Whatever strikes my fancy! Shakespeare, Dickens, and Aeschylus. Arthur C. Clarke and Neal Stephenson. Charlotte and Emily Bronte. A thick biography of Stalin, a thick history of the Korean War. Michael Connelly and Ken Follett. Mysteries, espionage, thrillers, historical fiction, science fiction, fantasy, and horror are my favorite genres for escape. I have a thirty minute drive to work and listen to a lot of non-fiction audiobooks--Erik Larson, Bill Bryson, biographies and histories.

I could easily do a top 40--there are so many books I love. Even a top 10 seems a bit much, but it would be difficult for me to leave any of these writers off of a list of favorites. So here they are.

Top 10:

#10 Bill Bryson - A Walk in the Woods, One Summer: America, 1927, and A Short History of Nearly Everything are all brilliant--humorous and full of delicious stories. I enjoy listening to him read his books as much as I enjoy reading them myself.
#9 Dennis Lehane - Mystic River blew me away. A common theme that runs through this list is that certain scenes from these writers' books inhabit my mind like I lived through them. A certain character's death in Mystic River stands out to me as one of the best murder scenes ever written--sad, powerful.
#8 Daniel Silva - I plan my reading around when the next Gabriel Allon book gets released. The brilliant plots and international settings are always a treat.
#7 Michael Connelly - I also plan my reading around when the next Michael Connelly book gets released. The plots are always brilliant, but he adds something more. When Harry Bosch goes home and turns on the jazz, it's just a reminder that I've been living with him since The Black Echo. Connelly also does a masterful job of making Los Angeles a character in his novels. He has more or less defined that city for me.
#6 Russell Banks - The Darling, Continental Drift, and Lost Memory of Skin are a few novels that are must reads for anyone. The Darling is probably my favorite of his. I learned quite a bit about Liberia, and there were scenes so devastating I walked through the rest of the week dazed. Powerful stuff.
#5 Michael Ondaatje - Novels like The English Patient and Anil's Ghost contain such beautiful passages. Want to see how a master opens a novel? Read the first few pages of The English Patient. Ondaatje, like Harrison (#1 on this list), is also a poet. There's something to be said about novelists who write a lot of poetry. Stunning language.
#4 Stephen King - Of all the authors on this list, I've been reading King the longest. From the early greats like The Shining and The Stand to the new greats like Under the Dome and 11/22/63, I love going where he wants to take us--it's always somewhere unique!
#3 Nick Hornby - High Fidelity and About a Boy. If I had to (gasp in horror) sell off my book collection, these wouldn't be going anywhere.
#2 Haruki Murakami - Norwegian Wood is the novel of my twenties. I was living in Korea at the time, and the setting of the book reminded me a lot of where I was living. Many of Toru Watanabe's experiences as a young college student spoke to me. It was a great companion. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and Kafka on the Shore are brilliant as well.
#1 Jim Harrison - For the philosophy, the poetry, the sheer love of life. Legends of the Fall, Dalva, The Road Home, Songs of Unreason, the Brown Dog novellas, and everything else he's written. I don't know if any other writer on this list has taught me quite as much about life as Harrison has. I'll be rereading his stories and poetry for the rest of my life.

There's a book on my shelf that I wrote in elementary school. My older sister had a project and had to write a children's book, and I wanted to emulate her. I wrote a chapter book about my stuffed animal walrus, Waldo, and his archenemy, Jimmy the Raccoon. My writing has improved since then, but I can't say the same about my ability to illustrate. Someday I'll scan this early book and put it on my website.

I grew up in a suburb of Dayton, Ohio. Our neighborhood was surrounded by fields and woods and every house had a huge yard. There were a lot of opportunities to explore, to daydream, and I'm grateful for all of that. There was something magical about summer evenings, stars visible overhead, various games that went late into the night and covered entire blocks. Halloween, too, stands out, with the falling leaves and harvest air and treks up and down long driveways.

There wasn't much diversity in the town where I grew up, so it wasn't until college when my eyes were truly opened. Four years in Columbus and four years in South Korea (along with travels to Japan, Taiwan, and Thailand) showed me that life isn't necessarily "exotic" in far off places, just real. People go about their day to day lives with similar passions, wants, and concerns no matter where they are on earth. I wish I'd been exposed to a more heterogeneous cross-section of life as a child, but at least my children (Korean-American) have been able to benefit from time spent overseas.

I think some of the magic of growing up where I did shows in my work. I also think that the multi-cultural perspective I gained later in life works its way into my writing. I count Canadians, Australians, and Koreans among my close friends. I've also had the fortune of spending time with citizens of New Zealand, South Africa, England, Japan, Thailand, Vietnam, India, Somalia, and Mexico. Quite a cross-section of life!

Exploring different ideas and themes. With Stay, Illusion, for example, a big focus is on the single story--the biography we give to the people we meet, the stories we tell to fit them nicely into our worldview. The problem being people don't fit into a single narrative--we're way too complicated for that. Areas that I tend to explore in each book are evil and the effects of the past on the present. Take these big themes and spin stories around them--stories that I like to read--and it becomes an absolute pleasure to write.

