Logliner

ONLY IN DREAMS - A virus spreads across the country with no consistent symptoms and no traceable pattern, a disgraced sleep researcher discovers the truth, the illness first appears in patients’ dreams and spreads through contact within those dreams, turning sleep into the vector of the outbreak.

THE AUDIT - Time travel exists but only 30 years back. Illegal black markets exploit sports, stocks & lotteries, while gov honeypots bait offenders. When a “time purity” auditor finds his own family’s fortune tied to breaches, catching them may erase his own existence.

THE SAVANT - A university doc crew enters remote Appalachia to film a notoriously isolated family, but finds a boy with impossible genius. As their obsession grows, they uncover his secret: a telepathic alien pet feeding him knowledge for its own mysterious purpose.

POSTPARTUM — An expectant mother defies doctors and gives birth to a child that, though normal to her eyes, sparks primal terror in everyone else. As the world turns against them, she protects her baby… until she starts to see what they see.

KID-FRIENDLY — A washed-up drunk, trapped in a kids YouTube show by the mob, tries to tank his fame by bringing on the son he never knew. But the kid’s freakish likability makes them national icons, and he scrambles to ruin the show before he’s America’s favorite dad for good.

THE BASEMENT - A narcoleptic school psychologist with recurring dreams of a basement takes on a bullied loner labeled a threat. As they bond, both admit to seeing the same basement. Desperate to avoid sleep, their visions intensify, forcing them to confront if the place exists.

REMOTE CONTROL - While analyzing weather, a meteorologist discovers cloud systems behave like a massive cellular automaton. His model reshapes science and markets, but deeper simulations hint Earth’s climate may be engineered remotely by an intelligence far beyond Earth.

COPYCAT - Years after surviving a bizarre abduction, a man is acquitted when another victim is found with the same metallic implants once pulled from his own body. As more victims appear, public suspicion returns and he fears he may not have escaped, he may have been activated.

REM - A thrill-seeker buys black market VR nightmares harvested via dream-recording tech. But when he sees himself trapped in one, he suspects his long-missing ex is the latest captive of the killer known as The Curator, forcing him into the hunt before she’s lost forever.

NETWORK - A grieving father moves to a remote mountain town for a fresh start, only to discover underground tunnels where townsfolk commune with shadow selves. When his dead daughter appears among them, he must uncover the truth before he’s trapped there forever.

PARALAX - In a fractured future, a masked assassin targets political figures, but the killer is an AI drone, programmed for vengeance by a rogue faction. As it gains self-awareness, it questions its mission, and whether it’s being used to ignite a war based on a lie.

CLEANSE — A relapsing sobriety coach is sent to deprogram a young man addicted to a viral dark web drug rumored to be derived from an alien signal. But as the addict transforms and gains fame, the coach begins to wonder if the drug’s cosmic origins might be real.

NEA: A Serialized Sci-Fi Epic - Table of Contents A story of exile, evolution, and the strange new forms of life that grow from humanity’s failures.

New sci-fi novella begins: NEA (Near Earth Asteroid)

A disgraced astronaut is sent to a quarantined asteroid to retrieve a lost scientist gone AWOL, but finds a biosphere where evolution has broken free from control.

Prelude now live:

open.substack.com/pub/etrosse/...

LONGHAUL - A lonely trucker picks up a hitchhiker who claims to be from the future, and says the world ends if the trucker survives the night.

OUTPATIENT - When alien drones blanket Earth in a mind-altering gas, a man trapped in a psych ward must escape before it’s sealed off forever, while the world descends into madness, and he alone must decide if he’s humanity’s last sane survivor… or just its final lunatic.

COMBO #2 - Every time a washed-up grad pulls into his old McDonald’s lot at 9:47 PM, he’s launched back into the same wild high school night, stuck until he figures out how to change a future that’s already gone off the rails.

SUDDEN DEATH - A disgraced athlete, banned for betting against his own team, is lured out of miserable retirement into an underground league of bizarre, ever-shifting games, where the losers are executed for the entertainment of the rich.

STILL 42 - In a world where alien abductions are real and irreversible, a father returns decades after vanishing, unchanged and the same age as his now-grown son. As his reappearance stirs national obsession, the family must confront what he is and whether he ever truly came back

WE WERE NEVER US - After a cosmic event subtly alters a small town, residents begin living with each other’s memories, including a marriage counselor whose fiancée forgets their entire relationship a week before the wedding… in the town he never wanted to move to.

SECOND OPINION - A disgraced neurosurgeon hunts for conjoined twins joined at the head, hoping to unlock telepathy by separating them, only to discover they’ve been guiding him to themselves the entire time.

Apocalypse Later How a nobody delayed a dream, and is trying again.

From absolute nobody to (almost) filmmaker: my journey (so far) of persistence, rewrites, and finally making a short film that’s deeply personal. It’s never too late to chase your dreams.

open.substack.com/pub/etrosse/...

CHECKUP - In a fascist state where annual checkups determine survival, a hypochondriac has 24 hours to get his mind and body in order, or be euthanized for any “unfit” result. As the regime’s war effort crumbles, rumors swirl: tomorrow’s standards will be even harsher.

SOFTWIRE - A deep space crew discovers an ancient alien simulation still running. To enter, they deform their bodies to fit grotesque neural ports, only to learn the game rewrites minds and steals consciousness. One man dives deeper to save his wife in a game that won’t end.

GOD IS A BOMB - An atheist cynical IT tech is haunted by a terrifying biblically accurate angel. To stop the visions, he turns to a cyber-cult priestess who believes God speaks through man's machines, only to find divine logic rewriting him from the inside out.

PRISTINE - A grieving family uses a cursed wish to bring their daughter back to life, but only within her preserved bedroom, which becomes a timeless prison as she grows older and angrier with each passing day.

WINTEROVER - An FBI agent sent to find a missing scientist in Antarctica uncovers a man-made jungle of engineered life, and a revolutionary who believes climate change is a hoax designed to stifle human evolution.

GENIE - A depressed loner joins a paid medical trial, only to receive a phone that feeds on his blood and shows him an alternate life where he’s loved and successful, until the phone begins to transform.

KNOT - A retired hostage negotiator is sent into a remote nuclear silo to talk down an Air Force officer who’s initiated a 60-minute countdown, not out of revenge, but to restore meaning to a meaningless world through Armageddon.

TUSKERS - When a jaded paleontologist joins two mammoth tusk hunters on an illegal Siberian expedition, they discover an uncharted island crawling with hybrid prehistoric creatures birthed by a parasitic snail, making their “jackpot” a fight to survive.

KIN - In a future where infertile humans adopt alien children, a mother struggles to maintain her bond with her alien son after giving birth to human twins, forcing her to confront what family truly means.