If we're talking writer's notes...
As soon as they added "double-sided mercenary issue of Shrapnel" to the Kickstarter, I immediately knew I was gonna pitch something about how mercs get paid in the Dark Age and beyond, which became Getting Paid in an Uncertain Age. I submitted my pitch and immediately sat down to write it in a sprint of creativity. So I'm glad the pitch got accepted and I didn't stay up to 1AM writing for nothing! The format of a vox pop quickly came out where you'd have different people talk about the advantages or disadvantages of each option, and it struck me that adding a framing device and a rant about the Sea Foxes would be a nice way to tie it to events in Dominions Divided and Riptides. Amusingly I got feedback on the bit about stock options from two different people saying they didn't think stocks could work that way, but it was based on a personal experience with options I got in my last job when the company I work for. The last of them hadn't vested by the time I quit five years later!
By comparison The Truth About The Bounty Hunter? was almost random, it came about from a discussion with some other freelancers and I mentioned something like "It'd be fun to do something where a bunch of people are talking about the Bounty Hunter's origin and the only thing they agree on is that he was never Vic Travers", and it kinda went from there. Phil was in that chat and was a bit reluctant about the idea at first on account of possibly stepping on the toes of the Bounty Hunter anthology which is coming from the Kickstarter, but was more on-board when I said it'd be more conspiracy theory than anything factual. I didn't do any writing on it until the pitch was accepted though. This one was a bit harder to do, the stuff I had in my mind filled out maybe half of the word count - having someone suggest things we know to be true from the novels, someone suggest the Hunter travels slower-than-light (shamelessly ripped off borrowed from Natural Selection where someone suggests the Red Corsair did it), and then suggesting he's a vampire... or Nicolas Cage. I had the idea that as the discussion would go on that the reader should feel that this is a serious show only to discover it's the equivalent of ancient aliens by the end, and I added the person going on about cthonian urges to lean into that. And then I was still 70 words below the limit and I threw a few more jokes and the oddball segments for the next show in at the end.
