Meet fellow Clean Indie Reads author William David Ellis – with a New Release

Today I’d like to introduce William David Ellis, my fellow CIR author. David, would you like to tell us a bit about yourself?

I am 59 years old, married to an English Teacher which helps a lot, until it doesn’t. My name is David Ellis, apparently my pen name is William David Ellis, I live on a farm in East Texas, and raise honeybees and blackberries, have two German Shepherds and belong to an interesting ethnicity called redneck. For those of you in the underland?, downunder? Big island continent that has kangaroos?, well a redneck is Crocodile Dundee from Texas.  He carries a larger knife, and we don’t have crocs here we have pineywoods rooters, large feral pigs that will destroy a crop in a single night.

Well, I always did like those movies, especially that line, “you call that a knife?”  Ha ha ha. So, give us an idea about the content of your books, because as you know, this is Clean Indie Reads we’re talking about.

Do my books have fowl language, ahh hmm, well I don’t recall any poultry listings, or any references too ducks or geese or any of that sort. However.. if it was mentioned in the Bible, ( you guys read that in underland right?) it is fair game.. like when my roman soldier finds out the demonized high priest of Carthage is planning on sacrificing the children of Carthage to conjure a huge flesh-eating dragon, well he does not say, oh my, or isn’t that awful, or goodness gracious, he says the D word. And when his troops are being burnt by the same fire breathing dragon he says it again.. other than the D word used extremely sparingly, no there is no foul or fowl language. Sex scenes, hardly my wife reads and edits my writing and would laugh at any attempt I made to write something provocative… I am not a soft porn person either conjuring emotions that are not meet in existing relationships, so no to sex scenes or even emotional foreplay that would substitute for sex scenes, as to violence.. this is a book about battles, and fiery dragons, and suffering, but it does not glorify violence. They do work hard at trying to kill the dragon, and the dragon does eat a few folks so… take that into consideration.

Sounds like it’s a good thing your wife is your beta reader. As is my husband 🙂 Now before we learn about this new release of yours, we’ve got three questions to get through. What inspired you to become an author, and how old were you at the time? 

My mother read Edgar Rice Burroughs to my brother and me when we were in kindergarten, I cut my teeth on Walt Whitman books, the classics of Jules Verne, etc,, so I was a reader before I could talk, and my first word was ,”book” I actually attempted to write a book in the third grade, then skipped several years and published in the sixth grade, school publication, then started writing again in college, and over the last 30 years wrote several short stories, a few newspaper columns, and started seven or eight different books that are in various stages of remission.

Ha ha ha, I do like your sense of humour, David! next question–If you could tell your younger self something you know now, with respect to your writing career, what would it be?

Learn grammar, be prepared to work, it is very very hard especially the first novel, kinda like your first child, there is an extremely steep learning curve!   

Yes, that hill is a steep one alrighty! One last question for you. What three things would you say are the most important for an aspiring author to keep in mind as they being their writing journey?

Learn the craft–read books about writing.

Write, write write, a writers block is in your head, not in your fingers, type when you do not feel like, even if you have nothing to say. You have to jump start some manuscripts some mornings, but if you start writing, even if it is not very good, you will slip into the flow and then you can come back and delete the first few sentences, but if you do not absolutely force yourself to put something on the screen you will wait for a flow that never comes, you have to drill a hole before you hit water.

Don’t worry about being a planner of a pantser, most writers are a bit of both.

Now, about this new book of yours … what was the inspiration for your latest book?

I was reading about the possibility of some dinosaurs having survived till the present day, and came across a little quote by the Roman Historian Livy, who said a roman legion was attacked by a fire breathing dragon.. and then one thing lead to another..pow a book is born!

Sounds very interesting, indeed! So, here’s the link to the listing on Amazon (oh, and I love the cover by the way!).

And if you want to follow David on Amazon, here’s the link to his author profile.