The TRUTH Behind Borrasca - 100% True - Creepypasta/Internet Horror History S02E02 with CK Walker!

[Applause] [Music] for years no sleep readers have conversed amongst each other about the many stories that comprise the subreddit with all of those conversations inevitably leading to two questions what is your favorite story on no sleep and what is the best one story has found its way onto both of those lists and still today remains one of the most popular and successful tales to come from no sleep overall that story is brassica ck walker is an author and screenwriter from the midwest a prolific contributor to no sleep who also wrote the undeniable classic room 733 she is the rare example of someone who is able to use no sleep as a launching pad having been discovered by mike flanagan director of such films as oculus ouija origin of evil dr sleep as well as the critically acclaimed netflix series the haunting of hill house and its sister series the haunting of bly manor for which ck walker was hired as a writer with the first installment posted on july 21st 2015 veraska tells the story of sam walker as he recounts the downward spiral that becomes his life after his father uproots their family to drisking a small town in the missouri ozarks the story was an instant hit on no sleep garnering by the time of its archiving 3.8 000 upvotes and numerous awards the story was unique to no-sleep for a few reasons for one it was posted during a time when clickbait titles were rampant which if you listen to this show you've probably heard me comment on once or twice despite its one-word title veraska managed to break through the torrent of more inviting titles a task that has become increasingly difficult to accomplish veraska was also written somewhat differently than most no sleep entries of the time because it hadn't yet become the nearly 15 million member community it is now where authors deliver work of true professional quality many of the entries then were still written in the traditional creepypasta style now that's not to say they weren't good in fact many of my favorite stories come from that time what i mean is that it featured certain elements that existed specifically to give the story a more authentic feel most notably the decision to forgo traditional literary dialogue in favor of summaries of conversations and other communications barrasco read like a novel a real true to form novel something that at that point was still a novelty and no sleep so too was barrasca's length in 2015 other top stories had an average word count of 3116 words whereas part 1 of baraska boasted double that with 7338 this is all to say that given the time it was released if it were any other story baraska wouldn't have become the hit that it has what made it stand out amongst its competitors was ck walker's effortless delivery of a story that was easy to take in but no less complex or engaging for it as mentioned baraskas sees sam walker and his family move to the small missouri town of drisking after a vague incident with his father's job sees the police officer transferred once there sam learns of the local legend of baraska and the skinned men both of which seem to revolve around a singular location triple tree triple tree is a tree on which rests a large tree house and the tree itself is the spot where a local tradition takes place the carving of names a staggering amount of names are carved into the tree and the tradition demands that an ominous rhyme be said before a person can ascend the tree and enter the tree house underneath the triple tree there is a man who waits for me and should i go or should i stay my fate's the same either way eventually sam's sister whitney goes missing he learns that this isn't anything new and drisking apparently it's a somewhat regular occurrence for people to simply disappear with the aforementioned local legends said to have something to do with it but no one can really speculate as to what that something is when sam returns to triple tree he sees his sister's name carved into its trunk the rest of the story tells of sam's adolescence and early adulthood as he copes with the disappearance of his sister and the violent result of his investigation into it in the years that follow some ideas for the dark engrossing tale were inspired by the first season of hbo's true detective which if you've ever listened to me talk for more than 30 seconds you know i consider to be the single best season of television ever produced and is without parallel the single biggest inspiration on my own writing somewhere right now my girlfriend is rolling her eyes because i just said that exact sentence for the thousandth time the line from true detective to braska is plainly visible as each deals with themes of secretive groups existing and thriving in the margins of society groups capable of and eager to commit atrocities against the most innocent of people children the story began with ck wanting to tell a story of a child in an isolated community and while she didn't draw from any specific real world incidents in her words quote the fact that these kids were also selling each other into sexual slavery was one of the most horrible real world twists she could think of though sam kimber and kyle dictated where the story went ck had an ending in mind for the story when she began and it was initially supposed to end with part 4. however as a gift to her fans who felt the original ending concluded the story on 2 dower a note ck released a fifth part that offered slightly more hope baraska has gone on to become a flagship series for no sleep and the talent it's comprised of achieving mainstream popularity in may 2020 the first episode of a podcast based on barasca was released a podcast that starred actor