Writing Process Blog Tour

A friend and writer whom I recently reviewed The Crusader: JP Wilder asked me about doing a writing process blog tour and so here it is!

Answer these four questions about your writing process. Answers can be as long or short as you wish. 1) What am I working on? 
I just released a new novella Fangs of the Dragon - a Porter Rockwell weird western - this was previously published in Monsters and Mormons and just recently in Weird Tales of Horror - so this is one of my experiments teasers - with a fantastic cover by the amazing Matt Page! I have several projects I'm trying to wrap up in the short term - collections of my previously published short stories, one will be a weird western collection and the other is a Sword & Sorcery fantasy collection - each will collect my published (or not) short stories. Feels good to have enough nowadays to actually fill their own antho's  After that, I need to hit on a historical fantasy sequel to my first novel Blood of Our Fathers and then I have big plans for a fantasy series titled Gods & Robbers.

2) How does my work differ from others of its genre? 
I mix up all my influences and life experience into my stories, which mine like yours is completely individual. I remix history books and stories I love with Rock N Roll and then throw in things that come from dreams, sometimes a favorite (or disliked) story that I would have done differently. All of us filter things differently so it all comes out different in the work.

3) Why do I write what I do? 4) How does my writing process work?
It has to come out! I have so many ideas bubbling to the surface and writing is a cathartic release for all those things running through my mind. I might go crazy if there wasn't a vent for the many characters talking and doing things in my head, so many tales to tell and adventures to be had.

4) How does my writing process work?
I usually ponder some ideas, jot down illegible notes, drive and think about story's I'd like to read,  then sit down and start running with it. I rarely use outlines, but I do refine my drafts quite a few times. Sometimes its hard to let things go. My large output for 2014 has been a long time coming of everything I've worked on for the last 4 odd years.

Thanks to J.P. Wilder for inviting me on this - I need motivation to post better this last year! 
and in continuing these writing process blogs I've connected with my friend and amazing writer Charles Gramlich  who writes whatever interests him, including fiction, non-fiction, and poetry, His fiction is primarily horror or fantasy: his non-fiction deals mostly with science or with writing or writers.

I gotta plug that I loved his Swords of Talera series and his Bitter Steel collection of heroic fantasy.