Today we have with us Anne Baird, Katie Youmans, and Wil Williams, the team behind Hug House Productions and creators of fiction and nonfiction podcasts like VALENCE and Scoring Magic. We discussed adapting a written novel into an audio medium, the process of creating an audio documentary, and how to collaborate on creative projects.
Hello and welcome to the Inn! First of all, how are you all and how have you been?
Anne: We’re doing alright! Well, I am, at least. I can’t speak for these two. Busy. We’re definitely all that.
Katie: Busy, definitely. In need of a nap?? But pretty great, overall.
Wil: I just quit my day job so actually . . . less busy than usual, which is wonderful!
Anne: You’re only less busy because you were too busy before—now you actually have time to breathe!
Could you tell us a bit about yourselves, your creative journeys so far, and how you got into audio dramas?
K: Oh boy. How far back do we go for creative journeys? I’m a writer because I never really liked anything else enough to want to do it for me, instead of doing it because I was told to. And because I wanted to read stories that I wasn’t finding yet. That makes writing sound really self-indulgent, but . . . eh, I’m actually fine with that.
I got into audio drama by accident, mostly. I saw all these animatics of an elf and a dwarf and a burly dude making boneheaded choices and screwing up everything, and got into The Adventure Zone because of that, then found Join the Party, and then sort of . . . fell into the rest of the podcast world? So thanks, artists of YouTube! This is all your fault!
W: I’ve been listening to podcasts since before you could put them on an iPod, but I actually didn’t come into audio dramas until much, much later. I was fairly resistant to them initially, which is now pretty embarrassing to admit. Like a lot of people, the first audio drama I listened to was Welcome to Night Vale. I loved it, but it wasn’t until finding Limetown that I really understood what the medium could do. Actually, funny story—John Westover, the actor who plays Nico in VALENCE is the person who introduced me to Limetown years ago! From there, I listened to ars PARADOXICA, which became the reason I started writing about podcasts; not enough people were giving Mischa Stanton the praise they deserved.
A: Welcome to Night Vale was also my gateway podcast into fiction podcasts, back when it first started, but then college happened and I stopped listening until I stumbled upon actual plays! I started with one called D&D is For Nerds back in… oh god, 2015? Was it really only 2015? That feels like so long ago but it really wasn’t, in the grand scheme of things. From there I found Critical Role, The Adventure Zone, and Join The Party and eventually stumbled back into the world of audio dramas with The Bright Sessions and ars PARADOXICA—both of which got me through some really rough times at home.
As for being a creative? That was literally never something I thought I would be doing! If it wasn’t for Wil and Katie, I’d still just be listening to podcasts instead of making them. But they seriously have been my rocks in this whole endeavor and as much as I’m doing this for the community and myself, it’s really something I work on for them. <3
How did Hug House Productions originate?
A: It was literally… it started with Wil DMing me and Katie one night on Discord and asking if we might want to work on some podcasts together maybe someday eventually, and then we made a server for it as a place to discuss how we might do it, and within a weekend we had two shows planned and show art and were working on the first episode of Scoring Magic? And it all kinda snowballed from there. Literally, it was less than a week and we had already done all of that.
K: And as far as the name is concerned, it was the nickname given to a house in our Monster of the Week game where several of the NPCs (who were characters in VALENCE before they were characters in the game) lived. I think one of us joked that we should just use that name for our production company, and after we stopped laughing, there was a moment of “No, wait, that’s a really solid name. I think we have to use it.”
W: For me, Hug House—or, I mean, just the idea of a collective—had been brewing for a while. I knew I wanted to take my novel and turn it into an audio drama, and I knew I wanted to make a documentary of that process, and I knew that I’ve always looked up to the collective Multitude and what they stand for. It moved fast after I DM’d Katie and Anne, but it was a really lengthy process before then.
