I’ll just come right out and say it.

I rarely read Stephen King. Not because he isn’t good. It’s that I don’t like horror.  So me and his stories … not so much. And therein lays the irony. Here’s why:

As part of our Crazy 8 Press theme this month, we challenged one another to blog about a piece of writing that inspires us as authors ourselves.

In my previous life I received a degree in Secondary English Education from Buffalo State College. My plan — as man much younger than I am today — was to become a full-time high school English teacher. But after graduation I switched gears and went into journalism instead, and now I write novels.

Anyhoo, as part of my teacher’s course load at the time I was required to take a class in teaching writing. Enter said mad author scientist Stephen King. For my final paper — which counted for half of my semester’s grade — I wrote about (and gave a presentation on) the inherent value in teaching The Stand.

In particular I noted the epic novel’s modeling of dialogue, setting, tension, and character development. Granted, I found the book’s ending a bit weak, but the first 850 pages — eight hundred and fifty! — are absolutely mesmerizing. Trashcan Man. Fran. The Walking Dude, a.k.a. Randall Flagg. Whoa. I’ll never forget them.

The opening scene at the military site. The cough in the movie theater. And that heart-thumping trek through the Midtown Tunnel? Yikes. Talk about feeling like you’re in a moment — a moment so vivid and intense I could barely breathe — or wait to see what happened next.

But let’s return to Buffalo State College. I remember the scene vividly. It was the fall of 1993, in the English Department. The corner classroom was large, so there were many windows, and though the day was overcast, a beam of light shone on the floor, at my feet. I took it as a sign.

Because back then, the ‘Stephen King is a literary doofus horror hack loser disgrace to all writers and writing’ campaign among the literati was in full effect, and as an emerging English teacher, not overtly championing classic ‘literature’ was equally popular.

So … yeah… I had a little edge to me that day.

But if you’re going to stand up among your peers and profess the writing of Stephen King as a viable English teaching tool … you gotta just go for it. Can’t hold back.

So as I stood before my classmates, and announced my topic, I endured the expected gaggle of snickers, eye rolls, and thought balloons casting all sorts of clever insults my way: Stephen King? I think Colchamrio will be pumping gas before teaching class! Ha!

But you know what? I didn’t care.

To this day, any time I get hit with writer’s block, I stop what I’m doing, reach up to my bookshelf, open to any random page from my hardbound copy of The Stand, and within moments I’m inspired. I must have done this a dozen times as I wrote Finders Keepers, and another handful as I wrote Crossline.

If I have an author’s inspiration bible … The Stand is it. It has served me well, and continues to do so.

As for my Stephen King presentation? I endured.

And I got an A.

LONG ISLAND, NY (October 17, 2013) — The hero of veteran science fiction writer Michael Jan Friedman’s new young-adult superhero novel, I Am The Salamander,  is a cancer survivor.

“I didn’t set out to make Tim Cruz a kid who had cancer,” Friedman said. “But when you read I Am The Salamander, you’ll see why it makes perfect sense for Tim to have beaten that disease, and why he’s in a position to offer hope to real teens trying to beat cancer themselves. And let’s face it, hope is what superheroes do best.”

I Am The Salamander is being funded by a Kickstarter campaign. ““The publishing landscape has changed,” said Friedman, who has written 70 novels for major publishers like Simon & Schuster, Harper Collins, and Random House. “It’s harder than ever to get publishers to take a chance on a story, especially a quirky one like I Am The Salamander. And when they do, the book’s shelf life is shorter than that of a jar of half-sour pickles.

“I want I Am The Salamander to be around for a good long time,” he said. “That means I have to get it in the hands of readers on my own, and I have to keep it available to them.”

However, Friedman said, he wouldn’t ask anyone to donate to the I Am The Salamander campaign “just because it’s a worthwhile thing to do. I’m asking because it’s also the best thing I’ve ever written, and because I want to get it out to readers the most direct way possible.”

Friedman is asking his readers for $5,000. to cover the cost of book design and printing. The book’s cover was rendered by up-and-coming Brazilian talent Caio Cacau, who previously illustrated the cover to Friedman’s recently rereleased first novel, The Hammer and the Horn.

Those who wish to make donations to the I Am The Salamander campaign can do so at Kickstarter.com.

So the question of the day, “Hey, Glenn, who inspires your writing?”

First off, I’m lucky to say that I’ve never been inspired by the writer of “Pay To The Order Of…”  I’ve never written for need of money, though I’ve certainly written for want of it. I’ve always found myself unable to write anything with any poetry in the words if I need funds, it saps a certain spark out of the language. Oh sure, I can craft words and make serviceable prose, but the magic isn’t there.

