A Fourth of July Gift From Me to You

I am proud to announce that my second audio drama for Radio Hound Productions' Stray Dogs Project is now online (available here, or any other link in this sentence). It's called "Countdown" and it's a sci-fi comedy that's only six minutes long - you cannot use your limited attention span and our go-go-go world as an excuse to shirk it. If you don't enjoy it for some reason, I promise to award you a full monetary refund.

Would this man lie to you?

(In case you missed it, the first one I wrote for the Project, "Redux," can be found a few slots below "Countdown" on the same page. Here's the blog post I wrote for that one.)

"Countdown" is somewhat unique within my oov-ruh. Generally, I write things set in today's modern world because when you're working on a low budget, it's a bit tough to recreate the French Revolution. But this one is set in the distant future - so distant it doesn't even have a date. Sci-fi is not a genre where I dabble much, but based on this experience, I'd like to change that...if I come up with good enough ideas, of course.

The script came about when Nick Martorelli, the mastermind behind Radio Hound Productions, challenged me to write a script under a tight deadline so he could record it when he came came to visit New York the following weekend. I did not hesitate to agree, and made a joke in an e-mail along the lines of "I'll make this one nice and simple, no complex effects. Just two people talking....in a rocket ship."

Right before I clicked "Send," I re-read that sentence and my mind went "Hmmm..." Whatever it is that hatches ideas in my brain made a noise, and I hurried out a first draft that night, then revised it several times over the next few days based on Nick's very intelligent and helpful notes and suggestions. He found the actors - one of whom happened to be my Hard Boiled Productions partner-in-crime, the criminally handsome Chris Kapcia - and we recorded it in a humid apartment one balmy Monday evening.

I hope you enjoy the results. I'm very proud of it and grateful that I get to work with such wonderfully talented people as Nick, Chris, Tara Henderson, and Andrea Pinyan. They bring new life to my words in ways I never could have foreseen when I hastily scrawled them on a computer screen.