0:01:04 – Speaker 2
Thank you so much for joining us Today. I have on Mark Allen. He is a writer, a director, I’m not sure producer also, Mark, are you, Are you all three?
0:01:35 – Speaker 3
I have produced films in the past.
0:01:37 – Speaker 2
yes, Okay, so there you go. So, mark Allen, thank you for coming on, mark.
0:01:42 – Speaker 3
My pleasure. I’m happy to be here. Thank you for asking.
0:01:45 – Speaker 2
No, no, thank you. I greatly appreciate your time. Now everyone that listens to the podcast kind of knows what’s coming. But so we were kind of talking before the episode and you said that writing would be your vehicle and when I was reading about you I laughed and thought it was cool to hear to read this. You were like at the age of 10, my dad gave me a typewriter and it was kind of like that’s the end of the story there, like it just starts from there, I mean. So you remember when that happened and what you thought of the typewriter and what that kind of meant to like. Did it open up this new world that you didn’t realize was there?
0:02:23 – Speaker 3
I remember it vividly when I was 10 years old I was in about fourth grade and we had to do a writing assignment over the weekend and bring it back in on Monday and I went home that Friday and where I lived in the 70s, on Friday afternoons there was always some kind of a monster movie, either a big bug movie from the 50s or an old lawn cheney Wolfman movie, something like that, and I’d go home and watch it. And that particular Friday I got there and it was a Godzilla movie, Nice. So over the course of the weekend I wrote a three page short story about Godzilla attacking Tokyo. Every page arise did it was completely derivative. I had absolutely no idea about copyright and trademark or any of that stuff, because I’m a 10 year old kid.
I’m a 10 year old kid living in East Texas in a farming community of only 12,000 people, and I take it in Monday morning and I got an A plus on it. It was the first time in my life I’d gotten an A plus. And I had my mama buy me some spiral notebooks and a couple of pens and, man, I just started writing short story after short story after short story and my grandfather owned his own business and he had been using this old Underwood manual typewriter and he’d been using it since the 40s. In the 70s electric typewriters came out and they were state of the art technology. My grandpa bought one of those for his business and he gave the old manual typewriter to me.
0:04:23 – Speaker 2
Were those the ones that had like the spools of like ink, I guess, and like yes, there was a silk fabric it was.
0:04:31 – Speaker 3
the ones were made of silk and they were impregnated with ink.
0:04:35 – Speaker 2
Yes, I remember that my father had one of those, I can remember, when I could still see, I remember. So each letter had a like there was an arm that had each letter at the end of it, right, so that’s correct. Yeah, yeah, I remember that those were so cool. So that’s what you had then.
0:04:51 – Speaker 3
Right, that’s what I had then. Yes, that’s cool. And my mother worked for the school system. She was an administrative assistant and she had access to all this blank eight and a half by 11 paper. So she would bring paper home for me because we weren’t very well off back in those days, and she would bring paper home for me so that I could thread it up through the typewriter and write my stories. That’s cool, yeah, and that’s where it all started. Now, as I grew up, my life took some twists and turns and I had some experiences, both good and bad, and sometimes I wrote, sometimes I didn’t, but I always came back to it, no matter what else.
0:05:45 – Speaker 2
I saw that you did a long stint, I believe, in the Navy. Right, it was 20 years you did in the Navy, so I mean 21,. Yes, Were you like writing at that point, or was the Navy? I mean keeping you busy, for obvious reasons.
0:05:58 – Speaker 3
The Navy kept me busy.
0:06:00 – Speaker 2
Yeah.
0:06:01 – Speaker 3
They kept me real busy. I was concentrating on advancing in that career and learning all the medical techniques and combat casualty care, all this stuff that they teach you. And yeah, between that and working out, staying in shape and then going home to a wife and children, yeah, I was pretty busy. I didn’t have a whole lot of time to write and to earn part of my career.
0:06:30 – Speaker 2
You also mentioned you saw active time throughout those years also, so that’s obviously keeping you busy too.
0:06:40 – Speaker 3
We went a few places, we did a few things.
0:06:43 – Speaker 2
Yeah, yeah. So now I guess maybe this sort of leads up to also. What I want to mention is I think at that 21 year point is that when you did, you end the Navy at that point and then kind of end up getting throat cancer, or did you get throat cancer? I wasn’t quite sure of that when that came about.
0:07:04 – Speaker 3
Oh, I retired in 2001. I graduated high school in 1980, joined the Navy right away, and I retired in 2001, at the ripe old age of 39. Wow yeah, the cancer hit me in 2014.
0:07:26 – Speaker 2
Oh wow, so you had 14 years stretch of doing stuff. Then I thought it seemed like sort of right after when you got out of the Navy.
0:07:34 – Speaker 3
Oh, no, sir, not at all.
0:07:36 – Speaker 2
Okay, okay, I didn’t realize that.
0:07:37 – Speaker 3
Wow, yeah, it was 2014. I retired. I worked for a temp agency for a while in medical. And then I got a steady job with a big hospital system in San Diego I was living in Southern California at the time, wow, okay and I worked for them from 2002, well, until I got sick in 2014.
