Borrowing from writers you admire is not theft. It is how craft develops.

Every writer builds on what came before. Peretti built on C.S. Lewis and Walter Wangerin and the tradition of Christian fantastic literature that preceded him. Dekker built on Peretti. I built on all three. That is not a confession of weakness. It is an accurate description of how influence works in any creative field.

But influence is only the starting point. What matters is what you do with it. How you take the things that moved you and transform them into something that could only have come from you specifically.

Here is where Black Water departs from its influences.

In Dekker’s Black Thomas Hunter visits a dream world. It feels real to him but its dream nature is central to the story’s mechanics. In Black Water Alan Charms does not visit a dream. He enters an actual spiritual realm. The distinction matters. What happens to him there is not subject to the logic of dreams. It is subject to the logic of a real place with real inhabitants and real rules. The consequences follow him back. They have physical weight in the world he returns to.

In Peretti the spiritual world is always happening around the characters but they cannot enter it. They can only feel its effects. In Black Water the protagonist crosses the boundary. He is inside the spiritual world as a participant, not just a recipient of its consequences.

That crossing — that direct engagement with the spiritual realm as an active location — is what I made my own. It opens storytelling possibilities that neither of my influences fully explored. And it is where the most interesting stories in this series are going to live.

Stephon Rudd