We recently connected with Loyd Elmore Jr and have shared our conversation below.

Loyd, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. We’d love to hear the story of how you went from this being just an idea to making it into something real.

I can only speak for myself but you might find this happens with other writers. Ideas come out of the ether. They tend to pop up doing mundane things like driving, cutting the lawn, taking a shower, etc. One moment it’s not there and the next moment, it exists. Sometimes you have half an idea, and the other part might take months to form. I’ve had ideas since I was a kid, that I wrote down and didn’t make the whole until just a few years ago. That’s decades.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

Writing has always been something I wanted to do. I read a lot as a child, mostly comic books. I moved on from those to novels. Being a member of Generation X, I had access to books well beyond my age range. At age ten, I was reading my first Stephen King novel, Christine. That book opened my eyes to what I wanted to do. I wanted to make people feel what King made me think. The first journey into writing was one of the first fan-fiction stories before that was a thing. I loved a certain television show and wanted to be on it desperately. An idea struck my mind: I should write a story about the show and put myself in it. And that’s when my passion began.

Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?

Like most writers, I want to do it for a living. The idea of going to my computer and writing all day instead of working for someone else pushes me. I want to create for a living and I want to give people some escapism that helps them leave their own world for a while.

Looking back, are there any resources you wish you knew about earlier in your creative journey?

The old way of thinking when it comes to publishing books is you MUST get an agent so they can get your book in a publisher’s hand. That idea kept me from making that step. That process is difficult and disheartening. It’s a road that is unmapped and you usually need to know someone that knows someone. If I knew how easy self-publishing was, I might not have waited until I was fifty years old to publish my first book.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/loyd_elmore_jr/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/loyd.elmore/

Image Credits

All photos by me, Loyd Elmore Jr.