President Obama’s support of gay marriage may change few minds, may hurt as much as help his re-election chances, and carries no force of law.

But his support of a sexual minority’s rights – and marriage is as much about property rights as it is about love – is another affirmation of 250-year-old Enlightenment ideas that percolate through the Ethan Gage adventures.

Ethan is no intellectual, and my swashbuckler plots focus on action, treasure, and eccentric inventions. There is no sermonizing.

Yet our hero struggles to find his moral compass in the great tides of history unleashed by the ideals of the American and French revolutions and loosed upon Europe by Napoleon’s armies.

The French codified 18th Century philosophic ideas in their 1793 Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. Article 1 states “Men are born free and equal in rights,” and the document identifies such rights as “natural,” echoing the American Declaration of Independence. It also called for freedom of speech and the libertarian idea of “freedom to do everything which injures no one else.”

This was a radical idea then and remains a radical idea to some people today. A majority – including the sexual majority of heterosexuals – is always tempted [...]]]>

President Obama’s support of gay marriage may change few minds, may hurt as much as help his re-election chances, and carries no force of law.

But his support of a sexual minority’s rights – and marriage is as much about property rights as it is about love – is another affirmation of 250-year-old Enlightenment ideas that percolate through the Ethan Gage adventures.

Ethan is no intellectual, and my swashbuckler plots focus on action, treasure, and eccentric inventions. There is no sermonizing.

Yet our hero struggles to find his moral compass in the great tides of history unleashed by the ideals of the American and French revolutions and loosed upon Europe by Napoleon’s armies.

The French codified 18^th Century philosophic ideas in their 1793 Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. Article 1 states “Men are born free and equal in rights,” and the document identifies such rights as “natural,” echoing the American Declaration of Independence. It also called for freedom of speech and the libertarian idea of “freedom to do everything which injures no one else.”

This was a radical idea then and remains a radical idea to some people today. A majority – including the sexual majority of heterosexuals – is always tempted to impose its preferences on a minority, including homosexuals. We can see that in public votes in state after state banning gay marriage, even though it means gay domestic partners are deprived of the rights of inheritance and property that married couples enjoy.

But the Enlightenment idea of equality, so strange in the age of kings, continues to batter away at our instincts like waves against a cliff. Obama’s slow evolution on the equivalency of gay marriage is yet another example.

None of this ever comes easily or smoothly. The rights proclaimed in America and France were for men only, and the French declaration omitted discussion of slavery then common in the colonies. While the Declaration helped set off the slave revolt in Haiti that is the center of The Emerald Storm, a revolutionary promise of freedom was revoked under planter pressure, and Napoleon sought to reinstate slavery there, in part at the urging of his wife Josephine, the daughter of Martinique planters.

He failed in Haiti, making it the first successful slave revolt in history.

That victory was in 1803, but it hardly settled things. Slavery and serfdom was commonplace in most of the world. Despite the 1776 and 1793 Declarations, still ahead were the 19^th Century revolutions in Latin America to shuck off Spanish peonage imposed on Indians, America’s 1862 Emancipation Proclamation, the Russian Revolution to end serfdom, the Chinese Communist revolution to lift the peasants, and so on, some of these replacing one tyranny with a new one.

It takes a long time for an ideal to become an instinct. It was nearly 150 years after the Declaration of Independence that American women got the vote, and nearly 200 years later that blacks got the Civil Rights Act.

Like many Americans – polls suggest it is now a slim majority – my own attitudes toward gays have evolved as they have identified themselves and turned out to be, gosh, ordinary people: friends, bosses, colleagues, relatives. That high school teacher I admired? Gay. Best landlords we ever had? Gay. The inspiring editor? Gay. It’s that personal contact that makes a difference.

I don’t believe people choose to be gay any more than they choose to be black or white, male or female; we are what we’re born as, for better and worse.

In The Emerald Storm, Ethan encounters revolution at its most violent but also blacks who turn out to be, gosh, ordinary people. Haiti took the French revolutionaries at their word, sought freedom, and paid terribly for it. It’s a little-known chapter of a long Enlightenment struggle that is still going on.

Equal rights? Gosh, what a concept! Obama’s endorsement was overdue.

Approximately once a year I clamber out of my hobbit hole to communicate about communication, i.e. to talk about writing in conjunction with the publishing of my latest book.

This time it’s The Emerald Storm, on shelves starting May 8. I’ll be speaking at Pacific Northwest bookstores, hoping for good reviews, and doing what I can to use the Internet and media to get the word out.

With today’s ubiquitous consumer evaluations, a book is a book is a book. In the long run one’s work is read or ignored on its merits, and I’m gratified that all the books I’ve written in the past 20 years are still “in print” (electronically, for three early novels) and are still being purchased.

Still, the name of the popularity game is getting people to sample you, with some becoming fans and others preferring a different flavor. Reviews can be crucial, but so are bookstore displays, interviews, and word of mouth.

