Behind the Havok Story Podcast

Thanks for the questions, Rebeka! So pleased you’ve enjoyed the podcast so far. The story-choosing process is a highly secretive ritual amongst the Havok podcast team, involving coded messages, blind voting, ballots burned in a ceremonial stove (think White Smoke Over the Vatican), and a very liberal portion of the time-tested, tried-and-true method we call, “I Like That One Just Because.”

There are actually a lot of factors that we consider when choosing stories for the podcast. We try to include stories from all the daily genres, and we take into consideration whether we’ve featured the author previously in the podcast or in an anthology. As an actor, I consider things like the narrative style, the flow and tone of the dialogue, and pronunciability of the names and places in the story! I often wish that we could release new episodes more frequently—there are just so many great stories that we would love to feature!

And that brings us to your second question: how many stories we plan to produce.

We’ve an endless supply of material, as you know, so our plan is to continue releasing episodes on a biweekly basis pretty much indefinitely. We have a lot of ideas for things that we’d like to try in the future, like collaborating with other voice actors or music composers. I’m pretty confident that the podcast has a long and happy life ahead of it.

As for how Havok and I came to collaborate together, it’s a funny story. I actually wanted to work with Havok for a long time before we ever had a conversation about it. I was producing some of the Season One stories on my own last year (with permission from the authors, of course), and sometime around last November I was trying to track down contact information for an author. I emailed Havok to see if they would help me, and in the course of the conversation, Teddi Deppner casually said, “Don’t be afraid to dream a little bigger, darling,” and hauled out a grenade launc—

I mean, she said, “Actually, would you be interested in collaborating on a podcast?” (Sometimes I can’t tell if I’m in a dream, or living the dream…) Anyway, we talked, I thought about it for approximately 1.5 seconds, and we shook on it. Virtually, of course. With appropriate social distancing.