cole sprouse and was written in its entirety by ck walker featuring new story directions characters and themes as mentioned the story was discovered by filmmaker mike flanagan an experience which has launched ck walker into the world of screenwriting to that end ck is working team to bring baraska to the screen which i can wholeheartedly say i will watch every moment of with ck having been a writer on the utterly horrifying hill house and its sister series bly manor i would love to see what she could do with a story entirely her own without further ado please allow me to introduce to you one of nosleep's all-time greats yet another of my biggest earliest influence the dalek emperor herself ck walker and i am here with ck walker how are you doing miss walker uh yeah pretty good considering i think that's what everybody says now so yes considering pretty good glad to hear that definitely is uh people who are listening to this you more than likely already know who ck walker is but if you don't she goes by the dalek emperor on reddit and is undoubtedly one of the most recognizable names in all of no sleep and she is the author of stories such as what the f is going on in penal county arizona uh room 733 otherwise known as the suicide room and the story we're here to talk about today brassica so yeah you have quite the i have to ask actually what what's the story behind the dalek emperor where did that come from if you don't mind me asking yeah so i i got really into doctor who for a period and um a dalek is a uh like an army of these this is so nerdy now uh robots that he has to fight occasionally and they had an emperor in um one of the uh earlier new seats then one of the david tennant seasons so i don't know i just maybe i thought it sounded cool this was 2013 it was seven years ago don't judge me i gotcha hey i'm not i'm not casting aspersions at all i am as big a nerd as you will ever meet so oh excellent so um obviously uh we're here to talk about brassica but before we get into that nebraska is i mean without a doubt a horror story so and obviously you have built your career in horror so i'm just kind of wondering how did you get into the horror genre have you always been a fan or was there was there one certain thing that made you be like oh my gosh i love this yeah you know i i think it's like an always thing because even as a kid i loved like the r.l stein books but more than that it was the one type of movie my parents never let me watch and that really made me mad so um oh am i allowed to swear in this podcast i should ask that oh yeah i know okay that really made that really pissed me off um so as soon as i got old enough to start you know being able to sneak them or watch them i became obsessed with them so it's been a it's been most of my life yep ah so rebellion brother i know do you have a uh a favorite sub-genre of horror that you like like paranormal stuff uh demons cults you know realistic psychological that sort of thing man um that's hard i don't think so i kind of like every i find supernatural horror harder to write for me but i i do find it scarier i would say than um you know more grounded human horror even though that's what i write i think supernatural horror is terrifying because you just you you can't fight something that's been around for hundreds of years and is imbued with god-like you know powers i just don't know how you can outsmart something like that so i find it terrifying i definitely get that and that's my problem with a lot of supernatural horror movies because the way that they beat these entities just seems so far-fetched and it really does seem like they they should not have been able to do what they did to overcome this villain i totally agree um it's you know uh mike's movie oculus was one where i'm sorry about the spoilers everybody if you haven't seen it but one where they don't beat it and i was like oh man that is refreshing because it was still a really good and interesting story but you know it had an ending that i thought oh yeah that's probably what would happen for sure and that's the movie that put me on to mike flanagan yeah maybe that's the best radar yeah right yeah he's just amazing he is we will actually be touching on him a little bit later um what was the first story that you wrote or i i should say what was the first story you posted to no sleep uh that was betsy the doll oh really yeah for summary i don't know why i thought that was later in here no that was my very first one wow so you really came out with a heater there i see i think that's what got me addicted to it right for sure and it is it's like uh once you do it once and you get a good response you just it's hard to not go back like oh i figured out the formula i can do this exactly and then you find out that there is no formula there is no formula it's true so barrasco what did you where did that idea come from where did it what inspired the idea of veraska so i had spent um a brief less than a year living in a little town called poplar bluff missouri which is in the ozarks in southeast missouri and it's a very uh the town i lived in i think it had maybe 40 000 people i just found the whole area very creepy um the woods are very dense no one really goes out into them but no one talks about why and i don't this must just maybe just was a weird town or whatever but anytime we were like oh we're you know we're this is a small town there's plenty there's mountains let's go do something it was like there was one lake that everybody went to which was also called crystal lake but that was all anybody really did out there um and i always found that really creepy so then you know ten years later when i was thinking about it because i've never been able to get up i was like i need