Improvised Storytelling with Cat Blackard – WN 151

Sarah Rhea Werner:
This is the Write Now Podcast with Sarah Werner, Episode 151: Improv Storytelling with Cat Blackard.

And just a quick note before we jump into the theme song — Yes, this is episode 151. You’re not listening to them — well, I mean, I guess you are listening to them out of order, but I’m airing them out of order. I had episode 150 recorded, and I’m going to air that next week. And this week I would love to share with you this interview I did with Cat. So sit back, relax, enjoy… unless you’re like mowing the lawn or something, in which case maybe don’t sit back. Okay. Here we go.

[THEME SONG]

Welcome to Write Now, the podcast that helps all writers — aspiring, professional, and otherwise — to find the time, energy, and courage you need to pursue your passion and write. I’m your host, Sarah Werner, and I have with me today just one of my favorite people in the entire universe. And that’s… you know, it sounds like an exaggeration, but it’s not. I’d like to introduce you today to my good friend Cat Blackard, who is a creative of all dimensions, I think is how I want to introduce Cat to you. All or many dimensions, I don’t know. We’ll… we’ll figure that out, I think, as we go today.

Cat Blackard:
Uncharted dimensions.

Sarah Rhea Werner:
Yes. All, all of them. <Laugh>. So Cat, welcome to the show. I would love to start just by talking a little bit about who you are and your story. I know you have a background in journalism, but what else should we know about you before we dive into our conversation today?

Cat Blackard:
Sure. Well I guess what I often call myself is, is a multidisciplinary artist, which is just a catch-all to, to deal with how I have ADHD and I do a lot of things and I’ve sort of found myself in a situation where I wanna do all the things and I wanna do them pretty well. So like, I design album art for musicians and I am a voice actor and I, like you said, have been a journalist for a long time in a lot of different mediums, covering a lot of different genres. But what I’m best known for at this point is that I’ve been a podcaster since 2009 and that was the event that accidentally kicked off a career in journalism. And then also accidentally pivoted into a career in audio drama, which is where I am now. I’m best known as the showrunner for the Call of Cthulhu Mystery Program, which is a horror comedy podcast.

Sarah Rhea Werner:
And it’s so good.

Cat Blackard:
Thank you, Sarah. You happen to be in a forthcoming season that we’re currently funding for.

Sarah Rhea Werner:
I do, yes.

Cat Blackard:
This is not a coincidence that we’re speaking, but but it’s a great opportunity for us to do something that we’ve actually been meaning to do for a long time.

Sarah Rhea Werner:
I’ve wanted Cat on my show for a long time and this really just gave me a reason to sit down with you in front of a microphone finally and hit record. So, yeah.

Cat Blackard:
Sometimes you just put things off and put things off and put things off and then all of a sudden it happens at the right time.

Sarah Rhea Werner:
Yep. That’s beautiful.

Cat Blackard:
Yeah. So my series… I guess it’s maybe good to explain like how it is that you’re a part of it, the way that you’re a part of it, cuz you are also a writer who happens to also do voice acting and wherefore, but this is a very particular kind of show that has a very unusual method of being written.

Folks who are listening may have heard of actual play or real play or live play podcasts, a bunch of names for the same thing, which is tabletop role playing. And you just happen to be recording it, and releasing it as a podcast. If you have any preconceived notions of what that is, I invite you to check them away. Unless it is, it can be literally anything because there are all kinds of role playing podcasts I like to call my shows RPG audio dramas.

That’s what I’ve been calling them before any those other turns of phrase ever existed. I don’t wanna wave some kind of geriatric flag of like, “I did it first and things were better in my day” and whatever else. But like, everything I’ve done, a lot of it has sort of evolved accidentally. And, and so what I do is a very particular thing. It’s not a thing that I do exclusively anymore, which I’m excited about, but the way that I do it is still very much… Well, it’s a very complicated and strange process, which I will now explain.

Sarah Rhea Werner:
I like strange things. So do tell us. <laugh>

Cat Blackard:
So the Call of Cthulhu Mystery Program uses the Call of Cthulhu tabletop role playing game to run at its base level. But the short version is we come in afterwards, write additional scenes, bring in additional voice actors, have an original score, and add cinematic sound design. What that means is that we have a very complex production process, because one of my trademarks in my art, no matter what it is, is overcomplicating things. <Laugh> And sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes it means a project that never comes out. Or really what that means is it seems like it’s never coming out, but then it comes out years later and you’re like, What? This is really weird. <Laugh> So the Call of Cthulhu actually has been that in the past and hopefully will not be that ever again. The pandemic really put a big old hiccup in our pipeline.

But before that happened, Sarah, you were a part of recording three entire new seasons of content one summer… and then life as we knew it sort of went belly up.

Sarah Rhea Werner:
Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>.

Cat Blackard:
Our players are writers — now, that’s true of any role playing game. It is collaborative storytelling, but we put story first. We put character first. I have a lot of rules around the table that are not draconic but they are specific such as everyone is in character all the time. If you’re asking a question about dice rolls, you’re still in character. If you are talking about what it is you as a character are doing in a scene, you’re still in character. That way you never break out of the mindset of who you are and where you are. And as our show is a horror show that intensifies the personal investment that the writer slash character has slash actor in being in that space. It allows them to discover things about themselves, about how they portray the character. It creates a richer performance. It also makes the humor very real cuz it’s not just folks telling jokes to each other around the table. It’s people doing it in character in scene to break actual tension that is really happening.

Yes. So immersion is the name of the game with what I do. And over the years throughout this program and some other stuff that I’ve done, I’ve created a lot of different experimental — or, or been a part of creating. I have some collaborators and collaboration’s really important to what I do. Obviously I’ve done a lot of experiments in writing collaboratively, writing improvisationally and building stories together. So we have a Game Master — they call it a Keeper of Arcane Lore in Call of Cthulhu, specifically, or just Keeper.

