MAG S1 Q&A
ALEX
Hi. I’m Alexander J. Newall, director of The Magnus Archives podcast and voice of Martin on the show. And with me I have…
JONNY
Jonathan Sims, though you probably know me better as…
JONNY (TAPE RECORDING)
Jonathan Sims. [Alex laughs]
ALEX
And we are here doing a Q&A session for all of the most-asked questions from the fanbase and as a way of thanking everyone as well for listening so far.
JONNY
So in that vein, thank you! [Alex chuckles]
ALEX
So. We’re gonna go through these questions, and Jonny’s never heard any of these before, so we’ll see what he makes of them. Number one. Jonny. Is that your real voice?
JONNY
I’ve been asked this a lot, actually, and there are several comments around the internet I have actually stumbled across claiming that I’m putting on a bad British accent.
[ALEX CHUCKLING IN BACKGROUND]
[Sliding into American accent] And it is of course true. My real name is, uh, Earl… uh, Earl Big Mac. [Alex laughs outright] Uh, I’m from Pennsatucky, and–no. It’s my real voice. I change it a little bit. I, like, obviously I do lower it a bit and go a little bit more, little bit drier, a little bit more…
ALEX
Academic.
JONNY
Academic, yes. For Jonathan. But it is my real voice [Alex chuckles] and my real accent.
ALEX
Funnily, no one asks if all of the other characters, their voices are real.
JONNY
No, apparently they sound…
ALEX
Human.
JONNY
They sound genuine, even though we’ve largely conjured them out of meat.
ALEX
So. How long have you been planning this? Is it something you’ve always wanted to do? Were you actively seeking an opportunity out for a long time, or did you have the idea more recently?
JONNY
That’s sort of a difficult question, I guess. Because I’ve been – in the back of my mind – thinking of [chuckling] horrible things for as long as I’ve been writing. Most of my short stories I’d… fire – or for the novels I would start and get three chapters in – would be horror of some sort. In terms of The Magnus Archives itself, it wasn’t actually something I’d planned much until we started doing it. When I started working with Alex, he very much said, “What do you want to write?” To which my answer was, “Horror anthology,” which is how The Magnus Archives started. And then the overarching, the conceit that kept it all together very much spiraled off into what we now know as The Magnus Archives.
ALEX
Mm-hm. With that in mind, how did you specifically get into writing and how did you craft the story? Not in a spoilery sense, but did you start with the main event and work backwards, have you let it grow over time? Basically, is it like all of the corkboards and string that everyone has at home?
JONNY
I’ll start with the first question, which is: writing has always been sort of where I feel my strength lies, so it’s always been something that I’ve tried to do. And tried to make myself do. There’s quite a lot of… several years where I’ve done very little except tell people, “Oh, yes. No, I’m a writer.” [Alex chuckles] I love the process of creating, I hate the process of actually putting things down on the page, but it’s what you’ve got to do. So the answer is always, really. In terms of the story itself, I started by spinning out the central conceit. Once I’d figured out I wanted this meta-narrative, most of the very early stories are ones that have been brewing for a few years, to be honest. So a lot of what has turned into the metaplot came from what themes I liked from there. Spinning them out. Then I crafted the ending, as in the ending of Season 5. I hate series that don’t have an end goal.
ALEX
Oh, yeah.
JONNY
I’m a hundred percent about closed arcs, and there’s no way I was going to sit down and write a sprawling epic metaplot unless I knew where it was finishing. And since then, aspects of the end have shifted slightly with the writing because they always do, but I still know where it’s going.
ALEX
Yeah, like, there’s a fixed endpoint for this, which is always the goal. Okay. Another question for you. Do you know exactly where everything will end up in the story or have you introduced a few threads where you’re not sure how they’re going to resolve and just to have it as a throwaway thing that you might use later?
JONNY
The answer to that question largely depends on when in Season 1 you’re asking it, to be honest. Right at the beginning, most things were to one degree or another casting a line out. I would have a story, there would be a few aspects of it that I quite liked and planned to revisit later, and as Season 1 progressed, linking some of those up gave me the structure to spin out into, I now have virtually the entire story and the entire world planned to one degree or another.
ALEX
Yeah. How did you start to work with Rusty Quill? A lot of people don’t really know how the organization works. Were you just friendly beforehand, things like that? How did you end up working with us?
