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I have always loved books and reading. I started reading adult novels (if you can call Leslie Charteris's The Saint stories adult novels) at age 7, and read roughly a book a day from then until age 32 when first son was born. At that point out of sleep-deprived necessity I slowed down to "only" 3-4 books a week. I read science fiction (voraciously), fantasy (ditto), mysteries, magical realism (in Spanish), and even a smattering of "literature" (when it actually has a plot and a point) or random stuff on almost anything. I also like history and (rarely) books like Michio Kaku's Hyperspace.
The first things I wrote that weren't required for a class were articles for our class newspaper, stories for the same, and poetry back in third grade. By fifth grade I was quite prolific. I have copies of poems I wrote back when I was eight or nine. Since roughly that age I have written poems at completely random times when the muse has been upon me, since poetry is something that writes itself in my head much more than a deliberate act of creation. In fact, I drive my family slightly bananas by speaking in rhyming couplets throughout extended conversations (until they threaten mayhem if I continue).
One of my most memorable experiences writing poetry in high school was from entering a poem I wrote in the school's poetry contest. It was rejected by the school's faculty -- because they were sure I had plaigerized it. It was too good for a ninth grader, and it reminded one or another of the judges of something they had read -- somewhere. I protested vehemently since (of course) I knew that I had written it completely originally, challenging them to produce the work I had supposedly copied it from. To no avail. It didn't matter. I clearly won the competition by a landslide as all the other high school student submissions apparently sounded like -- high school student submissions.
At some point I started collecting my poetry for real, and with the advent of computers (I owned a 64K motherboard IBM PC and have always been pretty much on the leading edge of computational technology) I started to turn it into a "book". From there (once in ascii text, forever in ascii text) it morphed and was added to until it was one of the very first collections of poetry published on the Internet, back even before there was a web (distributed via gopher and ftp, for people who recall antique protocols).
These (free) online books, in their web form, have been featured by invitation on a poetry webring, poems from them have been added to various other sites by request, they have been illustrated and sold in Australia (by a web-friend there) and are visited and linked even now by dozens of people every day. For people who prefer to read poetry from a portable and warm book instead of from a relatively restraining and cold computer they are available in inexpensive print form on Lulu.com.
I started writing serious stories (ones that are pretty readable) starting in high school at about the same time. Many of these, alas, are lost over the years although one or two early stories survived (at least in fragments). From the early 80's on, however, nearly everything I wrote was on computer, and was transferred from 5.25" floppies to early hard disks, from one hard disk to another, and hence have bee preserved, polished, tweaked, and saved for the day I would publish them. That is this day -- at last the Internet has developed facilities that permit me to publish without the assistance or intervention of an "editor" or "agent" -- my early experiences with "the writing establishment" convincing me not to trust anyone and to write for myself above all others.
At this point I have accumulated three or four complete novels that I finished and simply set aside until it would be possible to publish them without things like a "mandatory" use of an agent (publishing companies having cleverly figured out how to basically force all authors to pay for the bulk of the editing and book selection process out of their share). Lulu was a godsend -- a process I was in control of from the very beginning. All my poetry, novels, textbooks, and informational books are coming out on lulu as fast as I can get them converted and buy them ISBNs.
My primary literary influences come from a mix of books and my relatively rich life experiences. I grew up in India (my father worked for Ford Foundation) and was hence exposed to the incredible diversity and richness of Indian literature and culture from such an early time that I never even found it remarkable. I found the United States remarkable when we returned (me age 12) to a blizzard in upstate New York, to a world where black people were "invisible" and (when seen at all) called something I'd never heard before in my life, to a world dominated by the festering war in Viet Nam. This was odd to me since I was raised surrounded by people with brown skin as one of a very small minority. India (as you will see if you read them) very much comes through in my writing: its philosophy and religion and culture.
The more "direct" literary influences from things that I read, have read, will read in the future would definitely include: Heinlein, Zelazny, Asimov, Farmer, Brin, Forward, Tolkien, Chant, Howard, Burroughs, Doyle, Rand, E.E. Smith, Christopher, Verne, Wells, Baum, Charteris, Christie, Wolfe, Gardner (several of them)... you get the idea. I have several thousand books in my house, including most of the best of most of these writers, all of it for some of them, plus hundreds of books that nobody's likely to have heard of (e.g. James Gunn's "The Joy Makers", which beautifully anticipated "The Matrix" movie series in many ways).
