READER'S ROCK LIFESTYLE MAGAZINE VOL 2 ISSUE 4 NOVEMBER 2014 Vol. 1 Issue 5 November 2013 | Page 27

Visually Impaired Reader
Inspires Author

(NAPSI)—Four years ago,
bestselling author Mary Jane
Clark spoke at the Friends of the
New Jersey Library for the Blind
and Handicapped’s Fall Festival.
There, she met Ottilie Lucas, a
former rehabilitation teacher for
people with macular degeneration
and other disabilities who is
visually impaired herself.
After the festival, “we continued
our correspondence and one thing
led to another,” Lucas says of
Clark. “She decided to include a
character in her next book with
macular degeneration.”
And so was born Terri Donovan,
introduced in the first book in
Clark’s Wedding Cake Mysteries
series, 2011’s “To Have and to
Kill.”
“Mary Jane asked me to give her
ways to identify symptoms that a
person may be experiencing
macular degeneration,” Lucas
says. These include blurred vision
and difficulty discerning the
intensity of colors—symptoms
shared by Terri Donovan, who
runs a bakery and is the mother of
the protagonist of Clark’s series,
struggling actress Piper Donovan.
Lucas, who was born with
retinitis pigmentosa, became a
patron of the New Jersey State
Library Talking Book and Braille
Center (TBBC) in 1966. TBBC is
among more than 100 libraries
across the United States