For years, Reel Reviews has been where I write about other people’s work—movies I love, movies I hate, filmmakers who know exactly what they’re doing, filmmakers who apparently misplaced the instructions, and all the strange shit that happens when somebody turns off the lights and points a camera at people.

Somewhere along the way, I started spending a lot more time on the other side of that equation.

I write fiction, short stories, screenplays, and nonfiction about music, memory, place, and the things people do when they probably know better. The books move from Los Angeles after midnight to Ventura after dark, from Halloween stories and Gen X lives to jazz, drum & bass, sex, regret, second chances, bad decisions, and the occasional moment when somebody actually gets something right.

The newest addition is Sickly, an original screenplay and the latest in a growing collection of screenplays that lets me put some of those years spent watching, studying, reviewing, and occasionally yelling at movies to a different use.

If you’ve been reading my reviews all these years, first: thank you. Seriously.

Second, you might as well see what happens when nobody lets me hide behind the critic’s chair.

Sickly, Everything Before Morning, Regulars, October Still, What Happens Between Beats, and the rest of my books and screenplays are available now on Amazon.

Loron Hays
Writer. Film critic. Author. Occasional bad influence.

Hays is a novelist, short-story writer, journalist, film critic, and nonfiction author who has spent nearly three decades teaching while continuing to write about the things that refuse to leave him alone: music, movies, strange people, broken people, ghosts, California, the ocean, memory, reinvention, and the places we convince ourselves we are finished with before discovering we aren't.