Featured Interview With Author Mark J. Donovan
Tell us a little about yourself. Where were you raised? Where do you live now?
I was raised in a few different places, actually. My family moved around Oregon a few times when I was still young, and then finally re-settled (kind of) in Texas just in time for Junior High. I live in Texas now, and I don't have pets because my heart is cold, callous, and jaded. Also, I'm allergic to pet dander.
At what age did you realize your fascination with books? When did you start writing?
I wrote my first book when I was eight years old. It was, in a word, terrible. Nothing but an unholy conglomerate of the books I was reading at the time (The Taran Wanderer series), the board game I had just purchased (Hero Quest!), and the names of my 4th grade class mates. If you ever wonder why we don't let children run the world, well…that story would be a prime example of why not. But it did get me an A+ on a writing assignment a couple of years later when I re-used it for a 6th grade school assignment; and then I got to spend two hours reading it to my younger brother's class, instead of going back to science. So I count that as 2 wins.
Who are your favorite authors to read? What is your favorite genre to read. Who Inspires you in your writings?
Honestly, since I started writing I don't have much time for reading anymore. David Eddings was my favorite author for quite a while, and he still might be even though my tastes have changed. He excelled at creating believable, ingratiating characters that you wanted to spend more time with on their journey. I read mostly Fantasy and science fiction, when I do read, but I am not immune to the charms of Charles Dickens and all of his wonderful books. The Sherlock Holmes stories are also a great read.
Tell us a little about your latest book?
My upcoming release is entitled The Hidden City (The Jade Crown, Book I). I was working on it for about 6 months when disaster struck a year ago and I lost some of the files where I stored my previous books. So I had to put it aside to fix that issue.
And when I returned to the Jade Crown, I realized that there was enough of a story to do more than one book. And since it kind of naturally built to a climax at the end of book I, I decided to just split it there.
But what interests me the most about the story – apart from the inter-personal connections between the characters, which is always the core of what drives the plot in my stories – is showing the warping of events and perceptions over time. It takes place along two different timelines, a thousand years apart – but the main character is alive for both of them, and gets to see how the history has been altered. That's something that has always fascinated me, the way that not only context but even massive amounts of actual, essential details can be lost over time, until only the bullet points of any historical event remain. And then even those are lost a hundred or so years later. Why is this interesting to me? Who knows? Maybe I'm just weird. Okay, I am definitely weird.
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