Tell us about yourself and how many books you have written.
I’ve written, well I currently have four full length books published and for sale, a number of short stories free on the website and I’m working on three more full length novels as we speak. I tend to work on multiple project to keep from getting bored as well as to keep up the release schedule I’ve set for myself of a new book every other month. With the amount of ideas and characters floating around in my head I’d like to get the number of releases up to one a month for full length books, that is to say books at 60,000 words or longer.
What is the name of your latest book and what inspired it?
The latest book, Beautifulest, which is going to be released on October 1st, 2016, is a surrealist book that deals with alienation and the human condition as it relates to god and love and loss, which although usually found together, are seldom mutually beneficial conditions. It is almost a stream of conciousness story, where the character finds himself shifting in and out of different versions of the same Earth, inspired by the great Michael Moorcock and his Eternal Champion books about the multiverse of parallel Earths. As a big fan of Haruki Murakami, Jose Saramago and Umberto Eco, there’s quite a bit of questioning about the worth of feeling at all and the use of God, as an object we look to rather than the benevolent father figure. Of course, I’m also a huge action junky in real life as well as in literature, so it’s a pretty fast paced book like my genre fiction tends to be. So yeah, it’s cerebral action adventure with lots and lots of satire. I find that satire is a fantastic way of poking fun not only at oneself, but at those who for lack of any direction in their own lives tend to look down on others for the crime of trying to succeed, or worse, actually succeeding.
Do you have any unusual writing habits?
I write. When I was younger I had the good fortune to meet a very famous guitar player and as we sat in his tour bus consuming all the usual things one consumes on a tour bus, I asked him offhandedly what the best exercises or practice routines I could do to get my guitar playing, face melting chops up. He just smiled, winked at me over the bottle of whiskey he was drinking out of and when he had swallowed that liquid fire said ‘Just play the damn thing. Play it as much as you can, however you feel like playing it at that moment. That’s the only thing that will really make you better is to play it.” So I write. It’s the only thing that’s going to make me better at writing.
What authors, or books have influenced you?
As I said, I’m a big fan of thinking writers who also aren’t boring as hell. Elmore Leonard, who a lot of people, despite his popularity, don’t realize is a thinking writer, slips in some really profound things when it comes to how we percieve people not lucky or unlucky enough to be in our own personal predicament. Umberto Eco, the master of the hidden world populated by those people whose only goal in life is the control of us normal folks, is a monster when it comes to stringing the reader along. Murakami for that strange, dreamlike quality he pulls off with so little effort and Jose Saramago for all his questions about why we follow so blindly and the wit with which he asks them. Of course there’s Michael Moorcock, who influences every single overblown fantasy epic that doesn’t really need seven books, each at least a thousand pages long, to tell a story. I love the fact that he out writes, out thinks and out adventures them all with those short novels of his. And I would be doing a disservice to my son if I didn’t put Howard and the mighty Conan into the list of influences as those were the books that made me interested in story telling to begin with. After all, what person on this planet doesn’t want to live a life of adventure free from the made up laws of governments who only seek to stay in power at our expense. So right now, everyone raise a toast to the barbarian that all of us, at least in some small way, wish we were as brave and careless as.
What are you working on now?
Currently I’ve got a few things going. One is a sequel to A Few Deaths More tentatively titled A Lesson of Filling Graves, which I hope will be done by December. Lots of folks have been wanting more of Horus Faulk so they will get that book in time for Christmas break reading. I’ve also got a book I’m calling Hime Daruma that deals with death, or rather the lack of someone you really love in your life once they pass beyond us. It’s very dreamlike and I’m being very careful with it, much more respectful of other people’s impressions of the subject than I am with most everything else I do. In November the book Alien From Earth will be released, which is a book about religion from the outside looking in, that is to say, it’s a study, in a very science fiction adventure way, of how a species can be so readily led by someone or something who is not at all what it professes to be. It’s my take on how we are so ready to be told how to live and even, sadly enough, how to die.
What is your best method or website when it comes to promoting your books?
I had really good returns with Awesomegang when I released my short, 1970s style horror book Wolves of the Land, so I’m back now to promote the new one, Beautifulest, and I’m quite sure I’ll be coming back to drop more of the books on you guys. As far as promotions, I have pretty decent luck with word of mouth, which is either a testament to my writing, or a testament to the fact that over the top melodrama really is the key to entertainment.
Do you have any advice for new authors?
Just write. If it’s not working, write some more. If it’s still not working then trash whatever you’re trying to write and start something you want to write. But for whatever counts as god’s sake, don’t put out a thousand page ‘epic’ where it’s really just a hundred page short story with unoriginal and completely boring, played out world buildings. We’ve all read Lord of the Rings and the Ghormenghast books so stop trying to fool us.
What is the best advice you have ever heard?
Suck it up, the world wasn’t built for you. So you’d better get to building yourself for it.
What are you reading now?
Finishing up Cain by Jose Saramago, and also reading an Agatha Christie collection of short Poirot stories.
What’s next for you as a writer?
Well I think we’ve covered that already.
If you were going to be stranded on a desert island and allowed to take 3 or 4 books with you what books would you bring?
I’m on the water every single day, so I doubt any force in the universe could strand me, but let’s just say that happened for the sake of the answer shall we…I’d hope to have Shogun, by James Clavell which is in my opinion the greatest novel ever written, Master of the Game by Sidney Sheldon, The Wind Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami, The Elric Saga by Michael Moorcock, and probably oh I don’t know Name of the Rose or The Prague Cemetery by Umberto Eco.
Author Websites and Profiles
– Donchatz Website
– Donchatz Amazon Profile
– Donchatz Author Profile on Smashwords
– Donchatz’s Social Media Links
Goodreads Profile