Hello again, everyone! My name is Geoff Micks, and as this week’s episode is both the shortest and also the halfway mark of Season One, I thought it might be a good idea to do a short bonus episode talking about the state of the podcast, a little about me, some content on how this story came together, and what else you can expect from me in terms of additional content both on Patreon and across the rest of the show’s run.
I want to begin by thanking all of you for giving this project such a warm welcome. For many years I hosted a business-to-business podcast as part of my day job that started very humbly and slowly built itself up into something that almost looked like television journalism. I was very proud of it, but it had a niche audience. Based on its viewership and listenership, I really had no expectations or even a frame of reference for what an audio drama might do, but for a project that has only been live for seven weeks, we are already doing numbers that would have made me and my team very happy on our business podcast of five years. I was prepared to put out the first season even if no one was listening, but I can say now with total confidence based on the reception I am already receiving I will finish all three seasons, and if this project does continue to grow and flourish to the point where it not only covers its costs but even turns a small profit? Well, I have another book I could turn into an audio drama ready to go, and I’m in the midst of writing another one too.
I think anything I write in the first person could probably be adapted in the same way I am working through the Tape Recorder Trilogy, and if people want the content, why not?
It occurs to me I might be going a little too fast. I just mentioned another book written, and another in progress, and mine is the unusual podcast project that did not really start with an episode introducing myself properly yet. I guess ‘Bonus Episode Nine’ is a better late than never place to do that.
My name is Geoff Micks, as I said earlier, and which you probably did pick up from the episode introductions. I live in Toronto, Canada with my wife and our dog. At the time of this recording I have completed five works of historical fiction. The Tape Recorder Trilogy Podcast is an adaptation of three of them, Beginning, Middle, and End. I have also written a novel about the Zulu set in the 1860s and 1870s, and I wrote a novel about the decline and fall of the Inca Empire, told from their own perspective. That is actually my most popular book, and if this podcast continues to do well, I may end up doing a new series based on Inca too. I am currently working on my third attempt at a sixth novel. People interested in hearing why it’s a third attempt are welcome to take a look at my personal website or my Facebook page for lengthy explanations. Anyway, this one I will be dedicating to my wife. I won’t get into what it’s about in this episode, but I will say it is written in the first person, which is something I can turn into an audio drama one day if that ends up making sense.
I have been writing since I was a small boy. I started off trying to write a Tom Clancy-esque techno-thriller, which I swear was the style at the time, although possibly not for a child in the fourth grade. Still, I had a lot of encouragement from a lot of people, and eventually I moved on to science fiction short stories, which at least were something I could actually finish and try to get published. I didn’t, but I cherished the rejection letters all the same. By the time I was in my late teens, I was getting serious about historical fiction. It is the genre I always come back to in my reading, and I think every artist deep down tries to make the art they wish someone else had already made so they could enjoy it for themselves. I wrote Zulu while I was finishing high school, and I learned a lot by writing that first book, but it was pretty amateurish. I wrote Inca while I was attending the University of Toronto for Journalism with a double minor in history and classical studies. I also went to Centennial College at the same time, earning a diploma in Journalism as well. Every week for five years, whatever else I was doing in my schooling, I took out books on the Inca from U of T’s library until I had read everything they had in English. I am immensely proud of Inca, and I am also confident I will never put that kind of sustained research and work into a novel again until I am either retired or somehow making a living from my writing.
Anyway, I found an agent to represent me, and we shopped Inca around the publishing houses, but even 20 years ago, the publishing industry was not what it used to be, and no one wanted to take a chance on a kid with a big book about a people no one really knew anything about beyond being able to rattle them off in the same breath as the the Aztec and the Maya. Around that time I completely rewrote Zulu up to something I am proud of, but it also failed to find a publisher. My agent and I parted on friendly terms, and I self-published Inca and Zulu through Amazon. I was pleasantly surprised both books found an audience, and I probably ended up making more in royalties from Amazon than I would have from a traditional publisher.