In December, HarperCollins offered the first Ethan Gage adventure, Napoleon’s Pyramids, for free to e-readers during a two week promotion. This tactic boosted its subsequent sales and that of the rest of the series, which in order are The Rosetta Key, The Dakota Cipher, The Barbary [...]]]>

Approximately once a year I clamber out of my hobbit hole to communicate about communication, i.e. to talk about writing in conjunction with the publishing of my latest book.

This time it’s The Emerald Storm, on shelves starting May 8. I’ll be speaking at Pacific Northwest bookstores, hoping for good reviews, and doing what I can to use the Internet and media to get the word out.

With today’s ubiquitous consumer evaluations, a book is a book is a book. In the long run one’s work is read or ignored on its merits, and I’m gratified that all the books I’ve written in the past 20 years are still “in print” (electronically, for three early novels) and are still being purchased.

Still, the name of the popularity game is getting people to sample you, with some becoming fans and others preferring a different flavor. Reviews can be crucial, but so are bookstore displays, interviews, and word of mouth.

In December, HarperCollins offered the first Ethan Gage adventure, Napoleon’s Pyramids, for free to e-readers during a two week promotion. This tactic boosted its subsequent sales and that of the rest of the series, which in order are The Rosetta Key, The Dakota Cipher, The Barbary Pirates, and The Emerald Storm.

My heroic Harper’s publicist, Heather Drucker, is tireless at beating the drum, as other authors she works with will affirm.

Yet despite good sales, translation into thirty languages, a Pulitzer, (and one is forced to repeat such credentials endlessly) my work flies fairly low on the national radar. I’ve had occasional scores (a single review by USA Today made a BIG difference) and consistent support over the years, but the publishing industry is a little bit like high school: I keep trying to be one of the cool kids. Someday!

I just read a biography of Kurt Vonnegut. It was difficult to tell when he was most miserable, when he went mostly unrecognized for his writing for two decades, or when he endured the pressure of global fame. “Be careful what you wish for,” one bookseller warned me.

Meanwhile we do what we can to pitch our goods, while realizing that book publicity is like a bank loan, you can only get it if you prove you don’t need it. The Emerald Storm came out the same day as new novels by Hilary Mantel and John Irving, and I didn’t exactly steal their thunder.

Over the years I’ve experimented with various PR techniques, including readings, signings, slide shows, a self-hired publicist, TV and radio interviews, and so on. In aggregate they’ve absolutely helped, and I’m in debt to many supportive people. Individually, it can be humbling when few show up. Some authors are extroverted actors, but most of us strain to be as suave and witty as our written characters.

The key, for me, is to stick with it.

A few authors become celebrities, with all the tradeoffs, but most of us create in happy obscurity. The restaurant still seats us by the kitchen door, which is better than having people watch what you eat.

As bookstores have struggled and the number of authors has increased, the old-fashioned nationwide book tour is also becoming rare. Replacing it are book festival appearances and ever-increasing use of the Internet.

For better or worse, we authors increasingly speak for ourselves. This blog is an example of that. On this website are not only my blogs, but my self-written descriptions, sample interviews (on the “press room” page), excerpts from reviews (edited by moi, of course, to emphasize the good parts) and links to Internet book sellers with still more reviews. If you type ‘william dietrich, author’ into Google, you get an absurd 6 million-plus results. I find this Brave New World exciting but weird.

The good news is that I’ve slowly evolved from being anxious about book publicity events to actually enjoying them. With numerous titles and satisfying success, I can relax and treat it for what it is, a chance to connect with you in person. It’s not just a sales event, it’s a way of saying thank you.

So thanks, if you’ve read this far…and I hope to see you at a bookstore. My upcoming appearances are here: http://williamdietrich.com/readings/

I was in Europe recently researching a future Ethan Gage novel and a French guide to the Normandy beaches asked me what water we were looking at.

“The English Channel,” I replied.

He shook his head. “No, that may be the name they use in England but it is actually La Manche, The Sleeve. History is different here.”

Indeed. In touring museums dedicated to both the Napoleonic era and D-Day, I was struck at how each nation edits the past to fit its own story. It’s not just what they say, but what they don’t.

While we Americans, with the help of Hollywood, are accustomed to thinking of ourselves on center stage, our World War II role tends to get better billing in France (liberation) than in England (the GIs were “over-paid, over-sexed, and over-here,” the Brits would say.) And the Soviet Union? Forgetaboudit. Yeah, they chewed up the German army but it was (fill in your own nation) that won the war, as the Beatles sang.

The same is true of Napoleon, a volcanic genius in France, ogre in Britain, and something in-between in American histories. It helps to poke about on both sides of the Channel to get a rounded look.

The Napoleon Wing [...]]]>

I was in Europe recently researching a future Ethan Gage novel and a French guide to the Normandy beaches asked me what water we were looking at.

“The English Channel,” I replied.

He shook his head. “No, that may be the name they use in England but it is actually La Manche, The Sleeve. History is different here.”

Indeed. In touring museums dedicated to both the Napoleonic era and D-Day, I was struck at how each nation edits the past to fit its own story. It’s not just what they say, but what they don’t.

