#AmReading
As I was taught, being an author means you spend half your work-time writing, and the other half reading. You simply can't do one without the other, they're as intrinsic as inhaling and exhaling. Every project I attempt comes with a reading list, some to be read while thinking about an idea, some to be read during plotting and characterization, some to be read before a first draft, and some between editing drafts.
For example, a couple of the books that crossed my desk while writing Renewal were Midnight Sun by Elwood Reid and The Great Leader by Jim Harrison for their takes on small-time cult leaders, as well as books like Marisha Pessl's Night Film and Lauren Beukes' The Shining Girls for structural matters, not to mention several nonfiction books on microfarming, homesteading, self-sufficiency, and doomsday prepping. It was, admittedly, a weird couple of months.
For my second and upcoming novel, Heritage, the first I've set in my native South, I had to return to the voice of the region, and for that I went to writers like Larry Brown - Father and Son, Joe - Tom Franklin - Poachers, Hell at the Breech - and, of course, the first and last writer in my library of influence, Cormac McCarthy, specifically Outer Dark and Suttree. But Heritage is also a more straight-forward thriller than Renewal was, so I wanted to verse myself in the finest contemporary writers in the genre, which included all three of Gillian Flynn's novels, and the first three Tana French Dublin Murder Squad novels.
So now, as I'm between the end of plotting and the beginning of drafting my third novel, Eustace Saves, I am again steeping myself in southern voices - McCarthy's Child of God is under my belt for the fifth time and Larry Brown's Fay is in the queue - as well as trying to find books that really delve into the mindset of maniacs, that unknowable region in the disturbed mind where heinous things are made perfectly rational, more than that, necessary. Again invoking Lauren Beukes, her most recent novel Broken Monsters does this quite succinctly. Another I've found that I'm hoping does the same is the next book on my list, James Ellroy's Killer on the Road. Though it sounds a little more noir than the tone I'm going for in Eustace Saves, I think Ellroy's understanding of the criminal mind will come in handy as I attempt to craft my own roaming monster.