JONNY
There was a car boot sale down my road some two years ago and, I mean, I’d never considered myself the sort of person that would buy a Ouija board…
[ALEX LAUGHS]
But–no, um, I perform with a… somewhat lunatic stage show called The Mechanisms, which is a mythic space pirate musical cabaret. And most years we do the Edinburgh Fringe, so about… two years ago now?
ALEX
Yeah, it was about two years. Two and a half.
JONNY
Alex, who I sort of knew through a few people vaguely, ended up coming to one of our shows and saw it and really liked it.
ALEX
Yup.
JONNY
So when Alex started up Rusty Quill, he messaged us and said–basically, with an open offer: “Would you like to work with Rusty Quill at all?” The band as a whole, largely because there’s no way to produce the sort of thing we do at speed enough to be useful in a podcast sense…
ALEX
You could get one episode, uh, every six months? Maybe?
JONNY
Yeah. Maybe. But I said, “Oh, I’ve been thinking of starting up a horror podcast for a while,” and Alex said, “Great! It’ll need a metaplot,” [Alex laughs] and here we are.
ALEX
Pretty much. How far in advance do you write the podcasts? There’s obviously an overarching plot but when do you flesh it out? Do you just churn them out one at a time, do you have bits of episodes floating around and put them together? How do they, how do you assemble them?
JONNY
For Season 1, any given episode will probably have been written somewhere between 4-8 weeks before you actually hear it.
ALEX
That sounds about right.
JONNY
With Season 2, I’ve actually sat down and planned it all out in a lot more detail, so I now know what the actual episodes are going to be about.
ALEX
Well, ultimately as well, from a production standpoint, I mean, Season 1 was entirely new territory. It was completely exploratory, we didn’t know if people were gonna like it, so ultimately there was an element of… seeing what worked, I think.
JONNY
Also for Season 2 I’ve been writing a lot more stuff down. [Alex laughs] Season 1 was incredibly intricate but also largely lived entirely inside my head. A couple of the episodes which are dreamlike in tone, um, because they were written to be dreamlike. Others are a bit dreamlike in tone because it was very late at night when they were written.
ALEX
So, this is a follow-on question. How long does it take you to write one story, would you say? End to end.
JONNY
In terms of just keyboard time, maybe 5-6 hours for a first draft and then 2 hours to edit it and go over. In terms of actual planning, I will generally have an idea and then be constantly churning it over in the back of my mind for about a week. So that when I finally come to write it, I have a much more complete idea of what’s going on and how it’s going to shape up.
ALEX
So. Another question here. How do you prepare to record an episode? Alex directs, but what does that involve? They’re interested in the technical and the performing aspects of this. So before we get into the technical, on to your side. We are about to record an episode. How do you prepare for that? Beyond just obviously writing some of the content.
JONNY
Well, obviously I’ve been fasting for a few days to purify the blood. [Alex chuckling] To be honest, largely it involves just sitting there and reading the first few paragraphs in the Archivist voice, to get my head in the right space for actually reading it.
ALEX
So for my perspective, obviously, there’s an element of setup involved. We use various amounts of equipment I won’t go into here. But once all of the mikes and the equipment are set up, what we’ll tend to do is we’ll sit down, and we’ll just run through the episode very quickly and decide if anything unusual has to happen in performance and we’ll address how that’s happened. So changes in voice, pitch, things like that.
JONNY
If there’s any soundscaping.
ALEX
Soundscaping, yeah. And then beyond that, the only other thing that really takes a lot of time with prep is when you have multi-cast recording.
JONNY
Oh. Yeah.
ALEX
Because that slows that process down a lot. Because then you have to sort of go line-by-line, make sure people understand the intent of the lines, how do you say that, how do you project that. And then we’re into more sort of basically the nuances of it, rather than just the sort of get it down, get it recorded.
JONNY
Yeah. The last episodes of the first season were easily the most complicated…
ALEX
Oh, yeah.
JONNY
…because we were doing, I mean, we were doing an actual audio drama rather than an audio drama-esque anthology series.
ALEX
Yeah. Following on, I figure we’ve already addressed this a bit. Are there any Magnus bloopers? Has Jonathan Sims ever laughed?
JONNY
No.
ALEX
Ever?
JONNY
No.
[ALEX ATTEMPTING NOT TO LAUGH]
No, I, I laugh a lot.
[ALEX BURSTS OUT LAUGHING]
I laugh uproariously. Some might say that I laugh too much.
ALEX
Not many.
JONNY
No. No, I’ve never actually heard it, but I assume they say…
ALEX
And they’re dead now.
