What a crazy couple of weeks!

We have had a superbly busy few weeks, which have whizzed by with very little time for reading or writing but a lot of being in places and with people.

CONTENT WARNING: Name dropping galore ahead!

Dreams in the Manor House

This last week has continued a madness of the whirlwind that we have been living in! We joined up with our amazing team in Treowen for a week for two runs of The Locksmith’s Dream and some promotional filming and photography for Key of Dreams (you’ll see it soon - I promise! Make sure you follow our social media.)

So here comes my big name drop. For our weekday run, we had Neil Patrick Harris and Emily Jillette join us for the experience! They had a great time and described it as “Stunning” and “Like stepping into a novel”. I’m so delighted that they, like everyone else, had a great time. You can hear the full response from Neil here and you can bet I’ll post extracts from it regularly for a while!

Additionally, we got to spend time playing with the new characters. I love how collaborative our process is. Our acting team are a joy to work with - we give them a skeleton and some words then they perform magic! There is more coming from them soon on the website and on the social channels. Tickets for Saturday 27th April are almost half sold out already and Monday 29th April not too far behind. Don’t wait too long and miss out!

What happened at Innsmouth…

On the weekend before the events, we attended the first Innsmouth Literary Festival organised by Tim Mendees and Rob Poyton of the Innsmouth Book Club Podcast. We haven’t tabled at a con of any sort before and taking an immersive experience to a trader’s hall was quite an undertaking. We learned a lot, met fantastic people and had a great day.

Our table was rather filled by our model house, character minis and puzzle boxes, and it did attract lots of attention. As did the lovely Matt Wood, of Edwyrdian Tales joining us as The Seed Collector in costume and looking fabulous!

The panels held at the event were really interesting with some fascinating people taking part. And in particular I enjoyed watching a series of comedy Lovecraftian short films by Lackey & Johnson which I highly recommend.

A real highlight for me was meeting many interesting and interested people. The aforementioned Chris Lackey of The podcast Strange Studies of Strange Stories, and Greig Johnson were a delight to chat with and I hope to spend more time with. We also met Paul Fricker and Mike Mason of Chaosium and had some really interesting chats about possible future plans.

We also joined Rob and Tim in the Gilman House Hotel for a great chat on their podcast about our work and design process for Key of Dreams, as well as RPGs, films and licking wallpaper (Ivan- not me!) If you want to listen to the four of us ramble on very enthusiastically you can do so here! We’ve also been chatting with them about more future plans and possibilities for next year’s festival. Colour me very excited!

But for now, it’s time to recover and unpack before getting back to the exciting process of crafting of a dream.