Guest Post: Dead End Deal by Allen Wyler

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Allen Wyler is a renowned neurosurgeon who earned an international reputation for pioneering surgical techniques to record brain activity.  He has served on the faculties of both the University of Washington and the University of Tennessee, and in 1992 was recruited by the prestigious Swedish Medical Center to develop a neuroscience institute.

In 2002, he left active practice to become Medical Director for a startup med-tech company (that went public in 2006) and he now chairs the Institutional Review Board of a major medical center in the Pacific Northwest.

Leveraging a love for thrillers since the early 70’s, Wyler devoted himself to fiction writing in earnest, eventually serving as Vice President of the International Thriller Writers organization for several years. After publishing his first two medical thrillers Deadly Errors (2005) and Dead Head (2007), he officially retired from medicine to devote himself to writing full time.

He and his wife, Lily, divide their time between Seattle and the San Juan Islands.

Get to know him more on allenwyler.com.

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Hey, guys! I'm sharing my space to Allen Wyler, author of the medical thriller Dead End Deal. This is not-your-every-day thriller and it has a Jason Bourne vibe to it. Read on to know more about this book and the very skillful author behind it. Take it away, Allen!

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GUEST POST:

Thanks for asking me to talk about Dead End Deal, a thriller that takes place in both Seattle and Seoul, South Korea.

Q: What inspired you to write Dead End Deal?
A: Good question. Like all my plots, the kernel came from a real life experience. At the time, I was working as the Chief Medical Officer for a start-up medical device company and was on a business trip to Seoul. As is often the case when traveling across numerous time changes, it was hard to sleep. At 2 am, while sitting at my hotel window looking at the lights of the city, I got to wondering how it might feel to be trapped in a foreign city without my passport, language fluency, or the means to escape. On top of that, what if I were accused of a felonious crime I hadn’t committed? What would I do? How would I manage to escape? The questions became so appealing, that I started hammering out a plot to encompass this situation. Because I love to put up roadblocks for my protagonist, the problem of how to reenter the United States without a passport became an interesting challenge. It was a fun book to write.

Q: How do you get your ideas for stories?
A: My ideas spring from various things that happen to me during a day. I can be doing just about anything and some small facet about it may spark an idea. More often than not, I mentally toss the idea around until it’s got so many holes in it that I reject it and move on. Rarely does an idea hold up to real scrutiny. But when it does, it’s one I believe I can work with. Cutter’s Trial, for example, is a non-thriller which will be released by Astor+Blue next year. It came from a malpractice suit against me years ago. It was, in fact, the basis for the first novel I ever wrote. My writing was so awful that I finally sent the manuscript straight to my computer’s recycle. But the idea stuck in the back of my mind and resurfaced every now and then. So once I’d honed my skills, I took another crack at it and believe it turned out much better. Or at least I hope it did. We’ll see.

Q: Where do you write?
A: I tend to lead a very disciplined life, which, I guess is a deeply engrained work ethic holdover from medical school, residency, and the practice of neurosurgery. A brain surgeon can’t decide to wander into the operating room an hour late or break from sterile technique, or not make rounds on post-op patients. I carry this regimentation over to my writing life. Being a morning person, I sit down at my computer each morning, seven days a weeks, to write. Some days I’m productive. Some days I’m not. But I always do some writing. It’s the only way I can get the first draft, which for me, is the most difficult. I don’t have a set amount of time to write, and when I’m done for the day, I know it.

Q: Is there something you need in order to write, such as music?
A: I prefer working in silence without distractions. Most often with a cup of coffee next to me. I tend to limit distractions because I know I am easily lured away from the task at hand. Funny, but when in the operating room, I usually had music going. I get asked how that could be. Well, unless I was dealing with an unforeseen complication, surgery was mostly manual dexterity task, so the music cut the drama. In contrast, for me at least, writing requires more concentration to be creative. Especially on the first draft. How should my character react? What would he say? Might sound paradoxical but when starting, say a brain tumor, I where I should end up and how to get there. When writing, such clarity isn’t always the case.

Q: Authors you admire
A: For thriller and mysteries the authors I admire most are: John Sandford, Michael Connelly, Robert Crais, Stephen King, and Dennis Lehane. I also read a ton of non-fiction and for that I admire any author who can make a dry subject interesting. I read constantly.

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Thank you so much for sharing your time with us, Allen! Dead End Deal does sound amazing and as someone who loves Grey's Anatomy and Jason Bourne, this is really exciting for me. :)

And oh, four of Allen Wyler's ebooks (Dead End Dead, Dead Ringer, Dead Wrong, and Deadly Errors) are on sale for only $0.99 on Amazon and Barnes and Noble throughout the entire month of October! Now, isn't that a great deal? :)

Thanks for sticking around, guys. Let me know in the Comments if you've read any of Allen Wyler's works and if you love medical thrillers.