Board Thread:Questions and Answers/@comment-99.230.76.198-20191002032825/@comment-99.230.76.198-20191005071454

I did end up asking SL this question, as per Waxerreds advice, and here is what she said:

"For whatever reason, I have a hard time identifying influences in my own work. The only easy part of that to answer is the adult RPGs genre: the tone of the game and Simon's character are very much direct contrasts with several popular games I won't (and perhaps don't need to) name.

As for fantasy novels, I've read many that had an impact on my thinking about stories, but I'm not sure which directly influenced TLS. I read A Song of Ice and Fire when I was pretty young and it definitely had an impact. Joe Abercrombie is doing good work these days and I like his take on powers behind the scenes. Aliette de Bodard is one of my favorites when it comes to establishing setting, divinity, and belief. My approach to plotting, trying to put a large number of story elements on the table and then smash them all together, has similarities to Brandon Sanderson and Steven Erikson.

I read eclectically in non-fiction, so it's difficult to say there. If you're familiar with the hedgehog/fox dichotomy from Archilochus, I tend to favor the fox side, so I don't read as many books based on single big theories. In terms of writing pseudo-medieval worlds, I'd credit The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England (Ian Mortimer), A Distant Mirror (Barbara Tuchman), and The Century of the Surgeon (Jürgen Thorwald). I was definitely influenced byGuns, Germs, and Steel (Jared Diamond) and The Collapse of Complex Societies (Joseph Tainter)when it comes to the broad brushstrokes of cultures. Meditations (Marcus Aurelius) had an impact on me back in high school. My views on human/succubus psychology are influenced by a ton of pop neuroscience books, but I'll namedrop Predictably Irrational (Dan Ariely) for being a lot of fun.

I'm afraid this has been a boring and listy answer. There aren't a lot of cases where I can take an element of TLS and say "This is from influence X". The Church of Ivala is pretty heavily influenced by that religion degree I'm not using, but I'd rather not get into specifics there. But many of the elements, such as the characterization of the succubi, didn't consciously come from anything other than thinking, "If succubi were people, how might things work out?" The political/economic situation is just something that arose from all my influences, so I can't consciously pick out single ones."