I’ve often thought about what my influences are in writing. Some people watch a movie or read a book and think “Hey, I wish I had written that.” Others think “Gosh, I could have written that!” In fact, some stories are so good, or so impactful and resonate so well with what is churning in your own mind, that you think “Gosh — I need to write MORE of that!”

I can’t tell whether exposure to literature and film created my worldview, or if some primeval dystopian conspiracist reincarnationist ideas were merely activated and given form by the media I was exposed to. In either event, I’d love to detail a few of the influences that inform my writing.

Old School
When I was in 6th grade I think it was, I was too young for my parents to let me watch a violent film like Terminator. And yet my best friend turned me on to it, by sitting in the library with me and explaining the plot, beat for beat, to me. (Am I the only one whose exposure to the Terminator myth began through oral culture?) The story resonated because of the time travel. But if you look at it, time travel is a great plot device to explore consequences of actions over time. And these consequences go down for the ages.

Of course another time travel movie became wildly popular in the 80s, Back to the Future. This movie explored not only time travel but also generations, how families grow over time and pass on their values, beliefs and culture. The juxtaposition of then and now serves not only to advance the story, but as a compressed-time metaphor for exploring how EVERYTHING that happened before now is leading up to THIS INSTANT and our actions within it.

One of my teachers, a Kenneth Haker, AP US History, had us watch a film. It was The Manchurian Candidate. It’s a cold-war film about mind control and sending soldiers back to the US who have been mentally reprogrammed to assasinate. We were told I think that Sinatra (who stars) was against it’s continued release in light of Kennedy’s assassination (there was no snopes.com at the time to disprove this false fact). This experience set me searching for other material about this. Even if you view swinging watches and queen of hearts and post-hypnotic suggestions as a bunch of hooey, the success of the advertising industry should tell you that mind control *can* work…

It Never Works Out
Of course like every high school student in America (I assume), I was exposed to Animal Farm at some point. It’s a great book, and my main take-away was that they change the rules over time. Lord of the Flies taught me that even in democracy, the majority will eventually vote to eliminate human rights. But Brave New World is by far the most impactful and influential of these novels to me. From it I learned that you will be rewarded, in our culture, for giving up your power of choice.

Going Back in Time
Now, when I was in my mid teens, I had an interesting experience. After some soul searching about what I wanted to do with my life, I somewhat unexpectedly and suddenly remembered with clarity and specificity, who I was in a past life. The memories were of just the same quality as my normal memories. The experiences were just as profane or mundane as now. And I could see how the incomplete projects I had started in that life had simply spilled into my current life. This experience made me somewhat of an oddball. I wanted to talk to people about it. It’s not like I believed in past lives — I don’t. I simply have memories, as vivid and detailed as my current, such as driving such-and-such a car, and being friends with so-and-so, and wanting to live in a certain part of town, but living in another part. I even remembered how I died. Should I believe these memories? Ah, another film, Total Recall and numerous others in the amnesia-through-drugs-or-mind-control explores these tropes and helps us understand the answer to that dilemma.

But how weird was I? Weird enough that I knew not to speak of my knowledge casually. But I find some solace in the fact that today, on Earth, at least a billion people, perhaps 1.5 billion believe in past lives. And a few billion more — the vast majority — at least believe in future lives. (Source: CIA World Factbook. No joke, look it up.) Even the much revered and respected Dalai Lama knows that talking about his past lives may be too much for people, and he downplays their significance in interviews.

Around this time as well as later, I was exposed to the Highlander movie and series. This theatrical device — an immortal, who sort of “hides out” and keeps changing identities — is another fantastic metaphor that touches on the problems of reincarnation without having to address it as it is understood in Eastern culture.

It’s a Conspiracy
I have read countless ‘rational’ and ‘skeptical’ articles attempting to debunk conspiracy. And yet, for every one of these authors, no matter how many individual fallacies they point out, I still think they are whistling in the dark. I think their approach to explaining the chaos of the world is to say it just isn’t that complicated, resorting to Occam’s razor and all that, glosses over the fact that sometimes the world IS dark and sinister and very, very complicated.

One of the earliest introductions to this fact was actually not fiction, but the true stories of American double agents in WWII Germany. I read about double agents; in this case, working for the British but trusted by the Germans, they had to let real Allied troops die, and had to give good, actionable intelligence to the Germans to build that trust. This fact made me realize that the game of war and of life really, can get so very existential and complex, that the loyalties can get so perverted and converted that you don’t know what to do any more. And it taught me that the real truth can, after a “reveal”, be startlingly different than what you thought it was.

The stark verisimilitude of LeCarré’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, the best spy novel of all time, only confirmed my sense of how the world runs.

My history studies of the 60′s contributed to this view. We know the Warren commission said it wasn’t. And we know that Bobby Kennedy’s death was yet another lone agent. And so were all the others. And after a while, after so many events, the rationalist will try to talk you down from trying to draw conspiratorial conclusions. “It’s a human need to explain things”, they will explain. “Your mind wants to make sense of all this, fit it into a pattern”. To hell with this rationalist. There is an order to this chaos. We know now about the FBI hounding MLK, John Lennon, anyone they don’t like. We know about Nixon’s lies.

Perhaps it’s not the lizard people, perhaps it’s not the UFOs, and perhaps it’s not the dirty dozen, but to deny the fact that evil men conspire to create evil effects in our world is to be in denial.

Why I write
The novels I am writing are reincarnationist, because I simply find it fascinating and under-explored in the fiction of Western civilization, and of course I’m weird. The novels I am writing are conspiratorial, because in trying to make sense of the chaos of the world and all the broken plans of man, my mind feels compelled to weave it into a logically consistent and explanatory conspiracy.

My exposure to Huxley’s Brave New World (and the irony of his dropping acid on his deathbed and trying to achieve some sort of agnostic spiritual ascent) informs my complex anti-drug spirituality.

Possibly the real reason I am writing about it because, like Woody Allen, “I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve immortality through not dying.”

But think about your writing in this light. Immortality is a tricky thing to understand. Yet there are writers from thousands of years ago, whose ideas we still discuss every day. Greek philosophic ideas, various sacred testaments, and the Veda permeate and shape our culture, often more powerfully than the artists of today.

Who knows — perhaps that poem in school you hated having to study was something you wrote long ago!

But whatever you write, know that it can echo down the ages, affecting people, changing their minds, and imbuing them with the energy that was your life.

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A chill wind blows. Beneath the starry skies a lone finger pokes out from the ground, a shock of white in an otherwise blank landscape. The plains stretch out beyond the horizon, an endless ocean of green-gray grass. Footfalls sound behind you, the crunch of underbrush and new frost startles you. Slowly, you turn expecting the worst.

The scythe falls before you can cry out. A hollow laugh echoes across eternity.

It all has to start somewhere. At some point in some of your lives, someone had planted that tiny spark inside your head that blossomed into wildfire. So, it has been and so it will continue onwards, cyclically until the end of time or storytelling as we know it.

Here’s my story:

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away paperback books were actually displayed inside grocery stores, not relegated to the smallest section next to the greeting cards, dog food, or laundry detergent. At the time, I had been excitedly following my family into the grocery store weekly for the newest releases in the Disney adventures. Somewhere around the summer of ’92, my parents rounded the corner in the little buggy and we made our way to the junk food aisle. And that’s where I saw it: A little picture of a house, some bumpy gooey writing, and a picture of a creepy house front and center. The title gave me goosebumps.

