I met Catherine Mayo last year in San Miguel at the San Miguel Writers’ Conference. Since then I’ve been keeping in touch with her through her blog(s), Facebook, and now … sigh … Twitter (the latest in Net addiction). As well as charming, she’s a wonderful writer and teacher.
She has a historical novel coming out soon: The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire. I am very much looking forward to reading it.
But the subject of this post is the list of books she recommends for novelists. Many of my own favorites are on it:
From Where You Dream: The Process of Writing Fiction by Robert Olen Butler;
Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting
by Robert McKee;
Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel by Jane Smiley.
But there are a number I know nothing about. This one I will definitely be ordering:
The War of Art: Winning the Creative Battle
by Steven Pressfield.
Because the writing life is often a war: a battle for time, for discipline.
[Note—for the list, go to: http://tinyurl.com/cdmlmx]
Thanks for the expanded list, Catherine!
http://www.cmmayo.com/workshop-recommended-reading.html
Yes, Catherine, you are lucky! It’s gorgeous.
Thanks guys! It was all the doing of the Unbridled Books team— I had nothing to do with it, though if I do say so myself, I’m very lucky! I think they were aiming for a sense of the past– therefore the 19th century lithograph of Mexico City— together with a sense of surrealism and violence. The butterfly is a monarch– quite apt, as the novel’s monarch, Maximilian, collected butterflies.
It is gorgeous, isn’t it? I’d love to find out from Catharine how it evolved.
Merci beaucoup dear Sandra!P.S. Here’s an even longer list (constantly growing…)
http://www.cmmayo.com/workshop-recommended-reading.html
What a gorgeous book cover!!