PINK COTTON CANDY IS SOMETIMES GREEN

About the Book

Jonathan Callahan, is an ordinary fellow by outside accounts, but on the inside, he is a complex psychological organism, who barely keeps his head above water. Living the supposed suburban good life, he feels beset by life’s problems. He works for a boss who hates him, yelling at him all the time. At home, the local Homeowners’ Association besieges him with threatening requests that he repaint his door back to its original color. His wife wants him to be a man and stand up to it all, but he just wants to be a peacemaker. While dodging the inevitable arrows flung his way, Jonathan’s father suddenly dies, and when his oldest sister convinces him that only he can handle the funeral arrangements in New York City, his life goes from bad to right down the toilet. Because, of course, Dad was not an ordinary fellow; he was a crazy World War II Vet, who terrorized the entire family when Jonathan was a boy, that is, until Dad got locked up on a psycho ward. Seventeen years have passed since Jonathan has last seen him, and now, even in death, he’s back, and the family is gathering to play out their learned roles. All Jonathan wants to do is to bury his father, get the hell out of New York City, and return to Northern Virginia to settle his fight with the Nazi-styled Homeowners’ Association. Left to his own devices, he doesn’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell, but aided by a humorous spirit guide, attended to by several wild and strange friends, and pushed by his two little girls, Jonathan learns that he doesn’t need to battle the forces of evil all by himself, all he has to do is stand up for himself and his family. Pink Cotton Candy Is Sometimes Green is an experimental novel, weaving psychological insights, humor, and new age beliefs.

About the Author

Mark Thomas Donough was born in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1951 and is now (as updated) a retired federal employee/attorney. He attended the City College of New York (CCNY) and Cleveland-Marshall Law School. Prior to becoming a lawyer, the author worked at various times as a janitor in an old age home, in a lumbermill in Alaska, as a cashier in a department store and as the assistant business manager and production manager for three weekly newspapers in Manhattan. During 1976’s political season he conducted political opinion polls for the New York Times and CBS News. During his college years, the author played two years of baseball (with modest success) before becoming a writer/editor for various college newspapers and the Student Vice-President for Education Affairs. He was also one of the “lead student organizers” on campus advocating for numerous student related causes. As well, he was an outspoken veterans advocate that culminated in his forming/commencing a student-veterans newspaper (The Line). The author twice served in the United States Army. The first time was before college, when he was an enlisted soldier in the United States Army for three years and served a one-year tour in Vietnam (where he was assigned to an aviation unit packing survival parachutes for a top-secret aviation unit while also spending two plus months manning a perimeter bunker (24/7). His schools and accomplishments included the following: Combat Engineering, Airborne, Rigger School and Instructor School. His second period of military service occurred after law school, when he was commissioned as a Captain in the Army’s Judge Advocate General’s Corp. During 1981-85, the author was a criminal trial attorney (serving as both a prosecutor and a defense counsel). In this time, he tried over one hundred criminal trials and became one of the most formidable criminal trial attorneys in the U.S. Military. His body of work also included investigating and presenting criminal evidence against numerous senior officers, which (in part, along with the work of others), ultimately led to the Army terminating the careers of three (and perhaps four) General Officers. All of this earned the author the unflattering, if not fearsome, nickname, “The Hitman”. As a reward for his outstanding contributions and services, in 1985, the Army “invited” the author to depart active duty, whereupon he spent the following three years in the U.S. Army Reserves developing and presenting training for the U.S. Army’s Law of War Program. Subsequent to his military service, the author spent twenty-three years employed by the Department of Veterans Affairs working as an administrative law attorney until 2011, when he retired from federal service. The author currently resides in West Virginia and he resides on a wooded lot on the edge of the forest in the Shenandoah Valley region. With all his free time, he enjoys working out in the gym, studying the martial arts and traveling all over the globe. Despite his having a life-long fascination with ESP, the Egyptian Pyramids, reincarnation, Atlantis, and past civilizations, he’s a down-to-earth person. He blames all of his life adventures on being born left-handed and all of his successes for having two encouraging and beautiful (now adult) daughters. He is currently working on another writing project. Pink Cotton Candy Is Sometimes Green is the author’s first novel. Subsequently, he has published the following five novels: The Cobalt Blue White Light, Roper Three-Zero-Zero-One, Sunset Over Happy Farm, Orion’s Belt and his most recent work, The Glyconian Incident, published in 2025.