And then, there was the time where I did four podcasts in a five day period, which was both eye-opening, and somewhat exhausting. All four were comics-based, and all four required re-reading a bunch of material — two of them needed hundreds of pages each — and drawing some kind of critical analysis. Suffice to say, it was a pretty full five days.
The scheduling was actually entirely accidental; three of them were long-standing commitments, and only one had been scheduled significantly in advance — that one was an episode of Drokk!, the monthly series re-reading Judge Dredd with the far-smarter-than-me Jeff Lester; I’d say that was also the least stressful of the four, if it wasn’t for the fact that I had to edit it the next day, too. Each of the others, though, kind of just coincidentally happened at the same time.
(They actually all started to be scheduled on the same day earlier that week, all via Twitter DM. It’s actually kind of amazing how much of my work and/or work-related conversations happen via Twitter DM these days; they’ve started to take the place of texts, which took the place of emails some time back. There’s an evolution of shorthand, but important, ways people get in touch with me for work that’s kind of fascinating. But I digress.)
So, I scheduled the podcasts and staggered them out: one on Thursday, one on Saturday, two back-to-back on Monday. (They were two episodes of the same show, so it made sense.) This way, I told myself, I’d have a breather and time for my brain to readjust and prepare for the next one without it being too much.
Reader, I was wrong.
I was wrong for the simplest reason, which is just that… life happens. There’s relationships and work and, shockingly, a need to actually switch off at some point or else you’ll go mad, and all of that makes fitting in hour long recording sessions, and finding the many hours required to do the homework ahead of time, trickier than I’d initially given any thought to. In theory, I knew this already — I do it monthly for Drokk!, after all — but what I can handle for one event per month is, it turns out, somewhat different than four in less than a week.
Each of the podcasts, I enjoyed doing a lot. I certainly don’t regret doing any of them, and I think I did a pretty good job on each, even if I’ll never listen to any all the way through again. But, in future, if this ever comes up again, I’m going to be kinder to myself and ask for a schedule that lets me breathe and think about something other than comics for awhile.