The first hurdle was admitting to myself that I couldn’t do it alone. This is something I still struggle with; I grew up in a household where overworking yourself is moralized as, like, the epitome of Good. Also, like, capitalism. But eventually, I got so burnt out that I knew doing it alone just wasn’t feasible or good for the art I was trying to make.
After that, I had to figure out who I wanted to invite in. This was a struggle for the opposite reason. Initially, I had so many names of people I liked and wanted to work with, but I knew deep down that I had to focus on people whose creative, communication, and organizational visions were the same as mine. Anne and Katie were the first two people I thought of inviting into the venture, and they were the two people I eventually knew were the only ones who hit every single need the collective would have.
A: It’s funny that you bring up the creative, communication, and organizational visions because since we’ve started to work together, those are the things we keep finding out we clash on! But it’s also good because it means that we all have different strengths, and we always talk through our issues and figure out a solution in the end, which results in us working better together going forward.
K: I think working together is a lot like living together, in that you really don’t know what ways you’ll mesh until you do it. It’s a testament to how much we care about each other that we work to find ways through those times where we don’t mesh so well.
I was impressed by the dual mission statement of Hug House. Your goals are to feature and spotlight marginalized characters and artists, as well as educating people about the realities of creating audio fiction stories. Why did you choose these goals to focus on and what steps are you taking to achieve them?
A: Our mission statement is really how we, the three of us, have always approached audio fiction and podcasting in general, and really just formalizes how we’d already been operating. Prior to Hug House, we already were working within our subset of the community to uplift marginalized creators and were sharing resources and our knowledge with the community to help them make podcasts of their own. Now that we have this platform we’ve really just started doing it in a more official capacity. It was really important to us that we create a place where everyone feels welcome and valued—like they’re coming home.
K: Anne hit it on the head. We’ve got a few more ideas on how to serve these goals even better in the future, but we’re saving any further work on those for after we’ve got the first season of VALENCE squared away and have a tiny bit more time.
W: Definitely keep an eye out for some things we have planned. We can’t say much yet, but I’m so excited to play a more active and direct role in helping the community.
How did the initial idea for VALENCE come about, and how has it changed as the story has been adapted to an audio medium?
W: There are a few key concrete moments I can pull for VALENCE‘s beginnings, but I actually think it initially comes from my love of near-future sci-fi stories like a lot of Ray Bradbury’s works growing up. I didn’t really have normal bedtime stories; my dad would read me The Martian Chronicles instead. I always loved how the genre aspects of those stories served to tell one honed, specific thought experiment and allegory for something in the real world.
On the concrete side, Liam and a few of the other characters got their start in a D&D game DM’d by John Westover. Liam is a character who I felt really attached to really immediately, and he just sort of wouldn’t leave me alone. I knew I wanted to do NaNoWriMo, so writing Liam’s story was a natural place for me to start. This was where the first big change came in: I wanted it to be modern day, urban fantasy lite meets sci-fi, and I wanted it to be in New York.
I wrote, like, 2.75 books in that series across 3 or 4 NaNoWriMos. They were . . . sufficient. Not my best writing, not my worst. When I brought Katie and Anne on, that‘s when the magic really happened. We edited the hell out of the first book to fit it into 12 nice episodes. We removed characters and B plots and added some in. We got down to the core of the characters and the point of what the story is trying to say, and wove those together in a way that feels like what the books were always supposed to be. We also got away from the real world New York and made its fictional twin, New Candler, which has been one of the most fun aspects of the change in this iteration.
A: I’m still mad about the cliffhanger ending to the third book in the series that was never finished. And now it’ll never be finished because we’ve changed so much in season 1 of VALENCE that there’s literally no way that the characters could end up in the same place. The two stories are really completely different at this point, even though they started from the same source material and have the same core characters—heck, even the characters are different! We changed names, personalities, etc. They’ve become their own beings separate from who they were when they started. Part of it is because of me and Katie being involved in the writing process, but it’s also thanks to our amazing actors who have brought their own experiences and personalities into the characters they play to really make it a unique creation.
