Books and Writing

I have three full length works of fiction in progress:

The Made-Up Man is a crime novel, complete but as yet unpublished, about a woman with a dangerous secret: a killer has gotten away with murder, and she knows who he is.
A Monster in the Garden is a genre-challenged crime/horror/sci-fi story about a 21st century Frankenstein monster. It is still in draft form.
Blue Lake, a mystery-romance set in the 1970s, is only about half-finished.

Recent good reads: (crime fiction only)

Purgatory Chasm, by Steve Ulfelder. A terrific book. Tough guy Conway Sax tries to solve the murder of an AA comrade while also coming to terms with his own degenerate father.

Before I Go to Sleep, by SJ Watson, is amazing. A woman suffering from a rare form of amnesia forgets everything every night. Her journal tells her not to trust her husband.

Most Influential Authors: (not ranked) these are the authors having the greatest influence on me as I write these days.

Edith Wharton
Ross MacDonald
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Vladimir Nabokov
Daphne DuMaurier
MM Kaye
Robert Goddard
Ruth Rendell
Alexander McCall Smith
Joseph Conrad
Jack London
Sue Grafton
Somerset Maugham
Paul Theroux
Sarah Waters

Crime novels: The books that resonate with me as I work these days, and again the list is not ranked or complete.

Crime and Punishment (Dostoevsky)
The Chill (Ross MacDonald)
Rebecca (DuMaurier)
Lolita (Nabokov)
In Pale Battalions (Goddard)
The Veiled One (Rendell)
The Secret House of Death (Rendell)
The Talented Mr. Ripley (Highsmith)
Frankenstein (Mary Shelley)

...and everything else by Ruth Rendell. I have been working my way through her oeuvre since October 2010, when I read A Dark-Adapted Eye, mainly because it has such a wonderful title. And now I am captive. She has written about 70 novels, of which I have read more than half. [Discussion]

I was particularly delighted with The Veiled One, one of the Wexford series, in which Mike Burden hounds a very suspicious-behaving (but innocent!) supect until the poor man caves in, begins telling Burden his life story, undergoes a transference, fires his therapist, and latches onto Burden, who by that time is in full and desperate retreat. The evolution of Clifford's and Burden's relationship is accomplished in about 17 scenes of no more than 4-5 pages each -- and ends in disaster.

Books on Writing: These are the books that have helped me one way or another as I have set out to write full-length works of fiction, and the list is not ranked. I've got a dozen more, but these are the ones that have worked for me.

Stephen King, On Writing
Robert McKee, Story
Nancy Kress, Beginnings, Middles and Ends
Orson Scott Card, Characters and Viewpoint
James Scott Bell, The Art of War for Writers
Jerry Cleaver, Immediate Fiction
James N. Frey, How to Write a Damn Good Novel
Monica Wood, Description