Welcome Aboard!

Writing has always been an important part of my professional and personal life. In high school, I wrote for the school newspaper and won an award for a creative series about a girls’ sorority. In college, I majored in English and took one creative writing course that fulfilled an electives requirement. It did little more than provide entertainment for my fraternity brothers as I tried to capture ribald tales of college life. During my Navy career, non-fiction dominated with endless reports formatted with discreet data fields. There was little opportunity for creativity except for some naval-oriented articles that I prepared for professional journals and a number of book reviews on naval subjects published in local newspapers and magazines.

Following the Navy, I worked for a large defense contractor on a broad series of domestic and international business pursuits and remained wedded to  non-fiction. Proposals prepared for the US Government followed very specific requirements including page count, font, and art work. The ability to summarize and to offer crisp conclusions regarding the likelihood of selection in a competitive procurement served me well and were always valued by the company’s leadership, but creativity and imagination played isolated roles in the written business environment. So they were applied to formulating an attractive value proposition to answer a customer’s need.

My first novel, Half Staff 2018, was five years in the making, a story mostly written during long international flights. The story features multiple overseas venues easy to write about because I’d been there. Now that I’m fully retired, I am spending much more time as a husband, father, and grandfather, and my interest in writing has taken a new course. My writing sandbox is larger than ever before and there are no constraints. I can color anywhere- there are no lines. That’s why I’m currently writing a sequel to Half Staff 2018.

I appreciate your interest in my writing and my protagonist, Dan Steele. My commitment to the reader is to create an interesting look into the near future based on my knowledge of how things work in the world and to craft a story that can transport the reader to a world full of imaginary challenges that will intrigue, excite and in some cases, frighten. I hope that you’ll enjoy the stories as much as I enjoy writing them. Writing in the thriller genre is an exciting vocation that stimulates my creative thinking.

One final note. My motto is “Feedback is the Breakfast of Better Writers”,and I would value your thoughts and recommendations for my plots and characters. Feel free to drop me a line here. 

Sincerely,

John P. Morse