DL: Do you prefer writing short stories or novels?
LU: As a teenager, I thought I _was_ writing novels, though I suspect they were just novellas. :-) In fact, my efforts at mystery writing were all novels. But when I started to sell my fantasy fiction, I wrote short fiction, mainly because I could produce more of it at a greater speed. But I love novels for the scope they allow. It's the difference between a short sprint and lengthy marathon race. Both can leave you short of breath. One just takes longer than the other. I'm what one might call a "sneezing" writer (my friend David B. Coe always teases me about that). I literally toss everything on the page at a rapid pace and then clean it up in the editing phase.
DL: What authors influence your writing?
LU: Well, if we start with the earliest influences, those would be anyone who wrote fairy tales. When I was six, my great aunt gave me a beautifully illustrated book of fairy tales (The Golden Book of Fairy Tales by Adrienne Segur who illustrated it as well) that I still have. It's rather moth eaten and fragile, and my evil younger brother drew all over the pictures, but I did manage to find a reprint of it recently. I also read a lot of Greek and Roman mythology. I used to be able to recite nearly every story from Bulfinche's and D'Aulaire versions of mythology. And of course, I fell madly in love with Kipling and must have reread The Jungle Book over and over.
As for specific authors, Edgar A. Poe, Fred Fields, Shakespeare, but then I advanced to Lloyd Alexander and George MacDonald and C. S. Lewis and Alexander Key in my teens. At that point, I actually switched to reading mystery novels and was a long time fan of Ngaio Marsh, Peter Lovesey, Dick Francis and many others. Then somewhere along the way in my early twenties, I rediscovered fantasy with Andre Norton, Marion Zimmer Bradley and Fritz Leiber. Barbara Hambly and Teresa Edgerton are now my biggest influences, though I am also fond of Lynn Flewelling, Esther Friesner and a host of other authors who write really good fantasy.
Surprising to most people is that I did not read any Tolkein before the movies came out. Now, of course, I see what I missed since I have gone back and read the books. They always seemed to wordy to me when I was a teenager and a librarian handed them to me, but now I can see a lot of the poetry in the work...I can also see the sources Tolkein drew from.
