I wrote this column the Fourth of July 2002, the year after 9/11. It was published in Alaska magazine in September 2002, and is now collected with all of my Alaska Traveler columns and feature articles in an e-book, Alaska Traveler: Dispatches from Alaska’s Frontier. It is soon to be published in audio as well.…
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…
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…
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
7 Tips for Writing Crime Fiction by Dana Stabenow (written for Writer’s Digest) 6. Decide early on if you’re writing a series or a stand-alone.* Don’t introduce that great character only to kill him off at the end of the first book of a 22-book (and counting) series. Don’t ask me how I know. *Realize…
Read more 6. Decide early on if you’re writing a series or a stand-alone.*
It’s easy to see how this book, or rather the character of Alexander Hamilton inspired Lin-Manuel Miranda to write Hamilton, although the constraints of a musical means some of the best stories get left behind. Like the one about Benedict Arnold, who has already turned his coat when Washington and Hamilton and Lafayette show up…
7 Tips for Writing Crime Fiction by Dana Stabenow (written for Writer’s Digest) 5. Never neglect setting.* It’s key to everything that follows. What does it look like, smell like, sound like, feel like? What effect does the setting have on the characters, and why? Once you figure out setting, you can figure out who…
