Books by Eric Douglas

Thriller fiction and Non-fiction

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Shooting for the stars

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My older brother and I agree that we had a good childhood in Cross Lanes. By today’s standards we were deprived, of course. We only had three or four channels on our television and didn’t have central air conditioning until we were 11 and 13.

What we did have was access to a lot of creativity and science. I remember erector sets, chemistry sets, microscopes, telescopes and just about every other “set” that let us challenge ourselves and our imagination. One of the more exciting summertime things we did was launch model rockets in the backyard.

We would build rockets and set them up on a stand. We would light a fuse by hand and run back a ways in time to watch the launch like a big bottle rocket. The thrill of the launch was only multiplied by the chase of the rocket’s return. We held our breath while we looked for the parachute to pop out and bring the rocket slowly back to earth. Or, as happened occasionally, watching it corkscrew back down, burying itself in the clay.

For the last several months, my oldest daughter Ashlin has been building rockets through the Starbase Academy Program at John Adams Middle School. The program is funded by the Department of Defense and offered through the school system. My younger daughter, Jamison, still in elementary school, has been able to be the “mascot” for the group and help out as well. They built smaller individual rockets and launched them. Then they worked together to build a larger rocket as a team. They recently completed a successful launch of the team rocket. The result of that launch, including altitude and other telemetry information, was sent off the national Starbase program. The great news is their rocket has been accepted into the national competition. They will be headed off to DC next month for more adventure.

When I was growing up, the space program was on everyone’s mind. The Apollo Missions were ending, but we had Skylab and the Mir Space Station along with the coming of the space shuttle to fire imaginations. Everyone wanted to be an astronaut and the possibility of space exploration got everyone excited about technology and the future. Back then, it seemed like technology fields were heavily dominated by men. As the father of two young girls, I’m excited to see that changing.

Ultimately, I don’t care if either girl ends up being an engineer or a scientist when they grow up. (I didn’t, but I’m still a space-junkie.) If they choose to, that’d be great and I’ll support that however I can. What I hope they both get from this is a sense of wonder and excitement for exploration. 

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I think I need to go buy a rocket….

Voices of War coming soon

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For a little over a year, I’ve been working on a documentary on war veterans and I’m excited to say it’s just about ready for primetime. The documentary project will be in two parts: a semi-traditional documentary and a companion book.

All together, I logged more than 2000 miles and captured nearly 50 hours of interviews from 48 veterans. Two of the interviews are incomplete so I won’t be able to include those two veterans in the project, but the other 46 will be in the book, the documentary or both.

I call it a semi-traditional documentary for two reasons. In a more traditional documentary, I would have picked a veteran from each major conflict and weaved a single story from those six stories. Instead, I chose to take individual comments and stories from most of the veterans I interviewed and combined them into a single piece. In all, there are 36 individual voices in the documentary. They cover every major conflict and some of the smaller conflicts and peace-keeping missions like Kosovo, Somalia,Grenada and Haiti.

The second way this project is different from a traditional documentary is a focus on the voices themselves.  I didn’t shoot video of the veterans being interviewed. Instead, I used an audio recorder and then captured a portrait of each person. The advantage to an audio documentary is people typically find an audio recorder less intimidating and they are less self-conscious than with a video. I wanted the veterans I interviewed to be relaxed and to forget about the recorder completely. I also wanted the viewer to focus on the words and the stories and less on the expressions and mannerism of each veteran. The documentary will include the photograph of the individual veteran as he or she speaks, but it won’t be moving images.

The stories cover a number of different topics including their reason for enlisting, emotions of leaving for war, losing friends, getting wounded and the comradery that comes with serving.

I will release the documentary in time for Memorial Day this year. I am planning a live premiere along with a web page. The book, to be called Common Valor, will be available at the same time. Stay tuned for more details as I lock everything down.

I’ve posted excerpts of several different veterans speaking on this blog. You can see several of them:

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The fools of April

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This morning I got an email about the new Kindle Zero. It said Amazon would be announcing it today and it would be free. Better still, it would pay you to read difficult books. Too good to be true? Of course it is. It’s April Fool’s Day.

