Next is, hmm. Well, the photographer suggested the caption, “Even artichokes read Dana Stabenow.” What’s puzzling me is why artichokes would like Blood Will Tell, specifically. One never knows what’s up with vegetables…

Also, the audio interview from the CD version of Prepared for Rage is now a podcast on Dana’s Odeo page.

Okay, here’s something to do with nothing else, but I think it’s tres kewl. I read an article in the New York Times Magazine about cell phones maybe ending global poverty, where this Nokia guy goes around to third-world countries and watches people live and figures out what they need to make their lives better (I want that job). It’s a fascinating story, or rather stories–the guy who got the Nobel for funding microbusinesses has started a cell phone company in Bangladesh where women buy a cell with a special battery for $150 and then set up in business as their village’s telephone service, and a guy in Nairobi has figured out how to send money to his mom back home in the village using a prepaid cell phone card. Nokia sponsored a contest for some of these folks to design their dream phones, and Business Week wrote a story about it and you can see pictures and descriptions of them here. The Nokia guy also has a blog here. The one that really gets me is the cell phone the 11-year old designed to keep track of her mom.

Whenever I think we’ve had it as a race, somebody like Jan Chipchase (and a business like Nokia) comes along and proves me wrong.

Just finished the first chapter of Liam5, aka Bones out of the Grave, and starting on the second. I think this is going to be one of the good ones, folks, all the usual suspects return and I’ve just introduced Wy to Damon Wolfe, a sexy movie star type on a fishing vacation in Alaska who I have just decided is going to be a recurring character.

If I don’t kill him off first. Which, as you know, I am prone to do on occasion…

In the meantime, more ‘maniacs with Stabenow books, beginning with Sandy in Boston with Hunter’s Moon in front of the USS Constitution (I’ve just been reading about it in David McCullough’s John Adams, a truly wonderful book I just reviewed on Amazon) and with Play With Fire in front of the Old North Church. Now, as Sandy well knows, I’ve long wanted to stand on the tower of the Old North Church and recite “One if by land, two if by sea/And I on the opposite shore will be/Ready to ride and spread the alarm/To every Middlesex Village and farm/For the countryfolk to up and to arm.” That would be Longfellow writing about Paul Revere’s ride. For an extra point, who was Sybil Ludington?

Here also is Thom Eley with a copy of So Sure of Death in Quantico, possibly in front of a [very] small stealth bomber because you know how those spooks are. And you also know Kate trained in Quantico, so she probably stood in that very spot at one time…

His partner was already at work, sleek head bent over a series of crime scene photographs, the graphic nature of which made the human in him wince away and gave even the cop in him pause.

“As in they had their jugulars ripped out,” Lobison said. “Don’t pretty it up. The M.E.’s considered opinion is that each victim was attacked by an animal, perhaps a dog, maybe a wolf or a bear, possibly even a wolverine. That I might actually believe, wolverines are nasty little sons of bitches. But since most of the soft parts of the bodies are missing and presumed eaten, the M.E. hasn’t been able to get a good imprint of the teeth.”

The interview I did for Westwood One for broadcast on radio stations in the western US, and
The interview I did on Talk of the Rock on KMXT, Kodiak Public Radio on February 29th.

I’ll be podcasting more excerpts and fun stuff to the Odeo page shortly. Tune in, turn on, don’t drop out…

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Photo of my ship at work, saving lives, in this case the crew of the Alaska Ranger, which sank yesterday (3/23) in the Bering Sea. Read the story here. Imagine having your boat sink out from under your feet on the Bering Sea in March and taking to the lifeboats and the water, and then have the helo whiz up and light you up with their spotlight, and then Munro hoving up over the horizon. That would come under the heading of a good day.

The next part of the story (3/25) about the Alaska Ranger rescue.

Scary stories from the survivors (3/26). They were really lucky. Note on April 4th: Of course, “lucky” also means that our tax dollars support the US Coast Guard. Money well spent, as those guys in the water would surely agree. I remember when I was on Alex Haley one of the fishermen said over the radio, “Good to know you guys are out there.” No kidding.

The crew testifies. Twenty to twenty-five foot seas.

Here’s a link to Senator Lisa Murkowski’s remarks on the Alaska Ranger rescue on the floor of the US Senate on March 31st.

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I just posted another scene from Silk and Song.
Read it here.

The book they are holding is Better to Rest, the fourth novel in the Liam Campbell series. What’s the first line in this book? Somebody? Anybody?

