Welcome to 2023 and Help from my Friends Friday! Today I’m pleased to introduce a fabulous writer and friend. Moreover, to highly recommend her Kate Deming medical thriller series. Note: I read The Code in one day! Please say hello to an author with one incredible back-up plan! By the way, Happy New Year! ~ Donnell
My Parents Were Right
By Ann Dominguez
Author Ann Dominguez
When I was seventeen and knew everything, I told my parents I wanted to take a gap year before college. My plan was to work at a restaurant/coffee shop and “see if I could make it as a writer.” Of what making it consisted, I was woefully ignorant, and they knew it. They said no and pushed me to get a college degree, so I’d have a back-up career. After stomping my foot and wailing that they couldn’t possibly understand what I was going through, I capitulated, enrolled in the college that offered me the most scholarship money, and moved across the country.
I wrote multiple fraught novels on college ruled notebook paper about characters with lives and jobs I knew nothing 
about—an interior designer who specialized in restoring chateaux, the tortured heir to a fantastical frozen kingdom, a teenage ice-skating prodigy, a spy. I submitted hundreds of short stories printed on my high-quality dot matrix printer — stories that were politely returned to me in self-addressed stamped envelopes. I studied French and Spanish, then chemistry and physics. I transferred colleges and worked as a tutor in an after-school program. When it came time to pick a career, my advisor encouraged me to consider medical school. Considering became attending and then graduating. Those first seven years after graduation, my back-up career took one hundred hours a week. It was far from what I’d imagined at seventeen.
Even during busy seasons, I keep writing. The intensity of my schedule taught me discipline, essential for any artist. I talk to all kinds of people, who tell me about worlds I would not otherwise know. My work gives me a window into intense and dramatic moments of people’s lives: births, deaths, life-changing diagnoses, near-misses, and psychotic breaks.
I have learned that while the details of our stories vary widely, our core emotions are universal. This is true in life and art. While I don’t write about the particulars of my patients’ lives, I recognize the underlying emotions we all share. Joy. Grief. Regret. Shame. Fear. Relief. Now I recognize my parents had it right. I built a back-up career that not only pays my bills but gives me a fly-on-the-wall view of the human experience.
However you support yourself, I encourage you to look at the lives going on all around you. Within you. While the particulars of a job or life story are unique to each individual—and you can make them up however you want for the purpose of your characters—the passions motivating us are shared. Tap into those emotions, and you’ll have yourself a story.
About the Book: Dr. Kate Deming has spent four brutal years working in a Chicago ER, swinging back and forth from tragedy at work to guilt for what she’s missing at home. The prescription is a new job that will allow more time with her growing daughters, an eight-year-old wannabe pirate planning to run away to the high seas and a twelve-year old expert in eye-rolling and sarcasm who is the star of her middle school’s new code breaking team.
When a sophisticated ransomware attack paralyzes the hospital’s electronic medical record, the hospital pinpoints Kate’s computer as the electronic gateway. She thinks it’s a misdiagnosis until the FBI raids their apartment to arrest her husband, whose home tech support now appears all but benign.
Meanwhile, her daughter’s classmate overdoses to get away from a sextortion scheme that her daughter knows too much about.
Can Kate crack the code before another child gets hurt?
About the Author: Ann Dominguez’s first book, The Match, won Best Mystery/Suspense from Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers in 2009. She has published in JAMA, The Christian Science Monitor, Medical Economics, The Well, and Venn Magazine. She has practiced medicine in Chicago, Denver, Haiti, Thailand and Guatemala.
Ann, thank you for being my guest today! i enjoy your series so much.
Donnell, I enjoy your writing so much. Thank you for having me!
I’m amazed at how many authors I know who started out as doctors or are still practicing medicine while writing. Your book sounds extremely topical.
Lois, yes, there are a lot of us! Medicine is good for setting up difficult situations (and difficult situations make for good fiction!)
What a great backup plan, Ann. And a wonderful blog. Thank you! I’m excited to read your book!
Thank you, Barbara!
My son said he wanted to be in a band. I said what’s your back up plan. LOL.
Exactly, Vicki!
Ann, this post really takes me back. Change the desired career to flight attendant (in those days called stewardesses) and the backup career to Speech Pathologist, but the parental characters’ reactions were just the same! Your words about having a career where we received/receive a bird’s-eye view of the human condition ring so true! Well said! And boy, do I ever remember those SASEs with returns of NO scrawled across my query letters. Loved this post! Thank you for sharing. Always looking forward to your books, and the next one, and the next one… 🙂
Thank you, Margaret! Those envelopes full of Nos were brutal!
Incredible backup choice! Perfect front row seat for the full spectrum of the human experience. So much respect for your work ethic and dedication!!
Thanks, Marie!
Wow, Ann, your story is truly inspiring. Best of luck with your book and on cracking the code to become a successful doctor and writer.
Thank you, Michael. (I appreciate the word play!)
Ann, your story gave me the inspiration to stop and look around me. A kick in the behind to start hitting the keyboard a bit more often.
And thanks to Donnell for having you on her awesome blog.
I’m thrilled to encourage you to hit the keyboard- I enjoy your writing.
A nice piece. I too wanted to be a novelist as a teenager, but I knew that was long odds. My back up career, fortunately, was in freelance writing, while I wrote fiction on the side. No regrets.
A great choice on your part! I am glad you’ve been able to make it work.
Great blog post, Ann. Back up career indeed. 😀
I’m glad you kept the writing bug. 🙂
Thanks, Francelia! (Me, too!)
What a great article! I had a similar conversation with my father when I told him I wanted to be a writer 😂. I chose lawyer as my “backup” career and spent nearly two decades practicing before jumping into writing full time!
I love these success stories!!
It was so hard when I had to tell my parents they had been right! 😂 I am glad you made the jump!
Wow. Fascinating post! Thank you.
Thanks for reading, Barbara!
Ann, thank you for serving the medical needs of people in countries where physicians and healthcare are not always available. From what you wrote in Donnell’s blog, medicine seems to have become much more than a backup. I look forward to reading your latest book.
Bailey Herrington
Skip, what a profound and insightful comment, I couldn’t agree with you more!!!
How kind of you, Bailey! It has been an honor and privilege to work with underserved patients and dedicated HCWs all over the world (as well as at home.)