Like my son I have always had trouble getting to sleep at night, as a result both of us have, and continue, to listen radio dramas and audio books into the early hours to lull us into our dreams.
Sharing a Passion
When my son was younger, together we listened to webcasts of old radio SF series such as, Space Patrol, and X Minis One which featured stories by Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Philip K. Dick, and Robert A. Heinlein. In this way my son has been introduced and myself reintroduced to some of the best science fiction writers of the last century. Asimov’s “Foundation” trilogy remains one of our mutual favourites. We listened to the 8 part BBC radio adaption, then went on to read the books together. Since then we have listened and read books from Heinlein, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Arthur C. Clarke and Jerry Pournelle, to name a few.
Making up stories
When my son was young I use to make up and tell bedtime stories to him on the fly using his suggestions for characters and situations. After he entered school and began to struggle in language arts we were looking for ways to get him excited about reading and writing. The podcast was initially conceived, in part, as a way of making story creation and writing fun again. The basic idea was to use the spontaneous collaborative process that we had invented bedtime stories with to make a serial webcast that would change with suggestions from my son or any other listeners. The focus was, and still is, not on creating polished properly punctuated pieces of writing, but on having fun coming up with ideas and realizing them as spoken stories. The name “Makeshift Stories” is intended to imply the improvisational nature of what we are doing.
The Spoken Word
The power of the spoken word is, I think, often under estimated. There is something very fundamental about listening to a story that must harken back to the beginnings of language. The mind of the listener creates its own unique picture of what is being said. In this sense the experience is the sum of the imaginations of the author or storyteller and the listener – something that a video can never do. This is a personal experience. My vision of the crippled spaceship in the X minus One’s presentation of Heinlein’s, “The Green Hills of Earth” must be vastly different from my son’s. Separated by 39 years, I am seeing a stream lined cigar with fins from the forties and fifties and I suspect that my son is imaging something more akin to the Prometheus from Star Gate.
The Makeshift Stories webcast may at times seem a little erratic, but the improvisational nature of it is at heat of what we are doing.
We hope you find something here to enjoy and if you do please tell you friends about us and feel free to share any story you find here.