(What, you don't have a copy of Ornamental Women, my Gothic Fantasy novel, that is available in print and ebook? Well, you can remedy that here.)
These are some of the authors whose influence I see at work under the skin of Ornamental Women; they are all people whose work has inspired me, so I list them with all possible gratitude:
Anna Smith Spark
When I started working on Ornamental Women in earnest, I was reading Anna Smith Spark's Empires of Dust trilogy. Dissecting how she wrote about acts of violence was instrumental in giving me the vocabulary for the bloodshed in Ornamental Women, both in terms of word choice and how violence can be used to set pacing in a scene. And I like to think there's some fairly grimdark, horrific violence in Ornamental Women, so you can judge for yourself how successful I was. This particular influence is perhaps most visible in the chapters where Serafina has her back to the wall, grits her teeth, and lets her knives do their dark work.
Alexis Flower
Readers might notice--hell, might even object to--my use of deliberate anachronism in Ornamental Women. Nightsong is the most obvious example; it's patently ridiculous to have a bardic subculture inspired by black metal and to have its foremost practitioner speak with an outrageous Valley Girl accent, but Alexis Flower's beautiful, pornographic fantasy comic I Roved Out gave me the courage to throw that stuff in and never look back. If IRO can have characters in gimp masks among all the fantasy questing elements--well, then the field is wide open. If you're familiar with both IRO and OW, it's pretty obvious that Nightsong would party HARD with Maeryll and Cinder.
Also, Nightsong's Traitor's Argent was heavily inspired by Becky the "psycho Rooster" in IRO, albeit with a weird, biblical bent.
Tamsyn Muir
What I learned from Tamsyn Muir's Locked Tombs series is pretty simple, but it was crucial to the tone of Ornamental Women: you can combine incredibly dark subject matter with characters who are sometimes funny and honestly a little over-the-top. Plus, I could totally see Serafina and Nightsong dressing as Harrow and Gideon for Halloween.
Michael Moorcock and Andrzej Sapkowski
Taken together, Michael Moorcock and Andrzej Sapkowski form the two most traditional fantasy inspirations I was working from. Michael Moorcock's Elric of Melnibone was the first fantasy novel I really fell in love with as a teenager, so that's not too surprising. The character Cassie Mabcrowe is a bit of a tribute to Moorcock's hero Corum, who has the alien Eye of Rhynn and the six-fingered Hand of Kwll, but she's the "lady version, who is also power-hungry and a little evil" of that.
Wayland is a character cast from the mold of Andrzej Sapkowski's Geralt of Rivia or at least descended from that archetypal style of laconic monster hunter. This is probably most evident in Wayland's encounter with the noknitsa, though I think that plot line ends in a far darker way than the Witcher books would ever offer.
Charles Dickens
One of the biggest influences on my writing style and plot structuring in Ornamental Women was an author it often feels like you're not supposed to admit to enjoying anymore: Charles Dickens. I'll make no bones about it--I love Dickens.
Dickens was especially inspirational in the way he often sets a weird group of disparate characters wandering in a sprawling setting, with the same set of characters running into each other and intersecting in interesting ways. It probably pushes the bounds of credulity that Serafina crosses paths with Wayland, Nightsong, and Cassie in Piskaro--and that Nightsong separately meets up with Wayland and Cassie--but letting happenstance have a role in the overall structure of the book really appealed to me.
Also, wherever my sentences got long, and bristled with asides, that's a little bit of Dickensian wordsmithing creeping in. I'm not sorry.
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