In this final bonus episode of season 1, host Tod Maffin answers listener questions about the future of the Mirror Falls podcast. He outlines the anticipated timeline for season 2 (mid‑late summer to early fall), explains that he still works a day job and needs listener support to free up writing time. He promotes several ways to support the show: a pay‑what‑you‑want downloadable book of scripts (book.mirrorfalls.com), merchandise (merch.mirrorfalls.com), and a general support site (support.todmaffin.com). He reassures fans that the series will retain its heart‑warming, Vinyl‑Cafe‑style tone while adding more intrigue, and confirms that the mysterious phone number in the show is real. He provides world‑building hints, noting that Mirror Falls is loosely based on the real Vancouver Island community of Holberg, with Ashford Bay standing in for Port Hardy, and teases the upcoming “Project 573” mystery. Maffin discusses his writing process, including the use of Aeon Timeline to keep character ages consistent, and recounts several major rewrites prompted by timeline errors and real‑world events (e.g., a mass shooting in Tumbler Ridge). He describes audio‑mixing challenges across different playback devices and his efforts to balance music levels. He confirms consulting Canadian military intelligence for accuracy on rank and terminology. He cites his creative influences—The Vinyl Café, Lake Wobegon, and the TV series Lost—explaining how they shape the show’s blend of character backstories, mystery, and twisty plots. He projects the story will span three (possibly four) seasons, with additional towns and stories potentially expanding beyond the core mystery. The episode ends with a lyrical interlude and a brief ad for the Red Circle podcast platform.
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Hello, it's Tod. Welcome to the final bonus episode of season 1 of Mirror Falls. This episode has big spoilers. If you have not yet heard the episode with Mohit's story in it, I strongly suggest you stop listening to this right now and go listen to that. In this episode, I will answer your questions like, when is season 2? Will this be on the CBC? And maybe the one you're asking right now if you just finished listening to the season finale: what the hell did I just listen to? So first of all, when is the next season? It's a few months away. I know where this story is gonna go. I know what is happening. Um, you may be getting a sense of what's happening and where it's going. I have not written any of those episodes yet. I got a lot ahead of me. We've got the Nanaimo infusion, we've got some things happening. I think I'm going to start this in the summer writing, so you could probably expect it, if I've got everything right, mid to late summer, maybe early fall at the latest. These episodes take me a long time to write, and I need to carve time away from my day job, which I still have, to do that. And I could use your help with that. If you wanna support this podcast and you're interested in hearing season 2 become a reality, there's a couple of ways you can support it. First of all, as you may have heard in the closing credits of that last episode, there's now a book, sort of. It's the complete scripts of every episode of Mirror Falls, including the bonus episodes. And it contains a special bonus, a map of the town, just kinda like as if it were in a tourist brochure. I think you'll really like it. And it is available at book— mirrorfalls.com. It's a downloadable book, it's not a real, uh, book. You can read it on any tablet or any laptop or any phone, and it's pay what you want. So if you have the means to support the podcast, I'd love that. If not, you can download it for free, just put $0 in the, in the price section there. There's also merch, there's, uh, stickers and t-shirts, and those are available at merch.mirrorfalls.com. Or if you'd just like to support my work generally speaking, I would greatly appreciate that as well. That's that is at support.todmaffin.com. Okay, answers to your questions. About 50 people have heard this episode before it actually went live. I use them as kind of a bit of a beta test. So these are their questions that they had. And so we're gonna start with the question that almost everyone asked, which is, what the hell just happened to our nice little show? Is this gonna become a dark show? Why is it suddenly full of suspense? I thought I was in for the Vinyl Cafe and Lake Wobegon. Do not worry. All of those heartwarming stories will still always be part of Mirror Falls. Everyone is safe in town. No one is dead. Um, and it will still be the, the, the story that you're expecting. It's just there's a little bit more intrigue. But if you're wanting to relax with episodes and feel wonderful things about being human, this podcast will always be that. The second question that I got: is that phone number real? Yes, it is, and I control it, and you could try calling it, and it even has some instructions that you could, uh, that you could follow as well. Uh, will you tell us what Project 573 is? Yes, I will. You will find out what Project 573 is in the second season. If you kind of want a hint though, uh, you could look up what Project 572 was in actual real-world Canadian history. Can you just give us a hint? Yes, there are hints all over this series. Why was Raymond Koreshaw in town? Why does Maureen seem to get every grant she applies for almost? Why did they never find Father Marcel's body? Why do people keep seeing military helicopters? Why was Mary George right, or