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theboarsbride · 1 year

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Writeblr Introduction📚

Hey, hi, howdy! The name's Josephine, but feel free to call me Jojo (pronouns are she/her), your local monster enthusiast and DILF Collector!

My art and writing updates I post a lot on my social media accounts, which are as follows:

Instagram: jojo.writing.art

Twitter: JojoPenguin_Art

TikTok: jojo.penguin.writes

Discord: Jojo the Rad Penguin#3942

Tumblr: my DMs and ask box are always open!💛

I am ALWAYS down for chatting with and meeting other writers, and engaging with others’ content!! The primary genres I work with are:

- Horror (in varying genres, but primarily Gothic) - Paranormal - Monster Romance (I'm aroace as hell, so expect all my romances to be pretty 'clean' - AKA no erotica to be found here!) - Historical Fiction - Light Fantasy

If any of these genres interest you, feel free to keep on reading about my WIPs below the cut! Now about my general writing style...

Most of the stories I write are inspired by two things: fairytales and horror. A majority of my WIPs are either directly inspired or loosely based on some fairytale, folklore, or myth, and most are part of some genre of horror, whether it be Gothic, psychological, folk, survival, or supernatural. Also a lot of my writing influence comes from authors like Angela Carter, Sarah Waters, Caitlin Starling, Shirley Jackson, and Robin McKinley.

A list of my WIPs are below the cut!

Ghosts Plague These Halls || Novel || Gothic Romance + Historical (1890s) + Paranormal + Gothic Horror + Fairytale Retelling (Beauty and the Beast + Eros and Psyche) || 3rd Draft Edits + My Main WIP

Comp: Crimson Peak + The Bloody Chamber + La Belle et la Bete/Panna a Netvor

Whitechapel, London 1894. Sophie Wickes and her family struggle to survive, melancholy eats away at her father more and more with each passing day, and her passion for cultivating flowers procures no income. She must swallow her pride and set aside her hatred for England’s aristocracy when she’s offered a chance of employment by the reclusive Lord Edgar Cushing to tend the gardens of his Rosenthorne Hall. However, the estate, its gardens, and their master is nothing what Sophie expected. The house? Rotting, dilapidated, hideous. The gardens? The husk of something alive, whimsical, and beautiful. The master? Faceless, nothing more than a voice from the shadows. Despite her fear and anger, Sophie becomes enthralled by the garden’s potential for mystic, untainted beauty, and she develops a close friendship with Lord Cushing, even though he is nothing but a mere whisper of darkness that pleads for her to never seek him out. However, whatever enchantment the gardens and Lord Cushing’s voice bring her shatters as she begins to receive nightly visitations from a crooked-jawed phantom and butterflies who’s wings whisper of a bloody past and the truth behind the faceless lord's gentlemanly masquerade.

Temperance and Mr. Wyrm || Novella || Body Horror + (Monster) Romance + Drama + Magical Realism + Historical (1980s) + Fairytale Retelling (King Lindworm) || 2nd Draft edits

Comp: The Fly... but make it snakes.

In a loose (and bloody) retelling of the King Lindworm folktale set against the backdrop of 1980s Milwaukee, two people try to navigate their unorthodox romance while an arcane, snake-like infection afflicts, and starts to change, one of them. Temperance Cavell, a six-foot tall woman living in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, lives a quiet, unexciting, and demure existence running a convenience store with her mother. But despite her mother's overbearing nature, the nonstop caring of her ailing grandmother, and her near-nonexistent social life, she cannot complain. This life is quiet, she’s (somewhat) in control, and nothing is unexpected… That is until Jack Turner, the motorcycle-riding kleptomaniac with a heart of gold, bursts into her store one Saturday afternoon, and between them a romance reluctantly blooms. But such love is swiftly threatened to shatter when Jack’s body begins to betray him, contorting him into something that is completely, and utterly, non-human.

The Bones We Haunt || Novella || Gothic Horror + Historical Fiction + Period Drama + Romance || 1st Draft + A.K.A the WIP inspired byJojo simping for Ciarán Hinds

Comp: Jane Eyre + Bluebeard's Bride + The Death of Jane Lawrence + Mexican Gothic

November, 1899. While on holiday in Cambridge and attending museum lectures with her mother, Jane Sterling seeks to make this her chance to officially pursue her love of paleontology. While her family encourages the pursuit of passions and challenging rigid social norms, the institutes in place hinder her passion, making her resort to dressing brightly and speaking loudly for attention. Jane's chance comes to reveal itself in the form of the wealthy and reclusive Sir Terence Hayes, who’s come in search for her father, the esteemed paleobotonist Dr. Samson Sterling, to appraise fossils found in his garden. Her mother eagerly volunteers Jane to go in Dr. Sterling’s place as he remains ill in America, and Terence brings her to his isolated family's estate in the vast, deep, muddy marshes of Wolf’s Run. And the land is shrouded in urban legends. There are whispers of 'The Wolf's Run Beast,' the 'Monster of the Marshes,' that haunts the land under the cover of night, and as Terence leaves Jane to her work he is hell-bent that she's to return to Cambridge before nightfall. However, freak storms rage, causing the marshes' waters to rise and wash out the roads in flash floods before Jane has a chance to return, leaving her stranded at Wolf’s Run - and at the mercy of all that lurks there. As night looms, the staff hastily depart, an eerie silence falls, Terence forbids her from even coming near the cellar, and, most importantly, he warns her against leaving her room before dawn. All is merely a strange act to Jane, brushing it off as the eccentricities of an Englishman, until something comes scratching at her door, hungering for her blood. What started as a mere chance at becoming known swiftly becomes a tumultuous game of blood, teeth, survival, love, and salvation - and Jane must prepare to sharpen teeth of her own if she's to survive the horrors of the Wolf's Run marshes.

