Please introduce yourself and tell us about your background as a writer.
I'm Ville Meriläinen, a Finnish thirty-something writer of fantasy and horror fiction. I started writing as a teenager hoping it would get me attention and kept writing through my twenties hoping it would make me money. Ah, to be that innocent again.

What are the most prominent influences on your writing? How do you incorporate those influences without being derivative?
The most obvious to me is Brian Jacques's Redwall series. You have your cutesy animals, you have incredible violence, you have a good time. I also feel like the ideas of Lovecraft influence me more than the man himself: While I'm not the greatest fan of his actual writing, I recognise and appreciate the impact he's had on later creators whose works I enjoy.

As for avoiding being derivative… To be honest, I've never worried about that. No one's accused me of being derivative of anyone yet, including Jacques and Lovecraft, so I guess I'm doing okay. It might help that I write in a foreign language, as trying to mimic someone else's voice on top of that would be unpublishable.

With self-publishing easier than ever, there are tons of books being released every day. What makes your work stand out from the crowd? What can readers get out of your work that they can’t from anyone else?
Hell if I know. I'm exceedingly critical of my work and don't see much good in it, but sometimes people tell me they enjoy my stuff, so I've learned to accept it's okay for people to like what I write even if I don't. I will say my stories have had wildly differing responses from readers, as illustrated in a rejection slip with comments from the editors' voting round: One praised the story to high heaven; the second enjoyed it, but found it too dark for their audience; and the third hated it so much they petitioned to blacklist me.

Many authors say marketing is one of their biggest challenges. What tactics have you found to be most effective for getting your name out there?
Teenage me would be disappointed, but I try to keep my name indoors as much as I can. I had a phase where I gave building an audience and connecting with people a go, but then I won an award, was famous for a week, and realised I want neither an audience nor to be seen. I write my stories, send them to magazines, and let the editor worry about the marketing. Sometimes I do a Q&A or something that they can use to promote the anthology, but that's about it.

How much do your audience’s expectations factor in to what you write? Does this ever cause you to hold back from experimenting?
Not at all and no.

Have you had any new stories published recently? Are you currently working on any?
"Vesper's Garden" is out in the anthology More than a Monster from Grendel Press. I'm always working on something, but finishing anything is rarer and rarer these days. (Don’t forget “Journey to the North” in Die By the Sword Volume II—DMR)

Name one newer and one older book you have read and enjoyed recently. (“Newer” meaning from the past year or so, and “older” meaning written before 1980.)
I don't really keep up with recent releases. I figure since a good book from twenty years ago is still good today, it makes no difference if I get to a book published next Tuesday a couple years late. As such, I'll maliciously and intentionally misinterpret "newer" to mean a book which is new to me: I loved Johanna Sinisalo's Sankarit (lit. "Heroes"), a modernised retelling of the Finnish national epic Kalevala. I don't think it's been translated, but it's a giant inside joke anyway.

As for older, I recently read Bridge to Terabithia as a break from non-fiction in my morning routine. It's one of those books I hear Americans often mention as an important part of their childhood (or the source of childhood trauma), but since I come from a different culture, it never had that significance for me and I picked it up out of curiosity. It's good. I can see why it hurt people.

Any final words?
My first response was "Are you threatening me?" but now I wonder if there's merit to a personality test based on how one interprets vague statements. Like a verbal Rorschach test.