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Award-winning author, songwriter, and emerging screenwriter Roderick Von King introduces an up and coming poet Emily Altizer and her forthcoming collection, The Fall.
For Roderick Von King, retirement from the aerospace industry was not a curtain call. It was an opening scene.
Today, King stands as an award-winning author, songwriter, screenwriter, and entrepreneur whose creative career spans music, film, and literature. Where retirement might suggest a slower pace, he found a starting point for something new: a publishing journey shaped by lived experience, reflection, and an interest in human complexity.
Now, through his company, Literary Launchpad, King is helping other writers take their own next step. Among them is emerging poet Emily Altizer, whose forthcoming collection, bearing the working title The Fall, explores how love and loss can transform a person’s understanding of themselves . Their creative paths meet around a shared concern: the complicated work of becoming.
A Career Reimagined
Photo Credit Lauren Abidin
King’s literary achievements include Why Didn’t We Love? and Altar Call – An Honest Depiction of a Path to Salvation, two novels that earned him International Impact Book Awards. Altar Call also received the Christlit Book Award, adding recognition to a work centered on faith, personal transformation, and redemption.
The novels reveal two complementary dimensions of his writing. Why Didn’t We Love? explores romance, emotional distance, and unresolved truths. Altar Call turns toward the spiritual questions that accompany the search for salvation.
One addresses matters of the heart; the other, matters of the soul. Together, they establish a literary range grounded in relationships, choices, and the possibility of change.
His work across songwriting and screenwriting extends that storytelling practice into other forms. With Literary Launchpad, he brings an entrepreneurial dimension to the creative process, helping authors navigate the distance between a manuscript and a book that reaches readers.
The company’s rallying cry captures that practical ambition: “Stop Talking About It and Do It — Get Into Orbit.”
Introducing Emily Altizer
For Altizer, that next step takes the form of poetry.The Fall follows a speaker through change, grief, love, loss, memory, healing, and becoming. Its central concern is not simply whether love lasts, but how the speaker’s understanding of love—and of herself—evolves through different experiences.
The title carries two meanings, separated by years but linked by the same season. In one autumn, the speaker falls apart. In another, she falls in love.That dual meaning gives the collection its organizing tension. Autumn becomes more than a backdrop for heartbreak. It is a season the speaker encounters again from a changed perspective, capable of holding both an ending and a beginning.The book unfolds in four sections: Withering, Drifting, Floating, and Turning. Each marks a distinct stage in the speaker’s emotional movement.
Four Stages of Becoming
Withering begins with heartbreak and fading hope. Even as the possibility of a shared future diminishes, the speaker continues holding on to a connection. The section inhabits the tension between recognizing loss and being ready to release it.In Drifting, distance grows and hope becomes less certain. The speaker explores the belief in an enduring, or “twin flame,” connection—a bond she understands as lasting even as closeness recedes.
That belief forms part of the book’s inquiry into attachment, absence, and the meanings people give to love.Floating moves toward acceptance and healing. A sense of connection remains despite no contact, but the speaker begins to live differently alongside it. What mattered need not be raised for life to continue.Then comes Turning: a new leaf, a changed outlook, and ultimately the experience of falling in love again.
The sequence gives The Fall a clear emotional architecture without reducing healing to a simple reversal of heartbreak. The speaker’s earlier experiences remain part of her story. What changes is her capacity to understand them—and to welcome something new.
Giving a Manuscript Its Public Shape
Graphic Credit Earl Edwards
For a collection with that emotional range, publication involves more than preparing pages for print. Its cover, description, and promotional language must communicate the whole journey, rather than presenting it solely as a book about loss. That is the kind of coordination Literary Launchpad is designed to provide.
As a full-service publishing accelerator, the company guides authors through the steps of bringing a book to market. It advises on self-publishing issues, publisher selection, and contracts, while assembling complete book packages that include covers, blurbs, taglines, advertising copy, and ISBNs. The aim is to give each work a presentation that clearly represents its genre and identity.
The company also manages writing credits and photography, with optional audio transcription. Its editorial services include rigorous editing and proofreading supported by controlled revision processes and AI-assisted tools.
Beyond print, Literary Launchpad offers audiobook production, compilation-book support, and professional reviews. It also develops potential spin-offs, including music, screenplays, and merchandise—possibilities that reflect King’s own experience working across creative disciplines.These are avenues available through the company, not announced adaptations of The Fall. For any author, the question is which opportunities best serve the work.
Building Connections With Readers
Literary Launchpad’s support extends into the public life of a book. The company handles launches, signings, and book-club outreach, and pursues awards and media coverage through an experienced publicist. Its platform-building services encompass social media, YouTube, email marketing, customer relationship management, brand strategy, and monetization funnels, including higher-priced offerings.
Where appropriate, the company also helps establish IMDb and Reddit presences. Live training at the Literary Launchpad Conference rounds out its approach, giving authors another setting in which to learn about publishing and audience development.
For an emerging poet, the value of such tools lies in their ability to create meaningful encounters between the writing and its readers. Visibility matters, but so does preserving the voice that makes a collection distinctive.
In Altizer’s case, that voice is being introduced through a book whose structure allows longing, memory, and renewed love to occupy the same emotional landscape.
A New Season
King’s reinvention and Altizer’s collection offer different perspectives on the possibility of beginning again.His post-retirement career demonstrates that a professional turning point can open into new creative work. Her poetry considers how an emotional ending can, over time, become part of a larger story of healing and love.
Through Literary Launchpad, those paths now intersect: an established storyteller introducing an emerging voice, and a publishing enterprise helping that voice move toward readers.
With The Fall, Altizer returns to autumn not to repeat the past, but to discover how its meaning has changed.One season holds the falling apart. Another holds the falling in love. Between them is the work of becoming.
