E. C. (Gene) Ayres Blogspot

 I am in Florida now, revisiting my old home turf, where I raised my son, and wrote my five Florida-based mystery novels, including my newest novel, RED TIDE . The weather has been weird, just as it has been weird in Seattle, now my primary residence. Seattle has been experiencing the hottest summer in recent history, unprecedented DROUGHT , and this following a winter with the lowest snowfall on record: only 16% of normal snowpack in the Cascade mountain range last winter. Meanwhile Florida is under an almost constant threat of flooding, which is occurring in the Tampa Bay area, where I stay, on an almost daily basis. Several rivers in the area have flooded to the point that hundreds of people have had to evacuate their homes, and there is no end in sight. Back when I first started writing my Tony Lowell Mystery series, beginning in the 1990s, Seattle had the wettest CLIMATE in America, and summer weather in Tampa Bay (or in St. Petersburg, where I lived) was actua...

For those of us who live near the Coast—any coast—the latest news, on top of continents of plastic waste, oil spills, and the kind of criminal chemical dumping I wrote about in my latest eco-thriller, REDTIDE , is disturbing: scientists have now discovered a mysterious warming trend in both the Atlantic and Pacific. We are already experiencing weird weather. Last winter's snowfall in Boston was unprecedented. On the West Coast, California continues into the 4 th year of it's terrible drought . And this drought his now spread north all the way to Seattle and beyond. Seattle, my current home, has long been known for being wet. Not any more. This past winter the Cascade Mountains received only 16% of it's normal snowfall, which needless to say decimated the ski industry. The farms in the dry agricultural regions east of the Cascades are starving for water, and there has been almost no rainfall since winter. What more do we need to know--to do--before it's too ...

There were three extremely disturbing stories in the news this morning, and none had anything to do with Libya, or Obama, or deficits (at least fiscal ones) or our disfunctional Congress. What they had a lot more to do with was the End of Civilization as we know it. To wit: the Philadelphia Orchestra is bankrupt. That is huge, and utterly inexcusable to be allowed to happen in any society that still imagines itself to be advanced. On a lesser scale, but equally significant, here in Seattle two similar cultural decisions have been reached: to close down the Intiman Theater, arguably the finest repertory company on the West Coast; and on a smaller, but perhaps even more significant scale, Nordstroms is firing all its piano players. No, not because they are too costly, or not gifted enough, or destract shoppers from their mission. No, it's because today's shoppers, it turns out, pefer canned pop music to live piano. So I think it wouldn't be too much of a reach to say that to...

A friend of mine works at NOAA, at their main research facility in Seattle. Or at least she will until Friday. Seattle happens to be the closest American city to Asia, as well as the devastating turmoil in Japan, where radioactive water continues to flow into the Pacific, and radiation into the air, all of which, sooner or later, will circumnavigate the globe. Already, low levels (so we are told) of radiation are turning up in both air and water in such unlikely places as Boise, Idaho, and Boston, Massachusetts. But no matter. Nothing to worry about, right? Except, well, maybe a little something called 'nuclear winter.' Which we may be having already in the Northwest, actually, since we have hardly seen the sun in six months, and then only on the cold days. Oh, and NOAA is also charged with trying to figure out whether the Gulf of Mexico is still alive, given most of its creatures are not; or, like the dolphins off Florida, are in the process of dying horrible deaths. But no ma...

Last Friday evening I attended a concert at Benaroya Hall in Seattle, where I live, and as I occasionally am wont to do. It was an old favorite, a Romantic paen, the ultimate Classical performance piece: Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1. The guest conductor was a young Spaniard, Pablo Heras-Casado, and the performer was an Englishman, multi-award winner, named Stephen Hough. It was a perfect performance, and as always, powerful experience. But I am not a music critic, per se, other than at my own personal level. But I come from a musical family, have grown up with and lived with music all of my life, been a musician of sorts myself, and music remains my first love. As an author, I am best gifted, for better or worse, at composing with words. Words are a wonderful tool and thing, however often disparaged by the linguistically challenged (George W. Bush and Sarah Palin come to mind),and the English language is the compendium of all languages. But the spoken language still cannot st...