0:08:06 – Speaker 2
Oh, wow, okay, that’s what happened. Wow, okay, yeah.
0:08:12 – Speaker 3
So when I wrote, produced and directed my first feature film, I was still with them. When I wrote and co-produced another film, I was still with them. When I went to my very first American film market in Santa Monica, let me tell you, that’s an experience.
0:08:34 – Speaker 2
Well, you just said a whole lot I need to follow up on. But the first thing I find is interesting is, like so you’re in the military for 20 years, right? So you know what that’s like. Then you’re a civilian for 14 years, you know, doing the civilian thing. So, like you know, you tasted both ends of that, which that’s interesting, but not now. But now you also touched upon the first thing I wanted to get to. So you were still working in San Diego when you did your first feature film. Now, I don’t remember the title of it, but your first feature film actually sold and like was distributed, right, that’s correct, the first feature film. That’s kind of crazy, yeah.
0:09:20 – Speaker 3
At the time I really thought I was on my way.
0:09:23 – Speaker 2
I hear you.
0:09:24 – Speaker 3
My dream at that time this was 2005. My dream at the time was to shoot, low budget, straight to video, straight to DVD horror, thrillers and science fiction, because that’s what sold during the video store boom from the late 1980s to the mid 2000s, and that’s what I wanted to do. I didn’t care about winning Oscars or making $80 million movies. I wanted to make stuff that sold and that made money. And then I wanted to get to a point where I could take profits from previous films and use them to budget whatever film I was working on. That way I would get to a point where I would not need investors. That way, when the money came in, I could keep all the money Same. With that is, I wound up selling Delirium to a company that now no longer exists, and I did not have an entertainment attorney.
Look like a contract over, and this boilerplate contract was a license to steal and I was too stupid and too naive to know it. Oh, that’s not good.
0:11:00 – Speaker 2
So that is an important lesson.
0:11:02 – Speaker 3
Yes, I never saw a dime. Nobody ever saw a dime. I was never able to pay my investors back and, in fact, I had taken out a loan, which you never, ever do. I had taken out a loan to help flesh out the budget. So I wind up on the hook for all of this and it actually sent me into a chapter seven bankruptcy.
0:11:31 – Speaker 2
So that was the film that you were talking about, where your first script sold and was distributed. That’s what happened with that Right. Wow, wow, yeah. That’s going to put a bad taste in your mouth, right?
0:11:45 – Speaker 3
It did, but I was angry. I wasn’t angry at the industry, I wasn’t angry at the or anything. I was angry with the distributor for being creditory, and I was angry with myself for buying into their line of BS of all that they were going to do for me. And you know, I just I got snowed, and so so I learned an important lesson from that, wow. And when it came to the second feature, which was several years later, I have another story that goes in between these two. Oh, please tell us if you have time. Oh, I’ve got time, I can talk all day about it.
What happened was, after the first failure, I had learned my lesson. I had written another screenplay called early grace, and it was a. It was a, a, a, a horror thriller and no-transcript. I’d written the script and I started getting the money together and I was going to shoot this movie for $100,000. And I had investors lined up. I had 10 different people around San Diego who were going to put up $10,000 each and I was ready to start casting the movie. And then the economic crash of 2008 happened and all my investment money dried up.
0:13:34 – Speaker 2
It was all gone.
0:13:36 – Speaker 3
I couldn’t get a nickel, much less $100,000. And hey, it wasn’t just me. The big studios were having the same problem. Paramount was in a position at the time. They were overextended on some other movies that they had just made and they were trying to get an international line of credit for something like half a billion dollars. And this is Paramount Studios.
0:14:09 – Speaker 2
Just to say above water.
0:14:13 – Speaker 3
And no one would loan to them. I always thought that was incredible. We’re talking about Paramount Pictures. They’ve been around for 110 years, but anyway, so that happened. And come along to 2011, I’m talking to an old filmmaker buddy of mine and he’s getting ready to make this movie in Maine, where he lives, and I said, look, before you go make your movie, I want to send you the script. I want you to just tell me what you think. Okay, I said I’m not sure if I’m hitting all the right notes in it or not, so I send him early break and he reads it and he calls me back a couple of days later. He goes Mark, I want to make this movie, okay. And I said well, you know, I just want to know whether you think the script is ready for me to shop it around. He said no, don’t shop it around, let me make it into a movie.
0:15:16 – Speaker 2
Right, he was like what part of I want to make this movie? Didn’t hear yeah.
0:15:22 – Speaker 3
And one thing, one thing leads to another and he and I and a couple of other people raise $45,000. Yeah, and with obviously it’s a non-union shoot, and he secures the location. He rents this. He rents an old Airbnb on an island off the coast of Maine. He rents it for two weeks and the cast and the crew go out to the island from the mainland and they all lived and worked together. They all, they all slept in the Airbnb. You know yeah, totally yeah, and you know they, they got the movie made.
0:16:07 – Speaker 2
That’s cool. And were you there for it too, with like the making of it and stuff.
0:16:11 – Speaker 3
No, I couldn’t. I couldn’t be there then because I was still recovering financially from the, from the bankruptcy and everything.
