Influences and Inspiration from Media
In the past couple of months, I’ve been asked multiple times about the media that influences or inspires my writing. Most questions were directed at Wraith and the Revolution (since that’s what I’ve been promoting the most), but Wraith has been with me for so long that I have a hard time coming up with answers. When a project is almost 30 years in the making, it’s hard to say what hasn’t influenced the story in some way. But there are a few things I can pinpoint.
Picking out media inspirations/influences for some of my other works seems to come more easily. So, here we go…
Some Musical inspirations
Breath by Breaking Benjamin (especially the chorus) was a major inspiration for parts 2 and 3 of Hunted. There’s raw grief in those lyrics, followed immediately by a furious desire for revenge, which is exactly what I was going for with that book. (Hunted is one of the few stories I’ve written that doesn’t necessarily end on a happy note, but rather, a bittersweet one.)
Animal I have Become by Three Days Grace and The Animal by Disturbed were inspirations for a werewolf story I was working on years ago. Sadly, that story was never finished, and I’m not sure it ever will be, but I still think about it when I hear those songs.
A Few TV/Movie influences
The prison world of Primordia-1 featured in Wraith and the Revolution was loosely inspired by the prison-planet in The Chronicles of Riddick. Primordia-1 has a different atmosphere and environment, but it’s no less hostile.
This one isn’t really an inspiration, but rather, something that got me in the right mindset to write a certain character’s POV. Dranamir from The Relics of War is one of the Soulless, and she’s a nasty piece of work. She’s also very powerful. I struggled at times to get into the right headspace to write her chapters, but I found one thing that helped: Watching the Darth Vader scene from the end of Rogue One. That is the same level of ruthlessness that Dranamir embodies so much of the time.
I’m going to preface this next one with a little background: When it comes to supernatural things like ghosts, I’m usually a skeptic. And the ghost-seeking TV shows are not my cup of tea (I mean, how many times can you have someone screaming and pointing away from the camera, only for the camera to finally pan over and find…nothing? I don’t see the point of these shows.) But anyway, a few years ago around Halloween, I was reading while others in the house were watching TV, and they happened to land on a show called Spooked: Ireland. It was one of those typical ghost investigation shows and I was not terribly pleased with the choice. The skeptic in me was rearing her head, but then I started thinking… What if, in a fantasy world, the ghosts were real? And what if the main character of the story was a ghost? And what if that ghost decided to prank the investigator? Those questions eventually led to me writing The Fontayne Company, which begins with the ghostly main character destroying an investigator’s expensive spirit-detection equipment (I’m currently drafting book 2.)
The Literary Inspirations
Katherine Kerr’s Deverry Cycle inspired elements of The Relics of War series (Emra’s storyline and the reincarnation bit in particular.)
The Scorpion Men from the same series came from Babylonian mythology. In The Epic of Gilgamesh, they were featured as guardians/sentries. I adapted them into a warrior race for my books, because the idea of half-human/half-scorpion people was too good to ignore.
Some Video Game influences
The basic idea of the summoners from Hunted was inspired by the dark elf mages in the game Lineage II. While I never played that class myself, it was one of my brother’s mains, and we used to discuss aspects of that game frequently. (I haven’t played Lineage II since around 2006-ish, but the ideas stuck around for Hunted.)
The basic design of Kye’s armor in Wraith and the Revolution came from the N7 set from Mass Effect. I wasn’t introduced to those games until the pandemic in 2020, but I kind of fell in love with them. (Shepard’s armor doesn’t have the ability to power itself and its wearer using modified photosynthesis like Kye’s does, but it looks cool.)
The Felene people in The Relics of War were inspired by the Huline species featured in the Lands of Lore games (I only completed the first game, and got pretty far into the 2nd before I got stuck and eventually gave up. But those were really great games for the time.)
And… Music that fits a book/character that I discovered after the writing part was done
This happens often enough with my stories. I’ll hear a song after a book is written and realize that its lyrics fit really well with the story or an individual character. These aren’t true influences behind my stories, but they definitely make me think of them. 😊
Hail to the King by Avenged Sevenfold is a perfect theme song for Colin in The Caein Legacy. I mean, he is the king…and not a nice one.
Terrified by Atreyu reminds me of Seren’s story in Magic in the Deeps (publication date TBD; it’s book 3 in The Mage War Chronicles series, which is not yet fully drafted.) Every bit of this song resonates with Seren’s story, and I look forward to the day when I can finally share it with you.
Collide by Howie Day was a song I hadn’t listened to in years, but it came on while I was driving recently, and all I could think about was Melchior and Zeldyvian from Rites of Departure (this is book 1 in that ghost-hunter story I mentioned earlier.)
Attention Attention by Shinedown doesn’t remind me of any one story, but rather, my writing process in general. Listen to the full chorus. If you’re a fellow writer, you’ll get it.
There are probably more inspirations and influences I can list, but this is all I can think of right now (also, this post is probably long enough as it is!)