Creating Blue Dust #2

Blue Dust is a sci-fi audio fiction series that I created and released in 2022. It tells the story of a teenager named Max returning to his old home, a floating mega-city, to find his father and get his old life back. You can listen on any major podcasting platform, or at https://anchor.fm/blue-dust

In the last post, I wrote about the initial ideas for Blue Dust and how reading a stack of books on writing fiction changed my thinking about the story. In this blog post, I’ll write about the process of adapting Blue Dust as an audio fiction series.

Blue Dust was always conceived of as a novel. In its many early drafts, I included detailed descriptions of the Upper and Lower Wards, the Red Guards, the history of the city, Vault-24, Vertov’s compound, as well as many action scenes, including one with a mech! While some of these things could stay, others obviously had to go.

Although this process of paring the story back to its basic structure was painful, the benefits far outweighed any pain. Simply put, there was a high likelihood Blue Dust would have never existed as a published book. Over the 15 years of its development, I’d written and re-written completely four times, sometimes with 2–3 year gap in between each draft. I’m also not a skilled writer of descriptions. In all my drafts, the dialogue and action scenes were usually the best, and I’d often purposely skip over descriptions of the city or of characters in favour of dialogue, usually writing [insert description of city here] or [write about Vertov here] and then moving on.

One of my only strong points as a writer, I believe, is creating engaging dialogue. I’m also an enormous ambient music fan, a musician, and an audio engineer. I felt uniquely poised to create a dialogue-heavy audio version of Blue Dust. It would be a great way to combine many of my skills. So when I started thinking about what to do for my capstone project in university, Blue Dust came to mind.

That doesn’t mean that there weren't difficulties in the writing process. The script is filled with desciptions of action and scenery that are never mentioned in the dialogue, so therefore are completely absent from the published episodes.

Some scenes are worse than others. Perhaps worst of all is the beginning of EP02 where Max wakes up with a tube in the back of his neck. The script describes that Max is in the medical bay of a dropship, lying flat on an operating table next to an unconscious Annie. Since the dropship has been overrun by Frank and Fi, Annie’s guards leave, taking Annie with them. Unfortunately, almost none of this is as clear as I’d like it to be in the publishes episode. Through voiceovers, we get a sense that Max is tied down, that he has a tube in his neck, and that Annie is taken away by a Red Guard, but precious-little else.

EP01 is also filled with little moments like this. For example, the look of the pherons, although detailed in the script, is left entirely to the imagination of the listener. Same for the look of the Red Guards, and even the vault.

I toyed with the idea of including descriptions, pulling Blue Dust closer to a dialogue-heavy audiobook, but thought better of it. I wanted Blue Dust to sound like my all-time favourite radio series, Star Wars, which may even rival the movies. Since they don’t have descriptions (well, at least not in-between lines of dialogue), I wouldn’t either.

By EP03 and EP04, I was much, much better at including strategic voiceovers from Max, or better yet, writing scenes that didn’t require a lot of complicated actions of descriptions. I’m particularly proud of the penultimate chapter of EP04, which required gruelling recording sessions from the three primary voice actors involved, as well as an entire month of editing and mixing, but which I believe is an excellent audio-only experience that is easy to follow, despite the scene’s chaotic nature.

Learning through experience what an audio-only story can and can’t do has been an extremely valuable learning experience that I hope to carry into future projects.

In future posts, I’ll get into how I developed the detailed connections between characters, as well as the processes of recording, editing and mixing the four episodes of the series.

Thank you for reading.