0:16:20 – Speaker 2
Oh man, that’s thanks, I had to work.
0:16:21 – Speaker 3
Yeah, I had to work.
0:16:24 – Speaker 2
Were you able to see the first film that got distributed when that got made? Were you able to see that B film and everything?
0:16:31 – Speaker 3
Oh, on Delirium, yeah, I was there every day I directed it.
0:16:35 – Speaker 2
That’s cool Because I was going to say, like as a writer, it must be, it must be awesome to actually be there and seeing your story, the thing you wrote down on paper, come to like life. Yes, like that. That must be exciting and insanely stressful because, like as a writer, sometimes you’re going to hand it off and it’s going to be handed off and handed off to someone, right, like it could be. However many people were moved from you, you probably got your fingers crossed just being like please get my, my idea on the screen, the way I wrote it down, because it’s like way out of your hands at that point.
0:17:10 – Speaker 3
In the screenwriting world. Yes, when you’re writing a feature film, unless you’re also going to direct it or unless you’re going to be one of the hands-on producers, your creative control is incredibly limited. Everyone is going to interpret the work their way, and part of it is they all want to put their thumbprint on the project somehow. They want their DNA there, because they want to be able to use it to bolster their own career. You know, which is fine. That’s how. That’s how everything works.
I’m not just in the film industry, but yeah, it’s. I will never forget the first day when we were out in the desert shooting Delirium. You know, I’m just standing there and the camera’s there and the cast is in the is in the RV. We had an RV that we used as a mobile production facility. That’s cool. That’s cool, yeah, and they’re in there going over their lines. Those have been set up and we got some reflectors and we got scrims set up and I’m looking at the script and I’m trying to figure out which direction to put the camera and everything. And it just hit me all of a sudden, you know, and I was so sublimely happy. I actually had tears in my eyes and I’m supposed to be a tough guy, right. And then the my DP came over and he just put his hand on my shoulder, he looked at me and he just said you’re living the dream, man? Yeah, totally. And then then he turned around and walked away and that’s all that he said but it crystallized that moment into a sound bite.
0:19:22 – Speaker 2
You know, that’s cool.
0:19:23 – Speaker 3
Yeah.
0:19:24 – Speaker 2
And then he pinpointed that memorable moment for you.
0:19:27 – Speaker 3
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
0:19:29 – Speaker 2
So then, when you were working on early grave and you’re getting you know they’re recording that and everything you were still recovering from the financial stuff Is that when around the cancer came, then A little bit later.
0:19:44 – Speaker 3
We yeah, it was shot in 2011. We went to AFM in 2012. Oh, that’s cool. We wound up selling it. Well, we had to have enough of the post production done to cut a trailer together, and so we were going around AFM with our with a laptop and the trailer pulled up on full screen, you know, showing the trailer to anybody who would give us two minutes of time, because that’s how long the trailer was.
0:20:21 – Speaker 2
Oh maybe it’s two minutes. Two minutes yeah.
0:20:25 – Speaker 3
Man. We talked we must have talked to over a hundred different distributors there and we wound up going with one of the companies that we met there and you know they did up their own key art and all that and they sent the movie straight to DVD and it’s still out there. Delirium has has is very obscure now and has been lost to time, which is probably a good thing, because the movie, I watched the movie now and I just cringe because it’s so bad.
0:21:06 – Speaker 2
I imagine all creators probably do that with their first kind of thing. Probably they’re just like I’ve grown so much past that now, Exactly yeah.
0:21:16 – Speaker 3
Early grave is still out there. It’s available for rent on Amazon Prime. You can buy it on DVD. It’s on some of the other, free with ads, streaming sites like Pluto TV and some of those other places. So, yeah, it’s, it’s still out there, right? And then, in February of 2014, I get, I get diagnosed with stage four cancer and that that kind of stage four yeah. That kind of put a damper on things.
0:21:53 – Speaker 2
Yeah, kind of right.
0:21:57 – Speaker 3
Yeah, so it pisses me off.
0:22:00 – Speaker 2
What brought you to like it’s crazy to be like, oh, hey, you know, yeah, oh, my throat sit you wherever. Yeah, you got stage four cancer. You know it’s crazy to be like. You like I think something’s wrong but then to be told it’s already stage four. You’re like what the heck? Yeah, like, yeah. So how long did I mean? Obviously you overcame it. So how long did that like whole thing take? And what like what happened to your writing at that point? Cause it seems like that’s when you’re writing career, like I think you might have said something like you know, I’m going to focus only on writing now, like this is only what I want to do, or something like that, right Like through your after you went through a cancer or kind of came through it and stuff.
0:22:35 – Speaker 3
Pretty in, in pretty short order. I was too sick to work, and so I and I was a per diem worker. So there was no paid time off, no medical leave, none of that. So if I wasn’t working I wouldn’t make any money, right? So I filed for a state unemployment insurance with California and I the see, I was going through the Navy hospital in San Diego, yep, and they assigned me a social worker, a case worker, and at the time I thought, what, what do I need a case worker for? This doesn’t make any sense. Yeah Well, let me tell you that young lady was worth her weight in gold, okay, and she, she got. She was able to get me lined up with unemployment insurance in like two weeks. Wow, yeah, wow, wow. And, of course, unemployment insurance is not designed to completely replace a person’s right Income. Yeah, yes, I think it was like 55% or 66%, something like that.