I mean it is a very literary system being entirely based on the works of HP Lovecraft. So that person, in my case, my Keeper, Luke Strom, confers with me. I kind of have a loose idea of what’s going on in the story. If I’m playing, if I’m not playing, then I have a complete idea of what’s going on in the story. He does the stories and then it evolves in ways that we never could have expected because the players are special. As a director and showrunner, I put a lot of thought into who is in the show, what they might do together, how they, how things might evolve when we put these people in a room. So it becomes very experiential, right?

Sarah Rhea Werner:
Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>

Cat Blackard:
Like I’m thinking about who are my friends or who are these people who I don’t know, but I’ve interacted with. Usually it helps. I don’t often like to to bring people in who I haven’t interacted with in person because I want to know what their energy’s like, and how they might play off of other people. And it’s not like a manipulative kind of Nathan Fielder sort of approach — it’s creators, collaborators, riffing. It’s much like a writer’s room in television or film, but in the skin of a character.

Sarah Rhea Werner:
Yes. That’s such a good way of talking about it. Sorry, not to interrupt you, but like a writer’s room.

Cat Blackard:
I mean, I wanna hear from your perspective cuz you were there <laugh>.

Sarah Rhea Werner:
You know, that’s exactly what it was. And like, and I’ve been part of different writers’ rooms and that’s exactly what it was like creating together. But there’s this added element that you are your character. So, sorry, I’m just having fond moments now.

Cat Blackard:
No, this is exactly what I want. I wanna hear about your side of things. I wanna flip this interview on its head, Sarah.

Sarah Rhea Werner:
Oh surprise, gasp <Laugh>.

Cat Blackard:
Yeah. I’ll explain the full process and then we’ll go back because I do wanna talk about that collaborative component of what it is we’re doing. And then we can talk about what it is we did. So we play the game. And this might take, I mean, our session was 14 hours long. We didn’t do it all. We did it in two sessions, over two days. You stayed at my house, we camped out, we had a great time. We had some dinners together and, and breakfast together. And it was wonderful. So you create a little environment where everybody gets together and feels really bonded and you go in for a long time and do this crazy thing. You roll up your sleeves and get serious about it and you don’t know what’s gonna happen.

And there could be like real sweat, real tears. It’s all possible and it’s a safe space. That’s an important thing to, you know, creating a safe space for people to experience really visceral things. We didn’t do it when you and I were recording because they didn’t know about it yet, but we should have done it — there’s a thing called the RPG consent checklist is I believe the title of it. Oh. And we did, we did do one, I believe for a later project that you were involved with in this style. Yes. But, but not for Cthulhu, which is the most important one. We do that now. Yeah.

So we end up with hours and hours of raw recordings. My editor and I go into it, cut it up, figure out what the story arcs are, and build it out. I will start listening and editing at the same time and building out a script of pickup recordings of lines that were normally, say, performed by the Keeper that are now gonna be performed by other actors.

If I see a character arc that has potential that’s there but isn’t like, fully fleshed out, I’ll add in new scenes. Often beginnings and endings are difficult, to have it have a good punchy start.

Sarah Rhea Werner:
Mmm-hmm. <Affirmative>.

Cat Blackard:
So I’ll rewrite that. I’ll make sure that everything is clear about what’s happening, what the background is with the plot is. And if I see a moment where there was something that like really could have expanded a character, then I will write it. I might collaborate with the player who it is involving. They might give me carte blanche. I might end up, as we’ve done in the most recent season, Night at Howling House, doing a bunch of research and effectively rewriting the villain’s plot entirely, but keeping all the resonance of what the characters went through. However, changing the macro level context in that one — it was especially easy to do because in Night at Howling House, which is out now, all the characters were children.

So any larger plot that they’re that they’re absorbing is like, they don’t fully understand what it is that they’re interfacing with. And I wanted to punch it up. I wanted to change it around quite a bit. And so I ended up doing a bunch of historical research and writing a crazy story that I would love to elaborate on, but I’ve got enough for the story as it was to highlight the important parts and also build out some creepy stuff in the back. That’s kind of a, a very vague example of what sort of happens when I do drastic rewrites to the show as it’s written or as it’s published with with all the music and sound design and stuff, and the way that I write it so that it feels seamless. Ideally, people won’t have any idea what was improvised and what wasn’t. And in fact, of course in the re-record stuff’s improvised there, too. So I love building a story together with people and then make sure that what comes out the other end is the heightened, most refined, best, most immersive version of that story possible.

Sarah Rhea Werner:
You’ve also created things by yourself. Tell us a little bit more about how you feel about the story that’s produced in the end when you do create collaboratively.

Cat Blackard:
I think that it is a greater thing than any of us could have done individually. There is an illusion in our culture of the monolithic author. It is something that needs to be, in my opinion, it needs to be understood that that is not the case. That is a marketing tool.
The director does not make the film. The director is a part of making the film. The showrunner, including my own show, does not make the show. I might have final say, I might have more control than television show runners have, but even still, I don’t want to be a monolithic force. I wanna collaborate with my team. The challenge though is, is that as an independent publisher, our resources are limited. So working collaboratively is beautiful. Cause I’m working with my friends, people I’ve known since I was a kid. And I love that.

But it’s also dangerous because it’s also a business. And that’s not to say that it’s the combination of business and friendship, though that’s happened plenty of times. And all the parables that people have about that. It’s that I pay people fairly. But we are, you know, a lot of us are working on a volunteer basis. A lot of us are doing it because we love it, and we are all getting older and we all have families.