JONNY
I assume they say it.
ALEX
But in all seriousness, from the production side, we do have a few recorded gaffes but we’re not intending to release them anytime soon. Mainly because it’s a bit of a mood-killer.
JONNY
Also I’m very sweary in real life. [Alex chuckles] Like, that sounds like a joke because I’m a relatively deadpan person, but it’s not, I’m… very sweary. And this is meant to have a “[CLEAN]” rating on iTunes. So… no rude words. I could say “bums,” maybe. [Alex laughs]
But I won’t.
ALEX
So, again, discussing sort of more of the production side: when putting together an episode like Hive, how do we get the SFX? What goes into making those SFX? So a lot of our sound effects will come from like online archives. I can’t recommend enough things like freesound.org, and there’s a few other sites similar to that. Sometimes if you require a really specific sound, you know, something that you just can’t find elsewhere, you go out and you do some foley. Truth be told, that happens less often than you’d think. Like I said, those archives are quite good, and you can get quite good at taking a sound and turning it into something that it’s not. For instance, I won’t tell people how we make the worm sounds, but it just involves a lot of pasta. Lots and lots of pasta.
JONNY
Delicious, screaming pasta.
ALEX
In fact, following on from that: have you ever considered your fixation with invasive worms from a Freudian perspective?
JONNY
I’m sure I don’t know what you mean. [Alex chuckles] The idea of pulsating, writhing, elongating worms tunneling into flesh is… I mean, it’s just good horror, really. I don’t know… I don’t know what you mean.
ALEX
We’ll skip past that one. I don’t really know what they’re getting at.
JONNY
I don’t, it’s nonsense, really.
ALEX
What are your fears?
JONNY
Well, quite a lot, to be honest. I feel that it’s very hard to write good horror unless you’re writing something that to one degree or another scares you a bit.
ALEX
Absolutely.
JONNY
If you yourself don’t have just a little tingle of fear at the back of your mind when you’re writing it, it’s probably not as scary as it could be. So a lot of these do come from, they might not be huge fears of mine, but they are things that freak me out to one degree or another. Trypophobia, obviously, is…
ALEX
Oof.
JONNY
…quite a significant one.
ALEX
That’s the one that we share. Yeah. Mm.
JONNY
Which is where a lot of Jane Prentiss comes from.
ALEX
I’d say certainly the episodes that are grabbing people the most, it seems, online, are the ones that tend to be quite universal. And honestly quite simple, so it’ll be things like fear of falling, fear of darkness, fear of the stranger.
JONNY
No, exactly. So a lot of these are, it’s marrying as universal a fear as you can with the specifics of what scares you. So taking your own fear and making it transferable.
ALEX
Yeah.
JONNY
So you listen to any episode and you can probably glean a nugget of what scares me.
ALEX
It’s been confirmed that you like M. R. James, so with that in mind, what’s your favorite story of his, and do you have any other literary inspirations?
JONNY
I mean, it’s called The Magnus Archives. [Alex laughs] The show is… the show is called The Magnus Archives. It’s “Count Magnus.” That’s why the show is called The Magnus Archives. To be fair, there are others that I’m very fond of from M. R. James. Weirdly enough, I have a really specific soft spot for “A School Story,” because it is possibly the most minimalist ghost story I’ve encountered that’s managed to have a really significant effect on me.
ALEX
So. Inspirations other than M. R. James?
JONNY
I’ve got a real soft spot for old-school creepypasta.
ALEX
Who doesn’t?
JONNY
When I used to work nights, there’d be some weeks where I didn’t fully adjust to the daytime and I’d spend almost a whole week in the dark listening to creepypasta, or reading weird blogs, or just going through creepy pictures and just working myself into a real state.
ALEX
I mean, interestingly, I remember the first time you pitched The Magnus Archives to us and you described it as “M. R. James meets creepypasta for a start.” And you also referenced Ionized Yeast.
JONNY
Oh. That’s because I–again, when I was working night shifts, I lived off the generation of horror podcasting before ours. So PseudoPod, who are still going strong…
ALEX
Oh, yeah.
JONNY
…and the early seasons of NoSleep, Knifepoint Horror, and also, I used to delve into radio archives, and one of them from the 1940s was a show called Lights Out. And it was very much of the time, but it was mostly sponsored by Ionized Yeast. And every episode there’d be, like, a minute-long unique Ionized Yeast advert about how if you’re only feeling half-alive and you were [American radio announcer voice] “too old and tired for your job at the war factory. I sure am discouraged!”
