THE NEXT BEST THING took a long, slow journey to publication. The idea came to Wiley Brooks, its author, in 1987 while he was on a four-month trek through Southeast Asia. While there, he met a man who inspired him to create the character who became Mason Ray. He had plotted the story before he returned to Seattle. Wiley was sure he would jump on writing it. But life intervened.
Instead, Wiley became an executive at a public relations firm. A year later, he left that firm to start his own. Meanwhile, he met the woman who would become his wife. Then came the kids. Life was full. He kept thinking about the book. He confided to friends that he thought that writing it might be his destiny. But he never found the time.
Years passed. Occasionally, someone would ask about the book. He'd shrug and say, "someday." But someday never came. Then in August 2018 one of his oldest and closest friends asked about the book over cocktails. Wiley told him that he feared he would go to his grave wondering why he never found time to write it. "Just write the damn book," his friend said.
Wiley started writing in earnest that evening. He waited each night for everyone to go to bed, then wrote until 2 or 3 a.m. It wasn't glamourous, but it worked.
Wiley is married to Marianne Bichsel. They have three adult children and three surviving grandchildren. Their first grandchild was a sweet, beautiful little girl named Amelia. Never sickly, she died two days after she was diagnosed with a rare and aggressive form of leukemia. She was just 20 months old. Amelia was the touchstone for Wiley when he wrote in the Prologue about Bob's pain over losing his child. It's a heartache that never goes away.
Seattle has been Wiley’s home since 1983, but he grew up in Tampa, FL. He was an only child in a lower working-class family. A good but not great student, Wiley graduated from the University of South Florida. He worked for a year at the St. Petersburg Times, then left for graduate school at the University of Missouri at Columbia, the oldest journalism school in the world.
After grad school, Wiley returned to daily newspapers. He rose quickly. By age 30, he was executive editor of the York Daily Record, an award-winning newspaper in central Pennsylvania. Then, like many journalists, he switched to a career in public relations. His niche was crisis communication management. He helped companies big and small make the best of the messes they found themselves in.
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