I begged my parents to buy it for me, and against their better judgement they caved. I took my new prize home and ran to my bedroom. Turning the pages with Cheeto-laced fingers, I dove in and didn’t come up for air until the last page.

The book was called Welcome to Dead House. It was written by a guy named R.L. Stein.

And it was the largest, scariest, most awesomest book my ten year old brain had ever digested.

I wanted more.

Now, Goofy’s Great Adventure Part 39 wasn’t good enough. R.L. Stein was my gateway drug to the world of the weird and macabre. And like all good addicts, I was out chasing the high. If Goosebumps were only coming out monthly and I was reading them in a day, I needed to fill up the other 29 days.

But Walden Books was far away. And Blockbuster was so much closer.

My parents were a terrible influence on me. They let me rent things I had no business renting. It was somewhere around the autumn of 1993, and I was no longer the cute organ grinder with the toy monkey. Now I was the cute vampire. Or the cute werewolf. I stumbled upon Nightmare on Elm Street, and it scared the crap out of me. I still hate hospitals.

So yeah. That was the end of that phase for another year or two. I still read my Goosebumps when they came out. And then I went back to watching things more age-appropriate. Things like Darkwing Duck and the Gummy Bears (bouncing here and there and everywhere…)

I had to have all of the action figures. To occupy my time between new Goosebumps releases, I would wander over to my toy box and stage epic battles of most epic proportions. The Ninja Turtles forged an alliance with Darkwing Duck to defeat the evil Shredder. Occasionally, my super powered parakeet would swoop down and claw at the faces of heroes and villains.

When my parents would yell at me to play outside, I would go outside. And my action figures would come too. Sadly, the super-powered parakeet had to stay indoors.

And it was outside that I learned just how scary things can be. You see, I had a much older kid that lived next door. He was a junior in high school, which was old enough to be an elder god to my ten year old self. And that first time he popped out of his window wearing a halloween mask, I thought he was.

Over the rest of the year, he encouraged my friend and I to go for a ride in his “time machine” (garbage can) that he promised he could take me all the way back to prehistoric times. I was excited at the prospect. Dinosaurs were cool. And so, he put a blindfold over me and picked me up and dumped me into his garbage can…I mean time machine.

Which he then carried into the woods, leaving me there to fend for myself and find my way back to civilization. It was one hell of an adventure that led me to discovering the ancient evil that lived in the lake at the edge of my neighborhood. It’s name was Gomar, and I was terrified.

And damned if I didn’t think it was real. Over the remainder of the summer, my neighbor (Gomar) would pop up unexpectedly and terrorize my friends and I.

So, we did the only thing we could to defend ourselves from Gomar and his hordes of gremlins and demons. We teamed up Power Ranger style and punched and kicked at the air, I mean the monsters, up until Gomar finally acquiesced our superiority.

But that got me to wondering about this evil being that lived in my lake. Where did he come from? Did he want to steal our butterfingers?

School started and the little wheels spun endlessly until the hamsters in my brain gave up the ghost. I couldn’t stop thinking about Gomar. My questing led me back to my fascination with the macabre and the reality. It turned out there was a really wicked shark attack in the lake behind my house (it was actually the inspiration for “Jaws”). And there were all sorts of nasty battles during the revolutionary war within minutes of my neighborhood.

While researching the evil within my home town, I inadvertently stumbled upon HP Lovecraft and Edgar Allen Poe. Which only led me down the path of least resistance. It was there that I discovered a man named Dean Koontz, almost by accident really.

And it was for the second time in my life I was truly terrified.

I had watched a movie called “Fire in the Sky” the night before school. Big mistake. After all but crying myself to sleep, I found solace in the fact that Monday was library day.

Think I was 11 or 12 at the time. And as fate would have it, I found a book called “Winter Moon” by Dean Koontz. The cover had a beautiful picture of a full moon and the cover copy convinced me to open it up and take a peak.

I checked it out and came back for more. The Bad Place, Lightning, Mr. Murder, and Cold Fire followed. It seemed someone else had thought evil existed within small town America. And he aimed to keep the suspense high and the brow mopped until the very last page. I dove in headfirst and spent the next several years poolside, bus side, or taking hits between classes. I was addicted again. And it was amazing. I kept up until I couldn’t take any more. And that’s when I found The Dark Tower.

If Dean Koontz taught me that ordinary men and women could do extraordinary things in the faces of extreme challenges, Stephen King taught me the magic of simplicity. “The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.”

Sold.

My mind drifted back to Gomar as my English/Creative Writing teacher gave me my first chance to write a story. Michael Wilfrey was born from two middle school kids caught up in a war older than time.  It was pure dreck, but it was an “A” and it was all mine.

As I grew up, my reading habits changed, my writing habits began to take shape. I discovered Jim Butcher, who led me to the Lester Dent method of plotting, which only led me to discover Doc Savage, who then introduced me to Solomon Kane and Conan the Barbarian.

But my addiction still lingers, I still try to chase that high. Zombies, ghosts, devils and demons… I just can’t get enough.

Maybe it’s because I’m still trying to solve my little Gomar problem.

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When asked to write a post on what inspired me to be a writer I went blank. Couldn’t think of a thing. Most everyone else was talking about things they’d seen, books they read, that sort of thing, but when really thinking about it, my inspiration didn’t come from any external source. In the immortal words of Neil Gaiman, “It came from my head.”

I’m an addict, and my drug of choice is daydreaming. Has been from a very early age. If I’m not actively involved in a conversation with another person, or engrossed in a work of fiction, I’m locked in my head beating up bad guys or taking over the world–or both. I spend most of my day thinking about being someone else someplace else. So, naturally, when I started writing, all I was doing was writing what I had experienced in my head.

To tell the truth, I’ve been writing far longer than I wanted to be a writer. I think I started writing when I was in junior high school (I particularly remember a story about a group of kids my age who were trapped in their school, which had been sucked into a kind of limbo universe where nothing existed but the school—yeah, I was a weird kid). I never took it seriously at all. Making up stories was just something I did, like other kids doodled cartoons on their notebooks.

At some point in my teenage years (probably around eighteen or nineteen) I wondered what it would be like to get sucked into an alternate world with magic. Not original, I know, but bear with me. I started going through scenarios in my head as to how I would react in that situation. In true Walter Mitty fashion, I wasn’t really myself, but a better, braver, prettier, cleverer version of myself. At some point in the daydream, I got the weird notion that I would get imprisoned in a mountain. This brought up a question.

What would a magically inclined person be like if they were locked in a dark, underground prison, alone, for hundreds of years? How would they cope? What would they do to get out, and what would they be like when they did?

From that kernel was born my first trunk novel.

It was while writing that book, that I realized how much I really love writing. I’d been doing it forever, already. And I decided that, since it didn’t look like I was going to be rockstar, I’d be a writer.

Just about all my stories have started out just like that first trunk novel. What would it be like to experience this thing that I’ve never experienced, to be this person I’ve never been? Using myself as a starting point makes it easier to get into the idea. A dozen or so scenario’s later, and the idea has a life of its own. Those are the stories I end up writing down.

To be honest, what was in my head was influenced by real events in my life, books I read, music I listened to, and movies and television I had seen, all mashed up in my subconscious and bubbling out in my own unique way. Now that I think about it, the things in my head always had a tendency to work as stories because, after growing up sequestered in my room, reading fiction, I have a very twisted view of the world. I get frustrated when life doesn’t function like a piece of fiction (I’ve come to realize that I walk around listening to music constantly because I feel the need for my life to have a soundtrack—yeah, I’m still a weird kid).