That brings us to the Tape Recorder Trilogy, which is the podcast you are listening to right now. A few months before I started working on the project that would become these books, I had joined a very productive monthly writers group that I am still a member of today. They let you bring in ten pages a month that would get honest feedback from people who knew what a first draft looked like. They give really valuable input and act as a sounding board while I figure things out. For most of my twenties and early thirties, I had been bemoaning the fact that as a lover of historical fiction there were so many great stories I wanted to write about, but even if I was as prolific as Bernard Cornwell or Colleen McCullough, I was never going to do a proper book about them all. I hit on the idea of doing some of them as a series of interconnected short stories —which also lent itself well to the ‘bring in ten pages a month’ format of my monthly writers group— but I needed a framing device to justify stringing those short stories together into a larger whole.
Now if my novel Inca can be said to have a lot in common with Gary Jennings’ Aztec —and it is one of the deep satisfactions of my life as a writer that several reviewers have made that connection— and if my novel Zulu can be said to draw some inspiration from the first four decades of Wilbur Smith’s career, would you believe the framing device for The Tape Recorder Trilogy —the idea of an immortal human being dictating his life story into a tape recorder while waiting to finally die— came from Kurt Vonnegut’s love of absurdism?
Of course I don’t have Vonnegut’s brevity in me. As I brought in new pages month after month, someone in my writers group teased me that I was writing a real doorstop. That’s when I decided to break one very long book into three medium-sized books. As I took that idea further, it occurred to me the stories I wanted to tell could actually be divided into distinct periods: pre-history where I was drawing inspiration from anthropology, archaeology, and mythology will fall into Beginning; the Classical World will make up the plot in Middle, and End will take us from the Middle Ages through to the present. In each book, the first, last, and middle chapters take place in the present —which at the time of publishing the first book was 2015— and drive the story of the framing device forward towards a conclusion that I hope everyone finds both surprising and satisfying.
I don’t think it counts as a spoiler if I say what my abandoned first thought for the framing device was? In the early days of the project —again, think Kurt Vonnegut absurdism— I was going to have an Angel of Death, a Grim Reaper, sit down with the protagonist and have a heart-to-heart conversation explaining that something had gone terribly wrong, he was beyond her powers, and his continued existence was destroying the fabric of reality and the natural order of existence. It was pretty flimsy stuff, but it helped me get the rough first draft of the story up on its feet. I promise you, I came up with much better than that.
In fact, one of my beta readers for the project was the first person to suggest I might one day turn these novels into an audiobook or a podcast, and she said, “And when you do, I want to play the part of [the blonde woman]!”
When I started recording this podcast in earnest, I reached out to her to ask if she remembered saying that. She replied, “I have been waiting for this email for years!” You can look forward to her first appearance in the last episode of this season, and I promise you she has a lot more to do in Seasons Two and Three. She’s actually a very talented voice actress. I’m very lucky to have had her volunteer to help me, and I doubt very much she would have so passionately advocated and delivered the part if it had been a mere frustrated Grim Reaper.
Well, enough talking about what I did not do, or what you haven’t heard yet. Let me talk a little about some other stories of immortals that people might want to connect with this one somehow, and then I will close out the episode talking about some further bonus stuff to look forward to in the future.
At some point —maybe a year or two into writing The Tape Recorder Trilogy— someone in my writers group asked me if I had ever seen The Man from Earth. It’s a 2007 low-budget American science fiction film that was written by a man named Jerome Bixby. He started working on the idea in the 1960s, and he finished the screenplay on his deathbed in 1998 with the help of his son. It has since also been adapted into a stage play. The whole thing takes place at the home of John Oldman, a university professor who is quitting his job and moving away. Several of his friends and colleagues come over to see him off, and he engages them in a hypothetical conversation: What if he was a 14,000 year old man who has to move every ten years or so, or his secret will be revealed?
Now I hadn’t heard of the movie when I started writing my books, but I can tell you, that synopsis got my heart racing and the blood pounding in my ears. Was I accidentally writing something that had already been done? I promised myself not to see it or hear another word about it until my project was done, otherwise I might either abandon the whole thing or radically change it based on Jerome Bixby’s take on the concept.
