Inspiring Authors: Bram Stoker

No list of my inspiration would be complete without Dracula. Also, it's Halloween so...appropriate? Many people who have only seen the films have the misfortune of actually not knowing what the book is about. They have a misguided notion that Jonathon Harker is the hero of story.

They are wrong.

Mina in all of her glory, record keeping, awesomeness is the heroine of what some argue was a work of science fiction. I'm not wholly sure of that argument, but I do understand the reasoning. The use of the most up to date technology of the time allowed the cohort to work together across distances in a way that had no previously been possible. 

For me, Dracula was the book that showed me what Romanticism was all about. The language, the themes and the method of the book stuck with me. I first read this as an eighteen-year-old high school student. We'd been given a list of books to choose from and I, in a fit of disliking all of those books, requested that I be allowed to read Dracula instead. I was permitted. We had four months or so to work on the paper. I had a hard time getting into the book at first. The first hundred pages were so difficult to sludge through and then it was like a light came on inside me.

I understood it. I tore through the rest of the book in two days after having lingered for a few weeks on those early pages.

Dracula changed the way I saw words. It changed the way I wrote and for a long time it made my work clunky. I couldn't do what Stoker had done. It took time and patience and dedication to the simple craft of finding my own voice inside the voices that I had taken into myself over the years.

More than that, Dracula gave me Mina. A character who I have seen misinterpreted so many times. Mina is so much stronger. So, this Halloween, do me a favor, pick up the book and fall in love.

Because Dracula is not a love story. It's not even really horror. Dracula is about time passing people by. It's about stagnation and advancement.

Trust me, read the book.

Inspiring Author of the Day: Ellen Kushner

Now here's one where our fearless lady doesn't hide her gender. Ellen Kushner started this world with Swordspoint, but The Privilege of the Sword was the first book I read.

Katherine is thrown into a world she doesn't quite understand, with her uncle up to who-knows-what. His ultimate plan eventually unfolds to give Katherine what she really desires.

To say that this book had an influence of Rule of Sword would be an understatement, though I went a different way with Charlie. My love of fencing came from this book, and it led me to pursue an unseemly amount of research that should culminate in my taking lessons of my own.

If you haven't read Swordspoint or Privilege, I urge you to do so.

THE Inspiration: Shakespeare's Twelfth Night

As Directed by Kenneth Branagh

Around the time I was unemployed, car-less, residing on the couch of a friend post-grad school, I found myself with a great deal of free time and a library card. The library had DVD's and I got curious and checked out Twelfth Night. I'd read the play, and seen other adaptations, but it was this film that drew out the spirit of the thing for me.

I immediately went and checked out As You Like It and Much Ado About Nothing, as I have not taste for his tragedies, I stuck with the comedies. His thread of lady pretending to be a man reminded me that I had once wished to write such a story. In fact, I had attempted to write iterations on the theme many times over the years.

Except this time, Charlotte was born. It was the beginning of Twelfth Night that had me. That terrible storm and siblings torn apart. It's echoed clearly in the beginning of Rule of Sword, but Charlotte's journey is not Viola's.

Inspiring Author of the Day: Jasper Fforde

A friend handed me the Eyre Affair, and my love of Jasper Fforde was born. His quirky tone, irreverent dialogue and clear love of the written word pulled me in. Thursday was a wonderful character to follow and each of her books has been delightful.

Where Jasper Fforde really distinguished himself for me though, was in Shades of Gray. A world built on a coloracrocy, where the strength of your color-vision, and what color you could see, determined your place in the world.

It was something so different and yet familiar. And it hit close to home for me. My father is color-blind and as a female, I carry the gene. It was interesting to see someone write a book where everyone was colorblind in some way.

The hero was unlikely in every way and his love interest had the hallmarks of being smart, sharp-tongued and no-nonsense, which I adore. Fforde follows in the tradition of Terry Pratchett in finding the amazing amongst the absurd, and imbuing it all with a reality and a darkness that make it so relateable.

Inspiring Author of the Day: Maria V. Snyder

Yelena doesn't count as a lady with a sword, but that's okay because she has a bow staff. Yelena is an amazing character. She's so convinced that her life is plotted out in front of her, and so broken in the beginning that you just want things to work out for her.

In fact, her arc is very similar to many male characters I've seen before. Except Yelena is of course female.

Now, one could argue that these books follow the trope of tortured women make heroes, but we get tortured male heroes all the time so I'd call bull shit. Yelena doesn't let her past define who she is, who she wants to be.

Yelena is part of a very rigid society. Everyone wears a uniform. Everyone has a job. If you kill someone--well, you die. Except Yelena doesn't. That's not really a spoiler as it's in the first five pages.

I just re-read the three novels (though I know Assassin Study is coming out?is out?) so I'll get to that one eventually as well. My favorite thing about Yelena is that once she sees an opportunity, she takes it. She fights back. She sets the rules and the boundaries in her world in any way she can.

And she is so bad-ass.

I feel like I never hear people talking about these books, or Yelena, but trust me--you need to read them.

A Bit About the World

I did a lot of research to create genuine feeling alternate history, down to the last detail. When you are deviating as much as I did, you have to make sure you are on solid ground.

That starts with the everday things. Things like the days of the week, the names of months, the way they keep time.

Charlie is from Eire, the Empire that rose up instead of England after a fateful battle went a different way entirely. This change meant that there was a new language that swept the world as a common tongue. Some countries were never formed and the borders that were drawn changed.
January became Enair, August became Lughnasa, Wednesday became Miosday.
Ireland became the most powerful of the once British Isles.

It's not even just about the words. You have to project the path of a culture into what it might have become given those circumstances. Of course there's quite a bit of liberties taken as we don't know exactly what would have happened.

More importantly though, I had the rise of the British Empire to use as a plumb line. I tracked the cause and effect scenarios to give myself someplace that felt a bit like Victorian Britain, but was also very much not Victorian Britain.

I wanted to give readers something familiar to ground themselves with and then show you how different things really are. Rule of Shadows does that to some degree but Rule of Steel is really where we get to see how some of these countries have progressed. Including a bit of information on the colonies... (Yup, America).

And of course, there's quite a heaping spoonful of folklore, magic and misty moors to come.

Insipring Author of the Day: David Eddings

I should start off by saying I re-read these books nearly every year (All ten of them, yes) and I see them as a cornerstone for myself as a person and as a writer.

I know they are formulaic. I know they are based on an incredibly overused story arc. I know the characters are archetypes.

But when I was young and my grandfather died and I found this book on my dad's shelf and my grandpa had given it to him for his birthday when he was eighteen and I--I just had to read it.

These pages got me through a difficult time and those formulas and archetypes comforted me. I could see the arc of the story playing out for me and I wasn't worried. I knew good would win over evil.
It made a foundation for me. They are a touchstone now. Someplace I can go back to again and again to remind myself who I am and what I believe in.

Because of that, I know there are problems in them, but still, I know they shaped my writing.