While we Americans, with the help of Hollywood, are accustomed to thinking of ourselves on center stage, our World War II role tends to get better billing in France (liberation) than in England (the GIs were “over-paid, over-sexed, and over-here,” the Brits would say.) And the Soviet Union? Forgetaboudit. Yeah, they chewed up the German army but it was (fill in your own nation) that won the war, as the Beatles sang.

The same is true of Napoleon, a volcanic genius in France, ogre in Britain, and something in-between in American histories. It helps to poke about on both sides of the Channel to get a rounded look.

The Napoleon Wing of the Army Museum in Paris has splendid uniforms and weapons but is curiously dry in putting the campaigns in context or trying to relate what it was like to fight them. The British Army Museum in London is all-England,  and Nelson’s flagship “Victory” in Portsmouth relates reams about life in the British navy and nary a word about the French or Spanish sailors Nelson fought.

My interests as a novelist don’t always match what countries choose to remember. England’s Walmer Castle, on the La Manche coast near Dover looking out toward France, is a charming place to visit but the tour doesn’t mention its role as a spy headquarters in the Napoleonic Wars.

In France’s Boulogne across the water, there is a huge column commemorating the “Army of England” Napoleon built there for an invasion of Britain that never happened, but intriguingly the statue of the general on top is facing east (toward his eventual victory at Austerlitz) and not west at the country he longed to conquer.

Napoleon has been alternately portrayed as hero and villain by legions of competing historians, and he drew such mixed reactions even in his own lifetime.

Some first-person accounts record him as warm, charismatic, and handsome, able to modify his personality to put almost any visitor at ease and to enlist almost any potential confederate. By those accounts he recruited, rewarded, and delegated.

Other contemporary accounts describe him as brusque, disdainful of women, slight and then plump, with a sallow complexion, receding hairline, and clumsy administration.

Sometimes his gray eyes are described as seductive, and others, as icy.

His legend has him sharing the miseries of his shoulders and standing in for frozen sentries, while his detractors note his assembly of a costly array of servants and ruinous spending. He was either generous to his siblings or cruel, loyal to subordinates or ruthless, a hopeless romantic or a cheating husband.

There’s evidence to support all these assessments, which make Napoleon’s complexity one of the things that fascinate. It was as if he combined all our species’ strengths and weaknesses in one being.

Which is why Napoleon remains such a useful foil for Ethan Gage in his adventures. He is a man always being discovered. And Ethan, the wayward American, finds himself on both sides of the Channel in his pursuit of truth.

Did the Napoleonic Wars of Ethan Gage’s time produce Post Traumatic Stress Disorder? And could it be blamed for killings like the alleged deaths of sixteen civilians in Afghanistan by Army Sgt. Robert Bales?

Atrocities, yes. Those have occurred in all wars, in all times.

PTSD probably, although that term and its predecessor, shell shock, had yet to be invented.

But Napoleonic combat was a very different kind of warfare, with different trauma. The early 19th Century was a brutal era with virtually no psychological treatment beyond religious counseling, but Napoleon’s soldiers escaped some of the constant stress of today’s warriors.

One of the challenges when writing historical fiction is imagining physical and social conditions very different than our own. In Ethan’s day, life moved more slowly, with long pauses between combat.

Certainly Napoleonic war was on a scale not experienced since ancient times. Historians have roughly estimated that the Napoleonic wars killed a million combatants, with many more civilian deaths. It was the first time in many centuries that massive numbers were drafted, with 1.5 million Frenchmen conscripted.

Yet even in the most desperate period of 1813-1814, the French army actually enlisted only about 40 percent of the 20-to-25-year-olds of primary draft age. Avoidance, desertion, [...]]]>

Did the Napoleonic Wars of Ethan Gage’s time produce Post Traumatic Stress Disorder? And could it be blamed for killings like the alleged deaths of sixteen civilians in Afghanistan by Army Sgt. Robert Bales?

Atrocities, yes. Those have occurred in all wars, in all times.

PTSD probably, although that term and its predecessor, shell shock, had yet to be invented.

But Napoleonic combat was a very different kind of warfare, with different trauma. The early 19^th Century was a brutal era with virtually no psychological treatment beyond religious counseling, but Napoleon’s soldiers escaped some of the constant stress of today’s warriors.

One of the challenges when writing historical fiction is imagining physical and social conditions very different than our own. In Ethan’s day, life moved more slowly, with long pauses between combat.

Certainly Napoleonic war was on a scale not experienced since ancient times. Historians have roughly estimated that the Napoleonic wars killed a million combatants, with many more civilian deaths. It was the first time in many centuries that massive numbers were drafted, with 1.5 million Frenchmen conscripted.

Yet even in the most desperate period of 1813-1814, the French army actually enlisted only about 40 percent of the 20-to-25-year-olds of primary draft age. Avoidance, desertion, or the paying of substitutes was rampant.

The carnage in a single day of battle was staggering, with a third of the men fighting at Waterloo, Borodino or Leipzig dead or wounded by the end of combat.