Before I write a novel, there's a gestation period. The idea is there, and I take a lot of notes (Google Drive is wonderful for this). Eventually I'll arrange what I have into the skeleton of a story. I need a compelling premise, flesh-and-blood characters, and a direction. The Footnotes was written without a lot of planning. I found out where I was going as I wrote, and then I had a lot of cleaning up to do when I revised. The first draft of that novel and the published form are so different. With Ruin's Wasteful Entrance, I tried outlining certain plot points and scenes and essentially had the big picture before I began writing. Things changed as I wrote, but I felt the first draft was much easier and much more polished than the first draft of The Footnotes. As a result, the third book will be written in much the same way as Ruin's Wasteful Entrance.

When the first draft is completed, it sits for a while. The Footnotes sat for about five years (yeah, I won't do that again). Ruin's Wasteful Entrance sat for a few weeks. (The Footnotes was the first novel I ever revised--it was one of a few first drafts I had sitting around.) During the first round of revision I try to bring consistency and proper pacing to the plot. I cut a lot (kill your darlings), and then take a scene I need to rework and paste it into a new file. After I've rewritten the scene, I paste it back into the full manuscript. Isolating scenes helps me to focus on what needs done better than if I leave it in the manuscript--I tend to wander around the manuscript fixing little things when I don't isolate a scene. After I've spent months revising, I share the book with other readers, then take their feedback and make changes. One of the most important lessons I've learned as a writer is to listen to criticism. Yes, just listen. I don't argue. I don't say, "But you didn't get it!" That's ridiculous. No, I listen, I ponder, I look again, and quite often I make changes. Criticism doesn't always feel good, but it only makes me better. So I say thank you and consider every suggestion.

When I feel everything's done to the best of my ability, I read the book at least once more and make further changes. I typically read the eBook file on my Kindle and then order a paperback from Createspace. I see a lot of errors in different formats that I wouldn't see if I just looked at my computer screen.

One of the most intriguing quotes I've read or heard about the creative process, and this applied to film, was that a movie is never finished, only abandoned. I think this applies to albums, paintings, and novels as well. I'm a bit of a perfectionist, so it's hard for me to let go, but there are other books to write.

I have x amount of free time in a day. What's the best way to use that time? I could seek out an agent, blog, hit the pavement trying to sell myself, etc., etc. But then I wouldn't have any time to write. I feel that at this point in my life, the best use of my time is in writing the best novels that I can. As an indie author, I have no deadlines outside of those I set for myself. I can write what I want to write--I love all genres and don't know where I may turn in the future. The only challenges I face are the ones I set for myself: I want each book to be better than the last (so I study--books on writing, yes, but also literary criticism and the works of the greats and the modern bestsellers--there's so much to learn!). I want to try something new with each book. As an indie author, I'm free to pursue these challenges.

It's a given that reading takes up a large part of my non-writing time. So what else do I do? I work full time and I have three sons, so I'm rather busy. My bachelor's degree is in history (from Ohio State University), so on vacations or long weekends we hit a lot of historical sites and museums. Within the past few years I've made it a point to visit the National Park sites in Ohio--Dayton Aviation Heritage (the Wright Brothers), Hopewell Culture (mounds), William Howard Taft's home in Cincinnati, and Cuyahoga Valley National Park. This year we'll be vacationing in Charleston, South Carolina. I'm looking forward to walking tours, ghost stories, Civil War sites, and maybe just a little time on the beach.

I also put a lot of miles on my running shoes and my bike.

My desk sits in a room full of books. Behind me are built-in bookshelves hosting close to a hundred history books. American history populates the lowest shelf, Korean and World War II history the next shelf, and Asian, African, and European history the top shelf. On the bookshelf to my left sit novels by Korean writers, the works of D.H. Lawrence and Mark Twain, and multiple computer programming books--everything from C++ to to Java to SQL to Visual Basic. On the desk hutch sit more books. William Shakespeare, poetry, comparative religion, philosophy, mythology, etc. Perhaps I could call those books my Muse books. On the next shelf down on the hutch sits a photograph of my wife and I on our honeymoon in Thailand, arms around each other, the Andaman Sea at dusk behind us. To the right are a copy of my first novel, The Footnotes, and the 16th edition of The Chicago Manual of Style. On the desk itself are a 23 inch monitor, a laser printer and Canon scanner, and the various books serving as inspiration for the next novel (Prometheus Bound sits on top).

My Kindle with a keyboard! One stage of revision for me is loading my novel onto the Kindle. The keyboard makes it easy to take notes on things that need changed. I ultimately prefer the e-ink screens. I don't want a screen that glows--LED makes it more difficult for me to get lost in a book and it's hard on the eyes. I also don't like how easy it is to flip to the internet if I'm reading on my Galaxy Tab.