Hi, I’m Frank Perrotto, owner of Threshing Press and author of the Find the Needle series of books. This site is meant as a place for me to periodically write articles on self publishing, my work in television and film (shameless IMDB link), and my thoughts on other things which I are simultaneously published on Medium.
It’s also meant as a place for me to post updates on the book series, appearances (someday?), and to connect with readers who are fans of my work. Writing can be a really lonely process, so it’s great to get feedback, good or bad, and if you ever have a question, even about the ridiculous reality shows that I (mostly) work on these days, shoot me a message! If you’d like to stay updated, be sure you’ve subscribed to the mailing list above and/or the RSS feed.
As I said in the Preface to Find the Needle, Part 1: Diary of a Digital Outlaw and in the Welcome email if you signed up for the mailing list, I’ll be sending out free short stories between full book releases that will add other layers to the work of Find the Needle. These shorts stories exist outside the “Outlaw”, in-book game world, i.e., they involved the scientists in charge of the experiment and how they interact with Dmitry and what their goals and disagreements are. The Prologue to Find the Needle began as a short story, but I soon realized I needed to stick it up front in Part 1 to contextualize the rest of the book.
A little more about me – I live in Hoboken (soon to be Westfield), New Jersey and work in New York as a television editor. Some of the shows I’ve worked on include Dora the Explorer, Killing Fields, The Real Housewives of Atlanta, Alaskan Bush People, Mob Wives, and Made. I’ve been doing it for roughly ten years now and while I probably can’t say anything too specific here for fear of upsetting people or violating some NDA I don’t remember signing, if you’re ever in New York and want to know all the dirt on The Real Housewives of New Jersey, Miami, Atlanta, or Mob Wives, shoot me an email and I’ll… probably… ignore it. Seriously, if you made it to this website, you more than likely read a lot and don’t care about some silly reality show characters. That’s a healthy perspective.
Besides television, what I’ve always wanted to do, as cliche as this might sound, is to write and direct scripted film and television shows. In the past several years I’ve made a short film about alien abduction that did well on the festival circuit (but not as well as it’s done on Youtube!), and written several screenplays and pilots, one of which did well on the screenplay competition circuit. All of that got me exactly nowhere beyond my day job, and that’s okay. It took me a long time to realize that all I want to do is tell stories and to have an opportunity and an outlet where people could enjoy them. I get some small measure of that from my day job, but not nearly enough, so I turned to writing narrative fiction… mostly for the mountains of cocaine and piles of cash that people told me every self-published auth – wait, what?! No cocaine? No piles of cash? Someone lied about all this?!
As I’ve done on Medium, I’m going to write a lot about switching from screenplays and pilots to writing novels and how it turned out to be nowhere near as difficult as I thought it would be. Don’t get me wrong, there’s a huge learning curve, but there’s also a tremendous amount of freedom in self-publishing narrative fiction. Screenplays are all about crisp dialogue and the details you leave out more than the details you leave in. Economy rules the script format, whereas with a novel, if you want to spend an entire chapter on the history of a building the character lives in, well… go right ahead. You risk boring the audience to death but that risk could also pay off in that someone will find your ideas just as fascinating as you do.
At the end of the day, it’s all about communicating our weird little (and big) stories to one another and hoping there’s somebody else out there who gets it. If they don’t, well, try not to cut your ear off. Or build a time machine and keep going until you find some future people who’ve discovered your work. If you don’t find any, definitely cut off your ear.
Alright, this ‘About Me’ section is already too long, so I’m gonna cut it here and just say welcome again to Threshing Press (the name began as a Led Zeppelin reference), and I hope you’ll stick around for the entire Find the Needle series as well as what I have coming up next, another three part series of books called The Cryptid Cabal.
All the best,