Welcome to my revised website!

As a historical thriller writer, I’ve spent plenty of time in the past with Roman centurions, Attila the Hun, Ethan Gage and his patron/plague Napoleon Bonaparte, and most recently with SS Nazis on the eve of World War II. But even we time-travelers have to touch base in the 21st Century once in a while, this time with a redesigned website I intend to keep much more up to date.

I want to communicate more with readers, and have you communicate more with me. Gosh, the future! Not only am I old enough to remember telling a colleague, ‘I don’t get why you’d want to bother with something as slow and clumsy as the Internet,’ I remember (true story) lead type, linotype machines, and tickertape wires at my first newspaper. No wonder I put Benjamin Franklin’s homilies in my Ethan Gage books! I’ve probably got a quill pen and stone chisel in a back drawer, too.

Hey. I’ll try to blog with the best of them.

I’ve been busier than a barkeep on a regimental payday, as Ethan Gage might say. “The Barbary Pirates,” published in 2010, is scheduled for publication as a paperback on March 29. My next novel, “Blood of the Reich,” is a rollercoaster rumination on the lure of power and our tendency toward tribalism, and ranges from Nazis in 1938 Tibet to my heroine’s sleuthing in the North Cascade mountains in the present day. It will be published June 28 by HarperCollins and is getting great early reaction. And I’m working on another Ethan Gage adventure, to be published in 2012.

Last November, University of Washington Press republished a revised version of my first book, “The Final Forest,” a non-fiction saga of the Northwest timber wars that won the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award and Governor’s Writer Award. The original, published in 1992, was centered on Forks, WA, but failed to include any of the vampires of the ‘Twilight’ saga: am I an idiot, or what? I calculated Stephenie Myers sold more books in 20 minutes than my sober recounting sold in 20 years. Oh, well. My Forks is a lot less exotic but a lot more true, and if you’re looking for a sociological look at what’s happening in America, this might be a book for you. I was out to Forks to talk about it recently, and a visit there is always an experience.

In other news, the ebook revolution has allowed me to bring back three of my early, out-of-print novels, “Ice Reich,” (Nazis in Antarctica), “Getting Back” (an eco-fable in Outback Australia) and “Dark Winter” (a serial killer at the South Pole) and has allowed new readers to rediscover those stories. They are available (cheap!) through the Amazon Kindle site, which means they also can be downloaded for the Ipad, et al, as well.

If that weren’t enough, a moment of (temporary) insanity led to my recruitment to do a history of the environmental college where I teach, the first institution of its kind in the nation: Huxley College at Western Washington University. It’s actually been an exciting collaborative venture involving a lot of students and alumni, and “Green Fire” should appear in late April or May.

Whew! Someday I’m going to take a minute to decide what I want to do when I grow up, but in the meantime I keep typing.

This website should help you, and me, keep track of it all. In future posts I’ll talk more about upcoming and past projects, the writer’s world, and things I stumble across that I think might be of interest. Please say hello, and happy reading!