Reflections II

December 15, 2022·55 min·4 clips

Ed Sheeran said once he releases a song it's not his anymore, it becomes someone else's.

1. This is the second part of a listener Q&A episode for the fiction podcast The Antique Shop. 2. The host, an unnamed Glaswegian creator, answers reader-submitted questions she didn't cover in a prior hour-and-15-minute episode. 3. The core purpose is closing out a backlog of fan questions about her writing process, her PhD, and the podcast's fictional universe. 4. She says she read a book a day from childhood until about age 21, calling herself a "creative leech" who feeds off other people's work for inspiration. 5. She names no single writing influence but cites Supernatural and anime as recurring touchstones, and Jane Austen as a teenage influence that made her own prose "old-timey." 6. She reveals she has a STEM PhD, master's, and undergraduate degree, all in an unnamed subject, and calls a PhD "pretty useless" outside academia. 7. She describes lingering bitterness about the fallout from her PhD, joking that packing her one-page certificate while moving felt absurd given the ordeal it caused. 8. She confirms The Antique Shop was inspired by a real antique shop she recalls from an alleyway near Glasgow University, featuring bicycles hung on the walls and a glass counter with old coins. 9. She says she can no longer find or confirm the shop existed, since the building on the site today is a new build. 10. On character descriptions, she says she deliberately omits them so readers can picture characters however they want. 11. She cites a BBC Radio 1 interview where Ed Sheeran said a song stops being his once released and becomes the listener's, and applies that logic to her characters. 12. She says only Madame Norna and the black cat Kronos have any stated physical description in the podcast. 13. She explains Madame Norna, a 500-year-old character, always knows how to help customers because she's seen every version of human problems before. 14. She references the Sandman comic story "The Sound of Her Wings," where the same pub conversations recur every hundred years since 1389, as her model for that idea. 15. She confirms four-legged foxes in the story are ordinary animals, while only descendants of foxes who visited Madame Norna gained human qualities. 16. She rules out a crossover with her other podcast, The McIlwraith Statements, because ghosts don't exist in The Antique Shop's universe. 17. The episode is an unscripted, conversational solo Q&A recorded in a small, sparsely furnished room during a house move. 18. Her tone is casual, self-deprecating, and prone to tangents and long asides. 19. Fans of The Antique Shop podcast wanting creator insight and worldbuilding trivia. 20. Listeners wanting narrative fiction rather than behind-the-scenes creator commentary.

As heard by us

A candid, slightly loose Q&A that turns listener questions into quiet reflection on character, imagination, and support.

Reflections II keeps a close, conversational feel, with the host speaking from a very small temporary room and leaving the volume low on purpose.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

For a quieter part two of Reflections, where the leftover questions turn into a Q&A about character descriptions and why appearances stay open for you to imagine.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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