What Now with Simo

20,000 words for the NX book — Writing — Translating films and TV series — Securing creative freedom — Game writing — My default way of living — Screenwriting gym — A whole script going through your mind and fingers — Concise writing — A way to learn from others — Words need to go through you physically as well as mentally — Writing by speaking — Rod Serling and David Lynch — Ideal type of work — Doesn’t matter whether it’s a good or a bad script — Really inspiring projects — Rich input needed for rich output — Reading all kinds of stuff — Doing things this way has been freeing and has lit an unexpected fire — Working on screenplays and more — Like having discovered some secret — The wisdom of doing creative things quickly — Ray Bradbury used to dash through his writing — “Don’t think!” — Access to your secret self — A continuous, beautiful flow instead of building a Lego brick at a time — Something that comes from your soul

Started making the Northern Exposure recordings — Episodes of the podcast will be excerpts from the full work as it is being written — the hours-long full-length recordings and book chapters

Numbered points — 1. Season 1 ebook on Amazon — Paperback soon — Pricing — 2. Northern Exposure podcast series — A “sub-podcast” for now — No branding or advertising — 3. YouTube Garfield pipe strip video called 07/27/1978 — In the category of comedy — Lovecraftian thinking — Visual illustrations of the points — 4. The main street smelled like a clean beach — Streets washed clean — Lost count — Another 4 — David Lynch’s weather reports and what they do for people — Some of the most positive comment sections on YouTube — 5. Lasting language — Popular expressions that come and go — Uses of language that become outdated — 6. To future and present listeners — Monday, 25th of May 2020 — Rate of podcasting — Progress report — Years finding the right direction — Never a perfect time to get started — Important and unimportant things — Difficult times and good moments in life — Crossroads and course corrections — Vulnerability — Nicholas Meyer — Universality in specificity but only cafeteria food in universality — The texture of life — Personal stories

A less hectic pace this time — Things passing out of the common consciousness — The Twilight Zone — Even that — Forgotten? — Lasting work — People of generations after mine — Ancient history — Their own things — Anthology shows — The Ray Bradbury Theater — One of those eternal things — How many born later will go watch those episodes? — Losing the ability to watch or read old stuff — Going back to the roots — Such a daunting thought — Speaking across the ages — Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings — Enjoyed those too — The same will happen with them — Made a long time ago now — Rod Serling’s and Ray Bradbury’s work — Those things had worth — A special kind of loneliness — No shared love — A brighter note to end on — Episodes of The Ray Bradbury Theater — Not just artifacts from the past — All good art

Welcome — Podcast and book series — 110 episodes and chapters — American TV series created by Joshua Brand and John Falsey — Six seasons from 1990 to 1995 — The Blu-ray release preserves the original music — Earlier DVD releases — Amazon — How to do justice to this series? — A tall claim, but one I believe 100% — The maturest series I know — A unique combination of what it does and what it doesn’t do — Dispelling cobwebs — Opening my balcony door and stepping out into the summer evening balminess here in Finland — Green leaves, blue skies, and sunshine — Fresh air — Clean, pure, cold water — Lakeside — Running in beautiful nature — Sitting around a smoking campfire — Together with friends in a warm bus driving down dark night-time roads — Not an academic dissection — Storytelling — Screenwriting — Music — Food and drink — Nature — Literature — Art — Comedy — Humour — Drama — Theatre — Crafts — Health — Illness — A complete musical education — Every genre — Moosechick Notes (2001 to the present) — Metta Spencer: Two Aspirins and a Comedy: How Television Can Enhance Health and Society (2006) — Starting with the pilot episode — Eight episodes in season 1 — My other podcast series What Now with Simo — This will be collected in book form — Editorial approach — What is the story of Northern Exposure? — The nature of summaries — Reverse-engineering the stories — Our entrance into this world — Broadening out — Community — Starts with one and becomes the story of many — What happens then — A comedy and a drama — Elements that were soon dispensed with — A fresh brew — The main character we start with — Young, fresh, curious energy — Enough characters already painted in the colour of cynicism — The rainbow called darkness — Fresh forest — Plunges into cold lakes — Better to have said too much than too little — Welcome along

