Promise of coffee.

1. Allow the project to become my subconscious lurker as I go about everything else. It watches, it ruminates, it stews.

2. Read lots of whatever I want around the topic.

3. After a few days, jot down whatever insane sound bytes have been forming in my head.

4. Begin knitting the soundbytes into a narrative with structure.

5. Continue with 1-4 until I have a standalone, readable entity ready to throw into the world.

Reviewer recommendations.

1. Look for related source images that are explicitly flagged as allowing reuse with modification. (Or download equivalently vetted clip art.)

2. Create a simple on-topic design that does not look like it was filched from Amazon's collection of stock cover images.

I try to shy away from the more elaborate designs since they are so prevalent now that they look generic/off-the-shelf.

English drama (especially Elizabethan, Restoration).

Poetry (English American); both well-known and fellow not-so-well-known authors.

Fiction (horror, mysteries).

2nd or 3rd grade. One of my stories won a class-wide contest and was published. I learned my first lesson about proof-editing with this project. I overlooked a simple error on the first page ("toe" should have been "ankle"), and it went to press that way. D'oh!

A compulsion to create paintings using words and to share them.

Feedback and exposure! And lots of great tools and documentation. A really superb outfit!

Finishing something I feel proud to share. And getting it out of me.

The Elizabethans (Shakespeare, Jonson, Marlowe, etc.)
Homer
Milton
Vonnegut
Agatha Christie