Some More Answers

xinef
(1)I like a lot of the working authors who post here on LJ, and it would be wrong in me to have favorites.  Looking at the shelf, I've been reading the Sookie Stackhouse books, Rachel Caine's Stormwarden series, matociquala's Jenny Casey books, CJ Cherrhy's Foreigner triple-play, a manga series called Fruits Basket, and a whole buncha seemingly unrelated non-fiction that I'm sure the backbrain will eventually use somehow.

(2)Oh, let's see... Margaret Sutton, Erle Stanley Gardner, Agatha Christie, Rex Stout, Francis and Richard Lockridge, Dell Shannon, Dashiell Hammet, Raymond Chandler, Mary Stewart, Dorothy Eden, Elswyth Thane, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Ruth Stiles Gannett....Superman, Green Lantern, Flash, and the Justice League of America comic books...Rutabaga Stories, Charles Dickens, Willa Cather, Lois Lenski, The Trouble with Jenny's Ear... a book which I think was called The Nine Questions, which I only read once and it blew me away, and I've been trying to find it for the last thirty years, to see if it really was as wonderful as I remember...Madelaine, The Valley of Creation, Dragonflight, Samuel Shellabarger, Daphne Du Maurier, The Butterfly Kid,  Peter Beagle, Andre Norton, The Prince and the Pauper...  Those are all that leap to mind at the moment, but I think it's fair to say that, up to the point where your skull begins to fill up, everything you read is "an influence."


schulman -- No, dern it, I haven't.  Have you?