0:23:59 – Speaker 2
Yeah, I think it was like two thirds or something. That’s it. It’s two thirds.
0:24:04 – Speaker 3
And so I’m getting that for a year, but we’re we’re also burning through our our savings, because San Diego was, and still remains, of a high cost of living area. It’s one of the highest cost of living areas in the country.
0:24:23 – Speaker 2
It’s also one of the most beautiful I’ve heard. So, yes, yes it is.
0:24:28 – Speaker 3
So so we were burning through the money and of course my, my wife, was working too and she’s also getting me to and from my, my radiation treatments and my chemo and all that. And I keep getting sicker and I start to lose weight. You know all that stuff that happens when you have cancer. And see my, my doctor only gave me a 23% chance of making it to one year. No, kidding.
0:25:07 – Speaker 2
I didn’t realize it was that it seemed like, oh, I had cancer and I I over got it. I didn’t realize, as you actually had some pretty low percentages of kind of getting through this thing.
0:25:16 – Speaker 3
Oh yeah, this I was. Can I cost like a sailor on?
0:25:21 – Speaker 2
your? Oh, go for it, Okay.
0:25:24 – Speaker 3
Let me tell you I went through some shit, man.
0:25:27 – Speaker 2
Yeah, no, I, I, I believe that at 23% you know, here’s what happened.
0:25:33 – Speaker 3
My doctor tells me he goes Mark, you got stage four HPV positive squamous cell carcinoma of the throat. You have a two millimeter tumor at the base of your tongue, back down in your throat just a little, just a little bit to the left of the midline, the center right, yeah.
And he said you got two choices you can do nothing, in which case you’ll be dead within a year, and for the last six months you’re going to wish you were dead. Wow, okay, okay. I said what’s my, what’s my other option? He says the other option is we don’t remove your tongue right away. We do radiation and chemo and you might get past this. He said but here’s the thing you might still die within a year and the last six months you’re going to wish you would Wow. But you’ve got about it. Where you are in your progression, you’ve got about a 23% chance of making it past a year. He said but if you do, if you do nothing, you have a 0% chance. Hmm, and so we’ll talk to me about the chemo and the radiation. And he said well, how do you want it? You want me to sugarcoat it? I said hell, no, doc. I said you’re talking to an independent duty corpsman and you’re talking to an FMF warfare specialist.
0:27:13 – Speaker 2
Give it to me Give it to me yeah, seriously, yeah.
0:27:18 – Speaker 3
And and he just kind of smiles and he goes okay, he says, mark, I’m going to beat your body to shit. And he said you might not make it and there are going to be days when you are going to hate my guts, he said, because this is going to be an emotional ride as much as anything else. And he said but understand, he goes. Sometimes I have to inflict pain to not cause harm. Cool. And he said sometimes I’m going to have to be your doctor and not your friend. Wow. And I said. I said I want you to be my doctor. I said be my doctor first and foremost. I said if we become friends, that’s great. I said, but if I’m going to beat this, you know I was only 52 and I had a family you know I had a family and I said sign me up for the pain train, doc.
What, what do we do? And and that was the. That was the start of it. You know over those, oh yeah, over the over time, you know. Of course they had to put the pork in my chest and they had to put a feeding tube in them into my stomach.
0:28:46 – Speaker 2
Yeah.
0:28:48 – Speaker 3
And I was a porker at the time, I had really kind of let myself go. When I got, when I got diagnosed I was 270 pounds and I’m only, I’m only five foot seven. Okay, okay yeah.
0:29:03 – Speaker 2
You had to put it on your back.
0:29:04 – Speaker 3
I was rotund, but I’ll tell you that was in February. By by December of 2014, I weighed 147 pounds.
0:29:19 – Speaker 2
Man lost like 130 pounds, basically 120 or whatever.
0:29:23 – Speaker 3
Close to it. Yeah, and the the bad thing was, of course, you know you’re, you’re sick and you’re nauseous and you’re throwing up, and you know you’re, you’re in bed, you know cause you’re sleeping. You know 16, 18 hours a day and chemo wipes you out. Chemo wipes you out. I couldn’t speak. I lost my ability to speak. No, kidding, yeah, and radiation is a what I call a cold bar.
0:29:58 – Speaker 1
You don’t?
0:29:59 – Speaker 3
you don’t feel the radiation when they’re. When they’re radiating you, yep, but radiation burns and it burns soft tissue and that that’s kind of the point of it. So it destroyed my thyroid gland, which is, which is common, and my upper esophageal sphincter muscle. That’s the muscle that closes off your throat from your esophagus, from your esophagus down to your stomach. We just, in medical terms, we just call it the UES. Okay, and cause, you know, we have shorthand for everything, exactly.
0:30:44 – Speaker 2
Yeah, you don’t want to be saying those words every day.
