A farewell

The first episode of the tenth and final season of Within the Wires is out today.

I have been working on this show for ten years, which makes absolutely no sense. I cannot imagine working on something for so long, even as I sit here now having done it.

It's the weirdest piece of work I've made so far and I wouldn't be surprised if it remains so until I die. I hope not, I would like to get this weird again, but being weird for the sake of it is actually the most normal thing you can do, so setting out to do something weird is almost always a mistake.

Rather, what I want is the freedom to follow my stranger impulses down whatever paths they lead me without having to worry if they're leading anywhere good.

When we started writing Within the Wires we had only two parts of the concept. We were going to tell a story in the medium of relaxation cassettes. And it was going to be one woman speaking directly to another woman.

We ended up with a vast alternate reality in which families are outlawed but survival is easy, where there's brutal state repression and some form of universal income. When we started it was called a dystopia but it didn't really seem more dystopian than our own world. Now it seems considerably less so.

But then maybe we've been writing about nicer parts of it in recent years. Trying to spend more of our time thinking about basic needs being met and less of our time thinking about experimental medical prisons.

The first season remains one of our stronger seasons, which honestly is pretty impressive given how off the cuff it was. We planned out a season but wrote it as we went, in some cases leaving it so late that I was sending Jeffrey my audio file a day before the episode was due out. We realised half way through that the structure of the season was off and reworked the back half of the outline mid flow.

I'm not great at looking back over things that have passed; I'm not a particularly sentimental person. And as a writer I tend to think more about what I'm working on next than what I've just done, let alone what I did years ago.

I'm not sure I have a lot to say other than it has been an immense pleasure to make this show. I love that it's a cult thing, you know, I love that the audience is small and passionate. Get you the kinds of fans who will curate a detailed wiki and crowd source a major arcana project, they are the best kind.

The new season is set on a remote tropical island and concerns botanical research. I hope you like it.

I don't know what the next thing I release will be, but I hope you like that to.

We move.