Chicago’s very own Science Fiction and Fantasy Theatre Company, Otherworld, publishes a podcast called Gateways created in a sort of roulette style. Crowdsourcing one-sentence prompts from the community, for each show one is selected from the “sandwich baggie of destiny” and sent out to a group of writers, selected at random from the show’s rotating pool. I participated for the first time in July 2019, and I was selected again for September 2020.
This round’s prompt was particularly fun: “The space vampires really didn’t like the vampires of Earth.”
Writers have five days to produce a 1500-ish word story to be then performed by professional actors, typically in a show at the theater itself but now entirely released in podcast format. I was particularly thrilled to see the talented Courtney Lynn was to give voice to my grumpy thousand-year-old vampire character.
Listen to the podcast and read the text here.
Thank you to Ansel Burch for directing and producing Gateways and to C.E. Archer-Helke for being my unofficial editor. Be sure to check out their other works as well.
Terry Galvan 