Blog

Doing Twitter searches for “Fire on the Horizon” enables me to instantly find any early reviews, however obscure, and in the age of the Blog, they can pop up in some pretty obscure places indeed. “Enable” is the key word. As any recently published author can tell you, the addiction to hunting down any and all info about “how the book is doing” can become severe. In the old days, beside doing general web searches and checking the Amazon number every hour, you were pretty much at the mercy of your publicist to learn of far-flung reviews. Now, since anyone who writes ANYTHING will Tweet about it, I think I am pretty much All Seeing.

Click below for some examples of what’s popped up this week:

Roanoke Times-Dispatch

Coast Guard Blog

Old Salt Blog

My book on the Deepwater Horizon blowout, Fire on the Horizon, is finally “out there.” It’s been a humbling, fascinating, deeply involving eight month sprint discovering and trying to capture the world of offshore drilling, and the almost unimaginably dramatic events of April 20, 2010. Fortunately I had the help and guidance of my co-author, John Konrad, who was an oil rig captain himself, and had close friends on the Horizon when it blew out and burned that night.

Highlight of the publication ritual so far: Sebastian Junger blurbed it: ““One of the best disaster books I’ve ever read…I tore through it like a novel. A phenomenal feat of journalism.”
Low point: Publisher’s Weekly reviewer called prose “clunky”, which is only my worst fear every time I write anything.

The official release date is tomorrow, and Sunday at 5 I’ll be talking about the book at Politics and Prose in Northwest DC. I hope you all can come. Only you can save me from the author’s nightmare: more bookstore employees than audience. I promise to try not to be clunky.

This is weird: I woke up one morning and I realized that I was Mickey Mantle. I knew I wasn’t really him, but through some fluke (dream logic), I was getting to experience being Mickey — who happened to be in the middle of his best year ever. I (he) could hit ANYTHING.  It was so cool. I kept thinking how great it was and how much fun I was having getting to be the Mick for a while. It was a very vivid dream, I even dreamed a batting average, .352. When I woke up, that figure was so strong, I immediately wondered if it might actually correspond to reality. Thanks to Google, I could find out before I brushed my teeth. Turns out that in 1956, his Triple Crown Year and consensus “best year ever”, he hit .353.  The brain is a strange place.

Interesting dissection of David Von Drehle’s piece in Time on the Arizona shooting. I’ll be doing these roundtables every few weeks.

It started off poorly. I got pasted in my 6 a.m. tennis match. The Big Russian was nuking me with his laser forehand, had me pinned on the baseline and I couldn’t fight him off. Then it got better. Fire on the Horizon got it’s first review, from Kirkus, and it was a good one (even if the reviewed somehow concluded I had merely “assisted” in writing the thing, which trust me, isn’t the way I remember it). I’ll append the review below, but that wasn’t even the best news of the day. This evening Scott Higham messaged me to say that Finding Chandra, my first Story Surgeons editing project, had been nominated for an Edgar award for best nonfiction crime book.

When I hit the red carpet, I’ll be the one wearing “Tar-jay.”

Here’s the Kirkus review:

FIRE ON THE HORIZON
The Untold Story of the Gulf Oil Disaster
Author: Konrad, John
Author: Shroder, Tom

Review Date: February 1, 2011
Publisher:Harper/HarperCollins
Pages: 256
Price ( Hardcover ): $27.99
Price ( Large Print ): $27.99
Publication Date: March 1, 2011
ISBN ( Hardcover ): 978-0-06-206300-7
ISBN ( Large Print ): 978-0-06-206654-1
Category: Nonfiction
Classification: Ecology

With the assistance of former Washington Post contributor Shroder (Old Souls: The Scientific Evidence For Past Lives, 1999), veteran oil-rig captain Konrad guides readers through the culture and daily life of offshore drilling on the Deepwater Horizon.

