List the people you admire and look to for advice…

Stephen King

His writing is inspirational to me because he has a way with detail where he’s really underselling the horror of what’s happening, but the way it’s written, your mind embellishes it.

I loved his book On Writing and have adopted several pieces of his advice as my own writing rules.

Edgar Allan Poe

Poe, like King, has a way of making detail become more vivid in your mind than it is written on the page. While King is often known for his more bloody and violent horror scenes, Poe is more of a master of psychological suspense and torment, and I find myself lost in his stories even though I’ve read them many times before.

Ellen Hopkins (early)

Hopkins’ early works really made me think for the first time about how you can use poetry to tell an entire story and how formatting a poem can change its meaning once the image is seen. I loved Impulse the most as a teen.

JRR Tolkien

While far from my genre, Tolkien helped give me the courage to let my imagination fill in the gaps left by reality. To not be afraid of just literally making things up as I go along writing this entirely made-up story. Also, he taught me the value of a good character backstory and the reason people always say try and capture the reader’s interest from the first page, not in Bree.

Charles Dickens

My friends, may life’s many ironies never defeat us. Life has a way of kicking you to the curb like an old tin can a few times, and a happy ending is not guaranteed, but at least you can get paid by the word if you’re really good.

Marquis de Sade

No matter how sick, twisted, and disgusting the tale, it can have a happy ending. Ill characters can meet ill ends. Good characters can have a better life. That’s what we all hope for. My name was popularized by the novel Le Triomphe de la Vertu par le Vice or The Triumph of Virtue over Vice, eventually simply known as Justine.

I feel it’s my duty as a writer to go a little against the grain and allow evil to prevail some of the time, but it depends on the story. Characters like the ones in de Sade’s stories don’t deserve to prevail, and if you’re bad enough, even I’ll off you for my own peace of mind.