We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Rick Molchan. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Rick below.

Rick, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. One deeply underappreciated facet of being an entrepreneur or creative is the kind of crazy stuff that happens from time to time. It could be anything from a disgruntled client attacking an employee or waking up to find out a celebrity gave you a shoutout on TikTok – the sudden, unexpected hits (both positive and negative) make the profession both exhilarating and exhausting. Can you share one of your craziest stories?

Entrepreneurship didn’t start for me with some pitch deck. It started with a house that vanished. Five years ago, my twins and I were in Exuma, spending the day snorkeling with sharks. They were fifteen, which is old enough to be unimpressed by most things I said, young enough to still jump in the ocean with me without hesitation. The water was unreal. That Bahamian blue that looks photoshopped even when you’re standing in it. Lemon sharks moved beneath. I’ve been a scuba instructor for years. I teach people how to manage fear underwater, and this is something my kids and I did regularly.
When we climbed out of the water, masks pushed up, fins in hand, I saw it. Up the beach, near the dunes, sat a deep blue house. Not faded beach pastel. A bold, saturated blue. It didn’t look abandoned. It didn’t look like a resort property. It just belonged there. In an effort to have time to dry off before leaving, I said to my kids – “Let’s walk up to it.”
When we got to the end of the cove where it stood, it was gone. Not hidden. Not obscured. Gone. No foundation. No path. No remnants. No people milling about. Nothing. I told myself it was a trick of light. Heat and fatigue distortion.
But I needed confirmation. “Did you guys see a blue house up there?” I asked. Both of them answered immediately. “Yeah.” Both described it as I saw it as well.
We turned back to head toward our car. Greatly confused that all three of us had witnessed it. Halfway down the beach, my son stopped. “Dad,” he said quietly. “It’s back.” I turned around, and there it was. Same spot. Same impossible blue.
I’ve trained in environments where perception can lie to you. Depth shifts underwater. Shadows distort. Your brain fills gaps. I know what misjudgment feels like. This just didn’t feel like that.
Instead of walking back up to it, we went to a small nearby restaurant where locals linger longer than tourists, and I asked about the blue house. One of the guys behind the counter shrugged. “Yeah. It comes and goes. Sometimes it’s there. Sometimes it’s not.” He said it casually. Like he was describing the tide schedule. I remember thinking he had to be messing with me. Or drinking early. But what stuck with me wasn’t his tone. It was my kids’ faces. They weren’t joking. They weren’t scared. They were certain.
On the flight home, somewhere between Nassau and Atlanta, I opened my laptop and started writing. That’s the part most people don’t see when they talk about “crazy entrepreneurial moments.” They imagine viral exposure, public disaster, a celebrity spotted with your product, a nightmare customer that just won’t go away.
For me, the craziest thing that ever happened to my business happened before the business existed and sparked the beginning. I wrote about the blue house on that plane. More notes than a story, until I went to Lake Lanier and found a way that the stories connected. How water remembers. That document became the seed of my first novella.
Months later, I founded Resolute Bliss Publishing. On paper, it looked strategic. Creator-owned intellectual property. Controlled distribution. Horror and sci-fi branding. Long-term asset building. I had spent years as a comic creator and paranormal dive instructor, so storytelling was already in my bloodstream.
But the truth is this: That disappearing house forced me to choose. Either I dismiss moments like that as “weird vacation stories” … or I build something that allows me to explore them.
Entrepreneurship, at its core, is deciding to chase the thing that doesn’t fully make sense yet.
For the past two years, I’ve been building the company brick by brick while writing and publishing comics, launching crowdfunding campaigns, negotiating with printers, hauling inventory to conventions, learning what sells and what doesn’t. Some nights it’s exhilarating, like funding a project in days. Other nights it’s packing orders at 1 a.m. and questioning your sanity.
I’ve gone back through photos from that day in Exuma. There’s no blue house in any of them. I’ve looked at satellite maps. Nothing. I still can’t explain what we saw. But I can explain what it did.
It reminded me that the stories that won’t leave you alone are usually the ones you’re meant to build something around. The craziest thing that’s happened to my business wasn’t a public win or a crisis. It was a moment on a beach that made no logical sense and the decision, at 30,000 feet, to take that impossibility seriously. I became a Paranormal Scuba Dive Instructor, decided to find a way to explain that experience with the Blue House that my kids and I experienced, and put myself into my love of comics.
Some houses disappear. Entrepreneurship was choosing to walk toward them anyway. This is my craziest story because it was how Resolute Bliss Publishing began.

