To be a carpenter or a builder or a home inspector, you have to have that kind of visual brain where you can sort of imagine something taken apart.
In crime fiction, I cut my teeth on early Robert Parker, Elmore Leonard, John D. MacDonald, and Alan Furst. I always loved the writing of Hemingway and Faulkner. Cormac McCarthy's 'Border Trilogy' has been a huge influence; I think I read those novels four times.
I love the beautiful distractions of the world - television and movies, video games, the Internet in general. But I try really hard to avoid them, because they don't help me become a better writer. They subtract hours from my day. And a writer's main currency is time. Time to daydream, time to walk and think, time to sit and do the work.
I try to write about realistic people doing realistic things. Or as close as I can get, given that I'm trying to write a suspenseful crime novel.
