Books by Eric Douglas

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Turks and Chaos: Hostile Waters audiobook now available

May 22, 2018 By Eric Douglas

Turks and Chaos: Hostile Waters, the ninth thriller in the Mike Scott series, is now available as an audiobook on Audible, Amazon and ITunes.

The story

Armed gunmen board a liveaboard dive boat near Turks and Caicos in this sea story/action thriller. News photographer Mike Scott is on a dive vacation and gets taken hostage when the theft doesn’t go as planned. When the identity of the head pirate is exposed, he declares that all the passengers will die when they reach their destination. It’s up to Mike, the passengers and crew to overcome the pirates and save their own lives. It doesn’t help matters that there is a mole on board feeding the pirates information and they are heading right into a storm. Now they must rebel against the pirates and take the boat back before time runs out…

Turks and Chaos: Hostile Waters is set on a liveaboard trip in the Turks and Caicos. The real trip was hosted by ScubaRadioTM and the story features several show cast members. Greg Holt, Pup Morse and several others lent their voices to the narration as well, so you’ll be able to hear the real characters voice their parts. CJ Goodearl, “the voice of Mike Scott”, served as the narrator.

If you’ve never tried an audiobook but think you might want to give it a shot, this link will let you start a 30 day Audible free trial and you get Turks and Chaos.

Douglas’ Mike Scott series of thriller stories features diving, beautiful locations and the environment.

“I grew up watching Jacques Cousteau on television. When I created Mike Scott, I wanted to inspire people to love the ocean and go diving, just like Cousteau did for me,” Douglas said.

Get it on iTunes: 

Get it on Audible: 

Get it on Amazon:

Filed Under: Adventure, Books, Diving, Travel

Casting Mike Scott?

May 7, 2018 By Eric Douglas

The 9th Mike Scott adventure.

Eric recently joined the crew from the syndicated talk radio show ScubaRadioTM to discuss who would play Mike Scott in a movie based on Eric’s novels. A number of actors’ names were suggested, but two of the top choices were Alex O’Laughlin and Scott Eastwood.

Everyone agreed on the first choice for the actor to play the role of Mike’s fiancee Dr. Francesca (Frankie) DeMarco: Gal Gadot.

Listen to the discussion here (it’s been edited to keep the discussion on task. Listen to the entire episode on Hour 1).

https://www.booksbyeric.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/SR_5-5-18_HOUR1-actors.mp3

If you have any other suggestions for actors to play the role of Mike Scott, or Frankie, let us know!

You can also listen to an announcement about the new audiobook for Turks and Chaos:

https://www.booksbyeric.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/SR_5-5-18_HOUR1-tc-audiobook.mp3

Or the audiobook commercial for all of Eric’s audiobooks.

https://www.booksbyeric.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Eric-Douglas-spot-for-SR.mp3

Filed Under: Adventure, Books, Diving

Turks and Chaos: Hostile Waters coming as an audiobook!

February 26, 2018 By Eric Douglas

Update: Should be available in mid-May, according to the narrator. Listen here from ScubaRadio, May 5 2018:

https://www.booksbyeric.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/SR_5-5-18_HOUR1-tc-audiobook.mp3

 

This weekend on ScubaRadio I announced that Turks and Chaos: Hostile Waters is now in production as an audiobook!

https://www.booksbyeric.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Turks-and-Chaos-audio-annc.mp3

CJ Goodearl is the voice-over artist who has voiced my previous three audiobooks (Oil and Water, Return to Cayman: Paradise Held Hostage and Lyin’ Fish). He does a fantastic job making these stories come alive. If you haven’t had a chance to listen to one of these stories, check them out.

Turks and Chaos: Hostile Waters came out at the end of 2017 and is set entirely on an Explorer Ventures liveaboard dive boat in Turks and Caicos. The story includes several cast members from ScubaRadio as well and this audiobook will include the real voices of some of the people who were on board the trip. We did the same thing with Lyin’ Fish.

The audiobook version of Turks and Chaos: Hostile Waters will be available in April. If you haven’t listened to the first three stories CJ produced, you are missing out. Get started listening to them now and enjoy an island adventure while you are in your car or at the gym.

