When it comes to the Blues, one of the most important figures is McKinley Morganfield, aka Muddy Waters.
From The Official Muddy Waters website bio (which is lengthy but well worth reading) comes this:
The [Chicago] revolution began inauspiciously enough in 1948 with the release of a 78-rpm single by a singer-guitarist called Muddy Waters. Coupled on Aristocrat 1305 were a pair of traditional Mississippi Delta-styled pieces “I Cant Be Satisfied” and “I Feel Like Going Home,” and on them Waters’ dark, majestic singing. Waters’ use of amplification gave his guitar playing a new, powerful, striking edge and sonority that introduced to traditional music a sound its listeners found very exciting, comfortably familiar yet strangely compelling and, above all, immensely powerful, urgent.
Here’s the thing about Muddy. He brought electricity into the blues. He created the Chicago blues style which, in turn, has been a major influence on rock music. Though he played a simple style (as compared to the multi-layered finger-picking of Robert Johnson), he brought something new to it, and in doing so, created a fresh sound that just didn’t exist before.
There’s a song by Guns ‘N’ Roses called “Double Talkin’ Jive” — stay with me, here. It’s a fast, rocking piece. At the end, during an extended solo, the song fades out and is replaced by the exact same song, only this time, they are playing acoustic guitars. You realize quit quickly that the entire hard-rock song is really just a electrified version of a flamenco piece.
That’s Muddy Waters.
He took old acoustic blues — Delta folk songs, really — stripped it down and electrified it. Sounds simple enough, but he made it work as something new.
As a writer, this a main part of my job. All the stories have been done before. Much of what I do is take what already exists and find some new nugget, new approach, new sliver of something about these stories that feels fresh and different.
The Malja Chronicles is, at its core, a post-apocalyptic survival story with magic. I’ve described it in the past as Xena meets Mad Max. The fact that we can describe our work in this way is proof that we’re reworking older stories. So what makes it fresh? Well, the fact that magic (not oil) was the main energy source for the world before the Devastation has been intriguing readers, as well as the mixture of worlds that I’ve created. It’s not a traditional medieval fantasy nor is it a classic SF apocalyptic tale. And nothing shows that better than my favorite assassins — the Bluesmen.
So, when you create anything — stories, music, paintings, anything — don’t fret about being new and different. Think like Muddy. Strip it down, find something fresh in what’s already there, and go forward.

What influences us when we write? What external factors shape our characters, our settings, our narratives? When Stuart approached me about guest blogging on the subject, my initial thought was that I have no idea what shapes my thinking on any particular book or story.
aftermath of 9/11 to shape the rest of that series as well as the three volumes of the Blood of the Southlands, which were a follow-up to the Forelands books. I don’t want to give away too much of the plotting, but it’s enough to say that on one side of the racial divide were people who tried to navigate the waters between acquiescing in their own victimization and giving in to violent extremism. At the same time, the other side vacillated between tolerance of those who differed from them and cruel repression rooted in irrational paranoia.