The many influences
It is amazing what influences you when you are a writer. Most things are not even readily apparent to you, although there are many you can pick out. One of my earliest influences was my family’s (first) visit to the Little Bighorn battlefield when I was around ten. The scattered white markers standing out sharply from the dun-colored grass started a fire within me that has never extinguished. The image of men fighting against desperate odds has remained we me ever since, be it Custer’s last blunder, the Alamo, the Winter War between Finland and the USSR…the list is endless. It affected my future writing because reading about those battles made me understand that wars are not won by Sergeant Rocks, but by ordinary men who are willing to undergo the unspeakable, to rise above being ordinary.
When I was in high school, I stumbled upon Guy Sajer’s The Forgotten Soldier, the story of the author’s service in the German Army (the Heer) in WW2, fighting on the East Front. I did not understand what Sajer was trying to say in the book, and was disappointed in his rather minimalistic descriptions of combat, but as I have returned to his work as the decades passed I have gotten the message. His book also sparked a lasting interest in both the East Front (a topic never covered in my school history classes) and in the war from the German (and later, the Japanese) point of view.
My sister loaned me the Lord of the Rings trilogy in high school, which introduced me to the fantasy genre. I have spent countless hours trying to achieve the same level of world detail as Tolkien since (see my Phantom Badger series and the stand-alone novel Chains of Honor which share a common world) and failing.
Just out of high school I watched an animated movie called Wizards, and for the first time in my life (in an era without VCRs) I saw a movie two days in a row. It sparked something in me that I have never lost; it somehow put the fantasy genre into perspective for me in a way I had never been able to see it before.
In the Army I stumbled upon two authors and more importantly two books which shaped my writing styles forever: the first was the start of a decade-long affair with Glen Cook’s The Black Company series, and the second was Tim Power’s Drawing of the Dark, a book I have read countless times.
There have been countless inspirations large and small in my life, but the above are the high points, the life-changing events that steered my modest skills into the channels they have followed.
