In no particular order because I love them all equally: Terry Pratchett, Douglas Adams, Christopher Moore, JK Rowlings, and Tom Robbins.

This is a tough question since there are so many favorites, and they've changed over the years. Books like Madeleine L'Engle's "A Wrinkle in Time" and Hitchcock's "The Three Investigators" series were favorites when I was a kid and had a strong influence on my reading preferences. Now, Tom Robbin's "Skinny Legs and All," Christopher Moore's "The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove" and "Lamb," and Douglas Adams, "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," and "The Color of Magic" (or any of the books in Terry Pratchett's Disc World series, but since that's the first, I'll go with that) would all be up there.

My mother still has some of the hilarious poems I wrote when I was a kid. I remember sitting at my grandmother's dining room table writing them: Odes to my stuffed teddy bear, Oscar, the family dog, Muffy, and to my brother. In third grade, I wrote and illustrated a book of "School Rules." I'm not an artist--it's full of stick figures. Years later, my mother told me she and my dad locked themselves in the bathroom to read it so their laughter wouldn't hurt my feelings. They passed it on to my teacher, Mrs. Jones, who liked it so much, she gave it to her mother!

I'm a marine scientist, but to pursue my writing, I quit my full-time career and now am an adjunct biology instructor for the community college and online with UMUC. When I'm not writing or teaching, I do agility with my dogs, swim, and golf. And, of course, I read a lot.

A little bit of everything. Fantasy and satire are at the top of the list, but I love mysteries, thrillers, science fiction, anything by Carl Hiassen, biographies, some historic fiction. What I don't read would be a shorter list: romance. And even that will sometimes slip into my reading list.

I'm still refining it, but I'm definitely a plotter. I spend a lot of time thinking through the story and mentally figuring out a timeline. Then, I outline. I've done that with post-it notes and index cards stuck on a bulletin board, and with a roll of paper and colored markers, each character getting their own color, with lots of arrows connecting intersecting story lines. Once I've done that, I don't strictly follow along, but I do know the major plot points I need to include to get to where I'm going.

I'm working on "A Rattling of Bones," a magical realism novel based on a short story I had published at Infective Ink a few years back. When one of an elderly group of golfers dies, his friends use a passage from the Bible to bring him back and restore their foursome. His presence has some interesting effects on everyone around him and it divides the Holy City (Charleston) in two as people take sides about whether this is an act of God or Satan. You can read the short story here: http://infectiveink.com/?p=1700 Once I've got the first draft of that finished, I'll return to the chupacabra to write the last book in the trilogy, "Ye Goddess! A Tale of Girls and Gods." If you've read either "The Un-Familiar," you'll have some idea of what's ahead. The story picks up a few months after "The Un-Familiar" with the Kiki coming out of her coma. As the new familiar to a goddess---or should I say THE Goddess--Kiki has her work cut out for her trying to bring a very, very angry Carmen del Toro, aka Mother Nature, under control and convincing her not to eradicate humankind from the Earth.

I don't know if it's inspiration or necessity: my two dogs, Muggle and Lupin, and cat, Minerva get me out of bed. I'm the least regimented person I know and somehow ended up with three clock-work pets who live by their schedules. Breakfast is at 7 a.m. (or 6, depending on where we are with daylight savings time). They start jumping on my head and whining a few minutes before to make sure they eat on time. They're far better than an alarm clock because their morning antics put a smile on my face so I always wake up happy.

Can I have two answers? I was born and raised in upstate New York. I left there and moved to the Virgin Islands when I was 19. That's where I started to become the person I'd be as an adult so I that's where I really did my growing up. Both influenced my writing: New York because that's where I became an avid reader and started writing stories for myself and the Virgin Islands because that's where my inspiration lives.

I love when the chaotic swirl of complex story lines tumbling around in my head all come together into a cohesive whole. When I first see the timeline filled with plot points spreading out in front of me, but only blank pages on the computer screen, it's a bit intimidating. In those early stages, I'm insecure and worry I'm not up to the task of capturing all the complexity and nuances of what I see in my head and hope to write. As I get further in and start to untangle it all, I get more excited to see if and how I can bring it together. It's very similar to how I feel when solving puzzles (I'm a big fan of all sorts of puzzles.) It's very fulfilling to know I've accomplished what I set out to do when I finish. That doesn't mean I've managed it completely to my satisfaction, yet, but I suspect all writers feel that way. That's why we write the next one.