Author Focus – Emily Inkpen

I’m delighted to have my first ever returning featured guest on Author Focus. Emily Inkpen was the very first person to make an appearance when I was still experimenting with the format last year. Back then, I wanted to highlight The Dex Legacy, an audio drama written by Emily and produced by the Alternative Stories and Fake Realities podcast. At the beginning of 2022 The Dex Legacy comprised a couple of standalone episodes, with a full series being developed to expand on the world Emily had created.

Things have moved on apace since then. Season One of The Dex Legacy has now been released to strong reviews with around 70,000 downloads, which is an amazing performance for an independent production like this. Fans of the show will have noted that the first season ended on a massive cliffhanger, so I’ve been keenly awaiting news on Season Two. Emily made the decision to launch a Kickstarter fundraising campaign to produce the second season, which ends on Thursday 8th June 2023. That means this blog is part of a final push to raise funds, so at this point I’ll hand over to Emily so she can answer my questions and explain why you need to back this project.

Tim – Congratulations first of all on reaching your initial Kickstarter funding goal. That’s fantastic! Can you explain to readers why they should still back you to reach your further stretch goals and what this will mean for Season Two of The Dex Legacy?

Emily – Thanks Tim, and thanks so much for having me back! Kickstarter is a ride, I can tell you that. For anyone thinking of crowdfunding a project, prepare for a rollercoaster! With Kickstarter, it’s all or nothing. If you don’t reach your goal, you don’t get anything. So the general rule is to set a lower first goal and aim for stretch-goals. Our first goal covers what we’ll pay our actors and four days in the studio, but it won’t cover travel, food, accommodation… there are a lot of expenses. The first stretch goal will cover these basic expenses in total.

What was the thinking behind going with a fundraiser to produce Season Two? How will this production be different from Season One?

Season One was recorded during the Covid 19 pandemic and various lockdowns. As a result we recorded asynchronously. This means that everyone delivered their lines from improvised recording setups in their own homes. Chris [Chris Gregory, the series producer] and I then worked through the recordings, chose which takes to use, and cut and spliced them together until they sounded like continuous conversations.

The challenge was getting the quality of recording even, and often this was impossible. One duvet fort with a microphone in it, is not the same as another duvet fort with a microphone in it! Chris did an amazing job in post-production, but sometimes it’s very obvious that it was recorded in that way.

Not only this, but sometimes our actors were getting up at odd hours of the night to ensure they were recording in a silent environment. It wasn’t ideal.

This time around, we want to get our actors into a studio, where they can perform together in a suitable space. We want to deliver a high quality production to our audience, and we want to provide in-person director support. One of the big downsides to asynchronous recording is not being able to be there to answer questions and support the actors, and when your story is set on another planet, there can be a lot of questions. This time around we want to fix that issue.

Not everyone will be familiar with The Dex Legacy show. Can you tell people what it’s about and what people can expect if they stream this series?

It’s quite different to most science fiction. Think Game of Thrones meets Dune meets traumatised Super Soldiers, and that doesn’t really cover it. The premise is cynical: a megalomaniacal weapons manufacturer moves his company to an island, declares it a nation and himself President. Then, without having to operate within the laws imposed by another government, he lets his scientists loose in the name of progress without limits. His adopted children, Varian, Isra and Ren, are the three primary lab-lizards (there are no rats on the planet SP714), and they suffer a huge amount under this regime.

There’s a lot of action for an audio drama, where action sequences can be hard to convey through sounds alone. Much of the story is political and raises moral questions with a side of dark humour. It’s a complicated world and the characters are complicated people. And that’s the fun of it. Fans have said that when a new episode comes out, they listen to it two or three times and notice different things every time. As a writer there is no higher compliment.

When do you expect Season Two to be released, and where can people find the show?

At the moment we’re working towards an October release for Season Two. It’s exciting and it’ll come around fast.

You can find Season One on every podcast platform, including Apollo, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Podchaser and Audible. Just go to where you usually listen to podcasts and search The Dex Legacy! We’re also on Apollo+ Plus, ad-free and with bonus episodes. Apollo+ Plus is like Netflix for audio drama. When you subscribe, a huge percentage of what you pay goes back to the creators, so you’re helping to bring more projects like The Dex Legacy to life.

