This year on New Year’s Day, I published a testimonial about my years as a member of Weight Watchers, which led to my being solicited, recruited and offered a job as a part-time studio weight loss and wellness coach with the 62 year old company and lifestyle program introduced to me by my friend, boss, mentor and favorite philosopher, Penguin Random House author Leonard Peikoff. I became Coach Scott for Weight Watchers in the spring.

I was awarded with my first fiction prize for my short story “Boom-Boom Goes to Jail” by Line of Advance, a City of Chicago publication co-founded by three U.S. soldiers who fought the Taliban together in Afghanistan. The fiction writing contest for the Col. Darron L. Wright Memorial Writing Awards was judged by a ranking officer with the United States Department of the Navy who's also an author.

Hollywood filmmakers and studios bought, read and expressed interest in adapting short stories in my first book, published on October 29th, 2025, debuting on Amazon's top 50 for literary collections. With praise from Best Picture Oscar-winning screenwriter and director Robert Benton, Virginia Tech literary scholar Shoshana Joy Milgram and University of Maine media studies scholar Michael Socolow, “Long Run: Short Stories, Volume One” includes 16 previously published stories, an author’s preface and a foreword by Ayn Rand biographer Shoshana Joy Milgram.

One of the stories in “Long Run” inspired my former writing student, screenwriter and director Mike Voutsinos, to conceive and write a screenplay, which he sent me and, with my co-production, choreography and approval, filmed on November 7th, 2025 as a short movie to be released in 2026. Open Trail Productions’ seven-minute film features myself as principal dancer and leading actor in my onscreen motion picture debut.

After 19 consecutive months of acceptance or publication of my fiction writing, including poetry, I was named Short Story Editor at Classic Chicago Magazine, which introduced fiction with my short stories. My writing debuted in The Gay & Lesbian Review in Boston and my second historic interview with the man Salman Rushdie credits with saving his life, Henry Reese, debuted in the winter edition of Pittsburgh Quarterly.