Creative inspiration. What is your's? Here is mine...

I recently posted to this blog about my drive and what makes me push so hard to be successful as a writer. Now I would like to also tout what has been my personal inspiration over the years for my creativity.

Image from Indiana Jones - Harrison Ford as Indy.

#1) I have to say was that I was a comic nerd for the first 20 years of my life. I collected heavily upwards of 3000 comics collected and traded. That over the top fandom of all things Marvel Comics. Sorry, though I did collected some DC comics, I was always a Marvel fan first. When I was really young I use to love my surprise when my mom would bring home a couple comics for me. Then probably at the age of 7 or so I started subrscribing to several issues and would anxiously await for the comic to come in the mail. Back then they were in wrapped in brown paper and folder over (Cringe, comic collectors would scream bloody murder now if they shipped that way), but as a kid I could care less, I was just excited to get the next issue to see what happened to my favorite hero. Unlike most kids at the time who were mostly Spiderman fans, I could take or leave Spidey. It was the big guns that got me excited. The Fantastic Four, Avengers, Defenders, Thor, Hulk, Namor, ect. My love of reading (and yes visually seeing them on page, guess you can call them the next level of picture books for kids after educational reading picture books) them actually helped my vocabulary be above what most kids used and of course the stories fueled my imagination for years to come.

Famous cover image from XMen Phoenix Story.

#2) Monster movies! When I was a kid, there were really only about 4 channels to pull up on TV (Makes me feel real old, but at least I am not so old that all we had was a radio to sit around and listen too like the generation before me, guess that was the harbringer of audio books today!). We had ABC, CBS, NBC, & PBS. Saturday was my day! If you got up in the morning you could watch about 2 hrs straight of cartoons which included Bugs Bunny, Road Runner, Donald Duck, and my favorite Super Friends. A DC cartoon covering the Justice League. Corny, but great for a kid. But it was Saturday Night that I was the most anxious for. They had "Creature Features", a Saturday night regular that collected Monster movies to show in a double feature every Saturday and I was allowed to stay up late that one night to watch them both. That had the likes of Frankenstein, Dracula, The Mummy, Godzilla, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Journey to the Center of the Earth, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, The Creature from the Black Lagoon, The Werewolf, The War of the Worlds, and so many more wonderful classics from the 1940-1960's. The idea of visualizing those creatures in the real world also had a big factor in my imagination going forward.

Creatures Features montage of some of the movies featured on the series.

#3) Sci-Fi/Action books and movies of the 1980-1990's. Too many books to even list here that were inspiration to my love of science fiction and action movies, but Dune was a big one for me by Frank Herbert, as was Ringworld by Larry Niven. Of course Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit also enthralled me into their worlds as well. Movies of the time like Star Wars, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Alien, Terminator, Independance Day, and especially the Indiana Jones series truly inspired me.

#4) Marvel Cinema. As a long time comic nerd and fan as I stated above, I always wanted to see my favorite characters visualized on the big screen. The early years (1970's) were quite dissapointing with the quality of the shows that put on the TV screen between Captain American, Spiderman, and then the Hulk. But finally by the late 1990's we started to get some seriously better adapations with Wesley Snipes as Blade being the first really good one. Right after that we got the Fantastic Four with Chris Evans as the Human Torch (which I thought he did perfectly as the cocky and somewhat spoiled "Torch" in the movie). Things really got started though when Marvel started their own movies controlled by their own writers and directors who were true fans. The First Ironman started it all off to what it is today, which I believe is now 22 or 23 movies later, all which have been successful in their own right, with only a couple looked at by fans and critiques as lackluster or not true to form. But some as you know have been record breakers like the first Avengers, Black Panther, Captain Marvel, and now the final Avengers Infinity War and Endgame which have seen huge success and rightly so for visualizing our favorites onto the big screen in ways we never would have thought we would see just a decade ago.

Photo from the Ant Man and the Wasp Marvel Movie.

#5) Aliens and UFO's. In the 1980's I also became somewhat of a UFO nut. The original TV show covering the Inca ruins tying them into alien visitation, Charles Berlitz book on the Bermuda Triangle, and then Close Encounters of the Third Kind created my more serious interest in the subject which had me researching more about the subject of encounters around the world and fueling even more of my imagination.

So all these culprits have been creative imaginitive triggers for me going forward into my books. Motorcycles and my involvement with them since the age of 17 which lead my into the Motorcycle Industry and racing scene from the late 80's until now also have some influence in my prose, since I always intent to have some motorcycle interaction in my stories as a signature card to my characters. All of these subjects swirl around in my psyche daily and help my creativity put it down on paper. Now all I need is seclusion and quiet time uninterrupted to write like I just did for this blog. Makes all the difference.

So what is your creative influence(s)?