to i want to write a new story i've got these characters in mind but where do i put it i just kind of decided to use that setting and the story kind of evolved from there that's awesome were there any like outside inspirations aside from obviously the main one being where you live that i mean the way you just described it is is drisking yeah from yeah from what i can tell but were there any like shows movies books anything that kind of influenced it a little bit yeah i think anybody that's read the story and seen um the first season of true detective can probably draw on some parallels there between baroska and karkoza um and i did like yes and i did really like true detective season one um i want i would have wanted to end it a little differently than they did and maybe that's what i ended up doing um in brassica but yeah i think that that definitely had some some influence on like the tone and and just like a creepy place out in the woods no one knows where it is but it has a name i just find that terrifying for sure if i'm about to say something that my girlfriend has heard me say i mean no no lie probably over a hundred times i firmly believe that true detective season 1 is the best standalone season of television ever produced it's wonderful it really is and if there's any one thing that influences any given piece that i write it's that so i totally understand that being uh and and there definitely are some parallels between brassica and true detective season one so anybody listening to this all three of you if anybody has not seen true detective season one do yourself a favor definitely check it out so the characters sam kimber kyle were they how do i want to put this were they kind of reflections of you or were they amalgamations of people you knew or were they just complete completely ground up brand new characters thought up in your head well yeah so i had a kind of an interesting childhood and i didn't have a whole lot of friends but i did move around quite a bit uh for my dad's work so i would say sam is probably the closest uh character to me and i definitely wrote him that way i'm also more of not not more of a follower than a leader i guess would would be one way to put it um and then as for kyle and kimber they were probably the friends i would have wanted to have i i did later in life have many kyles i think everyone has had a kyle as a friend uh yeah so that's kind of where where those three came from okay so the writing process of brassica did you i mean obviously you said you started off with the kind of the image of this town in your mind that that you were very familiar with personally but the later beats in the store and you know the actual narrative was that all planned out like did you or did you just kind of start typing or handwriting however you do it and just kind of let it all unfold itself yeah so i don't actually start writing a story until i've got dossiers on all of my main characters until i know pretty much all the beats that i want i might not know scene to scene where i'm gonna go but i just know the general like engine and momentum and thrust that i want to use to get there so it was pretty well beaten out all of the mysteries i had known fully from the beginning how to solve them and how i was going to do that and um i know that different writers have different processes this one works for me because when you do have a story particularly a grounded one with a lot of mysteries like that it's really fun to as you write kind of drop little tiny things in there that might on a you know on a re-listen or re-watch or re-read and like hit a little differently almost like an easter egg for instance um kyle trying on his dad's suit for the funeral and it's it's it doesn't fit him at all just like little stuff like that see and that's always fascinating to me because i've probably of all the authors i've interviewed more of them have said that they're kind of you know they're meticulous outliners and they you know plan everything and i uh personally i'm the complete opposite and like you said i mean there's no wrong way to be doing it obviously every writer's different but for me i can i can't really envision going down the road without actually taking the steps myself as i write the story so i've always found that fascinating because i i feel like i would be a better writer if i could learn how to outline and that's just i've always found that very interesting i don't see and i i don't i don't know that that's true and i think the reason is one as writers we know sometimes characters do things you you know what i mean you have this plan and then you're like wait a minute this character that i've written wouldn't do that and so sometimes they kind of make their own decisions but also i had a meeting with somebody and they were talking about how breaking bad was actually more broken as a story the way you do it where they didn't have maybe have some tentpoles but yeah they were kind of like okay so what would happen next they didn't you know what i mean i don't know they basically broke it beat by beat episode by episode and i've and that is one of the best shows out there so there's no wrong way to do it for sure yeah yeah and actually going back to something you just said having characters do things you wouldn't expect was there anything in those original outlines for nebraska or you know part of your original idea that didn't make it any any turns the story were gonna uh was going to take any endings that didn't happen because of other things you know i don't actually think so with brassica um i'd spent so long thinking about it that it pretty much went the way i wanted it to there wasn't anything that didn't make it in that i wanted in um but i have adapted this