Since I’m still in the throes of reorganizing my life after a busy trip, I thought I’d show you what ongoing research (f0r me) entails.  I follow all leads, both for my novel writing and my screenplay writing, and this makes for many haphazard (but sometimes serendipitous) connections.

Right now, on my desk, the following books are a sample of what I need to be reading:

Evolution’s Captain: The Dark Fate of the Man Who Sailed Charles Darwin Around the World by Peter Nichols
Children of the Dust Bowl: The True Story of the School at Weedpatch Camp by Jerry Stanley
Epics of Early Civilization: Myths of the Ancient Near East by Time-Life Books
Gods, Demons and Symbols of Ancient Mesopotamia by Jeremy Black and Anthony Green
Amen: Poems by Yehuda Amichai
The Canonical Lamentations of Ancient Mesopotamia by Mark E. Cohen
People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks

Do you see what I mean?  They seem to have very little in common, but when you’re talking character and scene and story, they have everything to do with one another.  All stories begin and continue with the same components–inciting incident, increasing conflict, turnaround point, catastrophe, then some sort of resolution–good or bad.  It doesn’t matter where the story is set.

When you read, do you see connections between the books you’re reading, or are you a one-book-at-a-time kind of reader?

[Post image: Liliana in high heels]