Hello, welcome to our first behind the scenes for Awe Island Adventures on Awe Island.
My name is Christy.
I'm part of the writing team here on Awe Island and I am here with Susie, creator and head writer for Adventures on Awe Island.
Hi, Christine.
Hi, everyone.
Welcome to our behind the scenes.
Yeah, we wanted to record a little quote unquote bonus content for our listeners, for people who are curious about what goes on behind the scenes.
Our process, how do we create this podcast?
I wanted to start with a little foundational question.
We have been writing for Be Calm on Our Island since, what, 2017?
But Adventures on Our Island has been in development for a long time, at least a couple of years.
Could you talk a little bit about why you wanted to create a companion podcast for Be Calm on Our Island?
Sure.
When we started Be Calm on Owe Island, almost immediately we started getting requests for a companion podcast.
Everybody loved the bedtime stories.
It helped them fall asleep.
But kids also wanted more exciting stories as well.
And in the back of my head, I always had in mind that I would call it Adventures on Owe Island.
So it has been in thought at least since early 2017 as well.
But over the last few years, we've actually tried to start making it happen.
It's a lot of work though, to launch an entire podcast, especially a story-based podcast that's written entirely from scratch.
It amounts to writing an entire book every few months.
So it's a lot of work and takes a lot of startup thoughts as to how you're going to do it and what you're going to do.
What I thought Adventures on Ahway Island would originally be is very different from what it's actually turned out to be.
I came on board in early 2023 and I know that the concept has changed since I was even brought on board.
Can you talk about what you initially envisioned versus what it's kind of come to be?
Yes.
So originally Adventures on Aue Island was going to be similar to Be Calm on Aue Island, in that each story was going to be a one story with an adventure type theme or something, a mystery things like that, rather than a calming story.
So that was the first past thought of what Adventures on Awe Island would be.
By the time when you were coming on board Christy, I was thinking it needed to be a little bit more of a serial podcast.
And so my thought at that time was that we would have an adventure story that took place over the course of an entire week.
And there would be potentially three episodes or even five episodes if I could write fast enough where it would be a story arc.
And so every story would start at the beginning of the week.
We'd have however many episodes we had and it would finish felt pretty confident.
Adventures on Awe Island was going to be.
When we had time in our schedule to revisit this and to actually start putting things into place and putting thought on paper.
That was what I approached Adventures on Awe Island, 2025 to be.
What ended up happening, though I realized very quickly is that it would be far better to have a longer story, to have it be a serial story, that to have characters that had growth and had a bigger arc.
Part of it was because we were gearing this towards slightly older kids.
So I knew that older kids could grab on to deeper characters and remember clues that were dropped in earlier episodes and have more fun with that.
Very quickly I realized in conceptualizing what this would be in the year 2025 is where the characters actually grow and learn and work together and change.
And I thought that would be a far more interesting inception of what this is than a whole bunch of little bitty adventure stories.
Yeah, I'm very excited about what you have told me about where the story is going.
And I...
I'm very looking forward to what you have planned for the overarching story.
But it is very different from what we were doing with Be Calm on Awe Island.
Do you think you could speak a little more?
The approach to writing is different between Be Calm on Oway Island, the bedtime story podcast, versus what we're doing now, where there's an overarching story that's hopefully going to last a long time.
We hope.
I'm having fun writing it too.
So Become an Away Island has one-off stories.
We do have recurring characters, but each story starts and finishes, usually within the course of one episode.
The stories are formulaic in that we always start, start off, with who the protagonist of the story is and we go through their, I guess, adventure for the day.
Something happens, some inciting incident happens, and at the end of the story or somewhere within the story, there's a teaching moment, a learning message.
It That's kind of the formula for the story.
And we actually do have a template for that.
And the last paragraph, we call it our go to sleep paragraph.
We talk a little more slowly.
The character always finds a wonderful place to lay down and cozy up and they think grateful thoughts.
Formula for Become Unaway Island, with the goal being to help little kids learn positive messages, have relatable characters and fall asleep feeling grateful.
One more thing I guess I would add about Become Unaway Island is our protagonists can be animals.
Our protagonists can be children.
Our protagonists can be inanimate objects.
We have our protagonist is Marie.
She has her two best friends, JJ and Christian.
And then we have the characters that are unfolding around them.
But they are always going to be the center of the story.
This is a hero's journey story.
And Marie is the hero of the story.
And her two best friends are her compatriots.
It's a very different thing.
We don't really focus on learning messages.
We're focusing more on the characters themselves and the growth and learning that they are going to experience over time, amidst the backdrop of this wild and crazy adventure that they're just starting on.
Marie is a central character that you're going to be following throughout this entire journey.
Could you talk about why you landed on her as your protagonist for this story?
And do you see any of yourself in Marie?
Why I chose Marie?
Well, a little secret, I guess, behind the scenes, is that Marie Duguay was one of my very first good friends in grade school, in first grade.
She was the first person I sat next to in the classroom.
We had the two desks in pairs and I thought she would make a good friend.
And I really admired her.
She was smart.
She was funny.
She was well-spoken.
She was brave.
She was things that I felt like I didn't quite have yet together.
And I just thought she was cool.
And So that's why she became my protagonist.
Are you still in contact with the real Marie?
Do you think you'll let her know that she inspired a main character of a podcast you're writing?
I am not in contact with her.
I think she moved away in early grade school, like when we were maybe in fourth grade-ish, fifth grade-ish.
But I would love it.
I would be tickled Thank you.
