Kickstarting the Creative Process

Before I begin, let me just say, this post has nothing to do with Crowdfunding/Crowdsourcing projects. Instead, it is all about getting stalled creativity going again. Let me set the stage a little here. I published my campfire story, Scouts of the Apocalypse: Zombie Plague back in July. When I published it, I had ideas for book two and three. To be honest, I still do and I have tried to sit down and plot out the basic storyline for each. That’s where my creative process broke down. Why? Well, I find the process of simply putting plot ideas down in some order to be dead boring and not a terribly productive one. I seem to have better luck when […]

Share
Read more

Distancing your work from someone else’s work

In June I released my book, Scouts of the Apocalypse. Scouts is a book that started as a campfire story probably six years ago and has been one that I’ve long wanted to see in print. As you might imagine, I was pretty happy to have it finally available. It was only a couple weeks later that I got my first email from a friend asking me if I had seen the news about a movie with a similar title: Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse. That was followed by the question, “Was it based on my book?” I hadn’t and it wasn’t. I must confess, I was pretty disappointed at first. And then I started to realize how different […]

Share
Read more

Creating Worlds

One of the things I truly love, whether it is in books, movies, comic books or whatever, is when the property hits a certain tipping point and stops being a collection of material and becomes a living breathing entity. Several such properties come to mind (and might make what I’m talking about easier to envision): Star Wars; Star Trek; Discworld; Wizarding World of Harry Potter; Pern; Asterix and Obelix; Narnia. This is just a very small list; there are many MANY other examples out there. In each case, the original work has grown well beyond what was first conceived, gaining a life of its own. Hmm…now that I think of it, perhaps the word, “Conceived” is very appropriate. What makes […]

Share
Read more
1 2 3 4 5 6