Don't you just hate it when you follow a blog and the author just disappears? I have become part of the problem. I'm not sure why I haven't written in so long. I guess because life happens. In April, I sent my agent two ms--the revised kayak memoir and the new novel. Publishing is different than other things and I have waited for three months to ask her what she thinks. The answer will chart my future. As for other writing, I started on a new novel last week. I didn't get very far. Summer is not good for writing. I admire people who can do it. There is just too much to do outside.

I... Read More...

I can't believe I did this, but I finished an 82K manuscript in 2.5 months. How did I do it, you ask? Especially because the last three took, cough cough, five years? I got a big jumpstart when I was on furlough for 35 days and that momentum carried me forward. I also made the time, something I haven't done before. Anyway, it's a novel called The Lightning Within Us. It is looking for a home. I am not sure if I will be hunting up a new agent, or if my current one will take it on. I'll figure that out in the next couple of weeks. 

This one was super messy. I didn't really have writer... Read More...

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...