Now that I've finished an initial draft of my narrative, I think I'm on a pretty good track. I took my idea of breaking the text down into sections a la This American Life and ran with it. Specifically, the story has become a series of scenes (vignettes?) of my relationship. The challenge here, as with any podcast that's going to be split up (now that I think of it) is to form multiple interesting parts, but to be sure that the parts make a coherent and whole. The whole must be more than the sum of its parts too.

I think the most difficult part of achieving this is adding points of reflection. At times my "vodka" of the essay seems like it's too obvious. I don't want to tell my readers (listeners) exactly what to think, but we've also talked in class about the perils of leaving too much out and leaving most of the point open to interpretation. And writing all my reflection at the end of the sections seems like the easiest, but then there's problems with style and structure.

Now that we're considering how to translate our writing to a podcast I'm having a difficult time choosing exactly what I want in my podcast. Particularly, musical selection has been a longer process than I envisioned. I'm the kind of person who examines all my options in many cases before making a final decision with something like this. This is good when I'm looking into buying a new camera, or doing some school work. But, with almost 50 gigabytes of music, such thoroughness is not practical at all. My first attempt was to scroll through my iTunes library, picking out possible options and writing them in a list. Before I knew it, two hours had elapsed and I had 50 options...just for only spots where I wanted music. I already have some ideas in mind for other areas, so maybe the rest wont take as long. But I do know that I can't take this much time in choosing one or two background songs for my podcast. Or at least I can try not to.

The "new media-ness" of this project dawned on me recently. I'm beginning to like what my draft is turning into, and though my podcast isn't where I want it to be, I'm liking that too. And the fact that a project of this type would have the potential for wide circulation really makes me consider the many to many aspect we talked about months ago. Perhaps it's because I don't seek out podcasts very often, but I like the idea of so easily creating this project. It seems like my final product will be very similar to the This American Life podcast we listened to in some ways, and that I could have a basic knowledge of this technology before this class and can now move to participate in it with some success is very satisfying. I think one of the major themes that has been on my mind about this class is how open new media is, and podcasting is now serving to further this idea in my mind.