K: I joked the other night that VALENCE could be considered fan fiction for Stabl (the book that VALENCE is based on). Yes, Wil created the original material, but the characters have become such different people by the end of the first season that, yeah, you could argue it’s an AU. Part of that is because Wil has grown, and I think part is because of what Anne and I injected into the story. Anne has the most dastardly ideas that we sometimes have to sit with for a moment, because they’re too good, and we can’t not use them. And I love to work in these quiet, soft moments between characters that tease out details about them for the audience.
Most of you have been embedded in the audio drama community for a while now. What does it feel like to now be in charge of your own audio fiction project? How do you feel your roles and relationships in the community have evolved as a result?
K: This is going to come off as a joke, but I’m absolutely serious—before Hug House, I had no projects of my own and didn’t have to worry about consequences if I needed to volunteer my voice on behalf of someone who did have projects that might suffer if they spoke out about something. I’d offer to be the one to jump in and risk offending someone with clout who was punching down. Now that my name is attached to HH projects, I try to be less of a blunt instrument when those situations arise.
A: Honestly, I think since starting to work with Hug House I’ve started to speak up and out about things more? Before Hug House, I was just a listener or a fan, so it always felt like my opinions weren’t as important as those of other creators—which isn’t necessarily true! Fans and listeners are the backbone of the podcasting community and are just as important as creators, but since becoming a creator myself it still feels like others in the community will place higher value on what I have to say. So I say more and I speak up for the people who won’t.
W: I’ve been pretty present and vocal for a while and, um . . . honestly I’m mostly just terrified? As a critic, working in the space you write about is terrifying. But that’s why I’m doing it. It’s definitely made me understand creators more, which sometimes leads to more empathy for them and admittedly sometimes less. Making something in this space is something I knew I needed to do so I could critique better and help better, even though the thought of being held to my own standards is scary.
What sorts of challenges have you faced in adapting VALENCE into an audio medium?
W: The magic. In the book, each character’s magic has a specific color, which winds up being relevant in the plot (and also steeped in metaphor) in a few different ways. We obviously totally removed that in audio. Bringing in our editor and sound designer, Julia Schifini, made this change way less scary than expected. She totally understood my vision with the magic and conveyed it perfectly in each character’s magic sound—including all of the metaphors I’d baked into the colors. Listen to those sounds closely, y’all.
A: Julia works literal magic with these magic sounds, seriously. I don’t know how we’d do this without having her and her experience of working with audio dramas by our side. But also, the colors haven’t completely gone away! We’ve incorporated some of the magic colors into our logo art and website designs, and I, at least, still think of them in terms of colors. The magic sounds that Julia’s made are representative of the colors, as well as the characters’ personalities and strengths.
K: It’s funny—I didn’t even think about the magic when I read this question because I already imagined it in a more tactile way when I read the books. In my mind, one of the biggest challenges was conveying things like the various reactions people might have to grief, or the sweet, tender moments between characters who care about each other, because my writing has always focused very much on things you can’t represent in audio—small, reassuring touches, facial expressions, all very tactile or visual things. Writing a fight scene and figuring out choreography that has to be clear and make sense when the audience can’t see any of it is a massive pain when you’re not used to that!
How did Scoring Magic originate, and what are you hoping to achieve with it?
W: I’ve been writing resources and guides for podcasters for years now, and while I think they’re (hopefully) helpful, I do feel that they’re incomplete. They tell you how to do something, but they’re not really the first venue to explain how it feels to do that thing, how frustrating it can be, how stressful it can be, even how rewarding it can be when you get it right. And that’s understandable—like, sometimes people just want to know how to use a mic properly, not about how using a mic properly brings me back to my old college radio days.
With Scoring Magic, I want to give that other side. I want us to give tips, for sure, but also share our ups and downs. I want us to be real with our process. I want people to learn what they should and shouldn’t do, but I also want them to feel seen in their struggles and know they’re not alone.
