Building our mythos: in 4 (not so easy) steps.

We begin, as all reasonable creative revelations do - with a half-drunk coffee, an open browser tab labelled “REAL MEN IN BLACK ENCOUNTERS 1950s - NOT THE MOVIE”, and the lingering fear that I might have accidentally summoned something.

Fear?

Probably outside the window again, loitering in his usual trench coat of doubt. I flip him off. Casually.

I’ve got writing to do.

It’s 3:07 a.m., and instead of sleeping or being a fully functioning adult, I’m deep in sci-fi noir lore, frantically discussing plot points like:

“Does Evie remember all of her screen memories?” (followed immediately by, “Why did I eat that third slice of banana bread?”)

The blinds are closed.

The static hum of inspiration is louder than common sense.

I am spiralling.

I am thriving.

Somewhere between researching screen memories, UFO cover-ups, and the terrifying reliability of fax machines in 1999, I realise, I might be building a mythos that’s both profound… and slightly unhinged.

(So basically - right on brand.)

We’ve created Flatline aka Evie Raven - a fever-dream of VHS grit, green trench coats, and cosmic dread.

A story about memory, identity and the creeping suspicion that your thoughts aren’t entirely your own.

Evie doesn’t just hunt returnees.

She might be one.

And the internet?

Let’s just say it might not be the tool you think it is…

(Hi, yes, Men in Black, please don’t knock. We’re very busy, and also, we’re cowards.)

Welcome back

Late Night Musings with Rogues and Scoundrels.

The joy of writing sci-fi noir with cosmic horror undertones is that nothing has to be safe or neat or gently resolved. In fact, if it feels uncomfortable, we’re probably on the right track.

Flatline was born out of late-night YouTube spirals about UFO abductions, stories of people blinking into other timelines and the eerily similar accounts of “screen memories.”

A barn owl with human eyes?

No thank you.

We started asking the question - what if the internet isn’t just used by aliens - what if it is the aliens?

A softly pulsing, hive-minded network of harvested emotion, half-memory and subconscious dreamstuff… disguised as dial-up and buffering wheels.

Evie Raven became our conduit.

A profiler turned “returnee,” now unknowingly working as an agent for the very force she’s trying to expose.

Part memory, part mission.

Entirely unstable, in the best possible way.

Step 1: Not Your Sanitised Men in Black

Forget the Will Smith charm and Ray-Ban polish. We’re diving back to the weird, the unsettling, the post-war paranoia - where men in black didn’t crack jokes, they just stared at you until your brain itched.

And in Flatline, not all the agents are men.

Not all are even human.

They’re protocol.

They’re silence made flesh.

They appear when the story tries to leak through.

Writing this version of the MIB mythos has been liberating, and a little terrifying.

Which is kind of the point.

Cosmic horror isn’t about jump scares.

It’s about that growing awareness that something is watching you watch yourself - and it might already be inside your head.

Step 2: Doc Martens, Trench Coats & VHS Grain

Setting the series in 1999 gives us the chance to lean into analogue unease - flashing red motel signs, rusted antennae, everything shot like it’s been dubbed three times onto a cassette tape.

Give us glitch.

Give us static.

Give us the quiet dread of a fax machine printing coordinates from nowhere.

Costume has become part of the storytelling.

Evie’s green trench coat isn’t just iconic - it’s armour.

Her Doc Martens?

Boots for walking memory loops.

The aesthetic is story. Every choice is loaded. We’re playing with colour to show control vs. contamination, and building a visual language of distortion, redaction, and psychic bleed-through.

Step 3: Prompt Writing = Shot Writing

Yes…AI animation is a wild, unpredictable beast.

You ask for “glitchy liminal stairwell with psychic fog” and get something that looks like The Sims had a nervous breakdown.

But - here’s the twist - writing image prompts has made me a sharper screenwriter.

Each prompt is a micro-scene.

It’s about distilling tone, movement, symbolism, and character into a single shot description.

It’s made me think more visually.

More economically.

More cinematically.

And while the output might glitch, the process has made the story stronger.

(That, and it’s fun to watch Maddie scream-laugh when an AI renders a vending machine as a third leg or my own head in my lap).

Step 4. Evie Raven = Feminist 90s Redemption Arc

In the 90s, women in genre stories were either mysterious plot devices or sexy sidekicks with a tragic past.

Evie Raven isn’t interested in that.

She’s messy.

She’s haunted.

She’s doing the work.

She forgets things, remembers too much, breaks down, and keeps going.

She fights for answers even when she doesn’t like what they reveal.

And here’s the joy - she gets to be powerful and unsure.

Smart and spiralling.

She’s not trying to be liked.

She’s trying to find the truth - even if it rewrites everything.

This isn’t nostalgia.

This is a reckoning.

So, we write.

We glitch.

We build myths with old machines and new questions.

We conjure aliens, faxes, trench coats and memory loss.

We walk Evie through the greyworld again and again - and we don’t let her go.

What began as a flicker in the mind of a young writer in the early 1960s has quietly

transformed.

The greyworld is no longer just imagined - it inhales, it responds and it remembers.

Once glimpsed through the eyes of a boy in the 1970s, it now bends to the will of a woman in the shadowed corridors of the 1990s.

Because something is calling.

And we’re listening.