My name is Aminar, if you find Aminar somewhere else it;s probably me.
As a kid I never thought about being a write, I'm too practical to bank on a pipe dream. Then I got involved in this thing called DaishoCon, it's a little tiny anime con in the middle of nowhere Wisconsin. My friend from elementary school bullied me into helping. One of our guests was an author from the area that I'd never heard of. He had 1 book that was supposedly pretty damn good, so I picked it up. If you haven't heard of The Name of the Wind then get to a bookstore and find it.
When I met Pat Rothfuss I became an instant fanboy, what he did with his book and his personality were both amazing. Then he told me about The Dresden Files and I wound up reading those.
What Jim does with plot is amazing, the episodic books with the overarching plot is great. Between Jim and Pat I learned that wanted to be a writer. It took me 3 years to find a concept I could stick with and thus the world of Vaicea was born.
What I wanted was to take everything great about High Fantasy(original world creation) and Urban Fantasy(modern setting, grittier feel, and the ability to travel like we do today; and mangle them until I came out with something cool.
All of the magical peoples in my world are based on other things, but by and large they aren't myth. I've instead taken influences from the things that I truly love. Video Games, music(and my synestesia), Dinosaurs, Elementalists, Alice in Wonderland, Comic books, how utterly terrifying ants are when you look at what they can do, and made what amounts to a modern day super hero's with roots in fantasy setting, except that the best part of Urban Fantasy is when it's covert. It's more of a spygame played by the few people gifted with supernatural powers.
One of my favorite decisions was to have the series plot be unified by the antagonist, but the POV characters shift every book, allowing me to have more diverse locations. The POV characters will not always be good guys, nor is the antagonist entirely a bad guy(evil yes, bad no). This idea was spawned by the question, why does everything big that we get to see happen in Chicago?