I don't have what some overly educated in the traditional sense folks might consider to be a proper literary background. I spent much of my childhood hiding in one library or another and time I might have been in college wandering throughout the underbelly of society and filling notebooks, the likes of which I started keeping as a tween.      The most dominate of my early influences were old world tales of the supernatural and well sketched out tales of science fiction and anything by Mark Twain. Life changing books include Crash by J. G. Ballard,  Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand, The Odyssey by Homer, and Great Dialogues of Plato. Crash was the novel that inspired me to become a novelist; because while reading it I was struck with the belief that I could write that kind of wild twisted shit. Other major influences include books about the unknown and  books on psychology and history and religion and people of interest.