influence and inspiration

Where does my influence and inspiration come from? Having deliberated on my answer to this one I would have to say that it purely depends on what I happen to be writing. I am horribly inconsistent in what I prefer to write. Be it poems or prose fantasy or romance I can never really find a niche and stick to it. But for whatever I happen to be working on I can never be without my influences to help me find my own way of doing things. I guess the best thing to do here is to talk about my current sources of influence/inspiration

Lately iv'e been working on creating my own fantasy setting in which to base my own series of adventures. When it comes down to fantasy it goes almost without saying that the works of Tolkien inspire all modern fantasy writers without exception. But when it comes to the type of setting that i'm aiming to create I would count my greatest influence to be the dragon age series of RPG video games by Bioware. In these games there is much of the standard tropes of fantasy but with heavy emphasis on rich character development and drawing parallels between its world and our modern one. I'm also keen to follow their example in balancing darker and more adult themes with a heavy dose of dry wit and light toilet Humour


I would have to say that iv'e begun to find john Cheever's writing to be very influential to me. Like Terence Rattingan and F Scott  Fitzgerald he writes with a deep understanding of the human condition. His work has a strange and almost dreamlike quality to it as he masterfully draws you in to his well crafted tale. What draws me to him most however is that while he sets his stories in the contemporary world of his day and primarily focus on the drama of suburban america there are sometime's hints of sci/fi and horror in some stories with the swimmer being wonderfully metaphysical

So there are my current running reservoirs of inspiration. Yet i know that wider rivers and greater oceans of idea's await me. I look forward to finding them and i cant imagine where they will take me