I’ve never been a big fan of April Fool’s Day. Most of it is relatively harmless, but sometimes the jokes get pretty mean-spirited, all in the “tradition” of having fun. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a big believer in laughing at myself. I believe if you can’t laugh at yourself, you’re not allowed to laugh at anyone else.
This all got me wondering, though, where the idea of practical joking on April 1 came from? Like a lot of things, the history behind it is somewhat unclear; it may go all the way back to the middle ages. The first reference connecting April 1 and “jokes” is from Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, published in 1392. Another possible reason for the day is when Pope Gregory XIII ordered a new calendar to replace the older Julian calendar in 1582. With that calendar, he moved New Year’s Day from April 1 to January 1. The idea is it took time for the word to spread and people who believed New Year’s Day was still on April 1 became the butt of various jokes and pranks. That doesn’t account for earlier references to it, like Chaucer’s, or the fact that England didn’t adopt the Gregorian calendar for almost 200 years, but the tradition of April Fools was fully entrenched there long before that.
Regardless, practical joking and pranks have long been associated with April 1 and people who have fallen for jokes are called April Fools or sometimes April Fish…young fish are supposedly gullible and easily caught. I have to admit I’ve never called anyone an April Fish before.
The best jokes, of course, are the ones that have some semblance of truth to them. When it is so outrageous that it isn’t believable, well, no one will ever believe it. Today, stories are published daily on the internet that aren’t true. In spite of websites dedicated to debunking urban myths, we seem to fall for them over and over. Did you hear the one about….? It’s not true. I guess April Fool’s Day has expanded to 365 days a year.
Unfortunately, this will be my last blog post for a while. I just got a call that one of my books has been selected for the New York Times Bestseller list and now I have to go on a book promotional tour. And I need to figure out what I can give people to read my books when they get their Kindle Zeros. I heard one author was giving away a car…
Happy April Fool’s Day!

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Fiction meets reality in Wreck of the Huron

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I recently got a very interesting email from a reader — Steve Lovell of Bristol, England. He was reading my fourth novel Wreck of the Huronand wanted to tell me about a true story related to the wreck. You can learnmore about the Huron here.

Most of what I learned about the wreck came of the reading PROCEEDINGS OF COURT OF INQUIRY ON THE LOSS OF THE HURON from Wednesday, December 5, 1877. The wreck happened in the early morning hours on November 24, 1877. The inquiry was held less than two weeks after the actual wreck.
In one scene, I followed William P. Conway, the watch commander on the USS Huron, as he swam ashore and then helped rescue some of the other men who survived the wreck. What I didn’t know about was the actions of Antonio Williams. He was also on the ship and was side-by-side with Conway coming ashore. Williams wasn’t mentioned specifically in the inquest and he wasn’t interviewed because he was still in the hospital recovering from his injuries.

Antonio Williams received the Congressional Medal of Honor for his actions that day making him the oldest recipient of the award. (Until just before World War II, servicemen could receive the award in peacetime. Now it is only given for actions during war.)

Williams was born in Malta in 1830 and came to the United States in 1867, after being shanghaied and serving aboard a whaler in his youth. He became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1890—the same year he retired from the Navy. He later moved to England, his wife’s home.

The Secretary of the Navy, in sending the medal to Antonio Williams, wrote “It is shown in evidence that upon that occasion, the wrecking of the U. S. N. steamer Huron, you gave up whatever chance of life a foothold upon the wrecked vessel offered by taking to the sea, with Ensign Young, on a small balsa in the attempt to carry a line to the shore for the relief of your ship-mates. The effort failed by the shortness of the line. Four times capsized on the balsa, and nearly drowned, you reached the shore, where, before you were clear of the undertow, and notwithstanding your bruises and worn condition, joining hands with your companion, you helped with him to haul two men out of the water, and afterward, joining hands with him again, and running back into the surf, hauled out two more. It is also shown that you rendered material assistance to the weak and exhausted men whom you had saved.”

In an interview with Harpers Weekly he was asked “Did you think you would reach the shore?”

“Yes, I did; and every time the sea knocked me off the balsa I set my teeth the harder together, and made up my mind to do my best. The sea off that coast of North Carolina would take me and throw me clear off of the balsa and then I would have to get back again. I was very much battered and bruised, as was Mr. Young, but he was as brave as you ever find them. If we had only known that we were 300 yards from the shore we might have done better, but we could not see. It was pitch dark. I said to myself the wind and the sea must fetch us up somewhere near the shore, and we worked about three miles of a course on that balsa before we struck the beach, and we struck it hard, I tell you. Of course I must have been used up, but I didn’t know it then… I saw more work to do, and I forgot the pains in my back, where the seas, or a spar, or something struck me. I was three months in hospital before I got all over it. I never was a strong man after it; though my nerves were just as good as ever…”

Later in his career, Williams was at sea on the Corvette Yantic and faced another severe storm. Harpers Weekly wrote: when it was thought that the Yantic would founder, (Williams ) strapped on his medals, and declared that if he went down he would still carry his decorations for manly and honorable conduct about him. “That’s the belt I put them in, and I wear it for three days-until the medals hurt my back. The sea make the bronze medal a little green, but the gold one is just as bright as when my adopted country give it me.”

