My name's David Reynolds. I am many things (as we all are), but mostly I am a culture addict and critic. I can't stop thinking about things - too many things - and that's led me down a path of adventure, academia, and publishing.

That's pretty much who I am in a nutshell. For further gritty details you should visit my blog (http://davaflava.wordpress.com).

That's hard to pin down. Like so many others I began writing for school. Unlike so many others, however, I actually liked writing at a very young age. I'd write little stories, like fan fiction or mash-up stories featuring my favourite characters from popular culture, and I'd record little radio-dramas on our old tape-recorder, making all sorts of strange voices and crazy sound effects. I love going back through whatever scraps that have survived from those early days of writing for a laugh. And, it's still good for a laugh.

I wrote a lot of poetry in my teenage years. Poetry brought me to writing songs and music, which I still dabble with a little. I moved away from writing like this when I went to university. Academic writing demands a different sort of rigour, and so I had to change gears.

I like to have a few projects on the go at once. One project I'm working on at the moment is a reinterpretation of the Three Billy Goats Gruff. I wrote the story when I was eleven years old, thinking about it from the troll's perspective. My reinterpretation is called The True Story of the Three Billy Goats Gruff: The Troll's Side of the Story. I am presently working with an illustrator and plan to publish the story through Problematic Press (http://problematicpress.wordpress.com). I'm really excited about it!

At times, I feel compelled to write. That sounds cliché, I know, but it's true. I am very opinionated. It takes an effort for me to ensure I don't always speak up. Writing is a way for me to sift through my mad internal ravings and hone them into coherent expressions that others might appreciate.

Self-publishing is where it is at. I enjoy the D.I.Y. elements. Self-publishing gives me the greatest amount of control over each project from beginning to end. Plus, self-publishing offers the greatest slice of the royalty pie. I want as few fingers in my pie as I can manage. That's generally a good policy on pie.

Ignorance is bliss. The joy I derive from writing is nothing like that. Writing, to me, is more akin to a burden I choose to endure. I love it because it is difficult. I also love the dissemination of ideas. A story is like a pebble tossed into a stream, creating ripples that journey to unseen shores.