The inspiration for a couple of famous books (and Twilight Express)

Writers are generally neurotic folks who fear failure - or blank page, which is a failure to come up with an idea - on a daily basis. This is why they tend to be particularly intrigued by the inspiration behind a story.

I received a couple of e-mails asking about my own ideas for Twilight Express and where they came from, which I'll mention later. But first I'd like to describe some inspirations/ideas behind a couple of my favorite books/novelists; people who are certainly more talented than I.

When I read Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, which is one of my all-time favorite novels, I read the notes that accompanied it. I can't remember if it was mentioned in the preface or afterword, but Nabokov described a story of a laboratory chimpanzee that had been encouraged to draw. The poor animal finally drew a picture: it was the bars of its cage. How he took this sad story and worked it into Lolita may seem odd at first, but a fair bit of the novel is about someone who is also held captive and helpless.

Frank Herbert's Dune series includes some parallels to Shakespeare, which isn't surprising as Herbert finished reading all of Shakespeare's plays by the time he was 12 years old. This Web page discusses them - plus the similarities between the Star Wars films and Dune series of sci-fi books - here:

http://www.spookybug.com/origins/dune.html

Last and least, I began to write Twilight Express after seeing a Japanese film called Survive Style 5. In this film, Shinichi Chiba (aka Sonny Chiba, Hattori Hanzo from Kill Bill Vol. 1) plays a senior executive, Kazama, who is reviewing creative work from an advertising agency. In his scene - which is more of a cameo than anything else - he is reviewing a new television commercial written by a copywriter with an odd sense of humour. I remember thinking that Mr. Chiba cleaned up awfully well.

A few nights after I saw the movie, I had an odd dream in which I was playing cards with the Kazama character on a train. There was nothing risque about the dream; Mr. Chiba appeared as Kazama and I was, well, myself. I can't remember who won the game.

So this odd little dream was where I got the initial idea for the character of Shinichi. I turned him into an architect as I dated an architect when living in Asia. I suppose I should have changed his first name, but I ended up keeping it as I liked the meaning of it. It is generally reserved for first-born sons and loosely translates to "faithful first one" or "true first one".

While I have a slightly similar appearance as Melina Reilly in Twilight Express - mainly, her coloring - there are lots of dissimilarities. While I have dark red hair and green eyes, I'm taller and older than the story's Melina. There are no familial or educational similarities at all.

When I created Melina Reilly, I wasn't thinking of myself - I was thinking of the actress Jennifer Morrison, who plays Dr. Cameron in the television series House.

The car accident detailed in the last portion of Twilight Express comes from memory. While living in Manila in the Philippines, I witnessed a similarly horrific crash scene, except that the weather that contributed to it was heavy rain, not snow.