IGMS interviews, one unpublished
In addition to my regular column on The Intergalactic Medicine Show, I took over their interviews for a few months before they folded their tents last summer. You can find the ones they published at their website, which has dropped its paywall and is now free-to-read for everyone.
issue 68: neuroscientist Ogi Ogas
issue 67: Barrett Stanley, author of space opera comic Heartbreak Quadrant
issue 66: animator Anton Bogaty
issue 65: pulptastic fine artist "Marlowe"
However, there was one interview, one which I was ridiculously, fanboyishly excited about, which IGMS never published. That interview, originally done in Feburary of 2019, is posted below for your reading pleasure.
NOTE: Both Alasdair and Escape Pod are up for Hugo Awards this year. If you're a voter, please give them your due consideration.
IGMS Interviews Alasdair Stuart of Escape Artists, Inc.
Since 2005, Escape Pod has been presenting short-form audio science fiction every week for free, paying their authors SFWA rates through listener donations. As of this writing, they’re on Episode #659. Three other successful podcasts followed to form the Escape Artists family: Podcastle for fantasy, Pseudopod for horror, and Cast of Wonders for young adult fiction. In 2014 the host of the horror series Pseudopod, Alasdair Stuart, bought the company (all of this background is via Wikipedia).
I’m a long-time lurker of Escape Pod, based largely on binge-listening with my kid during extended car rides, or during those long winter nights on the couch, when a stuffy nose makes sleep impossible. I dropped a few bucks on them back when I had a mundane job, but I have not engaged in the more active forms of fandom and mostly don’t know the lore of this tight-knit podcast community. So when EA made a general call for cross-promotion on Twitter a while back, it seemed like a good learning opportunity.
Now sit back and fire up your British-accent text-to-speech module, ‘cause it’s interview time.
Hayes: Just to satisfy my own incestuous curiosity, have you all ever run an IGMS story? I know I've heard it mentioned as a place some of your authors have published ...
Stuart: First off, A few IGMS stories:
http://www.castofwonders.org/2017/05/episode-247-the-golem-of-deneb-seven-by-alex-shvartsman/
http://www.castofwonders.org/2015/12/episode-184-wine-for-witches-milk-for-saints-by-rachael-k-jones/
http://escapepod.org/2012/02/02/ep330-the-ghost-of-a-girl-who-never-lived/
Other IGMS authors? Dantzel Cherry, JP Sullivan, Barbara A. Bennett, Holly Helsey and lots more.
Hayes: How does Escape Artists work, as a collective? IGMS's staff started, as far as I can tell, as a group of Card's friends whom he wanted to support. I've never met the guy, although we live in the same town. Ed Schubert was the editor who hired me, and he had all the latitude he wanted within the basic mission. I assume current editor Scott Roberts has similar authority, though I don't actually know, since almost all of my dealings are with Cyndie Swindlehurst. How many people work with EA? We know the on-air personalities; are there also Morlocks down in the bowels of the machine, doing ... something? Is there, heaven forfend, an org chart?
Stuart: Yes there IS an org chart! In fact one of our last tasks for the year before shutting down for the holidays is updating it. :) We have a lot of people too. Working from slushers/associate editors on up we've got just over 80 folks spread across the four shows and the globe.
In fact, when we got the Hugo nomination this year that worked in our favor. We got a really short turnaround time for the packet so here's how it broke down:
In the UK, Marguerite and I put together the initial idea and put it to Mur (East Coast) and Divya (West Coast) in the US.
Mur and Divya worked on it, refined it and sent their thoughts onto our e-book specialist Darusha, who's based in New Zealand.
Darusha sent it back to us, we added our comments and sent it onto Mur and Divya.
Thanks to a happy accident of time zones, this thing was worked round the clock for three days and ended up coming out looking great.
On a daily basis the same is true. Associate editors report to editors, who coordinate producers. Each editorial team runs their own slush and makes all decisions about content, from stories and narrators, to schedules and specials, to what ads they'd accept. (We are VERY anti 'stamps, socks and mattresses'.)
As publisher, we look for ways where the show's similarities can save work or money; for example, all EA's contracting is handled by a contracts manager, who processes the close to 500 contracts a year. Every other month there are editorial-wide check-ins to coordinate bigger events, like Artemis Rising, and to share things we've learned and directions we want to explore. We also wrangle the admin side of things -- accounting, tech, the recent website and graphics overhaul, marketing queries, Patreon, etc.
Another big part we play as publishers sounds odd but is really important to us - we're involved in the spec fic community. Marguerite is on the SFWA short fiction committee and the World Science Fiction Society's Hugo awards committee. I do a lot of cross-promotion of not just fiction shows but audio dramas and other indie podcasters. We both run convention volunteers, participate in programming and lots of events every year, and generally try to put our time and our energy where our mouths are in support of our core goals (lots more detail here: http://escapeartists.net/about-ea/)
Alasdair Stuart also has a geek life outside of EA, which we won’t cover here, except for the sentence “Loki is Blackadder without the troubling conscience,” from the link below, which I love.
REFERENCES
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_Pod_(podcast)
https://murverse.com
That’s Mur Lafferty, co-editor and author.
http://www.eff-words.com
That’s Divya Breed, other co-editor and author.
http://escape-artists.wikia.com/wiki/Artemis_Rising
https://www.patreon.com/EAPodcasts
https://alasdairstuart.com/2018/12/11/god-of-trickery-goddess-of-missed-opportunity/