This odd way of looking at the world sort of perpetuates my need to daydream. Life isn’t structured in three acts. We don’t get to skip the boring parts to keep the momentum going. People aren’t characters with understandable motivations.

Real life is complicated.

But dang it, it shouldn’t be! And so, I escape this nonsensical reality to my crazy made up worlds.

I am the first to admit that this is not a healthy way of looking at the world. But I ask you: How else am I going to experience life as a ridiculously rich and famous, deliriously beautiful, impossibly crafty, immortal vampire mage who travels through time to other planets in parallel universes?

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Many stories, from mystery to science fiction and fantasy have inspired and awed me. But my road to writing has been a tough and painful one. It wasn’t so much inspiration I needed as the courage to overcome an environment that discouraged reading, let alone writing for a living. One author gave me that courage.

Imagine growing up in a family where reading was never encouraged and was viewed as being lazy. Where farm chores and homework were the priorities. My father occasionally read westerns and Archie comics and then only after we were in bed. My mother just read recipes. Now, imagine the frustrations of a child whose imagination is so taken by the rich worlds in books that she wants to write but must suppress that desire and limit it only to school assignments.

What did I love to read? I still remember Dick and Jane’s antics in the grade one picture books –  ‘See Dick run. Run Dick run!’ – those first words excited my tiny heart and showed me the power of words on paper. Then came rhyming and Dr. Seuss filled my world – ‘One fish two fish, red fish blue fish’. By grades five and six, I was sneak reading the mysteries of Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys on the bus ride home – a book a day. Somewhere in junior high school, I discovered science fiction, fell in love with it and then got into trouble with teachers because my imagination and verbosity were greater than assignments demanded. When I took a degree in English and drama, I had relatives who shunned me for years.

Perhaps I should have quit then and for a few years life took over and I almost did. But I always dabbled and always loved reading. So, what changed? What gave me the courage to write and to overcome all the discouraging influences? Where did I find the confidence to achieve my goal of mastering and communicating in my second language? Oh yes, English isn’t my first language and throughout my life, I’ve had a desire to master it and rarely feel I have. Yet, one book, one writer gave me the courage to pursue my dream wholly – to throw myself into it with a modicum of hope to succeed. I owe my courage to J.K. Rowling.

When I read Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, I thought that if she could do it, so could I!”. Her life story, her courage to write and  her perseverance to find a publisher were the inspiration I needed. Since then, I’ve written many wild tales. I can write! My childhood desire to engage in worlds so far removed from reality, to master their voices and breathe life into them in words not my own has blossomed!

Which authors inspire me today? They all do as do the readers who buy their books. Everyone who has the courage to pen their imaginations, to give life to new worlds and voices, and to all our readers who encourage us, I give you my heartfelt thanks.

Cheers and happy writing (and reading too)!

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I’ve said in previous Fictorian blogs that I’ve been both an omnivorous and a ravenous reader since as far back as I can remember.  Oddly enough, though, as I’ve also previously mentioned, I was never someone who knew at an early age that I was going to be a writer.  I’m not sure why, other than I remember being tremendously in awe of anyone who could write a whole book, and never dreamed that I could do that.

I did, however, begin wishing that I could write a book.  And I can tell you exactly when it happened.  In early 1963 I was in 6^th grade in a school on Ben Eielson Air Force Base, just south of Fairbanks, Alaska.

The Scholastic Book Program was in full swing by then, and every month or so a brochure would come out listing books we could order.  I think it was in January that one listing in the brochure caught my eye.  It had an intriguing descriptive blurb, an intriguing title—Catseye—and a cool cover.

It was by Andre Norton, whom I’d never heard of before, but that was okay—I hadn’t heard of a lot of authors.  I checked the space for it on the order form, and waited.

The day that it arrived, I brought the book home, plopped myself on my bed, opened the cover, and found myself lost in a strange and amazing new universe.

I had just encountered my first real science fiction.  Eleanor Cameron’s The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet and Edward Eager’s Half Magic, charming though they were, lost me to a universe of interstellar civilizations, space travel, warfare, telepathy, sapient animals, and aliens.  To this day, if I’m asked the “you’re alone on a desert island and you can only have the books of one author” question, Norton would be a finalist in my short list.

Andre Norton was actually Alice Mary Norton.  She began writing at a time when it was very difficult for women authors to be taken seriously, and she used the standard tactic of the time to overcome that problem—she adopted a pseudonym.  She actually used at least three over her career, but almost all of her output was published under Andre Norton.  Bibliography  She did eventually legally change her name to Andre Alice Norton.

Norton was a superlative story teller, and had a gift for creating characters that even today I connect with.  Whether it was space opera, or earthbound adventure, or historical fiction, or fantasy, a book by her sucked me in.  I would read by flashlight at night in order to finish a book after bedtime.  And it was her work, first and foremost, that lit in me not the desire to write, but the wish that I could write like that.

Of course, once I found real science fiction, I started hunting for as much of it as I could find.  The libraries on the base had some, and I found Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Lester del Rey, and a lot more.  But the only other author who grabbed me like Norton did at that age—the only other author who resonated with me like Norton—was Robert A. Heinlein.

Both writers plotted gripping stories.  Both could write very taut fiction that moved at a fast pace, yet had depth and characterization.

Both writers excelled at writing “coming of age” stories, which even today is probably the single most popular plot form in the young adult market.

It would be hard to find two better exemplars of novel writing for either adult or young adult markets.

But at that age, that wasn’t part of my thinking.  I learned from them by osmosis, as I dove into their books again and again and again, reading and re-reading ad infinitum but never ad nauseam.  And both of them, more than any other writers at the time, fueled that wish that I could be a writer.

To pick a work from each that connected with me very strongly, take Catseye from Norton and Between Planets by Heinlein.

Both are coming of age stories.  Both are not routine run-of-the-mill plots.  And both are not “talk-down-to-the-kids” stories.  Both include violence and death.  Toward the end of his book, Heinlein’s protagonist is asked to man a “dead-man switch”—to commit suicide, in other words—to ensure that a space vessel is destroyed rather than captured if a battle doesn’t go their way.  In Norton’s book, her protagonist is offered the return of a family treasure and heritage for which he has longed all his life, but only at a monumental and deadly price.

I can’t describe to you the impact those two novels had on me.  I literally cannot communicate the feelings I had when I finished each one of them, the least of which was, “Oh, wow.”

But with each reading and re-reading of books by these two masters of their craft, that wish that I could write grew, until finally, sixteen years after I opened the cover to Catseye the first time, it became a desire to write, and I first set pen to paper—literally.  It has been a long road since then to where I am as a writer today, and it’s one I don’t think I would have walked without the influence of Andre Norton and Robert A. Heinlein.

Thank you both.

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A guest post by Quincy Allen.

Like so many born in the sixties, I was raised on television. In my case it was mostly cartoons, and I reveled in them because they took me “someplace else.” Even as a preschooler I found the real world to be banal. Something was always missing from the universe around me, a sense of purpose in crisis. To put it bluntly, suburbia was—and still is—a hive, one with few predators beyond shady car salesmen and cut-throat roofing companies.