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And here is a photo of Kate Shugak. Um, that’s Kate Shugak, basset hound, who resides with Bubba and Freda Burks of Springtown, Texas. Katie, known more formally as Champion Southlake Kate Shugak, has just won Reserve Winner’s Bitch at the Dal-Tex Basset Hound Club Show.

Kate, something of a winner’s bitch herself, would be so proud.

You may remember a feature I did on marine pilots in Southcentral Alaska for the Dec/Jan issue of Alaska magazine. Well, it just won “Best Feature” in the annual contest given by Alaska Professional Communicators to award excellence in journalism. This seems to be my year for prizes (see here for Governer’s Arts award for Artist of the Year). Go here to read “On the Bridge.” You’ll have to buy a copy if you want to see the cool photos, though.

In other news — Prepared for Rage is still up front at Barnes and Noble, and they haven’t run out of copies. I’m just saying… I signed it ten days ago in Kodiak, and a whole bunch of Munro’s crew showed up, with spouses and children. I got a huge kick out of meeting some of the people who posted to the blog while I was on patrol.

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And here are Mary Person and Pat Lyons standing in front of Old Faithful holding a copy of Prepared for Rage. In real life, Mary is Associate Dean for Library Services at Valparaiso University School of Law in Indiana. Awright! Thanks, Mary.

Anyone who has a photo of themselves holding any of my books in front of something weird or wonderful or instantly recognizable, send it to the Danamaniacs’s managers at danamaniacs@hotmail.com. They’ll forward it to me and I’ll post it to the website. Alaskans, think cans of Spam for the Whale Fat Follies slide show. ‘maniacs, start your cameras!

“I finished the book in about 3 days (in between iceberg, albatross, humpback, and penguin sightings),” she writes, and says further, “I thought it was quite captivating and had lots of threads that were slowly woven together like a Gaucho’s poncho showing the pampas cross (I picked up a book on Argentine textiles because I’ve been trying to track a certain design, which is why I use this metaphor).”

That’s two firsts for me, one of my books south of the Roaring Forties, and the work being compared to an Argentine textile. Gotta love that.

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There is an interview with me in today’s Kodiak Daily Mirror. Go here to read it.

So the first live broadcast I saw was in July 1969, the year we moved to Anchorage so I could go to UAA and my mom and dad could give it another try. The first was successful, more or less. The second most emphatically was not.

So guess what that live broadcast was? Yep, the Apollo 11 moon landing. I was hooked on the space program from that moment. I read everything I could get my hands on about it, and about space exploration and colonization (a couple of my favorites are Chariots for Apollo, Carrying the Fire and Riding Rockets), and you could say Apollo 11 was the proximate cause of my writing three science fiction novels, which, alas, weren’t heard from much past their publication date.

I was at KSC on February 3, 1995 for the launch of STS-63, with astronaut Eileen Collins as pilot (in 1999, she commanded STS-93). I live for the day she writes her autobiography.

I’m surprised, and relieved, that no terrorist has yet targeted the space shuttle. It is an obvious and instantly recognizable symbol of US pride and power and spirit, of our determination that our reach should exceed our grasp, or what’s a heaven for? It has failed twice and both times the nation has greatly suffered the loss of its best and brightest.

An attack on the shuttle would really hit us where we live, so naturally that’s where my little shit of a villain directs his attention. The US Coast Guard works offshore security during a shuttle launch. In Prepared for Rage, cutter Munro is the means of the attack, but its Coastie crew is also its rout. This was a scary, fun, scary book to write.

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Here is the link to the latest newsletter that went out on February 26th, with a list of Kodiak events and news about the next Kate Shugak novel.

This is, in fact, a real book I’ve been working on for over a decade, ever since I read The Travels of Marco Polo and never recovered.

So, okay, this guy was swanning around China for twenty years. You can’t tell me he didn’t scatter some seed around.

And thus, his granddaughter, Johanna, was born. Shortly thereafter appeared her evil stepmother, wise woman Olan, childhood friend and bodyguard Jaufre, Edyk the Portugese, Uncle No-nuts, Hari the mad monk, Jean the excommunicated Knight Templar, Tiphaine the outcast Jew, and a cast of thousands more. The story begins in Chandu in 1322 and ends in England in 1327, and takes in most of the continents of Eurasia in between, and I have begun posting excerpts on the website here.

I went to China to research this novel, and the photo is of the group I was with in the middle of the Teklamakan Desert. The map shows some of the many silk routes traveled by traders like the Polos back in the day (Johanna will be taking the sea route to India and then overland).

So, when you come up for air from Prepared for Rage, my second Coastie thriller, you know, the one you should have rushed right out to buy when it published this month, take a look at Silk and Song, and please do post about it.