You heard the story. Now you're those who were involved in medical life,
join us as we built behind the Door. Good evening, roomies, and
welcome back to another episode of Behind the Door with the Gray Rooms podcast.
I am your host Brooks Bigley, and with me tonight is Nick Manzilillo,
the author of season four, episode nineteen entitled Luckless. How are you this
evening? Nick? Great? Thank you so much for having me. Absolutely,
thank you for traveling back in time to have this conversation with us.
From whatever future you're from. This is a crazy story. I absolutely love
it. Um Where are you from? By the way, I'm from Rhode
Island, specifically, I live in Warwick, Okay. So another East Coast
author. I think every single one of our authors this season somehow lives out
on the East Coast. There's some kind of conspiracy here. I haven't figured
it out yet. What's the weather like out there? It's it's certainly heating
up here out on the West coast. It's gotta be you gotta be having
sun sunshine out there by now. It's warm, but it's moody, you
know, some days otter than others. Some days it's it feels like it's
gonna snow again, typically New England. That's right, because you're like up
at the very northern end, you know, kind of up there at the
bottom of Canada. Basically, yeah, pretty much. Yeah, yeah,
So Hey, this story uh fucking amazing like time travel, Like, wow,
we haven't done I think anything like that at all in the show.
I might have to go back in time and check that. We're gonna make
lots of travel time travel puns tonight. But you know, saving your story
till the end here was I think a great idea because it really helps kind
of round out, you know, this season with a really fun episode that
like entertains a lot that you don't have to think too much about this,
but it does leave a lot of lingering questions, you know that I'll that
I'll get to, you know, the style of just these these two two
people having this conversation and like you get into it and you have no idea
at all, there's no foreshadowing as to what's happening, you know, and
you're just like, well, what crime did this husband commit? What what
is going on here? Why are they not going to get their money?
And it totally goes in a direction that I think nobody saw happening. So
how then tell me, as usual, how did you sit down and you
know, create this story? What was the impetus for it? So the
crazy idea comes first. You know, uh, lottery commission meant to catch
chime travelers, right, and it's it's kind of like a common like meme,
right, like you know, if you could travel back in time or
to the future, you'd probably use it to cheat the lottery or get rich
right right. And from there it was just all right, so you have
this crazy idea, how do you nuance it and like ground it in reality?
And so it's just two people talking out a table. Interesting, So
you immediately were like, hm, I'm going to write a story about time
travel. It was at the very first thing that you thought, for the
most part, I wanted to write a story about someone who thinks they're a
winner, and then it just goes horribly wrong, like so catastrophically wrong you
could couldn't even begin to imagine it, right, Okay, yeah, yeah,
because anyone can write a time travel story. You know, the premise
that is there to just okay, time travel, go back in time and
do something, you know, and then you had to figure out. Okay,
well, what is the thing that is causing the time travel? Who
is it? You know, who? Which perspective a person is telling that
story? So you determined you did want to do a time Did you write
this for us or you already had this written? I wrote that actually during
the peak of the pandemic. I think it was like March, the late
end of March twenty twenty. Okay, so you had this time travel idea,
you sit down and you started hammering it out how and then yeah,
you know you're right that, like what is the very first thing anyone will
you'd go back in time and try and win some money, try and win
the lotto, you know, maybe correct a couple of mistakes, murder a
couple of people you didn't like, blah blah blah. Anyways, you decided
to pull back on the murder portion and you went with this this lotto idea,
so like, take me through how then you started to flesh that out.
