When writing new work I don't read because the story comes in a stream from my subconscious and all my senses are involved. Virgins came to me over several months and after overcoming weeks of fear and terror I would get up at night and write. After I sense that my subconscious is tapped or I have completed initial writing I read, research and read to learn about the visions or apparitions that have come to me.
With Virgins I had to do months of research and reading after the initial months of visions, apparitions and in fear of what I was seeing, feeling: all my senses on alert and involved. I even saw a therapist, called my best friend repeatedly, went overnight where my husband was staying when working out of town, sought help from my priest and got psychic readings, very scary readings, thought I was going nuts. Stuff I couldn't explain kept happening around me. My writing became so compulsive I wrote until the wee hours but was able to function during the day as if pumped up by adrenaline.
In the months and years that followed, I read all I could find online about the places, apparitions, ideas and to look and verify what seemed facts and most of them to my dread, where facts even the times before I was even born in this life. I started attending a writing group that went on for 5 years.
I wrote other stuff after awhile but the story of the Sylph kept me engrossed. Two years ago my husband and I went to Europe, of the two weeks we spent several days in Lalin Spain, a city near the Pontevedra Coast, where a lot of the book takes place. The experience felt supernatural to both of us.
Also, writing to me is a true labor of love, I have to edit and have others edit for me a lot because I was dyslexic and in my days as a youth that was not diagnosed correctly. English is not my birth language. I came to the U. S. when I was about nine, the first time. Also in college and in my occupation I had to read and write a lot. Like on this article, I check it myself with spell check and Grammarly and pass it by my husband to ensure it's not riddled with errors.