This is the seventh Captn OffScript bonus, and the last one of Season 2. After a main episode spent in the trenches, the vanished illustration work, the difficult year, the job listings he didn’t want to read, I asked Simon Flöter one question that flips all of it upside down.

If you woke up tomorrow with complete financial stability, never having to worry about money again, what would you work on?

Money ran through our whole conversation. His parents’ war-generation fear that there’d be none. The compromises that fear shaped. The year that made the fear feel justified. So I wanted to end somewhere else entirely: with the work that’s waiting underneath all of it.

His first reaction made me smile. He’d finish things. He has so many started projects that the freedom wouldn’t mean beginning something new, it would mean finally completing what’s already there.

The letters

Then he told me about the letters, and I went quiet.

Simon’s father found a bundle of letters his grandfather wrote to his grandmother, from the 1930s in Germany and onwards, through the war years. Love letters, mixed with the small facts of daily life. Simon barely knew his grandfather, who died when Simon was around seventeen. And now here’s this man, young, in love, writing to the woman who would become Simon’s grandmother, in one of the darkest places and times imaginable.

His dream project is to turn them into something he calls an online timepiece. Categorise the letters, sort them chronologically so you can read them like a book, and make them searchable. The old words and strange jargon would be highlighted, so you could check, live, what a term meant, what was happening in history at the moment a line was written. The experience of two people in love, talking to each other across years, with the world’s context one tap away.

He’s clear-eyed about what’s in there. It’s the 1930s in Germany, and parts of it are, in his word, problematic. He isn’t building a shrine. What draws him is the human side, which he calls kind of beautiful, and he’s right. Two ordinary people, in love, writing through history. Design, code and storytelling in one project, which might be the most Simon Flöter brief that could possibly exist.

The rest of the list

The letters aren’t the whole answer. He’s been circling something else for years: a way to fuse everything he does, the graphic design, the web development, the illustration, into one thing. He doesn’t know its shape yet. It needs to be more than a webcomic or an illustrated website, he says. Something specific. Something that feels new. He hasn’t figured it out, and he says so plainly, which after a whole episode about honesty felt exactly right.

And then the smaller dreams, the ones that sound like joy rather than ambition. A zine, made with friends, maybe print, maybe online. And a video game, or at least the art and design of one, an idea he’s carried for as long as he can remember.

I would have lots of stuff to do, he said. I believe him.

Why this is the season’s last word

The main episode was about surviving a brutal year without letting fear make your decisions. This bonus is what that protects: the maker’s list. The projects that have nothing to do with clients or invoices, and everything to do with why he started drawing in the first place.

Every creative person has a version of this list. The letters in a drawer. The zine with friends. The thing you’d finish if money finally stopped shouting. Season 2 ends here on purpose, with that list held up to the light.

Thank you for a whole season of listening. The bonuses live because of the people on the newsletter, so if that’s you, this one and all six before it existed first for you.

— Alen