A Halloween treat for the ages

If there was one event that dictated the primary setting of Mercer Street, released last week, it was a radio broadcast that was supposed to be no more than an early Halloween treat.

When Orson Welles took to the airwaves on an otherwise quiet Sunday evening seventy-seven years ago, he intended merely to entertain an audience. Instead, he turned a nation upside down.

On that night, Welles directed and narrated a radio adaptation of H. G. Wells' novel The War of the Worlds. The realistic performance, broadcast to 12 million listeners on the CBS radio network, sparked a mass hysteria unmatched in American history and catapulted the 23-year-old Welles (pictured below) to international fame.

I played up the event in Mercer Street because I thought it perfectly captured the tenor of the times. Many Americans believed "Martians" had invaded New Jersey, despite numerous disclaimers, because they lived in a world where scary things happened every day.

Hitler had just annexed a chunk of Czechoslovakia and looked at the rest of Europe with hungry eyes. America was militarily weak and still mired in a decade-long depression. Fantastic claims could not be disproved by searching Google or even turning on the news. On October 30, 1938, Orson Welles WAS the news.

As a result, many people took what they heard seriously. Motorists near Grovers Mill, New Jersey -- the extraterrestrial invasion's launching point -- jammed local roads and highways. Others overwhelmed switchboards with frantic calls to police. People in other parts of the United States responded in similar fashion.

The radio performance even created a stir in Concrete, Washington, nearly 2,400 miles west of Ground Zero. Some residents fled into the mountains when a power failure during the broadcast plunged the small community into near total darkness. Chaos reigned.

Researching the episode was a memorable experience. When reading dozens of newspaper, magazine, and online articles describing the event, I was able to immerse myself in a simpler, less cynical, more innocent era. I was able to easily understand how up to one million people had simply lost it, if only for an hour.

Much has been written about the broadcast, its aftermath, and its impact on everything from Welles’ career to the radio industry itself. I encourage those interested in this fascinating chapter in our nation’s history to learn more.

Thanks to the magic of the Internet, you can even listen to the entire War of the Worlds broadcast. It can be found at Archive.org.

(Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.)

Driving down a different Street

I admit I resisted writing this book. Even as one who had written six novels set in the twentieth century, I resisted writing about the 1930s. The thirties, I thought, were too drab, too colorless, and far too uneventful for the kind of story I wanted to write.

Then I researched the year leading up to the outbreak of World War II in September 1939 and found that the United States was anything but drab, colorless, and uneventful. It was a deceptively interesting and active place, a cauldron of political, cultural, and social activity in a world that was slowly but surely coming apart.

In Mercer Street, the second novel in the American Journey time-travel series, three strong-willed Chicago women, representing three distinct generations, jump into that cauldron and commence vastly different journeys of discovery.

For one of the ladies, the leap is a tentative first step as a widow. Weeks after her husband dies in the midst of an affair, Susan Peterson, 48, seeks solace and hopes to find it on a Santa Barbara vacation with her mother Elizabeth and daughter Amanda. The romance novelist, however, gets more than she bargained for when she meets a professor who possesses the secret of time travel.

Within days, the women travel to 1938 and Elizabeth's hometown of Princeton, New Jersey. Elizabeth begins a friendship with her refugee parents and infant self, while Susan and Amanda fall for a widowed admiral and a German researcher with troubling ties. Each finds love, adventure, and intrigue in the age of Route 66, Big Band music, mesmerizing radio broadcasts, and frightening headlines.

Like September Sky and the five novels of the Northwest Passage series, Mercer Street presents the twentieth century on a twenty-first-century stage. Like the other titles, it is available as a Kindle book on Amazon.com. It goes on sale today.

Back to the Present Part II

It’s been a while since I’ve seen Back to the Future Part II. Maybe twenty years, in fact. But today, the movie is fresh in my mind, if not front and center on my television screen. Marty McFly and Doc Brown traveled to October 21, 2015, in the popular 1989 flick.

Many news sources are commemorating the day with feature stories. Some of the best are from CNN, CBS, The Telegraph, and Vanity Fair. Most focus on the accuracy of the movie’s depiction of life in 2015. Several predictions, it turns out, were spot on.

