One morning earlier this year, I was woken in the usual way – by a ginger cat who had decided it was high time I woke up and gave him some attention. It was while he had successfully achieved his aim that a thought seemed to appear from nowhere.
I wonder if I could make a podcast?
This was perhaps a slightly ambitious notion to have as the sun was rising and prior to caffeine intake, given that I had never made a podcast before and knew very little about audio recording, editing, podcast hosting, distribution, microphones, loudness levels or any of the other things I was shortly going to become surprisingly familiar with.
What I did have was a ginger cat who was about to get more attention than he’d bargained for.
More specifically, I had The Woes of Weasley: The Diary of an Orange Cat, my book written from the point of view of Weasley — that thoughtful, slightly neurotic ginger cat living in a small harbour community in New Zealand.
The book had always seemed to lend itself to being read aloud. Weasley has a very particular view of the world. He worries about things. He misunderstands humans. He takes himself quite seriously. And, like most cats, he has absolutely no doubt that he is the most sensible member of the household.
So I wondered what would happen if I turned his diary into a comedy fiction podcast.
The answer, initially, was that I had an awful lot to learn. I had to work out how to record decent audio, how to edit it, how to use a microphone properly, how to remove the inevitable coughs, clicks and other mysterious noises, and how to make the finished recording sound reasonably professional. I learned about things I’d never previously had any reason to know existed. Compression. High-pass filters. LUFS. I learned that Audacity is audio recording and editing software and not, in this instance, a state of brave and fearless daring. I learned that recording something again is often considerably quicker than spending twenty minutes trying to repair three seconds of audio. And I learned that technology has an uncanny ability to develop an entirely new problem the moment you’ve finally solved the previous one.
Somewhere along the way, however, The Diary of an Orange Cat began to take shape.
The podcast isn’t simply an audiobook of The Woes of Weasley. I adapted the material into episodes and gradually developed a style that worked in audio. There were sound effects, occasional internal voices, cats having meetings, neighbourhood disputes, wildlife incidents, lockdowns, catnip crises and a great deal of baffling human behaviour.
At the centre of it all was Weasley, faithfully recording events in his diary and attempting to make sense of a world that persistently refuses to behave as he thinks it should.
The first episode, Meet Weasley, went out in March. Before I knew it, I had four episodes. Then, every Sunday at 7pm, another one appeared. And eventually there were twenty-four of them. The final episode, Time to Go Home, was released on 26 July 2026.
Finishing it felt surprisingly strange. For months, Sunday had meant another episode. There was recording and editing to do, descriptions to write, promotional clips to make and an assortment of social-media platforms demanding different dimensions, captions, thumbnails and other forms of technological appeasement. And then suddenly there wasn’t. I’d made a complete 24-episode comedy fiction series.
More surprising still, people were actually listening to it. Not in enormous numbers. Weasley has yet to knock Joe Rogan off his perch, but listeners have been finding the podcast in New Zealand and overseas, and some have stayed for remarkably long stretches. Since the final episode appeared, people have continued discovering earlier episodes and working their way through the series. For something I began largely because I thought, I wonder if I could do this? That has been rather lovely.
Would I do it again?
Ask me immediately after an hour spent arguing with captions, microphones or video-editing software and the answer might have been unprintable. But yes, I would. Because making The Diary of an Orange Cat taught me something beyond the technical business of making a podcast. Although thinking about it now, perhaps “taught” isn’t quite the right word. I realised I’d been here before. More than twenty years ago, I had an idea for an Excel freight calculator despite barely knowing how to use Excel. I learned what I needed to know as I went along and somehow made it work. Apparently, this is how I do things.
There is enormous satisfaction in doing something you don’t actually know how to do. You don’t have to understand everything before you begin. Sometimes you begin with what you have, discover what you need to know next, learn it, get something wrong, fix it, and carry on. Twenty-four episodes later, you discover that somewhere along the way you became a podcaster.
And Weasley, naturally, believes the whole thing was his idea.
The Diary of an Orange Cat is a complete 24-episode comedy fiction podcast based on The Woes of Weasley: The Diary of an Orange Cat.
Watch the trailer