was she? Is Mirror Falls based on a real town on Vancouver Island? Sort of. So geographically, when I was putting this in my head, it's where Holberg is. Um, so the story is not about Holberg. Holberg is a real community on Vancouver Island. Um, it's very small, it's about 30 people or so. Uh, it's an old forestry town, I think. There is a pub, uh, there, uh, there's a general store, uh, there's a place where there's, there's like a— there's cabins, and that's about it. It's real— it's really not— I'd love to go there one day. So in my head, geographically, that's where, um, uh, that's where Mirror Falls is located. Um, but this is not a story about Holberg. Also, Ashford Bay in my mind is where Port Hardy is. So if you want to kind of like look on a, on a Google Map, you can see that on northern Vancouver Island you drive up the main highway, there's Port Hardy— that's fictionally Ashford Bay— uh, and then if you basically go west, uh, eventually you will run into Holtberg. Kind of in— also in my head I feel that it's a quite a bit of a longer distance between, um, between Ashford Bay and Mirror Falls than between where Port Hardy and Holberg actually are, but there you go. Have you ever had to rewrite an entire episode? Yes, a couple of times actually. First of all, the ages were all wrong in one of them. I realized— so part of the reason this is a complicated series to write is that, as you may be discovering now, having heard the finale, there is another plot happening. At the same time. It's happening in another location, uh, along the same sort of trajectory. Um, but I am having to keep track of two different storylines and two different timelines and two different groups of characters, um, to make sure that they're the right ages and everything. And I realized I bought this great software called Aeon Timeline or something. Um, and it's— I think it's meant for novelists or something, but you basically put in like all of your characters and all of the dates that things happen on, and then you can see sort of on a timeline how they all fit together. You know, was this person in town when you claimed they were? And all those sorts of things. And I discovered when I did that, that the age that I had given Guy would have meant that he bought the golden wok at age 7. So I had to— I had to fix that. That required a lot of kind of reworking, actually, going back and fixing a whole bunch of stuff to make sure that the ages sort of all worked out as well. I also rewrote, um, the Zuniqua story after Tumbler Ridge. Um, so I'm not sure when you'll be listening to this, but recently in the last couple of weeks, uh, we had a mass shooting in Canada, uh, in Tumbler Ridge, and children were killed. The week after was the Zuniqua episode. Originally, that episode contained a bit of a kind of a darker portrayal of the Zuniga's story. Um, that story involves a, uh, a mythical creature who kills children, so I rewrote that, uh, to make it not quite as abrupt. Is this going to be a CBC show? Sure, I'd love it. I've not talked to CBC, uh, they've not reached out to me. Of course, I don't think it's on their radar at all, uh, but I mean, I, I'd love to, uh, I think what would be cool is having a show like this that I guess is kind of reminiscent of Vinyl Cafe but different. You you know, more character backstories and so on. But I like— I really like kind of this mod, and I'll probably do— I'll probably do more of it, of having an episode and then having a bonus part or a bonus episode or an additional chunk that sort of explains the real world history, the real world, how Canada fit into that. Um, I'm not certain I did it very well, to be honest, you know, kind of as bonus episodes that abruptly are not in the real world or not in the fictional world. But I don't know, it feels like something that could work on CBC. So who knows? Oh yeah, this one. The music is too loud. So here's the problem with mixing audio. When you listen on a phone, like if you're listening through a phone speaker, the music probably sounds a little bit louder than you want it to. When you're listening on speakers, or maybe in the car, you will find that the exact same music probably sounds quieter than you want it to. Uh, and that's just the way that music, uh, is. Um, so when the speaker, when the actual device that is driving the audio is small, it tends to lift up ambient sound, like sound effects, like music and so on. So I'm trying to have a balance between it sounding fine if you are listening through the speakers on your phone, or if you're listening in your car, or if you're listening on headphones. Professional audio studios have 3 or 4 sets of speakers and they try to listen through each of those. I have tried to do that. I have mixed the show down. I've listened on my big studio speakers. Then I mix it down. I make it an MP3 file. I've put it on my phone. I've listened in my phone. I've gone back and changed the mix. So I've tried my best. I know sometimes it's difficult. I will keep tweaking it. Did you consult the military? Sort of. So one of the things I'm really proud of with, um, especially the previous episode where we learn about, uh, this woman who, um, I think it's fair to say we all have now learned has defected or have— has created a breach of confidentiality. Um, so yeah, I did consult a couple of people who have— who, uh, had been in Canadian military intelligence and learned a bunch of stuff. You know, like I had, for instance, I'd called what she did recon, and they were able to quickly correct that