So the plan, such as it was, was to pod­cast the orig­i­nal ver­sion of Between Heaven and Hell as three 20-​week sea­sons while I write the new and Uni­fi­ca­tion Chron­i­cles series (of which the first three books com­prise the same events as Between Heaven and Hell). I fig­ured this would help get my name out there and start build­ing a fan base so that when/​if I started pod­cast­ing the new books, there would already be a siz­able audi­ence. Even if I decided to go the tra­di­tional route and query the (nigh unsaleable) seven book series to agents/​editors, a pod­cast audi­ence would show that there was at least a mar­ket for this story.

Then today I was lis­ten­ing to one of the pan­els from Drag­onCon ’09 (via the Dead Robots Soci­ety, my new favorite pod­cast I don’t host) and Mike Stack­pole had a sug­ges­tion that stopped me in my tracks. He said that you should def­i­nitely not pod­cast old work you just have lying around, that it’s vital if you’re build­ing a fan base that you show them what you’re capa­ble of as a writer today, not years ago.

Between Heaven and Hell was orig­i­nally writ­ten in 1996, and in just reread­ing the first chap­ter, I can tell how much I’ve changed as a writer in the last 13 years. When I wrote that book, I’d only actu­ally writ­ten five real short sto­ries before that, and only one of those based on my own char­ac­ters and not fan­fic. I’d had decades of sto­ry­telling expe­ri­ence through oral sto­ry­telling and later run­ning role play­ing games, but my actual writ­ing expe­ri­ence was thin. And frankly, you can tell. I know so much more about the craft now than I knew then, have learned so much about writ­ing in the screen­play and two nov­els I’ve writ­ten since, along with what I learned from writ­ing that first novel that you can only learn by writ­ing a first novel, that it really does read like it’s from a dif­fer­ent author than the stuff I write today. In a very real sense, it is.

Which means that Stack­pole has a point. It might not be a good idea to pod­cast a 13-​year-​old book as a way of get­ting peo­ple famil­iar with me and my style. And yet, it would be good prac­tice in pod­cast­ing fic­tion, and I know peo­ple enjoy the story, how­ever awk­wardly I told it. And it would seem that one of the unique things peo­ple like about pod­cast fic­tion is being able to see a work develop over time as new ver­sions of the same story come out (see Sigler, Scott and Hutchins, J.C.). Pros and cons to both sides.

Pros to pod­cast­ing Between Heaven and Hell while I write Uni­fi­ca­tion Chronicles

  1. Estab­lishes a fol­low­ing who want to read more of my work
  2. Gives me expe­ri­ence in pod­cast­ing fiction
  3. Gives peo­ple a “before” to which to com­pare the “after” I’m writ­ing now
  4. Refreshes my mem­ory to the major plot points and char­ac­ter moments for writ­ing the new books

Cons to pod­cast­ing Between Heaven and Hell while I write Uni­fi­ca­tion Chronicles

  1. Not a true rep­re­sen­ta­tion of my cur­rent capa­bil­i­ties as a writer; peo­ple might not come back to see the new stuff
  2. Will take a lot of time and effort I may not have while try­ing to write 2,000 words a day
  3. Could blind me to new pos­si­bil­i­ties with the reworked plot and char­ac­ters; might slav­ishly stick to the orig­i­nal plot too closely

I hon­estly can’t decide at this point. While I mull this over, let me know what you think.