This is a reworking of the Podcast Ping Christmas Calendar from 2009. I took all the poems and music and compiled them together into a single episode.
Doing this made me realize how much work I put into the Calendar. Just putting this together took a couple of hours even though I had everything else already done. The episode runs more than an hour and a half. I did have to redo the credits which themselves run about a minute and a half, and that's after compressing them.
I used all the old recordings of the poems instead of re-recording them. They probably would sound better had I re-recorded them but I wanted to save some time and effort. Re-recording would likely have taken a few days to record and edit, and it may not have made that much difference. The original recordings aren't that bad.
The idea was really to give people the convince of getting all the songs and poems from the Christmas Calendar in one file. This way the special can be played as background for a Christmas party. And I'm sure there's many who will be surprised to hear so many Christmas songs that they may never have heard before.
Since the Christmas Calendar was twenty-five days long, this special contains twenty-five songs and poems about Christmas. That means I've written about twenty-five Christmas poems, although some are just seasonal poems about winter. It's likely that I wouldn't have written many of them if I didn't have to do them for the calendar.
As for further episodes of Podcast Ping, it's going to be a matter of wait-and-see. I would like to do more but it does take time. But it's not so much the time it takes, it's more that I've just got so many other things to work on, and working on Podcast Ping takes time and effort away from those.
But I never really quit Podcast Ping, I just put it aside. And this is the second special I've done since the wrap-up show. I did have an idea for another podcast but I've been unable to get into that. And it's really hard to get an audience now for a new podcast. The podcast market is over-saturated and people can find streaming video very easily. It's hard to justify the work when you're struggling to get even twenty people to listen.
But if I do more Podcast Ping episodes it will be because I want to listen to them. And Podcast Ping is sufficiently established that I could get a decent sized audience. But I will have to spend some time writing poems and I've been busy with other writing lately so it could be a while. If I can sit down and crank out a few hundred poems it won't be hard to put episodes together. And I expect I will need that much because it would only really be worth doing if I was doing them weekly; monthly shows would not likely hold a large enough audience.
