The Book Addict Interview

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.”

June 13, 2025

The Book Addict Interview

BA. Hi, Dona. Would you mind telling us a little about yourself to start with? Readers would like to know more about you.

DM. Sure. Well, I’m a writer, and my debut novel The Taking was published earlier this year by Collective Ink. The Taking is a suspenseful story blending science fiction, deep emotion, and mystery. It’s a tale of love, loss, and forces beyond our understanding. The main characters are a young girl and her father who live in a small New England town, where nothing is as it seems. They’re besieged by strange events, and ultimately, they’re forced to confront the unknown.

Besides The Taking, I’m writing another novel now, and the story was inspired by the spirit of my Italian American family. It’s mainly set in the 1940s, but it also goes back into the past to the turn of the twentieth century, when my ancestors and millions of other Italian people from southern Italy came to the United States. 

I do a lot of writing and editing for my job too. I’m an English Language Arts content developer, and I write and edit short fiction and informational articles used for reading and writing assessments throughout the United States. I’m also a playwright, and two of my plays have been performed. I used to write articles for newspapers and online publications, and press releases for theater companies and conservation groups.  

BA. Were there any unexpected challenges you had while writing The Taking:?

DM. I always knew that writing a book would be challenging, but the specific challenge with The Taking had to do with the kind of story it is. For it to work, I had to make it suspenseful, and I had to start building the suspense right away and ramping it up throughout the book as more and more of the plot is revealed. I had to find fresh words and different ways to write suspensefully and to describe the characters’ emotions in those moments. Sometimes I felt like I was repeating myself, and I tried very hard to avoid that.

Another challenge, was blending the genres of scifi-fantasy and realism. The heart of the story is the relationship between the father and daughter, who don’t always get along but who are all that each other has. I worked very hard to depict their relationship with heartfelt emotional realism. And on the flip side, I was challenged by having to make the sci-fi/paranormal elements feel real, so that people who read the book would react to them emotionally and be concerned about what would happen to the characters.   

BA. Could you talk a little about how you balance your writing with the other things in your life?

DM. It’s challenging to balance writing with other priorities, like working, family, and life things. I don’t have a specific formula for that, and the truth is that I’m not the most organized person in the world, but I set goals for myself. I plug away working to achieve them, and that includes working on my writing, and I just keep at them. That’s mainly what I do to accomplish things. I usually do my writing at night when the rest of the day is done.

BA. Did the story evolve differently than you initially planned?

DM. At first, I thought I’d write The Taking as a young adult novel, but after I wrote the first twenty-five pages or so I kind of discovered there were ideas and themes that I wanted to explore that were too serious or heady for young adult lit. They were more suitable for a novel for age 18 and up. So, for a short time, it was going to be a young adult novel, but then I realized I wanted to write it for adults.

BA. Looking back, is there anything you would have done differently during the creation of your book?

DM. It’s hard to write a book and not have some regrets about what you could’ve done differently. My cousin who’s a poet told me a funny story once about a famous poet who pulled one of his books of poetry off the shelf at a library and edited his poems in the book, and then put it back on the shelf full of his markups. I guess that goes to show that a piece of writing can almost always be made better in some way, and that writers can be very self-critical about their writing. I know I am.  About The Taking specifically, though, I wonder if I should’ve had less dialogue. I used dialogue as one way to keep the reader close to the action, develop the characters, and build suspense. I can’t say I wouldn’t do it again, because it felt instinctive and right at the time.

BA. How much of your personal experiences are reflected in the story?

DM. There’s one event in the story that reflects a little bit of a personal experience, but other than that, the story is pure imagination, except that it draws from the details that real people have shared about their alleged experiences with the same mystery or phenomenon that occurs in The Taking. So my own personal interest and knowledge about the subject are definitely reflected in my book. It’s something I’ve been interested in most of my life, and I even wrote a research paper about it once.

BA. What emotions do you hope readers will feel after finishing your book?

DM. I hope that readers will become swept up in the story so that it stays with them after they finish reading The Taking. I hope they feel satisfied. I hope that the ending, especially, leaves readers with a sense of awe. I say that because I tried to give The Taking an epic kind of feeling, even though it’s about ordinary, regular people, but those characters are caught up in extraordinary events that have epic-size implications for them personally and for humanity.

BA. Is there a personal mantra or philosophy you have about your writing?

DM. I guess it’s this: Write from the heart and to the heart. Thank you for that question. It made me have to find a succinct phrase to describe my philosophy. As a writer, I’m interested in exploring the human condition, because that’s what we all have in common. We don’t all have the same experiences in life, of course, but emotionally and mentally we desire and fear similar things. We rejoice over similar things. I love literature that tries to show universal truths about being a human being through the microcosm of a few individual lives, so that we can all relate, because we are all the same in the most fundamental ways.

BA. Where can readers find your work and stay connected with you?

DM. People can go to my website to find out about my work and to order The Taking. My website is donamasi.com. There’s a link to get a copy at the top of each page on my site. You can also watch two cool video book trailers, read some blog posts, and watch or listen to interviews of me as a guest on different podcasts about the paranormal.  

The Taking is widely available at retailers including Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Thriftbooks, Waterstone, Indigo, and my publisher’s website: Collective Ink.  

I have a contact page on my website where people can connect with me. Also, I’m on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and X.

BA. Lastly, what would you say has been the most surprising part of your journey as an author?

DM. There are so many things. I was surprised that I learned things about myself that I didn’t fully know. When I was pitching my book, I got hundreds of rejections. I’m not exaggerating. Sometimes I felt really down, and other times I didn’t. I never felt down for too long, and I was surprised by how resilient I was. I felt good about the fact that I was trying, even if my book was never published. It just gave me a sense of satisfaction to do everything I could and leave no stone unturned. I told myself that if The Taking was never published then my next book would be. I really felt that way, and that surprised me.

One other thing that surprised me is how much I learned and had to learn on my journey to becoming an author. It was a really educational experience. It taught me more about writing novels, and I think it’s made me a better writer. I learned about the publishing business and agents and publishers and the process of publishing a book. Now I’m learning about communicating information about me and my book and marketing it. It’s kind of like going to college because of how much the experience teaches you. And I’m lucky and grateful that I’ve had that chance.