A pandemic survival story

“Ear Wax.” The old man said. 

“Here we go again...” Janet rolled her eyes and lay back against the rock outcrop using her pack as a rough pillow.  She arched her back like a cat, stretched her arms out over her head and relaxed to look at him. 

“No, seriously…” The old man continued, “How do you deal with ear wax in the apocalypse? You can’t see into your own ears…”

“I’m not touching your disgusting old ears.” Janet responded, hoping this was the end of this particular conversation.

They were on a bluff a couple hundred feet above the river. She looked down and across the muddy flow at the smoke rising from another burning town. The bridge spanning the watercourse was dotted with abandoned cars and trucks. The trailer of an 18-wheeler was sticking half out of the water, near one shore, jammed against a bridge pylon.  

...

S1 E20 - Outro

So here we are my survivor friends. The end. But, it’s not the end. Think of it like those old SciFi movies where they’d put up the words “The End” and then tag a question mark onto it. 

Don’t worry it’s not a question. “We’ll be back.”

It’s one of the strange ironies of these stories is that the more you do it the more ideas you have. It’s like a perpetual motion machine.  

Because I am super psyched!  Really. I am so pleased with the way this season came out. I am in love with these characters and their arcs. I’m in love with this universe that we’ve created. I’m in Love with Robert’s audio performance. It really came together and beat all my expectations. 

And you! Nothing happens unless you show up my survivor friends. I am so grateful for your attention, especially in this attention scarce world that we live in.

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

I just went over to A-cast and checked; we’re at 13,000+ downloads. Which is amazing. Thank you to all of you who have left a review or shared the show with your friends.

I hope you’ve noticed that I’ve tried to keep the narrative smart. Not just string together action and dialogue. Assume that you folks don’t need me to explain everything. I can reference history, or philosophy or literature and you are going to get it. 

So, again, thank you for being a smart audience. Pat yourself on the back. You earned it.

Hopefully you liked episode 20. I know it was dialogue heavy. I wanted to fill in some gaps and cement the journey of these three characters. Coming up in season 2 we’ll introduce some new characters, and we’ll raise the stakes as this universe starts to coalesce into centers of gravity. 

I did a fun interview with Mike from the Apocalypse Post podcast this weekend. We had a blast talking about the characters and the show. I’m going to get the recording of that and we’ll stick it on the feed here so that you can listen to it. 

Hey Mike, thanks for having me. 

His universe is more of a Mad Max universe. I remember Mad Max. I actually saw the Road Warrior first, which was Mad Max 2. It had everything a good apocalypse movie should, a good anti-hero, a dog and lots of action in the wastelands. 

Road Warrior was a great movie. I loved it. Mad Max was a pretty good movie too. The original Mad Max movie cost $200k to make and made $13M. That makes it one of the most profitable movies of all time. I guess there is money to be had in the apocalypse. 

Anyhow, Mike and a few thousand others get costumed up like Mad Max characters and go out into the desert to a festival called “Wasteland”. If any Wastelanders are listening – welcome thanks for spreading the word, have fun this year, it’s coming up in 10 weeks.

I’ll give you a little fan-boy trivia. There was a role in the Road Warrior called warrior woman that was played by Virginia Hey who was also the blue skinned alien Zotoh Zhaan in the cheesy SciFi show FarScape. 

Next up I’m going to hit ‘pause’ on the show production for a couple months.  We’re sitting at the middle of July 2021, Let’s shoot for starting Season 2 in September. So don’t’ delete us, stay in touch. 

In the meantime, I’m going to convert season one into a book, e-book and audio book, if I can swing it. I’ll be posting various progress reports and looking for help from readers and spell checkers on our Facebook page. Join me - “OldManApocalypse”. 

As always I am working to a tight budget, like the first Mad Max film! – so if you can go to the Patreon page for After the Apocalypse and throw me some money it makes everything easier. Just to be fully transparent, we are not talking about a lot of money here, but currently the variable costs per show are about double the income.

As they say in the startup world – we’ve got a negative burn rate. With your help I can turn that around!

That’s it for this season my friends. 

I feel a bit sad having to say goodbye to you for a couple months. 

Don’t worry, we’ll find a way to fill in some of that dead space. 

So chin up, one foot in front of the other, and above all else – Keep surviving! 

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