Ep 9, Revamps and Flying Solo

It's been ages since my last post, I know. But before you accuse me of slacking off, here is what I've been up to.

Lately I've been building my own voice cloning and Text-to-Speech software from scratch, purely to fuel my own podcast productions. Let's be honest: a year or two ago this would have been flat-out impossible for one person in a spare room. Now it's merely extremely time-consuming.

Speaking of the podcast  a lot has happened since I last wrote here. Episode 9 (Waterloo) is officially out in the wild. On top of that, I've completely rewritten, recast, and remastered Episode 1 (Pandas and Robots). It's a different beast now: more polished, more confident, and it actually gives the moment the fictional version of me meets Remus the War Panda room to land properly. Turns out the "norms" who stumbled across my original pilot found it a bit too manic, so hopefully this fixes that.

The trouble is, I've now built myself a lovely little trap. Because Episode 1 is so much better, everything from Episode 2 through 8 suddenly looks shabby by comparison, which means I basically have to go back and rebuild the whole staircase while also trying to keep climbing it. It's a genuinely ridiculous amount of work. The current master plan and I use "plan" loosely  is to get Episode 10 out before the end of July, patch up Episodes 2 and 3, and then dive back into the future with Episode 11. Ask me again in August how that went.

It's a mountain, even with AI doing the heavy lifting, and I fully understand now why so few people attempt a whole sci-fi drama solo. I won't lie, some days I do wonder what possessed me to start this. Then a new story idea ambushes me out of nowhere, and I'm right back in it, sleeves rolled up, no self-control whatsoever.

Here's the honest split: I genuinely love the writing and editing. The voice generation is the part that wears me down. It can take an age to coax a performance that actually sounds felt rather than read. Plenty of people are happy to release stuff that sounds obviously robotic  I am, apparently, incapable of doing that. I keep chasing "as real as humanly possible" on a shoestring budget, which is a slow and slightly masochistic way to make a podcast. Still, zoomed out, staring down the barrel of Episode 10 is not nothing. I've well and truly outlasted the point where most solo podcasters quietly give up.

Away from the audio chaos, you may have clocked the website's new look. The darker theme makes the images pop far more than the old one did, and even though the site itself is structurally simple, getting it to look exactly right still ate a full day of wrestling with code I'd rather have spent elsewhere.

What else? I've drifted back to a Pixel phone after a brief detour through Samsung and iPhone territory. My wife and I aren't really lavish-holiday, fancy-dinner people — my one indulgence is swapping phones more often than is strictly reasonable, plus the odd Funko Pop. If you want a peek into that side of things, our Instagram feeds are here

Unsurprisingly, I remain constitutionally unable to generate any real traction on social media. So I'm still leaning on the old hope that one of you will do the honours and tell someone else this thing exists. Self-promotion has never been my skill, and neither is the corporate game of glad-handing and ladder-polishing. I still stubbornly believe that if people are meant to find this weird little podcast, they will  mostly because I simply don't have the hours in a day to market it, make it, and have a life.

I realise this is starting to sound like a full moan. Honestly? I am tired, and a little daunted by how I'm meant to pull all of this off single-handedly. But I'll figure it out, the same way I muddle through everything else.

Thanks for still turning up and listening to my mad old world.

Until next time — stay safe, and keep on dreaming, Warpers.