Plus my archive is now (mostly) free, and what you can expect from me next!

 I’ll avoid burying the lede and start with the bad news: My Bartholomew Beck thrillers—Live With the Truth, Let the Guilty Pay, and The Price of Silence—will not be getting turned into audiobooks by Everand (a subsidiary of Scribd), as previously announced.

The audio rights for those titles were officially sold almost exactly a year ago today, with the hope that I’d have links to share with you by late summer.

But then Everand bought bookish startup Fable and appears to have stopped producing their own audio.

However, there are several pieces of good news.

First, my publisher Fawkes Press and I each received our payments for the rights sale. It didn’t change my life, but it paid some bills!

Second, Everand released the rights earlier than they needed to, which means my amazing subrights agent Amy Brewer at Metamorphosis Literary can get back to work.

Which leads to some good news that many of you probably know but some may not: Those audio rights can be sold again! That means another payday and another shot at having some incredible folks bring Beck and the rest of the cast to life.

This is how it works with all subsidiary rights. I know many authors who’ve earned a nice chuck of change having their rights sold over and over but never produced, or never released.

Now, as an artist, you hate to see an adaptation of your work fall through.

But as someone who is forced to operate in our current capitalist hellscape, you love to see the opportunity to have the same work earn money more than once!

Most of my previous Substack entries are now free to read!
Speaking of money and capitalism, when I started this Substack, I didn’t have a big plan for it. I still don’t have a big plan, but I am starting to formulate one.

So, upon researching the features, I realized that I had basically left the then-default setting of putting all of my previous newsletters behind the paywall after a fairly short amount of time.

But that was only really supposed to happen for the fiction and a few other entries with more personal or not-for-the-general-public information.

That situation has been remedied, so now only things that anyone can now read posts on the Substack website and app unless they were originally meant for paid subscribers!

Treoning it is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Coming soon
First up will be a book review for The Favorites by Layne Fargo! I will try to keep it mostly spoiler free, though some of what happens is already known since it’s a loose literary retelling. (My opinion on the books I read will always be free here.)

After that, paid subscribers will get a case study in a major film—Universal Pictures’ HIM—going from a spec script (written on speculation that someone may hopefully one day buy it, like all of my scripts so far) to a major studio movie.

I’m doing this because I have some unique perspectives to share.

A good while back, I was given access by a lit manager to The Black List—the real collection of the best Hollywood scripts not yet produced, not the pay-to-play website that has spawned from it—where I read the spec script not yet titled HIM. I dug it and was hoping it would eventually get made.

About a year later, I was brought on to work as a featured background actor in the movie, which was filmed primarily in New Mexico and produced by master horror filmmaker Jordan Peele’s company, Monkeypaw Productions.

Then, about another year later, the film released and was not well-received. I waited until it was streaming to watch it, despite it being just my second theatrical release. I was nowhere on camera that I can really tell (though I’m going to scrub it again just in case), and it turns out I’m okay with that.

So now I get to sit down with that script and see how much of it made it to screen and how much was changed by the grinding gears of a major Hollywood studio, while analyzing it from my three perspectives—writerly reader, readerly actor, and actorly reviewer.

What I’m reading
Right now I’m in the middle of Sour by Shae Smith!

I first heard about this book from talking with Shae during my live interviews on TikTok (which, now that we know the social app isn’t going away, I will try to get on more). I loved the concept so much that I invested in her Kickstarter!

Life took some crazy turns—the big ticket items have been documented on this Substack—but now I’m reading and enjoying!