Tell us about yourself and how many books you have written.
I am a former stealth and Predator pilot who now has four novels in print/audio—two from Berkley Books at Penguin and those books plus an additional two from Brilliance Audio. Though my career sort of pegs me as a military/espionage thriller guy, my favorite project was PIRATES: The Midnight Passage, a short novel now available from Brilliance Audio.
I earned my bachelors in Middle Eastern Studies from the US Air Force Academy. During my career, which is ongoing as a reserve Lieutenant Colonel, I flew the A-10 Warthog, the MQ-1 Predator, and the top secret B-2 Stealth Bomber, spending most of my time as a pilot liaison to the intelligence side of the house. I have been shot at, locked up with a surface to air missile and aided the capture of High Value Targets. Because of my experience and my clearances, everything I write about drones or stealth must get checked by the appropriate program security office before publication.
What is the name of your latest book and what inspired it?
Shadow Maker came out on 3 June 2014. This is my opus, so to speak—the reason I started the Nick Baron series in the first place. I knew that this story would be a great challenge, and an even greater challenge to get published, so I held it back, waiting to build the characters and build my own capabilities before tackling it. I hope that my patience will now pay off for the reader.
The challenge I laid out in Shadow Maker was threefold:
1. Follow the trail of dominoes triggered by collateral damage from a CIA drone strike, no matter where it lead me. What I found was that trail leading me back to the source of the strike, with some pretty ugly consequences.
2. Incorporate not one, but four escalating attacks, each of a different type (conventional, cyber, etc.). That is a broad scope and a lot of action for one book. I worked hard to bring it all together.
3. Wrap all of this into a chess match—a figurative game as well as an actual, no kidding game of chess—between the villain and the hero. In this chess match, the villain plays at such a level of genius that the hero cannot win, and knows it.
Do you have any unusual writing habits?
I walk. I cannot create while sitting in front of a computer, so I will take my phone (with its voice recording app) and walk for miles and miles. I will even walk in the rain, but when it is storming so much that I can’t, I’ll wander aimlessly about the house like a zombie. My children call this “think-walking” and know that if they speak to me, I will only mindlessly nod in response. The youngest takes advantage of this to acquire cookies—”I asked Dad. He said I could have one!”
What authors, or books have influenced you?
The blunt, yet biting wit of Mark Twain had an early influence on me with Tom and Huck and the Connecticut Yankee. Then I drifted into fantasy with C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, never really drifting out again. I read both series from start to finish every summer during my late elementary years, and have returned to them many times since. In middle-school I became enamored with Tom Clancy—like many in the mid ’80’s. I loved his descriptions of the tech. I loved the Cold War intrigue. The Air Force Academy, with its heavy engineering course load, sucked away all of my pleasure reading time, but after graduation, I discovered Clive Cussler. I can’t imagine a better dynamic between two characters than that between Dirk Pitt and Al Giordino. For me, Clive Cussler revealed that an adventure doesn’t have to take itself to seriously.
What are you working on now?
That’s highly classified. I will say that one project is a completely new series and another is a Christian discipleship program. That brings to mind something I failed to mention about my writing. It is clean. The Nick Baron series is secular, covert ops fiction, but it is free of foul language and sex. I want my sons to be able to read my work, and I want my work—even my secular work—to be a ministry that brings glory to God.
What is your best method or website when it comes to promoting your books?
I don’t think I have one. We all had Facebook, but it is rapidly going down the tubes. 3% of my fans see my posts as a baseline. If I get some likes and shares, that number bumps up, but not by much—maybe 10%. It is nothing like the good old days (aka less than two years ago). It used to be that you could run a photo contest or other promotion on Facebook and the natural traffic would boost your fan base and awareness of your book. Not anymore. You’ve got to pay for visibility no matter what, and even then my recent experience has shown that paid visibility goes to “like farms” despite demographic targeting to avoid them.
I am shifting hope, financing, and effort to the free Stealth Ops App. This is an app with great graphics that carries bonus stories that extend the books, character back-story, tech specs, mission maps, videos, etc. I want to give fans free content to expand the world of Nick Baron that I can’t give them in the books themselves. We’ll see what kind of response I get.
Do you have any advice for new authors?
Keep writing. Keep seeking critiques from objective sources. Listen to them—even that extremely brutal review from a reader on Amazon or Goodreads. We can always, ALWAYS be better.
What is the best advice you have ever heard?
Matthew 6:33 – But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.
We spend so much time in pursuit of what we want, rather than what we need.
What are you reading now?
The Mistborn series by Brian Sanderson.
What’s next for you as a writer?
Keep reading, keep writing. With Shadow Maker I completed a journey that I started more than a decade ago. Now it’s time to start a new journey, placing one foot in front of the other. Tolkien said it best: “It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.”
If you were going to be stranded on a desert island and allowed to take 3 or 4 books with you what books would you bring?
You ask the impossible. I would rather wait for such an event to occur and then play the cards I was dealt than choose at this moment. I absolutely MUST see a series through to completion and there are too many trilogies I love to choose from.
Wait… What about just one solar-powered Kindle?
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