Hey Folks!
I’m writing this as an introduction to anyone stopping by who doesn’t yet know me from YouTube, my books, or my music.
I’m primarily a writer of fiction and YouTuber these days, but I do still put out music in the eclectic or ambient rock genres from time to time. My formal education was in Music, specifically music composition and guitar, specializing in classical and Flamenco styles, though I spent much of my youth playing in many other styles, primarily jazz and rock. I taught at the college level for a few years in my twenties, then moved from California to Las Vegas, where I continued to teach and perform for another two years.
Shortly before my 30th birthday, I decided I had endured enough of the music business, which had gotten harder and harder over the previous 12 years. I have also suffered from hearing loss since childhood, which at that point was getting substantially worse with each passing day. I decided at that time to shift my creative focus to writing fiction, something I had briefly been serious about in my early twenties before devoting all my time to performing.
I returned to music a few years later after getting a bone-anchored hearing system—basically, a specialized hearing aid attached to a titanium implant screwed into my skull and protruding through my scalp. That allowed me to hear what I was doing properly again, and I have since released two albums, Memories Adrift and Return, under the name of “David V. Stewart’s Zul.”
The band's name actually comes from a talking Raven in one of my books, which I released in the interim: Water of Awakening. Since 2016 I’ve published around 20 books, with the most well-known being my Samurai novel Muramasa: Blood Drinker, the gunpowder fantasy series Moonsong, my horror book Eyes in the Walls, and my short creativity manual The Keys to Prolific Creativity.
I regularly publish videos on YouTube, where I have around 45,000 subscribers, dealing with guitar, writing techniques, current events, book cover design (I do my own covers), and the publishing industry.
I will likely be cross-publishing my articles here and on my regular website, dvspress.com, until something changes.
Good to see you here, David! I discovered you around 2018 when I was scouring the internet to find people who thought The Force Awakens sucked. I’ve since watched and shared your video on it several times. Looking forward to reading your work here!
Woohoo! Glad to see you on Substack, David. :)