Guest Post: “Influences & Inspirations” by Jamie Schultz

My taste in books, of whatever genre, can be summed up as follows: I like to turn literary rocks over and see if something nasty crawls out. I can’t help it. For this, I thank my mother, who got me hooked on that stuff at a young age. I remember being about eleven or twelve when she came home with a box of used books, one of which was a battered copy of Stephen King’s Christine, old even then. The cover was black with a white or silver striped design with a skull on it, best I can recall, and I thought it looked pretty cool. Plus, I had read some of IT over her shoulder at some point, and, with a twelve-year-old’s typical fascination with the morbid, this seemed like a pretty good author to tackle. My parents’ attitude toward my reading material was, “Whatever you think you can handle, kid,” so I dug in.

Guest Post: “Writing in the devastating wake of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” by Jonathan Wood

To the best of my recollection, the first thing I ever had published was a review of the 1990 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie. I was ten. I belonged to a local Youth Club that put out a small paper ’zine every month or so. You could write in and volunteer to review movies. I was devotee of the TNMT cartoon, and had been awaiting the release of the movie with growing anticipation for months. I wrote in, and to my shock and delight was selected. I even got free movie tickets. Few ten year olds have known the height s of ecstasy I reached.

This is typically the point in the story where my dreams are all crushed, and I leave the theater shaking my fist at an unrepentant Hollywood heaven. But in fact, the movie fulfilled my every pre-teen wish. I laughed, I gasped, I demanded pizza afterward. As for the review itself… it was a breathless plot summary that descended into excruciating detail. My father cut me off when I was about halfway through – a mercy killing if ever there was one. As I recall, the final immortal line was, “And the rest was great too.”

Guest Post: “Influences & Inspirations” by Duncan Jepson

During the last 150 years, China and the West have collided many times, virtually always on Chinese soil, and their relationship is heavily coloured by this history. Many in Asia are choosing and building their futures motivated by their own and their family’s experiences, ambitions and histories, much of it unclear and unknown to most in the West. The relationship between China and West is set to become more intense and complicated and we have to hope these two sides will work together rather than tear the world apart.

The story of Emperors Once More is about the collision of these different motivations and forces in China and among Chinese people, set against their position on the world stage. On a national level, the government is tasked with maintaining a union of a billion plus people so it does not crumble into chaos again, fighting the very human feeling of humiliation from centuries of defeat, both personal and national, the need to re-establish respect on the world stage, the clashes that will arise from the very practical need to obtain vital resources for the future and China’s new role in the global order. The story is also about those very personal experiences such as migration, subservience, colonialism, aspiration, ideology, revolution and tradition.

Guest Post: “Influences & Inspirations” by Stephanie Saulter

I had, by any definition, an unusual childhood – I grew up in what was then a fairly remote corner of rural Jamaica, beautiful but quite isolated, in a resolutely free-thinking, non-conformist family. I have seven siblings so I wasn’t exactly lonely; but being the eldest, a voracious reader and not particularly gregarious, I never really felt I fitted in to the neighbourhood. Books were my escape hatch, my window into different times and places and worlds. They were how I worked out who I was, what I was interested in, what lay beyond the horizon.

The power of story to capture your imagination and alter your thinking and take you somewhere else had a profound effect on who I grew up to be, long before I became a writer of stories myself. And because so many stories celebrate the outsider, the loner, the person who is always second to the right of everyone else, I think they helped to reassure me that being a bit odd and a bit different was okay. You can be the hero of your own life, and it doesn’t have to be like anyone else’s life. I learned that early, and I learned it from books.

Guest Post: “Pantheon Inspirations” by James Lovegrove

So far my Pantheon series extends to six novels and three novellas. What is it about these military-SF tales of gods and men that I seem to find so fascinating? Why do I keep coming back time and time again to this well of inspiration?

Partly it’s because the ideas embedded in polytheistic religious mythologies are so wonderfully rich and exploitable, like countless mines yielding up different seams of precious ore. I myself do not believe in deities of any kind, but the stories that others have came up with about them over the centuries are pleasingly intricate and complex, full of incident and nuance. Every Pantheon strikes me as being like a dysfunctional family. Their conflicts and passions echo those of their worshippers. Even though they’re gods, they’re eminently relatable. They banter and squabble, have affairs, plays tricks on one another, lose their temper, just as humans do. The aloof, monotheistic gods whose faiths prevail in the world today aren’t anywhere near as interesting. Those guys are like grumpy father figures you can’t get on with and have to tread carefully around but are still supposed to admire. Where’s the fun in that?

Guest Post: “Inspiration in Translation” by E.J. Swift

The second book in my Osiris Project trilogy, Cataveiro, moves the action from an ocean city cut off from the rest of the world, to a South American continent which has been radically altered by climate change. I’ve always been drawn by the beauty of the South American landscape, but in writing Cataveiro I also wanted to explore something of the continent’s literary heritage. For inspiration, and in the hope that some of their flair might rub off, I started reading Latin American writers in translation.

The obvious place to start was with magical realism, although I was interested to discover a podcast on Latin American literature debating a move away from the form. I’d previously read Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, but while I admired the novel greatly, Marquez turned out to be my least favourite of the writers I discovered.

