A screenplay in paperback form
The Jesus Candy Bar Was Only the Beginning.
Wood's Confection is a dark-comedy feature screenplay about a retired marketing executive, an entrepreneurial candy experiment, a younger cousin's criminal friends, and the kind of moral spiral that starts funny until the bill comes due.
The recipe
Mix faith, commerce, crime, and one extremely cursed product idea.
The backstory
Written in stolen half-hours and weird little breakthroughs.
Wood's Confection was my first screenplay, entered in the Nicholl Fellowship contest in 2005. I wrote it in fragments, carrying a laptop around and squeezing scenes into odd corners of the day. It was not the cleanest way to write, but it kept the story simmering until its problems started producing those rare, satisfying aha moments.
Some of it happened.
The opening church scene came from real life. So did the teardrop. Other moments were invented, bent, exaggerated, or dragged out of the strange private machinery that makes a screenplay become itself.
What kind of thing is this?
A feature screenplay, formatted as a paperback. It is not a novel pretending to be a movie. It is a movie script you can hold like a book: leaner, visual, dialogue-driven, and built around scenes that want actors, timing, silence, and bad decisions.
What is hiding in it?
Character sketches, research, cut subplots, private jokes, personal memories, and little buried details that probably no one will ever fully decode. That is fine. Some secrets are just there to keep the author amused.
Fair warning
This is not Sunday-school candy.
This one would merit an R. There is foul language, a misogynist Russian, car thieves, drunks, extremely lewd references, some brief racist language from a neo-Nazi, and a dash of porn for good measure. Not something you should let the kids read.
Try the candy bar. Regret is included.
Read the screenplay in paperback form and follow a strange business idea into dark comedy, crime, mystery, memory, and the sort of moral mess that deserves its own wrapper.
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