Elizabeth D’Onofrio

Tell us about yourself and how many books you have written.
My bio says I was not born in a small cabin in the big woods of Wisconsin, which is true. I’m from Michigan. However, it’s true I did grow up in a little house…one of those adorable suburban ones built in the early 1960s. Right after high school I toured Europe for three weeks, during which time my family moved to Arizona, though not with the intention to ditch me! I flew to Tucson on faith that someone I knew in this city I’d never been to before would be there to meet me at the gate and take me to my new home whose address I didn’t actually know yet. And yes, for the record, that was before cell phones! My next adventure was college at the University of Arizona where I earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in General Fine Arts Studies. That’s the cool, and not entirely useless, degree where you get to dabble in all the dark arts, I mean, Fine Arts. I majored in drama, minored in art, music, and dance. Studies in film and literature rounded out the curriculum. For the P.E. credit I took fencing. Every novelist of fantasy lit ought to duel with a rapier at least once.

Did I mention I knew I wanted to be an novelist when I was 16? While the mechanics of writing can be learned from a textbook, my studies opened up a whole new way of seeing things. I write scenes as if I were a stage or film director. Words are my camera. They capture sets and costumes, drama and emotions. Words are my power tools. Words are my paint box. I love to build and paint with them. I’m a big fan of employing color and imagery for their symbolic as well as literal content. Those techniques, and others, are in the books I’ve written, which include “Distant Eyes,” “Sword Striker,” “Charm of the Gloaming,” and “The Crystals of Yukitake.” When the big publishers failed to take notice of me, I founded my own publishing house: Little Pebble Press. In addition to my novels, Little Pebble Press has published children’s picture books and a cookbook.

What is the name of your latest book and what inspired it?
“Sword Striker” was born during the wee hours of a June night in Sedona, Arizona. Sedona is the location, according to legend, of a mystical vortex. I don’t know what the vortex is or if it’s real, but there IS something special about Sedona. I went to bed that night with fragments of “Return of the Jedi” settled in my mind and by sunup a story of my own had emerged. By the time I returned to Tucson the story that would become Sword Striker had begun to whisper its secrets to me.

Politics and spirituality have always fascinated me and inevitably find some expression in the stories I write. In “Sword Striker” they surface as Lord Brant’s reaction to the oppression suffered by ordinary people and the vengeance raging in him over the death of his father. For me as a writer and a person, there is no more powerful theme or act than forgiveness. It’s something more than one character in the novel has to grapple with, and to do it requires true courage. What I created is a great adventure – one born out of political strife within the kingdom but also internal strife, where a boy learns what it means to become a man of compassion. Controlling your temper and being able to forgive those who wronged you, along with putting the needs of others before your own, that’s strength that takes courageous formation, and it’s an achievement worth chronicling.

Do you have any unusual writing habits?
This may or may not be unusual but my writing method is non-linear, meaning I don’t write from page One to page End in order. For me, writing a novel is like working a puzzle with a thousand pieces and no picture on the box. Everything is already there, pre-existing in that inexplicable realm of creativity: it’s just a matter of touching the pieces and figuring out how they fit together. What a thrill when they do! When my brain is on fire with ideas, it’s a total high, and I can write for ten hours straight and forget to eat. At other times, when the fire has long since died down, inspiration likes to purr as a way of procrastination against stuff I don’t feel like doing. I get a lot written at tax time. Then, at the times when the brain is totally dry or squishy, I work on marketing or do research or clean the house.

What authors, or books have influenced you?
Laura Ingalls Wilder, Margaret Mitchell, and James Joyce, not necessarily in that order. I made the acquaintance of Ms. Wilder’s series when I was in junior high. She made me feel like Laura was my best friend. I read “Gone With the Wind” when I was 14. Ms. Mitchell taught me to write the ending first so you know where the story is heading. I encountered Mr. Joyce in high school but didn’t really appreciate him for another five years. A shout out to “Dubliners” for turning 100 this year. “Dubliners” is an amazing collection. There is so much to learn from Mr. Joyce. A big influence on me presently is Charles Dickens. I love the way that man uses imagery and personification. Jane Austen also gets a spot on my dance card. And I must credit Lloyd Alexander’s Prydain chronicles for getting my mind tuned in to a medieval sensibility. He and the masterful J.R.R. Tolkien. With Tolkien as a model I invented a foreign language. I don’t care that George Lucas isn’t an author of books. The biggest influence on “Sword Striker” was “Star Wars.”

What are you working on now?
“Star and Sun” is the sequel to “Sword Striker” and the third book of the Khryterdon Sage trilogy. It takes place twenty-five years after the events of Sword Striker when the kingdom of Khryterdon has new adversaries on the horizon. Book Three concludes with Intrigue, a web of murder and sorcery that threatens to destroy Khrytish liberty for decades to come. Projected release date is late 2014.

What is your best method or website when it comes to promoting your books?
My website: www.stanincelarts.com. All my publications have their own page where you can learn more about them, as well as find links to prominent global retailers. For fun, I post my photography on my website too. If my website is my baby, Twitter is my new best friend. The world connects on Twitter.

Do you have any advice for new authors?
Know English grammar. Know when to use their, they’re or there. Grammar is your toolbox. You can have the greatest idea for a shed but if you don’t know how to use a hammer and saw you’re either not going to get the thing built or it will be a rickety tumble-down disaster people will avoid. After that, write because you love doing it. Write because the people in your head are real. Write because you have a gift to share. And don’t stop.

What is the best advice you have ever heard?
I’ll give the nod to Yoda: “Do or do not, there is no try.”

What are you reading now?
Barbara Eden’s autobiography. I loved “I Dream of Jeannie” as a kid. Sidney Sheldon was a brilliant man. I wish I could remember the exact quote, but he once said something about how terrific it was to write novels because you can take the reader to any exotic location and you don’t have to worry about a production budget, and you have total artistic control. That inspired me.

What’s next for you as a writer?
More writing, more editing, more publishing. There is always another book to create. The craft is too glorious to ever get dull. Along with my work on the Khryterdon Saga, two of my authors are writing sequels to their children’s books.

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?
First of all I’d bring a really good dictionary and Roget’s Thesaurus. If I’m stuck on a desert island I will want to recline on the sand and write. For pleasure reading, which is the gist of this question, I would bring “Ulysses” because being stranded on an island would give me time to read it again and again and again and maybe then I’d start to understand it. I’d probably have to bring “The Odyssey” too for reference. I’d bring “Dubliners” as well because I love it. Then the Harry Potter series for pure fun.

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