Finding the Magic: How A Four-Year Meltdown Became A 630-Page Breakout Novel

The story behind my breakout 630-page novel and sixth publication of 2025, and the years of failure, addiction, and obsession it took to get here.

Published: October 23rd, 2025 (see: Medium)

I never set out to write my breakout novel.

In fact, I never set out to write novels at all. I was just a kid in pajamas, hunched over a whiteboard in my parents’ house, trying to map a story that had its jaws in my sternum. I didn’t know it would take four years. I didn’t know what I’d lose in the process. But I knew — undeniably — that I had something.

And my father believed me.

Made in America: or The Tragedy of Billy Castle and Unexpected Absolution of Dean Willis didn’t come from a top hat. It came from being twenty-one, broke, living at home in Marin County, with no credits that mattered and no backup plan.

It came from working night after night in a gaming chair in pajamas, three beers deep with nothing to show for it but belief and grit. It came from the fear of failure and the need to outrun that fear by doing the only thing that ever made sense to me: telling a story worth telling.

Even then, something about Made in America was different. Mythic. Scene by scene, beat by beat, I outlined obsessively on the whiteboard above my wooden desk. The Xbox controller sat within reach, hollow distractions everywhere, but that story had its hooks in me. It wasn’t optional. It felt like oxygen. If I went even a day without making some kind of dent, I felt subhuman.

Overtime had already been written when I was nineteen or twenty. The Bastard of Taylor’s End existed, but it was so wild, so stylized, I didn’t think anyone would take it seriously yet. I was betting on Made in America because it felt alive. I could see it, hear it. It was seductive. Angry. Brutal. And I knew what it could become if I could just hold it together. The skeleton was there; the themes, the ending, the beats. But stitching it into a living body? Shading in the blanks? That was the hard part. The part they never show you. The part that can drive you to the brink if you’re not careful.

I wanted to finish the script so badly it hurt. I didn’t have much. Certainly not money. Momentum? Forget it.

But I had this.

One of the few things I remember fondly is telling my father where I was with the script every night when he got home from work. He was a kind man. Gentle in ways I only recognize clearly now. He’d come home from the city, throw a frozen pizza in the oven, and listen to me ramble about crime families and skylights and this man named Archer Stone who’d started haunting my imagination.

I’m sure sometimes I sounded delusional. Ungrateful. Unhinged. In fact, I know I did.

But he never said so. He just kept showing up. And I kept trying.

The cold pizza. The late-night beers. The weight of a promise I couldn’t explain. But damn it, I knew it existed.

If there’s any reason why Made in America became what it is — sprawling, layered, unforgiving — it’s because I had to destroy that former version of myself to write it.

This wasn’t just a book. It was a purging. A final, ferocious attempt to prove I could survive myself.

And I did.

2021: Finding the Magic

In this era of post-COVID disillusionment and chronic unemployment, if I wasn’t wrestling with a scene or the way a character told someone to fuck off, I’d default to my first true love: watching movies.

One night, I was watching You’re Next (2013), an underappreciated slasher. The film opens with a couple winding down before being dismantled by men in animal masks. Charming as that was, it was the song that stuck: “Looking for the Magic” by The Dwight Twilley Band.

Immediately, from the moment I heard the piano, a 4K projector fired up in my head and transported me into a low tracking shot of a blood-red carpet. The camera moved slow, patient as sin as I floated just a hair above this sea of red. Then, suddenly, we began a slow ascension. The bass came in, and I was passing oil paintings from the 1400s, uncanny biblical sculptures, a tank with a King Cobra, its black scales glistening under museum lights. And as the intro echoed hauntingly, we began to settle on our subject — no more than his back at the time, wearing a black Armani suit and observing a blue-lit nightclub dance floor and its participants the way an Emperor might survey his courtyard. I could make out the hair — dark, slicked back, elegant.

Even then, I felt the darkness exuding, all from throwing on a B-movie from 2013.

More than that, I felt the magic. That ten-to-fifteen-second shot — brewed up on a random Tuesday with microwaved pizza and a Budweiser — told me I needed to figure out who the fuck this guy was.

The name came fast. Archer, my Microsoft gamertag to this day, though I haven’t touched an Xbox in well over four years, and Stone, because something about the man’s demeanor felt ancient, immovable, an evil carved and refined over centuries.

And before the jokes come, no, the idea wasn’t Dracula with nascent alcoholism managing a 1-Oak. It was deeper. Something rooted in reality, just not quite tethered to it.

The next day, I was blowing off steam on Grand Theft Auto V, causing mayhem from my warhead-launching space motorcycle when one of the other anger management cases must’ve had enough. After nuking his car for the tenth time on a Sunday morning in Marin, my Xbox was fried by a DNS attack. With nothing better to do, I flipped open my mom’s iPad and started outlining Made in America, scene by scene, moment by moment.

Two hours and four densely-spaced pages later in 12-point Roman, I had the first true, bare-bones outline of Made in America.

And so it began.

Final Draft groaned awake as I double-clicked the vomit-green emblem and plunged into what would become a 160-page screenplay, one that I’d eventually shelve when I moved to LA, but not before it taught me everything I needed to know about obsession, craft, and the kind of story that doesn’t let you sleep until you’ve bled it onto the page.

