Books by Eric Douglas

Thriller fiction and Non-fiction

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Lessons learned from watching musicians

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When I describe what it’s like to be an author working to promote my writing, I often compare myself to an independent musician selling CDS out of my trunk. You keep putting yourself out there, hoping to reach people, knowing some won’t pay attention, some will boo and a few will get it. And a few of the few who get it will buy what you have to offer.

It can be frustrating and disheartening. It can cause you to rethink your life’s goals. (Happens to me about once a week. Most days, I go do something else for a few hours and then pull myself back together and start again.) And it will also cause you to re-evaluate your definition of success.
Last night I got the chance to watch a dear friend of mine play and sing. Watching Jean Hanna Davis interact with her fellow musicians (Stan Bumgardner, Paul Greco and Scotty, a guitarist I don’t know) I was amused and impressed at how quickly they fell into playing. After a few minutes of chit-chat, they got to it. They had played together from time to time, but not recently. Still, all talented musicians, they said “Do you know…?” and off they would go. They followed. They led. They had fun. I’m sure there were mistakes. But, they didn’t seem to care and I didn’t hear them.
Watching them play and sing, I realized a definite difference between musicians and writers. We may hawk our art in similar ways, but where writing tends to be a solitary experience, music is best when performed in a group. Writers can support each other, but it is much more difficult to be collaborative.
I’m sure every one of them has dreams of making it “big”, getting a recording contract and playing to packed houses. Everyone has those dreams. But what I saw watching the foursome go from one song to the next was the joy of playing music. They performed for a small audience and had a blast. They played for themselves as much as anything else.
While I often compare myself to the musicians from the business side of the equation, I realize I need to spend more time on the “joy” of creating. Recently I wrote about my changing definition of success. I’m learning, and adjusting to the idea, that success is enjoying what you do and doing it for that reason alone. Everyone says that when you enjoy what you do, it shows, people notice that and that is when success begins. I always thought that meant that if you worked hard enough that the career would take off and you would make a mint. I’m beginning to realize that if you enjoy what you do and do it for the pure joy of doing it, that IS success. The rest is just details.
Check out a couple songs I recorded on my phone last night. The video is crappy, but the sound is pretty good.

 

 

 

 

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Getting used to creativity

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The hardest part of being creative is getting used to it. — Hugh MacLeod

When I began this blog, it was a way to write about the travel I was doing and show friends and family where I was. I wrote about work in Honduras, Russiaand Franceamong other places.
Fifteen months ago, I moved back to West Virginiaand started a new chapter in my life. I was excited about the change and looking forward to rediscovering my home. It has influenced my writing and other creative pursuits. I feel more excited about every day than I had in a long, long time. The number of people reading this blog took off dramatically at the same time. I guess a lot of people liked what I had to say.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about how to move this blog in a new direction. Sometimes it seems to be a bit scattered (not unlike my mind). First I’ll be posting photographs from a photo-safari and then talking about a new book or a new writing project and then shifting gears over to my latest documentary projects. The common theme I see in all of these posts is creativity.
I’ve been reading for inspiration lately, too. I’ve always loved to read, but most of what I’ve been reading lately has been about the act of stepping out on a limb and finding the things that move you by writers like Seth Godin and Jeff Goins.  I’ve also have the good fortune since I’ve been back in Charleston to do some work with DigiSoand that has inspired me as well.
I still plan to talk about the things I have going on and the things I stumble into along the way. I’m working on a couple big new projects including the Voices of War documentary that I plan to wrap up in a couple months and a new Mike Scott adventure novelthat should be done by summer. But I have some ideas about incorporating some fiction writing into the blog as well. The stories I wrote for Halloweenand Christmaswere a lot of fun and I want to expand on that.
I also plan to write more about the struggle to be creative. I thought of myself as a reporter for a long time after I left the newspaper business. I’ve thought of myself as a photographer. A writer. A documentarian. Today, I think of myself as a story teller.  
A few days ago, I read the line at the top of the page and it resonated with me. “The hardest part of being creative is getting used to it.” I’m not 100 percent comfortable with the idea yet, but I’m getting there. I hope you continue to follow along on this journey. At the same time, maybe seeing me try and fail and try again will inspire you to find your creativity and get comfortable with it, too.
“Adventure and creativity go hand in hand. Sometimes adventures take us around the world and sometimes creativity allows us to explore the world without ever leaving home.”

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Introduction to Russia: The New Age

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The following is the introduction to the ebook Russia: The New Age. The book is a collection of articles and observations based on more than six months spent in Russia. It is not intended to be the definitive work on Russian history. Rather, it is intended as a glimpse into the lives and thoughts of Russians as they lived through one of the most turbulent periods in their history—from 1993 to present.

