Why I write
September 26, 2018
Why write? Everyone has their own reasons,
but I suspect they all boil down to, “I write so people will read my book.”
thinking of what to write, after I get back from fishing!
Why do I want people to read my book?
Because I want them to learn and feel what I did after I’d written it. To thrill readers with an adventure, wonder, give them hope, make them cry or sometimes shout with joy. I always loved Michael Crichton so this novel needed that flavor: near future, business and government screwing up science.
The first novel, The Next Day, I started writing immediately after 9/11.
I experienced so many feelings stuffed into a tiny box together, patriotism, sadness, anger, hatred, love, all about to explode. I needed to figure out why this happened.
Islam was not a religion of hatred or murder. How could someone with so much passion for Islam become so hateful toward other humans to the point of murdering thousands? From Naval Academy days, I had picked up a book when studying Islam called The Meaning of the Glorious Koran, translated by Mohammed Marmaduke Pickthall. Now I read it in earnest, in addition to many, many websites.
On the other side of the coin, there were Americans, my compatriots, wanting to strike back at ALL Muslims. Everywhere. Kill them all. Some of my Naval Academy friends said, “Nuke ‘em ‘til their sand turns to glass.” My medical partner at one time was Muslim and Pakistani. She and her family suffered a lot just trying to pray in her back yard. It became an obsession to write these things into the novel.
Could there have been WMD that Iraq hid?
The President and his Weapons of Mass Destruction thought to be in Iraq, but then never found. What if there really were WMD, like bioweapons, easily hidden away to be used quickly. A movie had come out a year before about mutants, X-men, and my medical mind thought it possible for viral and bacterial infections to mutate human DNA. Quite possible, it turns out. And what if that mutation caused the humans to enhance their underlying personality traits, good became better, bad became evil. Alex Smith and Jabril El Fahd were born. A battle of good against evil started forming.
How would it feel if I had been completely isolated from the news on 9/11, yet had loved ones killed in those events? I would be furious, crazy with the need for revenge. Alex Smith and Rachel Anne Lane felt that way, too, in the beginnings of the book.
And then came the cast of characters
After researching all things Islam, WMD, mutations, bio-warfare, I developed the characters into unusual people, people who loved the environment, wolves, rock-climbing, fly fishing, wilderness photography, one major character an Apache Indian, the Navy and NSA, just so much FUN to write about!
Because of the nature of the characters and the problems, the novel involved many nations, spread around the globe, ending with the battle between good and evil in my home state of Colorado at the Royal Gorge. It required multiple mistakes on time zones, careful study and restudy of travel times by air through multiple time zones. I needed a story line strung around the room!
Finally finished, I had to find a literary agent—Yeah.
That didn’t happen. After shopping 20 agents, I began another book, put The Next Day away, only to have it reappear after writing and publishing two other novels. It took a year to get it changed from WordStar to Word, to improving the writing, to editing, to publishing. But it’s there now, for all to read. Many of the characters are used again in the sequel, Anodyne Eyes, which also uses characters from Dan’s War.
I hope you enjoy each book in turn, though they are all stand alone. You do not need to read them in sequence, but I think you will enjoy Anodyne Eyes more if you read The Next Day first, then Dan’s War.
Next time
I will talk about what it has taken for a science and math guy like me to become a writer. Back to school!
Milt
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Three Gifts for the Fourth of July
July 4, 2018
Music, Kindness and Reading. Someone told me we should live for these every day.
(There is a gift for you at the end)
One gift will add to the other, and you will be glad you did all three. For motivation, take a peak at this video of veterans reunited with family. You may only be able to take a few minutes. I needed a lot of Kleenex.
1) Music. Give one veteran something from YOUR HEART to THEIR HEART! A song, a collection, a simple CD of music that has touched you and them in a way that makes you happy, makes you want to dance.
If you are a musical artist, give them a concert!
It’s your time to give back to the 1% that protect the 99%.
2) Kindness. Do something that will stop wars. If we stop wars, there can be no more veterans suffering from ruined lives or families due to their experience in war. My suggestion is reach out and understand someone from a different culture, particularly Muslim, as we seem to need to understand them. One of the greatest generals and former President Dwight Eisenhower noted that the biggest way we can end wars is to embrace others as people, not alien beings who just don’t speak English.
Here’s a couple of Muslims you might enjoy. The video is old, quality not great, but oh so sweet.
Please try these simple things. The results will be huge. Music brings us together, and I believe heals as well as any prescription I could ever write as a doctor.
Don’t let music, our music with each other, our love for one another, die.
If you just feel you can’t get motivated to do it, you just don’t have it in you, remember, all that stands in your way is YOU. Just Try, like this beautiful song.
3) Reading. There is one final gift you can try. Give a veteran a book.
Better yet, give them a Kindle and they can carry the Library of Congress with them, a Kindle Fire and they can listen to all that music and watch all those color videos, too.
Kindle
Thanks for stopping by. there is a gift waiting for you, too.
a Free ebook- click here
Milt
Water Sense
June 10, 2018
How many gallons of fresh water per day are normally figured per person?
- 24
- 67
- 223
- 890
nice cold glass of fresh water
I found out I had no water sense. In writing my latest book I learned so much from Brian Werner at Norther Water Conservancy http://www.northernwater.org/sf and I thought I would pass it on.