2022-2024: The Abyss

Even the demons were starting to wonder what was wrong with me.

The years after were less momentum than collapse.

In March 2022, I moved to Los Angeles. Worked in a Santa Monica restaurant through the summer. Stumbled into a corporate job in September. The script sat in a proverbial drawer along with the rest of my ambitions.

Then, on January 21st, 2023, my father killed himself, and whatever scaffolding I had left came down with him.

The year that followed was a slow-motion car crash. I was a sales associate for a top insurance agency owner in Calabasas, showed up on time, answered emails, attended meetings and conferences where I nodded at the right moments while my brain bled behind my eyes.

Mornings started with four shots of tequila and a bowl just to stagger out the door. Nights were the rest of the bottle until I face-planted on the couch in my seventh-floor walk-of-shame off Highland. I’d come to still dressed, tequila sweating on the coffee table, the Hollywood Hills looking back at me like the uncle who knows exactly what you are and isn’t impressed.

Then I’d run it back. No purpose, no hope, just killing days and quietly wishing the next one wouldn’t come.

People talk about rock bottom like it’s this cinematic one-day reckoning. That’s cute. I’d been paying rent down there for months. Even the demons were starting to wonder what was wrong with me.

Clarity did show up eventually. 7:45 a.m., rush hour on the 101, March 4th, 2024, half-buzzed behind the wheel, watching the city crawl like a dying organism. That’s when it finally landed: this wasn’t a phase — this was the rest of my life if I didn’t amputate it.

Two days later, I carried what was left into the desert.

Wreckage. Nothing else.

Rehab wasn’t salvation, but it was a pause. A strange rebirth. I started flipping through old scripts like they were wrecked cars I could maybe rebuild into something drivable. Violent Crimes, a short screenplay I’d written in high school. The Schultz Brothers, my Frankenstein monster — feature, series, pilot, bible, whatever it needed to be. I ran them all through the fire again, this time as prose.

But Made in America was too big, too unwieldy. I wasn’t even close to ready yet. It stayed orbiting in the background, whispering.

After I left residential, I landed in a Palm Springs sober living house — think less facility, more “resort for the burnt-out.” Toward the end of my stint, I started volunteering at an animal shelter next to my acting class. That’s where I met Mulan — the prettiest cat in the place, but also the shyest. She’d already been returned by one family for hiding too much. I saw myself in her: spooked, skittish, just needing some patience. I convinced the shelter owner to make a call, tracked down Mulan’s original foster mom, and talked her into watching Mulan for a month until I was done with sober living.

I spent two weeks chasing an apartment in Palm Springs. The manager finally accepted me. My mom’s friend in Palm Desert — the same one who dragged me to residential when I blew in from LA with more agave than blood in my body— gave me a monster of a couch. I had to rope in a friend from sober living, rent a U-Haul, and haul ass across the desert on a tight deadline. We made it by ten minutes because the apartment manager, who looked desperate to get to TGI Fridays so he could catcall the bartender and eat nachos alone in the corner, insisted on leaving at 5:30 sharp.

We dragged that couch up a flight of lethal cobblestone stairs that would make the Templars gulp. A week later, after nothing but radio silence, the place denied me (pretty sure it was because I let it slip I was coming out of recovery). I went back, took my deposit check, and left them the couch to figure out.

Less than a week later, I found a place in Palm Desert — a condo so nice it almost felt like a reset button — and took it.

Somewhere in that last stretch of sober living — three weeks before moving out — I met the girl. Fell for her fast. Two weeks after I moved in, she moved in too. We had one good summer. Then fall rolled around, and the gauntlet began.

Early 2025, everything detonated.

2025: The Chase Event

It isn’t just God who doesn’t care about your plans. It’s anything bigger than you.

January cracked open in Big Bear, her birthday weekend turning into a full-scale derailment. After a fight on the way back to my condo in the desert, I ended up stranded — no phone, no luggage, no meds, nothing.

I’ll never forget what I told my mother in the aftermath:

“I don’t want to ever feel this powerless again.”

So I returned to the one thing I had ever been able to control.

The page.

She cycled in and out like weather, every return resetting the blast radius. Bad terms through early February. I spent my twenty-fifth birthday alone on February 10, drafting the first edition of Immundus between the chaos because sitting still meant thinking, and thinking meant drowning. There was a rebound, someone I thought could be an exit. We were too similar. It collapsed.

On March 12, I published Immundus under Abbycat Entertainment, the working company name at the time. The reception was warm enough to keep me moving.

March 26, I got arrested in my driveway after an argument. I slept in my Charger until the afternoon, windows cracked, 106 degrees outside. A neighbor called the cops thinking I’d overheat like a Labrador left in a parking lot. Four hours in Indio jail. Paperwork, holding cells, cops that acted like frat boys in Kevlar on twice the coke and half the testosterone.

My girlfriend picked me up in my car. We drove home in silence.

