2022 in review

The Elf Service and what's next

Well, here we are again: a new year and an old Christmas story all wrapped up and sent out (and, hopefully, opened by grateful recipients).

The Elf Service was something I haven’t done before: an adaptation of a true story. Obviously I changed quite a lot and pretty freely; the story of John Gluck, the man who founded the real world equivalent of The Elf Service, was not a bit like Irving Jefferson’s. But I kept a few elements that were too good not to include.

The business with all the charity trustees was Gluck’s hustle, and the proposed Santa Building was floated for real. But more fundamentally, Irving Jefferson was much influenced by the portrayal of Gluck in Alex Palmer’s The Santa Claus Man. He comes across as both a man on the make - with some shady ways of making - but also as a man who kind of meant it. I don’t think his Santa Claus plan was entirely a hustle to begin with; he just then saw a way of making it pay.

The Santa Claus Man wasn’t the only influence on this year’s story. In preparation I read Crying The News, Vincent DiGirolamo’s book on American Newsies. Maddie Sharp was at least partly inspired by Barbara Stanwyck’s Elizabeth Lane in the seasonal rom-com Christmas in Connecticut, from which I also stole some names: the wonderful S. K. ‘Cuddles’ Sakall plays restaurateur Felix Bassenak, whose name I split between Felix Savoir of The Metropolitan Hotel and Bassenak’s Restaurant in Episode 20, while the hero is called Jefferson Jones. Meanwhile, the name of the editor of the Argus, Walter Burns, is just a straight lift from His Girl Friday, while Hildy Johnson gets a name check in Episode 11.

The rest of Maddie Sharp, however - ever since her original appearance in The Apartment Store - was directly inspired by Jennifer Jason Leigh’s character, Amy “five dollars says she mentions her Pulitzer” Archer, in the Coen Brothers’ Christmas romp The Hudsucker Proxy. (Leigh’s performance is itself a glorious impersonation of Katherine Hepburn.)

On rewatching The Hudsucker Proxy over Christmas I realised its influence was greater than I’d consciously acknowledged. I knew I’d stolen Amy Archer, her editor (played by John Mahoney) and her paper, The Argus, but I’d forgotten that it also featured Newsies throughout, and that I had, more glaringly, basically half-inched the whole structure: wunderkind makes good, gets knocked back by the system, gets his revenge. I am consoling myself that it’s a pretty common structure, but watching the movie did make me squirm a little.

As the presence of Maddie Sharp and mention of Otto Krampus suggest, The Elf Service takes place in more or less the same city as The Apartment Store. I say “more or less” because this is very much not seamless world-building. Each story is meant to stand alone and not everything is going to line up at the edges. However, the city itself (largely based on my memories of living in Edinburgh in the ‘90s) is a handy setting for Christmas stories and will no doubt appear again.

I did at least try a few new things this year. I particularly enjoyed writing the ‘panoramic’ chapters, where we followed news stories through the city, meeting a grand cast of characters (including the artist Paul Massie who was named for the straight man in Tony Hancock’s movie The Rebel - an obscure Easter Egg for the more nerdish).

This cast of thousands created a lot of work for my friend Jon Millington, who reads the stories. Thankfully he is a trained actor (even more thankfully, he does all of this for free) and I think he really excelled himself this time. I tend not to direct Jon very much; I just send him the text and he sends back the recordings, so the voices are always a surprise to me. I was sitting in the kitchen of an Airbnb in Nicosia, Cyprus (in incongruous heat) when I first heard Irving Jefferson speak and I actually yelped out loud and jumped about in delight. I was especially pleased to discover that Maddie is Welsh. In previous stories Father Christmas has always been Welsh (Jon is too; I suspect this is not a coincidence) but Maddie was playing the Father Christmas role here and I think she thoroughly deserved the accent.

I have to admit that I wasn’t entirely confident about The Elf Service as a story. It’s been a bit of a busy year and I wasn’t sure I’d given it quite the attention it deserved. I’m still not convinced I stuck the landing at the end, frankly.  But the feedback has been very positive (thanks to everyone who’s been in touch) and the numbers have been good. According to Acast, we hit a peak of 1,800 listens on Christmas Eve, with a total of over 30,000 listens in December, which is well up on last year; and we now have over 1,300 subscribers on Spotify.

Speaking of Spotify, The Elf Service is also now available as an audiobook there, without credits or episode breaks. In fact we’re available in a lot of audiobook stores, including Kobo, Google Play and Libro.fm. We’re hoping for Audible soon, but it’s a tricky submission process.

We’re aiming to make all of the Christmas Stories available as audiobooks, but the technical restrictions are tighter than for podcasts, so some of them might require some re-recording, which will mean presuming on Jon’s time again, so it will further mean waiting for when he has that time to spare.

Also new is this newsletter. I’m intending to send something each month throughout the year, detailing the writing and the production of 2023’s story. This production diary is, however, only going to be for paid subscribers, either on Substack or on Patreon. On the other hand, it will contain spoilers for the story, so you may want to avoid it anyway.

We’ll also be publishing a previous story on Substack throughout the year, with an episode roughly every couple of weeks, leading up to the beginning of the new story in December. Because this year’s story is going to be a murder mystery, we’re going to be serialising Deadvent Calendar, our slightly unhinged detective story from a couple of years ago.

Obviously the main thing I’m going to be doing this year, though, is writing the next story. I always start straight after Christmas so that the atmosphere is still about me as I begin sketching out the plot. That way, when I’m trying to write a wintry story in the long, hot evenings of summer, there’s still a little snow on the page.

I think this year’s story is going to be called Secret Satan and be set around an office Christmas party. But things have a habit of changing as you work on them.

I guess the only way you’ll find out what happens is by subscribing to this newsletter.

Happy New Year!

Tobias