For over thirty years, AFF has played a key role in launching the careers of writers. We recently spoke with Alexander Adell, the winner of our 2022 Fiction Podcast Award, about how AFF helped jumpstart the success of his podcast, Celeritas, and his creative process behind it. Keep reading for an in-depth look at Adell’s experiences and insights, and be sure to check the Celeritas podcast!
AFF changed my life. Before AFF I felt like a crazy person obsessively writing and creating a sci-fi
podcast from home, screaming my weirdo dialogue in my boiling hot car in the parking lot of a local state park, and laying awake in bed every night trying to break story on the next episode.
Telling a big story is all I had ever wanted to do, but it was strange behavior for a guy with a newborn and a 2-year-old surrounded by wildfires in northern California, who had just quit his job in the middle of a pandemic. I started screenwriting as a hobby in my 20s, but this project was different – for the first time I felt blindly driven to do whatever it took to get the story out there.
My original plan was to try to shoot a short film, but that just wasn’t gonna happen (see: covid, babies,
wildfires). Then I discovered fiction podcasts. Shows like “The Bright Sessions,” “From Now,” “Forest
404” – I couldn’t believe how immersive and expansive these stories were, and I knew what I was going to do.
Writing and producing the podcast was deeply gratifying, but I was so isolated. I could see that people were listening to the episodes, but I felt like, unless I lived in LA, this is as good as it gets: me yelling in my car, and then trying to feel some satisfaction by looking at audience metrics.
Then, on a lark, I submitted the first three episodes of the podcast (called “Celeritas”) to AFF – I had never heard of a large competition accepting podcast scripts. A few months later I got an email that I was a quarter finalist, then a semi-finalist, and the next communication was a phone call. I couldn’t believe it, I was a finalist in this competition that intimidated the heck out of me, and a person actually called to congratulate me. I didn’t really know what validation felt like, it was otherworldly.
For the week of the festival, everywhere I went I met writers and talked about writing, and went to unforgettable talks where my heroes were on stage telling us their secrets and their challenges. I filled a notebook with scribbled information, but that’s not what changed my life. It was meeting Lauren Gardner, and Tamar Pelzig, and Kathy Lo, Matt Kagen, Josh Shelton, JP LeRoux, Westin Lee, Margaret Lazarus Dean, Sean Collins-Smith, Dana Braziel Solovy, Aurora Wells, Cassandra Rose, Lillie Gardner… I’ve been in a weekly writing group with half that list ever since, which has pushed my craft further than I could have imagined, and they helped me finish the show, which was recently nominated for a Webby.
And during the competition, Sean introduced me to Emily Lock and Joey Tuccio at Roadmap Writers,
who connected me with my now manager, Alex Cresia at Navigation Media Group.
Because of AFF, I suddenly have a community. I’m part of a community. Of writers. Holy sh*t.
Discover the same community of support and inspiration as Alexander did by submitting your own script or purchasing a badge to attend the Festival below.