Goodreads asked David Vining:

Where did you get the idea for your most recent book?

David Vining Colonial Nightmare is based on a real event from the life of George Washington. I read about the event in a biography of Washington sometime in grad school, and the story stuck with me for years. I once tried to write the story straight in novel form and quickly lost interest, but I never let go of the great idea that the story could have in a novel form. Partially inspired by Seth Grahame-Smith's Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter, I decided that the most interesting direction for me to take this story was to inject a bit of the supernatural.

I consciously made it a horror novel, and I worked very hard to make the horror multi-faceted. On top is the very real concerns about an impending war in Europe that would spill out over the American continent, sweeping up Washington's home along with it. The second layer is the incredibly difficult weather conditions that the entire party had to face constantly through those weeks that did threaten them all with frostbite and freezing. The third is the monster, the creature that pursues the party for reasons all its own.

The greatest inspiration was the story itself which has, innately, a "there and back again" story structure. This led me to thinking of Joseph Campbell and The Hero with a Thousand Faces, the same work of comparative mythology that inspired George Lucas in his writing of the original Star Wars. I purchased Campbell's work, read it, and used as many of the traits of the monomyth in the story that I could comfortably fit in with the story that seemed to so effortlessly align with the larger contours of the idea.
I also feel like Lovecraft had a great feeling on horror that I enjoy, creating this sense of unbridled terror that drives men to insanity because the source is so outside of our experience, so I like to tinge the horror with that. Leaving details out about the creature itself that would give it specific detail but never losing sense of the rules I establish for it myself, it creates a sense in the reader that there's more to understand that they'll never get, making the horror less understandable and relatable which makes it more terrifying at the same time.

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