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Mark David Gerson was born October 3, 1954 in Montreal, Canada, where he graduated from Concordia University with a business degree, later returning as the university's assistant director of public relations.
By the time of The MoonQuest 's genesis nearly 40 years later, Mark David was a freelance writer and editor living in Toronto. There he also taught creative writing workshops privately and through the University of Toronto.
Toronto would witness only the opening 100 pages of The MoonQuest 's initial draft before Nova Scotia called. There, in three different towns over 14 months, he completed the the first two drafts.
Some of the geography, dialogue, characters and experiences of his time on the Atlantic influenced both drafts in ways that survived later revisions, including the creature he named the k'nrah, which morphed from a real-life, orphaned raccoon rescued as a baby by a friend.
"As I sat outside working on the book," he recalls, "the racoon would sit on my lap, kneading my arm with its front paws, just as a cat would."
Subsequent revisions emerged off-and-on over the years as Mark David moved and traveled, first back to Toronto and then into and across the United States. Places like Midland/Penetanguishene, Ontario; Sedona, Arizona; Denver, Colorado; San Diego and Ojai, California; and Albuquerque and Santa Fe, New Mexico all hosted full or partial drafts of the book before, as with Toshar's MoonQuest, it was "fixed in ink for all to read."
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