But while war became increasingly unrelenting in Spain and Russia, there were long periods in which military rivals had no contact. As bad as battles were, they ended relatively quickly. There was no aerial bombing or long-range artillery or missile attack.

Muddy roads and lack of tents meant operations slowed or shut down in winter. Poor communication meant soldiers had little idea of family problems back home.

In reading first-person accounts of warfare in that time, the constant reality was endless marching with about 65 pounds of gun and gear. Shoes and boots were the equivalent of today’s rubber and gasoline, and drafted cobblers were often kept from combat to repair footwear.

Once on campaign, shelter was rudimentary. It took too many horses to bring along tents for everyone, so ordinary soldiers either temporarily crammed into houses wherever they were campaigning, or slept without covering outdoors.

Food and water were a constant preoccupation. The huge new armies were difficult to feed and had to steal much of their provisions from whatever countryside they were marching through. Soldiers were often wet, hungry, thirsty, and frequently sick.

Massacres occasionally occurred after hard-fought sieges, but an Afghanistan like slaughter was difficult. With each shot, a gun was empty until laboriously reloaded. Muskets were so inaccurate that a separation of as little as a quarter-mile could leave a soldier reasonably safe from small arms fire. Foxholes and trenches were almost unknown.

Napoleonic armies wielded the bayonet, but actual wounds from face-to-face fighting were rare. A bayonet charge usually resulted in one side or the other running away.

For the individual soldier, battle was a thing of confusion. Black powder smoke was so thick, and guns so loud, that soldiers fought half-blind and half-deaf. One officer ordered to charge at Waterloo was so disoriented by the smoke that he had to ask in which direction.

Combat was an ominous march to within fifty or a hundred yards from an enemy, volleys of incredible violence, and then, after one side or the other broke, a pause. The unrelenting grind of modern fighting was not experienced.

The brief moments of combat were probably worse than today’s, with the soldier exposed, casualties horrific, and medical care almost nonexistent. What was different was that combat was confined to battlefields that at their biggest were about three and a half miles wide, and that the slaughter usually ended at sunset, not to be repeated for weeks, months, or years.

Recruits were much poorer than today’s soldiers, but also had little stress from financial decision-making. Marriage was infrequent, and any wives and children stayed with extended families.

That doesn’t mean Napoleonic war was better, or worse. It does mean the stresses were very different. Napoleon’s biggest battles, from Austerlitz through Waterloo, took place in less than a decade. Combat in Afghanistan has already extended longer than that, with no end in sight.

Small wonder that some modern soldiers snap.

Don’t lead with the weather.

That was a typically pithy piece of author advice from 86-year-old mystery author Elmore Leonard, guru of tight writing, at the Tucson Festival of Books last weekend. The event drew an astonishing 100,000 readers a day.

A hundred thousand? Who said reading is dead?

Leonard, crusty and funny, went further than that. Don’t bother with the weather at all, he advised. Get on with the story. He told on-stage interviewer Brad Meltzer, another bestselling thriller writer, that the only time he recalled mentioning weather was when a character stepped outside, looked up, and said, “Fuck.” End of description.

Leonard is famed for tight writing, his hatred of adverbs, and creating wonderful dialog for crooks and lowlifes. His most famous dictum to authors is, “Leave out the parts that readers skip.”

Sage advice, but I find weather to sometimes be an effective environmental scene-setter. Besides, how do you get 400 authors to Tucson in March? The weather! (Sunny and 70.)

I also think adverbs were invented for a reason, and occasionally have their place.

But then we write different kinds of books. Leonard said he won’t read a novel much more than 250 pages long, and thus has never read Tom Clancy, even [...]]]>

Don’t lead with the weather.

That was a typically pithy piece of author advice from 86-year-old mystery author Elmore Leonard, guru of tight writing, at the Tucson Festival of Books last weekend. The event drew an astonishing 100,000 readers a day.

A hundred thousand? Who said reading is dead?

Leonard, crusty and funny, went further than that. Don’t bother with the weather at all, he advised. Get on with the story. He told on-stage interviewer Brad Meltzer, another bestselling thriller writer, that the only time he recalled mentioning weather was when a character stepped outside, looked up, and said, “Fuck.” End of description.

Leonard is famed for tight writing, his hatred of adverbs, and creating wonderful dialog for crooks and lowlifes. His most famous dictum to authors is, “Leave out the parts that readers skip.”

Sage advice, but I find weather to sometimes be an effective environmental scene-setter. Besides, how do you get 400 authors to Tucson in March? The weather! (Sunny and 70.)

I also think adverbs were invented for a reason, and occasionally have their place.

But then we write different kinds of books. Leonard said he won’t read a novel much more than 250 pages long, and thus has never read Tom Clancy, even after being asked to review him. Uh-oh. I think that rules out my books, too.

T.C. Boyle announced he won’t read anything but “literary” fiction. It must leave him enormously depressed.

