I mentioned before that initially I didn’t want to involve anyone else in the podcast project, because I knew it would span several years and I didn’t trust anyone else to stay committed to it that long. And that this was first overcome by my longtime friend Drake Walker volunteering, since I figured we’d be friends for a long time still and I could show up at his door and refuse to leave if I needed more lines badly enough. :) I still didn’t trust unknown people enough to ask for submissions in the podcast.
This changed when I received an email from Jocee Cotton. Attached was audio of EVERY SINGLE LINE by Daphne Greengrass. Completely unsolicited. Despite the first appearance of Daphne being months away, and the real meat of SPHEW being a year or so away. It took me by surprise and completely blew my mind. It had to take a fair amount of time to track down every Daphne line in the text and record them all, with no assurance that I’d be willing to do anything with it. And if that wasn’t stunning enough – they were actually good! This was entirely usable! The effort a stranger would put in for something like this with no expectation of anything in return or any idea if I’d even accept it really restored some of my faith in humanity. I opened up minor roles to submissions because of Jocee’s initiative, and received Tracey and Susan almost immediately. Since then more and more people have been lending their voices and (in James’s case) helping out by tracking down available lines (pdf). The world is a better place than I thought a year and a half ago. :)