Bad fantasy inspires me to write, buoyed up by the knowledge that even on a bad day, I can write better than that.

Good fantasy inspires me to write, driven by exhilirating encouragement.

But there is some fantasy that is so gripping, is so singularly, unbelievably spectacular, so unique in its unanticipated vision, that it leaves me burnt, broken, completely unable to put pixel to screen.

KJ Parker is one such, so a lesser extent. But the master is Guy Gavriel Kay.

No other brings tears to my eyes so easily, with a bland sentence and an understated point. No other draws his works together with such inexorable beauty. No other sees it, rationalises it, distills it to its essence and renders it into delicate prose.

I'll never write like him. The man is brilliant.

(I just finished Lord of Emperors, the sequel to Sailing to Sarantium. Kay's work surpasses the noun 'vision' and requires something larger. Something broader. Something with light and movement and magic and a sense of the huge tangle of the immense and the minute and the ways in which lives encompass both. Perhaps the word I'm looking for here - badly used and abused and misused previously, but oh-so-apt here - is 'epic'.)