Rick, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

If you strip away the business structure, the publishing imprint, the crowdfunding campaigns and convention tables, then I’m simply the kid who never really stopped staring at the screen when The Wizard of Oz came on. I grew up obsessed with that story as it was the first book (and series) that I ever read. Not just the tornado. Not just the witches. What fascinated me was the idea that somewhere beyond the visible world there was another layer, a place that looked colorful and whimsical on the surface but had rules, power struggles, and most importantly forgotten histories underneath.
Oz never felt like a children’s story to me.
At the same time, I fell in love with comics. Horror comics. The old EC-style morality tales where irony cut sharp and consequences mattered. Later it was darker reinterpretations of classic characters. Stories that respected the reader enough to be unsettling. Those two influences, Oz and horror, simmered in me for decades.
Long before I launched a company, long before I published my first book, I was writing something called GASP! nearly 30 years ago. It started as an idea for a horror anthology that leaned into that classic EC tone. The morality with teeth, supernatural elements grounded in human flaws, and endings that stick with you.
Life, career, and family all happened. But the stories never left.
Professionally, I made a career change, and I built a life around discipline and exploration. I became a scuba instructor eventually specializing in what I call paranormal diving which was exploring sites with legend, history, and mystery attached to them. Teaching people to stay calm underwater, to manage risk, to move through environments that can’t be controlled.
After that experience in Exuma with my twins and the disappearing blue house, something clicked. I realized I wasn’t just collecting strange stories. I was supposed to build a platform for them. That’s when I founded Resolute Bliss Publishing.
Today, I create and publish horror, dark fantasy, and sci-fi comics and prose under that banner. Series like Oz: A Nightmare in Emerald reimagine L. Frank Baum’s world through a darker, layered lens which is not to shock for the sake of it, but to explore power, corruption, identity, and legacy in a mythos people think they already understand.
GASP! finally became real, the anthology I had released decades earlier of blending classic EC-style storytelling with modern themes finally was given the life it deserved. I write and publish titles that live in the shadows a little bit. Stories that respect readers. Stories that don’t handhold.
What problems do I solve? On the surface, I create entertainment – comics, graphic storytelling, horror fiction, and I take those that fear water a chance to explore what others talk about.
There’s a hunger right now for reimagined worlds but many adaptations sand down the edges. I don’t.
I also operate differently than many creators because not only do I build my company to control the intellectual property from day one, as well as write, publish, manage production, and run crowdfunding campaigns. I work with people through my Abyssal Paranormal Diving, trying to find the stories. I own the risk and the reward, and I own the actual experience that I can share with others.
That sets me apart.
I’m most proud of three things. First, that I finally launched GASP! the correct way, after carrying it for three decades. There’s something deeply satisfying about honoring an idea that refused to die.
Second, that my twins have watched this happen in real time. They’ve seen the late nights, the Kickstarter launches, the printer calls, the setbacks and the wins. Entrepreneurship hasn’t been theoretical in our house, it’s been very visible.
Third, that readers respond. When someone tells me that a twist genuinely surprised them or that my version of Oz made them see that world differently then that matters.
What I want potential readers and followers to know is simple: This isn’t a hobby brand. It’s a long-game universe. Every series connects to a larger creative vision. Every story is intentional. I’m not chasing trends I’m trying to build a mythology.
And at the core of it all is something I’ve believed since I was a kid staring at that screen: The world is stranger than we think. Sometimes the house disappears. Sometimes it comes back.
My job is to write what happens next and explore the underwater universe while sharing with others.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.ResoluteBliss.com
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61581280093542
• Other: www.HauntedWater.com, https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1583582850/oz-nightmare-in-emerald-2, https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/llgarner/gasp-2-horror-anthology, www.paranormalscuba.com

Image Credits
Les L. Garner, Jae Lee