0:30:48 – Speaker 3
Yeah, I mean my, my UES fused shut with scar tissue, wow, so I couldn’t speak, I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t drink.
0:31:02 – Speaker 2
No, kidding Right. That’s why you had the stomach tube.
0:31:05 – Speaker 3
Right, that’s why I had the stomach tube. All of my nourishment, all of my nutrition, came in liquid form in this huge 50cc to me syringe that I would just plug into the exterior end of my tube, yep, and then I just I’d grab the the barrel of the syringe and put my palm, my other palm, on the point and I would just push that stuff in.
0:31:34 – Speaker 2
And that’s how I, that’s how it is. Was it was the color of it pink?
0:31:38 – Speaker 3
No, it’s, it’s kind of a, it’s kind of a baby poop brown, okay, cause I had a stomach tube.
0:31:45 – Speaker 2
Also, when I was cause that, my jaw was broken, so I was. When I was in the hospital for my car accident, I had a stomach tube and my mom would always joke like, oh, if you need your pink sludge or whatever Cause it was like yeah, but yeah, it was like exactly what you said. That was pretty, but yeah. So we had the same experiences there. That’s funny, yeah.
0:32:03 – Speaker 3
So, man they, they tried doing an esophageal dilation on me, which is a pretty standard procedure within the ears, nose and throat medical community, and it wasn’t working. They couldn’t get past the scar tissue and eventually my ENT doc the guy that saved my life he comes to me and he goes yeah, I’ve done about all I can do. And so I wrote out on a piece of paper am I going to be like this forever?
0:32:40 – Speaker 2
Wow, I’ve been there too, and I’m not being able to talk and write and done stuff, yeah.
0:32:46 – Speaker 3
And he says maybe not. He says I’m going to talk to the department head over at gastroenterology, maybe there’s something he can do. And the gastro guy took a look at me and he goes there’s a new procedure. It’s never been done here at this hospital. I’ve never done it, but I’ve been to a seminar about it and I understand how to do it. And he said what we’re going to do is we’re going to put a tiny endoscope through your feeding tube into your stomach and we’re going to come up from underneath through the esophagus. And so I wrote on a piece of paper I said let’s do this thing. And so, yeah, they take me into surgery, they knock my ass out. I wish I could have been awake for it, because it was really cool.
0:33:50 – Speaker 2
Yeah, I can’t imagine where it’s made.
0:33:54 – Speaker 3
This thing, this little, tiny little camera. They put it through the tube into my stomach and then they turn north and go up through the esophagus.
0:34:03 – Speaker 2
It makes you think of that movie Inner Space.
0:34:06 – Speaker 3
Yeah, yeah. And they get about halfway up and I had this little thin veil of scar tissue going all the way across the esophagus. So they just advanced this tiny little copper wire and they just poke through it and kept going. So they get to the underside of my UES. They put another camera through my mouth at the top of the UES, so the two cameras are looking at each other. This is why it’s called a rendezvous procedure. And then he just advanced that little copper wire again and just poked through that scar tissue right in the center of the UES. Yeah, because he wanted to tear the scar tissue, not the muscle, and he just poked a hole through it. And then he actually advanced the camera through my UES up into my throat and then he pulled it back out. They pulled everything out and then my ENT guy did the esophageal dilation and tore all that scar tissue.
0:35:22 – Speaker 2
And once it was broken up, he could get in there and clean it up.
0:35:26 – Speaker 3
Now, having this procedure done, you wake up with what feels like the world’s worst case of strep throat.
0:35:34 – Speaker 2
Oh yeah, I can’t even imagine what that is.
0:35:38 – Speaker 3
It’s not fun. But see, I had been joking around with him that this was in October and I told him I wanted to be eating cheese enchiladas by Christmas and so, and the fact is, I was eating cheese enchiladas at Christmas that year.
0:36:02 – Speaker 2
There you go.
0:36:05 – Speaker 3
The funny thing is, after eight, seven months of not being able to eat, my stomach had shrunk. Oh yeah, definitely. And it was to such a point that one scrambled egg was an entire meal for me. No kidding, you know, two spoonfuls of mashed potatoes was a meal for me. Wow, but I want to go on record here the very first thing that I took by mouth after my surgery was a cup of coffee.
0:36:53 – Speaker 2
So on record, then it goes to say that you’re a coffee drinker.
0:36:57 – Speaker 3
Oh, I’m a coffee connoisseur. Yeah, there you go, yeah.
0:37:03 – Speaker 2
When I got my mouth unwired because my mouth was closed for so long I could barely like open it. The muscles were like so relaxed so I could barely fit a Reese’s peanut butter cup into my mouth. That’s how, that’s how much. I could barely open it. So yeah, it’s really cool. I kind of like these line like intermingling kind of experiences. It’s kind of interesting. So when you came out of this, though, like what, what about this or whatever, that Like like I said earlier, kind of this experience kind of seemed to make you dive like head first into writing, because before you were kind of still working and doing the writing thing and it was kind of taken off and doing stuff. But it seemed like you were like forget it, I’m just writing now. Is that what kind of came out of all this?
