Authors Who Influenced Ornamental Women

The other day, someone asked me if there were any specific authors that influenced the way I wrote Ornamental Women. (What, you don't have a copy of Ornamental Women, my Gothic Fantasy novel, that is available in print and ebook? Well, you can remedy that here.)These are some of the authors whose influence I see at work under the skin of Ornamental Women; they are all people whose work has inspired me, so I list them with all possible gratitude: Anna Smith Spark When I started working on Ornamental Women in earnest, I was reading Anna Smith Spark's Empires of Dust trilogy. Dissecting how she wrote about acts of violence was instrumental in giving me the vocabulary for the bloodshed in Ornamental Women, both in terms of word choice and how violence can be used to set pacing in a scene. And I like to think there's some fairly grimdark, horrific violence in Ornamental Women, so you can judge for yourself how successful I was. This particular influence is perhaps most visible in the…