Category: Meandering Musings

Hello, and welcome to SMPJA (Social Media Political Junkies Anonymous) /stands up My name is Eric, and I’m an SMPJ. I guess it all started in college for me, back in 2006. A friend introduced me to this new platform called “Facebook”. It was fun at first. Sharing pictures...

TLDR version? I was created to do so (If you have not read my Mea Culpa identity blog, click here https://ericwsparks.com/mea-culpa/ to do so). This is simply what I was born to do. I do not mean this is necessarily how I’m destined to make my living (though it would...

So, I wanted to make a blog about why I write. But I realized you needed me to be more candid about my identity before you could understand both how this affects, and how it doesn’t affect, my writing. I’m a Christian. More specifically, I’m a devout Christian that...

While I listen to plenty of background music when writing (I have a Pandora station with hundreds if not thousands of songs liked), the following are the ones that I purchased on iTunes so I could loop them over and over. After all, artists draw inspiration for their medium...

Normally, I try to post blogs on tips for writing, or reactions to literature and/or criticism of literature. But today, I’m going to be a little selfish. My first Beta Readers have my first novel, and I’m going to give a little bit of a writer’s bio, as well...

The elite of society, especially in artistic circles, has become obsessed with originality. The worst thing you can do is present something that reminds them of something else. The question is: why? Don’t get me wrong; copying another artist and just changing up some names is tacky at best...

The first thing to consider when you are choosing to self-publish or not is your genre. That’s because publishers are first and foremost interested in making money. They’ll turn away a brilliant novel that won’t sell, and they bought the rights to 50 Shades of Grey after it became...

I have just finished reading Mark Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper for the first time. I loved every minute of it. Never mind that it is a “children’s story.” As CS Lewis noted, “When I was ten I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed...

As someone who wrote multiple short stories, I had a huge learning curve when it came to my first novel. Last week, I wrote about the need to make sure you have a key component of your world set up before you write that amazing Fantasy novel. This week,...

It’s a forgone conclusion that if you’re going to create your own Fantasy world, you are going to have some form of magic. Like Samwise Gamgee, we long to see the beautiful and strange; it’s a huge lure that draws us to these fantastic worlds. But you must also...