8/21/2025

My husband John and I go camping with the same group of friends every year for a week around the Fourth of July. This July, we went on our twenty-seventh camping adventure. At first, it wasn’t our plan to take trips together every year, but then it blossomed into an annual tradition. When we get together, it feels like we’re in our own little world, and there’s a touch of magic in the air.

Sometimes I bring my laptop with me camping, and I write. Some of my novel The Taking, and parts of the novel I’m working on now, I wrote while camping. In the afternoons, as I worked at the campsite, the birds crooned their hearts out – their voices tinkling like bells. Sometimes, I just let my mind drift until I was half-asleep, and I could listen to the birds and dream at the same time.

I had the opportunity to talk with thebookaddict blog about how and why I wrote The Taking. One of the questions I was asked was what my philosophy about writing was, and I had to think how to summarize it in a quick sentence. I gathered all of my scattered definitions for it and boiled them down into a mere eight words. “Write from the heart and to the heart.”

April 30, 2025

My home is New Hampshire. I made it the main setting of my novel The Taking (Roundfire Books, January 1, 2025; Paperback; IBSN: 978-1-80341-550). But there are other brief parts of the book that are set in different spots in New England, including Cape Cod, Massachusetts, where I went to live for a year, after I'd finished a season working as the production stage manager at a summer theater.

At the end of that summer, I was restless, and it felt like a letdown to go home, and I needed an adventure. A friend of mine had a friend who owned a summer house in Mashpee, Massachusetts on the southern shore of Cape Cod.

April 26, 2025

A few people have asked me if I’ll write a sequel to my debut novel, The Taking. When I wrote the book, I thought that maybe I might write a sequel to it someday. The Taking is a suspenseful story with paranormal elements about a young girl and her father who don’t always get along but who are all that each other has, and together they must confront the unknown. But I had a different idea for my next novel, and that’s what I’m focused on now.

April 19, 2025

I’ve been interested in UFOs and aliens my whole life. I wrote an emotional and chilling novel that explores that mystery called The Taking. The Taking is a suspenseful story with paranormal elements about a girl and her father who must confront the unknown. The universe is so vast and teeming with planets that I can’t imagine there isn’t extraterrestrial intelligent life out there. I had my own experience once, when I was a young kid.

A girl besieged by strange events, a mysterious disappearance, UFOs, alien encounters, and coming to terms with difficult truths. These are the foundational conflicts that make The Taking (Roundfire Books, January 1, 2025, Paperback; IBSN: 978-1-80341-550-5; $16.95) by Dona Masi a chilling paranormal novel that is both suspenseful

There have always been stories about encounters with strange beings from other planets. In these stories, human beings are singled out by the strange creatures, who change the humans’ lives forever. At least this is true according to the unsettling legends of unidentified flying objects and alien abductions, stories which have influenced the suspenseful new novel, The Taking by Dona Masi.

Thank you for being here. I’m Dona Masi. I’m a writer, editor, and the author of the new novel The Taking. I spent a long time writing The Taking and pitching it for publication, until about one and a half years ago when I landed a publisher. Now it is a soon to be published book available on Amazon for preorder before the publish release in December, 2024.