Still, it’s instructive hearing other authors. Thanks in part to Christine Burke at Clues Unlimited Bookstore in Tucson – another one of those amazing independents with a fiercely loyal clientele – I was on three panels at the weekend event, holding forth on Napoleon, Nazis, and the techniques of putting ordinary characters in extraordinary situations, such as heroine Rominy Pickett in “Blood of the Reich.”

If you haven’t been to a book festival, the typical event is a moderated discussion of some topic by two to four authors, followed by questions from the audience. There is usually a lot of grist for readers and writers alike.

I found my long-lost secret twin (though younger and better looking) in fellow panelist Lauren Willig, who writes romance novels set in Napoleonic times. They eerily match the adventures of my hero, Ethan Gage. She even included Robert Fulton’s submarine, Nautilus, in a recent adventure. I informed her that I had sunk it in Tripoli Harbor.

Book festivals are a useful publicity venue for authors and a chance for readers to put a face to a name. It’s just like the red carpet at the Academy Awards, except that authors are more likely to be homely, badly dressed, introverted, and utterly obscure.

Some author socializing goes on. (Typical conversation: “My career is a wreck.” “Mine is a catastrophe.”) But it’s the questions and comments from the audience that are the most perceptive and enjoyable.

I’m something of a book festival failure. If you want to be taken seriously, the preferred literary uniform for men is black, as in black T-shirt or turtleneck, black sports coat, and black jeans. Sneakers add the common-man touch. Sunglasses indoors, if you want to go for broke. I wander around in dorky khakis and Eddie Bauer shirts, and anxious readers ask me things like, “Where’s the restroom?”

There’s a high premium on wit and humor, so we all try to be funny when we’re not being profound. Talk about pressure! The literary pecking order is obvious in the length of signing lines, and I could sometimes spray the space in front of me with machine gun fire and not have to worry about hitting anyone. Suffice to say I’m no Elmore Leonard – but then he’s been at it for sixty years. I’d like to match his success, but it’s probably easier to simply expire.

Meanwhile, what’s gratifying about the Tucson gathering is crisp organization worthy of D-day. I sunburn easily, and the sun was so blinding to this Washington State resident that a volunteer at Clues Unlimited actually bought me a festival hat.

Now that’s service.

The Napoleonic era of the Ethan Gage novels was colorful. The Cold War was grim.

But I’m intrigued by the idea of including part of the notoriously polluted Hanford nuclear reservation in Washington State in a new “Manhattan Project National Historic Park.” I spoke on the possibility in Seattle recently.

I was invited by the National Parks Conservation Association because I covered Hanford as a reporter for the Seattle Times and wrote about it in my nonfiction book, “Northwest Passage: The Great Columbia River.”

Hanford is in the midst of an 80-year, $130 billion cleanup of radioactive waste. At first glance the idea of making desert desolation a part of the national park system might seem nuts.

But the national parks are about more than pretty places. The agency does a superb job of interpreting the best and worst of American history, including slave cabins, Japanese internment camps, and the Andersonville Civil War prison.

Hanford was where the plutonium was made for the world’s first atomic bomb test in New Mexico. It also fueled the Nagasaki bomb. The Hiroshima bomb was fueled by U-235 from Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

Both these communities would be included in the new park, as well as Los Alamos, New Mexico, where [...]]]>

The Napoleonic era of the Ethan Gage novels was colorful. The Cold War was grim.

But I’m intrigued by the idea of including part of the notoriously polluted Hanford nuclear reservation in Washington State in a new “Manhattan Project National Historic Park.” I spoke on the possibility in Seattle recently.

I was invited by the National Parks Conservation Association because I covered Hanford as a reporter for the Seattle Times and wrote about it in my nonfiction book, “Northwest Passage: The Great Columbia River.”

Hanford is in the midst of an 80-year, $130 billion cleanup of radioactive waste. At first glance the idea of making desert desolation a part of the national park system might seem nuts.

But the national parks are about more than pretty places. The agency does a superb job of interpreting the best and worst of American history, including slave cabins, Japanese internment camps, and the Andersonville Civil War prison.

Hanford was where the plutonium was made for the world’s first atomic bomb test in New Mexico. It also fueled the Nagasaki bomb. The Hiroshima bomb was fueled by U-235 from Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

Both these communities would be included in the new park, as well as Los Alamos, New Mexico, where physicists worked on the design of the bomb.

Hanford includes the world’s first large-scale nuclear reactor, the B Reactor next to the Columbia River. It’s a fascinating artifact. Visitors can see the old control room and the stack of graphite rods that controlled the reaction.

Legislation to create the park is expected soon. Just what form it would take is far from decided.

The title of my talk was “Tool of Victory or Pandora’s Box?” illustrating the ways the arms race can be interpreted.

So how do we commemorate Hanford? Did it win World War II, prevent a disastrous invasion of Japan, and deter World War III between the United States and the Soviet Union? Or start a ruinous arms race that still threatens the end of the world?

The easy and most likely solution will be to put a simple sign up, let visitors draw their own conclusions, and call it a day.