story a couple of times since then and have added more stuff that i thought i think is cool that kind of fleshes out the story and makes it longer um that i wish i had thought of back then uh to put in the original story right yeah i've had a couple things that i've written for different formats where i i'll think of even something new and i'm like man i wish i would have had that for the original yeah yep exactly so you you posted the story over four days correct um and there were four parts but as everyone will know there are five parts to burasco what what's kind of the story behind that where did that fifth part come from so yes i uh so part four or the end of the original story ended a bit of a downer um quite a downer really yeah i mean you know kimber got away so there's that um and i had a lot i don't even know what percentage of it but a lot of people who felt like they wanted more justice and more of a a little bit happier of an ending uh and so i think it was probably two years later i'm not even sure how much longer it was later i decided that i didn't have anything in mind to write for the christmas season and that maybe as like a christmas gift or whatever you want to call it i would write a part 5 which is like vindication for sam and kyle and kimber um and so i wrote it and it ended up being longer than all four parts of the original story which was interesting um and i posted it on christmas day so you know i get asked if it's you know so to speak canon and it's i mean it's if you want it to be yeah if people like if people liked it at the end of four then that's the end of the story if they like five then that's the end of the story it's kind of up to them right i saw i was doing a little bit of stalking in my research for the you know for this and uh i saw you had left a comment on some posts regarding some somebody had asked on the no sleep out of character subreddit if they should read part five and you said that it's not for everybody it's for the people that did want a happier ending i liked that i thought that was that was a diplomatic way of putting it and i enjoyed that oh good okay it's like a choose your own adventure exactly yeah you can either be super sad yeah or you know yes i think part four is the more realistic ending to how something like that might play out in real life in a kind of a fantastical version of real life but we're kind of living in that right now so you know oh definitely and this year if nothing else has shown that yes and never really know what to expect the world to throw at you very true very true and uh yeah i know for me personally i do prefer part four i mean part five is phenomenally written as is all of your work but the part four because of what you just said it's some it's more that that's what i personally feel would have is the more realistic ending yes cuz things aren't always wrapped up nice with a bow right i agree it's kind of like we were talking about oculus you know sometimes the engine is bigger than the character and there's not much you can do about that if you want it to stay kind of more more grounded yeah which is even more fascinating to me with a story like oculus because it's so supernatural and so to be able to get that like that kind of ending that really kind of hits you like that is even all the more impressive to me i agree what was the reaction to barrasco when you first posted it was it did i mean did it blow up did part one blow up immediately and was just like was everybody demanding more was everybody commenting part two question mark like they always used to or did it sit for a while i don't remember when it was actually posted oh right uh i think it was posted in some november but uh so i had written the entire story had been written and while i was writing i i made kind of like breaks in the story wanted to write because i knew based on the character limits of the subreddit um and their uh rules about you can only post one story a day that it was going to have to be broken up so i could have done it in three but it felt more natural to do it in four like more organic for the story so i had it all written i had it all ready to go i posted it um and i'm one of those people that likes to walk away like i can't i can't just watch and see what happens that day so then i would like i didn't look at it again until i came back the next day and i had done pretty sure i'm trying to remember i'm pretty sure i'd done really well for the time this was back when there were you know maybe half the maybe there were 6 million so 12 million i don't i don't remember it's a big subreddit now but um yeah it people did want uh part two so i got to post that and then just kind of like over the four days but what was really fun for me was being able to see people talk about it um in real time and not know what was gonna happen even though i did because most stories you just dump i'm not a huge series writer and no sleep this had just happened to be so long that it was kind of forced that way so it was neat for me to be able to see people time by like oh but what what do you think it's this do you think it's this it was really fun but i i remember the response being being good particularly on the fourth part when when everybody found out what happened and the comments just got really long in a kind of like book club discussion which i loved and participated and yeah for sure and i mean that's for me at least personally as a long time contributor to no sleep that that's my favorite part about no sleep is the audience interaction or the reader interaction yeah so yeah anything that invokes a discussion or i should that's my second favorite my first favorite part is people really joining in in character like the the no sleep rules