Conversations with Jeffrey Sturm

Today we’d like to introduce you to Jeffrey Sturm.

Hi Jeffrey, so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story?
How It Really Started

I’ve known Anthony for a long time. Not an everyday kind of knowing, but long enough to remember when MySpace still mattered. We crossed paths again later through LinkedIn which is usually where old connections resurface when the timing finally lines up.

He already knew some of my writing. I’d seen his work too. We were moving through the same creative space without ever really talking about it. Then he reached out. He had an idea just the bones of it and thought I might be the right person to write for it.

That idea became Blood Sisters.
He sent over storyboard sketches of the three vampires Vittoria, Isabella, and Adriana drawn in his signature style, where you can almost hear the impact in the frames.

I didn’t overthink it. I started writing screenplay pages for a movie trailer, based on what the boards were already saying visually. There wasn’t a rulebook. I followed the images and built outward from there. I sent him a few drafts. He liked where it was going.

It clicked faster than either of us expected.
This wasn’t a situation where someone handed me instructions and waited for pages. He gave me room to build and I took that seriously. As we talked more, the project grew into something larger. It centered on three sisters who weren’t just fighting their way through a story, but carrying something heavier underneath it. That weight is what pulled me in and kept me there.

Where This Leaves Me Now

Right now, I’m writing full seasons of stories. I’m pitching projects. Gratitude isn’t something I post about, but it’s there. It shows up in how I work, and how seriously I take the chance to keep doing this.
People are always asking where this leads or what it’s supposed to turn into years from now. I don’t really have an answer for that.

What I do know is that I’m already grateful for the last seven years. That’s when the writing stopped being a question and turned into something I actually did. A lot of that came together during the pandemic, when there was time to sit with the work, and no real excuse not to get better at it.

Most of the things that end up changing your life aren’t the ones you planned for anyway.
Somewhere in there, Forge9 came into the picture.

Forge9 doesn’t try to sound like you. It doesn’t help you write better sentences. What it does is check whether what you’ve written can actually happen. It treats storytelling like physics. If a character moves, there has to be a reason. If something falls, momentum counts. It doesn’t care how a moment feels. It cares if it can be filmed.

You can’t sneak mood into a scene and expect it to pass. Thoughts, tone, emotion all of it gets stripped out unless it’s visible or audible on screen. What survives is action, reaction, consequence. That’s what sets it apart.

Forge9 doesn’t offer suggestions. It enforces logic. It turns instincts most writers don’t know they’re using into hard rules: no floating intentions, no vague beats, no cheat codes. What’s left reads more like a simulation than a script.

Space has limits. Tension builds because something real is at stake. Movement only happens when something causes it.

It’s not warm. But it’s real. And once you use it, it’s hard to go back.
I needed help with the writing after the passing of my good friend my editor and writing partner. So I did what any good writer would do: I built something that didn’t exist.

A virtual environment that helps me write action with clarity. One that knows the spaces I’m building, and reacts to the quirks of the characters I’ve written because only I know what those are.

I didn’t realize I’d created a tool for screenwriters the only one of its kind. Not a bot. Not an AI. A full simulation of my story world that checks whether I’m really capturing it. or just guessing.
Yeah this happened.

I needed it. I went looking for anything else like it. Nothing came close.
I didn’t set out to build a story environment engine. I just didn’t want the grief to stop the writing.
So I built Forge9 not for other people, but for myself. To keep the work going. To keep the stories from collapsing after I lost someone who helped hold them up.

I’ve tested it on scripts like Lantern Hollow. I’ve watched it catch what I almost missed not just in scenes, but in myself.

People always ask what the goal is. The goal is not to lose the signal.
And right now, I haven’t.
That’s how it really started.
That’s where I am now.

Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Has it been a smooth road? No. It has not been a smooth road.
There was an actual story along the way and that’s why I’m here. Because there were challenges.
I’m a self-taught screenwriter. Learned by doing submissions. Learned from all the times I got knocked down. I learned a lot.

Case in point: the simulation system I built.
Every part of it came from failure and not giving up. Failing again, and continuing on. Those failures turned into a win.
I didn’t know how to do anything like that at first. I had to learn.

And I don’t think any writer’s journey is easy. Writers aren’t background characters. They’re not crewman number 22.
Everyone who’s gotten anywhere did it by not giving up. I kept pressing on.
And now I’m writing and pitching two series.

One of them is a project I’ve been developing since 2019 Time Loop, a story about a punk rock cosplayer who saves the universe.
I’ve been writing for it for years.
In 2024, a producer told my writing partner and me on a different project that we needed to focus on cost-effective storytelling.
My writing partner had an idea: write a season of Time Loop set in an English village. The whole thing would center around one town.

