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On Turning Sixty

I turned sixty a few days ago (same September 29 birthday as Admiral Horatio Nelson) and found myself neither as wise nor as wizened as I would have predicted when I was thirty.

To my surprise, the Big 6-0 is no big deal. Sure, physically I’ve slowed, though I actually have felt better the past few months than in years due to improvement in my rheumatoid arthritis and the drugs for it. Mentally, my consciousness feels little different than it did when I was in my 20s; once you hit adulthood your sense of self doesn’t change much.

Age is a state of mind. Sixty is the new fifty, partly because we live longer and partly because Social Security and Medicare are receding like rainbows as a result. When I quit teaching in June people congratulated me on my “retirement,” and I thought, ‘Are you kidding? I hope/fear to be in harness at my keyboard at 80, still trying to peck out a living.’

I regard myself as a fortunate hard worker, a blue-collar kid with modest expectations blessed with a surprisingly interesting life – with the best and worst developments in it often disturbingly contingent on good and bad luck. I think […]

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Environmental hero

On Saturday, September 17, I was flattered to be one of five individuals and one organization honored as a 2011 “environmental hero” by Resources for Sustainable Communities in Bellingham, WA.

As I pointed out when accepting the award, I take em where I can get em, but I’m not much of a hero. I’ve written about the environment as a journalist and author for decades, but that was writing about real heroes, not me. I’ve contributed to local environmental books, made speeches, and served on boards. But I know hundreds of people who “walk the talk” better than I do.

I drove our Prius to the ceremony, but that’s my wife’s car. I usually pilot our small SUV, a RAV4.

My fellow heroes, who are real ones, are tireless volunteer Marie Hitchman, energy conservation leader John Davies, environmental educator Robyn de Pre, the late activist Gerald Larson, and the Bellingham Food Bank.

Still, it’s an opportunity to comment on an abiding interest. The keynote speaker was Denis Hayes of Seattle’s Bullitt Foundation, the first national coordinator of Earth Day way back in 1970. He made two good points. First, we’re in deep doo-doo – world population is seven times what it was in Napoleon’s […]

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Moving On

On the evening of Sept. 11, 2001, my family did our best to celebrate.

It was my mother’s 72nd birthday and she’d just moved near us after the death of my stepfather in Arizona. So we went to a restaurant as planned, and sat there in surreal, gloomy isolation, the only customers in the place.

She’s 82 today. We took her out to dinner again, but you can bet it was on Friday the 9th this year.

That first birthday bash wasn’t the only miscalculation I made. I initially believed Colin Powell’s pitch on weapons of mass destruction and supported the most boneheaded war in American history.

Oops. I forgot that “the first casualty in war is truth.” (See the initial reports on Jessica Lynch, Pat Tillman, etc.)

It’s been a rough decade or, I’d guesstimate, a rough 13 years. There was the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal and impeachment fiasco, the dot.com collapse, the Bush-Gore election imbroglio, 9-11 and its economic aftershock, two wars, the housing bubble and bank collapse, ineffectual tax cuts, disastrous deficit spending, Hurricane Katrina, a blitz of blizzard-tornado-drought-flood this year (accompanied by climate change denial, of course), and completely dysfunctional politics.

There was even an East Coast earthquake, for crying out loud. And a […]

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Bookstore of the Future?

Is Scottsdale’s Poisoned Pen mystery bookstore the bookstore of the future?

Certainly owner Barbara Peters is one of the industry’s most innovative thinkers in our Brave New Scary World of e-books, Internet competitors like Amazon, superstore chains like Barnes & Noble, and speculation about whether the printed book will survive at all.

Poisoned Pen (www.poisonedpen.com) is a smart-looking independent bookstore with wood floors and brick walls in a suburb of Phoenix, and has carved a niche since 1989 by offering an expert selection of thrillers and mysteries. I appeared there recently with another author, Max Collins (“Road to Perdition,” etc.) and his collaborator on mystery “cozies” with an antique theme, his wife Barbara.

Afterward the other Barbara, Ms. Peters, explained how she’s adapting to tumult in the industry.

First is strong Internet promotion with a sophisticated bookstore website (regularly updated) and webcasts of author presentations. http://poisonedfiction.blogspot.com/p/webcasts.html is the webcast page. There’s an electronic newsletter, links to book clubs, online sales, and more.

Second is the regular hosting of author events that have made Poisoned Pen a regular stop for nationally-known mystery and thriller writers. She’s turned out a thousand people for those at the top of the field. Barbara builds on this with […]

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Write By The Water

Teaching writing is wonderfully instructive for the teacher, and few venues are more pleasant than the August residency program of the Northwest Institute of Literary Arts, part of their MFA (Masters of Fine Arts) writing program. I just spent three days there, eating more than I should.

Setting: The funky log-house charm of Captain Whidbey Inn on Whidbey Island, “Proudly out of step for the last 100 years.” Penn Cove on one side, a saltwater lagoon on the other, and trees and flowers between. The ambience inspires students and instructors alike.

Fellowship: A whole passel of people passionate about writers and writing. There’s a special pleasure in sitting at breakfast with 85-year-old poet and novelist David Waggoner and hearing him hold forth on drinking with Dylan Thomas in that poet’s final days.

Fringe benefits: Texas barbecue, watching graduates take a celebratory (?) plunge into the frigid saltwater, or checking out the exquisitely-crafted sailboat of author Larry Cheek who spent three years, he explained, learning not just the art of the Boatwright, but patience.

