Christina Henry is a graduate of Columbia College Chicago and enjoys running long distances, reading anything she can get her hands on and watching movies with samurai, zombies and/or subtitles in her spare time. She lives in Chicago with her husband and son.
Black Wings, her first Madeline Black novel, was released last month by Ace/Penguin.
Late in November I asked her what she was reading. Her reply:
I love to read pretty much anything I can get my hands on. I have about 25 magazine subscriptions, ranging in various topics from hockey to astronomy to running to cooking to fitness. I also have a gigantic to-be-read pile of fiction and nonfiction books that is getting more gigantic every day, because I now buy way more books than I actually have time to read.
When I am writing a new novel I can read fiction until I get about a third of the way through the book. At that point I stop reading fiction until I’m done with the first draft. I don’t like to be unconsciously influenced by other writers when I’m trying to hammer out the story. At that point I’ll switch over to reading nonfiction – again, just about anything will do as long as it catches my eye. The next two books in the nonfiction heap are Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky and Flower Confidential by Amy Stewart.
I just recently finished writing the second book of the Madeline Black series and haven’t gotten too deeply into writing the third so I am trying to cram as much fiction into this period as possible.
Right now I am in the middle of Jim Butcher’s Side Jobs, a collection of short stories from the Dresden Files. I had read many of these stories before in other anthologies but it’s been fun to go back and revisit Harry-through-the-years. The collection also features one new story, which takes place after the most recent Dresden Files novel Changes. I’m trying to work my way slowly through the book so that I can savor the new story when I get to it. Butcher is one my favorite writers and it’s such a treat to get an extra Dresden story when he normally only releases one Dresden novel per year.
Read
chapter one of Black Wings, and learn more about the book and author at
Christina Henry's website.
--Marshal Zeringue
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