"12.21: A Novel" by Dustin Thomason

Jeff Glor talks to Dustin Thomason about "12.21: A Novel"

Jeff Glor: What inspired you to write the book?

Dustin Thomason: My own insomnia was the first inspiration for the idea. I was working on another project and having great difficulty sleeping -- something I've struggled with my entire life. So finally I decided I was going to use it in some way. When I started researching insomnia, I learned about this rare disease called Fatal Familial Insomnia in which you have trouble sleeping and eventually can't sleep at all and finally die. And by then I was hooked. I loved the idea of setting a thriller in a world where people could no longer sleep. The connection to the Maya quickly followed based on my research into prions, and soon I knew that setting the book against the backdrop of the 2012 phenomenon was exactly what I wanted to do.

JG: What surprised you the most during the writing process?

DT: What surprised me most in the research process was how much still isn't known about prions, the type of proteins that causes Fatal Insomnia and Mad Cow. We've known about their existence for half a century, but we still don't know what they are, where they fall within biology, or why they spread and cause disease the way they do. These mysteries are what really got me excited about the idea of writing the book. What surprised me most in the actual writing process was how much fun it was to write in the voice of a ninth century Maya scribe. I had dreaded writing those sections at first because I was worried about getting the voice just right, but once I was into them, I just loved being able to imagine myself in that place and time.

JG: What would you be doing if you weren't a writer?

DT: I'd probably be a psychiatrist. I loved my rotations in psychiatry during medical school, and I think psychiatry is about the closest you can come to being a writer; you are probing the human psych in the same way, trying to understand character and helping people think about what it means to be alive. I love a lot of different fields in medicine, but I think psychiatry is both the least understood and most exciting.

JG: What else are you reading right now?

DT: I'm loving reading the early books in Lee Child's "Jack Reacher" series, and I'm hoping to get through all of them eventually. They're an incredible ride -- action packed and written in such a close perspective that in only a few pages you feel like you know the character. I'm also just finishing William Landay's amazing "Defending Jacob," one of the best written mysteries I've read in years.

JG: What's next for you?

DT: All of my books have an international flavor to them, and one of the great things about being a writer is having the opportunity to explore new parts of the world each time. For the next book I'm headed farther south, past the reaches of the Maya jungles and into South America. The escalating intrigue around natural resources in those rapidly developing nations is the backdrop for my newest thriller.

For more about "12.21" visit the Random House website.