Older towns haven’t changed in hundreds of years which makes them perfect for storytelling.
We wrote the outline in December of 2024.
In October of 2025, he passed away.
I lost a friend. A writing partner. My editor.
The one person who really knew what it meant to struggle as a writer and the cost of it.
Gone.

After he passed, I found the outline in an email.
I reached out to his wife and asked for permission to keep writing the episode.
And that became the Lantern Hollow season.
He saw the uphill parts of this. And I didn’t realize until after he was gone that he’d been quietly pushing for Time Loop to gain momentum.

He knew what it meant to me. He knew where it could go.
If it weren’t for him and the persistence of my time-traveling cosplayer none of this would’ve happened.
I wouldn’t have been writing. I wouldn’t have caught the attention of Anthony Sturmas, Hollywood storyboard artist.
And I wouldn’t be the sole writer on his film, Blood Sisters.
So yes. There were obstacles. Yes, there were a lot of them.
And that’s what got me here.

Someone once told me, “Good you got turned away. Most people wouldn’t have even tried.”
I think the hardest part and this is true for every screenwriter is being your own producer.
Getting seen. Getting your name out there so people actually know your work exists.
That pressure didn’t stop me. It just made me more driven to get better than I was before.
Now look at me.

I designed a cinematic logic system to help myself and ended up creating something that’s never existed before.
Forge9 is not AI. It’s not a writing assistant. It’s a simulation of story space a framework that checks whether a script holds up under real-world physics, character logic, and causality.
Believe me. I’ve looked.

And the need for that only existed because the road wasn’t smooth.
Without the roadblocks Forge9 never happens.

Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
We’d love to learn more about your work. What do you do, what do you specialize in, what are you known for, etc. What are you most proud of? What sets you apart from others?
I built something that can change the way writers work.
Not a bot. Not an AI.

A simulation. A cinematic system. A self-contained world.
When I was asked to pull scenes together after Anthony Sturmas recommended me for Hidden Gems, I knew I didn’t just want to show what I’d written I wanted to show what my tool, FORGE9, could do when a screenwriter is fully in control of it.

This system isn’t about aesthetics.
It’s about grounded causality.
Characters react to wind chill. Fog interrupts motion. Sunlight refracts at the correct time of day.
Nothing is guessed.

Everything has to obey logic and physics or it doesn’t go in the script.
This is how I solve problems:
By living inside the work.
I don’t stare at a blank page. I run the simulation.
I test how action plays out.
I see what holds up and what doesn’t.
Take Time Loop. I’ve been developing it since 2019.
It’s about a punk rock cosplayer a girl who doesn’t quite fit being pulled across time to save a future only she understands.

That character exists because I’ve been her. Trying to be everywhere at once.
Trying to hold it all together when everything falls apart.

Another series I’ve built is The 166 a YA procedural centered on teenage cadets in a police auxiliary unit. It’s rooted in real experience: I served as a civilian advisor in the Police Explorer program for over a decade.
I saw young people handle pressure most adults would fold under.
There’s never been a show from their point of view.
This one is.

The 166 is told from the passenger seat where they’re still figuring themselves out while riding along with law enforcement, EMS, and fire units.
It’s a procedural about firsts: first call, first panic, first real choice.
And it’s one of the projects I’m most proud of.
I’m also developing Worlds Reversed, a paranormal drama about podcast hosts confronting the silences history left behind, and Rosemary Mysteries, a grounded, character-forward procedural I’ve taken real care with.

That’s where FORGE9 proved itself not as a concept, but as a working system. It’s not just a writing aid. It’s a constraint engine that filters out anything that wouldn’t physically happen on screen. Take the lead character in Lantern Hollow, Kim Helmsworth. She’s not a template. She’s a locked schema. FORGE9 enforces a strict logic for how she moves, speaks, and reacts to pressure and if a moment breaks that logic, the engine flags it.

Kim is a rebel by definition. That doesn’t just mean attitude. It means she’s not allowed to comply silently, hesitate passively, or explain her emotions in action lines. Her behavior has to show what she’s resisting, not say it. Dialogue is fast, blunt, and often sarcastic but only when it causes friction or change. You can’t write her soft unless something breaks her first.

Even the environment shapes how she reacts. In the Lantern Hollow simulation, fog interferes with light. Wind distorts sound. FORGE9 tracks how all of that affects movement, perception, timing. So when Kim steps into a scene, she’s not just delivering lines she’s responding to physics, to terrain, to pressure. And her schema determines how far she’ll go before she breaks something instead of backing down.