So, you know, with most of my high concept stories, I
like to try and ground them as much as possible, you know, just
so the reader can kind of like get a feel for the weirdness and slowly
open up to the idea of it. So starts off, you know,
just with the interrogation in a lottery room. You know something's wrong. You're
thinking fraud, you're thinking some type of like massive conspiracy possibly, but times
travels probably the furthest thing from your imagination. And I kind of tried to
make it more personable to the main narrator and how it was her husband and
how her whole life was basically a lie. And as it starts to get
weirder and weirder, the time travel idea starts to present itself. So it's
not a complete out of left field. Still is a little bit not a
complete out of left field reveal. Yeah, you unraveled it, I think
perfectly because you introduced you know, little nuances here and there, this man
questioning her in strange manner, and her absolutely thinking well, this is just
the state commission. This is just some lot of dude that is questioning the
method as to how we won here, you know, and then questioning her
relationship, and you know, you're thinking, well, what does that have
to do with anything, So then it does make it seem like, oh,
this is some kind of crime caper that like this is really a the
detective who's just trying to piece together you know, the situation. I love
absolutely, you know how you came up with that, and you gave just
a couple of bits of information at a time, you know, leading us,
you know, with the care it down down that road towards you know,
the ultimate conclusion of the story here, how did you kind of determine
you know, the relationship between like you you had a body of characters,
and how did you determine that this should be a man because he you know,
again it's about him coming back in time and illegally winning the lottery,
But then you also worked in the relationship between her and him. Did you
do that just to keep it going or was there like what theme were you
trying to go with there? So you know, I started off just wanting
to tell a time travel story and making it a practice in constraint and like
not trying to reveal too much and trying to like train myself as a writer
for that. And then it became almost amusing on like faithfulness and relationship how
well know, you know, your partners, and it kind of evolved into
this commentary and all that. Yeah, yeah, there's a lot of implications
I thought about, you know, the theme of trust, and like she
really thought she had this perfect guy here, and how much of it was
that he was in love with her and you know, it was the right
kind of person for the relationship with her versus what this Latto man was saying.
And he could have just been saying anything because you know, he just
needed to fix the time continuum, but saying, well, he doesn't really
love you and he back basically calculated all of these different moves, which to
me is also like, well, how the hell then can you keep your
composure for eleven years trying to connect all these dots just so at the very
end of it all you could win the lotto. It seems like it seems
like a plot from like a nineties sci fi movie. This was such a
fun, i think story to go through that you didn't need to understand any
kind of science. It very much was just caught up in the drama of
the reveal. This is very suspenseful dawning on her what the actual truth was,
you know, and then whether or not we even saw the husband in
the end, you know, which we got to see him. You know,
she passes by him and he's like Oh, I'm so sorry, blah
blah blah. You know, it didn't matter whether he felt bad or not,
because it was I guess ultimately the story wasn't about him. It was
about her. It was about our narrator and just having her life completely ripped
out from under her. Basically, you know, was there anything personal to
you that kind of brought this out of you to write it this way subconsciously,
you know, subconsciously, and because it was the pandemic, like you
know, things are pretty dark in March twenty twenty. I think it was
more so like just that negative atmosphere of let's take the luckiest thing you can
imagine, winning the lottery and completely flip it on its head and make it
the worst day, not just like the worst day of your life, but
the end of your life as you know it. Yeah, it's funny how
the pandemic really caused lots of people to think differently, you know, just
about things in general. That has leaked out into our writings. I've always
thought, I remember, like, right when the pandemic started and you see
memes about this, but like you know, sure enough, in a year
or two, you're going to see all these kinds of stories coming out because
of the actual psychological pressure that was put on everyone because of the pandemic.
So it's it's I guess it's good to hear you know that you use it
positively to to kind of get you, you know, moving forward with some
new writing and stuff. I was fortunate to not experience a slowdown writing unlike
a lot of my fellow writers. But I did notice that a lot of
my characters didn't have the happiest of endings during the most of the pandemic.
