A big screen success

Posted 11:37 a.m. Thursday, Dec. 22, 2016

Author Kelly Anne Blount, ’06, earned her degree in education with a minor in broad field social studies. She was Kelly Anne Flynn when she attended UWL. She later went on to complete her master’s degree in Early Childhood Special Education at Old Dominion University.
Read more → — Author Kelly Anne Blount, ’06, earned her degree in education with a minor in broad field social studies. She was Kelly Anne Flynn when she attended UWL. She later went on to complete her master’s degree in Early Childhood Special Education at Old Dominion University. Read more →

Alumna author writes horror, thriller novels being considered for movie adaptations.

Alumna author writes horror, thriller novels being considered for movie adaptations

Author Kelly Anne Blount, ’06, still remembers a comment written on one of her college English essays: “Your future is so bright you’ll need sunglasses.” Today Blount’s future is looking bright — in an eerie sort of way. Producers have purchased the rights to adapt two of Blount’s adult horror/thriller novels into films or TV shows. The young alumna has had three other books published, and has become a popular author on the website Wattpad, a free online platform for reading and sharing stories. Her book “Captured,” one of the two that has been optioned for film, has garnered more than 12 million readings on Wattpad. Blount says she was in the right place at the right time when she began writing her first book “Grishma” in 2012, which later became an Amazon best-selling novel. The process from writing to publishing took only six months. She attributes much of that success to a critique group she joined, which pushed her to produce 20 pages for review every two weeks. At the time, she was also critiquing other writers’ work and teaching preschoolers full-time. Blount says it paid to have a strong writing background from undergraduate teaching and general education courses at UWL. “From the structure of the courses to the highly-skilled professors, they all played a huge part in not only sharpening my writing skills, but also making me feel confident in writing,” she says. Blount points to two UWL professors in particular, Bradley Butterfield, English, who wrote the comment about the sunglasses, and Professor Emeritus Robert Richardson, Educational Studies, who taught “the most difficult class of my entire life,” says Blount. “Even at the graduate level, nothing held even a small, dimly-lit candle to his course,” she explains. Richardson’s high expectations forced Blount to fine tune her writing. “Even to this day, I think back to lessons that I learned from turning papers in to him and holding my breath that all the citations were correct, and I didn’t have a comma in the wrong spot,” she says. “I learned so much about writing from Dr. Richardson. It was incredible.” Find out more about Blount’s books Kelly Anne Blount’s books “Under” and “Captured” have been optioned for film, meaning producers have purchased the rights to them. The producer who optioned “Captured” also worked on the hit television show “Dexter,” and was the production supervisor on the first season of “Goliath.” Her dark thriller “Under” was optioned by Komixx Entertainment, which has had success on many platforms including the BBC. Blount’s book “Grishma” is the first in her three-book series of young adult fantasy novels published by Limitless Publishing. Learn more about Blount’s books at http://www.kellyanneblount.com/. She also has books available for free on Wattpad at https://www.wattpad.com/

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