Williams was buried at Greenbank Cemetery in Bristol with honors. The minister who officiated said he was struck by Williams’ idea of Christianity and his preparations for the afterlife. Being a man who obeyed orders all of his life, Williams said “when the order came from his Captain to go aloft, he would be ready to obey.”

Reader Steve Lovell noted that he visited Williams’ cemetery plot and it was run down and very plain. He cleaned it up and placed a cross of remembrance on it. He is currently waiting for a reply from the US Consulate and the Veterans Administration to see about getting the grave restored. Lovell has no connection to Williams; he just wants to see the proper respect and honor paid to a hero.

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Spring is in the air

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I’m sitting outside enjoying the sun as I write this. It’s not all that warm, but the sun feels good and I’m tired of being in the house. I’m already planning projects for the spring and summer—a few of which will never happen and a couple others will change dramatically from my first idea. That’s the very nature of the creative process.

I left West Virginia in early 1998 and lived away for nearly 14 years before I moved back about a year ago. I have a greater appreciation for my home now because of that time away. Not that I think everything is perfect here, but I see potential or beauty that I overlooked before. I was always hurrying someplace or trying to accomplish something else and didn’t take the time to just “be” and appreciate my surroundings. A lot of us live that way and it takes an effort to slow down.

One thing I missed while I was away was the river. I lived a few minutes away from the Pacific Ocean for a while and spent a lot of time visiting the Atlantic and Caribbean, but there is just something about that river that I find fascinating. I love the way it moves, reflecting lights in an ever-changing pattern. Rivers in West Virginia have been as been as important to the development of the state as any of the other natural resources.

The West Virginia Land Trust is running a photography contest encouraging photographers to seek out special places in the mountain state. I have no affiliation with the group, but I like the idea behind the contest. They define a special place as:
“A special place is more than land and water. A special place takes you to a time and to a memory, it brings you peace, and leaves you open to life. It is a place where you feel connected to your own life and to the life around you. A farmer’s special place may be his field, a wildlife watcher’s a forest, a sportsman’s may be a remote stretch of woods, a hiker’s an entire expanse of mountains, a child’s may be a field of green where she can run and play or a creek bed to fish.”
The deadline for submitting photographs is April 15. Even if you don’t enter anything in the contest, now that Spring is in the air, get outside and enjoy the special places that we call home. Most of the time, they aren’t even that far away. And don’t forget to take your camera along with you. You never know what you might see.
I’ll be down by the river.

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Re-release of Guardians’ Keep

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*** Update ***
Download Guardians’ Keep for FREE
Wednesday, March 20 through Friday, March 22 2013 you can download the latest edition of Guardians’ Keep for FREE directly through Amazon. Share the news with your friends!

Follow this link and then click on the Guardians’ Keep cover to go to Amazon.

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The publishing world is changing and in general that is a great thing for readers and a good thing for authors, too. Authors now have greater control of their work and how it is promoted.

Just a few weeks ago, I was able to regain the publishing rights to my third novel, Guardians’ Keep. The publisher was doing a terrible job promoting it and had it severely over-priced. It wasn’t selling, but that’s no small wonder.
I like all of my books but Guardians’ Keep is one my personal favorites. In my formative years of reading, the Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan books were hot. People stood in line to get the latest release. Those books were incredibly complex with multiple, seemingly unconnected storylines converging on a single point by the end of the story. When I started writing my own books, Clancy was one of the models I had in mind; Guardians’ Keep was the first book I wrote where I felt like I truly hit that mark.

“Dr. Francesca DeMarco, a beautiful archeologist, is searching an underwater site on the Adriatic coast of Italy. Chasing stories of a mysterious group of Guardians, she runs into roadblocks as someone is trying to keep her from discovering the truth. News photographer Mike Scott is sent to do a story on the project, but when he and Dr. DeMarco are nearly killed in the process he decides to help her discover who is behind the attacks. To unlock the mystery of the Guardians, they have to overcome a group of delusional fanatics bent to stop them at any costs. If they are successful, they might just find a religious artifact lost when the Romans overran the Temple in Jerusalem. If not, they might be locked away in a tomb for the rest of their lives.”

 

One of my favorite reviews for the first edition of the book came from Jon Rusho: 

“Guardian’s Keep is an awesome book. How can you go wrong? Chemical weapons, conspiracy, diving, exotic locations, the wanna-be bad guy that is really insane and the monologuing bad guy that claims he won’t be caught monologuing. Awesome!”

Over the weekend I re-released Guardians’ Keep in both printand Kindle editions. This Wednesday (March 20), you will be able to download the Kindle version for FREE. The offer lasts through Friday, March 22. Let your friends know to get ready.

You can see all of my novels and other books at:

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