Konrad worked seven years for Transocean, the owner of Horizon, which exploded into flames in April 2010, taking 11 lives and leaking more than 200 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. He comes at the story from the perspective of the people who do the work to get the oil. In so doing, he provides a complementary angle on the event to Carl Safina’s A Sea in Flames (2011), with its emphasis on corporate malfeasance and the blowout’s social and environmental impacts. First, Konrad introduces the Horizon, which, even in its outdated state, was an awesome construction, a floating drilling platform the size of an office park, with computer-controlled dynamic positioning that could keep it over a 20-square-foot target a mile under the surface of the ocean. Konrad writes of the rig with easy familiarity, while comfortably populating it with its maritime and drilling crews and warmly conveying the camaraderie that suffused the platform. Though the author comes from a maritime background, he turns the drilling process into a fine choreography, offering an effective critique of the corporate edicts that jeopardized the safety of the rig’s people and the integrity of the exploratory well. The corporate atmosphere was complex, however—one moment finds Transocean working hard to avoid common-hazard injuries, then cutting back on crew just when the aging rig needed them most for preventative maintenance. Konrad’s gavel comes down on corporate irresponsibility, and the consequences of the poor, indeed criminal, decision making is palpably, gruesomely expressed as the author screws down his focus to the last few days of the Horizon, concentrating on a few individuals in an absorbing re-creation of the disaster’s brewing, mayhem and horror.

A lucid investigation into the fatally risky business that caused the blowout, which, by putting human faces on many players, amplifies the ache.

I was trying to re-attach the exhaust hose on our clothes dryer to the exhaust vent, a hugely frustrating endeavor requiring duct tape and small muscle control, only one of which I had in any quantity. As I was in my usual home improvement position, squatting on my haunches and cursing, a flapping crowd of black wings careened by within inches of the window. Even in that brief moment, I could sense that this was no random fly-by. Something was definitely up in the world of tooth and claw. I thought: Even as I’m sitting here immersed in the banality of human life, the wild world is simmering just beyond my walls. And then I thought: I better go check it out.

I knew the chances were that if indeed some Animal Planet drama had been unfolding, I had almost certainly missed it. But I went anyway, stepping out on the back porch. At first I saw nothing of note, but then the large cherry tree to my left exploded. An immense brown projectile shot from the upper branches, pursued by three impressive crows. The brown missile resolved into a huge bird — an owl! The wings spread at least three feet across as it shot toward a pine tree at high speed. But the crows were on it. The lead crow was actually diving down on top of the owl, slashing it with his talons. The owl didn’t bother to fight back. It just fled to another tree as the crows swarmed after it, again body slamming the owl, who pushed off once again and swept away out of view, crows in hot pursuit.

The owl was twice the size of the largest crow, but it was no match for all three in concert. Plus, as I later learned, it had been rudely interrupted during nap time, and was no doubt still groggy.

This I discovered when I got back to the computer keyboard and typed “crows chasing owls” into Google, and got this link, which answered every one the questions forming in my head almost before I could articulate them.

I don’t think we’ve begun to understand the implications of  the constant and instant availability of the world’s collective knowledge, now always a few taps of the fingertips away. In this case, it put the exhilarating scene I’d been lucky enough to witness into full context — and then some.

Which reminded me — you know that add for Bing.com, an upstart competitor to Google? Someone starts spouting randomly connected nonsense in an acutely annoying manner, which is supposed to represent the meaninglessness of information overload you get with a Google search, presumably compared to the directed answers you get from Bing.

The ad comes across as pathetic desperation — on Bing’s part. The problem is that the supposed flaw they are attacking in Google doesn’t in fact exist. You want Google to tell you why crows chase owls, and it tells you. End of story, and end of market opportunity.

Click on link to view the final Fire on the Horizon cover.

FireHorizonCover

Writing a book is an exercise in self-delusion. I was convinced that when I finished the first draft, everything would be a downhill glide. When the edits came back, so too did the edict: I had to do all rewrites in a week. Somehow I made it. Now I was REALLY over the hump. Except when the ms. came back from the copy editors, I had days to go through it all again. And good thing too — I was so burned out in the editing phase, I had missed some things that would have been semi-disastrous had they gone through. So now I HAD to be over the hump. Except that as I was about to go through the page proofs, looking forward to being able to read carefully from start to finish on an almost-complete book, I got word from David/Barry — the brain trust concluded we needed an epilogue after all.

I was on vacation the week before Christmas, skiing with the wife and kids. I’d be returning to Christmas weekend with relatives. They needed an epilogue complete by Dec., 28. My son’s birthday. I begged for two more days, and to my shock and relief, I got them. Actually made the deadline, realizing the brain trust had been right — an epilogue WAS necessary.

