official reply count to a million

This is a dangerous question, you realize.

That's increasingly hard to pin down, as Matt (my co-author) and I have been writing together since we were 14. It doesn't help that we're a bit playful with our writing styles. One book is about a tyrannical wizard-king who is trying to bring about a golden age in spite of his failing health and sanity. The other is a coming of age story that turns certain aspects of the Hero's Journey and traditional fantasy on their heads - such as the hero crossing the threshold from the magical world into the mundane world, instead of the other way around, or the hero beginning with kewl magick powers and gradually losing them as he confronts mortality and adulthood.

Matt and I have different influences. Terry Pratchett is there, but we don't write comic fantasy. Tolkien is there, but every fantasy writer says that. David Eddings, Terry Brooks, and Robert Jordan are there, but there are things they do that we would never want to inflict on a reader. George R. R. Martin is one of our new favorites, but we're not really writing that kind of series. I've enjoyed the Harry Potter series, but I have no interest in writing fantasy in a modern setting.

In truth, whatever I am reading has some pull over my writing, but it's about mood, not content. When I was reading The Shining, for example, there were a couple scenes I wrote that were more horror than fantasy.

Some of what we do is react against devices that we feel are overused by individual authors or by the genre as a whole - prophecies, exposition vending machines (Gandalf, I'm looking at you), over-describing people and places (Jordanizing, as we call it), etc...

And I'll stop there. I am ferociously passionate about my writing, but I've learned not to expect other people to be.