Visit the book’s Amazon page to download a copy. And you’ll get to see nearly 100 images spanning 1993 to 2010 from Russia as well.

You can also read other blog posts about the book here and here and see a few selected images here.

Introduction


“Before 1993 I could predict the future, not now. We live all the time like we are on the top of the volcano.” Nikolay, 2008.

Twenty years ago, I visited Russia for the first time. That trip, and the place, changed my life and redirected my career in ways I never expected.
In the summer of 1992, I was working as a reporter in the Charleston (WV) Gazette-Mail Metro Department and Dr. Virginia Simmons invited me to report on the West Virginia Governor’s Honors Academy being held at (what was then) West Virginia State College. The academy was a summer program for top students from around state. That particular year they were fortunate to have a Russian teacher joining the faculty along with two young Russian students as part of an international exchange program. Following that visit, the West Virginia Department of Education was asked to bring a group of educators to Russia, specifically to Kaliningrad, Russia, to help the city government rebuild its education system. Their text books were useless and their instructional system was outdated.
Remember, the Soviet Union only officially ended on December 25, 1991. The Russian people were struggling to recover from the dissolution of a system that had controlled every aspect of their lives for more than 70 years. I recall hearing many Russian friends say “We were told for 70 years that we had the best of everything. Now we find out we were lied to.”
Dr. Simmons asked me if I wanted to go along on that first trip to Russia. I thought about it for about half a second before taking out a loan against my car and signing up for the trip. My boss at the time, Diane Lytle (now Wallace) at the Metro Staff was kind enough to allow me to go. They weren’t going to pay for the trip, but she kept me on the payroll with the understanding that I would publish stories when I got home. That was exactly what I wanted to do so it worked out perfectly. I was the only journalist on the trip. I had a couple cameras, a rag tag collection of film (slide film and black and white negative film) and a lot of wide-eyed innocence. At the time, I’d never been out of the United States and had never been on an airplane.
The trip affected everyone tremendously. When we got home, we all ran into the problem that our friends didn’t want to hear about Russia nearly as much as we wanted to talk about it. We ended up having a couple parties to get together and share pictures and memories. Probably the most significant result of that first trip was the creation of a nonprofit foundation, called the Russia and West Virginia Foundation, with four areas of focus: education, culture, business and community. Dr. Simmons was the president.
That April we pulled off something that we shouldn’t have been able to do. The foundation hosted a visit from the Russian Presidential Orchestra around West Virginia with a final concert at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC. It was the first time the orchestra had ever been outside of a Communist country. Consider the logistics of getting 70 plus musicians to concert sites all over the state, along with feeding them, housing them and promoting a series of concerts with just a couple months to put it all together. In hindsight, we were crazy. But, we pulled it off and got it done, largely thanks to Dr. Simmons and her attitude of not accepting “no” as an answer from anyone. West Virginia University and Dr. Phil Faini (Dean of the College of Creative Arts) were instrumental in this effort, with their knowledge of moving large groups of musicians around.
The Russia and West Virginia Foundation has organized more than 400 exchanges since 1993 for everyone from teachers to students, doctors, artists, pharmacists, cosmetologists and architects. A Russian sculptor worked with a sculptor from West Virginia and they erected a statue at Haddad River Front Park in Charleston. Several Russian folk music groups have toured in the United States and the music group The Esquires toured Russia, even ending up on Russian national television. There have been dance exchanges both ways alongside humanitarian efforts including arranging for a young Russian girl to have brain surgery to remove a tumor. It literally saved her life.  Russians have opened businesses in American and Americans have opened businesses in Russia.
True to its core, the Foundation has coordinated efforts between universities to write and publish books, public school teachers to publish a comparison of standards for the first through third grades, and nearly 100 exchanges with Russian and American students, with upwards of 25 students at a time visiting the opposite country for as much as month, staying with host families and studying language and culture. Other students have lived in Russia for up to a year while several Russian students have attended university in the United States beginning with Dmitri Saveliev. There are even 4-H programs in Korolev because of the Foundation.
Through Kaliningrad/Korolev’s connection to the Russian Space Program, Fairmont State University created a special Space Scholar program where students worked at various space-related sites and projects in the summer. Several groups of students attend the NASA Space Camp on United States Information Agency (USIA) grants.
I returned to Russia in March of 1994, this time with Dr. Simmons and Dr. Ted Calisto. They were doing more lecturing on educational processes and I was photographing everything I could and conducting interviews. In August of 1994, I did two things on the same day. 1. I quit my job at the newspaper 2. I opened an exhibit of my Russian photographs from those first two trips.
Just a few days after leaving my job, I left for Russia for the third time. This time I planned to stay for three months. I had my own apartment and a few days a week I went to School 11 and talked to English classes to let them practice. That trip was followed by another month-long trip in May of 1995. I took one more trip to Russia in April 1997 and then my career took off in other directions and I didn’t go back until 2008.
Flash forward 11 years and I was able to work out an opportunity to go to Russia and re-photograph many of the same people and places I had visited in the 1990s. Fortunately, through the foundation, we had stayed in contact with many of those people. On my return, after talking to dozens of people and exploring a number of different opportunities, and again with the assistance of Dr. Simmons and the Russia and West Virginia Foundation, I was able to put together a photo exhibit of my work that ended up being displayed in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina in 2009.
My work was part of a larger exhibit of art designed to bring people together organized by a nonprofit group in Myrtle Beach called the Global Awareness Project. One really interesting side benefit that came from that was the group decided to recognize the Russia and West Virginia Foundation in its annual calendar. They commissioned an artist to paint a picture that would represent all of the work done by the Foundation. The artist used two of my images as inspiration for the painting. It was featured for the month of July in the 2010 calendar.
After the success of the exhibit in South Carolina, we were able to take the exhibit to Moscow, Russia; Charleston, West Virginia and Bordeaux, France and back in Myrtle Beach in 2010.  You will find the 30 images, along with the Russian and English captions from the exhibit, at the end of this book.
Dr. Simmons, Ginny to everyone who knows her, was responsible for most of my opportunities relating to Russia and has had a profound influence on my career and my life. She opened doors for me I really never expected to see opened. Case in point, the opportunity to exhibit my work in Russia and France came about because Ginny met some Russian film producers on a trip to Russia in 2009 (immediately after the Global Awareness Project exhibit). She told them about my work and they invited me to exhibit my photographs at two film festivals.
What follows is a collection of stories, notes, blogs and photographs I made while traveling in Russia and working at home. I hope you find the stories and events included in here as interesting as I did when I was living through them. I remember saying in the 90s that it would take Russia 25 years to catch up to the West. They did it in less than 15.
For the record, the Russia I am talking about is not the Russia of government, policy and diplomacy. I am talking about the Russia of the people.

