Welcome to Dash Fire Diaries

Welcome, sojourner. Sit down. Take off your hat. Put up your feet. Get comfortable. We are going to visit faraway places in a fantastical past than once upon a time, was never now…

Let us begin, shall we:

Dashfire: vim, vigor, spirit. It’s not what I find in the past, but what I instill in it through my incisive essays, stories, letters, and epistolary writing.

“Epistles,” also known as missives, are letters. Epistolary writing tells stories through fictional (fake) letters, lists, telegrams, diaries, newspaper articles, reports and other documents. Did you know that whole novels are written this way? I did. I happened to write one. It’s about Theodore Roosevelt hunting for Bigfoot.

I write using real and fictitious (made-up) characters. I have even authored several fake how-to guide books using one of my characters, Dr. Horace S. Browntrout (a rather stuffy Victorian gentleman) as a pen name. I also write stories using many real characters from history. My latest book, Squabble of the Titans: recollections of Roosevelt and His Rival’s Hunt for Bigfoot in the Olympic Rainforest includes Theodore Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt’s wife, parents and children, Edward Smith, Gifford Pinchot, Franklin D. and Eleanor Roosevelt, Richard Nixon, William Howard Taft, Ernest Hemingway, and Alfred Kroeber as characters.

Alternate (alternative or just alt) History fiction is based on events. I call it the fiction of “what if…?” What if the Confederates had won the Civil War? What if Abraham Lincoln had not been assassinated? Alt history is a kind of storytelling based more on events and outcomes than on people and personalities. It’s concerned with the course of history based on pivotal moments of change.

The historical fiction I write, on the other hand, is more about who people are and less about what they did. Therefore, the research I did for my novel Squabble of the Titans, was in regard to the intimate details of Theodore Roosevelt’s personality, his habits, mannerisms, speaking style, beliefs. As a result, I could tell you a lot more about how he related to the world than I could about his actions as President of the United States.

The joy I derive from writing and thinking about the past comes from recreating the life and times of the people who came before us. I spend a great deal of energy figuring how how to imitate how they thought, spoke, and acted, and then I create new worlds and spin new stories using people from the past. My stories usually end up being droll and funny, because my characters are products of their culture and their viewpoints are limited. They are blissfully ignorant of their own foibles, weaknesses, and limitations. Seen from our vantage point, one hundred or more years later, their actions look silly and their beliefs seem absurd — even if they didn’t know any better at the time.

It’s not just the past that intrigues me. I gravitate towards people, places and things that are larger than life. I’m fascinated with failed leadership, with hubris, arrogance, with doomed expeditions, incompetence in the face of chaos — usually with 19th century trappings. Why? Perhaps because willful ignorance is the funniest kind, and people that are totally unable to see irony are the ones who are the easiest to satirize.

In any case, if you keep reading the Dash Fire Diaries expect to see historical characters expressing absurd, ridiculous or antiquated beliefs in the form of long-winded digressions and explanations. Expect to see lists of expedition supplies, rules for “proper” behavior, stories expressed in letters with a bent towards the fantastical — fairytale and folkloric creatures do make appearances from time to time. Expect serialized novels and novel excerpts from completed works and works in progress, and don’t worry, if you’re feeling a little bewildered by it all. You can also expect the occasional essay that steps out of the frame of history to take a frank, forthright but plainspoken analytical look at it all from a safe and sane distance.

Above all, expect to be entertained. Welcome to my world, a a parallel dimension where the past is viewed through a funhouse mirror. Welcome to…the Dash Fire Diaries…

If you like what you see, subscribe.

Care to read a hilarious account of Theodore Roosevelt hunting Bigfoot? Find it here: https://www.amazon.com/Squabble-Titans-Recollections-Roosevelt-Rainforest/dp/B097X4R4LN