Cassie McCullough

And when I think about my latest novel, Honey Bee, the structure and that core relationship has a lot in common.

That's right, yeah.

I think discussing my reading habits as a 12 and 13-year-old boy doesn't really bear discussion because a lot of it was, you know, I discovered commercial adult fiction and just dove into it.

No, I don't want to be that controversial, but anyone from Wilbur Smith to Robert Ludlam to Patricia Cornwall, you know, for a 13-year-old boy, you know, it was pretty rich terrain.

Yeah, absolutely, and by no means am I disparaging commercial fiction or thrillers.

I still love them, but it was just all that I read.

I just leapt straight into it.

Yeah, there's something propulsive and intoxicating about those plots that I'd never quite sat inside before, and no doubt they were influential in terms of how I framed them.

scenes and how I look at structuring work as well.

But I don't know if I could identify one book from that period that really stands out from the rest.

But I do remember when I discovered literary fiction, and that was the moment that I was 14.

And that was the moment that was clarifying for me, put it that way.

And I went to the Pinjarra Library after school because the town I lived in didn't have a library.

So I had to get off the bus and find my way in there.

And there weren't too many people who visited the Pinjarra Library at that time.

And so they had a single librarian and –

who just sort of decamped behind the desk and let me go at it basically.

And, you know, I used to get a bunch of books out.

And one in particular, I think maybe it was because I lived on an orchard, I don't know, but it had a piece of fruit on the cover and it looked kind of a little bit – it looked inviting to me.

The artwork was kind of interesting.