Sarah Rhea Werner:
Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>

Cat Blackard:
And things happen, things change, pandemics happen. And then you’re, but you’re, as a business, or as a crowdfunded business, taking money from people, promising release dates, trying to create advertising deals, and everything. And if you can’t guarantee… like, it’s hard to guarantee anything. So like, these are real, you know, logistical struggles that go with this beautiful process. I would hazard to say, based on my own experience as a younger person, it was much easier back then. And it wasn’t just because I wasn’t… I was making shows that were less complicated than this. It’s cause everybody had more time and less to worry about.

Sarah Rhea Werner:
Oh. I think that’s so interesting to talk about what phase of life you’re in, what’s available to you because, you know, it ends up maybe balancing a little bit as you get older — you maybe have more finances but less time, and when you’re younger, you maybe have more time and less finances. I guess… what does that mean for us as creators, speaking broadly to people of all ages? Like, what does that mean to you and what does that say to you?

Cat Blackard:
Well, I think limitations are good, right? Oh, it’s great to know where you are and what you have to work with, which is, and this is, I swear, I’m actually really self-conscious about being a shill. Like, I don’t like asking for money or talking about about stuff. I’m like, I will. And I’m in the middle of like, doing a bunch of work on this thing, so I’m gonna constantly bring it back to the crowdfunding campaign. Yeah. And it’s because, like, Sarah and I are trying to make some art here. So like, I’ll be clear about that. But in regards to this crowdfunding campaign presently, the past two seasons of Cthulhu that I’ve made have been tapping into sort of a nest egg that we built up over the years doing a lot of different kinds of podcasts and then we pivoted into this exclusively, and then the pandemic happened.

So it became really clear that I who am a writer first and a business person, fourth or fifth <laugh>, like that is a real challenge. And like I said, I pay people, I want people to get what they are worth. If I can not ask for a favor, I won’t. If someone says, “Don’t pay me,” and I can, I will pay them. That’s something I’m very intense about, obviously.

What I’ve learned is I need to have a budget. And that’s why for the first time ever we’re doing a crowdfunding campaign as opposed to just tapping into what we have from say, Patreon, which we’ve been using for a long time. So that way I know, all right, I have some grand ideas about what I wanna do with this season that we’re working on. It is the biggest one we’ve ever had. It’s the most material we’ve ever had to work with. It’s dealing with the most challenging themes of anything we have ever done. And its genre is all over the place, and I love it. And I cannot wait to get my hands dirty doing it.

But while there are a bunch of different price thresholds for what it could be and how it could look and how it could sound, and I need someone else to dictate that because I am not qualified to do it. So that’s the gamble here, right?

Sarah Rhea Werner:
Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>

Cat Blackard:
We’re either gonna make a really stripped down show, or we’re gonna have, like, two original songs by Walter Sicker and the Army of Broken Toys. We’re gonna have a musical sequence that you and I are singing in. We’re gonna have a live jazz band during one of the… like, these are… these are possibilities. Or it’s gonna be bare bones and we’re gonna do our best with what we have. And Sarah and I are gonna be playing a bunch of different parts that are not the ones that we’re there to play. <Laugh> It’s all possible.

Sarah Rhea Werner:
Mm. I love that. And I’ve never really thought about it in those terms. This idea of possibility versus limitation and how you temper what you want with the means that you have to create and produce it. Is this hard for you? And would you call yourself a perfectionist?

Cat Blackard:
Sort of. I mean, like, the thing is, is that I’ve beaten and chipped away at that over the years. So I can do less. Some people misunderstand me when I shoot for the stars — I shoot for the stars to see where I land. I’m not exacting, I’m not demanding. I’m someone who means what I say. And I think in a world where there’s an awful lot of double talk and passive aggression, some people don’t know what to do with that. So I will ask a question, question about like, Hey, could we do this though? And someone will think that I’m like pressing them, but I’m not pressing them. I’m just being like, I’m just asking a question. I’m asking a question because I wanna crowdsource an answer. Because if I crowdsource the answer and everybody’s straightforward about it, we get the best results. We get the results that serve the most people that do the least harm and that get the job done well.

Sarah Rhea Werner:
And that’s collaboration, too.

Cat Blackard:
Yeah. It’s not always easy, though, even with people you’ve known a long time. Like, these things just sort of happen. And also, like, I’m flighty and it’s because I spin so many plates that I can’t keep track of them. And I try to be very frank about that. You know, like if you’re expecting something from me, there’s a chance I can let you down. I don’t want to let you down. That’s the thing I want least of all in the world, but it still could happen. So just, you know, poke me and know that I mean no harm. And I will promise to also know that you mean no harm by asking

Sarah Rhea Werner:
How do you manage so many different opinions and processes and ways of doing things on a project, including your own?

Cat Blackard:
When we’re recording a show, even at the RPG level, it might not always appear to be as such, but I’m still directing. I might be playing, unfortunately, two characters simultaneously. I might ask somebody, “Hey, could you deliver that again? But this way,” — not in a way that, like, takes away their intention, but focuses it directly. And if someone was dealing with something and I was like, I was like, Hey, look, actually there’s a content issue there. And I don’t wanna put out a show that has that in it. Like if once it became apparent to me that’s actually what was happening, I would be very clear about that. And then we might retake whatever scenes from the top and then I would in post combine them so that whatever all the best parts were jumbled together and it all flowed.

So, you know, that’s all possible. I mean, I think a good example is that we have a really charming character in Night at Howling House named Dirt. And Dirt is a young boy who has another name, probably, but we don’t know it because his father treats him like garbage. All the other kids treat him like garbage.

Sarah Rhea Werner:
Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>.

