Elijah David

I have two more tips for keeping your creative bucket full that I did not cover last week. Keeping in Sync with Your Creative Drive Many of us have patterns and rhythms to our creative drive. I've mentioned before that autumn tends to spur me on to be more creative. It's not that I don't feel creative during other times of the year. It's more that when the first crisp days of autumn hit, I have to make something. I haven't always been aware of this trend, but ever since I first noticed it, it's something that I've come to expect, take advantage of, and even rely on (see last year's difficulties when I didn't  experience this creative surge). When I mentioned this in writing group two weeks ago, one of my friends said that she has  a way of telling when she's ready to work on a new project. Much like pregnant women tend to nest and get their houses ready for a new child, she starts cleaning and organizing her writing space. It's not a co...

I've had a number of friends do this tag in the last couple weeks, so I figured I'd jump in. 1. WHAT GENRES, STYLES, AND TOPICS DO YOU WRITE ABOUT? Genres: Fantasy (high, urban, contemporary, epic), magical realism (or something that's not quite full-blown fantasy), and I've got ideas for sci-fi and horror stories/novels that haven't been written yet Styles: Well, I only wrote in third person omniscient for a long while, but I've tended to use more first person in my writing in the last ten years or so. I almost always write in the past tense in my fiction. Topics: I haven't really written topically, but I have touched on some issues like infidelity, homosexuality, personal identity, and religion in my short stories and novels. One novel-in-planning will deal very heavily with child abuse and its effects on both the victims and their friends and families. 2. HOW LONG HAVE YOU BEEN WRITING? I've been coming up with stories and writing them down sinc...

I've been trying to write this post for the better part of two months. But I never quite bring myself to sit down and type. This year started out with an exhausted and creatively weary me. I'd just come off of NaNo and the Christmas season in which I'd been in two separate church dramas with three total performances. I needed a break. And then the break became more of a hiatus. I did some revision work on Albion Academy , and I toyed with finishing There's No Place like Home? , but really I just took a break from everything. Then the Year of Major Life Events TM started rolling. We learned we were going to be parents, we started looking for a house. We had weddings and birthdays, anniversaries and funerals. My brother's wedding date was moved, and we were now both in the wedding. We found a house. I was elected as a deacon at our church. I signed a contract to have Albion Academy published. Oh yeah. That was the original reason for this two-months-in-the-m...

Currently Writing: Albion book 2                                NaNoWriMo prep Currently Reading: A Night in the Lonesome October by Roger Zelazny                                 Blood Thirst: 100 Years of Vampire Fiction by Leonard Wolf                                 Royal Assassin by Robin Hobb                                 Monster by Mirriam Neal My friend Sky at Further Up and Further In does a blog link-up for writers called Beautiful People every so often that allows writers to delve into their characters and share those insights with each other on their blogs. This month, in anticipation of NaNoWriMo, she's changing it up and making it Beautiful Books...

Currently reading: Les Miserables by Victor Hugo (I've been reading this for more than a month, and I'll probably be reading it for another two or three months.)                             Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson Currently Writing: Thesis revisions ("My Friend the Fish" is next up)                             "Joseph Psalm" Mike DiMartino, one of the creative minds behind Avatar: The Last Airbender  and The Legend of Korra , has started writing a blog , and I have been inspired to come back and make another entry here. One of my friends recently asked me if I had been doing any writing lately. Normally, this would be a silly question. A better query would be " What have you been writing lately?" The truth is I haven't been writing much at all due to my thesis defense later this semester (a little over a month f...