First of all, could you introduce yourself?
My name is Michael L. Martin Jr. and I’m an author of fantasy. Currently, I’m writing a fantasy series called The Darker Side of Light Saga. The first book of that series is titled Burn in Hades. It is about a deceased man on a quest across the underworld in search of a river that will erase the terrible memories of his past (more info on mlmjr.com).

How does feedly help you get inspired?
I use Feedly for inspiration. As a storyteller, paying attention to the world around me is one way to invite stories to find me, and subscribing to feeds is a great tool to stimulate ideas. Inspiration doesn’t always come to us. Which is why I expose myself to as many different things as I can, feeding my subconscious. All the content I absorb is locked away and stored somewhere in the archives of my mind and referred to when I need it.

Inspiration can come in a variety of forms and my eclectic set of subscriptions reflects that. Music blogs, design blogs, photography, filmmaking, fashion, technology–I’m a devourer of stuff. I subscribe to 460 sources in 26 categories (and growing). My eyes are always open for films, images and words that excite my creativity.

I usually start my feedly inspiration sessions with the “Today” section. The featured articles are like the front page of a newspaper. Remember those? Yeah, me neither. (I’m kidding!). I scan through the Today section and “mark as read” articles I’m not interested in, reading a few of the intriguing ones as I go along, saving others for later. After I browse through the featured articles in Today, I tend to choose categories at random. Whatever I’m feeling in the moment, I’ll just go with it.

What are your 5 top tips to help other people getting inspired from such a wide range of topics?

• Follow a lot of feeds on a lot of various topics and include topics you had no previous knowledge of.

• Ignore the unread count. Never feel like you’ve missed anything because there’s always a shiny new something waiting to inspire!

• Every time you open feedly, mark as read all the articles older than one day.

• Use save for later as an “article limbo” for those times when you’re uncertain whether or not you want to archive an article, or if an article doesn’t clearly fall into a specific category. But don’t archive anything in there.

• Tag articles you want to archive and do so as soon as possible. I hate going back to organize a bunch of stuff, so I try to immediately tag things I want to refer back to later. For example, here are two good tags I use:

  • Words of Wisdom – Sometimes I come across a post that speaks to me in a way that sparks a new way of seeing something or reinforces my personal philosophy in a profound way. Stuff like that goes in this tag.

  • Watch Later – I subscribe to a lot of feeds of filmmakers. It would be impossible to watch everything they publish. And even when it comes to the films I want to watch, there are just too many to watch in one sitting. So, I have a “Watch Later” tag. As new videos appear in my feed, I scan through them, picking out the ones that strike me as interesting, and tagging them. Sometimes I may watch one or two in that moment but the rest get tagged for later viewing. And I remove the tag from watched videos.

What would be some great feeds to subscribe to to start an inspiring feedly?

Some great categories to start with:

Apps & Co.
Feedly’s blog – Subscribe
Google’s Official blog – Subscribe
Evernote – Subscribe
Dropbox – Subscribe

Geeky
io9 – Subscribe
Red Letter Media – Subscribe
MAKE – Subscribe
Geeks Are Sexy – Subscribe
How-to-Geek – Subscribe

Thinkers
kottke – Subscribe
Ill Doctrine – Subscribe
Freakonomics – Subscribe
Tweetage Wasteland – Subscribe
Co.Exist – Subscribe

Philosophy
Talking Philosophy – Subscribe
PEA Soup – Subscribe
Leiter Reports – Subscribe

Science
Bad Astronomy – Subscribe
Seriously Science? – Subscribe
Universe Today – Subscribe
Scientific American – Subscribe
National Geographic News – Subscribe

Art & Visuals
FFFFOUND! – Subscribe
500px – Subscribe
BOOOOOOOM! – Subscribe
Colossal – Subscribe
Fonts In Use – Subscribe

Interesting
Boing Boing – Subscribe
Likecool – Subscribe
The Curious Brain – Subscribe
Co.Create – Subscribe
ANIMAL – Subscribe
Flavorwire – Subscribe
Fubiz – Subscribe

Filmmakers

Red Giant – Subscribe
The visual effects team behind the clever science fiction short-films Plot Device, Order Up, and the hilarious Form 17.

Vimeo Staff Picks – Subscribe
The majority of the filmmaker feeds I subscribe to were introduced to me by Vimeo’s very own staff. A must follow feed for video nerds like me.

Daniel Ablin – Subscribe
Daniel Ablin is a french film director behind the poetic science fiction short-film series “•363” (Check out Episode 1 and Episode 2).