10-minute clock — A finely crafted wooden box — News — Two books — Finished a book during the break — A transcript of every episode — The editorial approach — Hybrid books and books that try something new — Issues of focus and memorability — Podcast then also available for anyone with any hearing loss — Writing by talking — Rod Serling, creator of The Twilight Zone, wrote by dictating into a tape recorder — Sitting out in the sun by the pool — Honed his skill for writing dialogue — Every word tested in the act of writing — David Lynch has also dictated many things — Room to Dream — A few of my favourite books — John Cage: Silence: Lectures and Writings by John Cage (1961) — David Lynch: Catching the Big Fish (2006) — A lot of white space — Hildur Kristín Thorstensen: Hugljúfar minningar (Warm Memories) (2017) — Room and light in the poems and on the pages — More than 40,000 words, about 250 pages, next week — The back cover blurb — Another book series and podcast — As Fresh as Northern Exposure — A project in the works for many years already — Six books in that series — A practical matter — Protective of my audience’s experience — The NX podcast will start out as a stealth podcast — Interpolated with episodes of What Now with Simo — 6x9-inch paperbacks and ebooks

Welcome to season 2 — Putting myself on a clock — 10-minute episodes — My father turned 75 — David Lynch’s weather report (David Lynch Theater) — Norm Macdonald tweeted Dr. Jordan Peterson — Bear McCreary’s Battlestar Galactica maybe soon on Spotify — R.I.P. Fred Willard — A couple of announcements soon — Regular schedule from now on — Happy birthday, Dad — Always supportive parents — Something else playing soon at David Lynch Theater — Fred Willard on Norm Macdonald Live (video podcast) — Status update — Tampere, Finland — This podcast was born at Hótel Vellir in Iceland — Relocation after two episodes — Weather and a look out the window — Roses — Ray Bradbury: “You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.” — Applies to all creativity — Unconstructive thoughts — The point is not about escaping reality or responsibility — Necessary to process — Writing — A beneficial effect of doing this podcast — Sticking to the 10-minute plan — Looking back and lessons learned — A question for the listener — What role does art play in your favourite TV series? — Focusing on things I can affect — Exercising, eating well, living healthy — An uncustomary teaser

Season 1 finale — Single-mindedness can be a good thing when pursuing a single task — But life is many tasks — Throwing the thoughts out into the winds — The good ones will come back — Close Encounters of the Third Kind — Field of Dreams — Clearing out some things — Reminders of things forgotten for some time — Discussion featuring Philip Glass and Godfrey Reggio — Director of the Qatsi trilogy — Opening up vistas — The nature of Koyaanisqatsi — To present something but not tell you how to take it — Room for the audience — Link on Twitter — Philip Glass’s Twitter account — An experience that stirs up things — Completing the work — A Conversation with Godfrey Reggio and Philip Glass from WBUR CitySpace — “The Grid” — Perfect time to watch Koyaanisqatsi — Northern Exposure (1990s) — Mixing up things — Ray Kinsella recap — His limit of aggression within the family — Different matter in other contexts — Someone steps over a certain line — The wellbeing of his family — A matter of defending — A place for anger as long as remaining in control — James Horner Discusses Field of Dreams (12 mins.) featuring Horner and director Phil Alden Robinson — Intuitive and creatively sharp people — The right instincts — A respect between them — When James Horner sits at the piano — Appreciating the moment — It takes a special soul to create something with that kind of simplicity and beauty — The night drive scene — Terence Mann played by James Earl Jones — That music is not any one single emotion — Lemon-ginger infusion — Voice boost — A warm drink or cold — Looking at my notes — A few dreams — City driving dream, 6 to 7 p.m. on a Saturday — To do with trust and knowing someone well — Dream with a waterway and girders — Seals — Student group dream — Season 1 epilogue — This podcast — Working on books, screenplays, and music — Some overlap — Expressing your thoughts and feelings in your own voice — Every voice is unique — Ray Bradbury: “The April Witch” — Spring — “How could I stay for so long away from this beauty?” — What is important in life and what isn’t — It’s possible to forget beauty — Some series only want you to watch another episode — Season-concluding thoughts — Pilot season — Remember fire safety — Baking paper — Just me — Take care

