Hello all, I have been hard at work looking to get my screenplay Both Hands In into production, while still learning and growing as a screenwriter. Part of that journey is to reengage with audiences in a way that I haven’t done since Chuck passed away. I have restarted my tiktok account and will be posting semi-regular unscripted/unplanned movie reviews and also detailing my journeys in writing, acting, and still making music at an elderly age. Part of that is learning about Ai, which is not a path i want to explore right now, but I have been challenged by a fellow screen writer to use it outside of my writing and creative projects as a learning tool…
I am not hip or flashy or coming with hot take headlines, so I know I am not in touch with what catches fire on social media, but I hope you check in from time to time as I navigate these waters. Yelling into the void is unsettling, so any feedback and interaction is appreciated.
Also, keep a look out for a crazy, over the top, uncomfortable yet also funny slasher film, Satan’s Peak that recently wrapped shooting in the canton area. Helmed by my buddy James L. Edwards and boasting a really cool cast, the movie will offend almost everyone at some point, but can also entertain for the entire runtime.
Up next, I film a blink and you’ll miss is role in Kingsbury Run detailing Elliot Ness and his time in Cleveland chasing down the torso murderer.
I am not sure acting makes the most sense for me as something to pursue, but I love working with people I trust, producing scripts I believe in. To that end, I have one more role lined up for later this year in an exciting movie, that I cannot announce yet. And possibly something I’m set to film this Summer that I also can’t talk about yet, but it is an intense movie, written and directed by someone I’ve worked with before.
I hope y’all are doing well. Sorry I haven’t had any news on my thriller novel “In The Watershed” I thought we were close to having a home for it a couple times, but nothing happening just yet.
Ages ago, eons ago, I wrote a book. It started with a simple premise involving two friends, one lucky and one not as they went through life competing with each other. When I started the book, I didn’t know there would be a love triangle, but when a female of interest crashed into their lives and joined the fray I was helpless to intervene. The initial idea had the two friends primarily face off in various sports until they both went off into their careers and started families and found new ways to compete. The first thing i wrote for the book was going to be the last line, “and there I was shaking hands with the luckiest man alive” or something close to it.
Around that time, I heard a news story on the radio about a husband and wife who had an argument that caught my attention. I turned out that as they yelled at each other, the husband’s mother-in-law had come over to visit. She heard the commotion outside and called the police. When the officers arrived, the couple had patched things up, but the mother-in-law insisted she didn’t feel safe, so the officers took the husband into custody. He got understandably angry and resisted enough that they took him to jail to cool down. It happened to be the start of a holiday weekend, so he was stuck in jail for several days. The couple was supposed to travel, but he missed his flight.
I can’t recall if the wife ended up going on the trip without him…but i think that’s what happened. I thought it would be great if the lucky character from my book was on that flight and he hit it off with the wife or they had been old friends and they reconnected and she fell for him.
I initially intended this story of lucky vs. unlucky guys to be a short story or possibly a novella that would fit into a novel I had a rough outline for and a few chapters typed out. The idea being that a character from the novel would tell the story within the larger novel, but it turned out that the two competitors, who were now also competing for the same gal, had more to their story than I realized. The larger novel took place around a plane crash, so the story of the arguing couple totally fit and I thought it would be super cool if she was on the flight and she was the one telling the story, but…
When I started fleshing out the lucky vs. unlucky story it grew way too long and complicated to remain inside of another novel. It became its own fully realized book. I wrote it out and rewrote it a few times as I learned more about writing and lived a little life of my own.
I found a small publisher, who suggested a few edits to help it fit their more romance genre books, and after another rewrite they published the book in 2015. The launch of the book was a mess…partially my fault and partially theirs, which was a huge bummer. I hated the cover they designed…I hated the little bit of marketing they wanted to do, and worse, they abandoned the new imprint they spoke about which would focus on sports romance books, so it really stuck out with the rest of their offerings.
