Introducing...Donald J Carey

Hello, my name is Donald J Carey, although my friends just call me Don. And we’re all friends here, right?

My Y chromosome and I are excited to join the lovely and talented ladies here on the Writing Fortress blog. Rebecca has asked me to provide a little testosterone to the mix, so I’ll do my best.

Being the token male is a position I’m very comfortable with, as I grew up in a house full of sisters, and am now raising a house full of daughters. Even our guinea pigs are both girls. The only other boy around here is the cat, and he has to sleep in the garage.

My family and I live in a small town just west of Fort Worth, Texas, where we moved four years ago so my wife could be closer to Dallas for medical treatment. Prior to that, we lived near my sisters and parents in Utah.

By day, I am a software engineer, working from home for a small company in Midvale, Utah. I write code in Java and C++, and I like to joke that this is much like writing fiction, only with a lot more semicolons.

Although my first love in literature is Speculative Fiction, my muse saw fit to feed me a romantic coming-of-age story for my debut novel. (So don’t get too worried about testosterone overload just yet.)

The book is set in my hometown of Laie, which is also home to BYU-Hawaii and the Polynesian Cultural Center. The kernel for this story idea came to me in the middle of a harsh Utah February, when I was feeling particularly homesick for the tropics.

Last month, I signed a contract with Cedar Fort to publish this as-yet unnamed book. (Actually, it has about a dozen names, but nobody seems to like any of them.) This is technically my first novel, although the finished product is so different from my first feeble drafts that I could easily say I’ve written three or four stories over the last eight years.

While I have always loved reading, writing has been a fairly recent avocation. In my younger years, I scratched my creative itch musically, playing many different instruments in a number of high school and college bands. Once out of school, however, it became more and more difficult to coordinate the schedules and personalities required for a musical group, and I began writing as a more solitary creative outlet.

I soon learned, however, that while writing itself is a private activity, meeting and socializing with other writers – both online and in person – has been one of the most fulfilling aspects of writing.

Because of my love for that interaction, I really look forward to participating on this blog and getting to know both the Writing Fortress authors and readers. Thank you for giving me this opportunity.

And now I will leave you with a photo of the SR-71 Blackbird, because nothing says “testosterone” like tearing through the sky at Mach 3.2.

Photo by jamesdale10