Novels by Alan A. Winter |
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The Beginning: Alan was born in Newark, New Jersey. He attended Weequahic High School (Philip Roth's alma mater) for one year, before graduating from Livingston High School (Seinfeld's Jason Alexander's alma mater), in Essex County, New Jersey. At seventeen, Alan knew he wanted to be a dentist, so he enrolled as a Biological Sciences major at Rutgers University, in New Brunswick, NJ. Once there, he realized being a science major was too confining. After completing the necessary science courses to apply to dental school, Alan switched majors, and graduated with honors in history in 1969. Professional Education: Alan next attended NYU's College of Dentistry in New York City. Upon receiving his DDS, he interned at Jacobi Hospital, which was the teaching hospital of the Albert Einstein School of Medicine. After his internship, Alan continued his postdoctoral studies at Columbia School of Dental & Oral Surgery, receiving his certificate in periodontics in 1976. Awards, Honors, and Special Training:
Scientific Publications: Visit Alan’s professional web sites: centralparkperio.com and centralparklaserperio.com
Writing Career At first blush, Alan is quick to say that he never intended to be a writer. But when he thinks about it, he's been writing in
one form or another, for his entire adult life. In college, he wrote paper after paper for his history and literature courses.
Professionally, he edited a dental journal and wrote eleven It started in 1982 when Alan made small talk to a patient about a sci-fi idea he had. She thought the idea was so terrific, she urged him to write a movie treatment about it. Alan dismissed her offhand. What did he know about writing movies? The patient persisted. Each time she would visit his office, she would demand to see the finished movie treatment. Seeing she was serious and relentless, Alan agreed to hand her a treatment. But how? He had no clue where to start. Asking other patients for guidance, Alan was introduced to a young screenwriter who agreed - for a fee - to write the treatment. They worked together, produced a treatment, and shopped it around to a number of studios. Though the movie was never made, Alan experienced two revelations at the time:
Still, Alan had no desire to write fiction. That changed in 1985. That was the year that Alan began writing his first novel, "Someone Else's Son," which was eventually published by MasterMedia, Ltd., in 1993 and is available for purchase at Amazon.com. What prompted Alan to write "Someone Else's Son" is a story in itself. When Alan completed his periodontal training at Columbia, he joined a prestigious Fifth Avenue periodontal practice. Day after day, the well-to-do, prominent patients asked Alan if he was old enough to be a dentist. (He looked that much younger than the two senior partners). Trying to convince the patients that he was old enough to be a dentist and, therefore, experienced enough to treat them, Alan put his two sons' pictures on the treatment room wall. When his third son was born, he added that one, too. Every few months, he updated the photos.
But a curious thing happened on a daily basis. The patients kept asking why Alan had pictures of children on the wall. When
he replied, "They're not just any children; those are my sons," no one believed him. They claimed the boys looked too dissimilar to be brothers. They joked that he must have taken
the wrong one home from the hospital. Though this was not the case (at least he didn't think so), Alan wondered what he would've
done had he discovered, years later, that he and his wife had brought the wrong child home from the hospital. The
result was "Someone Else's Son."
For reasons only understood by other writers, once Alan got the bug to construct a story about babies switched at birth, he was compelled to put pen to paper. The first draft of "Someone Else's Son" was written in longhand on yellow legal pads. After many drafts, writing courses, mentoring by the wonderful John Bowers, and tons of encouragement in the face of slews of rejections by literary agents, MasterMedia, Ltd. saw fit to enter fiction publishing with "Someone Else's Son" as its first entry. The book was made a McNaughton Selection. Ever since being bitten by the writing bug, Alan has continued to write. He presently has finished manuscripts being shipped to publishing houses by his literary agent, Olga Vezeris. |
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scientific papers. That still doesn't explain how a dentist came to write fiction!
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