I listen to music a good portion of my day, though it’s probably more accurate to consider it a background soundtrack rather than an activity in which I actively engage.  I wear my Ipod during my walk and subway trip to work,  sometimes while I’m working, and it plays in the sound dock at night.  […]

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    I know that Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules for writing include “Don’t go into great detail describing places and things” but I love writing those. Part of the pleasure of travelling is watching out the window of the train, finding ways to describe what I see, or discovering the perfect graffiti on a dumpster […]

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One of those Facebook things is making the rounds and since it’s on the topic of influences, it seemed an eminently suitable thing to repost.  It’s not just that I’m lazy/busy.  No indeed. 1. Fairy Tales 2. The Incredible Journey 3. Andre Norton 4. Peter O’Donnell 5. Tanith Lee 6. C.J. Cherryh 7. Shirley Jackson […]

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Where do writers get our ideas, you ask?  Sometimes, we get them from other writers. There were many inspirations for my first novel, The Night Inside, but one of them was definitely a story by another writer.   I read Suzy McKee Charnas’ wonderful collection The Vampire Tapestry, which features a vampire quite unlike most of the others I had encountered to that point. There’s nothing supernatural about Weyland and […]

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No question at all. Patricia McKillip. If I could figure out a way to magically steal every scrap of poetry, plot, inspiration, craft and beauty out of her soul, I’d do it. (Ok, maybe I wouldn’t do exactly that but I’d    certainly be tempted…) I read The Riddlemaster of Hed in high school, while I […]

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The next writer I discovered (around the same time as Tanith Lee) was C. J. Cherryh, with her first novel Gate of Ivrel.  With a cover like this, how could I NOT buy it?*  The worlds created for this book, and the 3 sequels, operate at the intersection of fantasy and science fiction.  The main […]

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If Andre Norton’s Witch World series opened my eyes to the idea of fantasy fiction that was not aimed at young adults, Tanith Lee’s The Birthgrave blasted apart everything I had thought a narrating hero had to be.   This is one of the few books I can actually remember buying.  My family was on vacation […]

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I’m talking about Andre Norton and the fact that I might not be the writer I am without her influence.  Probably any number of writers would say the same thing, especially female ones, especially female ones of my generation. Oddly enough, I read none of her YA fiction growing up.  The first book of hers […]

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  Like just about every SF fan of a certain age, I was a huge Star Trek fan as a child.  I didn’t watch it on the first run but probably in the first years of the reruns, when I was 10 or 11.   While I never wrote Star Trek   fan fiction (which is not to […]

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          Some conversations last weekend reminded me of the impact certain comic books had on my imagination, so that’s the topic of this week’s post. When I lived in small-town Ontario during grade 8 and 9 (living in small-town Ontario was not exactly a success for me, though I made a […]

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