What does Foreward mean?

When you write a podcast series, you start by making an outline.  It’s important to know where the story begins and where it ends. I had a hard time deciding where the story of the Foreward podcast should start.   

I’ve wanted to create a fictional story based loosely on my own experiences for a long time.  I originally planned to skip the painful memories from my teenage years, because the shooting that happened at my high school is hard for me to talk about.  

I hate it when I meet someone new, and that’s the first thing they know about me.  Every time I walk into a job interview or a first date, I wonder if they’ve googled me.  I wonder if they’ve seen the picture of me from when I was 15 and horrified.

As I wrote my outline, I realized that none of the later stories of my life make sense without including this first set of disturbing stories. 

I had to include this piece of my story as a foreword to the rest, in order to contextualize the bigger picture.  I don’t see Season 1 as my first chapter; it’s a preface.  It’s like the foreword of a book.  The foreword introduces the story, but it’s not the most important part.  It tells the reader how the rest of the story “came to be.”  It speaks to the cast of characters that helped create the foundation for what’s to come.  

Season 1 is a foreword to the rest of my story, but it’s also a play on words.  Each of the characters find their way forward even in the face of impossible obstacles.  I combined the 2 words, foreword and forward, in choosing a title: Foreward.  

Foreward begins my sophomore year of high school (when the shooting happened) and ends as I approach 30 and begin building the Foreward podcast. In the span of those years, you’ll hear a decade worth of stories about what it means to move forward for the 4 main characters featured in the podcast.

It’s written like a play, which means you’ll hear conversations between characters. It’s like watching a television show without being able to see the screen. A team of actors have worked tirelessly to make sure each character is brought to life. Someday there will be many seasons of Foreward. For now, we start at the beginning.

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