By design, the culture of suburbia suppresses any sense of crisis, attempting to bubble-wrap existence at every turn. It strives to create cogs born and bred for the great machine that is our society. That’s not a condemnation, merely an observation. Such were my early stomping grounds, and many of us—particularly devotees of geekdom—have our roots in just such culture.

Interestingly, there is a misapprehension among many Americans raised in suburbia that the Chinese character for “crisis” is the same as the one for “opportunity.” While this is inaccurate, I believe many of us cling to the notion because it speaks to an inner-self that few ever explore in their daily lives. It is this same inner-self that appreciates the film Fight Club and why most of us remember the phrase, “That which does not kill you makes you stronger,” probably learned from the 1982 film Conan rather than from having read Nietzche.

These things speak to us because we’re all seeking something, and in suburban society we can only find it in fiction and films depicting the fantastic. What we seek is import and wisdom—a sense of participating meaningfully in great events that shape the fabric of existence—whilst going mindlessly along in whatever daily grind holds sway over our mortgages and rent payments. Yet we desperately hunger for the wisdom of the ages, learned through epic events that threaten our sense of existence, whatever that may be.

During my formative years—and thanks to my brother—I discovered a handful of authors who stole me away from the banal. Within their tales I was carried to the stars and bore witness to great events, learning from them as if I had been an active participant. I discovered places like Heinlein’s Mars and Zelazny’s Amber. I cut my imaginative teeth on stories spun by Asimov and Clarke, delving deeply into tomes like The Science Fiction Hall of Fame Volume I (printed in 1971 and sitting on a shelf next to me as you read this). They were my first real exposure to import and wisdom, and done in a way that was both intriguing and meaningful to a tenant of the banal.

Philosophers—and they were philosophers—like Campbell, Sturgeon, Bradbury, and Leiber shaped what was a very young, hungry, and naive mind. I was the chalice to their wine, and what I learned between those pages read so long ago still shapes who and what I am today. Zelazny taught me what a shadow walk is and how to appreciate the significance of journey, even when I’m just hiking the Rockies. Heinlein gave me a comprehension of what it means to “grok” and helped me understand why a human should know how to “change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly.” Thanks to Laumer I understand the difference between men of action and men of sophistry; I comprehend what loyalty is and have a sincere sense of duty in the face of personal sacrifice.

I am a son of many such fathers… and mothers like Le Guin and Sheldon who helped me understand the differences between the sexes and, more importantly, how shameful inequality in any society really is. I have many more such parents, but you get the point. These thinkers, these visionaries, shared with us their distinct notions of humanity, speculating upon “what if” we were to take current societal constructs and follow them to their inevitable conclusions. Either that or they took societal norms, turned them upside down, and held them up to the light for all to see.

And thus, having set out upon this journey of becoming an author in my own right, I find myself editing my second manuscript. In it I alter American history and explore bigotry, zealotry and sexism. I hold them up to the light and expose hypocrisy. I cast in harsh light those who would discriminate and subjugate, dealing with them via the heavy hand of a six-gun-packing privateer. It’s pure fantasy, to be sure, and pulpy, but under the surface there’s a theme of equality, of treating with other sentient beings in precisely the same manner we wish to be treated.

I can’t imagine that my work will be as highly regarded as those great visionaries who influenced me, but I can aspire to walk in their footsteps and—perhaps—make my own small contribution to what Arthur in Excalibur referred to as “future memory.”

It is a dream I have.

*            *            *

Quincy Allen has been published in multiple anthologies, online and print magazines, as well as in one omnibus. His steampunk version of Rumpelstiltskin is under contract with Fairy Punk Studios, and he’s written for the Internet radio show RadioSteam. His novel Chemical Burn—a finalist in the Rocky Mountain Writers Association Colorado Gold Writing Contest—was first published in June 2012, and has been picked up by Fantastic Journeys Publishing. His new novel, Jake Lasater and the Blood Curse of Atheon, will be on sale this summer, and he’s writing an off-world steampunk-esque series. You can follow his ongoing exploits on Facebook and at his website.

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A guest post by Megan Grey.

In retrospect, the signs of my becoming a fantasy/sci-fi writer and proud geek were all there from an early age. The joy I felt Christmas morning when Santa brought my older brother and me Castle Grayskull—the perfect backdrop to any number of adventures with He-Man and She-ra. The summers spent in my friend’s backyard, acting out the rousing adventures of Link from The Legend of Zelda. Perhaps the most damning piece of evidence is the note I found from my late grandmother, which references a story I wrote at the tender age of five and titled “Battle for the Unknown Universe.”

Despite these auspicious beginnings, however, I remained mostly uninterested in fantasy or sci-fi through middle school. I was always an avid reader, but my books of choice were standard fare for the time—stories about girls and their horses, or girls and their babysitting clubs

All this changed in seventh grade, when my dad introduced me to a series entitled The Lord of the Rings.

I can hear you already. “Oh, wow. A fantasy writer who was inspired by Lord of the Rings. I’ve never heard that before.” And I get it. Fantasy is a field rife with Middle-Earth wannabes. In some cases, they are great novels all their own, adding their own unique perspective to the genre, and in others, well… not so much.

There’s a reason for all the Tolkien love, and quite simply, it’s because Lord of the Rings is awesome, in the truest sense of the word. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

I soon discovered that my dad didn’t bring home these books for me, the avid reader of the family. No, he bought them for my older brother, a high-schooler who played guitar in a heavy metal band and whose reading, I was fairly certain, consisted primarily of lyrics to Poison songs.

Surely my father was suffering from early-onset senility, thinking that my brother was the better candidate for this intimidating-looking series whose covers promised adventure and magic.

This couldn’t stand. So I, in an effort to show my misguided father who was clearly the smarter sibling, decided I would be the one to read those thick books filled with faintly archaic language and weird little poems first.

I swiped Fellowship of the Ring from my brother’s nightstand and started reading that very day. I admit I didn’t get into it right away. A birthday party for a one-hundred-and-eleven-year-old hobbit didn’t exactly pique my interest at twelve years old. But by the time the Ringwraiths showed up to attack our intrepid band of heroes at Weathertop, I was hooked.

For the first time in my life, I not only enjoyed and was entertained by a series of books, but I lived them. I stood beside Frodo, eyes wide with horror as Gandalf disappeared into the chasm in the mines of Moria. I trod silently through the beautiful and mysterious forest of Lothlorien. I rode on the massive branches of Ents, and triumphed in Saruman’s downfall. I swung my sword beside Eowyn and defeated the Witch-king of Angmar. I begged Frodo to cast the ring into the fires of Mount Doom. I stared solemnly out to sea, watching the ship that bore Frodo, Bilbo, and Gandalf from Middle-Earth disappear into the horizon.

And when I turned the very last page, I wept. I was certain I could never experience something that pure and soul-thrilling again.

Fortunately, though, I discovered that the bookstores had a whole section of fantasy books, full of worlds in which I could surround myself with wonder and magic. Worlds where I could discover who I really was, by living the lives of characters I wasn’t. I devoured every fantasy book I could get my hands on—books by great authors such as Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman, David Eddings, Guy Gavriel Kay, Raymond E. Feist, Robert Jordan, and many more. Slowly but surely, I made my way across the speculative fiction aisle to discover the joys of sci-fi as well, beginning with Orson Scott Card’s excellent Ender’s Game.

What began as a healthy dose of sibling rivalry become an important part of who I am—not only a reader of speculative fiction, but a writer whose books will hopefully provide worlds that readers want to live in and characters they yearn to sorrow and triumph alongside.