That said, who inspires me? Let me tell you a story…

I grew up, as so many of my contemporaries did, in a sort of Golden Age of science fiction– Star Trek was in reruns on channel 11, Star Wars was in the movie theaters, and new sf and near-sf shows were coming up all over the place like Space:1999 and Ark II and Star Blazers, and I could read the Legion of Super Heroes and Green Lantern and Guardians Of The Galaxy. And my father got me reading books early, reading the Foundation Trilogy when I was seven and back when it was still a trilogy.

But I was growing up in 70s suburbia. I couldn’t figure out how I could get from a Long Island bedroom into outer space, how to insert myself in all of these strange and wonderful worlds. Even New York City was a long way away for a kid, and it was a scary place then, filled with all the dangers the newspapers could tell us about. I felt like Luke on Tatooine, as far away from the action as possible.

Then I was introduced to Spider Robinson, and the most famous of his works, the stories centered around Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon– where all those strange and wonderful things were happening in a bar on Route 25A in Suffolk County.

Well, heck– I lived in Suffolk County, I lived on 25A! That place must have been just down the road from me! The advice given to writers is “write what you know”, Spider was writing what I knew.

And so I read the stories about the talking dogs and time travelers, and the aliens and the absurd puns, and the people and the community they built, all the while looking for clues as to where exactly the place was. Because that was accessible. I could make the leap from where I was to the fantastic, to the future. It was, quite literally, the gateway.

Through Spider I was introduced to Robert Heinlein’s works among many others, and through his own writings I was introduced to characters who I might have easily passed in the supermarket and just hadn’t been introduced to yet, real people with flaws and quirks and horrible cases of paronomasia. And many years later, I got to meet Spider and his lovely wife Jeanne, and we told each other stories and sang songs, and he was just about exactly like his writing had shown himself to be. His authorial voice was true to himself, and I was proud to publish an electronic version of Night Of Power back in the 90s.

Spider’s had a bit of a rough patch of late, including a heart attack about six weeks ago. So I’m glad to have a chance to put down in writing what I’ve mentioned to him before, to thank him for showing how to get from Kansas to Oz.

If you’ve never done so, go read some books from Spider Robinson right now.

I was amused to see that Bob Greenberger, who suggested this month’s Crazy 8 blog topic “What one piece of writing inspires us?” and wrote the first blog entry based on it, violated the premise right off the bat. Being asked to single out a favorite book or piece of writing is, as he so correctly observed, like being asked to choose a favorite child or family member. Besides, there’s so many ways to be inspired: by a well-constructed story or beautifully realized characters or the elegance (or sparsity) of prose or the reality of the dialog. Bob failed to come up with a single piece that answered the question, deferring instead to the simple truth that inspiration came from different places depending on the mood and the need.

However, in the spirit of the challenge, I did attempt to pick just one piece from a list of favorite writing. I started with what is, in my opinion, the greatest novel of the 20^th century, The Great Gatsby (1925) by F. Scott Fitzgerald. It’s a beautifully written, stunning achievement of story telling that I reread at least every couple of years. Despite its dated and deeply ingrained Jazz Age flavor, it remains a gripping tale of one man’s need to reinvent himself in pursuit of an American Dream–not necessarily the American Dream, just the one that Jay Gatsby had imagined for himself. That his dream is, in reality, a vapid and ordinary bit of fluff like Daisy Buchannan is what makes his efforts and his fate so heartbreaking.

But that just lead me to another favorite novel of self-reinvention, Jack London’s autobiographical Martin Eden (1909), the tale of a San Francisco waterfront tough who by the sheer power of ideology and muscular intellect shapes himself into a man of letters and renown who, despite achieving everything he’s sought, is unable to live in a world that can’t also be reshaped to fit his proletariat beliefs. But then, I also love his Sea Wolf (1904), which is less a rousing seafaring adventure than it is a psychological thriller that pits brain against brawn. And then there’s London’s John Barleycorn (1913), another autobiographical novel, this one dealing with the author’s love of and struggles with alcohol.

Of course, it’s impossible for me to think of John Barleycorn without comparing it another great American work on the subject, Pete Hamill’s A Drinking Life (1994), another tough guy writer who dealt head on with his demons and addiction to drinking, this one in the form of a memoir that, if you haven’t read, you owe yourself an apology and the immediate purchase thereof. And how can I talk about Hamill without recommending his lyrical allegorical novel Snow in August (1997) and the fantastical Forever (2003), about a man who draws life from the hero of most of this author’s writing, New York City.