Well, of course, I mean, I can't have all you know,
rose colored glasses on through all of this. I have some questions now also
about just the story itself, Like you can immediately shut me up if you
you know you want, but you're the author, and so I thought i'd
i'd plug them anyways with the ending, right the reveal of like there's this
like spiderlike machine and you know they're firing it up, and you know,
the Lotto man will just keep calling him that. I know he wasn't an
actual lotto man, but the lottom Man like telling her that you know,
he was going to send her back in time to fix everything, send her
consciousness back in time, which is akin to I guess how the husband came
back in time himself was some type of like conscious transference, you know,
not physically showing up in space, but his conscious coming back. At least
that's what it sounds like. So did that really happen though, because it
seems like he just killed He just shot her and killed her and disposed of
the body and and basically was admitting I I needed to clean up the timeline
basically, So it's kind of like you can go either way, right,
if he was just going to kill her, why didn't he just shoot her
in the back of the head or something brutal like that, it's more so
even if it's more so, if her mind went back in time, there's
still a body in the present. The present just doesn't collapse, and so
the mission. I'd like to think that. And I'm not necessarily necessarily sure
if this actually happened or not. I mean, it's out of my control
at this point towards and the story. I like to think that her consciousness
went back to that moment, like the timeline was restored without that man infiltrating
her whole life. But at the same time there's a dead body in the
present because she can't be allowed to continue living because she's basically an anomaly and
a disruption to the current timeline, right right, Yes, And that's what
I inferred from the story as well, that you know, if indeed it
worked and her consciousness went back in time, it does leave that shell,
that husk of a body, you know, behind with nothing in it.
So that is basically the death of the body per se, not really the
death of the soul. And I talked about this with a team too,
like, hey, does this story kind of go against the gray rooms because
the idea is that, like the character dies and then you know, the
souls are being collected for you know, our main characters throughout the the narrative.
But if this was just the body died and the consciousness went back,
then her soul is still intact. So but yeah, so then also then
what about what about his name was Paul? Right, Yeah, the husband's
name was Paul. If he came from the future, clearly there would be
his body somewhere doing something. But then whose body did his consciousness landing?
So like it opens up and you know, you don't have to answer this
we're just talking rhetoric here. Whose body did his consciousness landing? Like does
this mean that people going back in time? Could you be minding your own
business, that you know, shopping at the grocery store, and then suddenly
someone else's consciousness lands in your body from the future, and now you're deleted,
You're gone, Like, how does that work? I loved that ambiguousness
that was left open because I had I was like, oh my god,
I have like five different questions now about his story. Did you think about
any of that at all as you were writing it? Yes, Like,
I you know, I really originally will let an you think of time travel.
I came up with a lot of like different machines and concepts. But
through the nature of the story, you know this, it would never be
explained by the law of man just how the time travel worked. It wouldn't
benefit him. Maybe he wasn't privy to this information. And the main narrator
she wouldn't really understand it either, because you know, she's supposed to be
just a normal person with no concept of that kind of stuff. So I
kind of left all of that out. I played around some ideas, I
took some notes on it, but I didn't reveal it by Yeah, and
so basically I would say that there's more than one method through time, and
that the husband's physical body came from the future and he had managed to infiltrate
the past. But at the same time, the way the woman's consciousness is
kind of transported back, like her soul, as you said, kind of
just reset. There's different ways of fixing the time stream. And you'd imagine
the lot of Commission has more than one way to say, skin a cat,
you know, there's more than one way to solve a problem and handle
this massive disruption. Yeah, that makes sense. He because you know,
the lot of Man said that her husband had lived and in almost an entire
lifetime prior to even meeting her, you know, so he there would have
to have been some kind of way around that, Like, you know,
you couldn't just have again what I said, conscious being just landing in people's
bodies and then deleting that person. You know, he'd have a bunch of
Oh, but he would still have I was gonna say false memories, but
not false memories, but he just wouldn't have. So he comes back in
time, he meets her at the new year's party. He's not gonna have
any memories of anything you know, from her world because he's from the future.
But there where you did add little bits of like how he he basically
calculated everything, So clearly he must have done some research, you know,
he came prepared basically, and then this was just this long con for him.