Thanks, Dad, for bringing The Lord of the Rings into my life. And thanks to my big brother, for providing me the competitive push I needed to read it.

For the record, my brother is now a well-respected university professor with two master’s degrees and a PhD, so it turns out he was the smarter sibling, after all.

But I totally finished Lord of the Rings first.

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Megan Grey currently lives in Calgary, Alberta with her husband, two kids, and two yappy dogs. Her story “To Be Remembered” won the Editor’s Pick Grand Prize in a fiction contest for the Animism: The God’s Lake animated TV series and will be featured in an upcoming anthology. She has received two honorable mentions and a semi-finalist award for short stories in the Writers of the Future contest.

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 A guest post by Kim May.

For some people, the call to write came late in life. For me, storytelling has been a favorite pastime for as long as I can remember. Really, it has. Now, I’m not just referring to the stories that my folks read to me—though they do play a part. I’m talking about the stories I told as a kid.

That time I told my mom’s friend that I was chased around the house with a butcher knife? Much to my mom’s friend’s relief, that was storytelling.

All those times I lied to my mom so I could place the blame on one of my siblings? Yup. That was storytelling too.

All the hours I played Barbie dolls with my little sister? You better believe it.

You see, our Barbie dolls weren’t content to sit at home and mother all the My Little Ponies, She-Ra, and Rose Petal Place dolls. They had to have fantastic adventures in far-off lands. One of our favorites was a spinoff of Cinderella. First of all, since neither of us wanted to take a back seat to the other, everything was done in duplicate. That meant we had two Cinderellas and two princes (for some reason, we never doubled up on the villains). Rather than sit around and wait for the princes to find them after the ball, our Cinderellas snuck into the palace, knocked the princes unconscious with a thunder egg, kidnapped them, and had a Stockholm-syndrome happily ever after.

Now, you have to keep in mind that I was about eight years old and had no idea that what we were playing out was morally wrong. For us, it was just a fun and empowering twist on a favorite tale. The fact that it gave us an excuse to hog-tie Ken was a bonus.

When we weren’t infringing on the Geneva Convention, we play-acted/discovery-wrote stories that borrowed elements from our favorite books and movies. Those world building skills came in handy in the sixth grade when I had to write a short story for an English assignment. Most of my classmates wrote about their dog or about a stupid, annoying younger sibling that bore a strong resemblance to their own. I, however, had no interest in writing the same story as everyone else. After drawing on Barbie skills, my story ended up being about two talking flowers that were going to save the world after they finished having tea.

In high school, even though I hadn’t touched my dolls for years, I drew on those skills again for another short story assignment. This time I wrote a paranormal YA story—twenty years before it became cool, I might add.

You would think that I would have figured out by then that it was my fate to be a writer. Nope. That realization didn’t come until college. After bopping between eight different science majors, the only thing that didn’t change was my desire to minor in writing. Unfortunately, that was also around the time my life took a sharp turn for the worse. I won’t depress you with the details. Suffice to say, when life turned back around the first thing I did was sit down and write.

I love being a writer. I get to sit down with my characters—my imaginary dolls—every day and take them on fantastic adventures in wondrous places. If those adventures take a turn for the weird, and they most likely will, all the better.

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Kim May writes sci-fi and fantasy but has been known to pen a gothic poem or two. She works at an independent bookstore and dog/house sits on the side. A native Oregonian, she lives with her geriatric cat, Spud, and spends as much of her free time as she can with family and friends. She recently won The Named Lands Poetry Contest. If you would like to find out what she’s working on, please visit her blog.

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On a schoolyard in 1993, I made a new friend. His name was Joey, and he introduced me to Star Trek. Without seeing a single episode, I began to learn about the Starship Enterprise. It was like hearing the Gospel for the first time. I started by watching some of the Star Trek movies. I remember going with Joey to the local video store. While browsing the shelves, he explained to me those basic tenets of the Star Trek feature series that now seem as constant and self-evident as the lunar cycle, the length of day, and the colour of the sky—the odd movies are good, the even ones are bad. So we started with Star Trek II, which proved successful, if not completely a deal-sealer.

I was reluctant to share this interest with my family, because I had a sense that they would not endorse it. Little did I know that my mother had grown up watching Kirk and Spock on her family’s television—a piece of technology still mostly shunned in the 1960s by most people in the religious community where she grew up. Yes, my mother’s family was quite worldly, a fact which I am somewhat proud of.

My parents were tolerant of my interest in Star Trek, and so it was that I began catching episodes here and there on television. This was the early 1990s, of course, so the episodes I saw were reruns of Star Trek: The Next Generation—and I quickly grew to love it. There is one episode that sticks in my mind. I’m not a hundred percent certain it’s the first episode I saw, but it’s definitely the one that sealed the deal. It was called “Remember Me,” a fourth season episode featuring Dr. Crusher’s escape from a warp bubble. (I’m sure that sounds like Chinese to some, but it makes perfect sense to me.)

The result is that in 1995, at the age of twelve, I wrote a full-length novel. It was set in the Star Trek universe and it was called “Warring Factions.” Oh my goodness, it is a travesty of epic proportions. I say it’s set in the Star Trek universe, but I had the unmitigated gall to invent my own new ship, and a whole new crew. Eighteen years later, I have only the vaguest recollections of the plot, but I’ve been too embarrassed to actually read it (it even has an alien character named “Hamlit,” ugh). I may never read it. A year later, I wrote a follow-up called “Nightstalker.” This one mingled my invented crew with the cast of Star Trek: Voyager, a bizarre mashup which makes precisely zero sense.

As terrible as those books are, within them are over 100,000 words, interspersed with correctly placed commas, period, and apostrophes (also a fair share of incorrectly placed semicolons). These books gave me a powerful head start, and I doubt any of it would have happened without Star Trek.

Ever since, my progression into the world of genre publishing has been characterized by an attempt to eradicate Star Trek tropes from my writing—not that they’re bad, but because they’re so very distinctive. Remember what I said about the warp bubble? Well, in my early fiction I had a tendency to write about the positronic reconfiguration of the neutrino assembly, or the baryon- particle causation effect in the warp field capacitor. Trekkers affectionately refer to this as technobabble.

But there are a lot of things that Star Trek did right, lessons it taught me and which have served me well over the years. For one thing, Star Trek, at its best, did a good job of balancing sci-fi premises with compelling character drama. After all, just about every form of fiction, whatever genre it falls into, must have a strong character component. Star Trek also taught me about immersing the story and the characters in the setting, and finding ways to actively integrate and bring to life the environment in which a story takes place.

Star Trek was powerfully inspirational to me, in more ways than I can count. It’s something I return to constantly, and it always gives me a creative boost.

Ultimately, Star Trek imbued me with an appreciation of style and setting, but when it comes to story and structure… well, that’s a post for another day. May 27, to be exact. I’ll see you then!

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 A guest post by Martin Greening.

In seventh grade, a classmate of mine gave a presentation on his comic book collection. I had read a comic or two prior, but had never even considered collecting them in plastic bags with backing boards to keep them fresh and unbent. That Christmas, I asked for one thing from Santa, my parents, anyone: I asked for comics so I could start my own collection.