dictate and kind of inserting themselves into the story i i love that that is that is very fun i yeah you know what i don't that's true i forgot that was a role um i don't know if we followed that on the brassica comments but i guess we would have had to but they did get very deep as in there were a lot of comments on some of them so it's hard to mod that yeah for sure oh yeah and i think at a point moderators just kind of realize that the train is left yeah yeah we're not going to stop nothing let it go so you do you've written both supernatural and supernatural paranormal and more grounded stories like uh brassica and were there any no sleep stories in particular that kind of got you into writing for no sleep or the kind of you drew from for any of your stories i would say not that i drew from but the stories that got me in were so this is awful because i can never remember the names of them but uh there's a nut there's a female writer and she wrote one i think it was the first one i ever read and it was um there were there's these famous murders from the 70s or 80s that happened at this uh not girl scout camp but girls summer camp um it was just like a pile of bodies of kid bodies found on this trail and this writer had been like i know what really happened and like used like basically wrote a fictional story around those murders and i found it really creative and interesting um and then i read another one i want to co i want to say it's called something about emily um where this girl has a group of friends and there's a fifth person in their group and but she can't see her here she thinks they're messing with her it's just it was again another i just happened upon a bunch of really unique stuff that i really liked and i was had such a boring job back then that i would just sit almost all day at work and just read them and i just got obsessed that sounds like a good job yeah you're into reading yeah exactly do you so i mean obviously you've kind of uh cut your teeth with horror do you have you written in any other genres um yeah i mean back before i even started writing on no sleep i had been working on a novel i mean as every aspiring writer does um that's definitely more in the sci-fi fantasy area um i'd say i've been writing it at this point for 10 years and i haven't looked at it in four but yeah that was that's have i really written outside of that not really um some some of my stories can be quite kind of like saddle the line but most of its thriller horror murder mystery area and i feel like that line is blurred a lot anyways like it is one per two people can watch the same movie and one can come out of it saying it was straight up horror and other can say it was thriller and they'll both be meaning the same thing true and and i think when we wrote hill house and and bly to a certain degree as well um they were there was a lot of drama in there that had nothing to do with the horror so that was fun right definitely yeah and that was actually where i was going to go with it next bro uh obviously got you to the position that i feel every no sleep writer before and after you is trying to attain and it got you discovered by mike flanagan who he mentioned earlier and who i personally consider to be one of the modern masters of horror he's one of the best in the game personally and uh how did that come about how did did his people reach out to you or were you shopping stuff around at the time and it just got put on his desk or yeah you know i've never i've never shopped anything because i just it seems like such a far-fetched thing to to to get to i suppose and i'd always heard the whole thing like it's amazing that anything ever gets made in hollywood and i had never even thought about screenwriting or working in the film industry period and if anything i wanted to be an author and maybe have some stuff adapted or something like that um but no i uh i had had a couple of stories optioned by some smaller production companies uh and then mike did um some voiceover work for the no sleep podcast on one of my stories which was brasca uh and he read it yeah yeah he played um oh he played sam's dad and i think kate his wife played uh sam's mom yeah and he he really liked the story and my understanding is that he went through my kind of catalog of stories and he liked he liked my writing and um he optioned two of them and then uh i got an email like a month later asking um if he could have if he if i if i if he could call me and i said sure i thought it was going to be about option stuff um and uh now he calls and he's like actually he's like sorry i've got this show i'm doing with netflix would you be able to come out and write it with me and i was like yeah oh yeah yeah of course so yeah and yeah i didn't have to leave phoenix for the interviews i mean i think i did uh you know zoom or video interviews with uh um the producers at uh paramount and netflix and they they signed off on me even though i'd never written a screenplay in my life so i so i packed up and went to l.a that is an incredible story yes like i said i mean that's got to be that's inspiring to me and i imagine everyone else trying to get to the position you're in i mean and when it happens it happens quick because i think i was only in that room for a couple weeks before um i was signed with a um an agency out here called wme uh and then it was all uphill-ish from there so yeah that's awesome do you have you written or have you worked in any other major productions like that aside from hell house and blind manor uh that you can talk about i mean right right right right um so i've i have written uh some uh film screenplays uh for features um that are in uh various states of um either production or deal making or sitting and waiting