I'm guessing ultimately to just win the lottery, you know, to win
what was the eighty eighty five million dollars for him to then just comfortable and
who the hell knows if he would have stayed with her, But interesting that
she was a part he had he need for whatever reason, he needed her
to be a part of that that world to get there. Man, you
you've opened up this world. I want to like see sequels and prequels and
like other other characters in this world, you have a lot that you could
you work with here to like continue this as like a series. Yeah,
the Lot of Commission itself was really fascinated me while I was writing it,
And you know, I'm always generating new ideas. My notepad is filled with
hundreds and hundreds of possible stories, and I would love to possibly explore more
of the law of commission, especially the lot of Man and their role what
they know. You got to imagine that they live in the presence, So
how much information are they given about the future, the past, the technology
itself. Yeah, and you establish a couple of rules like you mentioned where
the lot of Man mentioned that there was like a you know, a law
that he broke, and there was kind of like, ah, I forgot
why what did you say? Was it had to do with like it was
a statute of limitations or something like one hundred years back one hundred years forward.
So like this opens up, you know, lot to play with this
giant time sandbox that you've created, that you could kind of flesh out and
make many stories and larger stories and more characters. So I mean I would
I would be absolutely interested in hearing and reading, you know, do more
with this, turn it into some kind of series. Yeah, if there's
a lot of possibility with it. And I have actually written something similar to
it that I'm currently still on the ed stages of It's but like thirty page
story, but it deals with entirely different concepts in the same kind of universe.
Excellent, Okay, Okay, Now now tell me about your writings like,
is this the first time that you've had a story turned into a podcast
or have you done this kind of stuff before. I'm fortunate enough that this
is the second time I've had a story publishes a podcast. This was more
so one of my more favorite stories that could turn into it, Like I
published, Okay, what was your other story? I was Paul the firm
grip on the back of the ankle. It was for the Tales to Terrify
pod cast. Basically, it's a haunted hotel story with some lovecrafty and uh
outer dimensional craziness going on towards the end of it. Now, tell me
more about does your writings in general? Do you do you write a lot?
Do you have any novels out? Any any novellas? Like what is
your what is your gamut of writing? So last spring I published my first
novel through Worldcastle Press small press. It's Moon Regardless. It's a mostly a
dark crime story with a lovecrafting and spin on it as some supernatural horror elements.
And then I've I've written about well, I've published about seventy short stories
through a variety of different publications, Like I mentioned, only two podcasts so
far. Hopefully more in the future, and I'm generally writing every day.
I'm currently editing about three different novels right now. I'm trying to shop one,
and I'm always busy with that nice nice are they? Is everything within
like a horror theme or a suspense a thriller theme is your what is your
flavor? Kind of runs the limits of genre fantasy. A lot of stuff
is kind of split between, like crime and fantasy, or crime and sci
fi. I have been getting into more straightforward like fantasy, urban fantasy,
contemporary fantasy writing as of Wait, so when you wrote this story, Luckless,
it was the crime portion first that you were aiming for, and then
you developed time travel around it instead of it being a sci fi thriller of
time travel, and then you added crime into it. I think the sci
fi element was more so the driving curiosity for it. I've written only about
like twelve sci fi stories, and I love the genre. It's just I
always like I'm on edge about knowing what I'm talking about or inventing technology that's
really sound and stuff like that. So I'm a little more intimidated by sci
fi than I am fantasy or horror for the most part, And like what
does horror mean to you? Like, what what do you what do you
get out of it that encourages you to add your voice, you know too,
to the zeitgeist of it. You know, to me, horror is
the mystery. Some horror is what isn't explained. And I guess that's kind
of what I love about, like you know, sci fi or fantasy um
as evident in this story about what I don't tell the reader, you know,
like watching like movies like Friday Thirteenth as a kid, I was always
more curious about, like how does Jason keep coming back to life? Like
what's possessing him? How come we can get shot in the face and still
attack people? You know? Oh yeah, that's the supernatural element behind all
of it. Oh god, those some of those movies were truly disturbing as
they were getting you know, deeper into the lower of it all. M
I mean, it's it's amazing again how horror really is just this umbrella of
so many larger concepts that fit under it and in just different ways that you
can explore different elements in ways that we feel and fear, you know,
things in real life. With your story, luckless, like it was kind
of like, well, how do you trust anybody? You know, how
how can you trust this person? She absolutely thought that her life was perfect
with him, and then he was the greatest thing, and maybe he was
still like, maybe he was treating her right. He wasn't out, you
know, having sex with a bunch of people after going to a club or
something. But still there was this massive lie as to why he originally got
with her. It was just to slowly work his way towards winning this this
this lotto, I guess. So you definitely, you know, kind of
shed light a bit on the themes of trust in a relationship. Absolutely,
the crime portion, which I thought was was brilliant. We don't have enough
like crime horror, I guess. Yeah. And then of course just the
marriage of sci fi with horror is always fun. Yes. Yeah. One
of my biggest inspirations for a lot of what I write was a true detective
the first season that ran on HBO. Um if you're not familiar, if
that, it's you know, it's a crime story, detective story, and
then they start working in this love crafting, cosmic horror angle to it,
and by the end it almost completely transforms into something that's pure horror, and
I kind of love that transformation from what you expect into the complete out of
left field, right, yes, And that's very indicative of this story.
