I can’t remember how I got to this article; more than likely one of my author or reader friends probably shared it on FB…
…But it got me thinking about all the authors on my shelves. I mean any one who has been coming to this blog for longer than a month can probably work out that I love Sir Terry Pratchett’s works or that it was David Eddings who inspired me to start writing Fantasy.
But there are a whole slew of other writers that come up when I really think about all the books that have influenced my work and the majority of them are on my shelves at the moment.
The first author that I ever collected was Enid Blyton and I started with the world of the Faraway Tree; it was the series that inspired my first attempt at Fan-Fiction at the age of 8!
The next one to come along was Diane Wynne Jones – I fell in love with Chrestomanci and read every single book of hers that I could get my hands on; at this point I had discovered the wonder of Libraries…
When I started earning my own money at the age of 13, I started buying my own books. I was a little obsessed with ponies and riding so a lot of the books I was getting from the Library were about horses, but when I bought my own books, I discovered that Here Be Dragons… and that you could ride them!
Yup, I had discovered Anne McCaffrey and the Dragons of Pern.
Between library books and the bookshop over the last twenty years, I have read a slew of authors, male and female, always either Sci-Fi or Fantasy. Anne McCaffrey, Diana Wynne Jones, David and Leigh Eddings, Terry Pratchett, Katherine Kerr, Elizabeth Moon, Janny Wurts, Raymond E.Feist, Sara Douglass, Jack Vance, Ursula Le Guin, Anne Rice, Robert Jordan, Terry Brooks, Tolkien, J K Rowling, Gail Carriger… and that’s a small proportion of the books that I’ve collected and read over the years.
They’ve all influenced my own work, some of them more obviously than others. The fact that a lot of them were female never crossed my mind; they were just books that I enjoyed a lot, so I bought them.
Another thing that I have only just realised, is that Mr & Mrs Eddings may have ignited my love of epic fantasy, but Anne McCaffrey and Diana Wynne Jones are the ones that showed me that I could write too, and not have to hide behind a male pseudonym.
So here I am, following in their footsteps and hoping that I have created my own books well enough that young readers are going be inspired by them in turn… maybe if they read that I enjoyed certain authors as a kid, they will search their books out and enjoy them too.
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I’m very bad at blowing my own trumpet and marketing my own work; but that all has to change, so I am going to start doing so today. We’ll go back to my roots as a writer and feature one of my Short Story collections…
One of the fun things about being a writer is responding to a challenge. This book is full of the results of such challenges…
From the wedding celebrations of Greek Deities, to mermaids, ghosts and superheroes, a whole gamut of creatures await your eager eyes.
This little collection of short stories contains some of my favourites from the beginning of my apprenticeship as an author. With each story is a little anecdote from my writing life.
It’s available in ebook and Print formats and from a variety of places including:
Amazon
Smashwords
B&N
If by any chance you’ve already read all of my books… could I possibly persuade you to pop into my Patreon Page and become a Patron?
The thing is, unless I sell more books or get more Patrons, I won’t be able to produce any new books!!
The World of The Teigr Princess 