Donnie Dale

Writing. Call it a lifetime of fascination with people. People and their stories. Stories and their dialogues and their lovely little plots. Okay, it’s also the challenge of the telling, the excitement of conception and the risk of birth. Then, if you’re good as well as lucky, there’s transformation at the end.

That’s what Donnie Dale does. He’s had a novel published, A HUNTER’S FIRE, in 1989, by New American Library. He was a staff writer on the TV show ARREST & TRIAL, a true crime reenactment series from Dick Wolf in 2000. His first movie script was shot in 2005, the low-budget horror film ROOM 33 which was co-written with director Eddie Barbini.

BIO
Donnie has a BA in Creative Writing and a BS in Wildlife Biology from the University of Arizona. He has made a living as a writer his entire working life. He’s written for the state governments of Arizona and Queensland, Australia. He’s written for the two big morning newspapers in Phoenix and Tucson. He’s written hundreds of articles and shot hundreds of photographs for a variety of magazines as a freelancer.

Dang, he’s written his little heart out in order to make a living.

His true love remains fiction. Maybe it’s the elation of creativity. Maybe it’s easier to just not remember the facts. Either way, Donnie continues to write novels, screenplays and short stories. His literary/political novel ARCHIPELAGO is finished and nosing around New York City looking for an agent. He has several screenplays finished, in genres ranging from romantic comedies to thrillers to sci-fi and horror.

But there may be no writing quite like a short story for intensity and impact. Here’s a sample from Donnie’s story, SCULPTURE:

“He was either on something or it was stolen. You don’t try to wreck a nicely tricked out car like that if it’s yours and you’re in your right mind. I gunned it and came up alongside because I knew what he had and knew what I had and knew I had more than he did. I buy the old interceptors, you see, the used Crown Vics with ghostly police insignia and ripples in fenders where bad things happened to good cops. It’s an old tactical vehicle interception trick you use to stop a car under severe conditions, and when I suddenly dropped back and whipped into his rear end with my front end he rolled about six times while I watched him going away out of my mirrors. I knew it was going to cost me a couple K in body work but it’s like hitting somebody. At the exact moment when you start it you somehow feel the gratification shoot through your brain the way Pearl Harbor or Baghdad shoots through history and you just keep doing it until that war’s done.

Odd how a car in an accident like that will roll and roll and then end up sitting on its tires kind of heaving and wheezing like a geezer in a rush. Steam and smoke rose from it front and back in a lazy kind of way and one guy, the passenger, flipped the door open and fell out onto the pavement as if he’d been shot. He crawled over to the sidewalk and lay there talking to himself in the third person. The other guy never came out. Something about a part of the rear view mirror in his temple, is what they said later. Should have been wearing his seat belt.”

CONTACT THE WRITER
Email Donnie Dale.