Author Robert Donohue has a new fantasy novel, Child of Creation: Book One of Then Came a King series(October 2017, Page Publishing), the thrilling journey of Lark, who after witnessing a massacre and being pursued by an atrocious threat, must struggle to survive and evade death, along with unearthing stunning secrets about his heritage.
Alone and terrified, the only son of the village’s hunter is on the run from a threat he doesn’t even understand. Marauders, who destroyed his village and murdered his parents, are chasing him to silence the only voice left able to bear witness to their atrocities. His parents ominously warned him to trust no one as they sent him away while they fought courageously to give their young teenage son a chance to live. Thus, begins the adventures of Lark.
I had a chance to interview Robert to learn more about writing.
How did you get started as a writer? As a kid I was an avid reader. Growing up in Central New York where the winters are brutal, there was really not much else to do in the winter, so I would borrow whatever my mother, who is also an avid reader, was reading. Then I started my paper route around age 11 and that gave me the money to buy my own books. I was never really good at English or grammar though. Then I got to college and was taking a mandatory English Comp class and we had some assignments to write fiction. I got A’s on them and was like, hey, I am pretty good at this. From then on it was just whenever I A. had no book to read or B. was into whatever I was writing I would sit down with pencil and paper and just write. Much of that old stuff is lost or thrown away now. Laptops have been wonderful because I no longer have to keep up with all the various pieces of paper I was writing on.
Is it ever too early or late to participate in NaNoWriMo? I honestly had to look up what that meant, however I strongly support any efforts to give people the motivation to sit down and write. I have always done it as a way to relax, however, some people just need that added motivation of a person known to have written well to just sit down and get it started.
How can novel writing be beneficial even if it's never published? I served in Iraq during the recovery from the war there. At the end of the day I would pull out my laptop and take the time to add a chapter or even just a few sentences to get my mind off of all the stress and bad stuff I had seen. It provided me with a place to relax in a situation where relaxation was hard.
What do you do if you run into writer's block? Step away from that particular subject. It took me 25 years to write and publish the novel we are talking about, and in some part because I would just walk away from a particular writing if I ran into a roadblock. At the same time, I started a number of other books while I was figuring out how to get past the problem that blocked me in the first one. I have a bunch of started books saved on my computer. Everything from Westerns, to non-fiction accounts of either particular cases from when I was a police officer, or on my time in Iraq, to other fantasy stuff.
No comments:
Post a Comment