Shout out

I’d like to say a quick shout out to Explorer Ventures for allowing me to set my story on board one of their boats. I think it makes the story that much more real to have a tangible location. I’ve cruised with Explorer Ventures. If you are looking to get to sea for a week and have a blast diving, I highly recommend them.

 

Filed Under: Adventure, Books, Diving, New Releases

Turks and Chaos: Hostile Water novella now available

January 7, 2018 By Eric Douglas

The latest thriller novella the Mike Scott series, Turks and Chaos: Hostile Waters, is now available across all ebook formats at a special introductory price, author Eric Douglas announced.

The ninth installment in the Mike Scott series is a thriller novella.

“I wanted to challenge myself with this story a bit. No bringing in outside help or equipment. This story is entirely set on board a liveaboard dive boat,” Douglas said. “Most of the Mike Scott stories feature the location as an additional character, but this was different. It was confining, but also liberating at the same time. I had to focus on characters and limit them to what was onboard.”

Turks and Chaos: Hostile Waters

Armed gunmen board a liveaboard dive boat near Turks and Caicos in this sea story/action thriller. News photographer Mike Scott is on a dive vacation and gets taken hostage when the theft doesn’t go as planned. When the identity of the head pirate is exposed, he declares that all the passengers will die when they reach their destination. It’s up to Mike, the passengers and crew to overcome the pirates and save their own lives. It doesn’t help matters that there is a mole on board feeding the pirates information and they are heading right into a storm. Now they must rebel against the pirates and take the boat back before time runs out…

Diving fans will also recognize some characters in the book. Douglas based this story on ScubaRadio’s 20th Anniversary Scuba Cruise. Greg Holt from ScubaRadio is a major character in the story as well as several of the show regulars. Pup Morse, the Scuba Cowboy entertains the worried passengers and his daughter Tiff takes out a bad guy (no spoilers!). There is even a reference or two to Mermaid Rum, a ScubaRadio favorite.

Of course, the entire story is set on board the Explorer Ventures Turks and Caicos Explorer, featuring the real crew. (None of the Explorer Ventures boats have ever been boarded by pirates in real life.)

“One fun thing about this story is I plan to use a character or two in the next full-length Mike Scott novel, planned for the summer of 2018. As with all my stories, you can read one without the other, but there will be a connection to a story line in Turks and Chaos to the next adventure,” Douglas said.

P.S. Don’t forget, the ebook of the first story in the Mike Scott series, Cayman Cowboys, is free to download from all major ebook retailers.

Early reviews

“Fans of Clive Cussler will enjoy this brand-new novella in the Mike Scott thriller series from Eric Douglas.” Greg Holt, host of the talk radio show ScubaRadio.

“…a great “Murder on the Orient Express” set up going, where everyone is captive and most everyone is suspect. It gives the story a nice whodunit quality…” Suzanne Garrett

Filed Under: Adventure, Books, Diving, New Releases

25 years since my first trip to Russia

January 3, 2018 By Eric Douglas

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime. – Mark Twain

 

Twenty-five years ago, today, I did something extraordinary. It began with my first international flight. In truth, it was the first time I was ever on a plane. I was part of a group that took off from Baltimore-Washington International and landed in Moscow, Russia. To make the trip, I had to get my first passport.

The Soviet Union split up in December 1991, slightly more than a year before. President Boris Yeltsin led the Commonwealth of Independent States, the loose organization that followed. President George W. Bush was in Russia for his final state visit before leaving office, having lost the election to Bill Clinton. We weren’t affiliated with Bush at all, although many people thought we were because of the doors that got opened for us.

I can still point to that trip as one of the single-most important things I’ve ever done in my career. It set things in motion that I wouldn’t even come to realize for many years. I met people who would change my life and those experiences opened doors for many other aspects of my career.

It all began with an invitation from my friend and mentor Dr. Virginia Simmons who invited me along with a group of educators traveling to what was then called Kaliningrad, a suburb of Moscow. Kaliningrad was renamed Korolev, in honor of Sergey Korolev. He was the father of the Russian space program and the city was the home to their Russian Space Flight Control Center – their Houston Control.

I will never forget walking through the dim halls of Sheremetyevo International Airport to be confronted by a Russian border guard for the first time. He didn’t speak any English and I didn’t speak any Russian. I simply handed him my brand-new passport and hoped I wouldn’t be whisked off to some back room for interrogation.