Over the hump?

Not quite. The edits came back, and I needed to turn them around the same day, which was yesterday.

Now. Certainly. There. Can. Be. No. Mistake.

I am over the hump.

Please.

F

Last spring, the world watched for weeks as nearly two hundred million gallons of crude oil billowed from a hole three miles deep in the Gulf of Mexico. Warnings of various and imminent environmental consequences dominated the news. Deepwater drilling—which had been largely ignored or misunderstood—exploded in the American consciousness in the worst way possible.

But the culture and history of underwater drilling, to say nothing of the events aboard the Deepwater Horizon leading to the blowout, have remained obscure and unscrutinized…until now.

Fire on the Horizon, written by veteran oil rig captain John Konrad and veteran Washington Post journalist Tom Shroder, recounts in fascinating detail the life of the rig itself, from its construction in South Korea in the year 2000 to its improbable journey around the world to its disastrous end, and reveals the daily lives, the daily struggles and ambitions, of those who called it home.

A real-life thriller in the tradition of The Perfect Storm, Shroder and Konrad take the reader on and off the rig—from the little known Maritime colleges to Transocean’s training schools and Houston headquarters to the small towns all over the country where the wives and children of the Horizon’s crew live in the everpresent shadow of the risks they take to make us less dependent on foreign oil. Contained herein are full-scale portraits of the Horizon’s captain, it’s chief mate and chief mechanic, and others, in a captivating history of the industry and the astonishing technology that makes drilling wells at the bottom of the ocean possible, and very dangerous. What emerges is a white-knuckled account of engineering hubris at odds with the Earth itself, an unusual manifestation of corporate greed, and the unforgettable heroism of the men (and few women) on board the Deepwater Horizon, culminating in the harrowing minute-by-minute account of the fateful day, April 20, 2010, when the half-billion dollar rig blew up, taking the lives of 11 people with it and leaving an unprecedented swath of natural destruction.

Fire on the Horizon will be published by HarperCollins March 1, 2011.

I was walking the dog today, wearing my daily uniform of tennis sneakers, blue jeans and long-sleeve T (that’s my cold weather uniform, as opposed to my summer uniform which is sandals, shorts and short sleeve T). Since I’ve been staying home the past 18 months, my dog has become increasingly spoiled and begins bugging me to take her a few minutes earlier every day. It used to be in the evening, just before my wife was due home from work, but now she’s worked her way down to mid-afternoon, two-ish. So as usual, I’m trudging around in my jeans in the middle of a working day seeing nobody but high-maintenance housewives and silver-haired retirees out and about.
I’ve wondered about this. Do I still look too young to be a retiree? Do I just look like some guy who is pathetically unemployed?
Now I know. The winner is: B – pathetically unemployed!
I ran into a neighbor woman who has kids about the same ages as our kids, married to a guy who made a fortune in the real estate boom — not so much in the last few years, of course, but still probably pretty well accounted for from past robber-baron type activities. She’s a self-described housewife, and rather famously blunt in revealing her inner thoughts.
We chatted about the kids, about property values. And then she got this morose look on her face and asked what had been on her mind the whole time. “Are you still out of work?”
About that: It’s a funny thing. I’ve just spent four months working harder than I have ever worked in my life trying to write a 75,000 word book in the time I used to allot for writers to complete a 6,000 word magazine article. I worked seven days a week, 12 hours a day. Plus, I continued editing projects for my storysurgeons clients when I just couldn’t bear to think about the book any longer.
And yet . . . because I haven’t put on hard shoes but once (to speak at a black-tie dinner) in 18 months, I DO kind of still feel like I am “out of work,” because work for me has always been synonymous with going into an office, having a big boss, getting a monthly pay check, dealing with corporate bull shit. Now that I am totally on my own, workwise, sometimes don’t see another human being from 8 am until 6 pm, eat lunch at my kitchen table, can decide to go work out at 10:30 and . . . walk the dog in the middle of the freaking afternoon, I don’t actually feel like I am working.
Still, it was interesting to get this little glimpse into the minds of those who see me shuffling through my appointed rounds, happy hound zigging and zagging from one scent to the next before me. I am that poor dude who lost his job and more than a year later is still schlepping around the house.
Which is interesting, because “schlepping around the house” has always been my fondest ambition.