Upon Her Bloody Horn || Novel || Dark Fantasy + Political Fantasy + Romance || 1st Draft (incomplete) + A.K.A. The WIP inspired by Jojo simping for Crispin Glover

Comp: The Last Unicorn meets Legend (1985) meets Elizabethan history

A unicorn takes on a human disguise to enact revenge against those who have hunted her kind to extinction, only to find herself caught in the middle of bloody kingdom politics and allured by the one-eyed hunter with whom she has a violent history with.

She Wears the Face of a Polar Bear || Novella || Psychological Horror + Historical Horror + Survival Horror + Arctic Gothic || Developing (A.K.A the WIP inspired by Jojo simping for Ciarán Hinds as Sir John Franklin in AMC's The Terror)

Comp: The Terror meets Crimson Peak

Whilst trapped in the deadly ices of the Arctic, a British naval captain heading an expedition is haunted by visions of his wife, only she's the head of a great white bear and comes to be his greatest nightmare - and she hungers for his fear.

Dragon-Plague || Novel || Medieval Horror/Fantasy + Adventure + Body Horror || First Draft + NaNoWriMo 2024 Project

Comp: Bloodborne + Blasphemous + DnD + Between Two Fires

A plague doctor, a gentle ex-knight, a runaway lady, and a thieving nun cross a land ravaged by a devastating disease that turns people into uncanny dragon-human hybrids to find, and destroy, the origins of the arcane plague.

Those Red Nights || Novel || Crime thriller + Psychological Horror + Neo-Noir + Urban Fantasy + Werewolf Horror + Historical (1990s) + Fairytale Retelling (Little Red Riding Hood) || On Hiatus + A.K.A. the WIP inspired by Jojo simping for Bob Odenkirk

Comp: The Silence of the Lambs + Se7en + Gargoyles

Selene Radcliffe is a young freshly-graduated detective, having spent long hours and many sleepless nights researching, studying, and looking through cold case files in an effort to prove herself as skilled of a private investigator as her late father, the renowned and well-respected Det. Arthur Radcliffe. However, she is a woman in a predominately male profession, a woman without a voice–literally and figuratively–and she wants to make a name for herself without relying on whatever legacy her father left behind. When the presence of a serial killer who the media has named “The Big Bad Wolf” on account of the strange, animalistic nature of his murders that occur on the nights of a full moon begin to plague the streets of Milwaukee, Selene sees this as her opportunity to prove herself and her skills to her peers, and she tasks herself and her partner Det. Apollo Esposito to hunt him down. But it swiftly becomes apparent that the man they are hunting is no man, and may instead be a dreaded creature of folklore–one that is now keen on hunting them down in a blood-red game of cat and mouse…

The Faeries and the Lark || Novel || Dark/Gothic High Fantasy + Sapphic + Adventure + Fairytale/Folklore Retelling (East of the Sun, West of the Moon + Sleeping Beauty + Scandinavian Folklore) || Development + On-Hiatus

Loosely based on the fairytales Sleeping Beauty and East of the Sun, West of the Moon, as well as Scandinavian folklore, The Faeries and The Lark follows three faeries–spirits of nature–raising a human child they’ve named Lark, the princess of a sun-worshipping kingdom wiped out by a subterranean society of trolls. The faeries devote their lives to protecting Lark from the worlds of man by raising her to believe she’s one of the fae, and to keep her deep in the forest so that she can remain hidden from the trolls that restlessly hunt for the princess that escaped their massacre. But everything the three faeries worked hard for is put to the test when Lark encounters a human named Sigrid, the toughened, sword-wielding chancellor’s daughter from a neighboring moon-worshipping kingdom that’s threatened to be swallowed by the fairies’ forest, and every aspect of her life as she’d known them threaten to crumble around her.

And these are my WIPs!!!!! I hope one of some of them have caught your eye, and that you stick around to see where these all go!! To know more about some of these WIPs, I've their tags down below!

Thanks so much for reading!!💛🐧

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fictionadventurer · 10 months

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Alternate universe dream jobs:

Keeper of a quaint country post office

Writer of several sci fi and/or fantasy audio drama podcasts

#the other book i got from the bigger on the inside used book store was a copy of 'lark rise to candleford'#and just reading the intro made me realize just how intensely i would like to work for a quaint country post office #but only the quaint old-fashioned fictional kind #where people send each other letters and brown-paper-and-string wrapped packages instead of junk mail and bills #i love handing out letters to people #and doing so in a quaint picturesque country community would be the dream

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warlordfelwinter · 5 months

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eventually i'll clean this up and paint it properly and make it my custom portrait in game, but just wanted to try and figure out what this guy looks like

Lark (he/him), my wrath of the righteous character. rogue knife master, urchin, tiefling of uncertain heritage, chaotic neutral at the moment but will probably head in the good direction

#he's not named after the bird he's named after the noun #'something done for fun especially something mischievous or daring; an amusing adventure or escapade'#which describes his personality for the most part #he's the typical thief with a heart of gold type rogue #bit of a goofball despite how serious he looks here #just trying to have a good time #which has been made rather hard for him in the past day or so what with all the demons #he's probably sad underneath it all bc he's an oc of mine #and also because he's a tiefling and i'm like not that far into the game and have already experienced some tiefling microaggressions #in this continent that is apparently constantly dealing with demons tieflings probably aren't treated super well #i think he just sort of drifts around to different cities and he was just travelling when he was attacked before the intro #doodles #oc: lark #fel's pf wotr

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angomyleggo · 1 year

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Can anyone explain the intro to me? Like what was Henry talking about having a daughter and does he only know brad through volunteer work at the museum??

