Hey everyone, welcome back to the screenwriting life. I'm Meg Lafour.

And I'm Lorry and McKenna and today we're excited to chat with screenwriter, producer, journalist, and novelist Cole Haden.

He created the TV series Dracula starring Jonathan Rees-Myers, which aired on NBC in the States and

Sky Living abroad.

Cole has also developed dozens of feature films and TV series around the globe and his graphic novels have been published by Dark Horse and other celebrated publishers.

His debut novel, Psalms for the end of the world was called ingenious and compelling by the times.

He also writes a very popular substat called 5 a.m. story talk that I highly recommend

and that we're going to talk about today.

Hey Cole, welcome to the show.

Thanks so much for having me.

And we're excited to talk to Cole, but first we're going to dive into our weeks or what we like to call

Adventures in Screenwriting. We'll let

Lorian start. Lorian how is your week? Good actually I am working very hard to move

from cynicism into realism which means that instead of catastrophizing everything, I'm trying to do something

called realostrophizing things.

So instead of making a list of all the terrible things that are happening, I am focusing on all the real things that are happening, like things that are actually going on.

2023 was an actual absolute shit bird of a year for me.

So here's what's happening so far.

I just delivered the final script for an animated short.

I was hired to write. I got an offer this morning to write an

animated feature. Someone reached out to me to potentially rewrite a different animated feature.

I'm getting ready to pitch my animated TV show.

...