The answer, at least in Colorado goes back to very specific rules developed for water rights from rivers. Since reservoir storage capacity was figured in acre-feet, that is what was used. They decided that one family of four needs one acre-foot of water per year. That’s 325,851 gallons per year, 892.74 gallons of water per day per family, or 223.19 gallons per day per person. The answer is c) 223 gallons per day per person. WOW!
However, the EPA has figured that typical Americans use is 100 gallons per day, or about half what reservoirs typically reserve for us. So there should be plenty. Why are all the rivers drying up, then?
dry river bed
https://www.scidev.net/global/water/news/world-s-major-rivers-drying-up-.html
How can we possibly use so much water? Look at typical water use and learn.
https://www.epa.gov/watersense/how-we-use-water
This is a great website someone showed me to explore how to teach your kids (or yourself) about fresh water facts and conservation. https://www.epa.gov/watersense
Other ways to conserve water in your home and yard. https://learn.eartheasy.com/guides/45-ways-to-conserve-water-in-the-home-and-yard/
http://rocklandcce.org/resources/conserve-water-with-xeriscape-landscaping
But, I don’t want to do all that stuff to conserve water. Let’s just use the ocean. There is so much water there. Surely that’s the future and we’ll be okay.
The problem is that desalination uses a lot of energy to work and costs twice as much, as regular fresh water sources, though the cost has nearly halved since the Post Carbon Reader came out in 2011.
the mighty Pacific
http://www.totalsoftwater.com/2017/01/desalination-good-and-bad/
It’s clear that conservation can help a lot. But with the continued population explosion, we will need other sources of fresh water. Desalination may be the only thing we have. To avoid increasing global warming by using so much energy to process sea water, we need to do it with renewable energy. https://cleantechnica.com/2017/01/18/renewable-water-desalination/
There are other, more drastic solutions to global warming, as in Dan’s War. But that might lead to global war and a post-apocalyptic United States as in Anodyne Eyes.
Sometimes people just don’t care about other people, only their own home, farm or ranch and are willing to do almost anything to prevent others from having any of “their” water. That is a subject I explore in my next book.
Enjoy that glass of cold water now. Your grandkids may not have that luxury.
For a free e-book click Here.
Addicted to Water
June 6, 2018
71% of the Earth’s covered surface is water. What percent of that water is fresh?
a) 2%
b) 5%
c) 0.01%
d) 10%
Answer is at the end.
i AM ADDICTED TO THE STUFF. cAN’T GO EVEN HOURS WITHOUT IT. MY MOST FAVORITE SPORT, FLY FISHING, IS DEPENDENT ON IT. MY LIFE, MY FAMILY, MY FRIENDS, MY PETS, THOSE BEAUTIFUL FLOWERS WOULD NOT SURVIVE WITHOUT IT.
Lawn Lake Rocky Mountain National Park
A nice brown on the Bighorn River
I love you
Flower Garden
How can we get more fresh water?
The amount of fresh water today is the same as it was when humans began “civilization” thousands of years ago.(Post Carbon Reader)
But I want more. I want it for my kids, my grandson, everyone. I want humans to survive.
What can we do to conserve this finite resource? What can I do? What can you do?
In the USA we are lucky. We have about 5% of the world’s population and nearly 8 percent of renewable fresh water. China has almost 20 percent of the world’s population and only 7 percent of renewable fresh water. More than 1 billion people lack access to safe drinking water.
Hell, let’s just take more water out of those huge rivers like the Colorado, Rio Grande, Yellow, Indus, Ganges, Amu, Darya, Murray, and Nile. Problem: These great rivers are tapped out with only a trickle coming out for months at their mouth to the sea.
So what can we do?
Do you care? Since this post mostly reaches USA readers, does it matter to us?
I’ll let you think about that while you cogitate the answer to the question above:
c) 0.01 % of the Earth’s water is fresh.
(To be continued in another post.)
Most of the information above is available on the web or in the (Post Carbon Reader)
For a free e-book click Here.
Catching BIG Smallmouths
May 29, 2018
Clouser Deep Minnow
Created by Bob Clouser in 1987 for smallmouth on the Susquehanna River, Lefty Kreh made it famous, claiming 87 species caught with it. I think it works well because the hook rides point up, avoiding too many hang-ups, and with stripping it jumps up, then jigs down, like a wounded fish. But you should vary your stripping speed and amount.
I used the pink and white version last week for smallmouth bass in Horsetooth Reservoir near Fort Collins. Why now? Spawn or pre-spawn. Why pink and white? Two years ago it worked when nothing else did. Do smallmouths key on red/pink since they have red eyes? Worked again last week: several large smallmouths, one 16-17 inches and easily 5 lbs.
Some like a “Deep Dead Clouser” with white on top, others the usual with white on bottom. I didn’t find the fish cared. I use 70 Denier Fish Hair and dumbbell Realeyes on a 2/0 hook. Loop the Fish Hair around the hook, over the eyes, tie in to begin with, then rotating the hook, tying on three strands each side of pearl crystal flash, then similar loop around hook and tie on white Fish Hair.
Where to fish? Yeah. . .
Not my place! Try Horsetooth where there are rocks and other structure.
Video for tying the Clouser Deep Minnow.