A few months later, while strolling through the aisles of the local comic book Mecca, I first discovered The Holt. What is The Holt, you ask? Only a gnarled tree in the midst of a great forest. Within the boughs of this tree lay magically shaped rooms that were home to a tribe of elves known as the Wolfriders. I had discovered Elfquest, by Wendy and Richard Pini, and it would be the start of a long and loving relationship.

The original story introduced such great heroes as Cutter, also known as The Blood of Ten Chiefs, his trusty companion Skywise, and twisted creatures like Winnowill and Madcoil. Cuuter and Skywise, along with their small tribe, are forced to embark on a trek from their idyllic woodland home. A trek that would eventually lead them on a quest to find their true origins. The story has all the makings of traditional Hero’s Journey. Joseph Campbell would be proud.

The Pinis shopped Elfquest around to the major comic publishers, but received no bites other than a tiny independent comic called Fantasy Quarterly. The first issue of Elfquest appeared in that comic in 1978, but the Pinis felt they could do better. They founded WaRP Graphics and published the rest of the story themselves. Since then, Elfquest has appeared under the banners of Marvel, DC, and now Dark Horse (for the upcoming Final Quest storyline). The Pinis’ tale is one of the great success stories in self-published comics.

Not long after devouring the four large graphic novels (which dominated the top of the fantasy and science fiction section at Waldenbooks) that comprised the original story, I came across a copy of the Elfquest Roleplaying Game by Chaosium. Yes, I was a roleplayer, Dungeons and Dragons and all that. It’s my brother’s fault. You try growing up in the same room as a sibling who is three years your elder and not absorb whatever he is in to. That game opened new doors for me. Along with my good friend Dennis, we created our own tribe of elves (called the Kindred). We created our own stories that featured the likes of Stormpoint and his daughter Springmist and the tribe chief Swiftscent (Dennis’s character). All kinds of things found their way into our stories, including a clawed glove that was exactly like the one Lion-O donned in Thundercats and even a dark elf (courtesy of R.A. Salvatore’s Drizzt) we named Orebender (because he could magically shape rock and metal).

On a side note, the Elfquest Roleplaying Game had character silhouettes so you could draw your own characters. My art skills have long deteriorated, but I’ve kept the drawings of many of the Kindred, which I’m happy to share below. Looking at them is a doorway into the past and brings memories of good times with friends, both real and imaginary.

Sadly, my friend and I never wrote down any of the adventures of Stormpoint, but I still dream of their tales and parts of them find their way into my writing every now and then. Perhaps someday I will get around to chronicling their story.

To bring my story full circle (which is sort of ironic, as one Elfquest saga is titled “Kings of the Broken Wheel”), in 2012 I was fortunate enough to attend the Superstars Writing Seminar in Las Vegas. During one of the evening meet-and-greets, I sat next to one of the faculty whom I did not know, James A. Owen (who also contributed a guest post here at the Fictorian Era). We chatted for a bit about how he is a comic artist and novelist and eventually the conversation turned to Elfquest. It turned out James was a huge fan, so much so that he wrote the introduction to the second volume of the Elfquest Archives, put out by DC comics (it’s the one with the dark blue cover in the below pic).

That brief connection has rekindled my love of Elfquest and the stories I created as a child. The first thing I did after that seminar was go home and dig out Volume 2 to read his introduction. (By the way, James is an inspirational guy who has written about his journey in a fantastic book called Drawing Out The Dragons).

So there you have it. Elfquest: one of the works that has influenced me. You can read it online for free at www.elfquest.com. Maybe it will spark something in you as well.

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Martin Greening hails from Southern California and has been drawn to fantasy and science fiction from a young age. He is currently working on a fantasy adventure novel and several short stories. Martin lives in Sin City working as a IT guru by day and a dreamer of the fantastic at night. He can be found at www.martingreening.com.

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A guest post by Brenda Sawatzky.

“I’m standing outside of Mindy’s restaurant alone about two a.m., thinking about nothing in particular, when it strikes me that I have not seen or heard from my friend Brenda for quite some time.”

Thus opens an email from my long-time friend, Jim. He is not inclined to banal salutations—“How’re you doing?”, “What’s new?” No, he’s too creative for that. Instead, the opening paragraph continues, inviting me into a short story set in a 1930’s gangster milieu. His cliché-riddled prose pours onto the page like a Damon Runyon tale, the protagonist—yours truly. It’s at this point that I long for a moniker more befitting 1930s New York—like Hazel Hubbahubba. Something with panache, edging on libertine.

It seems an odd place for a writer to get their start. But this is the exact moment where a sleeping writer-spirit awoke within me and took to the stage. For Jim, it was a clever way of saying “hello”; for me, it was a challenge. Within hours my fictitious riposte was complete, having dug deep into the archives of Google and Wikipedia for historical accuracy, and eluding loosely to the real protagonist’s life. Jim, I decided, would make a fine leading man. I hit “send” and giggled with schoolgirl delight.

Day in and day out, the exchange continued, the yarn growing more elaborate, cunning, and fantastical with every tap of the “send” button. The greatest challenge, you see, was building on a story that was being weaved, in part, by someone else. A plot was near impossible, the possibilities endless.

A few weeks in and I was hooked, like a fish to a worm, a carb addict to a bake sale. I found myself rushing to my laptop the moment my eyes opened to greet the morning. Had he responded yet? What would he do with the plot shift I’d dangled over the proverbial cliff the night before? Dinner burnt on the stove, the laundry piled up, and the dog sat forlorn next to me on the sofa, speculating over his self-absorbed mistress, wisely choosing to cross his hind legs rather than disturb her reverie.

Three months and fifty thousand words later a novella was born. The madness had ended. Jim and I shared a virtual high-five and then went back to our everyday. But the sun peaked over the horizon each morning and I had no reason to get out of bed. Kierkegaard said, “Boredom is the root of all evil—the despairing refusal to be oneself.” The doldrums had set in, but the writer-spirit was too fresh to be mummified just yet.

Employing the internet I began an arduous search for writer’s workshops, short story contests, anything to restore that feeling again. I wrote a novel and paid a prince’s ransom for a professional critique. I joined an online writer’s workshop pairing myself with an author-mentor, set up to teach me how to break into print. And I’ve started my own blog, a creative and fun way to flex my writing muscles.

I’m a bit of a late bloomer, I suppose. It took me a long time to recognize the voice inside my head as my imagination clambering to escape. I’ve been involved in a long-term love affair with words and have done a substantial amount of topical writing for committees, business projects, and the like, but I didn’t exercise my right to fictional storytelling until my kids were grown and life slowed to a manageable pace.

One of the most fallacious euphemisms in the world is, “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.” I just turned fifty-one. I don’t aspire to a Nobel prize in literary fiction (although one can dream) or even a review in the New York Times. I’m just looking for an outlet for an inner voice. A voice that’s moved from vegetative to vociferous. And step by baby step, the giant awakens.

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Brenda Sawatzky is a relatively new, unpublished writer hailing from the wide-open prairie spaces of southeast Manitoba. She and her husband of thirty-one years are self-employed and parents to five kids (two ushered in by marriage). She is presently working toward fiction and non-fiction writing for magazines and manages a personal blog.

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… what the heart wants. Right? As a kid, fairy tales were the reading fare. You know – Rapunzel (prince saves girl from evil witch and they live happily ever after), Sleeping Beauty (prince saves girl from evil witch and they live happily ever after), Snow White (prince saves girl from evil witch and they live happily ever after), Cinderella (prince saves girl from evil witch and they live happily ever after). The list goes on. And as a kid, I thought that was the height of romance.

