Covenant author really just an ordinary man?

Press, 2 July 1983, Page 8

Covenant author really just an ordinary man?

The surprising thing about one of the world’s most successful fantasy writers is that he does not seem so surprising at all. Stephen Donaldson, the American-born author of the six-volume “Chronicles of Thomas Covenant,” has some difficulty with that himself. “One of the problems I have is getting people to understand that I am not into drugs,” he said. Others assume he is a practising witch or has a guru. “I work in the garden, I recreate, and I like small Sies,” Mr Donaldson He arrived in Christchurch yesterday on a New Zealand publicity tour, with a bad case of writer’s cramp from autographing copies of his books that have each topped the million sales mark. “I must confess that every time I sign my name, it has fewer letters,” he said. Another problem with fame is saying “no,” a word Mr Donaldson says he has trouble with. But the line has to be drawn when it comes to people asking to

move into his New Mexico home to learn writing, or 7000 boys from Cleveland, Ohio, asking for autographed photographs. Otherwise he would not have time to write — 40 hours a week with evenings, week-ends and public holidays off. There was a time when Mr Donaldson, now aged 36, had his first Covenant manuscripts rejected 47 times. “I was astonished when I finally found a publisher,” he said. “When they sold three copies I was ecstatic.” He does not want to be a failure again, and success does have compensations in that he can be choosy about assignments. A publisher’s offer of an Australian and New Zealand tour was one “carrot” that worked. The last 10 years have been spent writing about Covenant, a guilt-ridden writer who contracts leprosy and dreams himself into a fantasy world where the disease is cured and his Clatinum wedding ring gives im unusual powers. Both the leprosy and guilt are the product of Mr Donaldson’s childhood spent among “fire and brimstone” missionaries

in India where his father was a medical missionary working with lepers. Covenant has now been shelved although Mr Donaldson plans eventually to write a third and final trilogy. In the meantime he wants to try something different — perhaps detective novels. The two crime novels he has published so far under the pseudonym Reed Stevens have flopped as badly as the Covenant manuscripts when they first made the round of American publishers.