0:37:47 – Speaker 3
That is what came out of it, and I was I wanted. During my cancer, especially during the dark days of it, I started working on a vampire story because I had promised myself I would never write a vampire story or a zombie story unless I could come up with something different than what I was seeing in film and television. And all that. Well, I finally got the hook for a vampire story. That was what I thought was truly unique, and I wanted to write it as a screenplay. But I was about 45 pages into the screenplay and I realized I was still in the first act. Which first act? Their screenplays are written in three acts and the first act is only supposed to be about 15 pages. Okay, so I realized I had a real problem.
0:38:50 – Speaker 2
Yeah, you’re like almost triple yeah.
0:38:54 – Speaker 3
My wife reads it and she goes Mark, you’re not, you’re not writing a screenplay. And she said you’re writing a novel. And so I took what I had and I just reformatted it to a novel and then, all of a sudden, all the pieces fell into place. I had this moment of clarity, I had this epiphany and I just took off with it because, see, here’s the thing I was convinced that, no matter what I did, I was going to die. No-transcript. I was going through it on the off chance that I could live, but I just assumed that I was toast. Wow. And so I’m thinking about my own mortality in a way that I had never thought about it. Well, had not thought about it in a long time, because you know you’re seriously facing looking down the barrel of it.
Yeah, exactly, and in the military there were times when I was literally looking down the barrel of it.
0:40:02 – Speaker 2
Yeah, I can imagine.
0:40:03 – Speaker 3
But the thing is. The thing is back in those days, once I got past that initial fear, I kind of shut down emotionally and I became numb. And it’s combat simply became a function that I performed and nothing else. It’s like I was watching somebody else do it, although that came back to haunt me later. But with the cancer you can’t fight. If you die, you’re not going to be able to die. You know.
Cycling your weapon, you know standing in a pile, standing in a pile of your own brass. You can’t do that when you fight cancer. When you fight cancer, you have to give up control of your body and your life to other people and you have to trust that they’re going to save your life. And that’s a tough thing to do. And I was scared with the cancer. In a way, I was never scared in combat. Not that I was never scared in combat, I was, but not like this. So, anyway, I wanted to write a story because I kept asking myself and I get kind of emotional about this hey man, I’m seriously almost crying right now, dude.
I was asking myself if I die, what do I leave behind? Yeah, and the other question was if I die, what lives on? What is powerful enough that it lives after death? And the first thing I thought of was love. And I thought oh my God, that’s my story right there. What lives after you die, love?
So I wrote a story about a young man who gets off track in his life, winds up being murdered by his own people. But just before he dies, a vampire comes out of the darkness and asks him I’m going to give you a choice. Here are your choices. A lot like what my doctor did for me. You’ve got two choices.
Well, this man says make me a vampire. And he comes back and the woman he loves rejects him. He’s a monster to her. She understands what he is. What he didn’t know at the time was that she was pregnant with his child. And what happens is he makes her a promise that she will never see him again and that he will not interfere with any descendants. So because he loves her so much, he makes the promise and he leaves her life. But what he does is, over the decades, he does kind of check in on them, like if they’re hurting for money. They might go out to the mailbox and find an envelope with like $500 in it. He watches over them and, as a vampire, he can innately tell who is good, who is bad and who is just pure evil.
It emanates off of people like visible waves of color that he can see and if he can touch you, if his skin comes into contact with yours, he makes a psychic connection and he can see everything in your soul all at once. So he doesn’t touch a lot of people because he doesn’t particularly like this and he only feeds on bad people, criminals. He feeds on drug dealers, pimps, pedophiles, murderers, rapists. Yeah, and this is a guy. He doesn’t just bite you on the neck and you know laugh like a puppy.
This guy will rip your head off your body, pick your quivering corpse up over his head and up in it and bathe in your blood, because he’s like Honey Badger Honey Badger, just don’t care. And if you’re a single mom coming home from working two shifts or whatever, he’ll leave you alone. Yeah, you know, if he’s in a good mood that night and you’re carrying groceries, he might offer to carry your bags. Yeah, you know, father coming home from working a 12 hour shift to buy his kids some Nike, sneakers or whatever, he’ll leave you alone. Yeah. But if you’re one of those bad types, if you’re a low life, if you’re a pimp or a drug dealer or pedophile or you know whatever it is that makes you evil, god help you. If you cross his path, you know. And the story? What drives the story is he finds out that an undercover cop who has infiltrated a transnational drug cartel has been outed by one of his fellow police officers and the cartel is going to kill this guy. They’re drawing him into a trap where it looks like they’re going to do a drug deal. Yeah, but it’s actually a trap to get him isolated. So they can. So they can assassinate him, and for reasons that become clear later in the novel.
My vampire says I don’t think so. And he does something that he very, very rarely does he gets involved in the affairs of man. Hmm, and that’s where the story takes off. And it’s all driven by his love for the young woman that he had known back in the early 19th, yeah, yeah, and his innate sense of responsibility. You know, living up to that promise that he made, even though it just kills him inside emotionally, it just causes him extreme pain over the years. And he keeps the promise, no matter how much it hurts him to do it. Man, that was my first novel.
