Donna Gillespie's Blog
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Mar.26.2013
When I first made the jump from short stories to a novel, I used to say that if the raw excitement of getting swept up in a short story could be compared to starting an affair, writing a novel was marriage with ten kids. By that measure what I’m doing now feels like marriage, ten kids, and omigod I...
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Oct.26.2012
A friend of mine told me she was getting frustrated with her writing class and wasn’t sure she was going to stay with it. Students were told to outline the whole book before the instructor let them start, and he’d just rejected her fourth outline. She was itching to begin chapter one. She wasn’t...
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Sep.04.2012
Whenever I complain over the fact I seem to need at least ten or twelve years per book, I nearly always hear these words of comfort — “But of course. You have to do all that research.”
At first I’m tempted to agree — after all, the person is trying to help me out. But the fact is, it’s nowhere...
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Jul.23.2012
So I just went in for the second time — my next — and final, since now I’m fresh out of legs — total knee replacement. It seems I’m hard on knees. Thank god I’m not a horse. Or, worse, a spider, the knee surgeon added helpfully when I tried this joke on him. (I’ll bet even our eight-legged friends...
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Jun.26.2012
And so at last the freshly scanned copy of my first novel was buffed and polished and — or so I thought — all ready to be electroni-cized. It was time to find the right conversion guy.
I knew I would need separate files for Kindle and Nook, but other than that I knew very little....
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Jun.13.2012
When my first novel (The Light Bearer, Berkley/Putnam 1994) was teetering at the edge of the out-of-print abyss and my publisher didn’t seem interested in putting it out as an e-book, I realized that if I wanted to save my first-born child it was time to strike out on my own.
I’d read...
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Much has been written of the cold-blooded shenanigans of the Roman way of life, but Gillespie weaves her tale in a way that brings new color and excitement to the era… Throughout this monumental story, Gillespie constantly increases the excitement and intrigue. There are no flat passages in The Light Bearer, only a fast-flowing stream that erupts into a full-scale torrent in the book's conclusion.”
—The Washington Post
About Donna
I'm the author of two historical novels set in first century Rome, The Light Bearer (Berkley/Putnam, 1994) and Lady of the Light (Berkley/Putnam, 2006). The Light Bearer has been translated into German, Dutch, Russian and Italian, was an international...