In the interest of expanding my writing a bit, I always wanted to write about the media I’m consuming a bit more, and I will start with a small series of posts on my favorite podcasts.
To me, there are roughly three kinds of podcasts I listen to. The first one is history podcasts - just some narrator telling me interesting tidbits from history. I will write about all of those in the next post. The second kind are what I’d call “current affairs” podcasts, e.g. news, politics, Open Source/Linux talk podcasts and such.
And the third and final kind is what I want to talk about today, namely fiction podcasts, or audio dramas. I think these are the most difficult to talk about, because I don’t want to tell too much, avoiding spoilers for the story.
I’m very much looking for feedback to this one - right now, I’m feeling like I don’t have even the faintest idea on how to write a review of a work of fiction. Perhaps the next couple of paragraphs are just going to end up variations on “I enjoyed it”. 😅
The podcast I’d like to tell you about is The Antique Shop. It’s written, produced and narrated by Ghostly Thistle, a Scottish writer. The podcast is told in the form of an audio journal from Maya, the protagonist. It tells the story of how she was looking for a job while studying at University and found a poster looking for an assistant in the window of the titular Antique Shop. After a little bit of time, Maya finds out that the shop’s proprietor, titled a Madam, is not actually an antiques dealer, but a servant of fate itself. And Maya had unwittingly become her apprentice.
The initial episodes of the podcast revolve around the customers coming to the shop. Some having been cursed and seek the help of Maya’s boss, others have been guided to the shop by fate looking for a specific item. Those items are often cursed themselves, and Maya records what happens to the customers after they bought the item.
I especially like the single narrator style, and the fact that the story is mostly told in episodic style. In the final few episodes, the meta-plot becomes the center of the narrative, but until then it stays mostly in the background compared to the “Customer of the week” narrative. I quite enjoy the more episodic style in fiction podcasts.
The author also has a good and clear voice that’s easy to listen to, and she has a Scottish, or more specifically, a Glaswegian accent. At least to me, this made a nice contrast to the otherwise mostly US or English accents in my podcasts.
The podcast has 50 episodes, with each episode somewhere around 20 to 25 minutes. Most episodes are capped off by a short blurb from the author, talking about some Scottish words in the episode or explaining some Scottish folk tale or some piece of history talked about in the episode. It is a finished podcast, which ran between 2020 and 2022.
The RSS feed can be found here.
So what do you think? Interesting enough? Too much info? Too little info? I probably should go and read a few podcast reviews to see how to actually write this kind of thing.