0:47:59 – Speaker 2
That’s pretty crazy, mark. I mean, are you seriously almost coming to here and up over here because I can hear your, your story in in that story?
0:48:10 – Speaker 3
My story winds up in pretty much everything I write. One way or another, I’ll always have a main character who is flawed. He, he or she might have a physical condition that they have to live with and try to overcome or do a work around on. Yeah, it might be something mental and emotional. Yeah, I always want to give him some kind of personal imperfection, for a couple of reasons. One, it makes for a more interesting character because not only do you have external conflict in the story, you have internal conflict as well, and that may, and you know, they say, they people like you for your strengths, but they love you for your weaknesses. So, yeah, so I never want a character who is a a paragon.
0:49:17 – Speaker 2
Yeah, I want to.
0:49:19 – Speaker 3
I want a character who is flawed, because it makes them more interesting for me to write about them.
0:49:29 – Speaker 2
Now with the the vampire. You said that was the first novel. So that was the first one when you were like recovered, Like so you totally being cancer at this point.
0:49:39 – Speaker 3
By the time it came out, I was three years out.
0:49:42 – Speaker 2
Yeah, Okay, so did you start it when maybe you were had were just beating cancer?
0:49:48 – Speaker 3
Oh I was. I started writing it when I was still assuming I was going to die. Yeah, that’s what?
0:49:54 – Speaker 2
that’s what I was wondering, just to see if you’re pulling the inspiration right from when you’re actually going right through it.
0:49:59 – Speaker 3
Yes, yes, absolutely.
0:50:04 – Speaker 2
So so what? What have you written anything else after that novel? I can’t remember. I know you’ve written quite a few novels and screenplays. If I can’t remember if you’ve written anything after that.
0:50:13 – Speaker 3
Yeah, I had a novel come out last year to strong sales and some and some critical acclaim, called blood red moon, and that takes place up here in the Pacific Northwest in the small towns that you know that dot the Puget Sound, and this is a classic struggle between good and evil and and it has to do with werewolves living up here in the Pacific Northwest. Now, my werewolves are not like lawn cheney from the 1940s. They’re not even like American werewolf in London or the howling. Take the werewolves from the movie Dog Soldiers and put them on steroids. My werewolves stand around. Once they go into full transformation They’ll stand around seven feet tall, they’ll weigh about 350 pounds and they’re all fur, muscle and teeth. They have three inch fangs and their claws on their hands are about the size of steak knives. They can change at will and even when they are in werewolf transformation they still have the cognitive abilities of a human, so they know what they’re doing, they can remember what they’ve done.
The difference is when they become werewolves because they have some mutated DNA, some biological stuff that I go into in the novel. I won’t bore you with it now, but they’re like real dogs or wolves. They live in the moment and they give in to their baser instincts with no guilt and no shame. If they’re hungry, they will eat. If they need to pee, they’ll lift a leg. If a female attracts them, they’ll mate. They do whatever they want to do. They have no inhibitions, not the type of inhibitions that we have as humans, because real animals live in the moment. That’s how they live. Minute by minute.
There’s some other stuff that I did to make them different from every other werewolf story or movie. The basic shot of it is my main character, Caleb. He’s a lone wolf. He does not belong to any pack. He never has. He’s got reasons for that that I go into in the book, One thing I do my main characters are never whimsical or capricious. They never do anything just because they have reasons for everything they do. He’s working as a history professor at a very tiny, obscure little community college. He, quite literally through no fault of his own, he stumbles upon a global plot where all the local packs all over the world have been consolidated under regional packs. Regional packs have been consolidated as national packs. All the national packs are now consolidated under one global super pack.
Wow, that’s interesting. Which means there’s one global alpha that every and he is the leader and everyone follows. Because one thing about dogs and wolves they’re born followers.
0:54:55 – Speaker 2
That is super interesting.
0:54:57 – Speaker 3
Well, here’s where it gets lethal. This global alpha has decided that they are. They’re moving chess pieces around all over the world, moving into place and they are going to butcher about half of the human race. They want to kill around three and a half million billion people. They’re going to enslave and herd the survivors for food, for sport, for slave labor you know, be bugglers, maids and all that and for sex. And they view humans much the same way Nazi Germany in the 1930s viewed Jewish people, yeah, and not just the Jews.
but you know, primarily the Jews were targeted, and the werewolves use the humans that way that the humans are less, and so they’re going to establish themselves as the dominant species on the planet and they’re going to wipe out about half the human race. Well, caleb has a problem with this, because Caleb Caleb is burdened with an inescapable moral compass and he says much like my vampire says in nocturnal yeah, I don’t think so Over my dead body. And you see, when most people say that, they say it as a euphemism. When Caleb says it, he means it yeah, and and then you know things, things go from there and that’s what I mean.
That’s an awesome story. Yeah, and I’m. I’m currently writing a sequel to nocturnal. Well, everyone, I never planned to write a sequel to nocturnal, but all my readers kept saying, well, what happens next? Yeah, it sounds.
