For almost five years I produced a weekly then bimonthly podcast called, “The Real Spies, Real Lives Podcast.’ The tagline (a rather clever one, I thought) was “Writing, Spies, and Writing About Spies.” The episodes would encompass some aspect of writing in general, others about the life of spies or the history of espionage, and yet other about the complexity of writing espionage when you’d never worked in the intelligence community. I had a lot of fun with it.

Until I didn’t.

In 2019 at my annual Tinker Mountain Writers Workshop, one of my favorite instructors, Pinckney Benedict, did a craft talk on producing your own podcast. He’d had his writing students at Southern Illinois University research how it could be done, and they each had an assignment to create one for themselves. In the craft talk, he briefly covered what they’d done. The interest in that craft talk was so high that the following year, 2020, Benedict did a four-day workshop on the same subject.

This was year one of COVID, so the workshop was virtual, but it turned out learning how to create a podcast, mostly for free, was perfect for virtual learning. We all left that workshop with the tools to produce and distribute our own podcast.

Right before the workshop, I’d received my first COVID payment from the government, the one sent to all citizens. It was enough for me to buy some of the equipment I needed, namely a professional level microphone and sound dampening. Not long after the workshop ended, my first episode, “Sin Eater,” appeared. One of the suggestions from the workshop was to use the podcast to familiarize readers with your works. So, I read that piece of espionage flash fiction from my short story collection, Spy Flash.

Again, it was great fun to research topics for the podcast, topics that weren’t reading my own work. However, I was the script writer, sound editor, narrator, research assistant, and producer. Truly professional podcasters either have the wherewithal to hire people for those jobs or they have paid subscribers to pay for them. Or they are affiliated with a company that pays those expenses.

However, because I was a rank amateur at this, I decided to distribute episodes for free and not to monetize the podcast, i.e., include ads where I’d get paid per listen. I didn’t think that was fair to listeners because I wasn’t a top expert at least in the espionage area.

After a year or so, I had decided on a workable format: an introductory section where I talked about the topic using the results of my research; a mid-episode commercial for whichever book of mine I had on sale for the month; and then a briefing reading from the book.

As with most everything I’ve ever done in my life or in either of my careers, I went directly into overachiever mode.

Because I wanted each episode to be as professional as possible for my limited resources–my “sound studio” was my walk-in closet–I researched. Thoroughly. Like, on a master’s degree level research. I also set up a production schedule. After an episode dropped on Thursday afternoon, Friday through Monday were research and scripting days. Tuesday was recording. Wednesday was sound editing (I have the remnants of a childhood stutter.) and scheduling. Thursday, the episode appeared, and the cycle started all over again.

But about four years in, I realized podcast production was taking up the majority of my workdays and weekends. I wasn’t getting much writing or editing done, and I wasn’t having much of a social life. My answer to that was procrastination. Often, I’d spend Thursday morning compressing all those steps in the process into a few hours.

I usually take a social media break every December or January, and in 2024, I added the podcast to the break. I had time, then, to think about how I could make it easier on myself. The ideal solution was to switch from weekly to twice a month and to use the topic of my blog for the podcast on the alternate weeks.

Perfect.

However, I was trying to work on two novels: the second in my mystery series and an espionage novel that’s coming out this Saturday. The podcast was still taking time away from editing or rewriting.

Plus, I was running out of ideas and found the episodes to be repetitive. Again, if I had a podcast staff, they could research, present me ideas, and I’d write and record the script. No way that was going to happen. It simply wasn’t in the budget.

In the spring, then, I made the difficult decision to stop producing episodes.

Why did I wait until now to say anything about it?

Being that overachiever, I felt as if I’d failed, and it took weeks of pondering to realize if I continued, the quality would diminish and the podcast would become an embarrassment. Plus, I had to realize that as I age, I can’t do as many things as I did when I was half this age.

So, here’s why I stopped the podcast:

1. It’s a time eater.
2. I’m a rank amateur, and there are dozens of espionage podcasts way better than mine. I wasn’t even a blip on the radar.
3. I ran out of ideas. (Thank goodness I don’t run out of ideas for stories.)
4. The episodes became repetitive.
5. I no longer had the heart for it.
6. It was NOT for the reason two MAGAs suggested on one of the rare political episodes–“You need to get a life.” I so wanted to reply with STFU, but I kept it professional.

There it is. The podcast was fun. It was ego-affirming when I looked at how many people listened to each episode: only double or low-triple digits compared to thousands for the professional ones but still providing a nice “They like me! They really like me!” moment.

In the weeks since I ceased production, it’s like a heavy weight lifted from my shoulders, and my productivity where writing, editing, and revising are concerned is much improved. The writing, after all, is most important to me.

I don’t want to discourage anyone from trying a podcast. Indeed, feel free to contact me at paduncan@unexpectedpaths.com for advice on how to start. If you have the time, the money to invest in top equipment or rent a sound studio, and the fresh ideas, I’d say give it a try.

The 300+ episodes are still available on Spotify or HERE. Some of the earliest episodes can be found HERE. Still free and ad free (except for me hawking my books). If you were a listener, thank you so much. It meant the world to me.