Suite101 talks to up and coming author Jesse Bullington about that which influences him as well as having ferrets for pets.
Are you influenced by specific writers or does your inspiration veer more toward a specific type of writing?
I think I’m influenced by most of the writers I’ve ever read—and that goes double for the writers I dislike. Nothing inspires me like writing I loathe. But I won’t name names where that’s concerned, lest the favour be one day returned.
As someone who learned to write mostly from reading, the bulk of my early efforts were overly derivative of whatever I was interested in at the time—Roald Dahl and James Howe in elementary school, Douglas Adams and Stephen King in middle school, H. P. Lovecraft and Umberto Eco in high school.
Identifying the style you’re subconsciously aping is the first step toward finding your own style, or styles—many of the authors I admire have very distinct and different styles depending on the individual work. Of course solidifying my own style is something that hasn’t completely happened yet, and it probably won’t for some time.
Looking over my writing, I do see the indelible imprints of a good many specific authors, particularly those who infuse their work with a bit of dark humour—Italo Calvino, Clark Ashton Smith, Umberto Eco, Jack Vance, Flannery O’Conner, Mikhail Bulgakov, Irvine Welsh, Warren Ellis, Edward Gorey, hell, even Angela Carter gives me a chuckle now and again. Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, Robert E. Howard, Lovecraft, and other pulp authors played it much straighter, of course, and I have a very strong fondness for the not at all intentionally humorous Gothics.
You're not a morning person, right?
Not when it is at all avoidable.
What's so cool about ferrets?
I take it you’ve never seen The Beastmaster? Ferrets are the pet equivalent of hobbits, and as such are about as cool as a dozen cucumbers. When confined to their spacious cage (Furcatraz) they spend all day snoozing on top of each other and eating, and when they are loosed they play for hours, hiding and chasing and wrestling. They can fit their bodies into any space they can get their skull through, which can be creepy for those not used to it—in the middle of the night our smallest carpet shark informed us that we needed a new cage when she pancaked through a tiny gap at the top of her prison, Dracula'd facedown the side, and joined us in bed. New cage, smaller gaps.
For all their softness ferrets are not too far removed from their fellow polecats and can be hard bastards if need be—one of ours was found on the streets where she was fending off three Jack Russell terriers that were trying to eat her. One pound of ferret versus three dogs bred to go after furry little animals and the result was a draw. I wasn’t the one to discover the scene so I don’t know exactly how long the battle raged, but knowing her I’m sure it was epic.
All of our four ferrets are rescues, because taking in rescued ferrets is just as important as rescuing dogs and cats instead of contributing to puppy farms, pet stores, and breeders. They are incredibly sweet animals, especially the dopey ones—our oldest, Windham, has a bonafide obsession with a squeaky rubber hamburger that he trots around the house with. There are few things more adorable than an elderly gentleman weasel taking a constitutional with a fake foodstuff half as big as he is.
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