You know, as I said in the beginning, that you put down the
parameters of what it was going to be about, and then whoa fuck.
Time Travel as a total total came out of left field. But it all
made sense too. It didn't feel like you were just like painting into a
corner and then trying to figure a way back out of the story to conclude
it. How did it feel to hear the story turned into a podcast?
Like, you know, having your story on tales to terrify. Its different
because that's more dude sitting in a chair narrating your story doing all the voices.
This was like fully fleshed out audio drama. How did that feel to
hear it? Oh? It was so impressive. I had a bit of
a long road trip more of the weekend and I played in the car with
my friends who were driving, and all four of us were just completely gripped
for about twenty minutes just to the whole thing. And it was awesome.
The footstep up to the doors opening and closing, different accents, Jason knows
what he's doing. Would you be encouraged then to kind of write more of
your stuff or maybe take even stuff you've already written and kind of flesh it
out more into like script format in order to you know, submit to more
podcasts. Yeah. I was really energized after hearing that. I was come
up with all sorts of ideas behind I would like come up with more like
audio focused stories like that, like oh man, then mount of notes I
took after that one car ride excellent. Yeah, I am telling you right
now, you could create a series. I keep harping on this. You
can create a series out of what you have made here for luckless, like
does the larger world at play here? You could do so much with that.
It would just be so interesting to to, you know, develop the
science behind it and like how does how does it all work? Where you
know, you said that could be the consciousness is being sent back in time.
It could be the body that's being sent back in time. What does
that mean when you have people in charge of trying to keep that from wrecking
and ruining the world. You know, basically you know your own version of
time cop. You know the Jean Claude Van Dam movie. Um, the
sky is the limit with with where you could go with this stuff, And
like I for sure would be hooked, you know, listening to like a
podcast series about this world. Like you know, if you create your own
storyline and everything that you should definitely look into doing something like that. I
think I would always keep it a little bit vague. Um. For me
personally, I love it when there's still a lot more that your imagination can
fill in, you know, like just hearing the way you're you're you're thinking
about this, It's like, I think I'd go for more personable stories,
more more character focused stories, but at the same time play with more of
the time travel, more of the technology, more of the crazy world you
know, behind the curtain, right, And that's what I meant, Like,
I didn't mean like make a story where you explain to us how it
works. I meant more like the implications. So you know, you could
have a story where it's about this person also realizing that the person that they're
with is not who they should be or seemed to be because of something about
their consciousness shifting or changing. You could have stories, you know, just
about other people's motivations behind why they want to go back in time, and
you know, what are they trying to fix or what are they trying to
hurt? Because they could be they could be doing it for good or for
bad. You know that you could totally play around and then while that story
is unfolding, like you did with this one, reveal a little bit behind
how it works, or a little bit behind what the rules are. You
know, maybe even set like one of the stories could be the you know,
more about the Laudo Man himself, or just a character like that where
his job is to stop this kind of stuff, So what is his daily
life like that he's he's got to do with the implications of knowing all of
this. It's like he's the men in Black and he knows what really is
happening, you know. So yeah, you could. You could totally turn
this into a multimillion dollar enterprise. There's a lot of play with you.
I'm dangerously like overinspired. Where you tell me the slightest idea, I'll spin
it off into like a five thousand words stories. So it's already probably gonna
happen. That's awesome. So that's and that's why you just said you have
like what like seventy seventy something stories that you've already written that are published.
