Influences

People often want to know who a writer's influences are, either before they jump into their work, or afterward, wondering where what they just read came from. So, here is a short, but by no means comprehensive list of writers who occupy the most space on my bookshelves:

Neil Gaiman, Naomi Novik, Scott Lynch, Mercedes Lackey, Douglas Adams, and many others. Those were just the first ones that I saw when I looked over at the shelf next to my desk.

You can probably see more of those influences in Remember, November than The Fires of Winter, as is true for many first-time authors. Fires is more uniquely my voice, which even now I am still discovering the more I write. I try not to read a whole lot while I'm in first-draft mode, as I don't want the tone to be overly influenced by what I'm reading. Learned that the hard way when I had to re-write entire chapters of something because it changed wildly due to an injection of Terry Pratchett that wasn't there when I started.

But the mantra I've taken away from all of these writers collectively is 'say it better.' I love a clever bit of description or word play that makes me put the book down so I can savor it before ruing the fact that I didn't think of it first. English is very flexible, and we have so many ways of saying the same thing, there's no reason to use the same ways over and over again.

They're also responsible for my love of character, but that will have to wait for another post.