I have since watched the movie, and enjoyed it, and I encourage you all to give it a try too. It’s become something of a cult classic at least in part because the filmmakers encouraged people to pirate it to help it reach as large an audience as possible. As of my recording this bonus episode, it’s available on both Amazon Prime and YouTube.
I will also say I am enormously relieved how much daylight there is between what Bixby has done, and what I have done. From a similar starting point, we could not have diverged more widely in format or delivery. The Man from Earth is about a bunch of people in a room hearing an impossible story. Some like what they hear. Some hate it. Some make jokes. Some make threats. Some believe. Some don’t believe. Some who don’t believe, believe in the end, and vice versa. It’s not really the immortal human being’s story. It’s a story about how human beings react when confronted with the impossible. There’s also only so much history you can cram into 90 minutes, and —without spoiling the movie for you— Bixby does some things with religion I would never have dared to have my Narrator do.
No, The Man from Earth and The Tape Recorder Trilogy may have broadly similar starting premises, but they were conceived separately and do different things. If you can have a hundred three-camera family sitcoms with a blue-collar husband and a whip-smart wife dealing with suburban family issues, you can probably have a couple stories about people who have been alive since the Ice Age up to the present day.
Let me also quickly dispense with The Highlander series, which is another ‘immortal being’ IP that some people have mentioned casually when I tell them what my trilogy is about.
Taking nothing away from The Highlander —I actually like The Highlander, for what it is— it has very, very little to do with what I’ve done in my books. My Narrator is far older, and is unique in his immortality, as far as he knows. He is not able to die violently and then become alive and unharmed again provided he is not beheaded. He is not in competition with other immortal beings who he needs to defeat across time. Also, if memory serves me right, the franchise changes the rules, retcons the rules, and then ignores earlier changes and retcons of the rules to how being a Highlander works, how the Quickening works and its origins, and whether you are trapped in immortality or can choose to become mortal. My Narrator and trilogy are consistent in how they work.
As a final thing, I’ll add The Highlander at its heart is an action franchise mostly set in the present with the past used in flashback to justify the conflicts being addressed in the modern age. That’s so far from what I’m doing with the Tape Recorder Trilogy, I am very comfortable saying I did not draw anything at all from The Highlander that I can think of, although if a fan of the franchise wants to contact me with examples, I will be happy to give it as thorough a review as I have with The Man from Earth.
So is there a book, movie, or television show I should give some credit to when it comes to the Tape Recorder Trilogy? I think there may be one, although I am going to confess at the top of this that I read it once maybe thirty years ago, and while the broad strokes of the story definitely stuck with me, it was only while reading a Wikipedia summary to refresh my memory that I realized, “Oh, wow. There’s more commonalities here than I thought…”
I will also say in all the time I was working on The Tape Recorder Trilogy, and in all the years since I published it on Amazon, no one has connected me to this work, so whatever I may have done consciously or unconsciously, I probably would have gotten away with it entirely if I wasn’t making this bonus episode for you now.
The Boat of a Million Years is a science fiction novel written by Poul Anderson. It was nominated for the Nebula Award for Best Novel in 1989, and it was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novel and the Prometheus Award in 1990. I am 100% sure I bought a copy at a used bookstore in the early 1990s, read it once, thought it was pretty great, and sold it back to that same used bookstore. That store was a formative part of my reading life, which of course is also a formative part of my writing life. I like to make the joke that I either put the shopkeep’s kids through college, or I supported his drinking habit.
Anyway, The Boat of a Million Years follows the life stories of eleven immortal human beings from the distant past to the distant future. They are born at different times and in different places. Some of them die throughout the course of history. Some meet each other at different times and in different places and either band together or come into conflict. When their immortality is discovered by the public at large, humanity changes, and they find they can no longer fit into the new human culture that rejects the way mortals lived before their secrets were revealed. The surviving immortals get on a spaceship and go off to explore the universe together.
