A warmer take on a cold open 🪝

This is a cold open in a truer sense, giving us an emotional beat without jarring us.

Well hullo.

It’s gonna be a quick one I think, as I’m headed off to enjoy a bank holiday weekend like I rarely do… freelance life being what it is.

I’ve been re-reading Masters of Doom and ploughing through Dungeon Crawler Carl along with Dimension 20, all with ties to the world of D&D. It’s all proving useful fodder as I work on my second book in my off hours (a sequel to Molly Whiskers and the Blue Tentacle).

But what I’m bringing you today is much more real. It’s a clip from Hold the Moment, a podcast about dementia, hosted in part by a sufferer of early onset dementia, and made for an Australian charity.

The show takes a rare approach to the standard interview format, bringing the people into the real world, and out of a Zoom window.

The minute I have for you transitions from what we might call the cold open (the bit before the standard introduction) into the main body of the show.

I’ve written a little before about cold opens, and have come around from the now, slightly dated idea of taking an out-of-context clip from later in the episode and using that as some sort of hook (it rarely works and actually just confuses the listener more than hooks them in).

This is a cold open in a truer sense, giving us an emotional beat without jarring us. It’s a lovely piece of production.

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As ever, if you want to chat about putting something like this together, I’m all ears.

If you’re in the UK and permitting yourself a bank holiday, enjoy it. I will mine.

All being well, I’ll be with you next week.
-M

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