Interview and Giveaway: Infernal Eighteen Tour by Don A Martinez

The author of Infernal Eighteen, Don A Martinez, has graciously allowed an interview and is offering 2 ebook copies of his AWESOME book, Infernal Eighteen to my followers. To enter, just leave a comment with your email address below. Contest ends Feb 18th, 2013.

The Interview!

1. Tell me a bit about yourself.
My name is Don A. Martinez, I live in eastern Texas, and work as a writing professor at a small college here. My family consists of my wife, my baby daughter, and four cats who consider themselves the rulers of my house. When I'm not teaching or writing, the baby has been taking up most of my time lately. As far as who I am as a writer, I've been writing my series Phantom Squadron in one form or another for the last 12 years, which has also fed my professional interests; my Master's degree in English was earned with a focus on mythology and folklore.

2. When did you first consider yourself a writer?

At around nine or ten years old, I entered the Young Authors' Conference story competition in Oak Harbor, Washington, where my family was living at the time. I wound up winning a spot in the Conference two consecutive years, and that gave me the confidence to believe that I could write more than just to entertain or mollify myself. I kept writing, using writing as a coping mechanism, particularly because I wasn't exactly the height of popularity at any school I attended. I posted writings to the Internet when that became something normal folks could do, but I didn't start getting serious, honest-to-God feedback from readers until I wrote fan-fiction. Phantom Squadron kind of builds from that fanfic experience.

3. If you had to choose, which writer would you consider a mentor?
That's actually easy, because not only do I have his book, I studied under him in college. There's an author by the name of Dr. Ralph Wahlstrom who has a book out entitled "The Tao of Writing." He is my writing mentor, because he showed me some of the essential truths of what it takes to be a truly successful writer. Ralph is a writing and English professor at my alma mater, Buffalo State College in New York, and it's actually for his class that I wrote the first of my books, a bit of overachieving considering most of the rest of the class was working with four-page essays. 

4. If you couldn’t be an author, what would your ideal career be?
I'm already doing it, actually. Since high school, I've been wanting to teach on one level or another. That it's college that I'm teaching is all the better, although one thing I do regularly in my day-to-day work is put out fires set by poor English teaching my students have had to go through, where they haven't been kept accountable, or have just been bulldozed through the public school system without a major writing deficiency being addressed. When I worked as an intern at a social work training facility, and saw that many of the MSW's had no idea how to write coherently, this made me doubly determined to fix these problems before they reach the professional world. 

5. What book are you reading now?
Most of my time is spent reading through the books of the authors I publish. As such, any book I'm currently reading tends to turn into a plug for their latest releases. That being said, the most recent books I've read for both pleasure and business are Destiny Never Sleeps: Quest of the Two Queens by Bernadette Thompson Martin and Jeannie Faulkner Barber, River Town by Lynn Hobbs, and John Dies at the End by David Wong.

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