Log for 2021 Alcan Drive, aka Dawn and Dana’s Excellent Adventure. Covid-19 has made nothing easier but it has not made everything impossible, either. [All photos by Dawn.] May 9, 2021 First day–Got to Sumas, Washington at 9am, across the border by 11am. Four cars/campers/RVs in front and behind. Very nice, very efficient Canadian border…
One of the best books I’ve read this year. I couldn’t care less about sport and less than that about crewing, but this book isn’t only or even mostly about the sport, it’s about the boys in the boat, and about where they come from. It is also about the physical, mental, emotional and above…
[From 2011] Great blog post by Meg Clothier on heroines in fiction in The Guardian. Click here to read it in full, but here’s my money quote: …the most egregious example comes in Lord of the Rings (bear with me). In the climactic pages, when every man on the battlefield flees before the Lord of…
From Scirland, something like Victorian England during the height of scientific discovery and exploration, Isabella, Lady Trent, defies convention and risks personal peril and terrible loss by joining an expedition into the darkest and most dangerous reaches of storied Eriga to investigate the habits and habitat of dragons. Written much in the fashion of Charles…
In August 1914, Ernest Shackleton and a crew of twenty-seven set sail from England to Antarctica, their goal to cross the last uncharted continent on foot. These guys didn’t have any kind of luck but bad. First their ship gets stuck in the ice for ten months, then the ship is crushed in the ice,…
Read more It would be 20 months before the rest of the world knew they had survived.
If you’ve ever seen Jaws you’re familiar with this story. Days after it delivered Little Boy to Tinian, the battle cruiser USS Indianapolis is torpedoed by a Japanese submarine. The attack is so effective that the bow literally vaporizes and because they are running “yoke-modified,” with most of the hatches dogged open because the crew…
Fried.
In the fall of 1991, deep wreck diver John Chatterton found a German U-boat under 230 feet of water off the New Jersey coast where no U-boat had ever been recorded sunk. According to all the history books, it simply couldn’t be there. It took Chatterton and fellow diver Richie Kohler six years, multiple dives…
7 Tips for Writing Crime Fiction by Dana Stabenow (written for Writer’s Digest) 7. Backstory. Every single character gets one, including the guy who shows up once to deliver the mail. It can be as little as a sentence or as much as a subplot running through the entire narrative. The supporting cast is what…
In Blue Latitudes journalist Tony Horwitz follows in the footsteps of Captain Cook, beginning with a week working as a member of the crew on board a replica of Cook’s ship Endeavor. I’d always thought of Cook as this stereotypical British officer, all his buttons properly polished and looking down a very long nose at…
Read more Tony Horwitz follows in the footsteps of Captain Cook
