Rooster King Project Launch

An multimedia zine website collage album memoir thing

There comes a time in every young web developers life where the limitations of “““substack””” become too restrictive. How is a creative genius (such as myself) able to express themselves with mere words and images and audio and videos alone? Nay, my interests lie in the specific combinations and collisions of these things; the ways that they can form a sum greater than their parts, or at the very least clear the bar of being moderately interesting.

(https://roosterking.drewschorno.com/ – best viewed in a desktop chromium browser)

Rooster King is a series of seven loosely connected stories from my life building up to when my life exploded at the end of 2016. It takes approximately 20–30 minutes to get through the whole thing, but if you want to just get a better sense of what it is you can get through the first story in a few minutes.

It can probably be fairly described as a zine, multimedia collage, memoir, scrapbook, or album. Its not challenging or “interactive” in any meaningful way so don’t worry, you just scroll through the pages and look at pictures and listen to songs at your own pace. The seeds of this idea have been growing for over a decade. As a fair warning, it goes to some pretty painful and dark places storywise.

If you were in Austin for vibeclipse this past weekend I had a premiere event where I did a full reading followed by a Q&A. It went probably as well as it could have: I didn’t know that hugging ovations were a category of applause.

(If you follow me from my Null Call essay this project is basically my take on a “Death and Resurrection Show”, as a little piece of inside baseball.)

My intention is to make more art in this vein, and potentially a tool for anybody to be able to make pages like this, so keep an eye out for that.