#getting lose in the sauce over here #honestly as soon as I hear the music I thought they were gonna say Paeden #I’ve listened to the other intro bit too many times #do lark and sparrow have a little sister #dndads #dungeons and daddies #dndads spoilers #henry oak

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ma-lark-ey · 11 months

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(New Username Notice— was larkofchaos.

Also using this as an excuse to make an intropost)

Yes, I’ve had this blog four(-ish) years. No, I never made an intro. I’m doing so now!

My name is Lark (or Magnus), I use he/him (or they/them), I’m 18 and I’m from Kentucky! I’m a writer, primarily. Find my ao3 at the same username as here, only with underscores.

I know most niche grammar rules and use them in my every day text conversations, which makes me sound like a boomer according to my boyfriend’s best mate. I’ll read just about any book you put in my hands, so long as it’s not a straight-cis romance (with exceptions for ones so bad they’re a good hate read). My favorite modern author depends on what genre we’re talking. Though primarily sticks to Rick Riordan, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Mason Deaver.

I’m a voracious Spotify user with over 250 playlists and 3300 liked songs (send help). My favourite band is tied Chase Petra and Set It Off any day of the week, and my favorite solo artist varies, but Taylor Swift, Sabrina Carpenter, and Alec Benjamin rotate pretty firmly in that top spot.

Now, I’ll give you a detailed list of fandoms I reblog/post about and whether or not I’ll reliably tag it:

Dungeons & Daddies (lol no)

Harry Potter (Always.)

- Sub-category of The Marauders, to filter make sure to put just “Marauders” in your filters. I never tag Marauders posts as Harry Potter for fandom culture reasons.

Unprepared Casters (really depends on the day)

Percy Jackson (50/50 shot)

Rise of the Pink Ladies (yes)

Shadow & Bone/Bardugoverse (yes!)

Check, Please! - Ngozi Uzaku (pretty reliably)

Magnus Chase (also fairly reliably)

Hermitcraft (rarely post on it, but yes.)

Dracula (yes)

The Extraordinaries (yes)

(Any fandom thats not on this list will prolly be tagged at least 50/50 )

#lark saya #intro post #four years late o7

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ineedchamomile · 4 months

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THE REVERENT SILENCE, Character Intro #4 - Lark Galleon

The oldest of four siblings, Lark graduated with honors at the Reverent Seminary of Rotier (which is basically magical magic school). Right after graduation, Lark applied for a job at the Blackfylde Investigation Bureau, where he was welcomed with open arms. When a certain magical self-help group comes to town, Lark is the first to ring the bell. They know something is wrong, but can't quite place their finger on it... Lark can control the metallic particles of any substance and can control the polarity and magnetic force of those particles.

And this character intro marks the last of the introductions for the protagonists of my upcoming webcomic! The next few character introductions will be about the villains. Progress is going well and I hope to release the first few chapters in the next few months.

What are your first impressions of Lark? 🌊

Nadia's Intro

Safiye's Intro

Pyotr's Intro

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nick-close · 2 years

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Dndads questions!

rb with your answers in the tags if you want!

s1 or s2?/Fav character of s1?/ Fav character of s2?/ least favourite of s1?/ least fav of s2?/ OTP/NOTP/BROTP/Best goof?/A song you associate with a character?/Fav hc?/Least fav hc?/best ep intro/Hot take?

#answer the ones u want #heres mine:#s1 #glenn #taylor #jodie or ron #uu i dont get the hermie hype even if i like him a bit #neet yick for life or taylor hermie or taylor margarita #lark x nick. nick x cassandra. and glenn x jodie #glenn and ron or terry grant #the elevator rant and goblin joke r amazing- but if we could talking dads its beths 'my grandma loved-' riff that killed me #oh death by sugr or goodlooks by girlyboi for glenn #also once a loser always a loser by happyhappy is a glenn song #disabled taylor and trans nick #hero is larks kid and glenn encouraged unsafe driving so thats why morgan died in his timeline #meth bay or taylors mom intros dude bangers #see you paeden gets a shoutout too tho #hot take is people need to stop treating nicky like glenns kid #he has the memories of being jodies kid and glenns and he also is with the mom he remembers dying #hes a very differnt entity and is more influened by jodie than glenn imo #ok hehe answer if u wanana #sorry is long ehe #dndads #dungeons and daddies

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writingwoe · 1 year

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introducing: Kipper!

