Announcing: Indecent Exposure, an Alaska Mystery Novel

The year is 1955. Eisenhower is President. Al Kaline and the Dodgers still own Brooklyn. And Elvis is driving a truck.

Up north in Alaska, the Cold War heats up fast when secrets are stolen from a Dew Line Radar Station. What the new priest, young Father Hardy, doesn’t know could kill him. A list that includes murderers, spies and survival at forty degrees below zero.

He’s an Episcopal priest, newly ordained and newly a widower. New to this remote Alaskan village, he’s helping the villagers and hiding a broken heart. But who helps him when a body is found and a young girl threatened–when he sees things he just can’t explain?

Can he trust his new friends? Andy–an Athabascan Indian–dead-eye sniper in World War II Italy. And Evie. Is Hardy falling for her? Is she the murderer?

In a land where any exposure is dangerous, indecent exposure kills.

Now available on-line at Amazon Kindle Books.

Writing What You Know

Like Will Rollins in Cheechako, I moved early to Nenana, Alaska from Cambridge, Massachusetts. You can find Nenana near Fairbanks on the map, near dead center in the state.

I was just seven when we moved, eight in the photo above. Yes, that's me, smiling, with our dog Chena, the one who managed to get himself stranded on the ice during breakup. No, I didn't actually go out there and get him. And I never forgot the drama of that moment, years later turning it into one of my first sales to Cricket Magazine and then into the first Cheechako chapter.

As a former Jr. High English teacher and sometimes writing coach, I have often advised writers to "write what you know." I remember an eighth grader wailing "but I don't know what I know."

Or as Yogi Berra might have said, "I didn't know all the things I knew."

And like Berra, we would be right.

I can't rattle off many facts about the interior of Alaska, but I know how snow crunches– how it sounds and feels underfoot when the temperature rises. I know the softness and surprise warmth on my face of the midwinter chinook wind that drives the temperature up maybe thirty degrees in an hour, and when it goes leaves me longing for spring.

I know the sounds of trees cracking in the bitter cold, the winter wolf howl that raises hairs on the back of my neck, and the first soft scent of cottonwood trees at just about breakup time.

And it's that knowing that lets us write authentically. The experiential knowing that informs and enriches our storyteller voice. That inspires us through to our successful conclusions.

Sometimes, unexpectedly, we sit down to discover we do know a whole bunch of the things we know. See ... right there on the page.

Check Out This Cheechako Trailer

Appreciating "Wilderness" and Gary Paulsen

Several of the chapters of my new book "Cheechako" were originally published in CRICKET, the children's magazine. In fact, it was one of their editors who sent me a very nice letter saying "this should be a book." While that's a wonderful letter to receive, it still took me about twenty years to put the whole thing together.

It was shortly after that I first met up with "Hatchet," Gary Paulsen's totally absorbing youth novel, enjoyed by youthful readers of all ages. I loved that it was set in the wilderness, loved that the situation puts the boy, Brian, totally off on his own and lets him work it out.

The "off by himself" is critical, even in a story that has nothing to do with the outdoors.

In a summer session with Jane Yolen at Western Washington University, I had written a segment that included a boy magician who went up to his attic to work on spells, and locked the attic door behind him. One of my session-mates questioned locking the door.

Yolen reinforced that locking the door gives that youthful character the independence that having an adventure requires. Much of the chemistry in a youth novel involves settings and situations that put the protagonist on his own. Away from parents and even friends. Most of us can remember how freeing that was in our own lives.

Not all stories can happen in the wilderness, like Paulsen's or mine, sometimes an entire adventure of wilderness, or wildness ... independence ... can be created in a garden, a school for wizards, or at the back of an old wardrobe.

"Hatchet" is a fabulous book. I re-read it almost yearly and collect used copies to hand out. And when people ask me what my book is about, I can tell them enthusiastically that if they liked Paulsen's book they will like "Cheechako."