Tuesday Writer's Block: What book influences your writing the most?

This week (And hopefully every week from now on) I'm taking part in the Tuesday Writer's Block, started by the lovely Erin over at Mirkwood Cottage. As Erin explains in her own post, each week she's going to be giving us a a topic to write a few paragraphs on, and then discussing her favourite answers, so once you've read this, you should head over to Mirkwood Cottage and take part!

This week, Erin asks, "Which book influences your writing most?"

This is an easy one for me, although I'm going to cheat and pick a series of books rather than one particular tome. As I mentioned recent at Forever Amber, I was an Enid Blyton fanatic as a child, and, now I come to mention it, I still love reading those books now. The Famous Five, the Adventure Series, The Five Find-Outers and Dog... basically, if it has a bunch of kids having adventures with an animal of some description, you could count me in.

Now, Enid Blyton's books didn't influence my writing in the sense of changing the way I actually write. I don't, for instance, use the phrase "Oh, I say!", for instance, and my work is sadly bereft of secret passages, smugglers and ginger beer.

These books did influence my writing, though, in that it was my love of them that made me want to be a writer in the first place. It's been my dream to write novels since I was a kid, sitting up late to find out just who WAS the owner of that mysterious face in the window, and it's still my dream now.

I'm working on it. And in the meantime, I'm re-reading the entire works of Enid Blyton...