A motorcycle — Sunny day — Continuing the serial — I hate manipulation — Playing games with people — Relevance to Field of Dreams — Simply a good man — Superman is meant to be a completely goodhearted person — His backstory — From another planet, but raised by really good people — A valuable concept — Many writers don’t know what to do with this — Moving on — The connecting link — Whether you can trust someone or not — People reveal themselves over time — Assumptions can be telling — Nearly every superhero ends up being a compromised conception — A more innocent time in comics — Ray Kinsella (Kevin Costner’s character) would not crumble — Not violent — Rarer than we may realise — How much happens behind closed doors — A line in an early Sherlock Holmes story — Watson, Holmes, and the countryside — Sherlock has no romantic conception of the countryside — There terrible deeds can continue year after year undetected and unsuspected — Isolated places — Abuse — Real life — Circling back to Field of Dreams — A sunny film — Moving — Also scenes of twilight — The word “magical” — Interlude — The people who keep life going may also feel broken — Doing it regardless — Appreciating comedians and the ways they help — Norm Macdonald — Everyone has both dark and light sides — Anything that makes you feel more normal in a bad situation — Do I feel whole or completely together? — Isolation and loneliness are not what a human life is supposed to be — Everyone more or less breaks down at some point — Let it happen — Bending so as not to break — The limit of Ray’s aggression — Strength can often be found in unexpected places — One thing sure to worsen depression or anxiety — The real heroes — The unassuming and non-underlined nobility of the main character — Ray and his wife Annie grew up in the 60s — Part of the hippie generation — Those ideals — Shoeless Joe by W. P. Kinsella — Carrying the ideals into adulthood — The essentially teen dream of just flower power and making peace signs — What creating peace actually takes — Lovely humorous strain — Ray tried to like sitar music — People who aim to project enlightenment — Dalai Lama cookie story recap — Breaking a monastic rule — Maturity — To be continued

When did I go to sleep last night? — No way was I going to record today — A tumble of thoughts — A good creative principle — Small manageable chunks — Modular — A sort of serial — The real heroes in life are the people who keep life going no matter what — In that spirit — A podcast like a radio programme of comforting regularity — Heroes and superheroes — Perspectives change — Superman goes crazy — Poor Jimmy Olsen — The other 48% of the time — Pretending to be Santa Claus — Cinnamon roll — A living hell — Going crazy about 50% of the time is not good — Pivot into the main point — Simple human decency — Field of Dreams — Directed by Phil Alden Robinson — Based on a book by W. P. Kinsella — Featuring Kevin Costner — A few years ago someone asked me who my favourite actor was — The question took me by surprise — More a matter of the story than any actor — Edward James Olmos, Christopher Walken — No good answer — Hero stuff — This most unassuming form of heroism — A lot of people do things for the wrong reasons — Narcissism, desire to impress — The people who simply keep life going — No living under a dark cloud — Ray Kinsella — A humility and gratitude at what he has in life — The greatest treasure a person can have — Working through his issues — The emotional core of this film — The pain of having said something you regret — Too late — A story of a second chance — Humanity and genuine feeling — Another facet of that diamond-hard pain — Parents go through literal trauma in raising a family — The price they pay — The very least we can do — Exceptionally beautiful soundtrack by James Horner — When he was asked to score it — Speechless — Simplicity and taking its cue from the film itself — A big symphonic score would have been all wrong — Appropriate music — A fascinating thing about writing film music — The greatest people — A crazy and unexpected time — Beacons of sanity