Everyone loves a good story and no one understands that better than Mark Dickson, author of Enemy at the Helm. Having moved to the Texoma area fresh out of surgery residency in 1993, he built a successful practice and, in addition to starting the Trauma Center at Texoma Medical Center, held several leadership positions within the network including Chief of Surgery and Chief of Staff.
Once his kids were raised, he transitioned into medical contract work and bought a farm outside Collinsville, Texas. Despite having no background in farming or ranching, he and his wife Theresa successfully evolved the property from hay production into an agrarian dream complete with fruits, vegetables, herbs, chickens, ducks, bees, horses and cattle.
We sat down with Mark to find out how a surgeon-cum-farmer added author to his list of disparate accomplishments!
At what point did you decide to be an author and what was your path to publication?
The funny thing is, I never harbored any desire to be an author (see what I did there?). In 2018, Theresa and I were headed out to sea on a Caribbean cruise when we noticed a small Coast Guard vessel shadowing our departure. I told her “I know why he’s there. And I know how to defeat it.”
I explained to her that they were there to deter any potential action against the cruise ship and laid out a potential scenario how our escort could be disabled allowing an attack anyway. We joked how it would be a great story but not being a “writer,” we let the idea die.
A few months later, I revisited the idea and, given some spare time, started putting words down on paper. Before you knew it, I had a draft of the novel!
Describe your writing process. Do you outline, plot, and plan, or is your writing more organic?
By nature, I’m a planner. I research, strategize, acquire the necessary skills and materials and execute tasks in a methodical fashion. With writing, I just started putting down the first thoughts that came in my head. Those thoughts would lead to others, and so on.
What have you found to be most challenging and/or most enjoyable about writing?
Finding the time to write! Life gets in the way with everything we want to do, right? I would frequently put it aside to do more important things, then come back weeks or months later. In a way, I think it helped to be able to come back fresh to an idea or use a different approach.
Did you take any inspiration from the Texoma area in your novel or do you plan to use the region as a setting in a future novel?
Absolutely! I used a lot of people I know from the area as inspiration for some of the characters. People who know me can recognize some of them. There are multiple settings all over the world, but the main characters are from Texas. I decided to use Austin as their base because it was on the route one of the bad guys took from New Jersey to Mexico. I definitely have a more rural setting in mind for the next two novels
Do you identify with your main character or did you create a character that is your opposite?
Oooh, good question. There’s a surgeon in the book, John Jensen, so there’s some obvious parallels there. That said, I consider the main character to be Tom Jensen, and I took his experience in Latin America straight from my own youngest son’s experience. His enthusiasm for life and willingness to try anything is infectious and I wanted to capture that as much as possible.
Without spoiling the novel, do you feel that Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge tragedy is a sign of things to come?
Choke points are all vulnerable - that’s why they’re called choke points. We are a strong country in large part because of our trading prowess. If a bad actor wants to cripple us, blockage of chokepoints and trade is an obvious objective. Just because it hasn’t been done in our lifetime doesn’t mean it’s not on someone’s list.
We just got a glimpse of the difficulties that will ensue from the blockage of one harbor. What if that was multiplied by over 20 times, like in the book?
I guarantee that adversaries are watching and learning from this. I made a post the day the bridge got hit where I asked if the authorities were treating it as a crime scene. I caught flak from people I don’t know who said I was being irresponsible to suggest it may be more than just an accident. Three weeks later, the FBI said they were opening a criminal investigation.
Enemy At The Helm by Mark Dickson is the provocative and engaging first installment of a new thriller series full of terrorist activity, conspiracies, and the military operations and other, less expected efforts to stop them.
Available everywhere books are sold.
Learn more at MarkDicksonAuthor.com