Cat Blackard:
And in Cthulhu, you either choose a phobia or a mania or something else to sort of create a distinct little extra component for you as a player to be thinking of, which generally really adds to the character. Sometimes it doesn’t get treaded on, but sometimes it becomes very important. In this case, it was very important because Dirt’s mania is being compulsively kind. He’s being kind to his abusers intensely. And so I worked with Brandon, our voice actor — like, Dirt had a couple different variances in how that was played during the show.

And in the editing process I sort of dialed back any of the kind of things where it seemed like I wanted to emphasize the heart of what he was doing, which is the kindness of Dirt and what’s really going on there and what that abuse looks and feels like in a way that, you know, sometimes you can laugh at it in a dark comedy sort of way, but really you’re just feeling for him. And in what I’ve seen so far, people are really feeling for Dirt — even more than I’d expected. And that’s because I refined a performance that went in a few different directions and pared it back. But we worked on it together. And it’s still very much Brandon’s character. It’s like… sometimes it can be like cutting a stone to make it into jewelry, to figure out how it’s gonna have the best luster. It’s all there, all the beautiful imperfections are there, but you can just like trim little couple things away that can get lost. Cuz they’re not important to show the heart of what is really the best of it.

Sarah Rhea Werner:
That’s such a beautiful analogy, Cat. You’ve mentioned the word “accidental” three-plus times, which means it is significant. And I wanna ask about having what you’ve called an “accidental career” and some “accidental” career shifts. And I think that happens in the creative field a lot more than is talked about, so I would love to get to get your thoughts there.

Cat Blackard:
Yeah. Well that’s actually interestingly complicated with me, but I’ll attempt to give us a succinct answer. Okay. When I started my first show, Nerdy Show — I mean, I say I started it like, that was an incident where I was invited onto a radio program because one of my friends who was on it didn’t wanna be on there anymore. And actually, a friend of mine was invited on it and that friend said, “Hey, do you wanna come too?” And I said, “Yeah, sure.” And then I ended up, we had a good time, we kept doing it together and the more we kept doing it together, like as in we were invited back on someone else’s show and things kept happening. This turned into, I was already doing some stuff that was in the vein of media journalism, but this turned into my journalism career, which I didn’t intend to have.

I intended to be a career writer. I thought I was gonna go into, like, writing video games, like all the different scripts for all the different NPCs and whatever else. I thought I’d leave Florida and do that. But here in my final year of college, I started a program called Nerdy Show. And as the person who was the most responsible, I guess, out of the people involved or had the least going on, maybe, I ended up being the person who was running it. And I had eventually… as it got bigger and bigger and my life shifted in ways where it’s like, well, I’ve graduated now, shouldn’t I be making decisions about what comes next? I was like, I think this is, I mean, people are here, people are here right now. And I don’t know what that means and I don’t even listen to podcasts, but we’re doing one, and this seems important, but also I’m really insecure about how all this happened by accident. I don’t… this isn’t what I want, but it is a responsibility. And the reason I was feeling that way in particular back then was because back then I was a husk of a person.

Now, no one would know it. Because I had my own things going on. I could talk about interesting stuff and, like, I was fun to be around, but I didn’t know that I was transgender. And I as such didn’t entirely know who I was. And especially during college, I’d spent a lot of time subconsciously burying myself away.

So I was like a piece of driftwood in an ocean. Like I might have a lot of what some kind of art scavenger might call character, but that doesn’t mean that I knew what I was doing. I didn’t have any, like, presence of mind. I was feeling, I mean, anyone who’s starting a career out of outta nothing is always feeling it out for themselves. They’re always figuring it out. They’re always tripping over stuff and they’re always gonna have doubts.

Sarah Rhea Werner:
Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>.

Cat Blackard:
But I didn’t know who I was on a fundamental level. And when that did happen, everything changed. And that was much later on in my career. The Call of Cthulhu mystery program already existed by then. There are a lot of things that I would do differently now if I was, had the opportunity to, like, shape my own path. I say opportunity — I do have the opportunity to shape my own path. I have a lot of luxuries afforded to me. I’m a very fortunate person who has a lot of resources and has an entire history of work that I did hard work that I put in on a bunch of projects that were all the spaghetti method, all throwing stuff against the wall and seeing what stuck. And many trans people who transition later in life especially feel like they’re stuck in someone else’s life.

And I definitely have felt that even with parts of my career, that I’m like, sometimes I’m proud of it, sometimes I’m not proud of it. It can be a double-edged sword. So the accidental-ness of all of that, that’s all real. It could have happened anyway, but it happened even more so because I didn’t have the agency in myself to have direction.

It helps to know yourself in all aspects of life, but if you know yourself, then you might be able to more clearly say, like, this is what I wanna do and here’s how I’m gonna get it.

Sarah Rhea Werner:
Mmm. <affirmative>.

Cat Blackard:
Now with programs like Cthulhu, I would’ve done stuff different to start, but I am obviously… I’m here, I’m still here, I’m still doing it. I’m still a show I’m very proud of. And I have like, it has been really integral to how I developed as a person, which is a much longer story.

But there will continue to be accidents, but in this case, it will be much more of synchronicity. It’ll be much more serendipity because part of even transitioning and knowing myself was allowing myself to not just be like a piece of driftwood in an ocean feeling like, “Ah, I’m pulled in every direction”, but to embrace the ocean, to become a part of the ocean, to be part of that motion. And when I opened myself up to the kind of impossibility of intuition and what my heart was telling me when I started actually listening to that, not just acknowledging it, not just like whimsically thinking, “Oh, that would… like, those are interesting thoughts, but they don’t mean anything.” When I really started listening to myself, that is when everything changed. And that’s what’s opened up a lot of synchronous things, including you and I meeting. Accidents now are happy ones.

