2023 has been a bit of a momentous year for me.
A couple of years ago I worked for a director/producer friend of mine, Aaron Kamp, on a movie we called “Thorns and Thistles at the End of the World”. It is, if you can believe it, a Christian, apocalyptic, sci-fi drama – and if you think it sounds heavy, wait until you see it. We aimed for meaningful and serious, and did not miss. It’s a bit of an intense watch at times.
Now when I say worked on, I co-wrote and appeared in the film – small acting part, significant writing gig.
The way indy film-making works is, after you take all the risk and make all the effort, then you try to sell your stuff to a distributor. One of the classic ways to get distributor’s attentions, is to send your film to film festivals, hope that they will admit it into competition and maybe you win an award – and then distributors might take you more seriously. So that’s what Aaron did with his film…
…and we won some stuff.
A couple of Best Picture type things and our two leads, Jeremy Levi & Vivienne Marshall both won awards for their excellent performances. We also won a Sound Design Award – which is the kind of thing that’s difficult to do at our budget level.

Most excitingly from my perspective, we won for best screenplay – twice.


Two awards for screenwriting this year was very encouraging and pretty sweet, but that was nothing compared with the second half of the year when…
…Prentice Ash won the Gold Medal for Christian Fantasy in the Reader’s Favourites book awards.
I do not remember ever winning a gold medal for anything ever, so that needed a small celebration. I like my books and I am thrilled that you, the readers are enjoying them – that’s the reason I write, to share the stories I feel God has put in my hands to write. I know awards aren’t the be all and end all, but they help me to believe that I’m on the right track, doing what I am supposed to be doing.
So, thank you to all those who have been enjoying my books, look out for Thorns & Thistles coming out on Blu-ray soon, and praise God for all his blessings.