A: Some of the best feedback I’ve heard about Scoring Magic is that people love hearing how open we are about our process and what goes right and wrong in it. A lot of those resources Wil mentioned just tell you how to do something right, but they don’t tell you why something is wrong—and they’re also typically steeped in opinion that isn’t made obvious. In Scoring Magic, we try to be very clear in that our way of doing things isn’t necessarily the right way to do it. It’s the right way for us, and sometimes it isn’t and we learn from those mistakes.
We aren’t trying to be perfect, we’re being realistic. We make mistakes, just like everyone does, especially if it’s their first time trying to take on something like making a podcast. And I think that’s what people need to hear sometimes. To know they’re not alone in messing up and not knowing things.
K: Somehow, all of my episodes keep focusing on the feelings aspects of it all. I love that we have different approaches to the various topics, because a series that’s all feelings or all facts start to finish would probably alienate a lot of listeners. Each of us trading off talking about aspects that are particularly meaningful to us has worked out well so far, because we’re focusing on the parts we can bring the most excitement and honesty to. That’s our goal. The how-to part is wonderful, and I hope we manage to help provide a lifeline to new podcasters, but more than that, I hope we get people excited about the process just as much as they are about the product. I want them to hear how satisfying and rewarding it can be to create, and to think differently about the media they consume, knowing a little bit of what went into making it.
You recently released a quiz for people to see what their magic would sound like in the world of VALENCE. How amazing is it to hear something you’ve been working towards for so long? And which type of magic did each of you match with?
K: First off, Julia is brilliant. She took these concepts that were not always easy to put words to, that lived in our brains and on the page, and turned them into really rich, layered, beautiful sounds. We joked on Scoring Magic about how we cried because we were overwhelmed by it, but it is genuinely incredible to have someone take your attempts to explain what you have in mind and just get it.
I’ve taken the quiz multiple times (Purely to test that it worked. Definitely not just for fun. Heck no.) and most of the time I get Mending magic, which is my favorite of the sounds so far.
A: My magic, according to the quiz, is Data, which… if you know the character it represents in VALENCE and also know me, makes complete sense! >:) But besides the magic sounds themselves, the most amazing thing to hear so far has been the actors playing out scenes together in real time.
W: I am a nightmare chaos gemini, so I wasn’t terribly surprised when I got Entropy. And yeah, when I heard all of the magic sounds, I um definitely just cried a lot.
If the three of you could go back in time and give one piece of advice to yourselves pre-VALENCE, what would it be?
K: Procrastinating and watching Cutthroat Kitchen instead of writing episodes is not self-care! If you hit a block in writing, talk to your co-writer instead of hoping magic lightning bolts of inspiration will come out of nowhere. They don’t. I checked.
W: Bruh calm down. Ask for help when you need help. Oh my god.
A: We’re still working on the “ask for help when you need help” part. And I’ll also add: talk to your collaborators. If you feel like you’re not giving enough to the project, talk about it! Because the chances are that your collaborators don’t feel the same way. Value the work you do. You have value and your work is worth something, no matter how little it is. Time put in doesn’t always add up evenly to the value of the work being done.
Looking forward, what can we expect from Hug House in the future?
A: More podcasts. Am I allowed to say that? Listen, it’s no secret that we’re a growing production company and, in the words of Katie, we want to “get our wretched little fingers into every pie”. We have ideas. We have plans. We just need to find the time to execute them!
K: Listen, I absolutely want all our fingers in all the podcast pies. We have a couple of ideas we’re kicking around, both for future shows and projects, and people we’d love to work with in some capacity.
W: VALENCE is a contained story that will have a planned, solid ending. Like the others have said, we have so many ideas kicking around, but what excites me about them is how different they’ll be from VALENCE.
What are you reading and/or listening to these days?
