Because Fire in the Heart has been out for a year and a half, I sometimes reflect on what I could have written and what I did write. These sometimes diverge. If I wrote it today, it would be a different book (remember, there's a huge lag in when you finish writing and when it is published...sometimes years.) I was thinking about all the reasons I left fire, and most are still true. But there's one big iceberg most people don't mention, and it's the big divide between us and them.

In the old days, everyone who was capable "did fire", whether you were categorized as full-time... Read More...

In my day job, I've been working on "fuels reduction" projects in northern California, and it's never as easy as people like to think it is. Blaming the California fires on "tree huggers", lack of forest management, or the need to rake the forest floor is the easy way out and not true; it is a combination of factors that caused the devastation.

Paradise, California, is built on a slope, in an area born to burn. When it did burn, the area had not seen rain for two hundred days. But that's not what I want to write about. Just viewing the homes and lives lost, and looking at the sad... Read More...

Next year will be the first that I haven't had an "arduous" rating on my firefighter red card since 1986. Back then, the test you had to pass was a one and a half mile run. Depending on your elevation, you had to complete it in eleven minutes and change, a time that I found easy to beat. Once I was the only one completing the test, and my supervisor hung his belt on a tree lining the dirt road. I had to grab the belt and run back with it to prove I hadn't turned around short. Another time, my friend Roger pushed me to a nine minute finish time, a fast pace for me as I entered my thirties.... Read More...

That's the amount of copies Fire in the Heart has sold. You can look at it in a positive way--Yippee! 2500 people have bought my book! Or, like this: Dang! I still haven't earned back my advance. And Geography sold even less! Why am I even doing this?

It's times like this that test a writer's soul. Yes, like the park ranger I once was, who was "paid in sunsets," you can tell yourself you are "paid in appreciation." The emails and responses I have gotten from former firefighters and present ones have been priceless. At the same time, you are basically writing for free. You'd better... Read More...