ALEX
So there you have it, then. The primary influence of The Magnus Archives is wartime horror.
JONNY
It’s Ionized Yeast. I mean, I’ll be honest, Alex, I’ve always said that you look remarkably low on Vitamin B and iron. [Alex chuckles] You could put on 8, 10, or more pounds of good new flesh!
ALEX
Moving on… Okay. These are some more questions to do with the actual story itself. Why, narratively rather than canonically, does the Magnus Institute only collate information and not engage with their learnings beyond supplementary clarification investigation?
JONNY
It’s largely because the sort of horror stories I want to tell are standalone. They are the experiences of an individual when confronted with something sinister and inexplicable. To actively follow up with the encounters would turn it into, I mean, it would turn it into something that’s more along the lines of the X-Files.
ALEX
Yes.
JONNY
Which is, like, a very valid and excellent form of horror, but not the one that I’m trying to write. Also it’s useful from an audience point of view to not need to say, “Go back and listen to everything or you just won’t understand what’s going on!”
ALEX
Oh, yeah. Other question, same kind of lines: how large is the Magnus Institute? As an organization.
JONNY
There are between 80 and 100 staff in total. Very few of them are focused on the Archives. I think probably the core staff is maybe 40.
ALEX
Okay. Now, this is a bit of a specific one we’re going to have to drill down to. So. You’ve been very specific in The Magnus Archives about the reasons that Sims is recording on tape, but how does the sound play into this? It’s an interesting idea that some things are so fundamentally unnatural that they would cause corruption to recordings of it. But what about the music that plays for the atmosphere? Is that an actual thing that’s on the tapes and thus canonical, or is it just something for the listeners? Now, that’s something that I might jump in on a little bit. So…
JONNY
Yeah, please do.
ALEX
When Jonny originally pitched The Magnus Archives to me, there was a period of testing where we actually ran a few episodes that will never see the light of day. And what we were doing is seeing what sounded right. And part of that was to do with the sound of it. So we did versions of the Archives without the tape deck, just to test. I didn’t like it. I think that it’s got a sort of lo-fi charm. And then we tried doing them with the music, and we found that the music added something. Ultimately, from sort of the directorial standpoint, I’ve always had it that the music is not part of the actual recordings.
JONNY
Yeah.
ALEX
However, the tape deck, the distortions, the sound effects of things actually happening, the voices of the people within there, are part of the actual files. The only thing that was added is music, and the main reason for that is, it needed something to fill out that sound a little bit…
JONNY
Yeah.
ALEX
…and just give it a little bit of pop.
JONNY
Everything that you hear is on the actual tape within the world of The Magnus Archives except the music.
ALEX
Yeah. Yeah.
JONNY
Oh, and just to say, we do not mean to say that there are lost episodes of Magnus out there. [Alex laughs] It was largely the first few episodes we just did over and over again in various formats.
ALEX
Yeah, we just did multiple permutations. So you’re not, you’ve not missed anything, I’m afraid. Okay. Now, we’re heading a bit more into the sort of fanbase-y kind of questions, things to do with that. So with that in mind: what’s it like having the ability to interact so closely with your fanbase? Would you do it again?
JONNY
It’s fascinating, gratifying, and it holds me to account. [Alex laughs] I don’t think it’s even a question of would I do it again. The, I mean, the answer is yes. But moreover, the way that content is created these days, I don’t think a creator has an option but to engage with the community that builds up around what you do. Unless you deliberately remove yourself.
ALEX
I mean, certainly you’ve said this to me before, which is that an element of The Magnus Archives was tying yourself to a rock [Jonny chuckles] and then throwing that rock off a cliff and you’ve just gotta keep writing rope.
JONNY
Yeah, exactly. And the fans and the community are a big part of that. And I don’t want any of that to sound like I don’t love the community massively. It’s really gratifying to see that something you’ve created has hooked people like that.
ALEX
But absolutely there’s an element, though, that once you’re accountable to those fans it does help keep getting that pen to the paper, doesn’t it?
JONNY
Exactly. Exactly. Because it’s not just me I’m responsible to. Also it is very useful in terms of writing a story like this to see which bits of the mystery, which sort of threads, are picked up. There are, I won’t say who, but there are a couple of people on the various sites and message boards that I…
ALEX
Oh yeah.