I’m still holding out on Part II's most famous claim. The Chicago Cubs, down three games to the New York Mets in the National League Championship Series, have some work to do if they hope to meet the film’s lofty expectations. They must win four straight to reach the World Series for the first time since 1945.

I plan to publish Mercer Street, a book that mentions the Cubs, once Chicago’s playoff fate is known. Look for a weekend release.

Making The Journey to audio

Of the six time-travel novels I have published in three and a half years, The Journey is perhaps the least like the rest. It is easily my shortest work at 244 pages, by far the most contemporary, and arguably the most serious and poignant. It is the only one of my books set in a fictional town and the only one inspired by personal experience. It also offers the fewest points of view at two.

Published as a Kindle book in November 2012, it is the story of a 48-year-old Seattle widow who finds a second lease on life in 1979 Oregon, the time and place of her senior year in high school. Only Mercer Street, scheduled for publication later this month, features a similar theme. No other novel has a comparable ending.

The Journey was also the last of the five Northwest Passage books to receive a cosmetic makeover. Illustrator Laura Wright LaRoche produced a new cover, based heavily on the original, just last month.

Today, the book, the second in the series, gains yet another distinction. Thanks to Caroline Miller, a veteran voiceover artist from Missouri, The Journey is now available in audio.

Miller, the narrator of more than 90 titles, recorded the novel more than three weeks ahead of schedule, making an October release possible. I found Miller through the Audiobook Creation Exchange, an Amazon.com program designed to match authors with audio professionals. This was my first experience with ACX.

The Journey is available through Amazon, Audible, and iTunes. It joins The Mine, released by Podium Publishing in 2014, among the Northwest Passage books that have been converted to audio.

Review: Radiant Angel

I never tire of reading Nelson DeMille. There is no one in the business who combines suspense and humor as well as the New York novelist, who has been entertaining readers since the 1970s.

DeMille’s latest offering, Radiant Angel, picks up where The Panther, his 2012 thriller, left off. Retired NYPD detective John Corey has taken a new job with the Diplomatic Surveillance Group, where he is charged with watching Russians working at the U.N.

Corey considers his job ho-hum until he stumbles upon a senior Russian intelligence officer posing as a diplomat. When Colonel Vasily Petrov disappears from a Russian oligarch’s party on Long Island, Corey takes it upon himself to find Petrov and determine whether he is part of a possible attack on the homeland.

This is the seventh novel of the John Corey Series and arguably the best. Just when you think DeMille has run out of compelling assignments for his crusty, sarcastic, rule-breaking protagonist, he finds another. I would recommend the author and the series to those who like thrillers with a humorous edge. Rating: 4/5.

When life influences art

As a sports fan, I generally root for the underdog. If my favorite team is not playing in a game or in the hunt for a playoff spot, I side with a lowly team that is.

Earlier this week, I was set to root for the Chicago Cubs. With my Seattle Mariners going nowhere in the American League West, I was ready to adopt a usually hapless team that is suddenly a favorite to make the National League playoffs.

I saw no downside to siding with baseball’s lovable losers.

Then I remembered I was in the final stages of writing a time-travel novel where three Chicago women from 2016 go back to 1938 and do something that no baseball fan has (presumably) done since 1945: watch the Cubs play in the World Series.

Should the Cubs reach the World Series next month, Mercer Street, a novel slated for publication next month, will have to undergo emergency surgery. I will have to acknowledge 2015.

I should have known I was in trouble when I read a news article in March that refreshed my memory of a favorite movie. In Back to the Future Part II, a hologram informs time-traveling Marty McFly in 2015 that the Cubs have won the World Series.

The lessons are clear: Don't ignore Michael J. Fox movies, don't put eggs in one basket, and don't assume anything. Nothing in sports is a stone-cold lock. Not even the Chicago Cubs missing the World Series for the seventieth-consecutive year.

Fortunately for me, the part of Mercer Street that deals with the Cubs is minor. Whether Chicago goes on a roll and reaches the Series or fades in the playoffs, I will be ready to give the story an appropriate spin. Thank God for alternate histories.

