Chemist-turned-author Arthur Doweyko says any writer has three things going on at the same time: promote the book that’s already published, shop the book you just finished to publishers, and work on the one you’re writing next.
While those three may never get crossed off the to-do list, he has at least had tangible results for his efforts. He’ll be signing his just-published first novel “Algorithm” at a book fair in Eau Gallie next Sunday, and the Vero Beach Book Center just got back to him about a signing there.
Late last month, his second, as-yet-unpublished novel, “Angela’s Apple,” won the first-prize Royal Palm award in science fiction at the annual conference of the Florida Writers Association in Orlando. “Algorithm” won its own Royal Palm in 2010.
Meanwhile, in his home office on Vero’s barrier island, Doweyko is plugging away at “Henry the Last,” his latest book. It’s about the last person on earth with a brain – the rest are all robots.
Add to that the last remnant of his chemistry career: He is teaching part-time at Indian River State College. “I like to see the light in the eyes of students when they get something that they’ve never thought of before,” he says.
It’s the same look people get when he tells stories, he says, something he has done all his life, including in childhood, when the kids in his Newark, NJ, neighborhood would egg him on to make up a tale, just to pass the time.
Later in high school at Seton Hall, instead of passing notes, he’d pass around his stories. “I’d staple them into a booklet and get comments from whoever decided to read it when they were supposed to be taking notes for trig,” he says.
Today he gets his critiques from a writers group in Melbourne – an affiliate of the Florida Writers Association. ”It serves as a sounding board for something you’re writing, and you can find out ways to get in touch with publishers or agents.”
The just-published “Algorithm,” that begins with a gold medallion found in a 100 million-year-old lump of coal, took six years to write. He started with the encouragement of his wife, Lidia, herself a chemist whom he met in graduate school.
Now he gets guidance through his agent, something not every budding writer is able to find. “It’s a very difficult thing to find an agent,” he says. “It’s almost as difficult as finding a publisher. My personal feeling is you’re better off finding an agent who’s excited about your work and has a connection with a certain kind of publisher.”
Agents, he says, typically read very little of the work before dismissing it. “They’ll read the first line or paragraph and if that doesn’t catch their fancy, that’s it. You’re done. It’s notoriously difficult to get people to pay attention to your work. They’re so overburdened.”
By contrast, for “Angela’s Apple” to win the Royal Palm award required the close scrutiny of judges both to become a finalist, and then again to become a winner. The blind competition involved 400 works in various categories.
Before writing science fiction and horror, Doweyko wrote more than 100 scientific papers. He was the only child of refugees of World War ll, and long before he told stories of his own, he heard his parents’: his Polish father, a jazz trumpeter, joined the Polish army and was captured by the Germans; held in a concentration camp, he escaped, and ended up in England.
His Estonian mother, meanwhile, had made the choice between bad and worse, as Doweyko puts it, and fled toward Germany to escape the Russians. Eventually she found her way to England, where she met her husband playing trumpet in a jazz club.
Doweyko was born on a military base south of London. He grew up speaking Polish and German; he remembers arguing with his first-grade teacher over the word for “pencil,” insisting what she was holding up was the German word instead. “I was stubborn. I don’t know how my parents had the patience for me.”
He also had an original way of thinking – a hint, perhaps, of his bent for science fiction, he created his own time warp in first grade when he was left to follow his mother’s instructions as she and his dad left for work one morning.
Arthur was not to leave for school until the clock read 8:30. “I was ready to go but the clock only said 8. So I just stood on the table and moved it to 8:30, and went to school. I remember getting to the playground and wondering why no one was there.”
Eventually his family left England for America. They settled in Newark. Arthur studied hard at his parents’ urging, but he was also in painting and even more in soccer – he played at Seton Hall and at Rutgers, and only recently quit playing in a soccer adult league. He still runs three miles a day.
Chemistry became his focus early in school and he went on to earn a Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he did a post-doc in oncology, and moved to Los Angeles to work at the cancer center there.
The bulk of his career was devoted to the synthesis and design of bioactive compounds – he shares the 2008 Thomas Alva Edison Patent Award for the discovery of Sprycel, an anti-cancer drug.
For the last 13 years prior to retirement, he worked in computer-aided design for Bristol Myers Squibb. The programming he used included one he himself designed. “It’s called HASL, which stands for Hypothetical Active Site Lattice. I named it that because I was getting hassled by everyone because I was working on it when I wasn’t supposed to.”
He says the program, which he copyrighted and created a business to distribute, was “the first program that was PC-friendly and could actually help design compounds on the computer,” he says.
It wasn’t the first time he had fooled around with computers on the job. In grad school, he invented a primitive Pacman-like video game that used the Rutgers huge main frame computer. “It was a secret,” he says, laughing. “Later, when I was working nights at a hospital doing lab work, during our spare time we managed to finesse our way back into the same mainframe so we could keep playing.”
How the Doweykos ended up retiring in Vero had little to do with writing or chemistry. But it did involve analysis beyond the real estate market, as he carefully tested the size of the grains of sand on the beaches.
“We were looking all along the coastline and I figured out that the sand here is just right for running.”