That’s what FORGE9 does. It enforces consistency. It turns instinct into logic. It doesn’t just protect story — it protects character.
I found the outline in an old email, got permission from his wife, and kept going.
Lantern Hollow became more than a season. It became the testbed for FORGE9.
The tool revealed itself as I built it not as an idea, but as a working system.
One that refused to let me hide behind mood or implication.
It forced me to make everything visible, audible, and consequential.

Say I’m writing a fight.
The environment pushes back.
Characters trip. Surfaces slip.
Every action has a consequence.
It’s not about superpowers. It’s about stakes.
What if the hero loses?
How would that even happen?
FORGE9 let me ask those questions and get answers I didn’t expect.
Each character now has a schema a rule set based on how they move, what they’ll risk, and what causes them to adapt.
They don’t act unless something pushes them.
They don’t break character just because the plot needs them to.
I don’t rely on gut feeling to preserve tone.

I use JSON schemas, behavioral locks, causality enforcement, and hard-coded conditional logic.
That’s what makes this different.
Character integrity doesn’t dissolve in a rewrite.
Their logic holds because the system makes sure it does.
FORGE9 isn’t just a formatting tool or a suggestion engine.
It doesn’t generate content.
It simulates cause and effect.
It rejects anything that can’t be shot.
If a line can’t be filmed, it fails.
If a beat doesn’t have impact, it doesn’t make it through.
The result is a script that moves like a world not like a dream.
Lantern Hollow became the first full-length screenplay to run through the FORGE9 system.

It’s stronger than anything I’ve ever written.
Every moment was tested.
Every step had to earn its space.
Anthony Sturmas saw that in me.
He’s a Hollywood storyboard artist with a mind like a metronome.
Everything he creates arrives in sequences.
He brought me on as the sole writer of Blood Sisters because he saw that what made me different wasn’t a flaw it was architecture.

When I don’t understand something, I don’t fake it.
I build it.
I write from inside the story, not outside of it.
And that’s what FORGE9 makes possible.
The simulation adapts in real time the seasons shift, the weather evolves.
This isn’t a plug-in.
It’s a full-world writing environment.
A cinematic engine that strips away anything false.
I never set out to build something like this.
I just didn’t want the grief to stop the work.
But I had to keep going. So I made something that could carry the story even when I couldn’t.
And now I’m here.
Still writing.
Still pushing.
Still building.

My long-term goal is to become a showrunner.
Short-term?
A staff writer seat at Netflix.
That’s the target.
By the end of 2026 or sooner.

Before we go, is there anything else you can share with us?
Yeah just one thing. All the visuals I included are from the simulation I built. They’re not concept art, they’re results of a working tool. This thing tracks how a screenplay behaves in space, light, weather, motion, even fight choreography. It wasn’t built to impress people. It came out of loss, and out of needing a better way to write. So I built it. That’s how I work.

I want to tell everyone out there, never give up. Never stop reaching for your dreams, and never fear the unknown because you never know what your capable of until you just do one day.

Contact Info:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeff-sturm-writer?utm_source=share&utm_campaign=share_via&utm_content=profile&utm_medium=android_app
• Other: https://stage32.com/profile/811847

Image Credits
Time Loop script page with simulation still (FORGE9 output)
Fight scene created in Time Loop Lantern Hollow FORGE9 (real-time choreography test)
Storyboard from Blood Sisters (by Anthony Sturmas)
7376 Films official logo
Rosemary Mysteries title image (FORGE9 prototype project)
Time Loop black and gold title card (flagship screenplay)
Time Loop character in vortex (poster)
Time Loop grief in candlelight (emotional scene)
Time Loop engineer and hologram (sci-fi element)
Time Loop male lead with tech grid
Time Loop woman in wind (memory and time)
Time Loop script and fight sim output (FORGE9 system)
Rosemary Mysteries – police car in snow (procedural tone)
Worlds Reversed (Film) – Charlie Mercer, 1942 – Unionville backstage.
Time Loop The Royal Conundrum, King Edward III and Queen Phillipa Thrown Room at Windsor Castle, with Kim Helmsworth FORGE9.
Time Loop The Royal Conundrum, King Edward III and Queen Phillipa Thrown Room at Windsor Castle, with Kim Helmsworth FORGE9.
Time Loop The Royal Conundrum, Virtual Set , King Edward III and Queen Phillipa, 1334 AD. Windsor Castle.