Ashen Rider is my debut Epic Fantasy to be published by The Arcanist: Fantasy Publishing on December 19th, 2025. As I was performing the final proofread, I couldn’t help but smile at all the tiny intricate references and easters eggs on nearly every page.

Most of these only I will ever know, but I wanted to share some of the core influences behind this book that means so much to me.

Conan the Cimmerian by Robert E. Howard:

Ashen Rider isn’t strictly a Sword & Sorcery—but it contains several elements of the genre. I’ve always been moved by the tone of the American pulps and sought to emulate it when I began working on Ashen Rider in earnest.

In 2023, I attended a fiction workshop during my undergrad, which required that I curate a reading list of short fiction that would guide the creation of a new novel. I read several classic Conan stories to understand the mindset I wanted to carry into Ashen Rider.

The professor of that class was an avid Howard fan and encouraged me to keep developing my early drafts of Ashen Rider. If not for that initial vote of confidence, I’m not sure I would have finished my insane contribution to the Fantasy genre.

Malazan Book of the Fallen (and the Novels of the Malazan Empire) by Steven Erikson and Ian C. Esslemont:

It almost seems redundant to list Erikson and Esslemont as an inspiration—it’s like saying air inspires me to breathe. These were the books that made me fall in love with the craft of writing Fantasy. They showed me that Fantasy can achieve so much more than just plot-driven questing.

What I’ve always admired about the Malazan format is Erikson’s short fiction approach. Every chapter, every section within those chapters, reads like a short story and employs literary devices common in short fiction. The result is a neatly threaded novel that reads like an anthology.

Ashen Rider takes the short-fiction approach to the next level—different sections are written like entirely different stories to create the sense of found media that has been compiled to create a cohesive narrative structure.

The Broken Earth Trilogy by N.K. Jemisin:

Jemisin rocked my world with this trilogy. If Malazan was what had shown me that it’s possible to string together story fragments, Jemisin gave me the permission I needed to try it myself

The Broken Earth Trilogy is composed of three narrative threads, each using a different style of POV (1st person, 2nd person, and 3rd person). I also did this in Ashen Rider.

When I was submitting early drafts to the fiction workshops of my undergrad, another professor told me that “no editor in their right mind would publish this.” She urged me to switch to a more traditional form of narration.

But I just pointed at Jemisin—who had won awards using the strange technique. I’m so glad I didn’t give in to the pressure.

World Mythology:

There isn’t one specific story I can point to—mythology seeps into our culture and collective unconscious though myriad channels.

In “The Scarlet Chair”, the Excerpts from The Haimiad were my attempt at writing epic prose poetry to emulate tales like Beowulf and The Illiad.

Similarly, the melodramatic tone of Ashen Rider, as well as much of the content, is inspired by the tone exhibited in modern media based on classical myth.

The Broadway musical, Hadestown, is one such modern tale that drips with the atmosphere and melodrama that has found its way into my work. Hadestown motivated me to create The Great Stair. I’m in love with the drama of “all the way up… and all the way down.”

The Divine Comedy and Paradise Lost:

I’m ashamed to admit that despite my love for these classic works—I’ve yet to complete full readthroughs. Part of this is lack of time (and a mountain of other things I need to read). Admittedly, the other part is procrastination.

I’ve read the first five cantos of Inferno while studying the use of terza rima to use in my own epic poem, “Parricidio,” which I had written as part of my capstone project.

Paradise Lost, unfortunately, lives only in my implicit knowledge of the zeitgeist and a few video essays that I’ve listened to on the topic. This might come as a surprise, given that my underworld is literally called Pandemonium.

The unique quality of these foundational works is that they’ve inspired so many others throughout history.

What has more directly informed my setting is the 2014 found-footage horror film, As Above, So Below. After seeing that film, I became obsessed with a depiction of Hell that lives beneath our feet. Not to mention the film’s (and my own) blatant rip of Dante’s line “Abandon all hope, all ye who enter.”

Dungeons and Dragons and Tabletop Gaming:

Ashen Rider would not exist if not for my background in Tabletop. The Mad Wizard was first the quest giver of the very first session of D&D that I ran for my friends back during my senior year of High School and exists in some of the adventures I’ve published. The setting of Dusk and Dawn and many of its characters were first trial and errored at the game table.

The plot of Ashen Rider, too, had begun as an adventure module. I had published four one-shot adventures with complex boss battles that I dubbed “Boss Fight.” Ashen Rider was to be the fifth in that series, an adventure called “If Love Were Enough” where the party meats a sad Paladin of Devotion who realized his lover and goddess was actually evil.

Morgana was originally a modified version of the Deathpact Angel, which is an adaptation of a Magic: the Gathering card. Also, it turns out that Ashen Rider is an Orzhov card from Theros, the three-set block inspired by Greek myth and the one that introduced me to tournament play in middle school. Talk about zeitgeist!

“Griffin Rider” by an 11-year-old James D. Mills:

It’s no surprise to anyone in my family that I became a fantasy writer. I’ve written countless “chapter ones” to countless books I dreamt up as a child.

The concept that stuck most with me was “Griffin Rider,” a story about a young boy—totally not just Percy Jackson in a trench coat—who befriends a griffin in a church and flies through the roof to escape a boring sermon.

Yeah… I never got that one out of my head.

Closing Thoughts

My hope for this article is to demystify the creative process—and to give you permission to shamelessly rip off the things you like. Sure, I had cut Otataral and Cotillion the Shadow God from my setting once I moved it from tabletop to published fiction, but originality lies in the voicing of the ideas—not in the ideas themselves.

Ashen Rider is available for purchase in paperback and hardcover from The Arcanist: Fantasy Publishing or available for free to read online at magazine.thearcanist.net.