Description:
While in college I majored in creative writing. I enjoyed my time in that program immensely but found myself deeply disillusioned with the politics and business of the writing world. After several years of trying to pigeon hole my writing into the acceptable mold of contemporary fiction, I gave up and started writing purely for myself again.
For a long time I put poetry to the side and focused on fiction alone, but I've come back to the poetry after many years and am enjoying myself, especially since I'm not restricted in subject matter by what the hippest journals and magazines are looking for to publish.
Recently I've been working on a pair of novels, one hard scifi and the other dark fantasy. That work continues and absorbs much of my creative energy at this point. I would hazard a guess that I'm about 40% through the scifi effort and maybe 25% of the way through the dark fantasy. Most of my attention is on the dark fantasy story right now.
I have to admit that my guilty pleasure is vampire/supernatural fiction--I love all the strong female leads, and the nonstandard approaches to a set of well established mythos.
Music plays a huge part in my inspiration: I'm an auditory thinker (as opposed to visual--that probably has the potential to outlaw me here!) and my creative energies are mood driven. As such music is ideally suited to push me through my paces in terms of my writing.
My music interests range across an extremely broad spectrum: classical, opera, jazz, hard rock, progressive rock, some alternative if it's not too emo, classical country (can't stand the new stuff at all), and some other odds and ends thrown in.
Currently I'm having a Veruca Salt revival.
