Regular Reads

Image: Ian Wilson

This morning when I let for the work the moon was full and falling through the sky with only a few wisps of cloud training in front of it. It was very atmospheric, but more amazingly, I realised that one of the themes that runs through Stella is the moon. So I find it a strange coincidence that the book was accepted on the cusp of a full moon. Or is it?

I asked Devon Ellington about her regular reads throughout the year (the answer for which you can read here on her blog: Ink In My Coffee. But the thing is, I never answered the question for myself, so I’ve had a think.

Books I re-read over and over would include Hand to Mouth by Paul Auster, as it was the book that first set me off on my writing journey. I also tend to go back to The Outsider by Albert Camus quite a lot since I discovered it, and more recently, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

Asked what authors I read a lot and I would give you a slightly different answer. My Paul Auster collection is pretty big as is books by Ian Rankin, but I also immensely enjoy the works of William McIlvanney, Val McDermid, and PD James. I also read a lot of lesser known writers a lot, and in particular, poets. I have chapbooks by Rick Lupert, Big Poppa E, Brendan Constantine, Frances Macaulay Forde, and Tom Berman, and I read them as much for my own enjoyment as for inspiration.

My other fish died late last night. Madison, only a few weeks old, died only a couple of days after his buddy, Akane. It turns out there’s a parasite in the tank that killed them both, which I only caught wind of after Madison’s death. The whole tank will need to be fully cleaned before any more fish can go in it. Shame – they were both really nice fish.

I finished off getting all the documentation together to send off to my editor, and I couldn’t resist giving Stella one more proofread before I did. I read the whole thing from start to finish and managed to catch a couple of small typos and grammatical flaws, but on the whole it was error free, which means my editing skills must be improving.

Reading it again gave me some ideas of the direction of the next book that might involve these characters. I’ll see how that one develops but I need something stronger before I would begin work on it.

---

The Scruffy Dog Review – Winter Issue OUT NOW!!

Reddit

Facebook

Del.icio.us

StumbleUpon

Digg