So, when I hit my teen years, I had a firm foundation of romantic beliefs built up. What did I read then? I read Harlequin Romances (boy and girl have struggles, fall in love and live happily ever after). My allowance money went to belonging to a Harlequin book club.  I chose the Historical club. Every month I got a box of four to six novels that were some combination of medieval romances, western romances and regency romances.  I’d start with my favorite, the medievals, move on to the westerns and then read the regencies.

I read them voraciously and then would have to wait weeks for the next box. Back then, I’m not sure if my library carried romance novels or not. I don’t remember looking.  Libraries do now though, I’m happy to say. In between, I’d read fantasies, sci-fi, biographies and whatever else my parents had sitting around. But it was all on hold once I got my new box of romances.

I’m grateful for Harlequin romances for taking up where my fairy tales left off and providing me and millions of women with stories that give us what our hearts want. Not to mention being a major market for romance writers for decades. I still read Harlequin’s and my first dreams of writing included being published by them.

Fast forward thirty years and what do I read and write? Romance. Despite three failed marriages, and the occasional jaded cynic’s hat I wear, beats the heart of a die-hard romantic. My favorite movies are romantic. My favorite storylines in other genres are the romantic ones. Even when dramas and stories end on a sad or bad note, I always think – we just need one more chapter, one more scene and this can be fixed. They can have a happy-ever-after. I know it.

Is it naïve? Maybe. But what I love about romance is that no matter the journey I go on – thrilling, sweet, harrowing, magical, tragic – I KNOW that at the end, everything will be okay, the couple will be together and all will be right in the world. Okay, it probably is really naïve. I don’t care. I’m a happier person because of it.

This may be a really strange analogy, but bear with me. Romance is like a good natural disaster flick (2012, The Day After Tomorrow, Armageddon) which I also love. They’re hopeful. They end on a positive note. And I want that.

Natural Disaster:

•  Everything is going wrong (global temperature shift/giant asteroid is about to destroy earth)
• We rise to the occasion and fix the problem (mankind joins together in global effort to save earth)
• When all is said and done, regardless of the fact that maybe the majority of mankind has died horrifically, mankind triumphs and earth survives. YAY!

Romance:

•  Everything is going wrong (boy and girl have conflict – internal and external)
• We rise to the occasion and fix the problem (boy and girl each overcome their own character flaws and whatever else is preventing their relationship)
• When all is said and done, regardless of the problems encountered, love conquers all. YAY!

This is why I write romance. My heart wants happy endings. Now though, I want modern fairy-tales where boy and girl save themselves and each other from bad choices/tendencies and work to keep their happy-ever-after  happy. That seems more realistic, less naïve and still hopeful.

What do ya’ll think?

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A guest post by Stone Sanchez.

In my journey to be a writer, Anime has had one of the biggest effects on me. From the wayward storytelling of FLCL, to the completely epic outpouring that was Cowboy Bebop, the influence and inspiration it’s served for me has been phenomenal. In my last post, I covered how I was introduced to anime though Pokémon, and a lot of the different types of anime that exist. I’m not making a joke when I say that I’ve sampled and watched, in depth, almost every single type of anime that exists. Its presence has had a massive influence over my writing, how I perceive story, and the way my characters are presented.

When I started off watching anime, I was around six or seven years old. In those early developmental years, my common brand of story became a foreign form of storytelling. Goku (Dragon Ball Z), Heero Yuy (Gundam Wing), and Kenshin Himura (Rurouni Kenshin) were names that were just as big as Superman, Wolverine, and Batman. As I grew older, I delved more into this obsession that was slowly taking America by storm, and became one of those kids who flocked to the internet in search of anime. The why of it has to come into play at some point or another, and for me it was the storytelling. (Not so much in Dragon Ball Z, I have to be honest. Watching two guys beat one another senseless was all the story telling I needed in that one.)

In Gundam Wing, I discovered a sense of idealism that’s managed to still have an effect on me today.

“History is much like an endless waltz.
The three beats of war, peace,
and revolution continue on forever.”
—Mariemaia Khushrenada

Although I cite the quote above coming from the character who said it, the writers of Gundam Wing are the ones who put that view of the world in there. The idea of total pacifism, and the idealism behind giving your life for what you honestly believed in—no matter how old or young, really hit me. In the show, the characters portrayed were all teenagers, but they were fighting ardently for what they believed in. Honestly, my heroes were those five Gundam pilots.

Throughout anime I found characters like those young boys, like Kenshin. Hitokiri Batosai, The Manslayer. A wandering vagabond of a swordsman who, in his journey of repentance for the blood he’d spilt during the Meiji Revolution of Japan, took an oath never to kill again. In his story, this man was known as “The Strongest of the Imperialist” and had such a reputation that, if those who were hunting for him ever discovered where he was, they would take any opportunity they could to kill him. However, after he disappeared from the bloodbath that was the end of the Meiji Revolution, his past came back to haunt him. The current life he’s attempted to make for himself is invaded and he finds himself having to hold off the inner demon that exists inside him, while also defending those he’s come to love as his family; all of this with a reverse blade sword—a sword that is a symbol of his vow never to take another human life again.

In my own writing, characters like these have had a massive impact. Sure, Superman was always overly impressive, but there was a brand of awesome that came with characters that weren’t complete boy scouts. These characters knew the weight that came with having to kill, and often dealt with it in very unique ways—since there were times when killing their enemy was the only true path.

There were a couple of times where I’ve used the word “beautiful” to describe anime. The storytelling in it has left me speechless more than once, and in the case of Clannad, I was in tears. If anyone reading this has never watched a show called Code Geass all the way through, I suggest you do it as soon as possible. The idea of “destroying the world to remake the world” never meant as much as it did until I saw that show. The distorted perceptions of justice, peace, and the idea of flawed pacifism were burned into my mind by anime. I guess you could say that it introduced me to the idea of gray. Things weren’t always so black and white for the protagonist in anime, and sometimes those protagonist weren’t even heroes.

The main influence anime has had on me is that it changed my perception on how I viewed life in general. It sounds funny, but it’s true. I learned more than just story formats. In the same way that an author’s prose affected the way I write, anime’s storylines and passions had a heavy influence on me. Which is probably why some of the first stories I ever wrote was fan fiction of my favorite anime.

So, the Anime Effect has been that it was the format that made me love story enough to want to write stories. It made me want to be creative, and it led me down the path that would eventually have me writing stories of my own. In my own novels and stories, I can see hints of the heroes I had growing up, and traces of the scenes that I watched implanting themselves in my writing. Sure, it wasn’t the only thing that inspired me, but I have to admit it probably played one of the pivotal rolls. It got me writing.

Thanks, anime.

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Stone Sanchez is an aspiring professional author who has been active in the writing community for the past two years. Currently Stone is associated with the Superstars Writing Seminars, where he records and manages the production of the seminars. He’s also worked with David Farland by recording his workshops, and is currently the Director of Media Relations for JordanCon, the official Wheel of Time fan convention. Often referred to as the “kid” in a lot of circles, Stone is immensely happy that he can no longer be denied access places due to not being old enough.

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My story of a writer begins with the rejection and insecurity of a young boy who was searching for his place in the world. I was a tall, scrawny kid with glasses who was always on the honor role. One of the first things you learn is that the world is a cruel place, but no matter what troubles befell you in life, you could always find a little respite in the pages of a book.

