Aim High!

Day 15
Today's word count: 213
Overall word count: 20507

Don't let today's meager word count mislead you: I feel as though I got a lot done today. Most importantly, I realized what needs to happen next; the only plausible thing that could happen, given what the main characters want. So that's good.

If you're reading this as I write, as opposed to after the finished product is published, you probably have no idea what the hell this book going to be about. Allow me to tell you.

I have a ton of...I won't even call them influences, but things that have gone into the literary melting pot between my ears. Legendary authors (Melville! Marquez! Hemingway!). Classic authors (Somerset Maugham! Rudyard Kipling!). Really good contemporary authors (Stephen King!). Contemporary genre writers (Neal Stephenson! Brandon Sanderson!). Best-selling authors of my lifetime (Grisham! Cornwell!). Mediocre authors who nonetheless sell a shitload of books (I won't name them!). They've all wormed their way into my brain, and whatever worms its way back out is probably due, in some way, to them.

Having said that, I find myself referring back, over and over again, to two of my favorite living writers. One is, if not the, one of the world's most successful authors. The other is a writer whom you might not have heard of, even though he's flirted with mainstream success in the past.

They are Stephen King and Richard Herley.

Stephen King, I trust, needs no introduction from me. Speaking personally, I avoided his work religiously well into adulthood, thanks to two factors: one, his reputation as a "horror writer"; and two, the almost uniformly awful quality of the films based on his books. Because of those two facts, I didn't read anything by Stephen King until 1998 (age 25) or so. Since then, I've read close to 30 of his books.

Richard Herley is a ridiculously talented novelist who, in spite of being an award-winning and Hollywood-adapted author, toiled in obscurity for many years. I first encountered his work, ironically, not too long before I read my first Stephen King.

With inspiration from these two, I'm crafting the book I'm working on right now.

Stephen King has quite a bit of range as a writer, but my favorite books of his involve normal people, in a nominally normal world, dealing with inexplicable or supernatural situations. It's almost as if he takes the real world like a pond, tosses in a single supernatural pebble (Some people are psychic! or Johnny can see the future! or This town is full of vampires!), and documents the ripples that result. What makes him believable, what makes him unputdownable, is that the people in his books react to these situations like you and I would...or would like to. The vividness of his imagination is what I love.

Richard Herley is an absolute master of the craft of writing. Whether he's writing brainy thrillers, razor-sharp action novels, immaculately researched period pieces, or one of my five favorite novels period, his prose is sheer magic. He's experienced a bit of a resurgence in the last two or three years, topping the Amazon e-book charts, but nonetheless he remains a relative unknown compared to some far, far inferior writers who have commanded far more attention.

From Stephen King, I'm taking the kind of story I like to read: a story where a regular person, or regular people, are thrown into a new world, and get to know it, and react to it, right along with the reader. I refer back to King every time I ask, "What would ________ really do in this situation?" King gives me the view from 30,000 feet.

From Richard Herley, I'm taking the kind of story I would like to write: full of elegant clarity, crafty sentence structure, and sublime word choices. I refer back to him every time I find myself trying to convey an action sequence clearly and vividly, or trying to decide exactly how much to describe a new setting. Herley helps me down in the trenches, where I'm digging towards my goal one sentence at a time.

I fully expect to fall far short on both fronts, but I could fall far short of these two and still come up with a pretty damned entertaining yarn.