Inspirations
In no particular order, here's a list of things that inspired me and/or that you might enjoy if you like my fiction
- the Discworld novels by the late great Terry Pratchett
I don't recommend starting with The Color of Magic (the first novel in the setting), as it took him some time to get into the swing of things
- Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett
Amazon did an excellent 6-episode adaptation of it, but there's a lot in the novel you're missing without it
- The Leaky Establishment by David Langford and its satirical view on the British nuclear weapons program (unintentionally) inspired some of my view of Bell corporate culture
- Command and Control by Eric Schlosser was also an inspiration about cold war military culture and the AUTOVON system
- Exploding The Phone by Phil Lapsley is an excellent look inside the Bell System and phreaker culture in the 60s and is almost entirely why Bell is the villain
- my visit to the Telephone Museum in Ellsworth, Maine inspired my awe in telephone switching
- this 1981 article from Mother Jones served as inspiration for the coercive nature of Bell in 1ESSIE
- the SCP Foundation is a significant inspiration and I've tried to write some pieces in their writing style
- the game Control (2019) (which was also inspired by the SCP Foundation) gave me a love for secrets hiding in brutalist bureaucratic offices that's all over the portrayal of Bell in my writing
- the novels of Jasper Fforde have influenced my style, especially his Thursday Next series
- Monday Starts on Saturday by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky (in a decent but occasionally difficult to read English translation by Andrew Bromfield) paints a picture of magical academia that I rather like
Their other novels, especially The Dead Mountaineer's Inn (excellent translation by Josh Billings) are also worth a read.
- the novels of Stanisław Lem, especially Peace on Earth and Return From The Stars are also excellent and an inspiration to 75Ω Love, although I do not envy the job of his english translators
- This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone is outstanding, and I hope I've captured even one tenth of the sapphic energy in that short novel
- Piranesi by Susanna Clarke has made me capitalize words that I want to imbue with additional Meaning
- the Speed Demon stories by Zhange
on the SCP Wiki's Third Law Hub are the type of lesbian action witchcraft I love.
I stole a lot of the idea of heavily armed high-speed lesbians conducting a heist and a way of describing combat from it for The Witch of the Wires
- "Estrogen and Brimstone" was ripped shamelessly off of this story of demon smut by @HardSundae on Twitter
- "75ohm Love" was strongly inspired by the excellent Drugs and Wires webcomic, which takes the idea much better than I ever could
- I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter by Isabel Fall has its fingerprints all over "75Ω Love" and it's a shame that she was harassed off the internet
- Scanners Live In Vain by Cordwainer Smith reminded me a fair bit of Isabel Fall's piece and led to the themes of 1ESSIE
- qntm's books and SCP Wiki pieces are a huge inspiration and led to me trying to write some in SCP style, and I shamelessly copied the look of their website for this one
- Dana Terrace's The Owl House (Disney Channel/Disney+) was an excellent kid's show that touches on witchcraft, trauma, being hispanohablante in the US, found family, and hating Connecticut.
It's also wish fulfillment for having a parent who's cool with you being queer.
The third season being compressed into 3 episodes was literal homophobia by Disney, and they should be ashamed.
- "ChronoPost" was inspired by an offhand joke about mailing estradiol back in time and reading the Wikipedia article about the Prague pneumatic post
- Mt. Sisyphus and Bog Witch were both inspired by hikes in the Adirondack mountains of upstate New York.
I wrote almost all of "Bog Witch" in the back seat of my friend's car as we headed home from a peat bog near Tupper Lake where I felt something
- the beach in the beach episode was inspired by Limekiln Lake up in the Adirondacks
- visiting the Diefenbunker and feeling weirdly cozy inspired Alice's bunker house in the witchcraft continuity
- Aviador Dro y sus Obreros Especializados is a Spanish synthpop band whose lyrics inspired some of the 75Ω vibes
and is actively making my accent in spanish worseIf I listen to too much of their music in one sitting, I start thinking about adapting Antimateria into a story - Neil Stephenson's (very lengthy) novels have probably inspired some details of my writing
- Seeming's song Reality is Afraid is quite the vibe of bending the rules of the world
- Soulfire by Little Steven and the Disciples of Soul is probably where I stole the name Soulsparking from
- Reversing/Hexing/Typing/Rewriting/Unifying The Technical Interview and its witches carefully rewriting the fabric of reality
- this tweet from @capsule_169 influenced 75ohm pretty deeply
- "Capacitive Touch" was somewhat inspired by this tweet from @quatoria and by @capsule_169's tweet above
- my use of text messages in Magic HRT and The Battery was entirely stolen from @Azure_Husky's Unknown Number
- "Sarah" was inspired by this screencap of a tumblr post
- Postcards From the End of the World by Victoria Scott hits hard and perfectly captures the loneliness of being alone in rural America, and its indelible mark will show up in anything I write that touches on those topics
- the scene of "remembering" something that I never actually knew in "6U of Lesbianism" is related to the idea of reverse emulation, but I believe I came up with it independently
- "NTSB Mosaic" was inspired almost entirely by this tweet from @caraesten, which just sent me own a rabbit hole
- the fast electric motorcycles in The Witch of the Wires were lifted from the Pacific Standard heist in Grand Theft Auto V Online
- of course, no accounting of my inspiration is complete without my wonderful friends, especially other writers on Twitter. I've bounced a lot of ideas off of my friends y les agradezco tanto para toda sus ayuda.