for something which happens all the time and then i got netflix over this past summer hired me to adapt a book for them to a show so um that is what i have been working on and i'm not sure i'm allowed to say what it is yet but it will you know up eventually it will it will come out um yeah and i have another um well yeah we'll just leave it there i think that's oh and i'm working on a um a big budget podcast with uh david goyer who wrote some of the nolan batman movies uh he could have written all three actually called batman and buried um so that's what that's the room i'm currently in which has been a lot of fun no kidding i am a giant comic book fan oh you would get along well with this room because it's mostly them talking deep cup batman stuff and me being like okay i need to wiki at some of this oh if you ever have any questions i am a batman encyclopedia oh i uh no i'm not i've been following the or like keeping up with the updates for batman unburied and oh really i had no idea you were part of it yeah oh i am so excited for that i think yeah i think you know i'm there because i had i have written a a big budget podcast before uh by myself and also um you know it's it's a it's a it's a dark take as batman usually is so um i'm not a bad person heaven in that kind of room but um they definitely know everything about batman yeah it's wonderful yeah that's that's literally my dream um so actually bringing it back around to that you have written a big budget podcast that being brassica and what how was writing that different from writing your original series so um because it's uh scripted audio and and this is just uh screenwriting or script writing in general there's so much you can't do um you can't get into character's heads most of the time um in any script um and it's it it's it's the same with uh podcasting i i had written some uh straight-to-script stuff for um the no-sleep podcast and um the darkest night podcast before so i had gotten used to what you can and can't do and what's what's really exciting for the listener and what kind of falls flat so internal monologue is very boring i think in my opinion so i don't do a whole lot of that but that makes it even harder to get inside your character's head so it was really i got to do my favorite thing of all which is writing dialogue so it's basically you know 500 and something pages of of dialogue and sound effects and it's really fun to write because i don't feel pressure to describe the room or you know it's basically like this person sitting in this seat of the car this person's in this um and it was fun to be able to be like well i can stretch this out i can add new stuff i can add new characters and and when you know a story as well as i knew that story because i'd already been adapting it into a full-length novel it was super easy and fun to go in there and just play around with the characters and and just try to write the most um interesting and fun version of it that i could for something as dark as it was definitely and i listened to it i've listened to it twice all the way through oh wow yeah it was fantastic because i'm actually in the process of um developing one of my no sleep stories into a big budget podcast so that's amazing yeah i've kind of been taking your work as you know the gold standard right now because nothing nothing has come before it so and that's not to say it wouldn't still be the gold standard if there were a thousand big budget no sleepers right podcast but you know what i mean um yeah yeah yeah i mean i will say i think most of the work that q code does uh the company that did my podcast is is excellent um for the i heart podcast awards this year three of their shows including mine was nominated for best fictional podcast they do really good work there so that's a great if you're looking to write a fiction podcast um i would look at some of those okay definitely yeah because yeah yeah i mean obviously i'm familiar with cue code because of yours but yeah i'll have to check out i think they might have done one other no sleep story as a pilot yeah they did the left right which one left right game that's what it was yeah um um that's wow that's incredible um what what were some things you added to the the podcast that weren't in the original story so i added um something well first i added the borasca parties uh those were not in the original story uh i don't think god has been swan i don't think they were um basically that they would there would be a party were they now i'm sorry now i can't remember if they were or not either way if they weren't i expanded them quite a bit um and added in like the like a creepy ceremony um like a blood lighting ceremony and then i also my favorite thing i added was the mile markers which even in a podcast i think is very creepy to think about um very creepy so i wish that i had been able remembered or thought of that back back in the day um but yeah that was my favorite thing that i think i added and and the framing device is kind of cool too i like that oh definitely yeah which was not my pitch it was it was pitch to me and i was like great let's do it so yeah no and that worked out really well i thought that facilitated the story really well um considering where the story goes yes i agree yeah so that just seemed like a natural place from which to tell the story well and it was great because i could use it to pop out of what i would what i thought would be boring for a listener for instance there's a scene in brassica where jimmy is standing up on stage at a school auditorium and just like explaining the history of the town and i was like that's going to be very boring and you know without people asking questions so i decided to jump out back into the present day and