Monday, October 06, 2014

BEE ALL I CAN BEE

From my interview at The Bee Writes...

3) Which Author has influenced you and why?

Here are a pair who don't often come up together (I can't imagine they attended a lot of the same parties): George Orwell and Sidney Sheldon.

Orwell because of the sparsity of his prose. There is not an excess word to be found in "Animal Farm," and yet he gets his point across completely - without ever spelling it out for you. I strive for that kind of conciseness. (Like Elmore Leonard, when I write, I try to leave out the parts readers skip.)

As for Sidney Sheldon, he was the first writer I ever read (at the age of 13, it's a very impressionable time) who demonstrated that you could just write something that was pure fun and keep readers turning pages. There was a period in my life when I spent a lot of it on airplanes. I worked as a writer/producer/researcher for figure skating coverage on ABC Sports, NBC, TNT and ESPN (and I subsequently used that experience in my series of Figure Skating Mysteries for Berkley Prime Crime). I am a horrible sleeper at home in my own bed, so sleeping on airplanes was out of the question. The only thing that could make the time go faster was a good book. Ever since then, my goal has been to help humanity by writing books that make time pass faster on an airplane. It's not exactly up there with Mother Theresa, but we all do what we can.

Read the entire interview at: http://beehalton.com/2014/10/the-bee-talks-with-alina-adams.html

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