Kipper

dragon handler

she loves dragons and has wanted to race them since she was a little kid, and she's very good with them

unfortunately she's completely shit at the actual riding part, and has never once made it past qualifiers

she's convinced its because she has to borrow the company dragons, so she gets no real time to "flight-bond" with them - her friends let her believe what she wants

she has a big ol' crush on the pretty bard that plays by the fountain

#Lark intro should be following soon (shes the bard)#curses #character files #kipper (curses)

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longroadstonowhere · 2 years

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I’m rereading circle of magic now (cuz I’m in a constant loop of rereading the same books ya know) and I’m having fun making a fake movie adaptation in my head where things get moved around to flow better for a visual medium, but still has the correct feel for the story

Also line I’ve come across that I suddenly love and don’t know if I’d noticed before: lark asks briar to fetch rosethorn for lunch, briar asks what he should do if rosethorn bites him, and lark just matter of factly goes ‘bite back’

#perfect intro to rosethorn’s temper and lark’s easy humor

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llumimoon · 7 months

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Ignorance is Bliss... or Something Like That

if u realize this is a repost no you didnt. (I got voided from the tags) ANYWAYS i'm so normal about the twins in the erased au <- guy who is lying

THIS IS FOR THE FIC @kaseyskat WROTE FOR OUR AU !!! GO CHECK IT OUT ITS SO GOOD.

and if ur wondering wtf the erased au even IS here's the intro post w/ the first two pages of the comic. BUT TBH u could look at that or Nyx's fic first, they're both good introductions.

here's a bonus sketchbook doodle of erased au Lark and Sparrow (not under the cut this time bc I suspect the read more is what caused me to get voided lol)

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flanaganfilm · 10 months

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Hey Mike, I’ve really enjoyed reading your long posts on projects you’ve worked on through your career. I was wondering if you could talk a little about your experience in film school and making your student films. I was able to watch Ghosts of Hamilton Street a while ago and found it really interesting how some of the same themes in that film have been consistent through all of your work and have really liked seeing the progression and progress you’ve made in your stories since. Thanks!

Oh wow, deep pull here. I don't often talk about these movies, which I think of as the "Towson Trilogy."

They were amazing learning experiences, but aren't really fit for public consumption. I consider them an incredible, irreplaceable film school, but I've gone out of my way to not to help them become available - they just aren't on a level that I'd feel comfortable putting out into the world.

So let's go back to 1998.

I was an undergrad at Towson University in Maryland. I had dreamed of being a filmmaker for most of my childhood, and had made a few backyard movies on VHS with friends, and some VHS shorts in high school. But the idea of a career in filmmaking was very farfetched. My father was in the U.S. Coast Guard and my mother was a medical office manager. They were always very supportive of my little "movie projects," but also very much invested in my education and wanted me to focus on careers that were more likely. A career making movies seemed very, very unrealistic, and I spent my senior year of High School focusing on coming up with a "real job" I could get passionate about. As I graduated High School, I had let go of the filmmaking dream and was hoping to get enough scholarship money so I could afford to go to Loyola University Maryland, where I wanted to major in secondary education.

I was going to be a high school history teacher.

I didn't get enough scholarship money to attend Loyola, so I ended up enrolling at Towson University (then called Towson State) instead. I was initially very disappointed by this outcome, but it turned out to be one of the best things that happened in my life.

I was still planning on following the education track, but I felt discouraged and bruised by missing out on Loyola. So as I filled out my freshman electives, I signed up for Intro to Film on a lark. I mean, my hopes and dreamed hadn't panned out. I didn't get into my first choice school (or my second, for that matter) and here I was.

Why not?

It was immediately clear to me that this was what I wanted to do with my life. It was what I'd always wanted to do, if I was honest - I had been making all of those little movies, I lived and breathed movies, I had been saying since I was kid that I wanted to make movies for a living, and here was my chance to learn more about that world. I was hooked immediately. I started to ignore my other classes in favor in spending more time in the Mass Communications department (there wasn't an official "film" major at Towson); so what if this wasn't a "real job," so what if I didn't have a chance in hell of being a professional filmmaker... I had access to cameras. That meant I could make movies.

This happened to coincide with an exciting time in independent filmmaking. Spike Lee, Edward Burns, Kevin Smith, Jim Jarmusch - we would talk excitedly about the rumored budget of Robert Rodriguez's El Mariachi (everyone said it was just seven thousand bucks!), we would talk between classes about the filmmakers who were forging careers out of thin air on shoestring budgets. People were breaking the rules, and bucking the system. Careers were being made on one rogue film. They weren't climbing the ladder; they were suing for membership. Make a movie, then make a career. Independent Film was the way in. The odds might be against you, but if your number came up... man, you were on your way.

I had a substitute teacher in one of my film classes. His name was Steve Yeager and he'd just won the filmmaker's trophy at Sundance for his documentary about local hero John Waters, a movie called Divine Trash. He was the toast of Baltimore at the time, and he spoke breathlessly about the independent filmmakers who were leading the charge and finding audiences outside of the studio system. He told the students that any of us could do this - any of us could make a movie, especially using this brand new technology called:

DIGITAL VIDEO.

Steve argued that DV had democratized filmmaking, and cited filmmakers like Mike White, whose DV feature Chuck and Buck had just hit the festival scene. Dogme 95, the creative movement founded by the Danish directors Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg, was the talk of all the cinephiles. Not only could we make a movie, Steve declared, we could make it for a fraction of the cost that most filmmakers had had to bear over the years when dealing with purchasing and processing film.

I had been inspired by movies like Clerks, The Brothers McMullen, and Stranger Than Paradise - I was working on my own script, a slice of life story called Makebelieve, which was focused on the only slice of life I knew anything about: a college kid,,, who loved movies... and... had a crush on a girl.