have sam just do a really quick and so we could add in dialogue back and forth with leah about what the information that the listener needed to know and then we pop back right back in and i think it worked and and so the framing was great for that yeah it allows exposition without being glaring yeah right right and boring again yeah for sure and i obviously anything you're writing you don't want it to be boring so yeah yeah were there any limitations that came with uh developing and developing excuse me development i can't talk developing it to a different format there we go uh yeah i mean well that's hard i i would say you know but you didn't get this in the original story either but nebraska has a lot of what i consider kind of cool cinematography um and uh you know it's it's it's fun to describe it in the story um it's difficult to describe it in the podcast so i do feel like we lost some of the more purpley writing the pretty kind of things that that are short little half paragraphs but that really like give you that oh i have the i can see that this tree and dark gray cloud and the cold and all of this you know you don't want to lose too much momentum put in a podcast describing you know exactly what a scene looks like where i think you can get away with it more um in pros yeah definitely that makes perfect sense so with that cinematography that i totally agree with in the original story you painted such a clear picture of drisking um thank you are you looking to get it adapted further into you know for the screen yeah yeah i mean we're working on it right now um so we'll we'll see what happens but i we're optimistic about it um so yeah that's that's probably a more to come thing but um yes ultimately yes we are trying to get it uh to go for tv that's awesome i will be the first to watch it i promise you thank you oh that'd be great so we've pretty much covered everything there is to cover about brassica at least as far as you can talk about um i just real quick wanted to touch on a couple of other stories you've written uh one of which was i think it may have been the first story i read on no sleep or it was very shortly thereafter room 733 yes where where did that come from man that's a good question um some of these things don't really come from anywhere i think you know sometimes you'll just get a weird thought in your head about i mean for me it's a lot of times it just comes from having like a creepy sentence you know and i think for 733 it might have been um that this room that they thought they were next door to the whole time they were actually inside of the whole time uh i also wrote that story uh set on the college campus that i went to which was northern arizona university and the building the dorm that they lived in was called o'reilly and it was seven floors and there was a suicide room in there and another building i mean i think you know college campuses always have creepy like someone murder was murdered in that room or someone commits suicide or that room had a dance you know stuff like that uh so it was it kind of all came together pretty organically i think it's a it's it's got a lot of tropes in it that people like um that are kind of easy to write so yeah that that kind of just came from like my experience at college and and you know like what would have made that actually creepy like a suicide room so yeah because always every college campus has one and it's always like a broom closet now or something so what i've gathered from uh this conversation so far is that you are a resident or we're at one point of arizona which actually brings me into my next question what the [ __ ] is going on in pima county arizona can you please tell us the story about penal county arizona that's kind of a wild story yeah i was i was living in phoenix at the time and a lot of the uh more prolific writers on no sleep were friends uh the ones that wrote you know every week or something like that were friends and i think you remember and maybe they're still doing this they um there used to be collaborations so at the time what was going on there there was some sort of pandemic fears which i know that's like had on a hat now but it was something but small ones for i don't know was like bubonic plague i don't remember what it was but something was in the news a lot and we thought we would capitalize on it like let's all write you know like scary illness stories um so we all wrote one and i don't remember if we staggered the postings or whatever but um for whatever reason pinal county did like that ended up being the main one and because of no sleep's rules about having to pretend it's real all the other writers in the project started commenting on mine being like yeah i know i i have an aunt that lives there whatever um because it was mammoth arizona that it was happening in and so that begat more people playing along until it got on onto the front page of reddit um and i think that one got like 2 000 3000 comments deep it was kind of insane and then i because people i guess were saying well i called i called such and such gas station and nothing happened i put it out it was like whoever you're talking to that's not us we don't know those people you know just like random fun stuff um and then here's the funny part so what happened was some people in tucson i guess decided to try and drive over to mammoth because it's not that far to like just really get a look around for fun but if i recall this correctly a plane had ended up crash landing on the only highway into mammoth the same day so they were turned around at a blockade because of the plane crash which only perpetuated the story more and then i thought that was all fun and games until the next day i was literally getting ready for work