FEBRUARY QUESTION: How has being a writer changed your experience as a reader?
I think the biggest impact is in my book choice. A lot of my reading happens via audiobook in my car, and if there’s a particular story I’m working on I tend to queue up books that (a) I’ve read before and (b) fit the subject, general theme, or ambiance of what I’m trying to write. It puts me in the right headspace for what I want to do… or at the very least doesn’t yank me out of it.
For example, when working on Growing Magic I tend towards books where I really admire the world building, or the rules of magic, or if it just has a really cool adventure plot that vibes with what I want my characters to experience.
Audiobooks also help me de-stress after work. I like to think of it as holding harsh reality at bay so that I can go home and write rather than go home and lay on the floor experiencing existential crises.
When a person is lucky enough to live inside a story, to live inside an imaginary world, the pains of this world disappear. For as long as the story goes on, reality no longer exists.
at Milliways with a pen 
I have an ongoing internal debate about what to read when I’m writing. Too similar and I feel the reading book influences me too much, too different and it pulls me too far away. It’s a dilemma!
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It really is! In high school while we were reading Grapes of Wrath, everything I wrote sounded like Steinbeck. I hated it but I couldn’t stop. Ambiance and voice can be so heavily influenced by reading material.
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There are times when I would be delighted if my stuff sounded like Steinbeck, it’s better than sounding like drivel. 😀
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That’s true. It’s not that I didn’t enjoy the story in Grapes of Wrath, it’s that the pacing was So. Freaking. Slow. The entire book had the same pacing as that one chapter that was just about a tortoise crossing the road.
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I bet it didn’t help doing it in school either.
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