The Whidbey students, who ranged in age from 24 to 75, heard a real range of publishing experiences, from the Irish pleas for artistry from editor Brian Doyle to the commercial […]

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Into Africa

Safari sounds like an exotic word, but it simply means journey or trip in Swahili.  Yet even in 2011 it is a return to a lost world. Book research was the excuse to visit the Serengeti region of Tanzania, but curiosity about the cradle of mankind was the motivation for a just-completed two-week tent safari. I wasn’t disappointed.

East Africa casts a spell of golden grasses, dramatic skies, rearing volcanoes, a precipitous Great Rift, and the hope that comes from healthy wildlife. In Tanzania’s national parks, the humans are the ones in cages – their bouncing Land Rovers and Land Cruisers – and the animals roam free.

The result is astonishing; the roadside spectacle tops what I’ve seen in places like Yellowstone or Denali. We saw a leopard kill, lions mate, baboons play, giraffes neck-duel, zebras roll in the dust, crocodiles snooze, hippos grunt, warthogs graze, and ostriches flirt with a frustrated male. An aged, near-blind elephant as wrinkled as wet newspaper shuffled a few yards away, snuffing warily. A lioness sunbathed with paws elevated in the air, the breeze caressing the fur of her stomach. A black rhino trotted like a tank, lay down, and then snoozed for three hours […]

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Almost Famous

Not!

Every time a new book like “Blood of the Reich” comes out, I typically make a pilgrimage to bookstores, talk on the radio, answer questions for book websites, and otherwise do what I can to call attention.

Books can’t sell if readers don’t know they exist, and while word-of-mouth is the most effective marketing tool, you can’t have people recommending a story if they haven’t tried it. Since any book will be liked by some and put aside by others, the “secret” is to have as many people try it as possible.

Hence, publicity efforts and that curious, sometimes affirming and sometimes discouraging ritual of the bookstore reading, a creaky artifact that remains a cozy way to have personal contact with readers. I love your questions!

My biggest readings were for my first book, “The Final Forest,” when hundreds turned out because of the political emotions surrounding logging in the Pacific Northwest. My smallest have been one attendee, as in uno, most recently with a fan who ignored a rare balmy Seattle evening to get a book signed. I’ve had a couple other winter presentations where my sole audience has been a street person trying to get warm.

The Hollywood version of bookstore window […]

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Guy (author) needs women!

A column I did for Publisher’s Weekly: (An edited version as published is attached at the end)

A publishing quip holds that the difference between guy books and girl books is this: Men like to read about a lot of characters dying very quickly, while women like to read about a single character dying very, very slowly.

The joke hints at a serious issue. Estimates (although the original source of such statistics, endlessly repeated on the Internet, is unclear) are that up to 70 percent of fiction buyers, and 80 percent of fiction readers, are female.

My novels always have strong and smart female characters, but they usually also have a man as primary protagonist. They have battles (lots of people dying very quickly), intricate plots, and no character-developing Disease of the Week.

In other words, statistically I’m doomed.

My latest novel, “Blood of the Reich,” does have a female as its primary hero and three other important female characters to balance the four primary males. But it also has a Nazi Iron Cross on its blood-red-and-steel-gray cover, and a complete absence of hearts, flowers, children, pets, or ripped bodices.

The marketing reasoning is this: Women will pick up a thriller cover with Iron Cross – […]

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Story Behind The Story

“Blood of the Reich” is a thriller that evolved in the telling. It’s a comment not just on the Nazi past, but our own present, inspired by my own experiences.

Some novelists start with theme, others with character. I tend to start with plot – I want a good yarn, above all – and then learn more about who the characters are, and what they stand for, as I work on the book. For this newest one, that was particularly true. What made my characters tick?

Like many people I’ve long been fascinated by the evil of the Third Reich, and somewhat mystified. The usual explanation is that Germany was taken over by a band of hypnotic criminals, the Nazis, who put the country under their spell for 12 terrible years. With their annihilation, Germany became good again.

I’ve always felt this ‘Hitler made us do it’ explanation to be inadequate. What’s baffling to an American used to charming politicians is how uncharismatic the Nazi leadership seems in newsreels: unattractive, bombastic, and creepy. Hitler himself remains almost inexplicable (despite the effort of biographers), a terrifying fanatic who deliberately erased almost all traces of his past to make himself an icon. Yet the Nazis […]

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Advice from an agent

Agent Jennifer Weltz of the Jean Naggar Literary Agency gave some good advice in a speech to the Historical Novel Society convention in San Diego June 18. For aspiring authors, here’s part of what she said, posted with Jennifer’s permission:

How do I get published you ask? How do I grow my readership in the challenging publishing landscape of today?

What do you do in your office all day??

First and foremost – I am a reader:

I read queries (I and each Agent in my office individually receive about 8000 a year – request chapters from about 10%- and request manuscripts from about 10% of the chapters)

In the past year I have taken on 5 new clients.

I also read my author’s new and revised and revised and revised manuscripts, outlines, proposals…

I read all of the sold titles from other agents in our office as I actively sell all of our books into the international market. This is largely fun reading for me as these are books sold by people with great taste and my job is to tell the world what I love about their books!

When I can squeeze it in, I also read for pure pleasure – books from people who are not my clients. I seem […]

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