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New book on changes in Russia

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Last week I announced I would be releasing a new book including essays and photographs in honor of my first visit to Russia in 1993. The book is now available through Amazon as a Kindle ebook, but with a slightly different name than I used in my initial announcement. There are several books already in print called Russia: Then and Now. None of them are recent books, mostly detailing Russia as it transitioned from the Czars to the Communists or the change that happened when the Soviet Union broke apart in the 1991. Still, I thought it best to change the name of this book.

So, my new book Russia: The New Age is now available. It is about the Russian people that I met over a 20 year period from 1993 to present day. They have gone through one of the most turbulent periods in Russian history. For more than 70 years, they were repressed and lied to by their government. When the Soviet Union was no more, they had to reinvent everything. Religion had been repressed, technology was way behind. They even had to rely heavily on Germany and other European nations for kitchen appliances and other conveniences. Relying on Germany really didn’t sit well with a lot of Russians, the memories of WWII still fresh in their minds.
The breakup of the Soviet Union was as much a mental ordeal for the Russian people as anything else and they struggled with it. Many people wanted stability, even at the expense of freedom. They wanted a firm hand on the government. At one point over those 20 years, they flirted with a return to Communism. The current government isn’t quite what it was before, but it is definitely more directed than a lot of other democracies. The most important thing I learned from my time in Russia, though, is that the Russian people are the country, not the government. Generally, in their very fatalistic way, Russians, take whatever happens to them with a grain of salt and keep moving forward.
The group of educators I accompanied on my first trip to Russia was so struck by the people, the culture and the history of the place, they formed the nonprofit Russia and West Virginia Foundation to continue educational, cultural and business exchanges. To date, more than 400 exchanges have happened, totally on a shoestring budget. That includes all of my trips. So, 50 percent of all royalties from the sale of Russia: The New Age in January will be donated to the foundation. It won’t be a huge amount, but it should be something toward paying back the debt I owe them.
The photograph I used for the cover of the book was taken on my first full day in Russia. It is a statue of Prince Yuri Dolgoruky, the founder of Moscow. He is also called “Yuri the long armed”, because he pulled everyone together. That’s why his arm is stuck out. I took the photograph through a tour bus window. The window was covered with condensation. I quickly wiped it off and took the picture. You can see a blurry section near the base of the statue where the window was still wet. That is the second frame on black and white film…and then the bus pulled away. I always loved that shot, though. It just seemed to sum up Russia in 1993 for me. I always swore that if I ever published a book about Russia, it would be the cover.
If you want to learn something about Russian culture, history and sense of humor, download Russia: The New Age today direct from Amazon.

See a selection of images from the book here.

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