Thoughts on episode 7 & social media

Ah, episode seven ‘The Dawn of French Indochina’, is finally out. It took around three months to research, produce the script and then record, edit and release. This episode produced my first full on panic attack as the entire two-hour recording was corrupted by Audacity at a late stage in editing and I was forced to re-record the entire episode. That was not fun.

But you live and learn!

On that note.. two hours? That was a long one. The longest yet – and I hope that I can start getting the episode length back down a little. That may have been why this episode took so long, although I usually take about 2-3 months… and this one was double the size. I dunno, having a long section about the French revolution, I felt that I couldn’t release that as its own episode, because there are other podcasts and people much more qualified to speak about that part of history, but I did need it in this story too.. it couldn’t be skipped, and I couldn’t release it by itself. So there you go – two hour episode.

I am happy with how it turned out, but I am more excited that the content of the series is finally turning toward the 20th century and the history that I am more familiar with. Having to research the history of ancient Cambodia and the middle-ages, as well as Vietnamese, French and European history – all of that falls outside of my general area of comfort which is squared much more on the years leading up to and into the revolution in Cambodia. But we are almost there now. Another reason which led me to start the episode with the story of Pol Pot in Prek Sbau. I wanted listeners to get a touch of actual ‘Khmer Rouge’ content in the series again, as I felt that it had been slightly out of sight for the last few episodes.

In the days and weeks after I release an episode I usually get to work on the youtube version, and I like to take a little break as well. Between a full time job, a girl friend and 5 cats, my life has actually become busy and I’ve finally felt like I have a fraction of the responsibilities and commitments of a full on adult human being.
That being said – I’ve also spent all day just trying to get a social media presence together for the podcast. I deleted my personal facebook account about a year ago and I do not really like that platform… or any of the others if I am being honest. But after seeing how other shows self-promote and how mine basically hinges on people googling ‘khmer rouge genocide podcast’ then I figured maybe I should push the show out there a little bit more.

I have a twitter now. It is https://twitter.com/KhmerUtopia and if you have twitter please follow the show. We are looking at a big fat goose egg on the followers front right now and I am not savy enough to be able to get that up up up by myself.

Also, if you are reading this, and you do like the show, please leave a review on itunes or wherever you might listen to the show. It really makes me happy to read them and know that the time and effort I put into creating this podcast is being turned into enjoyment for other people, I love doing it but I also love hearing people engage with it. Why not tweet about the show if you can? Or share it on social media or reddit if you have the time. I would really appreciate it.

Thanks for listening everyone, should be starting work on the next episode really soon.

- Locky