You write what you know, I guess.

Now, our little Mass Comm program at Towson was a great way to get experience making movies, but we made them as part of a group. The best case scenario was waiting until you were an upperclassman and hoping you'd be able to direct a short film with your classmates, but most students never got their turn directing. Some students would labor through the department for four years but never sit in a director's chair when the senior projects came around. I was too impatient to wait for that. I wanted to be like Kevin Smith, Mike White and Ed Burns - I wanted to make my movie, my way, right now.

I was actively averse to commercial viability (an allergy it took me far too long to overcome), utterly enamored with the emerging mumblecore "indie film" vibe of the time, and convinced that a movie comprised of extended conversations about collegiate dating would make for riveting entertainment. I had several friends in the Theater Department, enlisted the help of my roommate Dave Foster, and pretty soon we were doing table reads and shooting proof-of-concept trailers on miniDV.

Raising money for the movie was a huge challenge. A girlfriend had managed to get ahold of Bruce Campbell's email (it was the worst-kept secret on the fledgling internet at the time), and I emailed him to invite him to be part of our little movie. He actually wrote back - he declined participation (for reasons that are astonishingly obvious to me now) but was kind enough to send some advice for the production. We were so grateful he took the time to respond that we named our production company after our favorite line from Army of Darkness... we were Sugarbaby Productions.

Steve Yeager, my substitute teacher, had told the class "if any of you write a feature film, I will do what I can to help you produce it." I came up to him after class and handed him the script for Makebelieve. He looked a little shocked, but he agreed to read the script. He did, and he liked it, and for reasons I may never understand, he said "okay, fine. I'll produce your movie."

Steve was true to his word. He didn't bring money (it would have been certifiably insane if he had), but he used his connections to find a crew of professionals in Baltimore willing to work on a little college movie. We had fundraisers, we had bake sales, we sold T-shirts on campus to raise cash to shoot. We hit up every family member and friend for possible investment (my parents, to their endless credit, put up more money than they could afford), and we scraped together enough to shoot the thing.

We filmed Makebelieve on miniDV in over the summer of 1999. The University gave us access to its facilities to use for locations, we had the run of campus, and our tiny cast and crew received independent study credit for their participation in the film.

The technology wasn't quite the amazing godsend people had made it out to be. It was low resolution, there was not yet anything that allowed you to change frame rate; everything still had that "soap opera" feeling you get with 30 fps.

We compensated for this by emulating a Hal Hartley film I'd seen at festival called Book of Life, which had opted for a slower shutter speed to give the film a dreamy, smeary look that hid the frame rate. We shot at a 1/15s shutter speed, and the movie looked a bit like an acid trip... but at least it didn't move like a soap opera.

The finished movie... well, it's not very good.

It was my first feature, it wasn't really about much of anything, but it had some fun dialog and a truly committed young cast. It had promise. And we finished the thing! That was the biggest miracle. It was the best film school I could ever hope for - a trial by fire that pulled me through each and every phase of production and forced me to learn on the job.

The film was rejected by every single major film festival - my dreams of being the next Sundance breakout auteur were dashed very quickly. But we had our world premiere at the Maryland Film Festival in 2000, to a sold out crowd, and that was the single biggest night of my young life up until that point.

I was completely hooked. I knew the film was deeply flawed, and I was eager for another at-bat - I knew I could do better.

I wouldn't wait long. I had already written a script for an "edgy" follow-up to Makebelieve called Still Life. It was "edgy" because it featured a more nihilistic plot, about a group of photography majors who begin exploiting elements of their lives for their senior thesis project, and in doing so get disconnected from their lives by examining them through lenses (Get it?! Man, I sure was a film student, wasn't I)

I had gone through a bad breakup after Makebelieve was done, an engagement that had ended and broken my young heart. Frankly, we were just babies - I really had no business whatsoever trying to get married at 21 - but I wrote that breakup into the script and let the bitterness rip. Edgy, right?

I used most of the same cast from Makebelieve (thus beginning a habit that still holds true today) and set about trying to find money to make the film.

The issue was how to raise money. We had already knocked on every door to finance Makebelieve and nobody got their money back; the movie never sold. Investing in independent films is one of the highest risk investments you can make. We'd turned over every single rock we could think of last time, how the hell were we going to do that again?

We courted more investors, including some professional risk takers and VC people. An accountant named Harry Rosen drummed up a bunch of investors in exchange for a role in the film (he played the grandfather of one of the leads). This movie had more money than the last, and it wasn't from friends and family by and large - it was from people who were giving and expecting much more.

We shot Still Life in the summer of 2000, just after Makebelieve had premiered (even then, I couldn't wait for one movie to come out before starting another). It was a more ambitious shoot across the board. And again, it was a phenomenal learning experience. And again, the movie wasn't quite... good.

The first cut was 180 minutes long. Yep, 180. The Final Cut is... 75 mins long. So... yeah, it was probably a few drafts undercooked.

It was indulgent, it was uneven, and it was spectacularly self-important. But it got into some more festivals - quite a few more than Makebelieve -and it even won some awards.

See, the rise of digital video meant an avalanche of digital movies. It had democratized filmmaking after all - suddenly, the sheer volume of submissions at film festivals increased by a factor of ten. And with that many thousands of extra movies flooding the festival market, the laws of supply and demand kicked in - there were suddenly a LOT more film festivals.

