How I made "Making Magic"

Now that the finale of my podcast miniseries on the Magic Wand vibrator, Making Magic, has gone live, I’m in the mood to reflect on this massive project and what it’s been like to work on it for the past year. Here’s a bunch of stream-of-consciousness notes and observations:

Making Magic was originally a book – or rather, it was going to be a book; that’s what I pitched to Vibratex when we met via Zoom in May of last year to discuss potential collaborations. It was the company’s CEO Ken Herskovitz who suggested doing it instead as an audio series. I may still write a book about the Magic Wand someday – life is long; who the hell knows? – but I’m really glad that this project ended up being audio-based instead. Hearing people’s Magic Wand stories in their own words, in their own voice, really hits different.

I didn’t know how to make a show like Making Magic before I started making it. I was literally learning how to make it while I was making it. That’s really scary! I mean, I’ve been podcasting since I was 12, but mostly that had involved recording a conversation between myself and 1-3 other people and lightly editing it. The only audio project I had done in a more complex, patchwork storytelling style before Making Magic was Beating the Stigma, an audio series about kink and mental health that I made in my final year of journalism school. So, going into this project was daunting, but I was exceptionally lucky to get to work with an editor, Jamie Pityinger, who turned my obsessively detailed scripts into fully-formed episodes.

I interviewed 35 people for this series, including several people I consider heroes and inspirations. My literal first interview for this project was with Carol Queen – talk about intimidating! And there was one day during production when I interviewed Stoya and Danarama in the same day – thankfully with a few hours in between for me to calm my starstruck nerves! I only got to speak to maybe one-third or half of the people I reached out to, and I think my original project proposal overambitiously said I’d aim for 40-50 sources, but 35 was a lot, and gave me more than enough material for the show.

I used Calendly for scheduling and Cleanfeed for recording. Then I fed all the recordings into Descript, which transcribed them for me. Truly, these three tools – especially Descript – made this project possible. Many times as I worked on this show, I remembered – with horror – the hours and hours I used to spend transcribing interview recordings in J-school, back when auto-transcription software either didn’t really exist, wasn’t good enough yet, or was out of my college-student price range. Being able to delegate that task to a machine was a game-changer – and was also occasionally hilarious, like the time it mis-transcribed “gender dysmorphia” as “gendered smurfing.”

I feel like making this show made me a better listener, and especially a better active listener. I took detailed notes during every interview, and found it so helpful that I’ve started doing it during regular conversations with loved ones sometimes, because it really does help me listen and process what I’m hearing better.

This was the most heavy-duty interviewing I’d done since J-school, and back then, I used to interview people face-to-face a lot of the time, which allowed me to convey things like empathy or non-judgment through facial expression and body language – crucial skills in sex journalism, where a source’s comfort can be the difference between getting the quote of a lifetime and getting no quote at all. But because these recordings were audio-only, I had to convey that stuff through active listening noises, the way I phrased my questions, etc. which was kind of a fun challenge. I will say, though, if I ever do another project of this kind, I think video calls – or, ideally, in-person interviews – might be the better way to go, if technology and pandemics allow.

Organizing clips into scripts was the hardest part, the part that took the most time and thought. During the process, I read and re-read all 35 of my interview transcripts so many times that, if you were to ask me about some random subtopic within the realm of the Magic Wand, I could probably rattle off some specific quotes about it from specific interviews. It was cool to reach that level of familiarity with the material I was working with, and reminded me a lot of when I wrote my two books. I don’t often get an opportunity to do such deep work these days, since digital media is (in many cases) about churning out fresh content, fast, forever.

I only cried during one interview, but I laughed during a lot of them.

Strangely enough, I didn’t have a lot of Magic Wand orgasms while making this series. It would have felt like putting down your paintbrush, grabbing an apple from your still-life’s tableau, and taking a big wet bite. I held it on a pedestal in my mind, though, examining it from all angles. Magic Wands were strewn around my apartment. Sometimes I soothed sore muscles with one after a day of writing about the damn thing.

But speaking of using the Magic Wand: When I submitted the last script and final batch of voiceovers to my editor, and was therefore done with the project, my body spent the next ~week in an explosion of libido. I gave myself 20 orgasms in 5 days, which works out to roughly one orgasm every 4 waking hours. (For comparison’s sake, I normally jerk off maybe 3-5 times a week.) It was pretty wild, and flew in the face of everything I thought I knew about my own sexual response, frankly. I attribute it to a mix of 1) ovulation, 2) smoking more weed for fibro pain relief during the day because I no longer had to worry about clouding my faculties, and 3) the joy and relief of having finished such a big project.

Another part of it, though, is that the show’s theme of sexual freedom reminded me of the importance of pleasure. People had emphasized to me in these interviews, again and again, that sexuality isn’t something to be ashamed of – whether you use a vibrator or don’t, whether you’re kinky or vanilla, queer or straight, trans or cis. A lot of my own guilt about pleasure comes from the fear that I don’t deserve it unless I “work hard enough” and have “earned” it – and so I think, even if I had ever wanted to jerk off 4-5 times in one day before, I never would have let myself, because it would have been a “waste of time” better spent working.

So it was interesting that in finishing Making Magic, I not only gave myself that justification by having completed something huge, but also reminded myself, through the making of the show itself, that pleasure doesn’t need to be contingent on anything. We “deserve” pleasure because we’re capable of feeling it. As long as we can balance our lives appropriately around the pleasure we want to feel (i.e. not get fired or divorced because we’re double-clicking the mouse too much), I don’t see any good reason to think ourselves undeserving of it, even great amounts of it.

It’s moments like these that make me miss my therapist, who I stopped seeing earlier this year when I felt able to – because I know I could’ve said to them, “I jerked off 20 times in 5 days and it was a sign of personal growth, actually,” and they’d be like, “Hell yeah! Tell me more.”

Anyway, thanks so much to all of you who’ve listened to Making Magic, and to all of you who will go and listen to it now, after reading about it here 😘 It was a joy to make, and it really did work some magic in my life, as the Magic Wand so often does.