But our government is capable of being ingenious in not just preserving historic places, but providing lively and thought-provoking historical interpretation. A museum at Los Alamos already does a good job of looking at The Bomb with a nuanced and balanced display.

We could enshrine Hanford, or condemn it. The park could be an occasion for a moving monument, like the Vietnam memorial in Washington, D.C., or the World Trade Center plaza in New York. It could provoke and invite comment, and become a site for discussion of arms control and international politics. It could lead visitors to the Arid Lands Ecology Reserve and the Hanford Reach of the Columbia River, two ecosystems ironically protected by bomb production.

How should we remember Hanford, Oak Ridge, and Los Alamos? I quoted Chinese Premier Chou en Lai when he was asked, two hundred years after the fact, whether the French Revolution had been a good thing or a bad thing.

His answer: “It’s too early to tell.”

One requirement of good writing is paying attention.

Whether one is journalist, novelist, or poet, the requirement to closely observe the subject at hand – be it human relationships, a political campaign, or the splendor of nature – is what makes reading worthwhile.

I admire people with the gift of paying close attention, and recently enjoyed the wisdom of an observer par excellence, Bud Anderson of the Falcon Research Group in Bow, Washington.

Bud is a neighbor who each winter offers a five-night class on the eagles, hawks, and falcons that patrol northwest Washington, where I live.

From my bedroom office window I spy bald eagles pretty regularly; one flew by just now. Some are year-around residents and others are “snowbirds” fleeing from Alaska’s winter. They dine on Skagit River salmon and migrating waterfowl in the temperate climate of the Pacific Northwest.

Bud has turned passion into a career. He’s not a scientist on a professional academic track, but his skill in watching raptors has won him grants to travel around the world to band, radio-tag, and observe. He’s added significant understanding to our fledgling knowledge of aerial predators that migrate hundreds of miles in a single day.

He also traps over-abundant hawks at Seattle-Tacoma International [...]]]>

One requirement of good writing is paying attention.

Whether one is journalist, novelist, or poet, the requirement to closely observe the subject at hand – be it human relationships, a political campaign, or the splendor of nature – is what makes reading worthwhile.

I admire people with the gift of paying close attention, and recently enjoyed the wisdom of an observer par excellence, Bud Anderson of the Falcon Research Group in Bow, Washington.

Bud is a neighbor who each winter offers a five-night class on the eagles, hawks, and falcons that patrol northwest Washington, where I live.

From my bedroom office window I spy bald eagles pretty regularly; one flew by just now. Some are year-around residents and others are “snowbirds” fleeing from Alaska’s winter. They dine on Skagit River salmon and migrating waterfowl in the temperate climate of the Pacific Northwest.

Bud has turned passion into a career. He’s not a scientist on a professional academic track, but his skill in watching raptors has won him grants to travel around the world to band, radio-tag, and observe. He’s added significant understanding to our fledgling knowledge of aerial predators that migrate hundreds of miles in a single day.

He also traps over-abundant hawks at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport and releases them where they won’t end life spattered against a jet. The trapping is quite humane and the birds surprisingly docile once he puts a hood over their eyes.

Viewing a Red-tailed hawk from a distance is fine, but it’s sort of like enjoying a supermodel from a quarter-mile away. To see its complex plumage, coiled muscles, gaping tongue, and brilliant eyes when in hand is an enormous privilege, reminding those of us who squat in our hives just how magnificent the outdoor world is.

Bud’s class is great fun but challenging. To make sense of bird behavior you first have to identify the bird. There are fourteen species of hawks in western Washington, male and female feathers differ (the females are also bigger, because they carry the eggs) and plumage changes again from youth to maturity. Add in the unusual, like the hawk equivalent of an albino, and we probably saw slides of sixty or so varieties that ideally we’d master.

Thank goodness there was no test. Some locals have taken the class a dozen times. So far I’ve managed to identify Red-tails and Harriers in the wild along with the usual eagles and osprey, meaning I have a long way to go.

But birding isn’t really about memorization, it’s about observation, and that is where Anderson grabbed my writerly attention with his skill.

First of all, he’s a collector of bird poetry and narrative description, and read us several works that made me envious, requiring that we shut our eyes and concentrate as the words were recited. We humans rarely look up, but he gave us a peek at an aerial world as new and complex as if we were underwater amphibians who finally crawled out onto land.

Second, he’s carved out a life by watching, something most people just don’t do. He’ll stop and spend hours observing a single hawk, watching it hunt, fight, mate and roost. In our frenetic Twitter world, he approaches the outdoors with the stately rhythm of the Downton Abbey series on Masterpiece Theater, understanding the wild through the patience required of a 19^th Century novel.

He views a bird’s life not as romantic but frantic, as edgy as working the floor of a stock exchange. The medieval dictum about life being “nasty, brutish, and short” could apply to raptors. Not only must they kill pretty savagely, hawks and falcons are constantly harassed by other birds seeking to steal their food or take over their hunting territory. We’ve learned raptors can live in the wild an astonishingly long time – up to 30 years, for eagles – but the mortality of young hawks can be as high as 90 percent.