Sarah Rhea Werner:
Yes. Well, I was just thinking about Bob Ross and his “happy little accidents” and how essential those accidents are to art, and ultimately to our development as people. I appreciate you sharing that so much. And I’ve noticed in my own creative journey… you know, this show has been going on for eight, nine years now, and I am such a different person now than I was when I started the Write Now podcast. And I think that is in part due to the fact that when we create, we’re not just creating audio dramas or novels or poems — we’re creating ourselves. I feel like that’s what art does. And I really appreciate you talking about, “I didn’t know myself until some of these things started happening and I started asking questions and I started…” you even talked about recording some of these programs.

You know, I learned things about myself. I evolved during the creation of some of this art. And I think that it’s something we don’t talk about. Because often in — and I’m gonna go off on my own tangent for just a second — often in writing classes, beginning writer’s courses, later classes that you might take at a college or postgraduate level, they all talk about knowing yourself and knowing your voice. But one of the biggest questions I get from writers and creatives is, “How do I know what that is?” And the answer is, you learn by doing, you learn by creating. So I really appreciate you saying that so much that even though you felt like this piece of driftwood awash in the ocean, you didn’t let that stop you from exploring and creating. You didn’t decide, hey, I need to wait until I know exactly who I am before I start. You found yourself, I think, and stop me if I’m putting words in your mouth, but it sounds like you found yourself alongside developing and discovering your own creative works.

Cat Blackard:
Yes. Me stepping into my truth as a writer was very simultaneous to me stepping into my truth as a person, and like, because I let journalism happen to me and it was really good for me and I enjoy it. And I’ll probably still… like, I still do stuff for hire. I love doing journalism, but it wasn’t something I set out to do, especially media journalism. I found myself as the nerd world was bought and conscripted as IP farms for large corporations to make diluted versions of the stories that we’ve mythologized. I found myself feeling like an unpaid intern to corporate overlords where I was just waiting to, you know, be gifted news from them and being beholden to a news cycle and all this other stuff, this ugly stuff that I wanted no part of because I was talking about art, I was talking about creation, movies, television films, records, stuff that I loved, or stuff that I thought even, like, in a critical eye could be better because of my passion for the work or the genre or something.

Because I… it is always an act of love. And I think that was maybe like a big difference between what my friends and I were doing and what a lot of other people were doing. And like the nerds sphere specifically, a lot of people were either being like religious zealots to their, the things that they loved or tearing things down. And we were talking objectively about art passionately because we loved it, but not with blinders on. No, no rose, huge lenses for us. But yeah, it was, everything kind of happened sort of when it was best I suppose in the end. But I always wanted to be a writer and I always consider myself a writer, but I let — getting back on track now — I let journalism happen to me. And it was useful, but it also, because it came with a lot of obligations, because it came with the news cycle, because it came with release schedules, because it came with all these things that I didn’t, you know, I didn’t realize that I could say, this is the experience I want, I can turn this down.

I’ve been learning a lot about having boundaries and part of having boundaries is saying, this is the life I want to live. This is an acceptable situation and I don’t wanna do these things in this way. I wanna do it in this way. And anybody who’s searching for success explicitly is probably gonna be really disappointed in what they find. Whether they get it or not. They’re probably not going to get quote-unquote success. It’s awful out there. The media landscape is awful. Hollywood is awful, it’s toxic. And those of us who have the space to create are extraordinarily fortunate. I am fortunate for the situation that I’m in, that has afforded me the capacity to be an independent producer for this long. And it’s mostly through people believing in me, which is something that I might have taken for granted at one point, but I sure as hell don’t take it for granted anymore.

Sarah Rhea Werner:
It’s so good, so beautiful. Thinking about… I don’t know if we wanna call it non-linear careers or opportunities that we kind of fall into… I always think it’s maybe slightly infuriating that you don’t know that you don’t want something until you go through it. Or you don’t know that you do want something until you don’t have it. I have a lot of regrets with my early career and it’s like, well, I wouldn’t have known that I wanted to do something else if I wasn’t stuck doing this other thing. And I think it’s important that we give ourselves a little bit of grace and kindness and forgiveness and remember that, you know — not to be a huge cliche or anything — but what’s important is the journey.

And I think it’s interesting that you said people who are focused solely on success are gonna be disappointed with what they find. I think that’s true. I think that’s absolutely true because of the relative nature of success. But more importantly, because I think you’re missing a lot of the… if you’re focusing just on the finish line, you know, you’re missing out on the journey, on the race.

Cat Blackard:
Yeah. And it’s awesome to know where you wanna go. Like that’s cool, that’s really cool. That’s very helpful. But it’s kind of like, more like the gestalt idea of success. Like what is being advertised as success… that’s the problem. Yeah. Seeing a bunch of stuff that you don’t wanna do and doing it anyway because you then might think it’s expected of you. That is what I’m really… like ultimately, when I’m looking at my own past, that’s what I’m kind of at war. Because the thing is that you may have the power or may be able to find the power to change things. You might not have to just be in that grind, you know, not just cuz you don’t wanna be, but because there’s an opportunity to change things and make it better. That’s not always the case. But we should know that we can redefine ideas.

Something that I always wanna instill in people, and it’s kind of in the background of literally everything I write, is that the human world is not reality. That everything that humans-at-large to make a very vast generalization think about what is important and isn’t is oftentimes not true. Like language — we invented language, language works for us. It is a tool of ours. If it turns out that our preconceived notions about what something represents or some, you know, like you can change the language — that’s easy to do — but humans love repetition. Some of them don’t want to accept those kinds of changes. I remember back when, in the nineties, when they started changing the face of American currency, people were saying, “I don’t want that funny money.” You know, like they wanted it to always be that way. But it’s always changing, everything, all around them. That’s one of the biggest lies about that humanity sells itself — is that change isn’t constantly happening. But change is the one thing you can guarantee is happening all the time.