I have a lot more waiting. Yeah, so not even just written,
but like chilling on your computer. You actually have them out there in the
world. Hey, good on you. Now what are you working on currently?
If you don't mind me asking if you can reveal anything. Yeah,
I'm trying to focus and just I really want to workshop and you know,
pitch to agents this new England urban fantasy novel with mermaids, sea monsters,
you name it. And I'm really trying to just get that ready for agents,
get my query letters, get my synopsis ready, and just pitch that
and not do a million things at once. We wish I'd been doing my
whole career. It's spreading yourself a little bit thin there. Yeah. Yeah,
but now that I have at this time travel of universe, I might
you know, be a little distracted from that a few months. Yeah,
I'm glad to light a fire under your ass. Excellent, go for it.
Then do you write full time or do you have like a day job
and you kind of do this as a hobby around it all. I do
have a day job. I actually just went from freelancing content writing and blog
writing freelancing to working for a company called Butterfly m X, which is in
the real estate industry. Work is, for lack of a better term,
and they encourage me to use it boring, which is great for my creative
writing. At night. You've got to have kind of a stale daytime in
order to kind of jump start, you know, that creativity, Yeah,
at nighttime. Yeah, it's all about the routine, exactly, exactly.
Well, hey, as we draw up a close here, can you tell
us places where we can find those seventy stories that you've got written, or
where you're working on stuff, how you're releasing things and books whatnot. So
most links to my stories can be found on Nick Manzililo dot com. Quite
a few of them are free, a few are in like paid anthologies through
Amazon, and my debut novel can be found on my website as well and
through my Amazon author page. Nick Manzielilla. Nice, excellent. So you've
got a lot, you know, you're a lot of pokers in the fire
right now, basically, yeah, yeah, I'm just trying to focus and
find an agent. So if you are an agent interested in mermaids and urban
fantasy and stores inspired by Stranger Things. Hopefully I have something for you.
Ah, Man, isn't it crazy how Stranger Things is taken off with just
getting into our nostalgia. That's it right there. If you can write stories
that dips into people's in nostalgia, you're just guaranteed to have a sure fire
hit on your hands. Yeah. And you know, I noticed there's a
severe lack of oceanic everything, you know, I mean, how many vampire
how much vampire media is there compared to mermaids and vice versa, you know
what I mean? Yeah, the ratio is unfair towards the vampires. Yeah,
very much so. But are we talking about killer mermaids? Are we
talking just about like the mythology of mermaids and themselves? The mythology you know,
you know, if there are areculer mermaids, then there are mermaids that
just help people who are drowning. You know. It's really diving into the
whole mythology of oceanic creatures in general too. That's amazing, that's awesome.
And you have some bodies of work that already touch on this or is this
stuff that you're currently working on. So that's my current novel, which is
what I've been completed, and I'm trying to pitch it to agents soon,
hopefully for the next month or two. And I've written two sequels to it
and a handful of short stories in that universe. Nice man, you are
making moves. This is This is awesome to hear. It's all about getting
down and focusing. Yeah, that's that's the key to it all. Absolutely
just got to buckle down and focus on getting the task done at hand,
and you will be a great writer like Nick manzelul here hopefully. Thank you.
Yeah. Well, hey, it was great of you for joining us
tonight. Nick. I appreciate you taking the time to sit and chat and
I thank you for sharing your world with us here in the Gray Rooms.
Thank you so much for having me. I'm very inspired by this conversation.
Excellent, Go fourth and achieve all those dreams, my friend. You definitely
definitely can do it, and I'm definitely looking forward to more of your time
travel stuff. Thank you. I appreciate it. And as usual, the
biggest thank you goes out to our fans and followers who listened daily and spread
the good word of Bob May you languish, may you lament, and may
you loathe, but always with love hashtag stay Gray, Take care and enjoy
your evening. Nick you two, thank you, and good night folks.
Bye. Join us each week after every episode for another interestion of Behind the Door.