One way or the other, Mercer Street, the second novel in the American Journey series, will be out in October. Until then, I am more than content to root for the boys in blue. Go Cubs!

Heading down new roads

One of the first things I learned as a self-published author three years ago was that I was more than an author. I was a businessman who had to package and promote his books as effectively as any Big 6 publisher to succeed in a competitive industry.

I also had to seek new markets. Through Amazon.com, I’ve been able to sell e-books in places I’ve never visited, such Britain, Australia, and Southeast Asia. Through Podium Publishing and Audible, I've been able to offer an audiobook of The Mine.

Last week I started down yet another road by signing a contract with Natasha Soudek to create an audiobook of The Journey. Soudek, a Los Angeles-based actor, narrator, and songwriter, has already begun work on the project, which should be completed by early October.

Through the Audiobook Creation Exchange (ACX), an Amazon platform, I hope to convert each of my six — soon to be seven — novels to audio. With the exception of The Mine, all are available only as Kindle e-books on Amazon.

Readers and listeners can also expect to see three new covers. Laura Wright LaRoche, who created or modified the covers of The Show, The Fire, and September Sky, is currently updating the cover of The Journey and creating a new one for Mercer Street.

LaRoche recently finished an elegant new cover for The Mirror (above), the fifth book in the Northwest Passage series. A cover reveal for Mercer Street, the second book in the new American Journey series, is scheduled for the middle of September.

I plan to release the novel itself on October 30.

Review: The Finest Hours

As I noted in a review of Timothy Egan’s The Big Burn more than two years ago, I don’t read many non-fiction books. And, when I do, I tend to gravitate toward stories about disasters.

My latest venture into non-fiction was no exception. Last month I finished the audiobook of The Finest Hours. Written by Michael J. Tougias and Casey Sherman and narrated by Malcolm Hillgartner, it is the riveting account of the “U.S. Coast Guard’s most daring sea rescue” -- a historic event that I had never heard about.

The book is much more than a tale about the Pendleton and the Fort Mercer, two oil tankers that split in half in heavy seas off Massachusetts in February 1952. It is a tribute to an often overlooked and unappreciated branch of the U.S. military.

Tougias and Sherman tell the story from the perspective of the participants and, in doing so, give the reader a feel for what it was like to be there. The book is much like Sebastian Junger’s The Perfect Storm, which chronicled the last voyage of the doomed fishing boat Andrea Gail.

Like Junger’s work, Tougias and Sherman’s book will be adapted to the big screen. Walt Disney Pictures will release a film account of The Finest Hours in January.

I recommend the book for anyone who likes stories about the sea and about the unsung heroes of the Coast Guard who take risks that many of us could not even imagine. Rating: 4/5.

Finding a place in Princeton

When you write historical fiction, you are immediately confronted with at least two challenges. The first is to describe a time. The second is to capture a place.

Writing about a time long before your own requires research. Writing about a place a thousand miles from home requires a visit. At least it does in my book. Literally.

Though research can accomplish a lot, it is no substitute for an on-site inspection. I rediscovered that basic truth this week when I visited Princeton, New Jersey, the setting for Mercer Street, the second novel of the American Journey series.

I’m no stranger to college towns, particularly in the West. I’ve spent quality time in places like Eugene, Iowa City, Corvallis, Lafayette, Pullman, and Missoula. But nothing quite beats visiting a community with an Ivy League college.

For one thing, everything is old. Very old. Princeton, founded in 1683, is no exception. Whether on campus or off, it is not difficult to find a building that is at least two hundred years old. One, Nassau Hall, built in 1756, once housed the entire United States government.

Other buildings are younger but, for me, far more relevant. I went to Princeton to see what it might have looked like in 1938 and 1939, the setting of the book. And though much has obviously changed in eight decades, much has stayed the same.

I know this from comparing what I saw in books and online with what I saw in person. Georgian and Greek Revival houses still dominate plush residential neighborhoods. Albert Einstein’s last home, on Mercer Street, looks much as it did in the 1930s.

As I did on earlier visits to Wallace, Idaho, and Galveston, Texas, the primary settings for The Fire and September Sky, I took notes, snapped photos, visited the local library, and tried to get a sense of place.

