I loved the fantasy elements in all three stories. (Granted, Dandelion Wine isn’t a fantasy story, but it just seemed very magical to me.)

I grew up watching my sister reading more than writing, but there’s no denying the effect older siblings can have on younger siblings. The books my sister read, the music she listened to, and the movies she watched were what I wanted to read, listen to, and watch.

What I like about the stories you listed, and the kinds of books you like, is the imagination that goes into them. A lot of mainstream fiction is the same old kind of thing, and unless the writer can really craft a story, it’s hard to hold my interest too long.

While I tend to write something teetering on mainstream fiction — even touching on the human condition — I like writing about how the human condition is affected by fantastic elements. With the exception of some short stories, I think everything I’ve written has something strange in it.

I know some people knock genre fiction, but genre fiction is a great place to look for anybody wanting to learn how to structure a story.

He inspired me to actually start by doing it all the time himself. I grew up around a guy who hugged his typewriter, banging out short stories on neon green paper. Even before that he wrote handwritten stories that I broke into his desk to read. Even earlier he drew and wrote comic books, with exciting adventures from guys like Omega the mutant to the rock band that turned into super-powered heroes.

I’d followed him in the music he liked and the books he read, so it was nearly inevitable that I’d try my own hand at it. Madeleine L’Engle and C.S. Lewis inspired what I’d write, or some of it, anyway. I tried horror first because it’s what my brother was writing, but I was drawn to fantasy, particularly fantasy that took place in expansive unreal worlds. So a huge amount of what I wrote in my earliest years was fantasy.

Then I got back into comics, wrote a bunch of horror, and more and more I find myself interested in the same things that I loved as a kid. Strange worlds populated both with people like us and with strange exotic aliens. I enjoy reading more serious fiction (by many of the same authors you like), but the older I get the less I care to peer too deeply into the human condition without some sort of fantastical softening agent.