This post is about the people who helped or inspired certain aspects of Dead Raiser come to life.

One of the most amazing aspects of writing is that some people end up influencing a character(s) behaviour, attitude, attire and even some of the things they say, this can be intentional or not. For instance, I got one of my friends to become a character. My friend was initially going to be only Jiid Dinok, a very geeky and intelligent Centaur who is the head of the Magic-Science department in The Temple, however when re-reading Dead Raiser before starting to write Going Under, I realised that my friend's  dry and somewhat irritating humour had weaselled it's way into Tristan's dialogue. I found myself laughing at this because the actual words Tristan says would never come from my friend's mouth, but the way it's said sounded like he was speaking them as it was the same kind of sarcasm that he uses. Tristan can, however, dry up the conversation by saying offensive things, you don't see this much in Dead Raiser, but it is already beginning to happen in Going Under. When I say he dries the conversation up, I'm not saying he makes bad jokes or that nobody wants to speak to him, it's just that he has a tendency to grind people's gears and he can be annoyingly correct a lot of the time.  This is an example of this:

“Already! Already you’ve gotten yourselves in trouble, and you haven’t even started yet!” Trinity hadn’t liked Ninrym when she’d first met him in the Temple Of Choosing, because of the weird way he dressed and his tendency to glare at Tristan, and she found she liked him less as he ranted at them from behind his desk in The Temple.

“Well,” said Tristan casually from her elbow, “it was hardly our fault.” He sounded oddly cool though they were in a precarious place.

“Not your fault?!” Ninrym boomed, heading towards hysterical. “You were supposed to watch over her and make sure she didn’t get into trouble! And what do we hear? An unexplained fire suddenly springs up in a Halloween house party and then gunshots and screaming starts up! Not to mention the normal authorities found only a spluttering smoke machine that was more than likely kicked over during the panic!”

Trinity opened her mouth to speak but decided against it, shutting her mouth with a tight snap. Tristan spoke for her anyway. “Well, it’s still not our fault. They were abducting children for God knows what reason, you’d have had a lot more to explain and cover up from the authorities if we’d fled and let them do it.”

Ninrym sighed in exasperation, knowing that Tristan's logic was undisputable.

That is an exact piece from Dead Raiser. Tristan doesn't always purposely grind people's gears, but when it comes to Elder Ninrym, he just cannot help himself. He both purposely and accidently gets in Ninrym's grille all the time and the two are continually arguing, trying to poke holes in the other's way of life, logic and they just seem to like to verbally attack each other. Tristan is that one person you know who's incredibly smart and he/she knows it, he enjoys interrupting people and interjecting conversations with his frankly ridiculous points of view and sarcastic humour.  

My friend also plays his part as Jiid Dinok very well. Jiid's geeky yet smart persona was planned and derived from Sam's like of science and Doctor Who.

Other influences from others also found their way into Dead Raiser, such as the password for the computer in the Frogmore Gaol which was 'Querty', this comes from another one of my friends who tried to get me to guess her password for her school account.
It's not just real people that can weasel their way into your work, it's also aspects of other characters, fictional people, places, times, world, that sort of thing. I found myself wondering what exactly a skeleton could wear, especially since the skeleton was that of a twenty-something year old man. My friend Zoe suggested that he wear a suit, but I said that it was too much like Skulduggery from the book Skulduggery Pleasant, written by Derek Landy, and so we decided that Tristan should wear a purple suit.