An Official Dana Stabenow Email
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Scott Kelly spent a year in orbit.

I and a million others have been following astronaut Scott Kelly's tweets from the ISS over the last year. He got back last Tuesday, but he took some spectacular photos of good old Planet Earth while on orbit. You can drool over them as long as this link stays live, which I am hoping is forever.

 
 
 

Marco Polo spent twenty years in China.

Marco Polo spent twenty years in China and by his own account he loved the ladies. He had to have left some seed scattered around and I wondered what happened to those kids. The Silk and Song trilogy, including the three titles below, is the story of one of them.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Speaking of orbits...

...did you know my first published novel was science fiction? (I know, contain your shock, my writing life did not begin with Kate.)

I wrote this first book in response to the Challenger blowing up, a story about a space program that worked. Rage is a great motivator.

The excerpt below features Star's first meeting with Caleb.

 
 
 

I pulled myself down via the handholds and the three other passengers followed me out. One of them was a big dark man in a scruffy gray flightsuit too short for his arms and legs and too tight in the butt. He had yet to learn that you don’t use your legs in zerogee and he kept getting tangled up with himself and anything else that got in his way. It’s always a surprise to me how much one human being can fill up an entire cargo bay, if the cargo bay is on Ellfive and the human being is an Ellfive cheechako. He looked like he was headed for Neptune when one of the longshoremen finally took pity on him and took him in tow with a boathook.

 

Can America find Alaska?

As an Alaskan it always irritates the hell out of me when people show maps of the US excluding Alaska and Hawaii (or maroon us off the coast of California, I don't know which is worse). As in The Atlantic's March cover, which moved me to tweet thusly.

 
 
 
 
 

Kate Update

I'm working on Kate21, tentatively titled Less Than a Treason, from the Robert Frost poem, Reluctance.

It's been a difficult shift from 1422 to 2016, one word painfully extruded at a time, but I can tell you that... orienteers will be involved.

While you wait, follow The History of Kate Shugak in 20 Objects. It's a monthly blog post featuring one item from the featured novel chosen by the fans. Click here for March.

 
 
 
 

Headed for Panama

I'm headed for Panama at the end of the month to transit the Canal. It's something I almost got to do when I was on a ridealong on USCGC Munro during an EPAC (Eastern Pacific) patrol.

Read all about it here, including the time I got to fly on the helo (whee!) and the time I ran into the ship with my head (which I incorporated into the book I got out of it. Twice.)

 
 
 
 
 

Last and best of all...

Nikolai Buser is up and walking, hooray! Oooh, and he got lumpia for dinner. Lucky guy, in more ways than one. Share the link below all over the place, would you? His medical bills are going to be astronomical.