And there were film festivals who weren't terribly scrupulous. There were festivals who only existed to collect submissions fees, and they'd accept movies that otherwise would never have made it into a fest, so long as they thought they could make some money of the filmmakers. Some of the fests we played back then soon became notorious for running these kinds of scams. But it wasn't nearly as difficult to get into festivals as it once was... and it wasn't nearly as difficult to win awards.

One of the festivals we were accepted into was in Los Angeles, and I came out to LA for the first time in my life for the screening. While here, I started making plans to move to California. It seemed impossible, daring, and crazy at the time - I had no money, my movie had some laurels on the poster but wasn't commercially viable - and I had no idea how to pull it off. But I decided then, walking around Santa Monica late one night after a screening: as soon as I graduated from Towson, I'd move to LA.

But it turned out graduation was a long ways off.

Still Life took up an enormous amount of time, and I fell behind on my studies. The film never did find a distributor. It played a few dozen fests (some of which were downright predatory) and then it was over.

Itching to keep shooting stuff but certainly out of fundraising options, I ended up part of a startup production company consisting of a recent grad and another student at Towson, and we actually got a couple industrial jobs around Baltimore. I took a semester off to focus on the work. Graduation got pushed back. And then I took another semester off when more gigs came in. I finally graduated in May 2002, two years later than I'd planned. My production company had gone bust (we had no idea what we were doing) but we did some good commercial and industrial work and I got some experience trying to manage a business.

I had also wised up in one very important respect: I had kept writing scripts this whole time (you really can't help it, if you're a writer) and I had finally decided to embrace GENRE.

I had written a script called Ghosts of Hamilton Street. On the outside, it looked like an episode of The Twilight Zone; the plot centered around a washed-up alcoholic who starts to notice people in his life disappearing without a trace... but whenever one of them goes, the world around him completely rewrites itself as though they never existed at all.

I thought I was starting to play with genre conventions, doing a light sci-fi story that would be fun and character-forward. What I was really doing, though, was dealing with the fact that a lot of my closest friends from college had graduated on time, two years before me, and gone out into their adulthoods. I missed them, and I felt that my world was altered with each of their absences. I was starting to get introspective.

This was about something. It was about regret, it was transition, it was about losing one's comfortable world and heading into the unknown. It was about my regret for my failed engagement (and my exploitation of it for Still Life), and about the friends who had gone ahead into adulthood without me. It was also, I realize now, about having a drinking problem. I wouldn't really understand this, or take any action to fix it, for fifteen more years.

For now, I just knew this one felt a little different. It had an engine. I had something to talk about for the first time in my filmmaking career. This one wasn't a class project, just fumbling around with the technical realities of production; this had a tiny, infant, unformed little voice in there. It was small, it was buried, but it was there.

So how could we finance it?

Okay. You're not going to believe this, but it's true... I've never really talked about this publicly before, but it's the truth so here goes:

A good friend of mine, a fellow student at Towson, was hit one night by a Papa Johns delivery car while crossing the street. He settled with the company and came into a lot of money. He invested some of that to finance Ghosts, and... well... that's how we did it.

Yep, you read that right: my third feature was financed because a friend of mine got hit by a pizza delivery guy. So when people ask me what advice I have for fundraising, unless I say "start shoving your friends in front of delivery vehicles", I'm being a bit of a hypocrite.

My friend was now a bonafide executive producer, and he was walking normally again, so we were off to make a movie!

It was a modest budget compared to the sprawling mess that was Still Life, but the digital video technology had advanced - we were now shooting in 24p, and for the first time in my career, my little digital features actually moved like a movie.

Again, the cast brought back some familiar faces from Makebelieve and Still Life. We held auditions for the other parts.

One of the fellow Towson students who auditioned for a role was a girl I knew tangentially from the theater department. She was much closer to my roommate Paul Jerue, who was working on the movie too, but she'd been over my place a few times and we'd hung out here and there.

Her name was Amy Schumer, and I remember her audition very well. I didn't give her a part in this movie. I remember telling the producers I thought she was too funny for it. She was quite funny, in fact. I think she's also now the most famous person to come out of Towson University.

Somewhat ironically, there aren't a lot of photographs from this period of my life, because I didn't have a digital camera. Everything was on film, and just about all of those shots are lost to time.

But there are a few leftover from Ghosts that I'll share here - I've used my phone to snap some pics of pages from a single surviving scrapbook:

(Holy god, I actually had hair...)

Ghosts of Hamilton Street isn't a bad movie. It had taken me years of work, but I had finally made something that wasn't bad. They say your first ten movies are gonna suck, so get them out of the way early... maybe I was a little ahead of schedule after all.

Even though I had graduated just before we shot it, I still consider it a student film. It was shot in and around campus, utilizing equipment from the school, and the cast and crew were comprised of students and graduates (a lot of the cast were returning actors from Makebelieve and Still Life).

The star of the movie was a student who was ahead of me by a year named Scott Graham. I loved working with him, and I loved what he did with this movie.

(The great Scott Graham, three years before the Oculus short)

Three years later, he would fly himself out to LA from Washington DC in order to star in a short film I'd make in Los Angeles called Oculus.

(Filming Oculus - Chapter 3: the Man with the Plan in 2005)

Looking back, I think of Ghosts of Hamilton Street as my first movie. The other two were just class projects, really, and I was throwing spaghetti against the wall. But this one... it features an ambitious 90 second oner in the middle of the movie that competently tracks Scott through a bewildering office environment. It's a good shot.