The Dex Legacy has a big cast, all played by professional actors. What challenges does this present when it comes to putting an episode and indeed the whole series together? What advantages does having a cast give you that you wouldn’t have if this was performed by a single narrator?

Yes, we have a core cast of thirteen and we’re adding three more in Season Two! The main trick with a big cast, is keeping them in distinct groups, especially when all you have is audio. In Season One we spend most of our time with the adults – Nathaniel Dex and the other founders of Dex Industries – on Dex Island, and Varian, Isra and Ren elsewhere. This means that in any given scene there are four voices, or three. We then added side-characters slowly so as not to overwhelm the listener.

The challenge of this is that we have many people to co-ordinate and direct. The benefit is that we have real talent and varied voices bringing the story to life. And it really does jump into existence. The Dex Legacy has been described as “a movie for your ears”. It conjures clear images in the mind and really transports the listener – all helped by an epic original soundtrack.

The Dex Legacy has been written in script format, so it wouldn’t really work with a single narrator. It would be like Robert Downey Jr. trying to play every Avenger… and while I would definitely pay to see that, it wouldn’t work across 30 movies!

Which character (or characters) develops the most during Season Two? Did their journey surprise you as the writer or was this something you’d planned all along?

Oof that’s a hard one! All of them grow a crazy amount, especially the kids. Varian, Isra and Ren face real challenges throughout Season One, and they live with the fallout of those challenges for the rest of their lives, so we’re still dealing with them in Season Two. They’re only fifteen and sixteen in the story, so that’s all part of growing up.

However, the most unexpected character journey came in the form of AUTO – the Dex Industries A.I. AUTO started out as a kind of functional audio narrator in the series. She does the “previously on” segments, and things like announcing when a call is coming through: “incoming call: Varian Dex”, and a transport is landing: “initiating landing protocols”. But as Series One progressed, she took on a whole personality and has a real impact on the story. I didn’t plan for that, and in Season Two her story just keeps getting better!

You started out writing short stories and novels but now you’ve branched out into audio drama. How do you divide your creative time at the moment between these different mediums and which storytelling format do you prefer?

Well The Dex Legacy is tied to my first trilogy. The novels are repped and in publisher submission right now, and the audio drama is set eleven years before the novels start. As a result, I’m working along the same timeline, which is interesting and challenging. I started writing Season One when I was working on book two, so I was jumping between the same characters as teenagers and as adults, and that was tricky! They become very different people as they grow up.

Dividing my time is something I struggle with. I work full time so my creative hours are limited and bringing any project to fruition is time consuming. I try to be kind to myself. It’s easy to feel like you’re not doing enough when you have multiple big projects on at the same time and progress is slow, but progress is progress and that’s what matters.

I’ll admit I find it hard to separate writing for my Dex characters and writing unconnected stories. I finished the trilogy in late 2021 and I started work on a new book in 2022 (after releasing Season One), but it’s not come as easily as the Dex stories. It’s hard when your mind is split. Varian, Isra and Ren have been in my head for over seventeen years and new characters are harder to get to know when they don’t have your full attention.

In the meantime, to scratch the novel itch, I’m writing a series of books to run alongside the audio drama, and it’s fun! I love both formats as they offer freedom in different ways.

What are your future plans? Anything new you want to tell us about?

Sure, yes! Amongst all of this I’ve written a non-fiction book: The Dex Legacy Season One: Collected Scripts and Commentary. It’s a complete overview of how we brought Season One to life, plus the scripts themselves. It’s something people have expressed an interest in and I’ll be self-publishing it soon. It’s ideal for people who are interested in both the process of creating audio drama and the story itself.

Thanks so much for giving up your time to answer my questions. Is there anything else you’d like to say before we finish?

Yes, please please back our Kickstarter! Any donation is gratefully received and will help us to bring Season Two to life. We’re working so hard, the scripts are ready, the cast is excited to get back into the story, we just need a bit of help to get there! There are great benefits for those who do donate, so go to our page and check it out. There are also updates, including new tracks from our soundtrack by Allen Stroud, so it’s worth the visit!

Thanks again, Emily. Here's the link to the Kickstarter page if you want to find out more!