William Dietrich, author of the Barbary Pirates

The Enlightenment Marches On

by bdietrich on May 10, 2012

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 […]

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The Emerald Effort

by bdietrich on May 9, 2012

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 […]

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Selective History

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 […]

Modern Vs. Napoleonic War

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, […]

Talking Books in Tucson

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 […]

Remembering The Bomb

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 […]

Pausing To Observe

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 […]

For Better and Worse

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 […]

Physics and Literature

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 […]

Plotting Tips

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:

A sympathetic hero/heroine with a Quest. Frodo must destroy the ring, Clint Eastwood must exact revenge, Jane Austen characters must find a husband, Hemingway dudes must find masculinity, Luke must fight the evil Empire.
High stakes. The fate of the world, clearing the character of a crime, saving the children, finding the serial killer, discovering the treasure, winning the prize, getting the girl or guy, achieving inner happiness. Mysteries are a puzzle, thrillers a vise.
A character arc in which your hero grows. Gains courage, competence, love, wisdom, acceptance, independence, etc. By the end of the plot, they have changed, usually for the better. End your story with resolution, don’t just stop it.
An interesting villain; i.e. an intriguing, believable one. Understandable motives. Everyday ticks and flaws. Surprising powers. Hannibal Lecter. Dr. Evil was interesting because he was out of date.
A wise mentor. Yoda, Gandalf, Obi-Wan, Merlin, Hannibal (again), Jim on Huck’s raft, the wise-cracking girlfriend, the […]

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author of Barbary Pirates