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Photo by Erin Nelson.
Mark Hart, a Homewood resident and author of the novel “The Timepiece Protocols”, stands in downtown Homewood on Nov. 17.
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Photo by Erin Nelson.
Mark Hart, a Homewood resident and author of the novel “The Timepiece Protocols”, stands in downtown Homewood on Nov. 17.
Local attorney Mark Hart released his latest novel, The Timepiece Protocols, which Hart calls fun and “not tethered to reality.”
The story involves time travel and science mixed with suspense and laughter, Hart said. It also explores messages about privacy.
This is Hart’s second published novel. In 2012, he wrote a novel called Fielder’s Choice about a high school baseball player in Birmingham at the height of integration. While Fielder’s Choice is serious, Hart said he enjoyed writing The Timepiece Protocols because it was fun.
“It was really a lot of fun, and I just let myself go,” he said. “The book didn’t have to come out. I didn’t have to do anything. I have another career. So the fun was the freedom to let my imagination go.”
Hart is a full-time lawyer at the law offices of Hand Arendall Harrison Sale and said he writes every day in his career. It’s a different type of writing, though. It’s persuasive.
“It’s a very different style of writing,” he said. “But because I write a lot, I’m comfortable, and I don’t mind writing. Really to write a novel, I just have to write, and write and write. Writing for law, I like words, and I like phrases, and I like turning a phrase. So I was swimming in an ocean I was used to when I turned to novel writing.”
He’s found that his novel writing has influenced his legal writing, he said.
“I write less formally now, especially to busy trial judges,” he said. “I try to get to a point. … When writing a novel, you have the reader in mind. When I write to judges, I have the audience of a busy judge with a whole stack of cases on his or her desk. So I try to make it simple, easy and more colloquial.”
Before writing as a lawyer, though, Hart said he always wanted to be a writer — from the moment he read the Sherlock Holmes and Hardy Boys book as a child.
“I wanted to write, and I started a novel when I was 10, but I didn’t know what to do, and I just gave up,” he said, laughing.
But writing continued to call through him through the years, he said, so in college, he took a creative writing course. In this class, he was tasked with writing three short stories. He said the class felt magical.
“I come from engineers, lawyers and doctors,” he said. “And you have to get a career out of college — you’re not a writer. So I never looked at it seriously.”
But later he got the idea for his first novel, Fielder’s Choice, which tackles issues about racism and segregation in 1969 Birmingham. It was an emotional issue, he said, and once he saw that in his mind, he couldn’t avoid writing about it.
“It was in me and had to come out,” he said. “But I had really young children then, and my wife and I were both working. I had to really learn how to write. So it took me 10 years to get Fielder’s Choice out.”
It was during this time that Hard realized that being a lawyer is his vocation, but being a writer is his avocation, he said.
Hart and his wife are former Mountain Brook residents and recently downsized to a place in Homewood. Hart thanked his family for giving him the time and space to write two novels.