It uses its genre moments as extensions of character, and is not concerned with scares or set pieces. It's metaphorical, whereas the other two movies were literal.

And it ends on a monologue.

As far as film festivals, it actually did okay. We screened at a few dozen places, and even traveled with the film. It won some more awards at some reputable festivals. And that winter, just after its premiere, when I packed the moving van to go to LA, I brought 100 DVD copies with me, hoping it would kickstart my career in Hollywood.

It wouldn't; that would happen ten years later, with Oculus. And when I filmed the Oculus feature, Scott Graham - star of Ghosts of Hamilton Street, and star of the Oculus short - played the janitor at the auction house where the mirror was kept.

And the two police officers who arrest Brenton Thwaites at the end of the film? Zak Jeffries, star of Makebelieve, Still Life, and Ghosts, and Dave Foster, my freshman year roommate, who worked crew on every film I made - even the little 8mm shorts - in Towson.

Nat Roers, who starred in Makebelieve and Still Life and was also my roommate for the last two years of college, appears as a jogger in Absentia, Dash Mihok's doomed wife in Before I Wake and as a reporter in Gerald's Game.

My professor at Towson who encouraged me to make all of these movies, and helped every way he could, was a man named Tom Brandau. He acted in Ghost of Hamilton Street, but he also was running the Fargo Film Festival in 2011, and he invited us to host the world premiere of Absentia at the festival. He also sat with me at the monitor for a week while we filmed The Haunting of Hill House, and for several days at the Overlook while we shot Doctor Sleep. He passed away a few years ago, and I miss him terribly.

As for Steve Yeager, the substitute teacher who dared us to make a movie my freshman year, and then put his money where his mouth was and produced my first digital feature a year later - Steve was also on set for Gerald's Game and for Doctor Sleep, and we went out for a beer to celebrate after a long shoot day. I quit drinking before that movie wrapped, so I believe it may have been one of the last beers I ever had, and I'm so glad I got to share it with Steve, who took this pie-eyed kid from his class and told him he could be a filmmaker.

My roommates when I moved out to LA were Ghosts star Zak Jeffries, Ghosts producer Jeff Seidman, crew members Amy Winter (soon to be Amy Seidman), Joe Wicker and Gaby Chavez.

In a way, all of these people were the foundation that started it all. I actively hate Netflix's lame "Flanaverse" idea, but if there was a Flanaverse, these were the people who built it. Scott Graham, Zak Jeffries, Dave Foster, Nat Roers, Jamie Sinsz, Megan Anderson, Steve Yeager, Jeff Seidman, Amy Seidman, Will Pinkine, Rich Koeckert, Jessi Bounelis, Chris Cridler, Sarah Yarbrough, Kara Webb, Kerry Brady, Joe Wicker, Gaby Chavez and Tom Brandau.

They were ride or die, man.

I think back on that time now and laugh. What a deal we made about digital video... I remember scraping together $2,000 to buy a 9 GB hard drive to edit - yes, I said NINE GIGABYTES.

I think about all of those dreamers out there today who have a 4k camera with 256 GB (or more) IN THEIR POCKET.

Yep, you've got a camera in your pocket that is infinitely more powerful than the cameras I filmed the first four features of my career on. Anyone who says they want to be a filmmaker and aren't sure how to start... I mean, take that thing out of your pocket and SHOOT SOMETHING. You are so, so, so ahead of the game.

So thank you for asking the question, and sorry for the long post. What I will always remember about that time was just how wildly, recklessly, adorably foolish we were... and how if we hadn't been, I might not have a career at all.

I made three independent feature films in my twenties, and another in my thirties, and while I don't think most of them are ultimately worthy of an audience, they were the best education I ever could have hoped for. I made them with dear friends, some of whom have remained in my life and heart to this day, and all of whom I owe an enormous debt.

My favorite thing? The title of the first one.

Makebelieve.

Because man, we were kids. Everything about that word is whimsy, innocence, and naivety. It's not a perfect movie; in fact, it isn't even a good one.

But that is a perfect, perfect title.

#memories #film school #towson university #make believe #still life #independent film

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theboarsbride · 2 years

Text

Writeblr (Re)Intro!

Hey hi howdy everyone!! It’s getting to that time for my yearly rewrite of my Writeblr Intro, so here it is!

My name is Josephine, but feel free to call me Jojo (pronouns are she/her), your local penguin and bird monster enthusiast!

I’m in my early twenties and am from the Midwestern United States, and am currently in college getting a degree in Writing and Applied Arts with an emphasis in editing and publishing, as well as a minor in History. I tend to be busy busy busy during semester, so in my free time I like to doodle and write silly little stories.

My art and writing updates I post a lot on my social media accounts, which are as follows:

Instagram: jojo.penguin.art

Twitter: JojoPenguin_Art

TikTok: jojo.penguin.writes

Discord: Jojo the Rad Penguin#3942

Tumblr: my DMs and ask box are always open!💛

I am ALWAYS down for chatting with and meeting other writers, and engaging with others’ content!! The primary genres I work with are:

- Horror (in varying genres, but primarily Gothic)

- Historical Fiction

- Paranormal

- Monster Romance (I’m aroace as hell so my romances are pretty ‘clean’--no erotica to be found here)

- Light Fantasy

If any of these genres interest you, feel free to keep on reading about my WIPs below the cut! Now about my general writing style...

