Welcome to the Romance of the Three Kingdoms podcast.

This is episode 154.

So, here we are, the end of a journey that started on April 9th, 2014, when I hit publish on the

first episode of this podcast, an episode that I foolishly numbered, episode zero, creating all sorts

of metadata annoyances for myself for the next 154 episodes.

I had no idea what kind of audience would be out there for this project.

Well, after four years, one month, five days,

175 total episodes, more than 81 hours of recordings,

700,000 plus words of scripts,

two computers, two crashed hard drives, and one lightning strike,

I have my answer, and it's beyond anything I could have imagined.

Now, by industry standards, our numbers are by no means huge,

but it's definitely bigger than what I would have expected,

and the enthusiasm that I've

seen from you is simply unparalleled.

So before anything else, let me say once again, thank you so much for checking out my

little corner of the podcast universe and for dragging others into it.

You guys are simply awesome.

Now, many of you have asked what I'm going to do next, and I'll get into that in a little bit.

But first, I want to do some reflection on the novel and the podcast.

I explained back in the first episode what the novel means to me.

I see it as a quintessential part of

...