with the news on and it's a news story on um in phoenix and i'm like holy crap and then my dad sent me a clipping it was a a news story in usa today as well and then they the local tucson one of their news organizations tried to call me and interview me and i said i'll do it by email but i'm too embarrassed to do it in the studio because it did cause the town i mean i think some of the people living in mammoth thought it was funny and some were annoyed and i did feel really bad about that right yeah but that that's so amazing it's so funny i know it really is hilarious um so as far as no sleep goes do you have any stories that didn't take off that you wish would have gotten more attention i do i have a few um i thought blue ridge underperformed and um what was the other one oh my god oh uh the uh late kaga chante also underperformed in my opinion i thought both of those stories would be much bigger than they were and they weren't yeah which goes back to you never know the formula you never know you never know what's gonna hit and what's not yeah yeah and no sleep is such a fickle beast it really is yes are you still writing for no sleep i'm not um i i'm not because there's some question and this is probably good for any no sleep writers to be aware of if you post your stories on no sleep conde nast technically owns them so when someone wants to option something of yours they might be put off by the legal complications um so i would just you know that's why i stopped posting stories on reddit um so i don't you know i i would just say other writers should should know that um going in but that's that's why i don't write there anymore and do you still i mean i know that you're obviously i'm sure very busy working on you know uh screenplays and shows with you know you know shows with your career in la are you still writing short fiction i mean even if you're not posting it to no sleep are you still writing uh short horror no i really should be i have so many ideas but um i don't i feel a part of it is is being busy even in the pandemic and part of it is um because writing is now my job it's the only way i make money i like to kind of try to put those creative outlets into the most um i don't know career oriented things i can not that i haven't thought about it i just haven't i think the last short story i wrote was um white fall which i wrote for the no sleep podcast but that originated as a short story that never got posted anywhere oh okay yeah and that makes perfect sense i mean yeah you want to put everything you've got into the yes the thing that's guaranteed to get you somewhere yeah yeah and i actually it's perfect i really like screenwriting now i'm not sure about more but i really it's it's it's it's different and it's challenging and it's it's it's got such a cool payoff i really enjoy it yeah and that's actually how i got started writing um when i was like 13 years old i started i i bought a book from barnes and noble called how to write a selling screenplay because you know i was 13 and i was you know yeah imagining big things and that was where i got started and that's and that's where my true love lies is in screenwriting so that's amazing yeah yeah so that's uh that's very cool um what can we i guess we already kind of touched on what we can expect from you moving forward yeah i think there will be more to talk about at the end of next month or maybe the beginning of february okay um uh but i'm i'm i'm not sure so yeah uh you know things are things are coming along which is interesting because just because you know the whole industry's kind of shut down due to covid i'm you know now i just saw yesterday that the the state of california is trying to urge uh films to close production um but that means there's a lot of development it's a development heavy i think period so yeah a lot of a lot of writing because what else can we do i was going to say that would be good for writers if no one yes obviously a huge blow to the industry as a whole but if you have anybody in it as a right yeah yeah but then you know there might come a time when they're like backlogged they're like oh we got we got too much to produce now we don't need writers for a while you know who knows right yeah it's a trade-off yeah that's a good one right right exactly all right well i think we have pretty much covered everything that i had to cover was there anything else that you wanted to to talk about or is there anywhere you want to direct people who want to check out your work um yeah well i do have a website which is uh ckhyphenwalker.com um yeah that's you know i would say uh if you haven't seen his house on netflix it's excellent i had nothing to do with it but i watched it and it was terrifying it was a really good horror movie so that's the only shout out i would give is just netflix recommendations right i actually watched the trailer for that like 10 minutes before getting on this call with you oh really i was considering watching it very scary yeah good to know all right i think i might have to when we're done here i might have to go do that awesome all right well thank you very much miss walker absolutely it's truly been a pleasure it was awesome talking to you i have been a fan of yours for so long so i know for all the people who will be listening to this they will love it but i love it more than all of them i promise you oh thank you that's that's amazing of course yeah so you take care and stay safe and i look forward to everything you will be working on in the future you as well thank you for having me on absolutely you take care you too bye-bye you

Channel: Nick Botic

Views: 11,158

Keywords:

Id: yveeBPITa3M

Length: 50min 44sec (3044 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 01 2021