It is my opinion that a writer as much as any other human being should polish their wits constantly. When I'm not writing or teaching or otherwise directly working, I try to exercise my brain. I do NY Times Sunday crosswords (in as little as an hour, more often 3-4 hours and can finish a double-black belt sudoku if I put my mind to it, and have a pile of both at all times to work through while accompanying my wife shopping. Lest that sound too esoteric, I also play World of Warcraft or watch The Simpsons on TV with my sons.
Other influences on my writing are less directly "verbal" or associated with storytelling -- linked, for example, to my education, my profession, my many avocations that join my vocations (plural in both cases). Physics is obvious, philosophy is less obvious. Then there are mathematics, statistics, computing. The latter is fairly important as I write quite a bit about it.
I'm an open source enthusiast, a linux/unix expert, wrote and maintain open source code that e.g. tests random number generators or permits a LAN or cluster of computer systems to be monitored, and am one of the longest term members of the beowulf list for people who know what that is. I have the world's only free online text on cluster computer engineering, and am moving it into print on lulu along with everything else, although it will still be available for free for those who can't afford it any other way.
Teaching is also critical. I was born to teach, and teach compulsively. Sometimes in rhymed couplets (until again, people tell me to shut up!) I teach physics (introductory through graduate level) at Duke, and am also a pre-major advisor there. I'm in the process of publishing two textbook/lecture note sets I use in courses I teach, both through lulu (of course). Again both are online for free and have been used by hundreds of thousands of students all over the world to supplement or even replace their college physics texts. I also teach random students from around the world -- students in India interested in cluster computing, students at Duke interested in statistics, neural networks, programming. If it will hold still and listen, I will teach it.
I write more than just novels. I write constantly and more or less live at a keyboard. For example, I'm a "legend" at Duke for my long emails, and on the beowulf list they accuse me of being a collection of "rgb-bots" who write my replies because I can churn out five pages of reply in twenty minutes of typing. I write for magazines several times a year, notably the now defunct "Cluster World Magazine" and for the alive and well Linux Magazine, where I had an article just a couple of months ago and will probably place another before the end of this year. I also do computer consulting, usually pretty high end stuff, in areas of my particular expertise (which are broad).
In years past I helped found a company that did predictive modelling using a really hyper-advanced genetically optimized feed forward neural network that I wrote, which failed in the aftermath of the dot-com collapse (although it wasn't a dot-com, companies basically all ran out of money and stopped buying our services longer than we could afford to sit idle). I still have the neural network code, of course, and am a pretty serious expert on neural networks, information theory, modelling theory, and stuff like that, although a curiously narrow one as I know and care little about most of the traditional few-variable modelling methods in favor of the ones that can only be solved by methods suitable for truly complex high-multivariate systems. Interesting problems, in other words. But NNs are fun, and certainly the entire experience has been an important experience.
Although I do have the usual BS and Ph.D in (theoretical) physics required to work in my profession, I also completed a philosophy major as an undergrad at Duke (one which at the time was not recognized as you couldn't mix a B.A. and a B.S. as a "double major"). No matter, philosophy and history and religion are major interests of mine, and I'm working on a book that I expect will say the final word, in some very mathematically precise sense, on metaphysical axiomatic philosophy and the theory of knowledge. Yes, it is being done using lulu as a publication base (not yet available for distribution though). Yes, an early version is available online for free at my website and attracts lots of visitors, ten or twenty a year of whom contact me with comments or to initiate discussions.
As an apostatic ex-Christian who has "converted" to the disorganized religion best described as "Zen Deism" -- belief in God, disbelief in all human scripture, observing empirically that certain aspects of Zen practice put one in as close contact as it is possible to be with God, I find this kind of topic fascinating to write about. Zen Deism has strongly influenced both my poetry, and in a lot of ways it "wrote" The Book of Lilith (one of my novels, available from Lulu, Amazon, and many other bookstores paper and online) -- it certainly was the basis for much of Lilith's experience of God.
In addition, I love to fish, hunt, take care of my wife (a physician in Durham) and three sons, and can draw or paint, build a house, fix a car, create a website, figure almost anything out even if I don't know it to begin with, and I do all of the cooking for the family (except for a bit that my sons do, taught by their old man to be self-sufficient).
As Heinlein once said (IIRC) -- specialization is for insects! It definitely isn't for writers...
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