I’ve been hard at work on the first draft of Passion. It’s third book in the Fallen series, and a prequel to everything that occurs in Fallen and in Torment. In its conception, this book felt like an impossible project to me: It covers a span of 5000 plus years, dips into a new setting, a new country, and usually, a new century with each new chapter. And it aims to explain just about every important moment that ever passed between Luce and Daniel. Definitely the biggest narrative challenge I’ve ever given myself.

I was nervous before I started writing it. I’d had such a great, fun, charmed experience writing Torment, but I know this book was going to be much more complicated, much more taxing. Just as I did when I started writing Fallen, I turned to books for help. Only this time, in addition to the theological research books I used for Fallen, I also got to look at some of my favorite novels for help with period and setting. Recognize any of these?

Everything a writer reads, loves, and is inspired by eventually sneaks its way into his or her own work, but it isn’t so often that a writer gets to say the books truly become a part of the story. I turned to North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell, The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov, and A Farewell to Arms by Hemingway. I read books about horse racing, books about the Globe Theater in London, books about the Mayan ball court at Chitzen Itza. If this sounds crazy and disjointed, believe me, there were moments when I felt precisely the same way. But the cool thing about this book, I think, is that Luce and Daniel’s story stays clear and solid across time, place, and history. It’s a survivor.

I still have a long way to go with this book. The first draft is a skeleton compared to all that will be fleshed out by the time the second and third and, cringe, sometimes even fourth drafts are completed. But the book has a shape and a backbone now, thanks in big part to all these texts I had so much fun weaving in.

My computer and I are going to take a break from each other. Just for a little while. This weekend, I’m running a half-marathon in memory of my grandfather. I’m running with a group called Team in Training to support the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. (To those of you who took part in my auction: you helped raise over $2300!)

After that, I’m heading to Berlin for a week for my publisher’s 175th Anniversary Gala. And then—the moment we’ve all been waiting for—Torment comes out on 9/28!!! And I start touring across the US and the UK. Those of you who live near one of the cities I’ll be visiting, I hope you’ll come out and say hello!

Yes, the monster list, taped on the back of our closet door, is taller than both of us and took three photographs to capture. But Jason still managed to slay it. See all the little check marks?

For the past five months he’s been preparing for his oral exam, which he takes this Friday (!!!). For three hours, three professors will grill him on any/all of these books, asking questions like “How would you teach this text in an introduction to Shakespeare class?” And this is just the first of two monster tests he has to pass before he writes his dissertation. Hear that, all you future English PhD’s out there? Are you scared? (I’m scared.)

So around here, it’s been one book a day, every day, for five straight months. He wakes up in the morning, he reads. I take the dog for a hike, he reads. I fool around online for seven hours, he continues to read. Because these are major doorstops of books. Tomes. Like on Tuesday: he sat down and read the Bible. The whole thing! Another day he tackled the very thrilling Shakespeare’s Perjured Eye: The Invention of Poetic Subjectivity in the Sonnets. Sounds like a real page turner, huh? Today he’s reading Paradise Lost. He’s got serious speed-reading skillz.

I marvel at his reading stamina and am feeling very proud that he’s made it through this list. As if it wasn’t already before, his brain is certainly a goldmine now.

So good luck on Friday, Jason, and thank you for always flagging the angel references for me. xx

When I was ten months old, my mother made an appointment with our ear doctor because she thought I was deaf. Hearing the story told for the first time to my husband recently, I was impressed by my mom’s verve as she relayed the family lore. Her eyes lit up telling of the placid way I’d stare into space when she tried to reason with me, how often I ignored my name being called.

A half-hour doctor’s visit revealed perfectly sound hearing in both my ears, and left only one explanation: at less than a year old, I was already selectively hearing my mother. (This is when my dad chimes in: “smart kid.”)

When people invoke the term “selective memory” or when my mother refers to my lifelong “selective hearing,” they’re referring to a way of tuning out what, for whatever reason, we don’t want to retain. Those terms get a bad rap, but I’d like to make a case for selective reading—tuning out or tuning up certain moments in a narrative—as a key to reading fiction.

When readers and reviewers talk about the “worlds” within my novels, I often have a hard time taking credit for them. Descriptive passages are some of the most challenging for me to write. Scenes that exist in vivid, specific detail in my mind often have to be teased out of me by my editor and agent. I’d like to say this isn’t laziness, but a desire to leave enough to the imagination of my readers.

One of the things I love most about reading is sharing in the author’s effort to create the world of a story. The books I open again and again always require active participation on my end; they insist that I split the creative load fifty-fifty with the author.

For example, I know that the light across the bay at Daisy’s house is green, but Fitzgerald leaves it up to me to imagine Gatsby’s nightly posture as he stares at it, how dim his own great house is behind him, and the precise angle at which Nick watches him doing this. No one else will ever read Gatsby in just the same way I read it, no one will picture the characters in just the same way I do. To share in the invention of a world is to do something powerful. It allows for an important intimacy between a reader and a book.

I get a lot of questions from parents of teenagers asking whether Fallen, my book about the earthly affairs of fallen angels, is appropriate for their daughter. Yesofcourse, bellows my publisher’s voice inside of me, but the truth is, I have no idea. I don’t know who you are, what your kid is like or wants to be like, whether a love scene might strike you as too illicit and your daughter as too tepid—or vice versa.

The most honest answer I can give invokes selective reading. Being in control of half of the story allows us readers to make a sex scene just as racy or just as comfortable as we want. To make monsters or murderers only as terrifying as we want them to be. This imaginative freedom and control is what makes many of us prefer books to their movie versions. It’s what allows a story—one that might be worlds away from anything we’ll ever experience—not just to speak to us, but to fill in gaps in our own lives. It’s what causes the same reader to have vastly different experiences reading a book at eighteen and again at sixty-eight. And maybe what gives mothers and daughters opposite—yet equally satisfying—reading experiences when they crack open a paranormal teen romance.

Speaking of mothers and daughters, I’ve been listening to mine more and more. But I supposed in other areas, I haven’t changed so much from the stubborn kid tuning her out: today, when I crack open a book, I bring my own constantly changing expectations and desires. I read selectively to bring myself closest to the world inside that book, and to bring the book closest to my world beyond the page.