Five days later I published Beat Cop. On April 21 I released Overtime — my first paperback, my first time holding something I wrote as a physical book. I was driving Uber for Coachella and Stagecoach, shuttling drunk festival people between hotels and obscene Airbnbs, marking revisions on my phone between rides.

Somewhere in there I filed Abbycat Group LLC with the state and built the website overnight — domain, pages, branding — because waiting was a luxury I no longer believed in.

Early May she told me she was pregnant. The words came through my phone while I was running errands at Walmart, holding a jug of Tidy Cats in one hand while she told me our lives had just changed permanently.

Late May I got the apartment, just a block down from the condo because I loved the area — and still do.

Simultaneously, I finished Violent Crimes — the Apocalypse Now of book editing. I quit InDesign halfway through production after punching and breaking my second monitor and switched software. No monitors have died since. I released Violent Crimes on Memorial Day, intentionally.

Early June I drove to the coast and visited her. We had one good day, the kind that tricks you into thinking chaos is a phase. A few days later she disappeared. On June 23 I published the remastered hardcover edition of Immundus anyway — still a personal favorite — and that same week I hurled myself back into Made in America like a man with a gun to his head. Late June through late July I drafted four acts of dense prose at a pace that bordered on medical concern.

In July she moved back in and friction resumed. By the end of the month I burned out hard and stalled one act short of the finish line. Within a week she was gone again. I couldn’t even look at Made in America. So I rebranded Abbycat and remastered my backlist instead. If I was at all correct about what I had on the fire, the past would have to be strong enough to stand beside it.

Overtime was re-issued in August 2025 under Abbycat Black after a full interior rebuild and narrative pass to bring it into alignment with the current line. Immundus: Remastered was reconstructed and issued under Abbycat Liminal to match the emerging house style and to restore material the earlier edition couldn’t carry. Violent Crimes was stripped of the experimental packaging and issued as a clean, trade-ready edition under Abbycat Black.

Once the backlist was dressed in the same skin, I went back to Made in America and New York.

September 17 ended the madness, bringing with it the completion of a four-year arc.

Everything I’d been carrying for four years, finally out.

Every word was written by hand, from scratch. Just obsession, grief, discipline, and time. Time I didn’t want, maybe, but clearly needed.

Because it isn’t just God who doesn’t care about your plans.

It’s anything bigger than you.

Made in America, Made by Hand

The stories were always there, waiting for the right way to tell them.

I spent years chasing Hollywood. Writing specs that went nowhere, treatments that collected dust, pitches that died in rooms I was lucky to get into. I thought success meant seeing my name in credits and watching actors deliver lines I had written.

But Hollywood cares about risk, runtime, budget, and recognizable IP, not your internal cosmology. And Made in America — a 160-page crime epic about a psychopathic demigod nightclub owner-war criminal kept alive by a magic Colombian ruby, and an alcoholic FBI agent with trauma buried by amnesia — was never going to fit that mold.

So it sat. For years. Finished but unfilmable. Too dark, too ambitious, too expensive, too weird. The feedback was always the same: “Love the writing. Can’t sell this.”

I didn’t switch to books because I got clever. I switched because prose was the only place the story wasn’t dying.

It changed everything.

The moment I started translating those old screenplays into novels, I realized I’d been working in the wrong medium all along. What felt cramped and mechanical on the page — action lines that could only describe what a camera sees — suddenly had room to breathe. Characters sketched in parentheticals could finally live inside their own heads. Violence that read clinical in screenplay format became mythic in prose.

In a script, I could write:

Billy looked out the window at Queens.

In the novel, I could transport you to the borough itself.

Screenplays taught me structure and pace. Prose taught me how to make people feel something.

Made in America became 630 pages, because it needed to be. Until then, I’d been writing lean. Violent Crimes came in at 270 pages. Overtime sits at 143. Immundus: Remastered at 136. I believed in economy.

But Made in America was the first time I realized that “lean” doesn’t mean “short.” It means no waste. And this story had none. Every page earned its place.

Six books in 2025. All built from material I’d been carrying for years.

Not because I’m superhuman, but because I’d finally found the medium that let these stories be what they always wanted to be.

And like that, the dam broke.

I am not a screenwriter who writes novels now.

I’m a novelist who happened to learn storytelling through scripts first. And that makes all the difference.

Hollywood taught me economy. Prose taught me how to spend it.

The stories were always there, waiting for the right way to tell them. Turns out, that way was always prose.

Four years ago, I was a kid in pajamas with a whiteboard and a promise I couldn’t explain. Now I’m holding 630 pages that nearly killed me to write. The story that started in my father’s house, that survived his death and my collapse, that waited through rehab and chaos and every reason I had to quit — it’s finally here. Not because I was strong enough to finish it, but because I was desperate enough to keep going when nothing else made sense.

Made in America isn’t my breakout novel because it’s good, though I believe it is. It’s my breakout novel because it’s the thing I refused to let die when everything else did.

And maybe that’s what a breakout really is — not the story that makes you, but the one you survive making.

Made in America: or The Tragedy of Billy Castle and Unexpected Absolution of Dean Willis is available for purchase on Amazon, Google Play, Barnes & Noble, Everand, and more. Hardcover arrives 10/30.