Reading as a writer is a strange and mysterious thing. It is different from reading for pleasure yet can also be extremely enjoyable. Sometimes when I have just finished a manuscript, I will pile up all the books that went into its creation and stare at the strange and seemingly random journey that brought me to the completion of the project. Reading is so important to writing that I even thanked some writers (Lidia Yuknavitch, Lisa-anne Gershwin), writers who I have never met, in the acknowledgements of my new novel because their books were invaluable to the process of writing An Uncertain Grace.

I am discovering more about my method and have begun to relax into my erratic process of reading-for-my-writing. I find that the books clump.  I tend to read a lot of books in several different areas to keep me on track with the research and writing of my own. My current project is still a great amorphous lump of ideas, fragments, tangled threads. It is my job as a writer to knit these threads into a unified whole but at the moment it just looks like the cat got into the knitting basket.