The Historian Who Needed a Story

For most of my adult life, I was a writer — just not a novelist.

I earned a doctorate in government, spent years as both an amateur and a professional historian and political scientist, and eventually published an academic book called The Soldier Vote, an examination of military absentee voting in American history. I wrote in the careful, footnoted, evidence-bound language of scholarship. I knew how to research. I knew how to argue. What I had not yet learned was how to inhabit the past rather than simply describe it.

The difference matters more than it might seem.

A historian reconstructs events. The job is accuracy — to establish what happened, in what order, for what reasons, with what consequences. The evidence constrains you, as it should. You follow the record wherever it leads.

A historical novelist does something different. The record becomes a framework, and within that framework you place human beings — specific, breathing, fallible people — and ask what it felt like to live through events that history remembers only in the aggregate. The novelist's job is not to contradict the record but to inhabit it. The research has to be invisible; the story has to carry the weight.

The idea for the Morse Chronicles arrived in late 2025, after I had spent months on a technical writing project related to my amateur radio station. When I finished, I felt the pull toward something different — not a report, not a monograph, not another careful argument for a scholarly audience. I wanted to write a story.

My historian's instincts did not disappear. If anything, they became more useful. The meticulous research habits I developed over decades now serve the fiction. The details I uncover — the exact weather off the Sumatran coast on a given day in August 1914, the specifications of a wireless transmitter, the administrative structure of a Dutch colonial port — all of it goes into the novel, not as footnotes, but as texture. The story breathes because the history is real.

The Morse Chronicles is history that moves. The research is invisible, as it should be. The story is what you will remember.