holmes and the Tolling Bell. In a lot of ways, this year was a high point for me as an audio drama producer, and I really felt a part of the greater community.
Unfortunately, on the down side, my personal life has been even more eventful than KFAT’s virtual one, and this resulted in the feed being largely dormant for the last few months of 2010. Writing and Producing for KFAT has been a joy for the past three years, and I’ve had a wonderful experience sharing these stories with all of you, but all that time comes at a cost for me personally and effects my family life in a huge number of ways. This past year, when priorities (like working 3 jobs) made me take an extended leave from working on KFAT, I re-discovered what I’d been missing while I also worked long hours to string together individual lines and lay effects. And you know something? I found I liked having time when I wasn’t worrying about the show and could do simple things like read and play Go.
This has caused me to consider deeply about KFAT’s future, and whether I want to continue doing this hobby.
I started this project for two reasons- 1) to spread my love for swashbuckling/wuxia type adventure stories, and 2) for the challenge of producing audio drama (to simply see if I could). Well, I think after producing over 50 episodes of audio drama, and having over 200,000 downloads, I can say to my own satisfaction that I’ve done it, and done it pretty well by most measures.
But what about the first reason?
KFAT started as an audiobook reading podcast in 2006 in an effort to promote the WuXia genre, and while I quickly decided that I wanted to try my hand at Audio Drama and changed formats (blame Jack Ward and Gregg Taylor) I’ve attempted to keep at least some of that goal alive with my own Little Gou adventure tales. Now, with the second goal safely accomplished, I think it’s time I returned KFAT to it’s roots, so to speak.
So, with this in mind let’s talk about KFAT’s future.
For the moment, I am stopping production of Audio Drama on KFAT. I hope to come back to it later and finish Twin Stars as an audio drama (it may end up being finished in another format), but right now I’m not going to sacrifice any more time to a job that pays nothing and gets little more than a trickle of feedback. I don’t do it for the praise, but it would have been nice to know if more than the same 10 people (who I adore!) liked it each month. My attempts at community projects like the Forums and Wiki also failed to generate much interest, and maybe that says something as well. My interesting in Audio Drama has been waning for some time as a listener, so it was inevitable that it would affect my interest in production as well.
Now, what am I going to do with KFAT?
As I said, I want to take KFAT back its roots, both as a website and podcast. So with this in mind, I’ve decided to start using KFAT to promote historical adventure fiction (Asian-themed, of course!) and begin to solicit pieces of short fiction to publish on the website and put onto the podcast feed. (Much like Podcastle or Escape Pod do.) At first, I’m going to focus on the written side, though, and hope to have a regular schedule for posting stories soon. Submission guidelines will be posted and added to the website shortly.
I know this is all going to come as something of a shock for my audio drama fans and partners, and I do apologize for it. As I said, I’ve loved doing this, and getting to know many of you during the past three years, but there comes a time when one’s personal life needs to get priority, and for me this is that time. I will still do some writing, and likely even some producing of AD, but I can’t commit to anything like a regular production schedule right now in my life, and it’s not fair to drag this uncertain situation on any longer.
So here’s to 2011! A new year filled with new challenges and new adventures!
Rob |
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