152 - The end is beginning

Hello and welcome to the The Spark & The Art creativity podcast. Thank you for subscribing to our weekly podcast, where we alternate between interviews with creative folks from all different career levels and insight and inspiration episodes. All with the intention you’ll get what you need to get your creative projects started and, more importantly, finished.

I’m your host Tucker and this week is an explanation of where the podcast is going. 

This episode is 152 that means I have done about 76 interviews and 76 just Tucker episodes and I have enjoyed every one of them. But lately the fun in making the podcast has gone away. 

At the end of each interview where I thank the guest for their time and their honesty and it fades out I always have a quick chat with the guest and explain when they can expect their episode to go live and other things like that. After this last interview, which you’ll hear next week, the topic moved to the podcast itself. During that conversation I started thinking about my four cores of creativity that I talked about in episode 126. 

The four cores are: Curiosity, Problem Solving, Personal Expression and Habit and Ritual

This podcast was born out of curiosity. How do you make a podcast? What would it be about? What’s the best way to publish it? and bunch of other questions. Then I went about solving all those problems and learning and practicing and publishing. I developed my Habits and Rituals around approaching and booking guests. Around writing, recording, editing and publishing the episodes. I had an outlet for personal expression because of the short episodes I did in the interview/just me weekly alternating format I’d created.

But my curiosity has been satisfied. I know what it takes to make a podcast. I don’t necessarily know what it takes to make a highly successful podcast but that’s the other point. Anytime it came down to making a Facebook group or starting a Patreon or just the business part in general the limit of the problem solving was simply finding the tool and how to set it up. I had no more than a passing curiosity on how to use it to grow an audience. I also saw no real opportnity for self-expression in marketing and promoting the podcast. I always tried to run the interviews so that the guest got the spot light. I would make comments here and there and share from my experience but it was always about the guest. I had no desire to be a personality or guru. I knew that was the space that podcasters often put themselves in and write books and do speaking engagements etc so I explored that but it wasn’t really where I wanted to go. I may still write a book one day who knows but that’s not on the radar anytime soon now. 

In my first episode I laid out the rules I gave myself for starting the podcast. 1) Alternating weekly episodes 2) Episodes come in a series This only worked for the first few episodes and I realized that this was a pretty big logistical problem and I should just book the guests in the order I could get them. But the concept was that I could just stop after a series and put the show on permanent hiatus if I discovered that podcasts weren’t for me. 

Well, I’m currently still enjoying the podcast. I still have lots of guests I want to talk to and a few I’d like to reconnect with for follow up interviews. But while the podcast didn’t take up all of my free time it took up a fair chunk. Setting up the interviews and finding guests and topics took time. The interviews took about an hour to conduct. They took about an hour and 1/2 or two hours to edit the conversation and take notes plus write and record the intro/outro. Publishing it took about an hour to process the audio in Auphonic.com and put the episode in Simplecast.com and layout the page in the Squarespace site and make the forwards in Hover.com and set up some tweets in buffer and then test everything to make sure it worked. 

Since I only have about 1.5 hours in an evening after kids and wife time that’s a good amount of time in the week. But what I’ve realized lately is that not only did it take up time it took up brain space. The cognitive load of all those tasks, particularity the planning guests and topics, were always just kind of spinning about in my brain.

So, I’m winding down the podcast. I have one interview left in the can and that will be up next week. Then I have a plan for my last just me episode. At the end of September I’ve been invited to interview the guests at the Camp Festival, the creativity conference here in Calgary, and those will probably be published starting in October. After that … who knows. Like I mentioned earlier I do want to reconnect with a few follow up guests but there’s a couple movies a CD and a graphic novel that need to get finished first.

So don’t unsubscribe just know that there will be episodes at some point they just won’t be on the mostly regular schedule I’ve been keeping. 

So what am I going to be doing instead? Well, I have a couple music projects I’ve been poking at here and there and need to just have some focus. A few videos for existing music projects. There’s that gluten-free-glow-in-the-dark playdough I’ve been talking about for so long. I’ve also had to create rules for what these new projects are. I’m calling it my #ProjectPurge and I’m looking to find ways to get them live somehow so I can consider it done. 

It’s a lot of projects so I’ll be able to fill up my time with it for sure. I’m excited. If you want to keep tabs on me I’ll be updating the website SongsTuckerWrote.com with all my stuff. Or you can leave your email at TheSparkAndTheArt.com and get your free little ebook at the same time and I’ll be sure to send out updates when the new projects are ready to share. I have no schedule for those yet though. 

That’s it for this week. I’ll talk to you again over the next few - and remember: you won’t get the art without the work and you won’t do the work without the spark.