ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Frank Muskeni
Frank Muskeni is a putative scholar, ex-seminarian, former business executive, entrepreneur and ex-solider. During his time in service, Frank served a total of six years between active duty and reserve time with the 617th Light Helicopter Company attached to the Eleventh Special Forces (Green Berets) between 1963 and 1969.
The author has traveled widely in his pursuit of knowledge in both the United States and Europe. During Frank's travels abroad (especially to England and France) he had the opportunity to hear many local legends, myths and some juicy old-wives tales which peaked his imagination when he wrote The Tale of the Bone Crusher.
Frank majored in Business Administration and minored in English at Fenn College in Cleveland Ohio. He continues to write books, plays and screenplays.
In his personal time, Frank has taken an interest in helping homeless veterans, especially in Portland, Oregon and his current place of residence, Southern California. Frank is also the father of three children.
Read more about his background in the Q&A section below.
Q&A with the Author
Q. What motivated you to first get interested in literature?
A. It started when I was four years old. My paternal grandparents were servants on the Garfield Estate in Mentor, Ohio. I lived there, in the servant's quarters with my mother while my father was serving in the Navy during WWII. Mr. James R. Garfield, the son of the late president was a very old man when I knew him. He had served president Theodore Roosevelt's administration and was very instrumental in assisting Teddy in establishing our National Park Systems. Now, long retired, he spent a lot of time in the family's private library. As a four-year old, my understanding of the protocols of servant and master was not attended to. As an occasional interloper, Mr. Garfield was kind enough to tolerate my sporadic encroachments into his inner-sanctum. My mother had taught me to read by then and so Mr. Garfield encouraged my interest in books. His daughter-in-law, Mrs. Eleanor “Bobbie” Garfield was later the mayor of Mentor Ohio and she further instilled my interest in books. I remember the first one she gave me. It was titled, Randall and the River of Time by the very prolific C.S. Forester.
Q. Why did you choose fiction and especially science-fiction as the underpinning of your stories?
A. I believe Fiction, either the writing of it or simply the reading of it is a powerful human addiction. It is an existential escape and entertainment element within the human psyche that can whisk us away from either the harshness of one's present circumstances or simply the monotony of our everyday lives. Writing fiction is the closest thing a person can do to rearranging the world on the writer's terms. It's like being some Grand Arbiter of the universe that one creates; all its characters, it's villains, its heroes and the imaginary worlds in which they act out their appointed roles. It's as close to being God as we poor humans can attempt to aspire.
Q. With all the advances in science and technology today, do you think Science Fiction may run out of new ideas?
A. Not as long as writers can dream or readers never give up their curiosity and desire to be enthralled with the possibilities of things to come.
Q. Why is Science Fiction so endemic in most of your works?
A. Science and science-fiction are cousins and are both necessary elements in three of my works:
In Jefferson Wept it is Time Travel.
In Primal Resurrection it is a sort of DNA on steroids as a modern day Dr. Jekyll accidentally turns himself into Mr. Hyde.
In The Tale of the Bone Crusher it is a co-mingling of Science Fiction with fantasy, myths and legends.
I think the great Isaac Asimov had it pretty close to right when he said that Sci-Fi writers often foresee the inevitable: both the wondrous and the catastrophic and the core of the essence of this art-form is that one is never sure of the possibilities of the outcome but those outcomes may be crucial to our human destiny–to our salvation if we are to be saved at all. These works of mine represent my humble attempt at dancing between the calamities and the conquest of the fears that emanate from catastrophes of one sort or another.
Q. Do you think some Science Fiction writers of the past could now be considered modern-day prophets?
A. That may be giving the whole genre more credit than it deserves but I will quote Theodore Rosak who wrote, “The question most troubling with each passing year is how much of yesterday's science-fiction has become today's award winning research.” That has a lot of implications both good and ill.
Q. Why did you decide to write so many books all at once?
A. I didn't do that in any sort of frenetic or “mass-production” sort of way. These works are an aggregate of decades of research and three of them were originally my screenplays which never got any attention from the power-players in Hollywood. Nonetheless, friends who read them encouraged me to convert them into an architectural narrative and viola! As to Jefferson Wept, my magnus opus, has a been a work in progress since the presidency of Willian Jefferson Clinton (hence the “word-play” of the title using JEFFERSON as the connection. Various illnesses I have suffered in the past consistently inhibited by completion and now I have FINALLY finished. This has allowed the edition to incorporate Jefferson's exposure to not just Clinton, but all those who succeeded him. These men helped me, whether they appreciate it or not, to write a better work of political pitfalls.
Q. Why do you write about so many different subjects.?
A. I'm not a “one-trick pony” sort of an author. No offense intended to very talented and much more successful authors, but people like J.K. Rawlings, Andrew Vaachs, Lee Childs, Steven King, and most others get a certain niche or character and exploit that and it works wonderfully for them and I salute their skills and remarkable success. I'm more of a polyglot as far as eclectic subject materials, but my works all have a scientific commonality: Science Fiction, Science and Myths, Political Science, or just plain cutting edge Science.
Q. Pardon me for asking but, aren't you a little old to be embarking on a writing career?
A. I always wanted to feel like a starving artist (just kidding) fortunately I don't have to worry about the starving part, but I never attended to my passion, my art and now I have done so. I'm a teller of tales, for sure, but I always also wanted to be a teacher. Perhaps my works can entertain and inform the reader. If I leave the reader satisfied with my work and also think about what I'm trying to convey I will have done my job.
Q. You indicated that you are a scholar but how do you define that term?
A. First of all, a scholar is anyone who has had a teacher. In an academic hierarchy definition, I have No Credentials that would give me a formal PhD following my name; however, I have devoted the past seventeen years of my life studying science, politics, and religion and writing about these subjects. As an example of my devotion to my forthcoming book (Jefferson Wept) I have read over fifty books on Thomas Jefferson and his contemporaries, made trips to Washington D.C. where I spent a good deal of time at The Library of Congress, visited Monticello and devoted the better part of the past two decades writing and re-writing this book which shall debut later this year. I'd humbly assert that my devotion to that exercise should qualify my efforts as that of a scholarly enterprise to say the least.