That evening, the group I was traveling with was hosted at a group dinner. There was a buffet of light meats, bread and vegetables. My friends and I all thought, “We are hungry and this is perfect. We don’t want to insult our guests by not eating.” So, of course, we all went back to the buffet a couple times. And then they brought out the next course. And the next one. It ended up being a long dinner with multiple courses and lots of toasting and drinking. We were eight time zones away, jet lagged and miserable. But we also began friendships that have lasted until today.

Amidst the tours and meetings, one evening we were invited to have dinner in the homes of our Russian hosts. The mother handled public relations and communications for Kaliningrad so she got to deal with the reporter on the trip. She spoke pretty good English. I will never forget accidentally dropping a few pieces of red caviar from my bread, directly into a shot glass of vodka I was about to drink. The father, who didn’t speak any English, smiled at me and dropped a couple pieces of caviar into his own drink. We toasted and drained our glasses of vodka and caviar together.

Nearly every evening after guided tours around Moscow and the Russian space program, we reconvened back in our hotel in a common room with our tour guides and interpreters and just talked. I have fond memories of Nadia, Natasha, Ludmilla and others, along with Anatoly, Vladimir and Alexey who was the deputy mayor of Kaliningrad and our primary host for the trip. The vodka flowed, of course, and we laughed and joked and got to know each other. One thing that struck me from those conversations was the declaration that the Russians felt their government had lied to them for many years. “We were told for 70 years that we had the best of everything. Now we find out we were lied to.”

Another thing they told us was that they felt very disconnected to their government. There is a big difference between the actions of the Russian government and the attitudes of the Russian people. I believe that still holds true.

One focus of the trip was education. The group were mostly educators, invited to Kaliningrad/Korolev to help the city rebuild and restructure its educational system. After the fall of communism, they discovered their text books and educational methods were hopelessly out of date. We visited numerous schools and were impressed in some ways, and disheartened in others.

I remember, about a year and a half after that first trip, having a long, vodka-fueled argument with a Russian friend about communism and its relative merits. I tried to say that what the Russians had experienced wasn’t communism at all, but Alexey wasn’t hearing any of it. Ultimately, we ended the discussion and by the next morning, he had put it aside. We remained friends—although I understood he was angry with me for a while. I realize now just how naïve my assertions were. He had lived through the fear and deprivation. My textbook answers and arguments had nothing to do with life on the ground.

Coming home, even understanding the context of the time, I was stunned to hear people I knew make comments like “They are all just commies, we should kill them all.” I was traveling as a journalist, but ended up being interviewed myself several times. I often quoted a line from the Sting song “Russians” from 1985.

“There is no monopoly on common sense
On either side of the political fence.
We share the same biology, regardless of ideology.
Believe me when I say to you,
I hope the Russians love their children, too”

I usually followed that up with the belief, that Sting implied, that they did. These were people I had laughed with and joked with. They were friends. I couldn’t believe people would wish death on my friends.

That first trip served as the motivation for the creation of the nonprofit Russia and West Virginia Foundation that supported hundreds of student, teacher and cultural exchanges.

In 2008, 15 years after my first trip to Russia, I went back and photographed many of the people and places I saw on that first trip, and subsequent trips I made in the 90s. In 2010, I took those photographs to Moscow and exhibited them in Moscow. The reaction was interesting to watch. It was fun to see the people looking at side-by-side photos of themselves. But it was just as interesting to see spectators who had no connection to the photos, comparing their memories to the ones captured in the photos. They were looking at clothes and hairstyles and laughing. The images showed life 15 or so years before, but in a lot of ways it reflected another world.

All together, I made seven trips to Russia, encompassing more than six months living in the country. Since then, I have made dozens of international trips to more than 25 other countries. It all started with that first trip and that first passport. I’ve had one every since and even had to have extra pages added to my last one.

Five years ago, for the 20th anniversary of that first trip, I published an e-book called Russia: The New Age with news stories I wrote and essays from the 90s along with blog posts and essays from 2008 and 2010 when I returned to see how things had changed. It also includes most of the photos from the 2010 photo exhibit that was also shown in Bordeaux, France, and in Charleston, West Virginia and Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. You can check it out here.

The last 25 years have brought some challenges, but even more amazing opportunities. I can’t wait to see what happens in the next 25.

Filed Under: Adventure, Books, Travel

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