They captivated my imagination and fuelled my hunger to read books. I had to write, there was no option. I started writing as soon as I learned to hold a pencil and scrawl my name. The power of the imagination, the ability for words and pictures to take you to another place, to stimulate the emotions, was irresistible. It was the only thing that made sense to me.
Influences fall into three periods.
There's the initial stage between the ages of six and eleven which I call my escapist period. Then there's the primary influences which started to shape my perception of storytelling in terms of technique, style, and content between eleven to eighteen. Then we basically come to the present. I had already started to devour Burroughs' Tarzan books and those led to the John Carter of Mars novels, Carson of Venus, etc. But of that period, the writer who had the most influence on me was Wyndham.