On the importance of setting. Can’t remember who I wrote this for. The US Coast Guard invited me to do a ridealong on cutter Alex Haley in the Bering Sea in February of 2004. I was invited to write a daily blog from the ship so the shorebound families of the crew could eyewitness as…
[from the stabenow.com archives, February 10, 2008, with present-day commentary also in bold] Okaaaaay, five days after publication of Prepared for Rage, I have received the first email wanting to know when the next Kate novel will be out. Laurie King and I were talking about this yesterday. We’re pleased and flattered that you “Just…
In honor of the June 1st publication of Silk and Song in trade paperback, here’s a post from the Silk and Song blog tour in January. Between Two Continents with Dana Stabenow From James Joyce’s Dublin to Bram Stoker’s Transylvania, readers everywhere have traveled to regions far and wide. All from the comforts of their…
[from the stabenow.com vaults, 2007] April 13 Today’s photo is of another cutter rendering honors to Munro. This is a long-standing, time-honored maritime tradition between warships. The XO explained the process to me. First the officer of the deck tells all stations to man the rail on the passing side. We were passing port side…
[from the stabenow.com vaults, 2007] May 11 Things I won’t forget The schizophrenic nature of an equatorial sunrise. Sometimes it’s a bare, self-effacing minimum of pink pastels, peeping over the edge of the world with a diffident look, as if to say, “Oh, don’t mind me, I’ll just come up over here and you go…
[from the stabenow.com vaults, 2007] May 10 I just got my mess bill from FS1 Kelly Napier. The total comes to $290.25 for March, April, & May. “Was it worth it?” she wants to know. “Not exactly cruise ship quality?” Kelly breaks my mess bill down this way. “Breakfast is $1.65. Lunch & Supper are…
[from the stabenow.com vaults, 2007] May 8 It’s called, in Coastie speak, a COMREL, short for community relations. Forty-five Munro crew members leave the ship at ten a.m. and present ourselves at a local orphanage for duty. We enter through a locked gate and are led to a courtyard occupying the center of a group…
[from the stabenow.com vaults, 2007] May 7 Relieving the Watch LTJG Josh Dipietro “Why’s this engine overloaded? What the hell you been doing all watch?” “Overload, what the hell are you talking about, look at the rack reading, look at the scav air. We are acting perfectly within published parameters, the only thing wrong here…
[from the stabenow.com vaults, 2007] May 6 Lookout SN Dennis R Gordon III 1120. I have been on watch for five minutes. It feels like three hours. The ocean rocks the 378 like a cradle. Water against the hull, wind whistling through the antenna, the occasional unrecognizable clank or thud. It is dark. The moon…
[from the stabenow.com vaults, 2007] May 5 There were initially sixteen students in what I called my Underway Writers Workshop. I confidently expected that number to drop by half after the first class, especially since it wasn’t for credit and class time was at the mercy of ops and as such, well, fluid. They stuck…