Now I’m not writing a story with multiple immortals, and the details of the physiology behind their immortality only slightly overlap with how my protagonist’s immortality works, and I’m not putting my narrator on a journey through the stars, but The Boat of a Million Years does have a character who lives through the Neolithic in Europe. It has a character who lives as a Phoenician sailor. It has a character who meets the Greek explorer Pytheas. It has a character who makes a living as a trader and travelling merchant. It has characters who convert to new religions and take on new lives. There are subplots where people either deny or try to prove their immortality. There is a funny aside where the difficulties of circumcising a self-healing immortal man are explored. That stuff is in my trilogy too, in ways big and small.
Did I steal from The Boat of a Million Years?
Who knows what the subconscious holds onto, chews on, and then produces in a new form? I am sure Beginning, Middle, and End are the output of hundreds and hundreds of books I have read over the years. It would be crazy to say any work of historical fiction is not the result of intensive reading. I don’t think I have ever consciously lifted characters or plot, and even if I had, how does any writer of historical fiction get to cover the Tudors or the Roman emperors or the popes or Winston Churchill or Abraham Lincoln as a fresh take when you know it is based on something many people have read and many people have written about before? Of course there’s going to be some overlap, and that’s even before you have to start figuring out the mechanics and practicalities of how you tell a story about an immortal human being.
I should also be very clear I do not mind having The Boat of a Million Years, or The Man from Earth, or even The Highlander associated with the Tape Recorder Trilogy, rightly or wrongly. In fact, I’m going to put a transcript of this episode up on my personal website in the hopes that I can attract some people googling those better known stories of immortals to find my work. I want my stories to one day be considered major works in the niche of historical fiction told through an immortal protagonist. Having those three other IPs in my SEO strategy does not bother me any. I just wish there were even more I could name-drop here.
Anyway, I promised a short bonus episode, and this is starting to get on a little bit. Let me wrap up by talking about future bonus content?
I have a Patreon account, as I have mentioned at the end of every episode. I have been brainstorming what kind of additional content I can put up there that would reward the people who want to support this channel that would not detract from the listening experience of everyone else. I think I have set my mind to a combination of things, and a pace of publication. I suspect each of the three seasons is going to work out to around 16 or 17 episodes, and if I am publishing that on a weekly basis with probably some short time off in between, that’s roughly four months a season, and probably a little over a year in total.
I am going to shoot for a Patreon supporter-only special episode of content every six weeks or so, so the first of those bonus episodes will actually be publishing this week on Patreon! Yes, somehow my shortest episode of the season is getting published on the week with the most content!
For the Patreon features, I am going to do a combination of some of my short fiction, some special guest episodes where I talk with people from my writers group and other authors, and also once I get far enough into the story to make it work, I also plan to do a Q&A Mailbag episode where listeners and readers can ask me clarifying questions. We will start with those ideas, and see what else I come up with over time. I am shooting for between eight and ten ‘extras’ available to Patreon supporters, so there will be plenty of room for innovation.
Something I haven’t done but would seem like an obvious thing to do for an author who plugs his books with every episode? I admit I don’t know how I would figure out getting signed copies of my books to people at a price point that makes sense —you figure I have to buy a copy myself, sign it, and then mail it to you, while also making some money off your commitment without asking for more than people want to give— but maybe I can come up with a level of support where I sent you a personalized and signed post card you can use as a bookmark? That seems like a more doable project. Anyway, stay tuned for updates on Patreon.
As for more bonus content here, available for everyone? I am confident there will be something, but I don’t want to turn a 16-episode season into something with multiple bonus episodes that will derail the listening experience. Why don’t I just promise when I do a bonus episode like this one, it will be for a good reason, and I will try not to publish them in too close a proximity to a long episode or an episode that ends in a cliff-hanger or on some kind of ‘heavy’ tone where rolling over to something unrelated will lessen your enjoyment.
That is why I am doing all of this, really. For your enjoyment. A writer wants to be read, and a podcaster wants to be listened to. I appreciate you, and I want to give you good value for the time you are willing to give to me.
Thank you again, and I hope you enjoy next week’s episode as we return to our regular story.
For more, visit my podcast website and personal website.
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Credits:
Voice Acting – Geoff Micks
Editing – Geoff Micks
Music – Dimitri Kovalchuk (MokuseiNoMaguro) through Pixabay
Additional Music – Aleksey Voronin (Amaksi) through Pixabay
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