First I get an idea which can just pop up in my head or be right under my nose for me to grab it, or, may I be looking after it and doing research for a while, anything to get the idea I may need at some point; I then start sketching or building some structure, for the material I need to start building the content, I start writing and then comes the great amount of editing, reshaping, carving the text and crafting it until it does look and expresses the way I want.

It is as simple as complicated and looks pretty much the same as my writing process. I believe that many of the connections or pick-ups of ideas from life come from the time I have spent reading when young, but that is probably the links I make in my own head for this interesting thing called life playing with us, showing us how important is for us what we do and what we read, what we intend and how is that we are supposed to think and behave. I sometimes observe and study but I also let things live a little, let them grow like moss or mould and watch them from time to time interfering to see how they behave in relation to one thing or another. Many times ideas just pop up in my head; I mean, they were right there, under my very little nose, what am I to do?

Writer block, to me, is when I either get too stubborn and have my head broken with other writers' and artists' ideas or I just get out there and start doing something interesting, fun and entertaining, sad as hell, desperate or utterly boring and probably stupid or non-sensical to get it and get over the writer block. It's a process and I've been told that we must learn and learn and go on learning things, making our mistakes, or some mistakes, so, for heaven's sake, at times I do find myself playing some roles, although not all of them sound appealing or are actually good for the way I was built and shaped. But that's another tale of the observer a writer and artist must be.

I don't care. Negative book reviews are as valuable as positive book reviews, if not better. They can indicate to a writer a lot of weak points in their work, be that the writing itself or other processes that may vary from regional and cultural differences to simple marketing strategies followed. A negative review almost always tells the writer more about the audience - the quality of it and the wall behind it - than a good one. Good ones are easy to ingest and one feels immediately grateful for them. The bad ones are though the ones that make the good writer come out for the very good one to start being and the great human behind it starts finding their well-deserved place - not the one given by a good or a bad review, and sometimes not the one the writer themselves thought was good for them, but the actual right one, the one making them truly happy.

To me, it depends on where I am, from a personal psychological point of view. If I find myself back in some broken dream childhood affair, I would probably find it difficult to approach a certain subject which means I don't have enough data and maturity to treat the subject and experience the awareness of not being prepared to work it out. If I do have the data and the knowledge to get the material worked, it may be the easy task of fighting the moody child inside or the other tasks during the day that are energy and time-consuming. In the end, though, the writing part gets done because, surprise-surprise, it actually is the easiest part of the whole deal. The hard part is editing, especially if the writer is emotionally attached to the text they produced. They need to grow out of it, be merciless and technical, cold to the soul's craving for redundant twists and tedious repetition... or heavy loads of text. Explaining a lot just like telling it all in a very long string of phrases might be beaten by a very well-built and simple phrase that suggests the explanation or even plays with the meaning and the reader's head in such a way that the whole work becomes engaging making the reader feel they actually belong to the story, that they are part of it. But that's also a matter of taste and type of text and audience a writer addresses a piece of their work.

I started when young, around the age of nine, I remember being given the first task of being creative and coming up with my own side of the story. After that I didn't have to particularly ask, I was just there, twisting ideas in my head on my way back home from school, tossing my backpack in a corner and forgetting at times about other duties because I had some story to write. Of course, I never showed them but let them rest under a pile of school books and notebooks. Very little of what I was writing when a child and a teen was ever shown and I always changed things when we had to do homework for practical reasons and adjustment to the classes subjects. It became a fun thing to do, playing with words and language aspects, and I remained pretty much in love with it, which is not bad for a writer who wishes to be a professional.

Start writing. It's crap or there's plenty of it on the shelves anyway? Never mind that, start working on it. Put something down, on paper or on your favourite app and come back to it every now and then, study a little around the subject of the book you plan and follow the rules applied to good text, learn what to break and what to stick to (in a matter of rules and text adjustment). Know your audience. For who do you write and why do you write for them? These are questions that may help you craft the text better without needing thousands of expensive classes. Sometimes one good class and your own brains and will is what you actually need. Find your audience right next to you. Get to speak with people, your friends and neighbours, your family, and anyone you feel they have the same interests as you do. You may also learn how to craft your story and shape it better for your readers. Listen. Do listen more than you speak. People tend to tell you more about their needs when you give them space to tell and let you know about their needs and intentions, feelings and experience. Offer a space for their own stories to develop; that is always very helpful. Darn good advice I just gave to myself too! Where did I steal this one from, I wonder?

