Pulp Dragon Press

Blog

  • Grimoire Detective Update

    On 12 March 2023, the first ideas of what would become Charlene ‘Charley’ Warlock and my Grimoire Detective series formed in my brain. I made a few idea notes and started my new Scrivener project. Then, on 24 May of 2023, I joined the Writer’s Block Discord server which is what changed my writing trajectory…

  • How to Stop Stopping

    Writing is hard. I know this is an obvious statement, but sometimes it still requires statement. Writing is difficult. But it can also be enjoyable if you let it. One of the things that kills our motivation is procrastination. Sometimes we think to ourselves ~ I really should develop this language, or this race, or…

  • State of the Pulp – April 2024

    This is a new series of posts that I plan to make showing the state of my progress as an author. I call this ‘State of the Pulp’ because I am trying to give my stories a pulp feel as well as wordsmithing the way the pulp writers used to write back in the past.…

  • Journey to One Million

    “Write a thousand words a day and in three years you will be a writer.”— Ray Bradbury There have been a few people talking about a writer needing to write one million words to become good at the craft. Hell, I track my word count on my march to one million myself. Currently sitting on…

  • The Tortoise and the Hare

    The Tortoise and the Hare in writing is the difference between the Burst writer and the Steady writer. I write every day. Every morning, I wake up at the same time just to craft words. 4 am and I am out of bed and walking the dogs. The oxygen gets my gray matter awake and…

  • What is your writing style?

    When it comes to writing, we each have a specific way in which we word things. We have what are called ‘crutch words’ which we use more often than we should simply because we rely on them. Just as every individual has a unique way of speaking, we all have a unique way of writing.…

It all started with a simple idea. I wanted to write a Fantasy Story.

But isn’t that always the way everything begins? With an Idea. A spark or a kernel of something that forms in the back of your mind before it comes forward and grows into the fully formed idea. I have always been a guy with idea after idea but then I let them sit in a computer file or on a scrap of paper, never to have life breathed into them.

Not this time though. This time, my goal is to make Dreams into Reality. Or rather, turning Fantasy into Reality.

I have always been an avid reader and I have loved reading books for as long as I can remember. Even during my time in the army,I would try to cram a paperback of something into my cargo pocket to read when we had our moments of Hurry Up And Wait. I would whip out some action, adventure, fantasy, or science fiction thing where I could read and consume and dream of being anywhere other than in the middle of the desert.

Then, one day, I saw a map on a wall. It was a map of a real place, the Mediterranean Sea, but it was a reverse negative map so the water appeared like land and the land like water. I saw the map, thought about how it looked like a world for a fantasy story, and my brain started to craft some story ideas inside of my own brain. This was 2007.

I had just gotten out of the army, gotten married to my wife and became a step-father to her two boys. Since then,we’ve had two more boys of our own. I have worked government jobs for a while, before settling down in the midwest. After 40-something years of having only a high school education, I used my G I Bill to get my Associate’s Degree in Programming and continued to gain my Bachelor’s as well. I left the world of Human Resources and Recruiting behind and became a computer programmer. During this time, the stories continued to form in my brain.

I would take ideas I liked from the books I had read and begin to craft my own ideas and my own worlds.when i started, i knew right away that i needed to learn how to write. Then, after I started to learn how to write a story, I knew I needed to learn how to write better. I Listened to podcasts and read articles and became a student of learning the art of telling a story. There is so much information in the world,often too much, and I became overwhelmed and would stop when it got to be too much.

Then, I came across two quotes that changed my life as a writer.

Thefirstwas something along the lines of, “Most writers become writers because they read a really good book and wanted to write one just as good, or they read a book that was so bad that they wanted to try to do it better.” Now,this is paraphrased and I don’t remember where I heard it or who said it. I tried looking for it, but had no luck in this world of technology. But this got me thinking. There were books that I had read that I did not finish because I did not enjoy them. There are no bad books, not really. Every book I feel has its audience and its reader.

But it was too late for me. Wasn’t it?

That is when the second quote entered my life, and this one I know the source. “Dreams Don’t Have Deadlines.” This quote from James Todd Smith, better known as LL Cool J. and do you know what? He’s right. There is nothing saying that you have to have a book published by a certain phase of your life. So why feel behind when I can start now? Which is what I have done.

This blog is a way for me to catalog my journey and my experiences as I transition from being a dreamer into being a doer. While the story began years ago with the dream, the reality of things did not start until May 2023. That was when my current idea struck and I was pushed into starting (more on that later) and I finally finished my first book. Since then, I have written 3 books in the series and am ready to take things up a level,so I am going to start the process of documenting the journey to help others along the same path and to hopefully teach people not to make the same mistakes I will make and that I have already made.

Here’s to a new year, a new life, and a new way of being!