And if we accept it, it’s like to be that log — if the log’s frustrated about where the log is, the driftwood or whatever, but if the log accepts that, that’s the reality. The log doesn’t have to be the log anymore. The log can be the barnacles, the log can be the algae living in the log. The log can be its own garden. It doesn’t have to worry about, like, where it’s going. It can just be itself.

Sarah Rhea Werner:
Acceptance is one of the most difficult things I have ever dealt with in my adult life and I’m… it’s something I’m still working on. I actually just bought a book called _Acceptance_, and I’ve been reading it and it’s been very difficult for me, because I think there’s this conflation between acceptance and giving up, or acceptance and losing sight of what you actually want or who you actually are. And acceptance is so much more of an active thing than a passive thing. And acceptance, I think at its center, is not only making peace with what is, but leaning into the creation of what will be. And I appreciate you bringing that up so much.

Cat Blackard:
Can I turn on the tables on you?

Sarah Rhea Werner:
Oh, oh, absolutely.

Cat Blackard:
You have participated in two separate major improvised projects. Yes. I love you. I love working with you. Unfortunately, neither of these things are out. Now again, one of them is crowdfunding presently — cthulhumystery.com/crowdfund. What we’re doing a story called The Case of the Penumbral Gate, and in that you play a Bureau of Investigation agent and we have combined so many different methodologies in the creation of the story together. And I’d love to hear about your experience as a player and as a writer through this improvised method.

Sarah Rhea Werner:
Yes. I would love to share that with you. So, it’s interesting, honestly, working on the Call of Cthulhu Mystery Program with you and doing that sort of improvised storytelling within a group. That was really the first time I had ever done that because, like you said, we recorded this several years ago now before the pandemic, and that was before I was involved in other collaborative methods of storytelling — before, you know, all of the TV stuff and all of the writers’ rooms and other things I’ve been a part of.

And so this was really my first experience co-creating something. And yet at the same time it was something that I was also comfortable doing because I had been playing things like Dungeons & Dragons and Pathfinder for years, and I’d even run my own games. And so it was so interesting to sort of fuse those two things — something that I had done just as a hobby and something that was going to be presented as a published piece and, and to combine those two worlds, the first one being (at least in my experience) just throwaway things for laughs. Like, that’s the biggest thing when I play D&D — I just wanna have fun and have a few laughs. But really we ended up taking the story very seriously and that was new and different for me as well. And it was even more interesting to, like, truly embody the character because again, when I’m playing D&D or Pathfinder, or anything else that I’ve played, I tend to take a little bit of a back seat and I tend to say, “Oh, my character’s going to do this” instead of, “I’m going to do this.” Or instead of, “Hey, you! Get your hands up!” or whatever my character is saying. So it was very interesting — I almost felt like a vessel sitting down at the table and waiting to be filled with the character that we were all going to create and, and being filled with not only things that my character was going to say and do, but the context that the GM-slash- … what is it? Lore master? Lore keeper…?

Cat Blackard:
Keeper of Arcane Lore.

Sarah Rhea Werner:
Keeper of Arcane Lore — I was close. <laugh> — What they were… the context that they were giving me and the others around the table.

And so it’s very interesting to co-create in that sense because you’re not even looking down with sort of an omniscience. You are participating in the story and, like you said, the stakes are real because this is something that imaginatively — which is as real as anything gets for me — is happening to you. It was an interesting contrast, too, to the later experiences I had in writer’s rooms where you could sort of set up and establish exactly what you wanted to happen and there was no guesswork. You would say, Okay, scene one, this is gonna happen. Scene two, this is gonna happen. Scene three, we’re gonna end here and we’re gonna transition or like set up the jumping-off point for the next episode. Whereas with this, it’s like, I don’t know where we’re going. And so I’m actively creating the character arc as we move forward. And I really enjoyed that. I really enjoyed not having to know or not having to plan for where the character was going to end up, either physically, emotionally, sanity-wise, anything like that. It was really freeing because you could just exist at the table, and just exist in the present of the story.

Cat Blackard:
One of those incredible things was that your character, Agent Lake, is paired up with another agent who she doesn’t directly know — Agent Bowman. And I’d intentionally paired you up with another writer, like who had done podcast work as a writer. Liam Malone is probably best known these days as being one of the hosts of RPG From Scratch, but he also had a stint on a show called Bad Storytellers, which was about writing.

So you two didn’t know each other at all and your relationship as people — and through these characters developed as you are assigned to work together through the context of how you were assigned to work together, which is under duress on both of your parts. Not because you were upset with each other, but because you didn’t… There’s a bunch of cool historical things relating to only the “cool” — quote unquote — but bad historical things relating to the circumstances of you two getting together and being given what you think is a garbage assignment.

And there’s an episode that’s gonna be mostly a car ride between you two talking and we’ve never done anything like that before. But the dynamism between the two of you getting to know each other was incredible. It was so cool to be a part of cuz, like, there’s these two folks you developed backstories independent of prior to recording to set yourselves within your historical context. They’re not major info dumps. It’s not like these, let me tell you my precious backstory. It, it’s very real, very dynamic, very emotional. There’s so much there. And your journey, your character’s journey through all of these trials, was incredible to behold.

Sarah Rhea Werner:
Thank you. I’m gonna take that as a compliment.

Cat Blackard:
It was!

Sarah Rhea Werner:
And it was a lot of fun to do. It was an extraordinarily new experience for me, but it was also really fulfilling. And I appreciate you pointing that out that like, as Liam and I got to know each other, that was essentially us getting to know each other through the lens of our characters — and, you know, every character that you create in a sense is you. And so I just think it made for such a rich and interesting experience.