Guest Post: “Influences & Inspirations” by Robert Bailey

Robert Bailey is the author of THE PROFESSOR, a legal thriller to be published by Exhibit A Books late January 2014.

I was born from a family of storytellers and teachers. My mother taught English and reading, and my grandmother, a math teacher, was never without a book to read. My father, though a builder by trade, can still hold a room captive with his stories and jokes, and, as a little boy, I was always on the edge of my chair when he would rasp on about Coach Paul “Bear” Bryant and the legends that played football for the Crimson Tide.

As far as writers, John Steinbeck was a major early influence. As a kid, I loved his shorter novels, The Red Pony and The Pearl. As a high school sophomore, we studied The Grapes of Wrath, and Tom Joad remains one of my favorite characters in all of literature. As a southerner and an Alabamian that grew up to be a lawyer, To Kill a Mockingbird holds a special place. I think every lawyer wants to grow up to be Atticus Finch, and the story just had everything. It was thrilling, historical, funny and tragic. Just a remarkable achievement.

Guest Post: “Influences & Inspirations” by Fredrik Brounéus

Civilian Reader has not featured enough authors from Down Under. Aside from some of the better-known SFF authors from all the way over there (e.g. Helen Lowe), not many people realise that there’s a huge SFF community down there. So, after a very amusing email from their head publicist, I discovered Steam Press (there was a very good joke about sheep and Hobbits). Anyway, I reached out for some guest posts and interviews with some of their authors. I hope to feature more Australian and New Zealand authors on the blog in the coming weeks and months, so watch this space!

To kick things off, I bring you a guest post from Fredrik Brounéus, a Swedish writer who has lived in Dunedin since 2009. His previous books include a children’s thriller and a young adult pop novel, both of which were published in Swedish. His first English-language novel is The Prince of Soul and The Lighthouse.

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“Influences & Inspirations”

Having read some of the excellent Influences & Inspiration guest posts on the Civilian Reader blog, I was inspired to share a piece about one of my own muses: my worries.

I’m the worrying kind. Don’t know if it’s in my genes (my dad – a great worrier; my mom – a legendary Amazon worrier) or just a hobby turned into a habit. As a kid I kept coming up with new stuff to fear – such as the TFM (Toilet Flush Monster), who’d grab me if I didn’t reach the carpet outside the bathroom in time; or the ghoul disguised as a magpies’ nest outside our house, which had me darting past the living room window to get to the kitchen alive.

Appreciation: Django Wexler on Terry Pratchett

In the second post in the Terry Pratchett appreciation series, soon-to-be-debut author Django Wexler writes about his love of the Discworld series and Pratchett’s writing as a whole.

“On Pratchett” by Django Wexler

“Write a couple of paragraphs about your favorite Discworld books.” I should have seen the trap in that one. It’s hard for me to pick favorites at the best of times, but starting with the Discworld canon it’s an impossible task. For starters, there are so many of them, and almost all of them are so good! I have more Terry Pratchett books in my personal library than any other author. It’s not even close – there are at least two shelves-worth just for Discworld. I started reading them in high school and never stopped.

Appreciation: Tom Lloyd on Terry Pratchett

This is the first post in a mini-series focused on the work of Terry Pratchett, which will go up on the blog over the course of this week. Here, Tom Lloyd (author of the Twilight Reign series) discusses the impact of Pratchett’s writing on his own…

“On Terry Pratchett” by Tom Lloyd

Terry Pratchett has an entirely unique position in my book collection. I’ve got beautiful folio editions of Tolkien, a hardback collection of the Malazan Book of the Fallen, several first editions by BB I’m saving to read to my daughter, but the tatty, much-read Pratchett paperbacks still reign. For starters, I own more of his books than anyone else’s – they almost rival my own for the number of copies I have – and secondly, they’ve been read more than any other’s. I rarely re-read books, I’m a slow reader and simply don’t have the time, but whenever I’m stressed or too tired to keep up with a new book, I’ll grab a Pratchett as I head to bed. It’s a habit my wife’s taken up and a testament to the quality that some have had over a dozen re-reads and remain enjoyable. They’re not perfect, with fluctuations of style and missteps aplenty, but still I’m not convinced millions of readers and a knighthood is sufficient recognition for his body of work, given the sniffy attitudes of the large chunks of the reading public.

Guest Post: “The Origin of the Götterelektron” by Ian Tregillis

I recently finished reading Bitter Seeds, the superb first novel in Ian Tregillis’s Milkweed trilogy. To celebrate its release in the UK, and the release of the sequel, The Coldest War, in the US, Ian was kind enough to write a guest post for Civilian Reader….

Bitter Seeds features a cadre of soldiers who have been imbued with superhuman abilities thanks to a liberal dose of mad science. The twisted genius who created these übermenschen is Doctor Karl Heinrich von Westarp: a sick but brilliant man, short on compassion but long on determination.