The first books I can remember reading were books like Boxcar Children, My Teacher is an Alien, or Bunnicula. They were fun books, written for children and they were great to get me into reading. They didn’t fully capture my attention yet. They were nice distractions, but were too simple and eventually I began to crave more.

The first book I read that completely blew me away was Redwall. It took place in another world, filled with anthropomorphic animals who had to act together to save their home from outside invaders. This book, while still written for a younger audience, taught me how worlds can truly change the world and your vision of reality. These books had combat, struggles, and death. They also had bravery, honor, and true courage. Even now, I look upon the cover of this book and remember fondly the world that I would frequent so often as a child and miss my time there.

Other books came along that amazed me in other ways. Dragonlance taught me the power that magic can bring to even a frail wizard, and believe me, as a lanky teenager, such power was very alluring. I began to learn how each author could create a new existence, create so many emotions, with nothing more than a pen and paper. Dragonriders of Pern. Lord of the Rings. The Wheel of Time. They all drew me in. They let me experience power and loss, the struggle for glory and the failures that connect us. I wanted to join them in their world, and leave mine behind, and so I did the next best thing.

I began to write my own worlds, create my own rules and find my own glory. I experimented with different realities, new physical rules and boundaries. I no longer have these early manuscripts, but I’m sure they were amazing. I dedicated my life to reading and building my own world. I wrote a whole story in second-person narrative just because I was told that it doesn’t work. You, the protagonist, was pulled into another dimension to fight for your world. In the end, you failed and all was lost. But at least you got to fight, and you went down giving it your all.

I don’t remember what my grades were on those papers, but I know I didn’t get much support in those years. As I’m sure is evident, much of my world resolved around existing and creating worlds that didn’t exist. Parents and teachers seem to fear these other worlds and believe they are depths that should be avoided. I began to gravitate toward other hobbies, such as computer and science. I would receive more approval from my teachers for a little program I wrote in a few hours than I would from a story that took me weeks to write.

Approval is a strong motivator, and I still wonder where I would be if I had received more of it for my writing. I still enjoy computers and science, and I make a great living at it, but I never lost my love for fantasy. The two loves would merge every now and then as I wrote games and interactive stories on the computer, but in the end I let that side of me sleep. I would play games, read books, and live in others world, but only let mine exist in memory.

Eventually, after finishing school and leaving the military, I was able to look back on my life and try to determine who I was and who I wanted to be. You would think that such a reflection should happen when you’re younger, but society doesn’t really allow for that. I’m lucky that the job I chose still happens to be one I enjoy, but those fantasy worlds that I created in my head still lurked in the background and I missed exploring them. The people on those worlds demanded resolution, and I needed to give it to them.

I took up worlds that I had created as a child and rebuilt them. I began to create new worlds, entirely new planes of existence. I jump back and forth between novels, but it works for me. Now I write for myself, and I write the world that needs to be written at that time. One of these days, soon I hope, I’ll get to the point where I’ll be happy enough to submit one of my novels to the world. I understand that they may never be perfect, but I love these characters that exist in my worlds. I care for them, rejoice in their triumphs, and cry with their sorrow. They are a part of me, and their world is real to me. Their story needs to be told, and I’m the one to tell it.

My hope is that someday some kid will read it, and it will show them just how magical the world can really be. Perhaps it will the catalyst to create their own worlds, their own stories that need to be told. And perhaps, even if they don’t get the support they needed at the beginning, they’ll soon realize that they don’t need to please anyone else. The stories exist, and they just need to tell the tale.

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A guest post by Greg Little.

When I sat down recently and started thinking about which science fiction and fantasy inspired me to seriously pursue a career in writing genre fiction, I thought the answer was a simple one. But as I actually began putting it down on paper, “the tale grew in the telling” as they say. Nuances I’d nearly forgotten woke as I fired up their neurons. So forgive me in advance if this turns into a bit of a ramble.

Like many if not most of us, I read a lot of fantasy and science fiction as a kid. My mom read Lord of the Rings to me after I’d watched the wonderful Rankin-Bass adaptation of The Hobbit and asked about that last line: “Then you’ll see that the story of the ring is not over, but is only beginning.” (Thanks, Mom!) This was followed by The Chronicles of Prydain by Lloyd Alexander, most (but admittedly not all) of The Chronicles of Narnia, and others.

We flash forward many years to winter break of my first year of college, the moment where I finally caved and jumped on The Wheel of Time bandwagon at the behest of two friends. After devouring everything up through The Path of Daggers (the last book that was out at the time), I switched gears and began with A Song of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin (Game of Thrones to you HBO neophytes). More recently the fantasy uber-series I’ve found most challenging has been The Second Apocalypse, by R. Scott Bakker. Those three series’ collective use of intricate worldbuilding, foreshadowing, dark themes, and multiple viewpoints certainly influenced my writing style.

But the thing that actually got me started writing in the first place took place in between childhood and college. On the verge of entering my teen years, I began reading the Star Wars “expanded universe” novels. I eventually went on to read a great many of those (stopping only when I realized they were never going to end), but the ones that had the most impact were the Thrawn Trilogy by Timothy Zahn and the Jedi Academy Trilogy by Kevin J. Anderson.

At that time, my mom had probably noted that for several years I’d eased off reading in favor of video games (video games being a particular weakness and a habit I haven’t managed to kick even today) and so knowing I was a huge Star Wars fan she shrewdly picked me up the first of Zahn’s trilogy. Well, technically she picked up the third book at first, but we quickly sorted it out after a bit of confusion.

I was blown away and instantly hooked (thanks again, Mom!), quickly devouring both trilogies and looking for more. Not only did it get me back into heavy reading, but I quickly realized that I liked the best of the novels even better than I liked the movies, because the books delved so much deeper into story and characterization. My friends and I quickly began incorporating details from the expanded universe into a Star Wars role-playing game of our own design. We took turns as dungeon master, and that was where I got my first taste of how much fun it was to create narrative mysteries for other players to try and solve.

Shortly into high school, my friend Bryan and I began taking turns drawing crude stick figure comics. Each of us came up with one “character” and the comics basically involved increasingly outlandish ways for the characters to kill each other, our own personal Itchy and Scratchy from The Simpsons. But eventually we grew bored with the pen-and-paper carnage, so our characters teamed up and began having narrative adventures (always wielding lightsabers, of course). Then in our sophomore year of high school, we started passing a three-subject spiral notebook around between classes, trying our hand at our own fiction, which quickly morphed into Star Wars fan fiction (set a thousand years in the future from the original trilogy, natch).

It was… not great fiction. Now liberated from the limitations of our crude stick-figure art, the one-upsmanship that had permeated our comics ran rampant. Mostly we would use our turn to either invent a mystery to confuse the other author (perhaps not the best collaborative technique) or each try to paint the other into a narrative corner from which escape would be impossible (an even worse collaborative technique). It marked the beginning of writing purely for my own enjoyment.

We never did finish that first story. Bryan moved away halfway through high school and we saw each other infrequently after that. I toyed around with finishing it anyway (and two others, because all books simply belonged in trilogy form to my inexperienced eyes) but eventually just dropped it. But I still have both that notebook and the comics. In fact, writing this piece spurred me to pull them out of storage and look them over. The prose is even worse than I remember, but I’m trying to take that as a sign of how far I’ve come since then. And as bad as it is, it still puts a smile on my face. I feel like that’s the most you can ask for from your writing.

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