Comrade Foxer:  Thanks loads for that excellent dump on Marcinko's books.  I've heard a lot about his writing and have looked up his bio.  As the old saying goes, there's nothing new under the sun, but generally, as much as I'd like to for sheer enjoyment, I do not read SF or action-adventure stuff (or much fiction at all anymore; biographies and histories, yes) precisely because I DO NOT want to be influenced by another author either stylistically or creatively.  If over 50 years of experience in the military and government didn't give me enough material to create characters and plots of my own, I might as well give up.  Where there are similarities between what I write and what some other author's done, I hope they're purely coincidental.  Now history is a different matter.   Both David and I crib from it all the time but there's a reason for that, human nature doesn't change, only technology does and that is a major underlying theme of the Starfist series. We believe if it were possible in time and space for a Roman legionnaire to read our stuff in translation he'd exclaim, "Wow!  That's just how it was for us in Gaul!"

People are always giving us suggestions for story ideas and we appreciate that because it means they're truly interested in our books and they wish to help us out by participating in the creative process.  Some of these suggestions are excellent and it's not unprecedented that some really great stories have evolved from suggestions authors have received from their friends and readers.  But when David and I sit down to plot a book what comes out of that is processed through our own personal experiences and philosophies of art and life.  No doubt we're influenced subtly by what we've read over the years and what other people have done or experienced, but what comes out in the end has to be filtered through our own experience and perspective so it has our personal stamps on it and is uniquely ours.  We hope.

Dan