I think I succeeded -- or at least succeeded enough to proceed with the book. In Mercer Street, three women, representing three generations of the same family, travel from 2016 to 1938, where they find love, intrigue, and danger on the eve of World War II.

The novel is now in the draft stage and making its way through the first of many revisions. I still plan to publish by Thanksgiving.

Giving animals their due

I admit I’m not very good at keeping track of these things. Had I not seen an obscure Internet reference yesterday, I would have never known that I had missed National Frog Month (April) and International Hug Your Cat Day (June 4) but could still participate in National Deaf Dog Awareness Week (September 20-26). My hard-of-hearing dog, Mocha (photo), has already circled the dates.

Groups create these observances because they love animals. So do many authors, including some who have turned stories about animals into celebrated works. These range from classics like Charlotte’s Web, The Call of the Wild, and Black Beauty to contemporary novels like The Art of Racing in the Rain.

As an author of six novels, I haven't done much with four-legged friends. Max, a 2-year-old Abyssinian cat, follows Joel Smith out of a door in The Mine. In The Show, Grace Vandenberg gives a belly rub to a golden retriever named Killer. Kevin Johnson and Sadie Hawkins ride Spirit, a gentle Appaloosa, in Chapter 44 of The Fire.

Most other animals in my books are unnamed or unappreciated. When Justin Townsend spots a West Texas pronghorn from the window of a passenger train in September Sky, he admires it for a moment and then moves on to other things.

I plan to do better in the future. In the second book of the American Journey series, due this fall, a pork-chop-loving German shepherd named Fritz will play the part of a temperamental gatekeeper.

I recently finished the rough draft of that novel and sent it to my editor for a first read. That freed me up to do other things this month, such as properly recognize some toothy and misunderstood creatures. Shark Awareness Day is July 14.

Book Seven: A midterm report

Of all the rules Stephen King has laid down for writers, none gets my attention like this one:

"You have three months."

That’s not three months to create an outline or write a prologue but rather three months to complete an entire first draft. Whether the book is 30,000 words or 300,000 makes no difference.

Three months.

Last week, I began month three in my quest to write book seven. I am now more than 72,000 words and fifty chapters into a novel that I hope will be my best.

Along the way, I’ve learned a few things. I’ve learned a lot about 1938, 1939, and Princeton, New Jersey, the setting of the novel, and even more about a central truth of fiction.

You don’t control the story or the characters. They control you.

When I outlined the second novel of the American Journey series in March, I had a time-travel romance in mind. What has emerged is a more sophisticated work, a book that takes a few risks and views two critical years from a fresh perspective.

I probably won't beat King’s ninety-day deadline. There are lawns to mow, fish to catch, vacations to take, and a summer to enjoy. But I probably will come close.

I hope to have that all-important first draft out by the third week of July. I expect to publish by Thanksgiving.

Breaking through the 'block'

Oxford defines writer’s block as "the condition of being unable to think of what to write or how to proceed with writing."

It is a malady that torments many writers, challenges most, and prompts others to deny its very existence. It also inspires some to provide creative remedies.

I investigated some of these remedies today after reaching a point in the second American Journey book that demanded at least a pause. The pop-culture site Flavorwire compiled advice from more than a dozen famous writers.

Most of the writers advised doing something specific, such as taking a walk or making a pie (Hilary Mantel) or writing "the cat sat on the mat, that is that, not a rat" for two weeks (Maya Angelou).

Mark Twain suggested breaking "complex overwhelming tasks into small manageable tasks, and then starting on the first one."

I have found one of Mantel’s approaches useful. When I reach a dead-end point in the writing process, I take a walk — a long walk in a natural setting, away from noise and electronic distractions.

Like Twain, I also break the complex into the manageable. I will often set up a scene on Tuesday, describe it on Wednesday, and revise it the next week. When tackling complex parts of a novel, I’ve discovered that two (or three) chapters are better than one.

I am currently seventeen chapters into my latest work, a tale about a grandmother, daughter, and granddaughter who venture back to New Jersey on the eve of World War II. I am making good progress and expect to complete a first draft by the end of August.

With or without writer’s block.