I've been podcasting with Cooper and Ginger on Life on the Swingset for six full years. With Shira, Miko it's been a little less. I've edited the audio for the podcast for more than five years, and we've gone from releasing whenever we wanted to every two weeks to every week, and while doing that I've learned to both clean up and bring out the shine in audio and optimize my processes. I went from taking six hours to edit an hour of audio, to taking two hours, to taking four hours, to taking two and a half hours, back to about five hours to edit a single podcast. It's a labor of love. I do it willingly without regret but for me it's been six years with little to no significant interruption, at least nothing done on purpose, definitely nothing planned.
The bottom line is I've been doing an unsustainable amount of work in ways that don't allow me to look to the future, and I need to take some time off of editing and time off being a co-host to get past this.
it feels like a terrible time to take time off, my very favorite non-sexy podcast (hello TWiB! Prime) lost a member and another podcast is on hiatus, it feels like there's a great cosmic force sucking the energy out of many of the podcasters I love and that I work with but it's time off I need both to regather some energy in the wake of a 2014 of trial and tragedy and a 2015 in which I scheduled myself to the bone, and to pour the energy I have into a passion project, and into building new infrastructure for the entire Swingset.FM network.
After several years of cajoling I started my own little podcast, The Gentleperverts' Social Club, which I love but which I also spend time and effort producing content for and editing but I'd been largely doing it alone. I realized this was unsustainable and started building a team to really tackle the job of assembling a variety style podcast from scratch. The team is in place and we're going to reboot the podcast and to quote Cooper's favorite politician, it's going to be fantastic and you'll all love it and possibly like the way you look, I guarantee it.
We've also spent a significant amount of time, along with the assistance of one particular fan who we now consider a member of the family, building a live chat community. At the moment participation is limited to people who decide to contribute to the ongoing lifeblood of Life on the Swingset by becoming Patreons but we will expand its availability soon. Live chat is only part of what I've envisioned for the Swingset family for years. I want to build a robust community around a forum, around comments on our posts, around people being able to connect with each other how they want and it's something I intend to put significant amounts of time and effort into.
The greater Swingset family, our fans, our conference attendees, our Patreons, our Desire resort group, our Swingset.FM Member podcasters, and the rest of the world I'm trying to desperately to make a difference in, you all deserve my best and I'll spend the next two months gearing up to give that to you again.
So… I'm checking out of Life on the Swingset, The Podcast! for a couple months, but I'll be back and when I return you will have my full attention.
In the meantime feel free to boop me on Twitter @DylanTheThomas. 