author of Barbary Pirates

I live on the edge of the world.

My Pacific Northwest house faces the Salish Sea, an inland body of salt water that includes the San Juan Islands. It perches like a tree house on a steep hill, looking into the branches of conifers a hundred feet high or higher, with orange madrona trees woven through like thread.

The evolutionary biologist Edward O. Wilson would say my perch mimics that of my African prehistoric ancestors. We evolved in a savannah landscape where we looked for grassland predators and prey from the relative safety of clumps of trees. An urban apartment overlooking a park gives much the same sensation.

While far from utopian, my abode is fairly quiet, pretty, and bourgeois-comfortable. Until reality pokes in.

Which it does  all the time. Having covered the Exxon Valdez oil spill as a journalist, I watch from my bedroom office window as a parade of oil tankers migrate in and out of the nearby refinery port here like balloons that might pop on the wrong rock. At least now they have tug escort and double hulls.

And I live a short distance outside the city of Anacortes, a refinery and boat-building town of about sixteen thousand with dreams of […]

Thriller author James Patterson made $94 million in 2012, according to Forbes. He’s one of 145,900 American “writers and authors” counted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a quarter of them part-time, two-thirds of them self-employed, and with median earnings of $55,420. (“Median” means half earned more than that, and half less, I believe.)

I looked this up for a couple talks I’m giving this week. People are often interested in a writer’s odds of success.

Pollsters report more than 80 percent of Americans would like to be author, and in 2011 statisticians counted 329,259 books published in the United States, and 2.2 million books published in the world. Google estimates 130 million books have been published in human history.

With electronic self-publishing, it’s become easier than ever to be “an author.” And harder than ever to get attention to your work.

Most successful authors have some combination of talent, persistence, and luck. The persistence stories are always encouraging. And daunting.

Mystery writer Janet Evanovich pulled in $33 million last year, but wrote for ten years before getting published. She labored first in the romance field before hitting it big with bounty hunter Stephanie Plum.

Stephen King’s first big novel, Carrie, was rejected 30 times. He […]

Napoleon Bonaparte would be at home in today’s relatively irreligious age. A recent poll showed nearly 20 percent of Americans report no religion, up from 8 percent in 1990. In France the percentage declaring no religion is 48, in Britain 50. Even in Mexico, 20 percent report no religious affiliation.

Napoleon seized power in a military coup against a revolutionary government that began as officially atheistic, and which had booted out France’s dominating Catholic Church. Notre Dame was turned into a “Temple of Reason” with busts of Greek philosophers. Then it briefly became a food warehouse.

Church property was seized, churches temporarily closed up, and convents and monasteries emptied.

One of Bonaparte’s first acts as dictator was to reach agreement with the Church to welcome back Roman Catholicism, but under conditions that trimmed it of its old ownerships and powers.

It was political calculation. The revival of religion was as popular with many French commoners as the return of Orthodox religion was popular with some Russians after the collapse of communism.

But Bonaparte was no churchgoer and no true Catholic. He remarked once that perhaps the sun would be a logical object of worship. He had curiosity without faith. His last deathbed word was not […]

When I worked as a journalist, I was a professional worrier. So are many academics, politicians, non-governmental “cause” groups, charities, lawyers, doctors, government officials, religious leaders, and Moms.

Americans tell each other things are bad so we’ll make them better.

Well, the world didn’t end Dec. 21. And this holiday season, let’s take cheer that our pessimistic system actually works. A lot of progress keeps being made, fiscal cliffs and guns notwithstanding.

Google terms like “good news trends” on the Internet and you’ll soon be humming Jingle Bells.

Violent crime and murders, for example, are down by half since 1991, despite the “if it bleeds it leads” credo of the evening news.

American life expectancy is up another two years since 2000, now averaging 78.5 for men and women combined.

Income taxes, as a percentage of the gross domestic product, are lower than in either the Eisenhower or Reagan Administrations. Our tax burden as a percentage of GDP is lower than 27 of 30 industrialized countries.

House fires are down 60 percent since 1972, and fire fatalities have been cut in half.

Farmland has shrunk slightly since 1982, but agricultural production is up 50 percent.

Traffic fatalities are at the lowest level since 1949. Aviation and railway accidents are […]