Now, I dunno, it’s not a world-changing novel…it’s got its charm, but it isn’t a classic they will talk about in class decades later, so it was never going to be a hit or sell a million copies, but…I like it and I worked fucking hard on it. Yes, you can say every author works hard and their first few novels are typically awful, but…
Anyway, five quick years pass by and I get the rights back to the book. It sits around collecting dust as covid hits and all that jazz. At some point I opened it up and started to do a quick edit. I recognized some of it’s faults and cut loose some things that I was too stubborn to delete the first go-round, but I didn’t want to change the spirit in which it was written…in a small house with babies being born and struggling paycheck to paycheck and with that hopeful gleam and magic of pushing through, you know?
But, then it sat for a while. Why?
I wrote a couple other books and signed with an agent. She mentioned that after I got a book published I might find a better spot to re-release the lucky vs. unlucky story. Oh, just to backtrack, the original title for the book was like “laughing at the luckiest man alive” or something…Since the story ended up more about snippets of life over a long time with a theme of determination and with the sports angle, I changed the title to “A Life of Inches.”
WARNING: If you look up that title, you’ll see some sketchy books about John Holmes (whoever that is, right?), so proceed with caution.
Back when I wrote the book, and had planned on self-publishing, I hired a famous Italian artist named sanjulian to paint a cover of the book. I love the cover and even though it was expensive and no one uses painted covers anymore, I was super excited to have it.
I pulled the trigger yesterday and put it up as an ebook only on Amazon and was able to use that painting and some extra elements to design the cover. I dig it:
anyway, now it is out in the world and all i can do is hope people find it and give it a chance. If you are enrolled in the KDP program through Amazon it is free to read, if not, it’s only 1.99. You can follow this link to it here:
I have other stories about the book and a lot of great memories from writing it, but those can wait until after you have read it and hopefully recommended it to a friend. Thanks.
Posted inmy writing, this guy!|Comments Off on the determination to re-release a book about determination
In Almost Famous, Jimmy Fallon says, “If you think Mick Jagger will still be out there trying to be a rock star at age 50, you’re sadly, sadly mistaken.”
While I’m not 50, I can see it looming closer through the windshield. Also, sure, you can sneer and point out that aside from a crush on Rae Dawn Chong (before I was married of course), Mick and me have very little in common, but I have tried to write and record music through my adult life on my own terms. I am proud of many songs I’ve been a part of and can except responsibility for the ones I don’t feel the same affinity for.
Writing and recording music is a crazy weird process that provides many challenges for a dyslexic, adhd, brain like mine and when you add other people to the mix(and money restraints and technology limitations and a dozen other issues) it becomes quite the mission impossible.
The Firmary is a rock band that I have been involved with since 2003 (though we took a severe break between 2006 and, uh, 2021-ish). In that time we have written a lot of songs i really enjoy, but without a set drummer and other factors our live shows and recordings haven’t always matched the level of the songwriting. In fact, all we have managed to release since coming back is a seven song EP and a couple digital singles.
Over the past two years, we have played a handful of shows while working with 6 or so different drummers (some live and some studio guys helping us record) and have tried and tried and tried to finish our second batch of songs. The process has been a grind and our progress has slowed to a crawl at times, but it appears we have five new songs close to ready to share. These songs are not the whole batch we originally intended, but they represent a trying era for The Firmary and deserve a life outside of our collective minds.
I really dig how these songs have turned out and I find myself excited to hear the EP, titled “Get Up”, named after one of the songs on the EP. Adam Probert has taken on the bulk of the mixing duties for these songs, which include the first two songs started by Joshua to get recorded and the first song started by me, which is probably the least firmary-sounding song ever recorded by The Firmary.
Our friend, Sam Hudson helped us with the cover by snapping some photos of herself (see image below). She probably didn’t know the risk she was taking in volunteering her time, talents, and image on an EP that for all she knew could be terrible. Here is the working cover for our EP:
But, Sam, it’s too late to turn back now.
When will this EP see the light of day? I have no idea, but soon-ish seems like an honest answer. will there be physical copies? No one uses CDs anymore, and we can’t afford to press records, so…maybe. We’re looking at options. I am an old curmudgeon who still prefers physical media, so maybe a small batch of CDs for those of you like me. Didn’t you post that you were possibly done with recording and writing music like five months ago? Yes, and the post still stands. I wanted to see this release through to the end and thought it would be done in late Spring/early Summer…which shows how naive and hopeful I remain after 25 years of delays.