Guest Post: “Influences & Inspirations” Shaun Hutson

Shaun Hutson is one of Britain’s best known and most successful horror authors, with over 50 books published. With some new projects on the way for Hammer Books, I thought this would be a great time to ask him about his influences and inspirations…

“Influences and Inspirations” by Shaun Hutson

My influences as a writer have always been cinematic.

Ever since I first started scribbling things down as a kid I was always influenced by things I’d seen on a big screen rather than stuff I’d read. My books were always constructed more like screenplays, they always relied on dialogue as much as prose to set scenes and establish characters. This moves the novel along more quickly and is less irritating than a writer attempting to showcase his ‘talents’ by droning on and on for pages at a time.

Guest Post: “Influences & Inspirations” by Guy Adams

In this week’s guest post, author Guy Adams talks about the influences and inspirations for his latest novel (published today), Hands of the Ripper.

Influences and Inspirations:

HANDS OF THE RIPPER by Guy Adams

A writer trying to define his inspirations should be rather like a curry discussing the heritage of a particular onion. We’re influenced by everything and sometimes catching any single thread is impossible.

That said, it would be hard to write a novelization of a movie (however bold) without being inspired by it and Hands of the Ripper, while it may stand on its own two legs as a novel, will always be an adaptation of the 1971 picture from Hammer Films. On the surface I seem to have changed a great deal (it’s set in the present day for goodness sake), but you would be surprised by how faithful it is to the spirit of the original, no doubt through fear of antagonizing said spirit and causing a murderous rampage.

Influences & Inspirations: ROD REES

Rod Rees is the author of The Demi-Monde series – currently standing at two novels, Winter and Spring (published by Quercus in the UK and William Morrow in the US). With the release of the second novel in the series, I thought it a good time to invite him to talk about his influences and inspirations…

It’s an interesting question: what are the influences and inspirations that inform The Demi-Monde series of books, and it’s one I’ve never really thought about before.

But before I answer the question, maybe I should give a quick synopsis of what the Demi-monde is. It’s a virtual world, designed by the US army to train grunts in the art of urban guerrilla warfare, inhabited by thirty million digital duplicates of real people (none of them aware they are Dupes), who live in five city-states locked in eternal civil war (“the last thing we want is peace breaking out in the Demi-Monde”). It’s planned to be a dystopia so every city-state is overcrowded; linguistically, religiously and ethnically distinct; and led by a coterie of the über-psychopaths from history who, during their lives, visited such misery on humanity. Everything has been done to turn the DM into a living hell.

So what were the inspirations I drew on when designing the world?

Guest Post: “Influences & Inspirations” by A. Lee Martinez

With the publication of A Lee Martinez’s next novel imminent (March 6th), I thought it would be a great time to dragoon him into writing about some of his influences and inspirations. Which he did. Which was very nice of him. Read on!

In A Princess of Mars, John Carter of Mars finds himself transported to the savage world of Barsoom (Mars, to you and me). He’s immediately taken prisoner by the race of giant four-armed green Martians. Soon after, he punches a Martian and kills him with one blow. It’s an accident, but it immediately earns him the respect of his captors. That’s how things work on Mars. It’s classic pulp bad-ass-itude, the kind of absurd levels of awesome that were once commonplace in the pages of Weird Tales and other serial magazines. John Carter is a power fantasy, a man who discovers another planet and through heroic resolve gets the princess, saves the planet, builds alliances, and destroys his enemies. Subtlety is not the goal of these stories. War is brutal (and often cartoonishly glorious). Love is as sappy and heartfelt as any romance novel, where people declare undying love merely upon setting eyes upon each other. And outlandish adventure is a way of life.

Guest Post: “Influences & Inspirations” by Claire McGowan

Claire McGowan grew up in a small village in Northern Ireland. After a gaining a degree from Oxford University and “spells in exciting places” including France, Oxford, and China, McGowan moved to London, where she lives with a very cute beagle (check out her website for more on that) and is the Director of the Crime Writers’ Association. The Fall is her first novel, and to celebrate its release I asked her if she’d be interested to write a short piece about some inspirations and influences.

Influences & Inspirations: HOWARD ANDREW JONES

In this latest instalment of the on going Influences & Inspirations guest post series, Howard Andrew Jones brings us the almost chronological story of his fictional education. If you don’t know of Howard’s work, the authors mentioned within might give you an idea of what to expect from his own fiction, and also some suggestions of how you can expand your own fantasy and historical fictional education.

Guest Post: “Influences & Inspirations” by Anthony Hays

In the latest in our continuing series of guest posts on Influences & Inspirations, Anthony Hays tells us a little bit about what influenced his decision to write a series based on Arthur. The first novel, The Killing Way, is out now through Corvus.

Influences & Inspirations: ERIC BROWN

In this post, prolific sci-fi author and editor Eric Brown (Solaris/Abaddon) talks about the authors who have influenced his own writing and interest in genre fiction.

Influences & Inspirations: TOM CAIN

Today I bring you a guest post from Tom Cain, author of the Sam Carver thriller series. The series, which opened with the acclaimed The Accident Man, is now five strong – The Survivor, Assassin, Dictator and, this month, Carver. As part of Tom’s blog tour, he joins us with a piece about his Influences & Inspirations. Over to Tom…