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Happy Earth Day!

by bdietrich on April 22, 2011

It’s the 41st Earth Day and Good Friday to boot, which brings mixed feelings. It was Earth Day a year ago that the Deepwater Horizon oil platform sank after exploding earlier, unleashing the nation’s biggest oil spill. And Good Friday in 1989 when the Exxon Valdez ran aground in Alaska, a disaster I covered as a Seattle Times reporter.

Hopefully, no spills this time! The sun is shining and the tulips are up in the Skagit Valley.

Long before my fiction writing career I had an interest in the environment, and this spring I’m wrapping up a five-year-long stint teaching environmental journalism at Huxley College at Western Washington University. Huxley was arguably the nation’s first dedicated environmental college, when it opened the same year as the first Earth Day, in 1970.

One of my duties at Huxley has been to advise a student magazine called The Planet; its website is http://planet.wwu.edu/. It’s entirely produced by undergraduates and right now we’re in the middle of reporting the spring issue, with the theme of “animals.” It’s inspiring and rejuvenating to work with creative young people.

Another project I’ve been involved in is writing and producing a book on the history of Huxley College called “Green Fire.” […]

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Truth vs Embellishment

by bdietrich on April 20, 2011

Here’s an idea: let’s make memoirs true and put the made-up stuff in fiction.

Ain’t gonna happen. Too much money in lying. And literary bigwigs think it’s sorta okay.

This grumpy assessment is prompted by “Three Cups of Deceit,” Jon Krakauer’s eviscerating take-down of Greg Mortenson’s “Three Cups of Tea,” and the 60 Minutes expose on the same book. We’ve yet to hear Mortenson’s full defense, if he has one, but it’s not looking good for a mega-best-seller who has garnered tens of millions of dollars for Pakistani and Afghan school building that may (at least in part) be ineffectual and fraudulent.

We’ve been here before. James Frey’s “Million Little Pieces,” a fraud. Margaret Seltzer’s fraudulent “Love and Consequences” about street-gang life she never experienced. Monique de Wael’s memoir of “Surviving With Wolves” during the Holocaust, which she didn’t do. Herman Rosenblat’s “Angel At the Fence,” who fabricated a story of his future wife tossing apples over the fence at him at a Nazi concentration camp.

All of us are suckers for stories too good to be true, be it Washington confessing to chopping down the cherry tree or Bernie Madoff promising investment returns no one else could match.

But in memoir writing in particular, […]

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Paperback Writer

The paperback edition of The Barbary Pirates in all its iterations (large print, a foreign edition, etc.) is officially on sale and it’s always satisfying when that version comes out. While I cherish hardback books, many of my most memorable early reading experiences are paperbacks because pennies were precious. I’ve still got paperbacks of novels such as 1965′s Dune (95 cents) 1959′s A Canticle for Leibowitz (same price) 1961′s The Butterfly Revolution (75 cents) and 1971′s Another Roadside Attraction by Tom Robbins (who lives about ten miles from me) for which I paid a whopping $1.50. Inflation marches on; the U.S. price for Barbary as a standard paperback is ten bucks. Here’s hoping that decades from now, someone will still have a tattered copy and consider it a bargain.

While the e-book is rapidly changing the entire publishing dynamic, most people are introduced to most authors through paperbacks; the first printing for Barbary is about three times the hardback printing. They were invented to make reading cheaper and more portable, which sounds a lot like the e-reader, doesn’t it? They also established a hierarchy of book stature including the “paperback only” title and the pulp, inspiring the Beatles’ tune Paperback Writer. And yep, one of […]

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Ben Franklin, Ethan Gage, and Libya

It has been 70 years since the U.S. Congress declared war on anyone, and the United States presently finds itself in at least 3.2 wars: one in Iraq we’ve largely ceased hearing about, a grinding one in Afghanistan, an air campaign in Libya, and naval patrols against Somalian pirates.

Benjamin Franklin, the mentor of wayward Ethan Gage in my series of Napoleonic-era novels, would be skeptical.

I don’t know whether to feel prescient or some kind of conduit of bad luck. Ethan’s adventure The Barbary Pirates was published last year as the depredations of the Somali pirates were heating up. As it nears paperback publication the pirates popped into the news again with the murder of four American yacht cruisers, two of them from Seattle near my home.

In another case of life imitating art, or vice versa, the climax of the 1803 novel takes place in, you guessed it, Tripoli. The pirate state was ruled at that time by a mercurial megalomaniac named Yusef Karamanli who murdered his own brother, shot his mother, and imprisoned his in-laws to seize power. Sound familiar?

There’s been an odd echo of contemporary events throughout the Ethan Gage series. In the first, Napoleon’s Pyramids, the French general […]

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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 […]

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