Same name as I had in grade school.
So she could find me on socials for sure.
So how is your approach to writing different between Be Calm on Oway Island and Adventures on Oway Island?
Quite different.
How it's different is So for Be Calm on Oway Island, it's a lot like with one event happening and the solution to the event coming quickly.
It's a very gentle story.
There's no big drama to it.
It's more about the positive resolution, the feeling, good experience that usually by taking deep dragon breaths, is how they self-soothe.
So it's pretty easy for me was bored in school because the class was going too slow or the teacher was talking too slowly.
I would literally have a story being made up inside my head at the same time, just to pass the time faster.
So stories to me are delightful and they just come.
And so Becoming on White Island is pretty easy for me to either think of a childhood memory or think of something I've observed with one of my nieces or nephews or something.
Just come up with something that bothered me as a child or happened, and use that as a starting point for whatever story happened.
In terms on Awe Island, my approach to writing is very different.
I started off first thinking of what my main characters would be.
And then I boarding.
And I actually started outlining what would the first overarching story, what would the first book, if you will be, however many episodes it's going to be?
What would the chapters look like?
What would the journey look like?
So I had to think very long and hard up, framework nailed down and something I felt confident in before I could actually start writing individual episodes.
And that was very different.
It's a little bit scarier, a lot scarier to write, because when you normally write like a full goes as a singular full manuscript to an editor or a publisher.
And you, up until the time you send that off into the universe, you can go back and change and adjust things.
And I don't have that luxury with this being a podcast.
Once I put each episode out into the universe, it's locked in.
So I can't go back and change something or add something.
Story needs to go in a little bit different direction than what i originally thought, or i want to change something about a character.
I can't um, so it.
It takes a lot more thought and and it's a lot scarier for me to push the publish button and send it off to you christine, for your editing and help and just put it out there.
But I also think that could be very exciting because if listeners give us feedback on things they like, I still have the opportunity to lean into things then that I might not have focused on otherwise.
It's a much broader approach to focus on adventures on Aue Island.
I'm dropping in Easter eggs, I'm dropping in hints, I'm dropping in things that I don't intend.
That's the difference in my approach.
I can tell you from my experience that our listeners are very attentive to details and will comment if something contradicts something we've established before.
You mentioned that you were putting in some Easter eggs.
Can you, without spoiling anything that's coming up, let us in on a little Easter egg that you might have put in in chapter one.
There is an Easter egg that listeners might notice in the form of a dragon.
So that there was a little dragon mentioned.
We'll see.
I'm excited to see where this other easter egg goes.
I'm sure dragon will pop up again soon.
So I have a question for you.
We have two very, very distinct podcasts with very different sounds.
How do, How would you characterize Awe Island as a whole now that we have Be Calm on Awe Island and Adventures on Awe Island?
How would you describe the ethos of Awe Island?
The ethos of Awe Island is multifaceted.
Every layer has been created and is written with thought towards the target audience for that layer.
But as kids listen, say to be calm on our island and hear the happy stories and the positive messages, when they get a little bit older and are ready for the adventures, they just make entirely new discoveries about Aue Island and what it is and why it's there.
That they would never heard about and be calm on Aue Island.
So, as time goes on and more is revealed about the island than just the bedtime stories or even just where the kids are at in Adventures on Oway Island in this moment,
So exciting.
Well, I have one last sort of fun question for you.
Now I've noticed that you have a trio of main characters Marie, Christian and JJ and they are focusing on solving the mystery of the mysterious paper.
Do you have a favorite mystery-solving team, perhaps one that inspired this trio that you're writing about?
You know, I don't.
I actually don't.
I was a voracious reader growing up.
I used to read Part of what Marie is that I was as a child was loving to go to the library and basically every week check out as many books as I could carry, or my dad could help me carry and dive through them and read through them all in the week and bring them all back and get new books.
And so I loved a lot of different mystery and adventure stories.
The one story that I think made a big impression on me as a kid was actually more of a fantasy story series by an author named Robert Jordan series.
My older sister was reading that series.
And so I picked up the book and it was more dense than any other story I'd ever read to that point.
It was like, the first book was like 800 pages long in a really tiny print.
And what I loved about it was the mystery and the adventure of it.
It was this epic tale with epic characters and amazing descriptions of scenes and feelings and nuance and Easter eggs all over the place.
And it was so detailed.
And I think that really departure from the young adult level books that you read, you know, when you're growing up, and so I love those type of epic stories and I think that that really was Wow, that's awesome.
I hate to inform you while we're recording, but they did cancel the TV show.
I know.
Well, truth be told.
I always wondered what you know.
I knew somebody had bought the rights to it, and I always wondered what it would turn out to be.
And I watched the first couple of episodes and I'm like this is, it's an.
I feel like it's an impossible story to tell on the screen, almost.
I mean it would take a lot more thought because there's so much to it.
It just felt like they were taking maybe like 5 of the story and putting it out there and like 95 was missing.
So I didn't actually watch past the first season.
So I guess.
That makes sense.
Well, I really want to thank you for chatting with me and I want to thank our listeners for being here.
I hope you enjoyed this little behind-the-scenes look at Adventures on Hawaii Island and at Hawaii Island as a whole.
And...
If you enjoyed this episode and if you have any questions that you're curious about, please put them in the comments.
We're hoping to continue this series and give you some more background as to what we're writing and what we're doing here on Maui Island.
So thanks again.
Hope to see you soon.
Thank you, everyone.
Bye-bye.
