“Inspirations and Influences” is a series of articles in which we invite authors to write guest posts talking about their…well, Inspirations and Influences. The cool thing is that the writers are given free rein so they can go wild and write about anything they want: their new book, series or career as a whole. Today our guest is Leah Cypess, author of YA fantasy novels Mistwood and Nightspell. To celebrate the paperback release of Nightspell (which we were thrilled to discover has a blurb from us on the cover!), we are delighted to have Leah Cypess talk about her inspirations & influences. Please give Leah a warm welcome! Anyone who is familiar with my reading habits knows that I’m a speculative fiction fanatic. If a book is fantasy or science fiction and sounds even mildly interesting, I will usually give it a try. I read other things, too – contemporary YA, historical, and anything funny — but 85% of what I read is speculative fiction. When I was younger, though, I had another love. Mysteries. Specifically murder mysteries. Specifically, for a while, murder mysteries written by Agatha Christie. She wrote sixty-six books. (I just looked it up.) I read every […]