Director's Notes – Episode 111 (Patreon)

We are entering Night Vale’s sixth year. So it seemed as good a time as any to look back to the start and see how much has changed.

I wrote the first lines of what would be Night Vale in March of 2012, when I was 25 years old. My father had died about six months earlier, and then about five months later I had been fired from an office job I truly hated. My girlfriend had just moved into my tiny, badly maintained apartment on Bedford Avenue in Brooklyn. Parts of the ceiling regularly bulged out toward us. A strange black ooze dripped down the heating pipes. There was a rat who lived in the backyard who was the biggest rat either of us had ever seen. We called him Todd, King of Rats.

In this deeply transitory part of my life, and in grief over my father, I started writing little paragraphs about a strange desert town where every conspiracy theory is true. Night Vale has existed in some form or other in my head since I was 12 or 13. The idea shifted depending on my interests and what I was reading at the time, but it was always a mystical place in the desert, where conspiracy theories where commonplace, and where the transcendental parts of existence lurked constantly under the day to day.

I am writing to you now at 31 years old. I live in the woods, a long drive from New York City. Night Vale has been my full time job for four years now, although it has been such a packed four years that it feels more like ten. Jeffrey and I are New York Times Best Selling Authors, the kind of ultimately meaningless phrase that still, when you first hear it, makes you realize you have just added something to your obituary. The little group of folks that started out working on a weird podcast for fun have taken a professional touring version of it to sixteen different countries, performing well over two hundred shows and counting. We have acted together on a Broadway stage, and a West End stage, and soon the Sydney Opera House. I still miss my father every single day. Night Vale is still, in many ways, about him.

Night Vale has changed too, and will continue to change. We are rethinking how to tell Night Vale stories in this sixth year of our show. We will be focusing less on long arcs leading to big conclusions, and zooming in instead on shorter stories about the various citizens of our town. And those characters will be continuing to change and age, just as the people bringing them to life have changed and aged. Ultimately though, Cecil is still Cecil, and Carlos is still Carlos, and I am still the 25 year old with no job prospects and a hole in my heart where my father once lived, sitting in an apartment that was smaller than my office is now, and trying to write my way into another world. 

- Joseph Fink
August 1, 2017