Cat Blackard:
Yeah. I’ve done a lot of experiments in what improvised storytelling can be, and the collaborative storytelling in the Mystery Program is the simplest one. It’s a very complicated show to make, but in terms of, like, what I have done to that process, it’s the easiest one.

I do a lot of collaborations with Doug Banks, who’s been a cast member of Mystery Program in the past, and he’s refined a thing that we call Surprise RPGs, which… I love talking about these things, but it can be kind of a whole other subject in of itself, I suppose. Before I get into that, we also collaborated on a show that’s a Ghostbusters fan show. It’s also a role playing audio drama, called Ghostbusters: Resurrection. And what’s really cool about that is that it uses the 1980s role playing system that was created for Ghostbusters, which is one of the most beautiful, streamlined role playing systems anyone’s ever made.

And it lends itself to creating the kinds of incredible improvised energy that is exemplified in the Ghostbusters movie. Cause Ghostbusters movie is an incredible feat of multidisciplinary creativity. It is a comedy film that’s also a horror film that’s also a special effects-heavy film that features a ton of improv. And somehow all of those things came together, because you can’t make a good special effects-heavy film with improvisation. It just doesn’t happen. And somehow they pulled it off.

So we’ve played around with that a lot. The cast of the show are all friends, they’re all people who are playing themselves, but what if they had careers as Ghostbusters? And they’re all friends of ours. So we went hard on it. Doug and I collaborated on the third season of this show and we treated it like a film. We location-scouted — it’s set here in central Florida — we went to different places, places we’d heard about but had never been before, to like check things out and got got a feel for things. We brought things back from where we were so that people could interact with it. I created concept art for creatures that they were encountering so that when all these characters who were also putting themselves into the shoes of, you know, like living the terror of what’s happening to them very viscerally in the moment, playing their characters constantly cuz they are their characters that I could reveal fragments of concept art and like, here’s what you see in a flash. They’d be like, “Whoa.” And they’d have a real reaction, and like, they didn’t have to get on a walkie talking and describe, but they just saw — like, “Guys, I think I’ve got something here. It’s like, I don’t know, it’s got three eyes, I don’t know what it is,” and describe it really quickly, reveal more of it in different contexts.

But that’s all a precursor to this thing that Doug developed: Surprise RPGs, which he was like, “Okay, so say I tell you, I want you to create a character that is a normal person in the mid-nineties and all you know is you’re gonna go on a cruise, could be anything. Create any character you want.” So that character’s then playing… let’s see, somebody who’s normally an insurance agent, but falls in love with somebody on this cruise ship and like, maybe there’s a murder mystery going on. There’s this drama on this cruise ship and you’re involved in it intensely, but there’s a storm coming, and that storm capsizes the ship, and you get washed out and wake up on an island. And so you as a player are like, “Okay, well I was in that plot there, but now I have to survive, so that’s intense and how am I gonna do that?”

So you start role playing your survival. Maybe other people from the ship will wash up. Maybe it’s all, you know, like that plot’s still in play. There’s still other things going on, but things are kind of strange on the island. You go deeper and deeper and eventually, like, you pull some vines off of an abandoned Jeep and you see the Jurassic Park logo and you the player know, “Uh-oh, that’s the Jurassic Park logo,” but you the player don’t know that what’s happening. You don’t know that you’re about to be attacked by dinosaurs.

And then that’s a context that you’re dealing with, and kind of like a meta and then also not-meta context, and that is how you play a Jurassic Park role playing game. You don’t create a character that’s statted out to fight dinosaurs. You play a normal person who has to deal with the reality of dinosaurs.

So then we’re like, all right, we wanna do one of these in public now. And that’s when we talked to Sarah, and we talked to Sean Howard of Civilized and Alba Salix. And Sarah and Sean and I played a show that we don’t have a release date for, but Doug’s hard at work on it. It’s called A Walk in the Park, where we play a bunch of house pets in the 1950s in a Chicago suburb. So that’s a different kind of spin on the role playing improvised experience, a very much more free-form experience. How would you say that differed, Sarah?

Sarah Rhea Werner:
It was a very, very different experience. I think mostly stemming from the fact that I felt like I was prepared for the Call of Cthulhu Mystery Program recording experience because I had a character and I knew what was going on. Whereas with the Surprise RPG, it actually was a surprise. And we met and we co-created our characters, and I think for me it was — I don’t want this to sound bad — but it was a little bit anxiety inducing because I tend to be a perfectionist, and I like to go behind the scenes and spend several hours preparing for things. And then I can pretend that I’m just doing it magically for the first time in front of people — but like, I treasure that preparation time because it makes me look better. But I didn’t have that sort of as a crutch for our Surprise RPG recording.

And so I thought that was very interesting. I could only be myself and I could only present myself in an unprepared way. And, like, that was… I said “anxiety”, but I don’t think that’s the right term. But it was just so different from anything I had done or created before. And it kind of surprised me into — like, literally surprised me into creating in what felt like a very different way. I think I ended up having to feel out things rather than coming into it feeling like, “I’m gonna do this and this and I have some kind of vague idea.” It was completely… it felt like more of an improvisational experience even than the Call of Cthulhu Mystery Program recording was. If that makes sense.

Cat Blackard:
Yeah, that’s 100% that we’re there were, there were no guidelines. It was just… the world was your oyster, theoretically. Yeah. Within the limitations of being a household pet.

Sarah Rhea Werner:
Yeah. Well, and it’s interesting, too, because I feel like I ended up creating a much more — because I was doing it essentially on the fly — a much more clear and concise character than I necessarily did with Agent Lake for the Call of Cthulhu Mystery Program because she — I had been thinking about her more. She had more backstory, more variables; whereas my character in A Walk In The Park is literally only what I came up with during the recording, live, on the spot. So I think that that was different and interesting, too.

