Mick Axelrod

It was early in life that Amichai Axelrod discovered a deep fascination with language – he spoke three languages in the first grade: Hebrew, Yiddish, and English. But one loses what one does not use, and Mick Axelrod (Amichai’s adult self – Mick is still Amichai, but he likes to make things easy for everybody) only speaks English today. He can speak it in a variety of accents though. Currently, at the top of his head, he can mimic:

Accents  American Bostonian Brooklyn Georgian Texan Southern Californian Australian Canadian Eastern European English Cockney Eton Royal French German Irish Israeli Northern Irish Russian Scottish Trans-Atlantic

Celebrities  Arnold Shwartzenegger Elmer Fudd Jimmy Durante Jimmy Stewart Justin Timberlake (singing) Kermit the Frog Louis Armstrong Ray Romano Sean Connery W.C. Fields Woody Allen

Creatures (Real and Imaginary):  Dybbuk Elephant Horse Monkey Yeller Zombie

Amichai/Mick Axelrod attended Jewish parochial school, yeshiva, from kindergarten and pre-1, through the twelfth grade. He graduated from the Hebrew Academy of the Five Town and Rockaway at the age of 17, having memorized a vast quantity of Judaic lore. He studied briefly at the Greater Hartford Academy of the Performing Arts and then attended City University of New York – Brooklyn College, between 2002 and 2007, bouncing around majors. During his time at the CUNY he was: a Film major, a Philosophy major, and a TV/Radio Writing major.

In 2005 he discovered the Comparative Religions Department and found a home.  In late 2006 the Department lost its funding. In January, 2007, dejected, Mick moved out to Las Vegas with his family. He stocked shelves and answered phones and pounded pavements until September, 2008, when Mick started his first creative writing gig, which would last for two years.

Red Dust Studios was a start-up video game company whose goal was to release a medieval fantasy-themed MMORPG. RDS’s mission was ambitious: it sought to create multi-player game-play developed on the premises of phenomenal art, rich original lore, quirky characters, the strangest creatures imaginable, extreme levels of customization, and an unfathomable economics system. Bumps in the road led to the company’s dissolution in July of 2010.

Mick’s time at RDS greatly improved his skills as a writer, sharpening his craft to a fine-hone by challenging him on a daily basis. One day he would be coming up with creatures for a new location, the next writing a short story for a famous character in the world; another he’d be compiling a geological and meteorological survey for the planet, the next he’d be editing a design document that compiled the work of all the writers in the department. Perhaps you’re unaware of the logistics of writing for a video game.

There aren’t really any. You have to make it up, essentially, as you go along. And that Mick did, not only developing means for consistency of style, but also immediacy of access for all the media the RDS Writing Department (Scott Lipsey, Mark Hurley, John Hardin, and Mick) was creating. And the amount of data they generated was massive – nearly 5GB in two years.

Together they created: formatting styles for location design documents, creature design documents, character design documents, and environment props; scripts for questing, in-game writings, print-media novels, graphic novels, encyclopedias, introductions to world lore and societies, complex histories and family trees, entire new languages and lexicons, and more concepts than we could actually ever use. Mick will always think fondly of his time there – the team-members that made up Red Dust Studios are all truly masters of their mediums and each department fed on each other’s creativity to create some of their best work to date. But their best work yet is not behind them.

Mick is currently available for both freelance and long-term writing projects. His grasp of matters cultural, spiritual and metaphysical, historical, technological, logical, logistical, visual, conceptual, grammatical, and editorial, lend him a precision in crafting and revising word sets for many forms of media.  Mick is the writer for WorldsAsMyth.com, a website for nerditity with a great degree of “Freshervescence(tm)“, and a poetry blog called An Oral Carload.

Since the dissolution of Red Dust Studios, Mick has been exploring his other passion: performance. Through The Insurgo Theater Movement, Mick has rekindled his love of the stage, which has been reflecting well in his slam poetry. He is currently writing a play in a new style, he calls Slamspeare, a full length staged production with slam-style rhyming and Shakespearean conceits. His first work in this style is a tragedy. He’s not sure if he’ll ever see a need for a comedy, or any other plays in this style for that matter, but he’ll let you know if it gets done.

Other stories in the works include a sci-fi murder-mystery novel by the name of Corporate Attire, an anime mini-series he’s calling Once, At the End of the World, and a film trilogy entitled Powers and the Prophecy. Story overviews, manuscripts, and scripts are available upon request. You can contact Mick at Mick.Axelrod@gmail.com, on Facebook, and on Twitter – he is not on an ansible network, but is rather happy on the Android network.