To see this requires paying attention, and birds show us how. Raptors hunt by ceaselessly and patiently watching for prey. Bud gave us moderns the briefest of tastes by having us try to concentrate on a single spot on the blackboard for a single minute, not looking away and not thinking of something else.

Hard to do. Try it.

So a good writer has some of the attributes of a good birder, or painter, or photographer. We pay attention. We become aware of detail. When I travel to research my novels I’m searching for smells, tastes, and textures as well as sights, but it’s work to stop to do this. Our habit is to rush by.

So, new resolution: Don’t just watch hawks, become as watchful as a hawk. Paying attention leads to truth, and writing that rings true is what makes stories come alive.

The dysfunction of Congress was a reminder this Thanksgiving of how some things seem to be getting worse.

Political ads. Air travel. Traffic. Road repair. The weather. (Climate change scientists are predicting more extremes.) The stock market. (More volatile.)  Musicals. (Rodgers & Hammerstein, come back!) The Academy Awards. Hiking trails. (In disrepair.) Manners.

As usual, America is falling behind. In earlier times it was to the Russians. Then the Japanese. Then the Europeans. Now it’s the Chinese. And don’t expect a reprieve. We have a chattering class of professional worriers who are well paid to keep our anxiety levels high.

For most of my life our schools have also been failing (Sputnik, etc.), our bodies flabby (JFK worried about this), our Christmases too commercial, our greed unchecked, our national debt rampant (we had to debate this in high school in the 1960s), our minds a muddle (from Gilligan’s Island to the Kardashians), our lives a sweatshop, our psyches angst-ridden, and our tastes barbaric.

Maybe it’s true. Intellectuals have been forecasting our fall at least since Oswald Spengler’s “Decline of the West” in 1918.

But history cuts both ways. In Ethan Gage’s day at the beginning of the 19th Century, the invention of mass conscription made [...]]]>

The dysfunction of Congress was a reminder this Thanksgiving of how some things seem to be getting worse.

Political ads. Air travel. Traffic. Road repair. The weather. (Climate change scientists are predicting more extremes.) The stock market. (More volatile.)  Musicals. (Rodgers & Hammerstein, come back!) The Academy Awards. Hiking trails. (In disrepair.) Manners.

As usual, America is falling behind. In earlier times it was to the Russians. Then the Japanese. Then the Europeans. Now it’s the Chinese. And don’t expect a reprieve. We have a chattering class of professional worriers who are well paid to keep our anxiety levels high.

For most of my life our schools have also been failing (Sputnik, etc.), our bodies flabby (JFK worried about this), our Christmases too commercial, our greed unchecked, our national debt rampant (we had to debate this in high school in the 1960s), our minds a muddle (from Gilligan’s Island to the Kardashians), our lives a sweatshop, our psyches angst-ridden, and our tastes barbaric.

Maybe it’s true. Intellectuals have been forecasting our fall at least since Oswald Spengler’s “Decline of the West” in 1918.

But history cuts both ways. In Ethan Gage’s day at the beginning of the 19^th Century, the invention of mass conscription made warfare vast and horrific. But it was also a time textile mills made clothes affordable, paper manufacturing efficiencies began to elevate literacy, city engineers introduced sanitation, and canned food improved diets.

Similarly, we could also say that today politicians are better-scrutinized, air travel is cheap, houses better built against storms, more people have investments, Broadway shows are likelier to tour, movies are more plentiful, trails more numerous, and the use of pepper spray in Walmart is at least unusual enough to make the news.

What’s gotten better?

Coffee. Yes, pricey, but more interesting, too.

Cars. Safer, more comfortable, more efficient, longer lasting.

Energy efficiency.

Electronics at all levels. Computers that once filled a warehouse now fit in our pocket, and the software usually works. (I don’t miss my 20-pound Kaypro “portable,” a wonder in its day.)

Food. Pretentious sometimes, but varied, fresh, from more cultures.

Wine. Too many good ones to choose from.

Citizen involvement. Way more civic groups on every conceivable issue.

Tolerance. Despite the “holier-than-thou, my-way-or-the-highway” cliques, the world is much smaller and more integrated in every way. It’s much harder to stereotype.

Literacy. From email to book clubs, people use the written word.

The environment. We still might trash the planet, but we’ve cleaned up, too.

Science. Hundreds of new planets, far-out physics, miracle vaccines, gee-whiz crops, and robots that trundle on Mars.

Smiles. It’s the rare middle class kid who hasn’t been ratcheted into straight teeth.

Smoking. I don’t get why anyone still does this, but at least they do it away from me.

Comfortable clothing, sensible shoes.

Less ironing.

On-line shopping.

I still miss repair shops, banks that had architectural grandeur, the mindless simplicity of Ma Bell with its phones sturdy enough to drive nails with, and comedy that was witty instead of vulgar.

But they had plenty of vulgar comedies in Ethan Gage’s day, too.

Besides providing pleasure, storytelling justifies itself by occasionally providing truth, or at least insight. But what if we don’t know what’s real?

