Frequently Asked Questions

For genre: 

Writings-fiction: espionage, fiction-war, 20th Cent. historical fiction

Writings-nonfiction: excellently-written nonfiction history, politics, economics, and organizational & behavioral sociology. I actually enjoy a good textbook every now and again. Yes, I know: snore, snore. Whatever.

Watching: espionage, some war (not most), and historical dramas (especially a deep documentary that dispels myths and reveals truth without being propagandistic)

For specific works, I define 'like" as I have read/watched them waaaaay more than ten times but also, here, I draw meaning from them or a deeper understanding of humans interacting with other humans under duress. Especially situations that pit human wisdom or revelation against status quo thinking and behavior which drives conflict. #storyofmylifedontaskmywife

My fav books: 

Dune by Frank Herbert

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John LeCarre

Our Game by John LeCarre

Paradise Lost by John Milton

Divine Comedy by Dante Aligheri

The Holy Bible. God. Period.

My fav movies:

Star Wars (Episode IV)(1977)

Lawrence of Arabia (1962)

Dune (2022)

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (2011)

The Big Short (2015)

Margin Call (2011)

Valkyrie (2008)

My fav TV series:

Person of Interest (2011-2016)

White Collar (2009-2014)

The West Wing (1999-2006)

The Chosen (2017-?)

The movie in my head has been the most emotional cinematic masterpiece I have ever watched. I think I've watched that show almost as many times as I have seen Star Wars (Episode IV) by George Lucas or read Dune by Frank Herbert. It existed before I wrote anything down, and it plays over and over whenever I think about my stories.

As a retired military officer and former defense strategist, I have 30+ years of professional technical and academic writing about very specific, niche issues as well as broad-stroke documents that described my assessments of global issues and factors. I still do some of that, and perhaps there will one day be a nonfiction book with my name on it. But my heart has very much been in written adventure stories since I was young. My first novel, Deep in the Place of the Dead, took me exactly seven years and two months to make real. My stories are very real to me -- either drawn from real life experiences where the memories remain deeply visceral or writing down the movie that played in my head repeatedly.

Ha! I am a process guy but, in my writing, I have yet to discover my "process." I'll try to describe here...

I love knowing history and so I love research. Perhaps too much? I put at least a thousand hours of research into the Deep in the Place of the Dead story and world building. This story setting is precisely where I patrolled with my light infantry platoon for the majority of 1997. The hills, the valleys, rivers, villages, and people groups -- and their animosities -- all originate from the mountains surrounding the Tuzla valley in NE Bosnia-Herzegovina (in the former Yugoslavia). The historical aspects of the German army, the SS, the Ustasha forces, the communist Partisans and their British Special Operations Executive (SOE) and American Office of Strategic Services (OSS) liaison teams are all from the sad and terrible reality of German occupation of Yugoslavia from 1941-1944. 

Then, built upon the foundation of that historical reality, I weave my characters and my situations throughout, modifying both the settings and characters as I go. Having spent years upon years overseas watching people respond to crises, I know that people are inextricably enmeshed in their social and physical environments. It forms their perceived range of options; it drives their behaviors. It causes people to unwittingly take actions that perpetuate their conditions. Only the true visionaries have a chance of escape. and some of them actually do survive. I try to transmit that understanding in my writing (fiction and nonfiction).

I write in ebbs and flows. I know what the "experts" say: write every day. I try. I cannot. I have too many things going on to do that. There have been periods where I will write for days and nights. and entire months when I barely touch the manuscript. My best and most productive moments in writing come from my "writing retreats" where I go away for several days (real time) and live in my hero's head for weeks and weeks of story-time. In those surge periods, I have had difficulty coming back to current reality. Some form of brain fog keeps me confused. it takes a day or two to fully come back to my time zone (like a form of story jet lag).

After the research, if there is a "process" then it would be this: I write the movie in my head when I cannot contain it, and then the characters fight to get out of the boxes I created for them because they will not be contained, either.

After that, I pay money to editors to give them the authority to criticize my efforts, tell me what's wrong with me (since I cannot separate myself from my writing), and then to kill my best darlings, to use the editorial parlance. Some of my favorite scenes no longer exist in my story, including scenes I cried over while I wrote them.*

Well, once I have the complete full, multi-format publication process behind me, I will learn the distribution and marketing processes (learn as I go), so that begins a steady-state "do-watch-learn-modify-to-do-better" cycle which I will apply to future books as well. An audiobook version of Deep in the Place of the Dead will follow relatively soon.

That said, the first draft of Book Two in the House of Broken Crowns is already underway. I will NOT (repeat NOT) take another seven years to knock this one out. I'm shooting for Christmas, 2024, which means more likely Spring, 2025.  

Book Three (draft 1) of the HOBC series is in concept phase. My teaser for the whole HOBC series is that the Second World War might have turned out very differently for the USA had my hero not taken the actions and formed the relationships he does.

Next (also in concept phase) are two novels based very loosely on my experiences during the invasions of Afghanistan (Autumn, 2001) and Iraq (Spring, 2003). There will also be another book about Iraq, but much later in the war (~2010-11). A romance, perhaps? 

Lastly, I have already begun a serialized story about a fictional war in a fictionalized land which is very near and dear to my heart. More to follow.

*you can find most of those scenes and other cuts and excerpts on the Extras page.