Coming soon: Under the Influence

I’m not sure we can ever really know exactly who or what influences us. Yet we can cultivate some awareness and peek in on what might be going on. So I’m starting a new section of Adventures in Secrecy called “Under the Influence” wherein we’ll do just that: peek and poke around and see if we can’t figure some of what’s seeped into mah literary brain over the last forty-ish years of writing stories.

I also invite you to speak up and tell us if you see an influence showing through in my writing that perhaps I have missed or overlooked. For example, when I was circulating the first draft of Everything Fails ten years ago1, I got a lot of comparisons to Chuck Palahniuk—specifically, to Fight Club—which I really didn’t see or understand at first. But when I looked back over the books of his I had read, I could begin to see some similarities2. We might think of such an influence as unconscious or subtle.

I will, obviously, be writing about conscious influences about which I am aware. Where you can help is by asking about or pointing out other influences you pick up on.

So that’s the deal. I say ‘coming soon’ because I am knuckling down on Teresa’s Backbone, as well as doing the “Ten Years Gone” retrospective of Everything Fails. So these will be like pickup issues as we go.

I am also taking requests—meaning if you know of one of my influences and that’s the one you want to read about, tell me, and that’s who we’ll do next.

Happy days, y’all. Be well.

Xoxo,

T

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