Oh, and speaking of F. Scott Fitzgerald, I didn’t mention his wonderful and heartbreakingly funny Pat Hobby stories, a series of short stories about a down on his heels Hollywood screenwriting hack, written near the end of the author’s life. And, while I’m on the subject of humor, there’s no way I can ignore the surrealist offerings of TV writer Jack Douglas, whose collections of short pieces, My Brother Was An Only Child (1959) and Never Trust A Naked Bus Driver (1960), both first read when I was eleven or twelve years old in the mid-1960s were, besides Mad Magazine, Jerry Lewis, and my father, the biggest influence on my thoroughly warped sense of humor. Not so funny (although it has its moments), but written by another 1950s television writer, is Helene Hanff’s epistolary masterpiece, 84 Charing Cross Road (1970), following her twenty year correspondence with London-based bookseller Frank Doel, a clerk at Marks & Co. located at the aforementioned address, which says more about the love and respect of friendships to me than anything since Huckleberry Finn.

I could keep going, on and on (and on and on and on), from longtime favorites acquired in my childhood like Madeleine L’Engel’s A Wrinkle in Time (1962), Sidney Taylor’s “All-of-a-Kind Family” series, and Jacques Futrelle’s “Thinking Machine” stories, to my two candidates for best science fiction novels of all time, Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End (1953) and Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination (1953), to the great detective and noir writers, including Rex Stout, James M. Cain, Dashiell Hammett, Lawrence Block, and Elmore Leonard, to name just a few, to novels by the likes of Gore Vidal, Frederick Exley, Kurt Vonnegut, William Goldman, Joseph Heller, Graham Greene, and absolutely anything by Phillip Roth…anyone who has ever made me stop dead in the middle of reading what they’ve written to soak in some line or idea. (The latest instance of that happening was while rereading Greene’s Our Man In Havana (1958) with the line, “Time gives poetry to a battlefield.” I mean…wow!)

And I’ve hardly even touched on short stories–J.D. Salinger’s “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” (1948); “The Girls in their Summer Dresses” by Irwin Shaw (1939); Ernest Heminway’s “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936)–and non-fiction, especially biographies of writers, or the great comic book writers…but don’t get me started! I could literally write a book on the books and stories that have had an impact on me and my writing. And, lately, I’ve been reading a lot of plays and screenplays by everyone from Lillian Hellman and Tennessee Williams to Paddy Chayefsky and Aaron Sorkin, looking for inspiration in the craft of writing dialog.

The point (at long last!) is, there’s some inspiration to be found in everything you read. If you’re lucky, it’s positive inspiration that leads you to take a chance on a new way of expressing an old idea or to up your game and reach for the level of prose and quality of writing you’ve just experienced. At the very least, even bad writing can be inspiring, if only as inspiration to avoid duplicating its badness.

But one piece of writing that’s inspired me? I wouldn’t even know where to begin.

I hate being asked about a favorite writer or book because it is like singling out a favorite child or family member. I like many different writers, many different books and have been an omnivorous reader for so long that I love certain books but prefer reading other, new works rather than circle back and keep re-reading the same ones.

Also, as I have grown up and have called upon all my reading to perform various tasks, from writing fiction to teaching in the classroom, different authors and works come to mind. I envy those who can conjure up beloved passages of fiction and poetry, especially their own works. My mind just doesn’t work that way.

So, this month, as the Crazy 8 Press writers discuss the one piece of writing that most inspires us, I am drawing a blank. The answer really is: it depends. Much as I put on different music for different tasks, different works come to mind.

For example, when I’m feeling really stuck, I read West Wing scripts by Aaron Sorkin to look at not only structure but how dialogue can reveal character. In a lot of my later Star Trek fiction, I found those works particularly useful.

Now that I am in the classroom, I realize different works about the writing and reading process, such as Stephen King’s On Writing come to mind and can be used with greater effectiveness than pure academic texts on the subject. Heck, whenever I get a chance to teach a creative writing course that may be the one book they read cover to cover. Beyond that, I’ve worked my way through various texts on the writing process such as Donald Maas’ Writing the Breakout Novel or Peter David’s Writing for Comics.

Other times, I study how certain prime time shows are structured. I’ve made little secret that I think Shonda Rhimes’ structure on Grey’s Anatomy is pretty strong and it’s testament to the foundation that it’s endured for a decade.  I’m studying shorter run series, such as House of Cards to see how to gain stronger impact when you’re limited in duration.

I’ve recently read the eighth and nine novels in Jim Butcher’s wonder Dresden Files series and have admired how he continues to advance the meta story while putting his protagonist through the wringer and that despite surviving each escapade, still doesn’t realize how powerful and successful he has been. All he sees are the flaws which in its own way is a strength and something I can learn from.

So really, it depends upon time and circumstance but the sheer breadth and depth of the writing I’ve exposed myself to really has made me a better reader and, hopefully, a stronger writer.