Cat Blackard:
Yeah. And it was really cool to play from a vastly different perspective than normal. We, you and I especially, cause we were both playing cats, had our own varying perspectives on reality. You as a lifelong indoor cat and me as an outdoor cat that was brought indoors, and then Sean as a dog and so forth. And we’re talking about a show that’s gonna come out way later, so that’s probably superfluous. Shouldn’t have even brought it up. But it’s a… I don’t know, it’s always really fun to collaborate with you and something that I hope that we can do more of.

Part of the crowdfunding campaign for Mystery Program is not just making the new season happen at bare bones, but also we hope to be able to produce a stand-alone storyline. We’ve never done one of these before, but I wanna start doing stand-alone specials for Mystery Program. They’d be entirely scripted and they would expand on, like, generally, a particular character’s backstory in a way that creates sort of a feature-length narrative, a one-and-done that people can listen to disconnected from anything, really, and say like, “I wanna listen to this movie,” effectively. And if they want to go deeper, they can go to the TV series that’s connected to the movie. And the… It’s such a deep well with this background of female Bureau of Investigation agents. Yes.

So the character you play, Sarah — Agent Lake — is the last female agent in the Bureau of Investigation. And that’s a really fascinating history that we’re kind of creating a a sidestep version of in our own little reality. So there were three female agents in the bureau, and two of them were hired before J. Edgar Hoover came into power. There was a thing called the Teapot Dome Scandal and it created this whole upheaval where lots of folks in Washington were, like, losing their jobs. That’s a longer, much longer conversation. Basically, there had been, in this man’s world of investigation, there had been two women.

Sarah Rhea Werner:
Good grief.

Cat Blackard:
Yeah, Hoover was a bad person and an intense misogynist. So the fact that there were women in the bureau… he forced their resignation. But then something really strange happened. A woman named Lenore Houston, who I’ve desperately tried to dig on and can’t find anything for, like, a 20-year gap between when she went to college and when she became the only female bureau of investigation agent appointed by Hoover, which was done so at the behest of a governor and a senator from Pennsylvania. I don’t know why, as far as I know, no one knows why — I’m hoping to find answers. And granted, we are dealing with a character who is fictional. But I think that in researching this show, we kind of stumbled on a really cool mystery in the history of women in America. Because this lady, she had a really great track record until she got moved to Washington directly in interaction with Hoover, and who knows, we don’t know what happened.

We don’t know what kind of cases she was assigned to. That information might be gone, but as it ended, Hoover directly forced her on leave, which is absurd because she’s an agent and he is the director of the entire bureau. He was writing letters saying, “Agent Lake will not be available because she is on a leave at the moment, blah, blah, blah.” No one’s really sure what happened. But in the end, he kicked her out and she was institutionalized. And and apparently at some point she said that if she saw him again, she was going to kill him. So, like there was something happened between the two of them that was very not good. And and he put her — like you do with hysterical women back in that time period — you put them away and they die in an institution. And that’s what happened to her.

Sarah Rhea Werner:
That’s so awful.

Cat Blackard:
Yeah. So I’m hoping that Sarah and I have the opportunity to maybe interview some Bureau of Investigation — or Federal Bureau of Investigation agents, at this point. To be pointed out that the first female FBI agent didn’t happen until just after Hoover’s death. He continued to insist that female agents were not needed. There’s a famous letter that you can look up from, like, late in his life — a woman wrote in, in asking how to become an agent, and he explained to her all of his sexist reasonings for why that was not a good idea. So maybe we can talk to some women from the FBI. Maybe we can go to the National Archives and snoop around. And we’re gonna tell Agent Lake’s story. But I also would like to tell, you know, some of the other stories that are in relation to that. I wanna know about that world.

Sarah Rhea Werner:
I’m very, very excited about that, by the way. And again, a link to the crowdfunding campaign for this season of the Call of Cthulhu Mystery Program will be out on the show notes for today’s episode out at sarahwerner.com. So make sure that you go and click that link and support all of this amazing work that Cat is doing. …Well, I guess that we’re all doing <laugh> Yeah. Collaboratively together.

Cat Blackard:
Yeah.

Sarah Rhea Werner:
Cat, you are just… I could talk to you all day. This could be a 12-hour podcast episode very easily, even like after editing. Like, that’s how much I think the two of us could continue to talk.

Cat Blackard:
We do like to hang out.

Sarah Rhea Werner:
Yes, we do. And we like to talk and explore ideas and create ourselves as we move forward. But Cat — where can people find you specifically online if people wanna connect with you? If they’d like to follow what you’re doing, tell us where we can find you.

Cat Blackard:
For sure. You can generally find me on socials at Cat Blackard — that’s Cat with a “C” — most anywhere except for Twitter, where I’m @neonfeline. You can also go to catblackard.com, which will go to my woefully underdone Patreon at the moment for my personal stuff.

But if you wanna help fund the Call of Cthulhu Mystery program, head to cthulhumystery.com/crowdfund or become a patron, because that’s, like… our patrons are our lifeline for, well, for literally staying alive and keep continuing to do the show. Like everything we’ve done is thanks to them. And that’s patreon.com/omniversemedia. You can of course find the Call of Cthulhu Mystery Program anywhere you get your podcasts. And I do hope you’ll join us for our latest season, Night at Howling House, and maybe also The Terrible Secret of Lot X, where we’ll meet some characters who will be interacting with Sarah’s character, hopefully in the near future.

Sarah Rhea Werner:
Hooray. Oh, I’m so excited. Cat, thank you so much for being here, and for sharing your story, and for sharing your thoughts, and your processes, and just… all of the things. We appreciate it so much.

Cat Blackard:
I appreciate being here. Thank you, Sarah.

Sarah Rhea Werner:
Thank you.