and say recon's an American term. Canadians would call that recce. So like just little things like that. I had, I had her, her rank wrong. I think I'd called her a lieutenant or a sergeant or something. And they said, no, she would not have been that. She would have like maybe have been a warrant officer. That would have been about the right level of responsibility, the right level of seniority. So they were super, super, super helpful. I would have put them in the credits, but they specifically asked not to be in the credits. So I will honor that as well. But yes, there was a lot of, a lot of consultation with two people who were incredibly helpful. Is there a reason the town is called Mirror Falls? There is. And you will find out why in season 2. How many episodes will there be in full? How many seasons will there be? So I think that there will be The story itself will take me 3 seasons to tell. The full story about the town's mystery and the secrets. There are other towns involved, not to be too much of a spoiler, so we may have sort of room for their stories as well. But I think that the town— yeah, I think once we resolve what this secret is, how the residents of Mirror Falls learn about the secret, and how they respond to the secret, I know where that's going. That's gonna take 3 seasons, maybe 4, but probably I can do it in 3 seasons. And then there'll be stories about the town and its people for as long as I keep writing the show. So it may evolve more into a kind of Vinyl Cafe, like Wobegon kind of model eventually. And we'll, you know, we'll call back to the secret that existed, but do not worry, this has not suddenly become a dark espionage. Uh, and then the last question is where— what were my influences for writing it? Certainly Vinyl Cafe, Lake Wobegon, genius storytellers. Um, I don't genuinely— I do not consider myself a good writer as much as a good mimic. The other series, um, that is heavily influenced me was Lost from ABC TV 20 years— was it 20 years ago or so? Uh, if you watched Lost, you may have also found that there are, um, you know, sort of Dharma Initiative kind of things going on. Especially, by the way, I'll say this again, if you call the phone number and you follow the instructions at that phone number, um, you'll find it quite Dharma Initiative. Um, there are things in the real world, um, that are out there for you to find. There is a Blue Sky account, there is a Project 573 Blue Sky account that you can go to on Blue Sky and search for Project 573. So yeah, there's all sorts of fun things like that, which there was in Lost as well. And one of the things I really loved about Lost was that they would have these deep, deep backstories. Like, sometimes more than half the episode would be backstories of characters, and I loved that. So in that way, it's different than, say, a vinyl cafe where, you know, you knew David Morley and the kids, but you didn't find out a ton about other people. I wanted to have sort of richer you know, tell the stories of people with, like, the show's tagline: decent people, complicated pasts, and a mystery hiding in plain sight. And the other thing that Lost did really well was it had these great moments of like, I'm sorry, what the hell just happened? And now this is pre-streaming, right? So this was way before streaming. So it would happen like it would air weekly and then you'd have to wait for a week to find out what happened. And they always had some crazy twist plot. You know, you discover there are polar bears on a deserted tropical island, you're like, why? So I kind of wanted that feeling as well. Anyway, those are the questions of the 40 or 50 people or so that, uh, that listen to it. Thank you so much for, um, for listening to this season. I hope you will be with me for the next season. Again, probably, probably like August, September, somewhere in that range. If you want to help me clear some time from my day job, um, so that I can begin writing it, and you want to support the podcast, you can download the book. You can pay $0 if you want to, or you can support it financially at book.mirrorfalls.com. There are t-shirts, um, and stickers, both of which made right here on Vancouver Island. Canadian company. Even the shirts are sewn on Vancouver Island. That's at merch.mirrorfalls.com. Or if you just want to support the work, generally speaking, that I do the Nanaimo Infusion, the Healthcare Infusion Project, and so on. That website is support.todmaffin.com. So thank you for listening. Thank you for telling me you love the characters. And I will see you again in a few months, hopefully, with season 2 of Mirror Falls.
<LYRICS>I am strolling along, just minding my business, humming a song. I'm happy by myself, not a care in the world.</LYRICS> This is the life, just me, myself, and I. I am watching the clouds up in the sky, all but laughing out loud. I'm telling you why I'm living the life, just me, myself, and I. I used to think that life was cold.— lonely. When you up and left me, sadness overwhelmed me. Oh me, I'm out and about, painting the town red. I'm coming around, there ain't no doubt about it. I'm no longer blue, so glad we are through. Just me, myself, and I. Last night I cried, I thought I'd die without you. Those tears are gone, no, I don't even care about you. I'm happy again, life is a blessing if I think of you. Ain't a thing that I've been missing. I'm here on my own, just singing this song. Now that you're gone, I'm happy alone, just me, myself, and I.
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