One of the reasons I write is because I like to travel. My wife and I have always done a lot of traveling. Add my former business travel and I’ve been to over thirty countries. But my favorite place to visit is not all that far from home: Alaska. It started with living there for over seven years of my life. Then I took almost annual trips to Southeast Alaska for the last thirty years. You do that and you get to know an area pretty well, like the back of your hand. So it is not a great surprise that Alaska is now the “place of interest” for my stories. There are hundreds of potential locations or settings for a story and you run into interesting characters everywhere.
When I was writing Destruction Island, my wife and I took a week to drive the Olympic Peninsula, which is the extreme northwest corner of the State of Washington, so I could research some of my novel’s locations. The Ruby Creek Wayside, where I took this picture, was one of our brief stops.
I often ask people who are interested in this novel if they have ever heard of Destruction Island. Most times, even when they live in the Pacific Northwest, they have not. Yet , it is an island just off the Pacific Ocean coast and can be seen from the Ruby Creek Wayside. Many of the locations used in this novel are real, like LaPush, a small Native American community with little islets just off the beach, or the Third Beach Trail, an extreme hiking trail along the coastline, or the Devil’s Graveyard, a small cove littered with rock pinnacles, or Wash Away Beach, named for an obvious reason. Travel can be a way to inspiration and, for me, the way I try to make my writing vivid and cinematic.
