J. Thomas Stroud, Jr.

J. Thomas Stroud, Jr. did not take the usual road to the screen.

Before the scripts, there was cryptology and electronic warfare, and a security clearance to go with them. There were more than two decades in information technology, nearly fifty years in the martial arts — Southern Shaolin Five Animal style, the long fist, the traditional weapons — and thirty-one years spent studying how six languages shape the people who speak them. All of it feeds the work. The discipline, the patience, the ear for how power and belief move through a room.

He has been writing for over thirty years, and building Astrann Media Group to do with that work what a byline alone never could: own it, protect it, and put it on screen. The result is a catalog of more than thirty original properties — horror, science fiction, fantasy, crime, drama — developed under one roof, in one voice, in Charlotte, North Carolina.

His stories tend to start in a familiar place — a campus, a small town, a family — and then open a door that should have stayed shut. What comes through is the point.