I think the fact that I use salty words in my Bonhoeffer book would tip you off that I'm no prude, exactly.
When I'm writing the book I'm laughing at just how overblown the characters seemed. How full of himself he seems. But I didn't get far enough in the series to really drive the joke of it home.
Donald Westlake's lean prose and deadpan delivery are engaging, as always.
The tone of 'Into the Beautiful North' is really the way I write. 'Hummingbird's Daughter' was the anomaly. It was a once-in-a-lifetime phenomenon.
I write five, six days a week. The thing is capturing the voice. I feel like I've been perfecting one voice - in different iterations, sure, but the Russian-ness has always been the undercurrent.
But if you read Jane Austen, you know that she had a wicked sense of humor. Not only was she funny, but her early writing was very dark and had a gothic tone to it.
Anyone familiar with my work knows I'm no sappy sentimentalist.
If I was writing about an academic or a more difficult person, I would use the Latinate vocabulary more, but I do think Anglo-saxon is the language of emotion.
Fiction is often most powerful when the author is exploring an issue - and not writing like a know-it-all who has the perfect answer.
Why do I love Roald Dahl? His voice, more than anything. It's irreproducible. It's so musical, and it's funny even when it's not trying to be, which is most of the time.
Don Basilio was a forbidding-looking man with a bushy mustache who did not suffer fools and who subscribed to the theory that the liberal use of adverbs and adjectives was the mark of a pervert or someone with a vitamin deficiency.
Let us proceed under the assumption that the fairy folk do exist, and that I am not a gibbering moron.
