In my ongoing effort to not become one of those authors who starts a book series and never finishes it, I’ve kept my nose to the grindstone recently, focusing on the actual writing part of my author journey. But I thought I’d drop a few quick lines here on the blog to give an update on what I’ve been up to.
Burgh to Burg: My Solo Writer’s Retreat By Train
995 Pages and Still Not Done
Do It Anyway: An Award-Winning Sunday That Almost Didn't Happen
This is the story of a long but rewarding Sunday, with an outcome I didn’t expect. In 2022, I wrote a screenplay called Last Night at the Mall. I’m not a screenwriter. But somewhere between the last book I wrote and the book I was supposed to be writing next, an idea jumped into my head that I couldn’t shake no matter how hard I tried. I just didn’t think a novel would do it justice. But I could see it as a movie.
"Last Night at the Mall" goes to the Phoenixville Film Festival
My screenplay, Last Night at the Mall, has been officially accepted into the Phoenixville Film Festival! To celebrate, I recorded a quick video where I read some selected scenes from the screenplay.
Logline: Four high school grads spend their last night before college doing the only thing there is to do in small-town America in 2006, hang out at the local shopping mall, but quickly split up on diverging quests to hold on to their emo glory days, find love, and pull off the most juvenile heist of all time.
Writing Last Night at the Mall was a blast and took up a lot of my writing time in 2022. It’s a coming-of-age comedy and a major departure from anything I’ve written in the past. I don't know what, if anything, will come of my budding screenwriting endeavors, but I really had fun learning a new storytelling process and am looking forward to writing more films in the future.
Only a couple of people have read Last Night at the Mall, and this is the first time I've shared any of it publicly.
You can check out the video on Patreon.
Enjoy!
Corey
What's Your Book About? Author Q&A - Science Fiction Noir Thriller
I initially thought that a murder investigation in a science fiction atmosphere would be downright dull. But then it struck me. What if technology had advanced to a point where DNA wasn’t reliable anymore and became inadmissible in a court of law? Criminal investigations would have to take a step backward. They would have to rely on old-school methods. And that’s exactly what happens in this book.
Glossy or Matte Finish? Amazon KDP Hardcover Self-Publishing Tips with Side-by-Side Comparisons
To celebrate the ten-year book birthday of the release of my first novel, I wanted to try bringing out some new editions of my fantasy series. This time, in hardcover. This was a new one for me, so I had to order a couple of rounds of proofs before I could really nail down the look I was going for. I decided to share the results here so you can see some of the different settings and how they turned out.
New Convention Dates and Festival Appearances Added
The Making of Tolkien’s Universe: The Full Story Behind The Lord of the Rings
Why did J.R.R. Tolkien’s consider his own universe to be woefully flawed and ultimately incomplete? Why are there so many inconsistencies in world-building between The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings? Why are there no Hobbits in The Silmarillion? And who REALLY wrote The Lord of the Rings? Here’s how one man’s creative adaptability in the face of failure led to the creation of his masterpiece.
Critical Hit: Lessons from Critical Role and The Legend of Vox Machina
What’s the secret to overnight success? What do successful creators have that others don’t? How do you persevere as a creator in the face of struggle? And how did “a small band of unlikely heroes” take a weekly live-streamed tabletop RPG show and turn it into one of the most successful original animated series in recent memory?