Director's Notes: Episode 256 - The Book of Lost Things

During our last live tour, The Attic (now available for purchase here!), Jeffrey Cranor played local community college professor Harrison Kip. Jeffrey and I always write each other’s guest parts, and we tend to give each other little challenges in the scenes. For instance, Jeffrey wrote me a part that involved a great deal of shouting and physical performance, which is quite different than anything I’m usually comfortable doing on stage. For Jeffrey, I simply asked him to take something on stage from backstage and then do…something with it. It was a different item each performance, and the action was also different. But, as is Jeffrey’s way, the action was often something designed to provoke the biggest possible reaction from the audience (for instance, taking a huge bite out of a stick of butter).

All to say, I came to enjoy the dynamic between Cecil and Harrison Kip, and it was a dynamic that had only existed on stage, never on the podcast. Also, in this latest live show, we had added that Harrison Kip was a member of a mysterious religion that might possibly involve human sacrifice, and it seemed worth exploring that more.

The final piece of the puzzle here is that I was a Religious Studies major, have spent a good deal of time studying religious texts both as sacred texts for a religion and as literature, and the result is that I really enjoy writing fake liturgy and biblical quotes.

And so: this episode, which combines all of the above, hopefully successfully.

Some other notes:

*oh hm, seems like the De Tours plot is still doing stuff. I wonder where that’s going? Probably somewhere big.

* the horoscopes are in a different order than usual, because I used the Washington Post horoscopes as my model and didn’t notice until after I wrote them that they had put the signs in alphabetical order.

On a personal note, I really braced myself when I first opened the Night Vale RPG crowdfunding page. I was ready for it to be maybe $600, and that was ok, it would be ok. But instead, it had already hit the 25k goal and flew past 200k in the first 24 hours. It made me feel so happy that there were still so many people out there who care about this world we make. So thank you for that.

-Joseph Fink

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