Mark and I met when we were active on Francis Ford Coppola’s Zoetrope website. That is, he may still be active there. Mark writes and works with literary fiction, while I write genre. Never-the-less, we’ve become supporting friends. Mark has an interesting history and career. Here is his brief interview and some of his projects.
Please, introduce yourself. Tell us about your personal life, family, education. Mark Budman, a first generation immigrant from the former Soviet Union. Married, two daughters, three grandkids. Master’s in Electrical Engineering. A certified Medical Interpreter. A writer. A contrarian.
What do you like doing in your spare time? Write. To waste time on social media. To debate.
If you are active in career fields other than writing, what do you hope for the future of that business? Describe your work or business activities in which you are presently active. I’m currently a medical interpreter. My job is to ensure communications between doctors, nurses, medical staff, and patients. Though they do have a lot of good tools for translation, including AI, the medical interpreting is above all people skills, so this profession is unlikely to go away soon.
Do you have hobbies? How did you get started in them? Yes, photography. I’ve been doing it for the last forty years.
If you are a writer, are you an avid reader? Avid and voracious reader. I am always reading either fiction or non-fiction.
What is your ultimate writing goal as you see it today? I want to finish my newest memoir so I could transfer my life approach to the next generation.
What inspired you to write your first book? It was about Lenin coming back to life, immigrating to America and running for POTUS. I thought it would be fun to imagine the American voters’ reaction, and his reaction to this country.
Do you have a blog or website viewers can visit for updates, events and special offers? Include links to any and all of your sites.
Some of Mark’s Books
Condensed to Flash: World Classics Kindle Edition
by Mark Budman (Author, Editor), Susan O’Neill (Editor)
There are no more new plots in fiction, and that’s old news. Everything that has been written in the last three thousand years is a recasting, retelling and rehashing of primordial plots. Shakespeare was retelling the work of playwrights who worked before him, and he recast older stories and historical material—going perhaps all the way to the stone age story-teller who danced around the fire and beat the drum. The Brothers Grimm started by collecting folk stories. Harry Potter had much in common with Luke Skywalker, and Georgette Heyer with Jane Austen. According to Goodreads, there are at least 75 retellings of Beauty and the Beast and at least 80 of Cinderella.
Yet by combining the basic plots and bringing them to contemporary levels, by finding new perspectives and connections, today’s author is able to create something new, fresh and original. Just like the painter Kehinde Wiley’s street-chick updates of the Old Masters, the fiction writer refreshes and re-energizes the old stories.
The Shape-Shifter’s Guide to Time Travel Kindle Edition
by Mark Budman (Author)
When 18-year-old Rose arrives in Temnota from the US as an exchange student, she finds the country even more oppressive than she thought. The Secret Service has just imprisoned Libera, a young rebel leader. A shape-shifter, she can escape by taking any form, so they’ve locked her away in a cell impenetrable to her kind, and are about to execute her.
Rose teams up with her classmate, Gavrilo, the prince of all shape-shifters, to find a way to unlock Libera’s cell to save her. According to a legend, such a way existed a long time ago. Rose takes Gavrilo back to the past to find it. A Secret Service Major, an evil genius of shifters, stands in their way.
Rose and Gavrilo fall for each other, but she has a disease that prevents them from touching. Will they beat the death clock and save the country and their love?
My Life At First Try
This semi-autobiographical debut novel chronicles the life of Alex, born in Siberia in 1950, and his dreams of becoming a writer and of meeting Annie, his distant American cousin. As a child, Alex observes a group of foreign tourists do something that non-drunk Soviet adults seldom do: they laugh. Alex yearns to become one of them—a free and happy foreigner. Those aspirations quickly fade as Alex begins to encounter the absurdities and constraints of living in a society where conformity is institutionalized. Hilarious and sometimes sobering, the book’s short chapters chronicle making it through the army, mastering the English language, sex, and meeting the girl of his dreams. In 1980, Alex and his young family finally get the chance to move to America. There he realizes that he is finally a foreigner—not the happy foreigner of his dream, but an alien. Ultimately, Alex finds his own place in the world, despite the fact that having the right “to vote for an elephant or an ass” does not necessarily guarantee self-fulfillment.