Aaa... That's a secret. The best way to develop a plot and its characters is to observe and take notes for your characters from real life. But, nobody said a fictional fantastic character or an out-of-this-world plot cannot work. Actually, they can both work together or apart very well. It's just like my writing process. I let things brew after I got the idea and found the beautifully crafted clean barrel to have it grow-wise. It's an observation-building-observation-studying-building-observation-more studying-observation-crafting-observation-editing-observation process with a return to the simple reader mind to see how it works from the audience's point of view. Easy peasy.

I wrote many poetry books among which "In T[I'm]", "Prism Tears" "Natural", "Under a Starry Sky" and "Soul Crush" but none is my favourite. My first free-verse volume is "Time Files" and maybe I'll hold it as a favourite among my poems collections just because it gave the tone to the "return to the exploration of the self through literary poetical devices". I still love them all which makes it very tough on the "poor guys". I also wrote one surreal light fantasy book titled "Moons of Amaterasu" and a young fiction series titled Phantomaniacs -one dark fantasy book trilogy. The latter in my fiction writing is a favourite because of a little personal heart and soul matter in it. I also wrote a few plays and I loved doing so, it revived the strong youth in me that I thought lost and forgotten. My favourites from my plays writing remain "Trolleo and Henriette" and "Interview with the Blue Door" because they reflect the best of who I am as a playwright and artist, how I formed myself not only with words but with other meanings I practically looked for and embraced by doing anything I could to have the pieces finally revealed.

It would probably be Phantomaniacs: World of Shadows to which I came back with a few re-editing actions over the years, the one with which I had "the hardest time". As I said before, it isn't hard to get the actual story written but crafting it is another thing; I cannot complain about having a problem crafting it, because I absolutely loved crafting the story and exploring the possibilities there, still, changing things, reshaping, and adapting the text to the intended new or different forms did consume a lot of my time and some energy I spent in "getting it perfect". I don't regret it, though, but I embrace it as the experience I needed to have me all set for the books I planned to write next to come out perfect in no time.

I just had it in me. I don't know. It is probably my days of youth when I was reading a lot of books and history and middle ages were a must in school and fell as a very intriguing time to me the greater inspiration source for my Phantomaniacs trilogy. I remember exploring a wide variety of texts back then so, maybe I do find myself in Amy, the young character more than I'd like to admit. But then, I find myself in Amitiel, Aedan or Maeve in a certain amount or at some degree, as well as in many other characters; all of them, the ones in my book, actually; Jeez! I wonder why! Oh, no, wait... I know! It's because I wrote them. Yep. The middle ages and the fact that this interesting, even from a scientific point of view, aspect of our lives kept coming to the discussions and dissections table. And boy we like to slice corpses and study them! I guess this is what I did and found more life than one can imagine. So, I picked a theme and a few young-minded typologies of characters to play with and have my "funny dark fantasy story to tell" actually told.

The sex scene. I mean, it's for young adults, for Christ's sake! What are we doing here, porn stuff? Anyway, suggesting that something happened between two fairly mature for engagement in sexual intercourse young people felt like just about enough. Telling without details and an elaborate description of the thing felt a little dry but I also asked myself: why not let my young readers discover through themselves what is that they do understand by love-make?

Order and perfect balance with an add of crazy knowing how to behave, just like the perfect dose of salt and pepper in any successful dish and the rest of the flavours that bring one only health and beauty. Everything is important. A good healthy schedule, a clean, well-divided and organised space, good habits and not so many new distractions and exceptions from the rule as to destroy the balance but just the fair amount to keep that balance going on; only the ones to help me maintain and/or return to my schedule happily and willingly, set up to work and perform the best out of all my experience.

I happen to admire and know a Romanian author whose name is Alexandra Furnea. She is not only a very talented but a very bright author and so I happen to know her from her high-school days. I have to admit though, I have spent a lot of time among the dead authors and their work and would still make references to Oscar Wilde or Jean Annouilh, think about having a conversation with Eugène Ionesco or get to be put down as a playwright by Samuel Beckett. And let me not forget about my fun take with Molière: memorable. I'd probably want to spend a day with Anne Bacus too. I learned a lot from her books and they were pretty useful to me.

Just yesterday. I google myself every day! Just kidding. I needed a quick link to one of my works to insert somewhere, so I found myself googling myself for practical reasons: I had no time wasting with navigating through the whole profile and pages of the platform/site. Oh, I did find what I was looking for.