Write What You Know — And I Knew the Navy

There is a moment, standing on a bridge at sea in the middle of the night, when the weight of command settles on you like the salt air itself. The ship moves under your feet — not metaphorically, but literally — and you feel every degree of roll, every shudder of the screws. You know, without looking at a gauge, when something has changed. That is not knowledge you read in a book. That is knowledge that lives in your body.

Writers are told, endlessly, to write what you know. For twenty-eight years, I knew the Navy.

I commanded a ship. I handled them in narrow channels, through storms, in harbors that didn't forgive mistakes. I understood steam engineering — not from a manual, but from standing in an engine room. I navigated before GPS made it automatic. I served as operations officer, learning how a ship thinks and moves as a fighting system. I spent years in the Western Pacific, particularly in the Philippines and Indonesia, learning those waters the way you can only learn them by sailing them.

When I sat down to write a novel, all of that came with me.

The ship at the center of my series, USS Wichita, is an armored cruiser — still capable, but already being left behind by a Navy moving toward dreadnoughts and destroyers. I understood her instinctively, because I had commanded her equivalent: a vessel with history and purpose, doing the work that needed doing, while the future made other plans. That tension — between what a ship was built for and what the world now demands of her — is something only experience makes real on the page.

The Morse Chronicles is a naval fiction series set in the opening months of World War I, in the Southwest Pacific. But before it was a series, it was everything I had spent a career learning. The pages you will read were written by someone who has felt the sea move under his feet, who has stood watch in the dark, who knows what it means to be responsible for a ship and the men aboard her.

Some things you cannot research. You just have to know them.