HIGH IMPACT: Laguna Beach author Theodore Taylor...

HIGH IMPACT: Laguna Beach author Theodore Taylor has been haunted for nearly 50 years. As a Navy deck officer in 1946, he witnessed two nuclear bomb explosions on the Pacific’s Bikini Atoll. His new young adult novel “The Bomb” (Harcourt Brace) is loosely based on the incident. . . . A half-century later, Taylor says, the surviving displaced islanders and their families remain “nuclear nomads.” “I delayed damned near a year [to write the book]. I have a certain amount of guilt over what happened at Bikini,” he says. Last week, the book earned the Scott O’Dell Award, a nationwide prize for historical fiction written for young adults. Says Taylor: “The nice thing is, it came with a $5,000 check.”

BIG BLOW: A williwaw--a violent wind that comes out of nowhere--has a starring role in Colin Kersey’s debut novel, “Soul Catcher” (St. Martin’s Press), a Seattle-set supernatural thriller. . . . The wind, summoned by an Indian shaman who is murdered by street punks, wreaks havoc. “It literally becomes the protagonist,” says Kersey of Huntington Beach. “Having grown up in the Seattle area, it was great fun destroying part of the city.”

BYE BYE: Best-selling author Nancy Taylor Rosenberg has sold her home in Laguna Niguel and moved to rural Tuxedo Park, N.Y., north of Manhattan. . . . “It’s a good place to write,” says Rosenberg. “I was a little scared of the earthquakes, to tell you the truth.” Rosenberg returns to Orange County on Jan. 25 to sign her latest legal thriller, “Trial by Fire,” at Rizzoli in South Coast Plaza.

ON SITE: In 1991, G. Pat Macha of Huntington Beach turned his hobby of identifying and documenting downed aircraft into a book, “Aircraft Wrecks in the Mountains and Deserts of California.” . . . Now comes his how-to video, “Wreck Finding.” Macha says “aircraft archeology” is growing in popularity. “It’s like finding old shipwrecks,” he says. “It enables us to see the technology of the past. It’s incredible how far we’ve come in a few years.”