Mark Nielsen

Well, what can I tell you? I'm just a good ol' southern boy. Okay, that statement alone proves I'm a fiction writer. Being good is highly overrated and I'm not really from the south. I was born in Minneapolis back when pterodactyls rather than storks delivered babies. So only the old and the boy parts of that statement are true. My family moved to North Carolina when I was three years old and I have lived here ever since, so I consider myself a southerner now, but when we first arrived, it was clear we didn't fit in. We didn't sound like everyone else, not with our midwestern vowels. We were referred to as yankees. Now, I'm sure you're familiar with the term, but in the south, it refers to anybody NOT from the south, and those of us who have the audacity to stay are referred to as Damn Yankees!

I have had two great passions in my life: math and theatre. I went to Duke University with the full intention of majoring in math, but somewhere along the line I switched my major to English and had the great honor to study with one of America's great novelists, Reynolds Price. I then attended the University of North Carolina where I earned two masters degrees in dramatic arts. (Yes, that's right Duke and Carolina. A complete no-no here in the south!)

One of the best periods of my life was teaching theatre at Chapel Hill High School, where I had the privilege to work with the most outstanding student actors and technicians. I am proud to say that many of those students are still involved in theatre in some fashion or another. Many like Jerry Sipp run community theatres; others like Peter Spruyt have gone on to make commercials. Susan Sanford has acted in regional theatres all across the country. Karen White provides the voice for audiobooks. John Haymes Newton was the first Superboy on television and went on to star in Melrose Place and made guest appearances on every show you can imagine. Perhaps the former student of mine that will be most familiar to you is Clark Gregg who is best known for his role as Agent Phil Coulson of the Avenger movie series, and star of the ABC drama Marvel Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. television series. Not only can he act, but he can write. He wrote the screenplay for the hit movie What Lies Beneath with Michelle Pfeiffer and Harrison Ford.

By the time I left teaching, I had written twenthy-three plays and musicals and directed more than fifty mainstage productions. It was time to turn my attention to something else. So, I fell back on my first love, math, and joined the programming revolution. It was the eighties and desktop computers were just becoming mainstream. I still earn my living as a programmer. But that creative itch just wouldn't go away. That's when I decided to try something completely new--I was going to write a novel. But not just any novel. I wanted to write a book like the one that changed my whole view of mysteries. If you're a mystery fanatic like I am, then you know that one of the fascinations with the genre is being able to solve the crime long before the author reveals it. But sometimes, you get to the end and feel cheated. Yes, the murderer isunmasked, but you were never privy to the vital information that ulimately led the detective to unravel the mystery. So, up until the late eighties that had been my experience with mysteries, I could either solve them, or I wanted to burn them. But then my good friend and former student, Eric Carl, loaned me a copy of Red Dragon by Thomas Harris, better known for his sequel, The Silence of the Lambs. I read the book in a single night, certain that I had solved the mystery, but when I reached the end of the book, not only did I get it wrong, I got my comeuppance. All of the clues I needed to solve the mystery were there from page one. Harris never hid a thing, laying all of his cards on the table. I wanted to thump my head for being such an idiot. How could I have missed what now seemed so obivious? But don't get me wrong. I was not disappointed; it was one of the most euphoric experiences of my life. If you've ever seen the movie The Sixth Sense, then you know exactly what I'm talking about, that moment toward the end of the movie where everyone in the theatre gasps.

So, when I picked up the pen (okay the keyboard) to write Hotlanta!, I did so with one goal in mind, to lay out a mystery where I would hide nothing from the reader, just as Harris had done for me, with the hope that readers would have that thump your head moment at the end.