Eric Tosky New Member

Where do you prefer to do your creative work?

Anywhere I can sit and peck away at my iPhone

Do you read literary journals and magazines regularly? If so, which are your favorites?

This Happened from Yarnslingers

Who are your literary (or artistic) heroes?

Anyone who only achieved success after death. Van Gogh comes to mind first.

If you could only take one book on a ten-year voyage, what book would you choose?

War and Peace

How much of a typical day (or week) are you able to dedicate to your creative work?

2-3 hours a day, on average

What makes you procrastinate when you could be doing your creative work? What are your strategies for finding focus?

Sports and recreation, sunlight, dog walks, eating, my wife’s mother all lead me away from my writing.

Rain, sports injuries, avoiding my wife’s mother, house repairs, decision making all bring me back to my writing.

How do you celebrate your successes, such as acceptances? How do you handle rejections and other setbacks?

I celebrate my successes by bragging to my friends. I handle my statistically greater number of rejections by eating junk food and railing against the pieces Medium and SUBSTACK send me to read. I almost always hate them all.

How much time do you spend reading for pleasure or edification?

A couple of hours a day. I should spend more time reading.

Do you have a personal creative style? How would you describe it?

Wry, deadpan, humorous

Where do you find inspiration?

In every day experiences. In my readers responses

What single creative achievement are you most proud of?

I have an evergreen bush in front of my house. I always thought it resembled a wooly mammoth. From a plaque that my kids got me for Father’s Day, I salvaged two bull’s horns. I attached them to wooden fence posts. They looked like long elephant tusks. I secured them to the trunk of the bush. I studied pictures of elephant’s eyes. I cut a softball in half and fashioned eyes. I used my dogs hair (that he shed), painted it gray and glued it above the eyes, like eye brows. The result was an evergreen that passersby photographed. This woolly mammoth has been photographed and the image has been sent all over the world. I am prouder of this shrub art than I am of anything I have ever written.

What advice would you give to a young, budding writer (or artist) with less experience than yourself?

Get a job where you can be your own boss. Write when you can. Don’t think of writing as a way to make a living.

Do you incorporate generative AI/LLMs into your creative process? If so, how?

Having a human editor able to weigh in on what is working and what would be best deleted from a piece of writing is not an option for 99% of writers today. Ai can serve that function very effectively. The benefits of Ai over a human for the editorial work I am describing are numerous and miraculous. Try getting a Human to review a 5000 word essay at 4:00 AM, on a Sunday and respond in under ten seconds.

What is your favorite word and why?

Quotidian

I had an English major friend who used this word all the time and I never bothered to find out what it meant. When I finally did learn its meaning, I would see it in other places and feel like I was getting together with a new friend.

What would you like your epitaph to say?

He was one of a kind

Are you an unreliable narrator?

No; I’m pretty reliable as a narrator.