A: For someone whose creator portfolio consists of “Oops, All Fiction!” (or fiction-adjacent), I listen to an awful lot of nonfiction. I’m subscribed to twice as many nonfiction podcasts as I am to fiction. Right now I’m loving Parcast’s Dog Tales, Short Wave from NPR, and to give a couple fiction recommendations… Margaritas & Donuts (Observer Pictures) and The Godshead Incidental (Cara Ehlenfeldt and Amy Giacomucci).
K: I used to devour pretty much everything I could get my hands on, regardless of genre, so long as it had snappy writing and audio I could hear clearly with my auditory processing issues. These days, my brain is a li’l crispy around the edges and I focus mostly on softer, gentler things, or light and silly shows. I keep shouting about The Xmas Mistake: A Cursed Podcast, but now it’s seasonally appropriate to do so! Disclaimer: I do give to them on Patreon, but they deserve it.
W: My job is listening to everything, so I listen to pretty much everything. I’m really loving the actual play Fun City right now, and for fiction, I recently listened to all of Radioland and it was fantastic. I’m always reading pieces of great blogging and cultural criticism and always looking for more, but Emily VanDerWerff‘s newsletter has been unsurprisingly amazing since it debuted. I’m also reading Maggie Stiefvater’s Call Down the Hawk from the Raven Cycle series, which was an inspiration for VALENCE, and I recently finished Madeline Miller’s Circe, which was beautiful and ruined me.
Thanks for visiting the Inn and chatting with us! Anything you’d like to say to our readers to close off?
W: One of our actors is also one of the most important people in the podcast journalism scene: the amazing Elena Fernández Collins. What people might not know is that they’re also finishing their Master’s thesis right now. Which is to say: hey, if you’ve ever benefited from Ely’s writing, which you almost definitely have, go chuck them some bucks so they can treat themself to a fancy chocolate because they fucking deserve it.
A: Oh shit, is it “say nice things about our actors” time? Because I’d like to shout out Katie Chin, who’s playing Grace in VALENCE. She’s been such an asset in developing Grace as a character, which is why future seasons of VALENCE are going to be so different than we had originally planned! It’s her first time voice acting, so if you’re in need of a charming, sassy, and just overall good-hearted person for your production, please please PLEASE consider Katie.
K: Please also remind our actors to drink water and sleep. I love them all to bits but they work constantly and the quality of their work is absolutely stunning and so I have to assume they’re just never sleeping. Stop that! (And to you, the reader, please also get some water and take a nap. Even if you don’t feel like you’ve earned it. You probably have. And also the concept of having to earn rest is absolute trash.)
About Hug House Productions
Wil Williams is a podcast critic and journalist based in the barren nightmare wastelands of Phoenix. Scoring Magic is Wil’s third podcast about podcasts, because she is a parody of herself. The others are Tuned In, Dialed Up, a conversation show about the podcast industry, and Radio Drama Revival, an audio drama spotlight and interview show. Wil Williams writes review for Polygon, The AV Club’s Podmass, her own publication, and more. (Twitter: @wilw_writes)
Anne Baird is a certified mathematics nerd and business enthusiast, spending her days managing operations for a real estate investment company at her home on the Jersey Shore and most of her evenings in sessions for any one of several tabletop RPG campaigns. With Scoring Magic and VALENCE under her belt, and now managing the social media for Radio Drama Revival, Anne has jumped head first into podcasting and has no intention of slowing down. (Twitter: @annecbaird)
Katie Youmans is tired all the time, but has not let that stop her yet. She is currently based in Maryland, where she spends her days writing for engineers and her nights listening to podcasts, moving her cat off of the keyboard, and writing things that are meant to make others cry, but end up making her cry too. You can find her on Twitter, or somewhere in standstill traffic on I-495 screaming into an uncaring universe. (Twitter: @kateryoumans)
Find Hug House Productions online at HugHouse.Productions or @HugHousePods.
You can support Anne, Katie, and Wil on Patreon at Patreon.com/HugHousePods.
