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.
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