Hello! I must admit I haven't read your books yet. I was simply intrigued by a 14-Word Love Story you had written and I found it very beautiful. I have a question for you as a writer: what books shaped you most as a writer or inspired you to become one? Have a lovely day :)

C.S. Pacat I like writing that is invisible. That is, I like the writing to feel simple but to feel there are things going on between the lines. My favourite author is Dorothy Dunnett. Dunnett is the master of the invisible. Where is this tension coming from? Why is this scene so agonizing? Tension and emotion pervade her books, sometimes almost unbearably, yet when you look at the writing, at the actual words, there's nothing to show that the scene is emotional at all. Her control over what I think of as her "unwritten text" - that which is not said - is phenomenal. She has been an enormous influence on my writing.

I'm also very influenced by some of the epic fantasy storytelling that comes out of Japanese manga, and some of the series that inspired me include Berserk, Tokyo Babylon, Hikaru no Go as well as some of the yaoi epics like the Mirage of Blaze novels or Ai no Kusabi. I think that there is often a quality to manga that feels very free, unfettered by writerly self-consciousness, a willingness to take work to imaginative extremes. I also think that Japanese fantasy has a very sophisticated understanding of character archetypes, and the power that archetypes bring to a series.

Finally, as a teenager, I read a lot of online fiction and fan fiction, and found the community very inspiring, firstly, in their willingness to experiment. But also in the way that they were writing the stories that they themselves (and other readers) most wanted to see - in the case of fan fiction, even changing the source material until it was exactly what they wanted. That was very different to the creative writing classes that I took later, where many people found it difficult to tap into "reader desires", and were often writing stories that they themselves would never read in a million years.

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