A list of my WIPs are below the cut! 💛

The Monster and the Butterfly || Novel || Gothic Romance + Historical/Paranormal/Gothic Horror + Fairytale Retelling (Beauty and the Beast + Eros and Psyche) || 2nd Draft + Major revisions + My Main WIP

Whitechapel, London 1894.

Sophie Wickes and her family struggle to survive, melancholy eats away at her father more and more with each passing day, and her passion for cultivating flowers procures no income. She must swallow her pride and set aside her hatred for England’s aristocracy when she’s offered a chance of employment by the reclusive Lord Edgar Cushing to tend the gardens of his Rosenthorne Hall. However, the estate, its gardens, and their master is nothing what Sophie expected.

The house? Rotting, dilapidated, hideous.

The gardens? The husk of something alive, whimsical, and beautiful.

The master? Faceless, nothing more than a voice from the shadows.

Despite her fear and anger, Sophie becomes enthralled by the garden’s potential for mystic, untainted beauty, and she develops a close friendship with Lord Cushing, despite him being nothing but a mere whisper of darkness that pleads for her to never seek him out.

However, whatever enchantment the gardens and Lord Cushing’s voice bring her shatters as she begins to receive nightly visitations from a crooked-jawed phantom and butterflies who’s wings whisper of a bloody past and the truth behind the faceless lord's gentlemanly masquerade.

~***~

The Vampire of Shadowed Castle || Short Story || Gothic/Survival/Vampire Horror + Folklore Retelling (Romanian Folklore) || 2nd Draft + major revisions coming soon

Local villages know to revere, and fear, Shadowed Castle.

Hunters know not to hunt the game in the surrounding forests, shepherds know not to let their livestock graze in nearby pastures, and wayside travelers know to avoid any paths that are within its wretched reach. Everyone knows to stay away from it, to avoid it as though the land itself is infested with the plague out of fear that whatever evil lurks within the darkness.

Everyone except Sorina Dalca.

She believes the local legends surrounding the Shadowed Castle to be only myths meant to keep children in line, horror stories with no ounce of truth to them. But when she’s forced to enter the cursed castle upon a dare, she must struggle to decipher what is all myth and what is all real when she comes face-to-face with the fabled Vampire of Shadowed Castle.

~***~

The Faeries and the Lark || Novel || Dark/Gothic High Fantasy + LGBTQ+ Romance + Adventure + Fairytale/Folklore Retelling (East of the Sun, West of the Moon + Sleeping Beauty + Scandinavian Folklore) || Development + First Draft +Incomplete + On-Hiatus

But everything the three faeries worked hard for is put to the test when Lark encounters a human named Sigrid, the toughened, sword-wielding chancellor’s daughter from a neighboring moon-worshipping kingdom that’s threatened to be swallowed by the fairies’ forest, and every aspect of her life as she’d known them threaten to crumble around her.

~***~

The Boar’s Bride || Novel/Fanfiction || Drama + Psychological/Gothic Horror + Romance + Fairytale Retelling (Bluebeard) || First Draft + Incomplete + On-Hiatus

A retelling of Bluebeard’s Bride set in 1980′s America that shows the unorthodox “romance” between a young, naïve painter and enigmatic, charming millionaire Mason Verger, as well as the horror that follows once they are wed.

(NOTE: This is currently being written as a Hannibal/Silence of the Lambs fanfiction featuring Mason Verger and my OC Edith Watts, but I hope to turn it into an original piece of fiction in the future.)

~***~

Mrs. Maturin || Novella || Historical Fiction + Drama || Second Draft + Major Revisions + On-Hiatus

This is a short historical fiction novella that’s a semi-fictionalized story based on the very real encounter between Joseph Merrick, AKA The Elephant Man, and young widow Leila Maturin, the first woman to have supposedly smiled at him and shook his hand, inspiring him to change his life for the better. (AKA my “Hallmark Movie WIP”)

~***~

Ruth || Novel || Folk/Environmental Horror + Drama + LGBTQ+ + Fairytale/Folklore Retelling (Little Red Riding Hood + Germanic pagan folklore) || Development + On-Hiatus

A folk horror retelling of Little Red Riding Hood where a woman and her partner join her ailing grandmother on a trip to her childhood home in the isolating backwoods of Germany, only to find themselves in the presence of a cult that worship a strange entity that lurk in the shadows. (Think Red Riding Hood meets the 1970s version of The Wicker Man)

~***~

The Wolf of Pine Falls || Novella (???) || Contemporary + Romance + Folklore (werewolves) || Development + On-Hiatus

A paranormal slice-of-life short story featuring a middle-aged, high school librarian werewolf navigating personal insecurities, as well as a romance with his blind coworker. (AKA the WIP i created because I wanted a werewolf character that subverts werewolf tropes, and I wanted an OC based on John Malkovich)

~***~

Temperance and Mr. Wyrm || Novella || Body Horror + (Monster) Romance + Fairytale Retelling (King Lindworm) || Development + On-Hiatus

A nurse with a pension for using herbal and natural remedies is hired as an in-home caretaker for a man afflicted with a strange, arcane, and serpentine, infection.

~***~

And these are my WIPs!!!!! I hope one of some of them have caught your eye, and that you stick around to see where these all go!!

Thanks so much for reading!!💛🐧

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