The thought occurred while reading physicist Brian Greene’s The Fabric of the Cosmos. It’s one of many popular cosmology books about the origin and nature of the universe I’ve read over the years by scientists such as Carl Sagan, Stephen Hawking, Kip Thorne, Frank Tipler, Michio Kaku, Roger Penrose, and so on.

I read numerous titles not because I understand this stuff but because I don’t. Each scientist brings their own set of analogies to help visualize peculiarities hard to verbalize outside the language of mathematics.

Greene is better than most at doing this, but the reality described sometimes sounds as fanciful as medieval monks debating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. We take these guys seriously because oddball ideas like relativity and quantum mechanics, proposed in leaps of genius, have subsequently been confirmed by experiment. So new bizarre ideas might eventually be confirmed too.

Consider a few of the impossible things before breakfast these physicists and astronomers ask us to believe:

-       That we can’t detect up to 96 percent of the matter and energy in our [...]]]>

Besides providing pleasure, storytelling justifies itself by occasionally providing truth, or at least insight. But what if we don’t know what’s real?

The thought occurred while reading physicist Brian Greene’s The Fabric of the Cosmos. It’s one of many popular cosmology books about the origin and nature of the universe I’ve read over the years by scientists such as Carl Sagan, Stephen Hawking, Kip Thorne, Frank Tipler, Michio Kaku, Roger Penrose, and so on.

I read numerous titles not because I understand this stuff but because I don’t. Each scientist brings their own set of analogies to help visualize peculiarities hard to verbalize outside the language of mathematics.

Greene is better than most at doing this, but the reality described sometimes sounds as fanciful as medieval monks debating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. We take these guys seriously because oddball ideas like relativity and quantum mechanics, proposed in leaps of genius, have subsequently been confirmed by experiment. So new bizarre ideas might eventually be confirmed too.

Consider a few of the impossible things before breakfast these physicists and astronomers ask us to believe:

-       That we can’t detect up to 96 percent of the matter and energy in our universe, and that we have little idea what it consists of.

-       That the universe isn’t expanding because galaxies are flying away from each other through space. It’s space itself that is expanding, taking galaxies with it. “Expanding through what?” is like asking a clam to imagine a cloud.

-       That our universe started as a particle far smaller than an atom weighing twenty pounds (no, I don’t get how they figured that) and that existence picked up the rest of its weight, or mass, by “robbing gravity.”

-       That empty outer space is in fact crowded with fields and subatomic particles we’ve yet to detect; an emptiness that is crammed.

-       That there are not four dimensions – three spatial and one time – but ten. The others are just too small to see. Oops, make that 11. Or, for another theory, 26.

-       That there is a parallel universe a millimeter away from our own, or that our universe is a mere hologram of a more real one, or that there are an almost infinite number of universes with new ones popping up like popcorn, or that even after estimating there are hundreds of billions of galaxies, containing hundreds of billions of stars, we “see” only a tiny part of our own cosmos.

Whew.

Science fiction writers deal with this madness by simply mining it, as I did for my own novel Blood of the Reich, which climaxes at the CERN supercollider near Geneva. I spend a lot of time in the early 19^th Century with Ethan Gage, but enjoy a good dose of mental whiplash by trying to absorb ideas from the 21^st., While I’m still marching with Napoleon, I’m prospecting these nuggets again for a different kind of time-travel story, which may or may not work.

Most other people do just fine ignoring this stuff, since the Wonderland scientists are describing is mostly too big, too small, or too distant for everyday observation. Maybe our explorations will lead to vast new manipulations of nature like nuclear energy, but in the meantime they don’t fill up your gas tank or get you a girlfriend.

Literature and theology, however, have arguably failed to come to grasp with what existence is really like. Books and religion tend to emphasize the inner life more than the outer one, and the personal more than the cosmic. But if the meaning of life was hard to explain two thousand years ago, when the world was presumed flat and at the center of the universe, how much more so when we begin to grasp just how incredibly brief, small, and illusory life really is? We can’t even really grasp what is is, let alone make theological sense of it.

I’ve tried to refine in my head our literary raison d’etre using the insights that have come from microscope, telescope, supercollider and equation, without much progress. I’m not just as hapless as a philosophizing freshman in a dormitory, I’m a mole at an astronomy lecture.

Is science’s frontier so way out that it’s really becoming irrelevant to human understanding of ourselves? Will outer space ultimately provide insights into inner space that revolutionize writing, and will a 24^th Century Shakespeare plumb the soul and spirit with an understanding of outer space we’re just beginning to comprehend? Or are physicists leading us down a rathole of misunderstanding generated only by theoretical calculations on a whiteboard?

I do think these theories are incredibly cool. And that their radical overthrow of our understanding of reality is almost never, ever, mentioned on the evening news…or literature. What does the new physics say about us?

The Seattle 7, an energetic “service club” of Seattle-area authors who raise money for literacy, recently raised $10,000 through a day-long instructional program. I was one of several authors giving brief tips, mine on plotting. For what it’s worth, here’s some things aspiring writers might find useful: