Books by Eric Douglas

Thriller fiction and Non-fiction

  • Home
  • Mike Scott Thrillers
    • Held Hostage: Search for the Juncal
    • Water Crisis: Day Zero
    • Turks and Chaos: Hostile Waters
    • The 3rd Key: Sharks in the Water
    • Oil and Water: Crash in Curacao
    • Return to Cayman: Paradise Held Hostage
    • Heart of the Maya: Murder for the Gods
    • Wreck of the Huron: Cuban Secrets
    • Guardians’ Keep: Mystery below the Adriatic
    • Flooding Hollywood: Fanatics at the Dam
    • Cayman Cowboys: Reefs Under Pressure
  • Withrow Key
    • Lyin’ Fish
    • Tales from Withrow Key
  • Agent AJ West
  • About the Author
    • Publicity and Interviews
  • Nonfiction
    • For Cheap Lobster
    • Heart Survivor: Recovery After Heart Surgery
    • Oral History
      • Batter Up!
      • Memories of the Valley
      • WV Voices of War / Common Valor
      • Capturing Memories: How to Record Oral Histories
    • Dive-abled: The Leo Morales Story
    • Keep on, Keepin’ On: A Breast Cancer Story
    • WV Voices of War / Common Valor
    • Russia: The New Age
    • Scuba Diving Safety
  • Free Short Fiction
  • Other Fiction
    • Sea Turtle Rescue and Other Stories
    • River Town
You are here: Home / Archives for Substack

On Substack: Problems with freshwater

September 28, 2024 By Eric Douglas

You can find this post on Substack as well.

This week we’ve finally gotten appreciable rain where I live. It’s been months. Fortunately we avoided the flooding rains that people not that far to the south of me have endured. According to the National Weather Service, we’ve been in “exceptional” drought. The grass hasn’t grown. Trees have been dropping their leaves since late July or early August. The last time I cut my grass was June. 

We normally have lots of birds in our yard. I feed them all winter and provide a fallow area where they live and build nests. On a typical evening, I can identify 10 or more species of birds. 

But not this summer. There are a few, but most seem to have moved on in search of water. The Elk River is a couple miles away. The ground is too hard for them to find worms. There aren’t as many bugs crawling around or flying through the air. 

I’ve watched the news all summer and marveled at our dry air and heat while other parts of the country have been slammed with floods. (Everyone has been hot.) 

As the planet continues to warm, weather patterns are set to change. Some places we live now will become unlivable and temperate areas will be hotter and drier. 

Many of my novels involve current events, history and science. I might make up places and people, but the science is all real. I don’t write science fiction, but scifi is often about extrapolation — taking what we have and wondering what it will look like in the future. Think about Dick Tracy’s watch or tricorders and tablets on Star Trek.  

The major theme of Water Crisis: Day Zero is, obviously, water. I wrote this book a few years ago, inspired by a situation in Cape Town, South Africa where the city of more than 4.5 million people was within just a few days of running out of fresh water — its Day Zero. Researching deeper, I found that wasn’t an unusual scenario and civil wars have even started over fresh water resources. 

That’s where water refugees move to cities to get access to fresh water, putting strains on city services, leading to uprisings. The civil war in Syria is an example of this. 

But it’s not just in desert climates. Fifteen plus years ago, I was living in Durham, North Carolina when the local water reservoir was within a couple weeks of running out of water. A tropical storm hit the Carolina coast and in one weekend, everything was back to normal. 

About two weeks ago, a small community in West Virginia — Richwood — was within a few days of running out of freshwater. The Cherry River was down because of the drought. The city managers were even contemplating using water in a fracking well — if the radioactive levels in the water tested low enough. 

This week, suddenly, we got more rain than was even forecast, even before Helene slammed into Florida hard enough that it brought heavy rain to the southern Appalachian mountains. Everything is back to normal.

Water out west is a prime commodity. The Colorado River doesn’t make it to the ocean any more. I saw a photo recently showing an area in the San Joaquin Valley in California where the official elevation had dropped dozens of feet because the water table below ground has been pumped out for agriculture.

The point of all this is, some people don’t believe in sea level rise or even climate change. But it’s hard to ignore things like running out of water when it is right in front of your face. 

Filed Under: Books Tagged With: Drought, Freshwater, Mike Scott thrillers, Substack, Water, Water Crisis

PFAS is a major problem for the oceans — and us

April 15, 2024 By Eric Douglas

My day job is as the news director for West Virginia Public Broadcasting. Our team reports regularly on the presence of “forever chemicals” in groundwater and in rivers, streams and fish around the state — as well as federal efforts to curb them, now. 

Forever chemicals are commonly referred to as PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances). The most famous of these is Teflon, but there is an entire category of these substances. They were designed to give materials like paints long-lasting qualities. The chemicals take forever to break down. 

The problem is these chemicals take forever to break down. Even after the paint has deteriorated or the firefighting foam has been cleaned up, to all of its other uses, the PFAS themselves are still around. 

Today, these chemical contaminants have been found in remote corners of the world — in Arctic Sea ice, in fish. 

“A study published in January by the American Chemical Society, a nonprofit scientific organisation, said that PFAS had been detected in the Arctic Ocean at a depth of 3,000 feet (914 meters).”

That’s from an article on Phys.org. 

“From the tiny zooplankton eaten by shellfish, which are consumed by smaller fish and ultimately larger predators, PFAS lurked at every step along the way.

“A 2022 study in Australia established the transmission of PFAS from female turtles to their unborn offspring, while other research found traces in polar bear livers and birds, seals and other animals.”

Exposure to PFAS has been known to cause cancer and other illnesses along with complications for pregnancy. The problem is, there are 4,000 chemicals in the family. Many of them are proprietary so it is difficult to study them. 

Earlier this week, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency moved to limit six of the most common forms of the chemical from 70 parts per trillion to between 4 and 10 PPT. 

Just last year, a statewide survey in West Virginia found high levels of PFAS in finished drinking water being delivered to homes. 

It’s been 62 years since Rachel Carson published her book Silent Spring about the dangers of DDT killing birds and bees. The book met huge amounts of resistance from industry at the time, but it ultimately led to the creation of the environmental movement and for Richard Nixon to ban DDT, sign the EPA and the clean water and air acts into law. That all happened between 1970 and 1972. 

The first Earth Day was April 22, 1972 and it grew out of the environmental movement of the time as well. Today, kids are taught in schools to protect the environment and Earth Day is something they expect to discuss every spring. 

As we approach the 52nd anniversary of the first day, it makes me wonder if PFAS chemicals are our new DDT. There isn’t as clear of a connection between problems with PFAS as there was with DDT — so far. But its pure pervasiveness and resistance to degradation once it is in nature makes it just as concerning. 

Filed Under: Diving Tagged With: adventure, contamination, diving, ocean, PFAS, Substack

Mystery and intrigue in Italy

March 20, 2024 By Eric Douglas

Much of my fiction is rooted in history and nonfiction. I’m not the kind of writer who spends a lot of time “world-building.” No disrespect to that at all. I cut my teeth as a reader on the Dune series, everything by Asimov and of course Tolkien and high fantasy. 

For me, the history of shipwrecks and ancient civilizations brought forward to today makes a great backdrop for the Mike Scott stories. One of my favorites in that regard is Guardians’ Keep. I was working in Italy along the Adriatic Coast when a friend told me a story about some archeological research Dr. Allesandro Marroni performed on a city that had sunk just off the coast. That sparked my imagination, of course. 

And in a twist, I was able to work in ancient Jewish history and the still-missing Breastplate of Judgment from the Old Testament. It was looted by Roman soldiers during the fall of the temple in about 70 A.D. 

I like to think it is the first book where I blended real history and modern day into one entertaining story. You’ll have to be the judge of that, of course.

Until March 26, Guardians’ Keep is on sale in both the Amazon and Amazon UK stores. The price will go up slowly between now and Tuesday so get it now!

Amazon

Amazon UK

A nonfiction book I co-authored with friend and former coworker Dan Orr is called Scuba Diving Safety. The book was originally intended as an update on an even earlier book on the subject. Ultimately, we completely rewrote it. That was 17 years ago. Just a few months ago, we got the rights to the book back from the original publisher and have been updating the chapters and reorganizing it some as well. I hope to bring you the good news soon that a new publisher has picked it up. We hope to have it ready this fall. 

Audiobooks

Most of my books are now available on Audible Plus where you can listen to as many books as you want. For some reason, Audible is dragging their feet on five of my audiobooks, though. They are still available to download directly, however. You can check them out here. 

Filed Under: Adventure Tagged With: adventure fiction, books, Italy, Mike Scott, Mike Scott thrillers, Substack

Using stories about the ocean as teaching opportunities

December 29, 2023 By Eric Douglas

(This week’s substack article is below. Follow this link for previous essays.)

https://www.booksbyeric.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/2015-06-02-01.44.22.mp4

I’ve been fortunate to have a career that has involved telling stories and working around the ocean. I’ve gotten to write about the things I’ve seen above and below the waves. 

One of my goals when I started writing novels was to expose readers to the magic of the ocean. Coming from the recreational dive industry, I hoped divers would enjoy my books so I attempted to make the diving as realistic as possible. 

But, I have written with nondivers in mind as well. I want those readers to be excited about my stories. I want some of them to decide to learn to scuba dive and explore the ocean. And I want everyone to learn a few things about the ocean itself. 

Recently, I read an essay called Why We Need New Stories About the Ocean: Natalie Hart on the Urgency of Literature That Brings the Ocean into the Climate Story

One thing Hart discussed was the difference between literature about the climate versus the ocean. With climate-based stories, the reader is likely predisposed to have an interest in the overall topic. But with the ocean, it is typically just a setting for a love story, adventure story or even a story of personal reflection like a memoir. 

“People can come to books that feature the sea, with no motivation to understand the ocean at all, but they can learn or feel something about the sea through the process of reading. And perhaps these people that we don’t normally reach are the most important of all.”

I don’t write science fiction, but I’ve always understood the genre as taking what is known and extrapolating it into the future. Think about concepts like Warp Speed and digital tablets from Star Trek or Isaac Asimov’s Three Rules of Robotics. 

With my books, there is always something readers can take away when it comes to oceans, water, the environment, or reef systems. 

An example of that is the 10th novel in the Mike Scott series. It’s all about the shortage of fresh water and the international upheaval that causes. 

Recently I saw a story that drought conditions and sea level rise had allowed more salt water intrusion into the Mississippi River causing problems for municipal water supply systems. So many things I extrapolated in Water Crisis are coming true and causing problems. 

There are times, as a fiction writer, I question whether I am doing any good. I want to influence people to love and respect the ocean while being in awe of everything we don’t know about it. But it’s easy to get frustrated and wonder if anyone is listening. 

And then I shake that feeling off and go back to writing. I continue to tell my fiction stories with truth as the background to help people learn whether they want to or not. 

 

Filed Under: Adventure, Diving Tagged With: adventure, diving, Fiction, Mike Scott thrillers, Substack, thriller novels, Water Crisis

Read my latest essay on Substack

August 17, 2023 By Eric Douglas

I’ve started a new weekly outreach on Substack. This platform is popular with journalists and other writers discussing a number of topics. 

Give me a follow if you are interested in stories about writing, diving and whatever else comes along. 

Check out my latest post on the tragedy of the dive boat Conception

Boat wake in a blue ocean heading away from land.

The dive boat Conception tragedy and learning lessons

I was in Houston a little more than four years ago when I heard about the Conception dive boat tragedy. Thirty-four lives were lost that day. I think about every diver heard that story with a sinking feeling in their stomachs, imagining that it could be them. It has been termed the deadliest maritime disaster in U.S. history.

Even if they’ve never taken a liveaboard dive trip, nearly every diver has spent time on dive boats often out of sight with land. There are times you aren’t sure exactly which way land is. And that inspires thoughts of worry — even if just for a moment thinking “if this boat sinks, what do I do.”

Read more.

See previous posts. 

Filed Under: Diving Tagged With: diving, free fiction, Mike Scott thrillers, Substack, thriller novels

Real Thugs: A Cult of Murder — Small groups of travelers have disappeared all over the mid-Atlantic without a trace. When bodies turn up with what appear to be ritual markings, FBI Agent AJ West is on the hunt for what might be a serial killer. Or something even more sinister. It’s a race against […]

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