The Year of Four Books

There are good years, bad years, and weird years. I’ll remember 2014 as the Year of Four Books, and it was good, bad, and weird combined.

The seventh Ethan Gage adventure, The Three Emperors, was published on schedule in May, along with the paperback edition of The Barbed Crown. That would typically be it for my annual publishing calendar.

But HarperCollins decided not to contract for the next in the series, leaving me with problem and opportunity. The problem was not the standard one-book-a-year routine I’d grown accustomed to. The opportunity was to expand my writing.

Already in the works was The North Cascades: Finding Beauty and Meaning in the Wild Nearby, by the Braided River imprint of Mountaineers Books. I contributed to what was very much a group coffee-table-book effort, and the photo-rich work came out at the end of September. It’s gorgeous, and I’m privileged to play a part.

About the same time my first experiment with independent publishing arrived. It’s a young adult thriller and environmental parable called The Murder of Adam and Eve. I used my forced hiatus from Ethan Gage to finish that stewing story, and have been pleased with the response to date. It’s nice to believe you have a great story even in the face of publisher skepticism – and find readers agree.

Having written so much fiction about the Napoleonic era, I also can’t resist tapping into the conqueror’s amazing, catastrophic, meteoric life with nonfiction. So I’m finishing up another long-pregnant project, Napoleon’s Rules: Life and Career Lessons from Bonaparte. It’s a cautionary cross between biography and self-help that’s different than anything out there. It should appear in early 2015.

I’m also working on another in the Ethan Gage series.

So I’ve been enmeshed with historical fiction, a coffee table eco book, a teen time travel tale, and a biography for business – all in the span of a few months. This is no way to run a career! I’m blessed that readers and bookstores tolerate my wandering curiosity, but it’s not exactly making me rich.

Throw in an abortive attempt to help out on a science book, Ethan in his various stages of progression, and a variety of other book ideas that went nowhere in New York, and I suppose I could also call it a year of eight books, or ten, or twelve. This is no way to run a retirement, either!

I’ve found life brings things in bunches, and 2014 has been unusual year in the number of readings, talks, classes, and speeches I’ve given or conducted: fifty of them, as near as I can calculate. Nothing special by celebrity or politician standards, perhaps, but at least double my norm, many just coming from sudden opportunity.

My last scheduled appearance for this calendar year was a December 11 Port Angeles high school class in the morning, and then another that evening for aspiring adult writers at Hugo House in Seattle. Both were fun.

The high school teacher, Mark Valentine, said I once helped get him fired. He had my first book, The Final Forest, on his desk and his conservative boss apparently didn’t approve of my take on the spotted owl debate, or Valentine’s decision to read it. Passions ran high in those days. Sorry, Mark! But he says he likes his new career better.

Which will soon bring us to 2015. Some good things are already scheduled (another grandson, for example) but I expect the good, bad, and weird will continue in ways I can’t predict. It sure keeps life interesting.

As Napoleon said, “Events carry with them an invincible power. The unwise destroy themselves in resistance. The skillful accept events, take strong hold of them, and direct them.”

So I’ll do my best to seize the day, mon empereur. Or at least keep typing and talking.

Tagged as: Adam and Eve, Napoleon, North Cascades, William Dietrich