The Storyteller's Journey

Since the summer of 2023, when I first started at Full Sail University, my stories have taken me on a journey across genres, formats, and even realities. What started out as a few short stories to complete class assignments, has grown into a body of work that spans from self-published fiction to full-scale transmedia worlds and television pilots. Each project has helped me find a clearer voice. Sometimes its gritty, other times slightly darker or funny, but it’s always my own.

One of my earlier projects and still a favorite today, I called Unwoken, (representing a double entendre). I created it as a dramatic TV-pilot, that began as a story bible assignment. It centers around Bobby Reilly, a man caught between life and Purgatory, forced to confront his many sins through the lives of those he left behind and make his own peace with it. I loved that project, as it was the first time I learned how to build a story world from scratch and truly experience the creative freedom that comes with it, before you are eventually asked to compromise that vision in some way of course.

Not long after creating that story bible for Unwoken, we started to learn about publishing and distribution in a subsequent class, and I was able to self-publish a book of short stories called Random Short Tales, a four-story collection that took previous class assignments, and showed my range across genres: Where Did the Time Go (sci-fi time travel), Somewhere Between Chelsea and Brooklyn (romance), Sam’s Next Card (casino thriller), and Pamela’s Bell (gothic fantasy). Writing that collection taught me how to shift tone without losing authenticity, and how every story, regardless of genre, still comes down to flawed but hopeful characters.

From there, I started experimenting outside of my comfort zone with more intimate stories that I would never normally write on my own, without some sort of guideline or prompt to do so. Stuck with Susan took the rawness of jealousy/betrayal, and spun it into dark comedy, while Cat Call, my NYC Midnight entry, one of my more recent flash fiction endeavors, is a tightly written psychological horror story that kind of sneaks up on you at the end.

My biggest creative leap, however, came with Protocol, a full-scale transmedia project inspired by my short story Just Another Shot. Set in the fictional world of Lab Sonic Medical Industries, it blended corporate horror, a lack of biotech ethics, and immersive storytelling across multiple platforms — from Lester Merck’s CEO blog and Billy O’Malley’s Facebook posts to a fake recall notice and a haunting voicemail trail. It taught me how to use multimedia not just to promote a story, but to expand it.

Each of these works, from my early scripts to flash fiction to transmedia campaigns… have all been part of my ongoing education in storytelling. Whether the setting is a casino, a lab, a church in purgatory, or a quiet Florida bar, my focus has always been the same: ordinary people making extraordinary choices, and the cost that comes with them… much like in life itself.