0:57:24 – Speaker 2
I mean, I haven’t read it yet, but now I’m going to because that that storyline sounds like you could have nocturnal 10.
0:57:30 – Speaker 3
Like I mean, it sounds like it would be possible. Yeah, so I’m working on that now, and then I’m going to write two sequels to Blood Red Moon. Awesome, blood Red Moon, I’ve. I wrote it specifically to be the first installment in a three part series and because I come from a film background, each story is a different act to a larger overarching story.
I see All right, so yeah, so that’s that plan and in between the various stages of writing the novel, in order to kind of clear my mind. That’s when I go in and write screenplays Okay, because I take a breath when it comes to writing.
0:58:24 – Speaker 2
You keep your head down, and every day.
0:58:27 – Speaker 3
Yeah, every single day. That’s what writers do, that’s what all artists do. We practice our craft every single day. Sometimes it’s a little, sometimes it’s a lot. You know, there are days when I can knock out 20, not 20, 2000 words. There are days when I struggle to get 500. Yeah, there are days when I have to handle the business end of things because this is a business for me.
0:58:59 – Speaker 2
It’s not a hobby.
0:59:00 – Speaker 3
Right, so but yeah, I’m doing something to either advance my career or, at the very least, sustain my career, so that I can get up and do it the next day.
0:59:13 – Speaker 2
Wow, that’s pretty awesome, mark. I’m gonna have show notes and there’s gonna be links to like everything. I’m probably stolen way too much of your time already.
0:59:23 – Speaker 3
Not at all. I’m, I’m, I can talk your ear off about this stuff, man oh.
0:59:29 – Speaker 2
I probably have to cut it short because your manager might get mad at me.
0:59:35 – Speaker 3
Judy is a sweetheart. She is she is I love her to death. I really do.
0:59:41 – Speaker 2
She’s a wonderful gal she is the greatest person in the world, and the first time I met her I said you know what? There needs to be a shirt with your name on it that says everyone needs to be like you, because she is really a wonderful person. But she’s gonna be mad at me.
0:59:57 – Speaker 3
It’s okay, it’s all right, I’ll smooth it over with her.
1:00:00 – Speaker 2
Thank you, thanks, mark, but honestly, man, I love to have you on again. Honestly, I think you have a lot of awesome insight and I think you’re really inspiring. Honestly, from my end, like I was even just a creator, I love what you just said at the end. Like not even just writing, but a creator is gonna do their art every day. They’re their creation every day. Whether it’s 10 minutes an hour, you’re gonna do your thing.
1:00:23 – Speaker 3
The serious artist. Now, there’s a lot. There’s a lot of hobbyists who can drop into it and then drop back out of it, you know, and they do it to relax from other cares and other pressures in their lives, and that’s wonderful, that’s fine. That’s like me when I sit down to play guitar. Right, I’m just a hobbyist, I’m not a performer, and that’s great. But those of us who are serious artists whether you’re an actor, a director, a writer, a painter, a sculptor, whatever, whatever your art is if you’re serious about your craft and if you’re serious about your artistic journey, yeah, you spend time on it every day. People will spend time on things that are important to them. So you have to ask yourself how important is this to me?
1:01:22 – Speaker 2
Exactly, and you know what.
1:01:24 – Speaker 3
And you have to be honest with yourself when it comes to the answer.
1:01:28 – Speaker 2
Yeah, exactly, and you’ll know. I think you’ll know the answer because, mark, you just kind of said it like if you’re a hobbyist, it’s this thing you bounce in and out of. But if it’s your your, which is fine, yeah, and that is fine. But if you know you found your craft, you’re not going to want to bounce in and out and you’re gonna. Yeah, I that’s great Again, mark, I thank you so much for your time. I I didn’t know that about the cancer either. That that’s an amazing story, my friend.
1:01:57 – Speaker 3
Oh yeah, it’s it did. It sucked. And here’s the thing I’m still recovering from it and I’ll and I will be recovering from it all my life Because I did have, I did have disabling disabilities as a long term effect of both the cancer and the cancer treatments and that that sucks. I deal, I deal with a whole range of of medical shit all the time because we can talk about it. I will come on here and talk to you about stuff anytime you want.
1:02:33 – Speaker 2
Awesome, let Judy know I have a free pass or whatever, like I have the whole pass or whatever.
1:02:39 – Speaker 3
Yes, you definitely have the. You have the free pass, man, I’ll talk to you anytime you want.
1:02:44 – Speaker 2
Thank, you so much, man, and again, everyone, if you made it this far, you, you got a lot out of this and I thank you all for listening and downloading. Don’t forget to embrace your storm, the show notes and everything I got in this, because I’m going to keep talking to Mark Everyone. Thank you so much and we’ll talk to you next time, see ya.
1:03:00 – Speaker 1
Tornado with Jonathan Nadeau If you haven’t yet. Please subscribe now See your first to hear new episodes with more stories of inspiration about the highs and lows of life and how embracing the storm is so much more fulfilling of a life than being crushed by the weight of the world. And until then, we hope you’re inspired to do something, whether it’s creating, participating or learning whatever leads you to your personal passion.
