Once you go fiction, you can’t go back.

Award-winning Denver author Peter Heller lived a swashbuckling life as a nonfiction adventure and environmental writer before finally succumbing to the lifelong internal nudge to write novels.

“Once you start making it up, it’s tough to go back,” he said.

Heller spent two decades writing for Outside Magazine, Men’s Journal and National Geographic Adventure. Those stories, chronicling his adventures as an expedition kayaker around the world, as well as joining the crew of an eco-pirate ship headed to Antarctica to hunt down a deadly Japanese whaling fleet, spawned four nonfiction books, including the 2004 “Hell or High Water: Surviving Tibet’s Tsangpo River.”

And then he changed course.

“I had to make a living when I got out of college and journa

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