Daniel J. Waters, Author
Throughout his career as a heart surgeon, Dan Waters nourished a love for writing that led to his taking online classes at Lenoir-Rhyne Asheville’s Thomas Wolfe Center for Narrative from his Iowa home. “I started out late in my career just pursuing a grad certificate in narrative healthcare at L-R,” he says, “but I found the experience so creatively invigorating and intellectually stimulating that I just kept going until I had a master’s in writing.” He graduated in 2018, and having since retired, has written a third novel, Barnegat Dark, in his Mickey Cleary/Jersey Shore mystery series.
“I wasn’t sure when I wrote the first book—Surf City Confidential—if it would be a stand-alone, but people liked the locale, the era and the characters so much that I decided to keep them going,” he says. “I thought having a female police chief in a beach town in the late 1960s opened up a lot of dramatic possibilities. I grew up around the Jersey Shore, and that late ‘60s, ‘70s timeframe had a lot of drama—plus great music and cool cars. What else could a writer ask for?”
Waters finds female protagonists “inherently more interesting” than male ones. “Mickey Cleary is an accidental proto-feminist by way of growing up a tomboy, so she has myriad possibilities for back story and character development,” he says.
He writes his novels as if he were a reader being surprised and entertained along the way. “Once in a while I have to backtrack and tweak a few plot points so it all fits together believably,” he says. “None of the stories has ended the way I initially thought they would. I think that’s been a good thing.”
Barnegat Dark, May, 2020, fiction, paperback $12.95, e-book $4.95, by Daniel J. Waters, and published by Bandageman Press, Inc., Iowa. To learn more, visit BandageManPress.com.