Will The Firmary continue? That’s a question for the other guys. I plan on writing and recording music in some form or another until I die, but the band isn’t driven by me. William, Joshua, and Adam are guys I respect and admire and have been lucky enough to work with on various projects through the years. They deserve a solid singer with drive and passion and talent (hard to find a better looking singer than me though). If that is me, awesome…or if we say, ‘hey, this has been a tough process and we were getting older and need to set The Firmary aside (even if just temporarily), I’ll support that 100%. Lord knows I don’t plan on being onstage moving and shaking like Mick Jagger forever.
Posted inUncategorized|Comments Off on Making Music still? Really?
Ages and ages ago, I wrote a mystery/thriller book based on the stories I grew up reading from Agatha Christie, Les Roberts, and Dan Simmons mixed with more modern bits. The book was ‘finished’ around 2014…
At the same time I wrote/edited/shopped a coming of age sports book called A Life of Inches. I signed with a small publisher for that book in late 2014 and the rest of that story is a head-scratching series of frustrating events, leading to the book arriving DOA. As I floundered, trying to promote the book and shop my mystery novel (set in the same world), I took a two year detour to play conga for Chuck Mosley. When he passed away in 2017, I was knocked back a million steps and felt completely lost and broken.
To help me make sense of the world, I started writing a book about my 20 year friendship with Chuck. It was around this time I tried explaining to my wife my many failings and how I still didn’t understand how to navigate a world in which I had failed so many times in so many ways.
In 2019, five years after finishing my mystery/thriller, I filmed a part in a found footage movie “Dwellers’, which helped me refocus on my creativity. I took another look at my mystery/thriller and realized I had much more life experience to inject into the story. This time, when I sent it out to agents, I got more interest, and signed on with one. She delivered the manuscript to a handful of publishers and we got a few rejections peppered with decent feedback. One publisher (a big one) expressed some interest and asked me to outline a potential sequel to the book.
I spent the Winter watching my Chuck book get released and fall on deaf ears, another gut-wrenching failure while I excitedly outlined a sequel/a book I hadn’t planned on being a thing. I really got excited over the set up and felt high hopes as I turned it in.
The publisher passed in the Spring of 2020 as the world shut down…many publishers suspended new manuscript procurement for an indefinite time. I jumped in to help my friend finish a hastily-made quarantine short film, “The Nutshell” which was fun, frustrating, and super educational for me. I also filmed a bit on a movie called “The Other Side of Darkness”.
As the world reopened in 2021, I reformed my old band The Firmary and tried like Hell to get the ball rolling (doesn’t anyone drum anymore?!). I lost touch with my agent, certainly getting the impression she had no desire to put anymore time into my mystery.
In 2023, Sara Panza roped me into filming a few clips for the Cleveland Auto Show to use on social media. Her being an editor and smart and all, i asked her to take a look at my mystery/thriller. She agreed and ended up sending me great notes for the first half of the book.
Now in 2024, ten years after the book was ‘completed’, I figure it is time to just push it out into the world and let it have a life outside of my head. I love this book, warts and all. I understand why it is harder to market then a traditional mystery, making it a tough sell to a traditional publisher, but I believe if people give it a chance they’ll dig it.
Skyler Willett over at Popgorn design created a kickass cover, which you can see below.
IN THE WATERSHED will be out in the world later this year. When? Good question. We have some more editing to do, but after that, out it comes. I’ll set up a presale link when I have a definite date, but I wanted to announce this now, so people could sign up to my email list and get the scoop. I plan on posting more about this book up through the release.
thanks all for sticking with this shell of a man as he tries to rejoin the living.
So, the trailer for Bunker Heights, a cool movie I did some work on dropped a while back and I wanted to share it. The film was developed by Drew Fortier (Dwellers) and he gathered a heck of a team, including co-producer and actress Hannah Fierman to pull this movie off. It is much larger in scope than anything else I’ve filmed on to date. Can’t wait to see the final edit. Have you seen any great movies lately?
