Making McNultyverse: How a Rainy Day Became a Podcast
The story behind the story — where the idea came from, how long it took to build, and why Saltpoint sounds the way it does.
Season 1 of Into The McNultyverse took about fourteen months from the first written sentence to the last exported audio file. This is the story of how that happened.
Where It Started
It started with a question I kept coming back to: what would it feel like to be twelve and discover that the world had been paying attention to you all along?
Not in a chosen-one, prophecy-and-destiny way. More quietly than that. The way you might suddenly realize that a place you've walked through a hundred times has a door in it you never noticed.
I wanted to write something for kids that didn't talk down to them. Something that trusted them with real atmosphere and real stakes. Serialized audio drama felt like the right format — it's intimate, it requires patience, and it rewards listeners who pay close attention.
The first thing I wrote wasn't a script. It was a map.
Building Saltpoint
Saltpoint doesn't exist, but I needed it to feel like it did. I spent about two months building the town before I wrote a single line of dialogue.
I drew maps. I wrote small histories for buildings that might never appear in the show. I decided what the weather was like in February and what the school mascot was and what a bowl of the local fish chowder tasted like.
Some of that never makes it into the episodes directly. But it shows up sideways — in the way characters talk about the harbor, in the sounds you hear from the school cafeteria, in the texture of a place that has been thought about.
Rules I set for Saltpoint
- It has to be a town where someone could realistically grow up. No convenient magic shops, no friendly wizard next door. Ordinary life, unusual underneath.
- The geography has to be internally consistent. Every location has a relationship to every other location. If the lighthouse is north of the harbor, it's always north of the harbor.
- The history goes back further than the story. Saltpoint existed for 150 years before Mike McNulty was born. Things happened there. Some of those things are still happening.
The Sound of It
I'm not a sound engineer. I had to learn as I went, and what I learned is that silence is the hardest thing to get right.
The instinct when you're building audio is to fill space. Music, ambient sound, effects. But the moments that tend to land hardest in this show are the ones where we pull everything back and let the scene breathe.
The storm in Episode 1 was the first scene we recorded and the last one we finished mixing. We went through eleven versions of it. The version you heard is quieter than the first ten.
The goal was always that the weather should feel like a character. Not a special effect — a character. Characters have intentions. They make choices. The storm in Episode 1 is choosing Mike.
On Writing for Kids (and Their Parents)
I think the best children's fiction doesn't make the mistake of thinking children need things simplified. They need things clarified — which is a completely different operation.
Clarified means the emotional core is legible. It means the stakes feel real. It means there's a forward motion, something pulling you through. It doesn't mean the language has to be small or the ideas have to be thin.
The audience I had in mind while writing Season 1 was an eight-year-old who pays attention and their parent who's half-listening from the front seat. Both of them should feel like the show is talking to them.
What's Next
Season 2 is in early planning. I know where the story goes — I've known since about episode 4 of Season 1, when a particular detail locked into place and I understood what the amulet actually is.
I'm not ready to say anything more than that yet.
If you've listened to all of Season 1: you probably have a theory. I'd love to hear it.
This post is part of the behind-the-scenes series. More coming as Season 2 takes shape.