My fictional influences are vast: John Irving (story), Stephen King (horror), Chuck Palahniuk (style), Raymond Carver (images), Larry David (humor), David Bowie (style), Mike Patton (strangeness), John Kennedy O'Toole (characterization), and Quentin Tarantino (dialogue). That is a few of them. If it was a comprehensive list, you would be scrolling down right now, and you would be gone...by...NOW!

Hemingway talked about how he was at such and such a place when he was writing such and such a piece. I've never landmarked my piece in such a fashion. I just write.

My fiction is negative, violent, horrific, cynical, and immoral. It is, in other words, everything that I am not. My fiction is not political. Nothing bores me more than an author who feels the needs to tell you how smart he is by detailing for you his views on such and such an event. Get over yourself, I want to scream, and get back to the damned story. Story should rule, not writing, not intelligence, and not setting. It strikes me that so many people try to write like Faulkner that they indulge themselves on their words and forget the story. One particular author takes you to the brink of entertainment, and then he goes off into self-indulgence, until by the time you get to the pay off you don't care anymore, but he's an excellent writer. He displays an adept use of vocabulary. Who gives a...keep to the story. You killed my enjoyment with your improper pacing oh glorious, best selling author.

The one problem with this mentality is that I don't have epics in my personal library of material. If I fleshed my material out and wrote three hundred some odd pages on the tree my main character passed, I would have longer stories, more novels, and I would be bored out of my mind by this profession.

I used to a "big, fat liar." I dated hot women before any of my friends did, and I had a big brother like all of the cool kids in my class had. It didn't take long before I got caught, and everyone realized I wasn't all I pretended to be. I focused my big, fat lies to fiction.

I started writing heroic fiction in which all of my characters knew what was going on, what each punchline meant, and how to handle humanity. This was a result of reading it so often. This is what other writers did. They filled that psychological hole that made you feel better about yourself when you were done reading their great American novels. The bully beating the lunch money out of you got beat up in your favorite fiction. The righteous indignation that the main character expressed was always right on Dude! Boring. Lies. All lies.

"I wouldn't really say I like your fiction," say friends of mine. "It's not enjoyable to see people go through that stuff."

My goal is to reach into your underbelly and pull out that awful mess you ate last night, because it had barbeque sauce on it. I prefer to write what I consider realistic stories without barbeque sauce or parsely on the plate.

On that note, I don't put setting in my story, because I'm more of a storyteller than a writer. I loathe superfluous words that spend three hundred words describing a tree. If you want a tree in my story put it there yourself. If you feel the need to look up at a cloud shaped like the Dig 'Em frog on the Super Sugar Smacks cereal box that's up to you. I'm not going to waste my time writing it. I don't like reading setting, and I don't like writing it.

I don't write Lovecraft style stories, though I enjoy reading them. I don't write Poe style goth, Koontz style cutesy where everybody hugs and kisses at the end, Clive Barker where everyone gets described to death, or King where every villian calls people tootsy or old gunner, and where there's a 60's/70's song that children sing on swings when the monster is near. I just write reality as I see it.

My works of fiction can be found at:

http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/Rilaly

I also like to swear, and I like to see people get hurt on television...or in other fictional formats.