Today we’d like to introduce you to Josh Weiss.
Hi Josh, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
I pretty much fell ass-backwards into a writing career.
Sure, I’d been a movie critic at my university’s newspaper—the Drexel Triangle—for half a decade, but my degree was in public relations. To make things even more confusing, my first job out of college was as a production assistant at a major news corporation in New York City. It was mind-numbing work involving metadata input that became even more intolerable when I was put on the weekend night shift (an unenviable rite of passage for all newcomers).
To keep myself sane, I did a little freelance writing on the side for Marvel.com (where I had interned as a college student under Drexel’s co-op program) and The Hollywood Reporter‘s “Heat Vision Blog” (thanks to a recommendation from an AEPi fraternity brother). The latter put me on the radar of SYFY Wire‘s new editor at the time, and he was good enough to bring me on as a regular reporter for the site. With several freelance gigs under my belt, I decided to quit my news corporation job and do what I loved for a while—much to my mother’s consternation—before finding another position.
And hey—now that I had a little more free time on my hands, why not start shopping the novel I started in college around to potential literary agents?
Nearly a decade, countless articles, two award-nominated books, and a star-studded documentary later, I’m still living my dream. It’s kind of nutty how life shakes out sometimes and I feel so incredibly fortunate to be where I am today.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
Traversing an unconventional career path is almost never smooth. While my three siblings went into the dependable worlds of finance and healthcare (as is expected of good Jewish kids), I decided to be the black sheep of the family and pursue nebulous ambitions of creativity that didn’t come with health plans and steady paychecks.
Was it scary? Absolutely! Like I said earlier, my mother did her best to try and talk me out of it, though now she’s very glad I was stubborn enough not to listen.
Building a career and reputation from the ground up, especially in the creative space, isn’t easy. It takes a ton of hard work, commitment, and a healthy dash of luck—cliche as it might sound. As the old saying goes, luck is merely the collision of preparation and opportunity. In my case, I had a plethora of clips to my name by the time a network contact offered to put in a good word for me at The Hollywood Reporter.
Perhaps the biggest struggle I faced was adjusting to a non-structured work environment of a literal home office. It was certainly an uphill battle to find that discipline and ease into a rhythm that worked for me. There was also the constant uncertainty of a freelance existence where opportunities can come and go at the drop of a hat. To combat this, I devoted every waking hour—day and night—to my craft. If an editor needed someone on call for breaking news, I was available to the point where I once wrote an article in the middle of my own boisterous house party.
A little excessive? Sure, I can be a massive workaholic at times (just ask my wife). However, the main lesson here is try and avoid the word “no” wherever possible because A) It shows you’re dependable and B) You never know where an assignment might lead.
Even now, I still strive to be the best version of myself and prove my worth. The hustle to “get that bread” (I hope that sounded hip) never ends, but the professional and personal satisfactions are indescribably euphoric.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
My career is essentially broken up into three parts: entertainment journalism, novel-writing, and film producing.
You could say my “full-time” gig is writing on behalf of pop culture outlets like SYFY Wire and Forbes Entertainment. That’s as close as I get to a traditional 9-5 grind. More often than not, I’m writing news and feature pieces devoted to film, television, literature, and comic book projects that fall on the genre spectrum (think horror, sci-fi, fantasy). An assignment becomes even more enticing for me if there’s some kind of Jewish element to explore. The convergence of Judaism (its history, customs, folklore) and the wider zeitgeist never ceases to fascinate me.
My novel writing is a little more intermittent. To date, I have published two books—Beat the Devils and Sunset Empire—as part of an ongoing mystery series I hope to continue one day. Both Sidewise Award nominated titles take place in an alternate, dystopian reality where Red Scare poster child Joseph McCarthy became president of the United States. The main character is Morris Baker, a schnapps-swilling homicide detective for the LAPD and a Holocaust survivor damaged from his traumatic past as a concentration camp guinea pig. Unfortunately, my literary agent—may his memory be a blessing—passed away in 2025 while we were considering what my next work of fiction would be. I miss you, Scott!
For the last two years, I have worked as producer and co-writer on The Thing Expanded, an upcoming documentary feature centered around the enduring legacy of John Carpenter’s 1982 sci-fi/horror film, The Thing. This all ties back to what I said about you never knowing what doors an assignment will open.
Back in June 2022, I published an extensive oral history of The Thing for SYFY Wire in honor of the movie’s 40th anniversary. The lengthy piece, which was graciously green-lit by my editor Trent and spans well over 20,000 words, caught the attention of the documentary’s executive producer, Robin Block. He reached out via social media and asked if I would like to be a part of the project (an invitation I happily accepted).
Since then, it’s a been an absolute whirlwind of one exciting milestone after another—be it helping the director write an outline for the movie’s structure or booking A-list talent like Guillermo del Toro, Frank Darabont, Issa López, Stephen Colbert, Keith David, Greg Nicotero, and Eli Roth. The entire experience never fails to blow my mind and I am so grateful to CreatorVC for not only bringing me aboard, but also making me feel like a valued member of the team.
What matters most to you? Why?
I’m a big fan of the old adage, “If you do what you love, you’ll never work a day in your life.”
What is most important to me in terms of my career, is that day-to-day responsibilities yield both professional and personal fulfillment. It would be easy to fall into a monotonous and cynical malaise after nearly a decade of constant writing. I try to avoid complacency and boredom at all costs by actively seeking out a wide variety of projects that excite me on multiple levels.
The more passionate you are about something, the more fun you’ll have with it and the better the end product will be.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://joshuahweiss.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/joshuahweiss/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jdawg72494/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/josh-weiss-47aa4090/
- Twitter: https://x.com/JoshuaHWeiss
- Other: https://www.creatorvc.com/thethingexpanded
