A sunny day today. With the heat index, we made 74˚F. We're having one of those coolish springs, which means more unseasonably cool weather, more thunderstorms, flash floods, and tornadoes. Today, I was up early, and by about 9 a.m. I'd finished proofreading and marking line edits (about the only "rewriting" I ever do) on "The Man Who Loved What Was" and "Two Monsters Walk Into a Bar. Tomorrow, I'll do the layout of Sirenia Digest 183 and 174, and I hope both issues will go out to subscribers tomorrow afternoon. I did a little work on the Winifred block today, but not as much as would like to have done. I need to get the geology section written for the next Cretaceous turtle paper I'm coauthoring with Drew Gentry (this will be paper 3 of 4, and an important one), but I'm having trouble laying my hands on some crucial references pertaining to the Niobrara and Pierre Shale formations. I promised you a list of the authors who had the greatest formative influence on my own writing, didn't I? I figure most of this this has shone up piecemeal in interviews and whatnot, and maybe even in this journal, but someone might find it interesting (and maybe disappointing, too). So, I'll try. It won't be complete, and it might come out slightly different were I to write it just next month, but here we go. Oh, this is an unranked list, okay? I'm just putting people down as I think of them, so please don't comment that you'd list X higher than I did. Danke. Also, I'm listing authors I was reading from, say, junior-high school into college, in the late 1970s and early 1980s. I have not included poets or authors of comics/graphic novels, though some of them were (obviously) very important to me. 01. Ray Bradbury 02. Edgar Rice Burroughs 03. Harlan Ellison 04. Shirley Jackson 05. John Steinbeck 06. William Faulkner 07. Angela Carter 08. James Joyce 09. H.P. Lovecraft 10. William Kennedy 11. Ambrose Bierce 12. Algernon Blackwood 13. James Herbert 14. Ernest Hemingway 15. Peter Straub 16. Harper Lee 17. Edgar Allan Poe 18. William S. Burroughs 19. Jack London 20. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. 21. Walter Tevis 22. C.S. Lewis 23. F. Scott Fitzgarld 24. Lord Dunsany (Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, 18th Baron of Dunsany) 25. Ramsey Campbell 26. Stephen King 27. T.E.D. Klien 28. Richard Addams 29. Lewis Carroll 30. Philip K. Dick 31. Peter S. Beagle 32. Dr. Seuss (Theodor Seuss Geisel) 33. Theodore Sturgeon 34. Flannery O'Connor 35. James Dickey 36. Gabriel García Márquez 37. Thomas Pynchon 38. Clive Barker 39. Dashiell Hammet 40. Daphne due Maurier, Lady Browning And, you know, I'm gonna say forty authors is more than sufficient for now. Make of this what you will. But the DNA of my own fiction is all tied up in here. These people, they're the ones who taught me how to write and what was important enough to bother writing about. Last night, we started the latest season of Naked and Afraid , because, what the hell. Every brain needs a little garbage, from time to time. Later, Aunt Beast 11:44 a.m. (Note, the plastic woolly mammoth I am holding is part of the British Museum set of prehistoric critters produced in the '70s and '80s, much coveted by collectors of plastic "dinosaurs." Yes, I have the whole set, even the hard to find Dimetrodon )