Marcos Donnelly wrote his first story in 1971 while in 3rd grade. The last page of that manuscript reads:

"So they unrapt the mummies, chaesd the bats away with a broom and locked the gosts in bottels THE END."

That work, arguably his finest, was never published.

Since then, however, Donnelly has published or sent to broadcast hundreds of thousands of words via print advertising, radio and television commercials, speeches for corporate CEOs and Hollywood spokesfolk, government documents, and (more to the point here) the literature of science fiction and fantasy.

That last category is his favorite. He likes getting to keep his name in the final text.

Donnelly first published short fiction in the early 1990s, appearing in such venues as The Magazine of Fantasy & Science fiction, Amazing Stories magazine, and Bantam's Full Spectrum anthologies. His first novel, Prophets for the End of Time, was published in 1999. Donnelly's work has been praised by the New York Review of Science fiction as "utterly gripping, very funny, and very clever"; noted by Asimov's Science fiction for its "wry wisdom, comic zip, and brio"; and lauded by Booklist as "brilliant and controversial."