Listen Up: Limetown

I get it!!!  I finally get it!  I have fallen for podcasting.  Which is good because I still have six months to go in my 2018 resolution.

The rules as they stand now.

• I will listen to twelve spec-fic oriented podcasts, one per month.
• For each podcast, I will listen to a minimum of five episodes per podcast before I either give up or add it to my entertainment cycle.
• Though originally, I swore to give each podcast five episodes, I am not going to hold myself to that.  In a month, I may listen to five first episodes of five different podcasts. Or I may listen to three from a new one. Or I may backtrack and listen to further episodes from a podcast I’d tried before.

Some notes on my own personality flaws:

• I am not good at listening or paying attention. Yet most forms of multi-tasking are out when you’re listening to audio. It comes down to baking or exercising for me, and those are not always easy to fit into my day.
• I am not patient. Reading is faster and more efficient.

But when I asked for podcast recommendations, they came fast and furious, so podcasts are obviously something people enjoy. I want to be one of them.  And now, thankfully, and excitingly, I have.

It’s taken me until the fifth podcast (Bright Sessions, Lauren Proves Magic is Real, Steal the Stars, The Haven Chronicles) to really glom onto this type of entertainment, but boy have I. Part of it is finally getting a listening system that works for me (driving while listening). Part of it is just finally getting into the good stuff. I may be currently addicted, and downloading podcasts like crazy.*

Let’s talk about Limetown.

Thanks to Shara, our intrepid Editor-in-Chic, for recommending it. Really, Limetown is the perfect entry  podcast since it mimics the utterly familiar NPR long-form programs. Even those of us who don’t listen to NPR (me, I admit it!), are familiar with the formats and the whole… tone. So this podcast was easy to listen to.

Also, the execution of this podcast is really well done.

I’m not talking just about the technical execution–which is wonderful: music, sound effects that work, people who genuinely sound like radio interviewees and speak in crystal clear radio voice.  The execution of the story is well done.

Partially incomplete, but well done.  Although there’s so much more to wonder, it leaves off at a satisfying point.

I want to digress and talk about writing as a whole. There’s one nightmare task in any writing and that’s the doling out of information. Not just setting, but the actual plot information (which Limetown excelled at).

Most plots, especially “mystery” plots, begin with a single reader/viewer/listener question: “What’s going on?” That’s what we want an answer to. And too many writers/story-boarders seem to mistake the nature of intrigue and never move beyond that question, heaping up mystery on mystery on mystery and refusing stubbornly to give us answers for fear of spoiling the intrigue. The thing is, when the reader only has one question to ask “What’s going on?” rapidly becomes, “What the f*** is going on and why should I care?” It becomes a source of frustration. Humans are hard-wired to put clues together, but if we’re deprived of useful clues, then the events just become noise instead of a story.

A writer friend sent me this awesome link that sums it up better than I can and way more wittily.  The Mystery Box is bad for keeping your readers/listeners happy in the long term.

It’s a constant struggle: we-the-writers tend to feel that less is more when it comes to secrets and clues and enigmatic moments and mystery plots. But it’s all a lie. When it comes to mystery, more is more should be the rule.

There are a lot of stories that are driven by the enigma. Which clutch the enigma close and refuse not only to give you an answer, but to even let the characters speculate beyond the “what the heck is going on?”  The characters end up enduring the events, not trying to solve them.

Then you have Limetown. Minimal spoilers.

LIMETOWN’S PREMISE:

Ten years ago, over three hundred men, women and children disappeared from a small town in Tennessee, never to be heard from again. American Public Radio reporter Lia Haddock asks the question once more, “What happened to the people of Limetown?”

Six episodes long, with a few digressions. Those six episodes start off with a mystery—what happened in Limetown? We hear about the start of Limetown, the type of people who lived there, the setting (laid out beautifully and naturally given this format), and the night of the Panic. All hard and fast answers, chiseling away at the unknowns we started with. Then, at the end of episode one, there’s a hard turn, changing all the facts we have been told are true: There are no survivors. Except, a survivor has just called in….

So the central question remains: What was going on in Limetown? But it also morphs and sprouts intriguing tendrils. “Who is the Man they were all there for?” “What was the purpose of Limetown?” “Why have the survivors been hiding/ who the hell is killing the survivors?” “What does this mean for Lia, our intrepid reporter?”

There are some elements to the story that are evocative. Lia tells us in the first episode that her uncle was one of the victims of Limetown. She tells us she doesn’t know much about him, that he wasn’t close to the family; later, given the reactions of her parents to a break-in, and some casually dropped dialogue, it becomes apparent that Lia’s been keeping a lot of stuff back. In another podcast, this might feel like a continuity error, or a clumsy sort of ret-con, but because the rest of the podcast is so smooth and well-thought-out, it feels like a secret sub-plot happening beneath the surface.

In the end, though the story is incomplete (a single season with a cliffhanger, not a series), it’s still satisfying because we’ve learned the primary answer: We know what happened in Limetown. We know what’s been happening since then: we know what’s going on, and can put the pieces together to intuit why. The question changes.  Not “what happened?” but a burning “What happens next?!”

Really, I do want to know what happens next.

Also, with these podcasts, I’m developing another criterion for judging. How useful is their website?  Does it have easily accessible cast lists? Can you catch up on the episodes there?  Do they have transcripts?

Two-Up’s website is minimal but most of the important information is there if you poke at a few things.  The credits are listed with each episode.  The voice of Lia Haddock was Annie-Sage Whitehurst, and I feel like she deserves maybe front-page recognition. She is carrying the entire narrative on her voice.  Limetown’s a great story, but Whitehurst sells it.

*Like any type of new thing, the minute you find what you like, somehow the universe (or computers’ fancy algorithms) starts linking you to more of what you might like, with increasing amounts of accuracy. So Limetown led me to The Bridge (reviewed next), which in turn led me to a whole bunch more. The problem has suddenly gone from finding 12 podcasts to try to limiting it to 12 podcasts. Seriously. This month, I listened to Limetown, then the whole available run of The Bridge, bounced off of Homecoming, and then worked my way through the first season of Archive 81. I have also downloaded the potentially comedic Kakos Industries, as well as Magnus Archives, Lake Clarity, Wolf 359, Life After/The Message, Ars Paradoxica, Mabel, Edict Zero, Spirits, and King Falls AM.

As of this posting, I have rushed ahead of myself and listened to a dozen Magnus Archives episodes and fallen for Mabel in a big way.  Man, I can’t wait to talk about Mabel.