JONNY
…keep an eye on because I feel that if I write something and they don’t spot it, it’s possibly a bit too subtle. Maybe I need to, you know, make it a bit more overt in a future episode. And others where I’ll keep an eye on them in case I’ve made a mistake somewhere, because they will let me know. [Alex chuckles]
ALEX
Following on from that, another question to do with something similar. How do you feel about the level of scrutiny that your work gets from listeners? Does all of the checking and fact-checking and so on outweigh the positivity of listening to people on the forums going into their own theories in depth?
JONNY
I mean, that makes it sound like having that level of scrutiny and being called to account when I make a mistake isn’t a positive. I mean, it feels a lot like if you’re writing a final exam, for instance, and you have somebody standing over your shoulder pointing out whenever you make a mistake. You might give them a look and be startled or even annoyed. But it’s good because it means that you’re not writing unintelligible nonsense. [Alex laughs] And moreover, especially with a show like The Magnus Archives where everything is very intricate and everything needs to be internally consistent. I can’t be allowed to make mistakes because that’s not fair. It’s straight-up not fair to ask people to try to figure out a mystery I’m spinning out and then constantly make mistakes, get dates wrong, or feed people false information.
ALEX
Do you have any plans to break the mold of your current narrative style? It seems like there would be some difficulty in telling the current arc without more… live-action-style narrative sequences.
JONNY
Yeah. I mean, obviously that question came in before the finale of Season 1 came out. Generally as the series goes on, there will be more of that? At its core, it will still remain one episode, one statement, one story.
ALEX
Yeah. And the last question we’ve got, actually, let’s try and avoid spoilers.
JONNY
Okay.
ALEX
What would you say is the biggest challenge that is facing you in Season 2?
JONNY
Balancing horror and mystery.
ALEX
Oh yes.
JONNY
Because fundamentally you see a lot of horror mystery series that start off extremely strong and peter out a bit, because at the beginning, horror and mystery are fantastically good together.
ALEX
Oh, yeah.
JONNY
Because they both rely on the unknown so heavily. And so the unknown feeds the horror and entices the mystery. But as it goes on, the mystery needs to be, it needs to get answers, otherwise you feel cheated, whereas the horror needs to stay unknown, because if you get all the answers to what the horror is, it’s no longer scary, and if everything stays unknown and horrific, then you don’t get any answers to the mystery. So I would say that the biggest challenge is trying to keep everything unknown and scary while at the same time providing enough answers to the mystery that people are willing to stay around and learn more. And there are answers. You won’t learn the answers to everything. There are some small mysteries that will never be known. But a lot of the why, the what, the who, they will in time come to light.
ALEX
So I think that about wraps us up here. Thanks again, Jonny, for all of your time. If you’ll just go back into the hole, you can carry on writing all the rest of Season 2.
JONNY
[Exhausted and despairing voice] I just want to go to sleep, Alex.
ALEX
No, not for you. But thanks to everyone who’s been listening so far. It’s completely blown us away. The response that we’ve had from everyone. We weren’t expecting this kind of a following…
JONNY
Not even remotely.
ALEX
…and it’s an amazing thing to happen. But if people are able to, please do leave reviews on iTunes and podcast services, write reviews yourselves. That kind of content, it makes a massive difference to a smaller operation like us. Be sure to check us out on Facebook, Twitter at @therustyquill, the subreddits, our forums at the website…
JONNY
Oh, we are also nominated at the moment for a couple of the categories in the Audio Verse Awards, which are, voting is open until the 6^th^ November for the… semi-finals, I believe? So if you get a chance to pop on there and give us a vote, that would be massively appreciated.
ALEX
Again, the response we’ve had from fans has been amazing and anything that you’re able to do in that would be a huge help to us. If you cannot wait, if you cannot hold on, if you cannot last without Jonny’s… sultry… tones, until the beginning of Season 2…
JONNY
Yes?
ALEX
…you have actually recorded something with us to stave people over until then, haven’t you, Jonny?
JONNY
Yes. It is the Halloween special for the gaming podcast. I’m running Deadlands, which is a horror Western setting which I’m very fond of. It’s a lot of fun, and yeah. Go over there and listen to it. Do it now.
ALEX
You can find that on all the podcast services that you normally use for The Magnus Archives. Just look for Rusty Quill Gaming Podcast. And I think that about wraps us up. So, thanks again, and we look forward to seeing you again for Season 2.
JONNY
[Ominous voice] See you then.