I proposed to my wife at a Wendy’s on the third date and married her two days later. If you take one piece of advice from this entire story, let it be this: don’t get married on the third date.

But that’s later. To understand how I ended up writing over 100 books, turning down an FBI informant, and photographing 50 mermaids in a Las Vegas casino, you need to start where I started, in a house where the safest thing a kid could do was stop breathing.

The House

I was born blue. My mother’s Rh factor had turned her womb into a war zone, and I arrived at Travis Air Force Base already dying. They drained my blood and replaced it. My older sister Debbie had died at nine months in the Philippines, and my mother carried that grief and me back to the States on a cargo plane. My father had been an Air Force radio operator before he became a graphics artist at Norton Air Force Base in San Bernardino. He was talented. He was also dangerous.

The living room smelled like cigarettes. My father kept the TV loud. If my parents were arguing, which was most nights, the trick was to be furniture. Don’t move. Don’t speak. Because if you opened your mouth, you became the reason they were fighting. You became the target.

He was a narcissist and physically violent. If I cried, he hit me. “I’ll give you a reason to cry, son.” He hit me with a two-by-four once. He told me he owned me, that I was his property. So I learned to be small and invisible. If I didn’t talk, I didn’t get hurt. That wasn’t introversion. That was how you stayed alive in that house. When I came out of his room with blood on my shirt, my mother was at the stove. She looked at me and said, “Go clean yourself up. Dinner’s almost ready.” Then: “Forget about it. Never happened.”

Both parents were narcissists. They taught me that Black people would kill you, Mexicans were dangerous, and Mormons eat babies. Then desegregation busing happened, and one morning I climbed onto a school bus and sat down next to a Black kid. I was ten years old and shaking. I looked at his face. He was more scared of me than I was of him. We became best friends. He kept bullies from beating me up. I did his homework. Out of every friendship from that whole stretch of my childhood, his is the only one I remember. I don’t even remember his name. I just remember that he showed up, and that was enough.

I walked two miles to school every morning and got beat up every afternoon. I was the nerd, the science guy, skinny. I asked my parents for help. They told me it was my imagination, in spite of the blood on my shirt. I finally fought back one day. I lost badly and came home looking worse than usual. But the bully never touched me again. He knew it wasn’t going to be free anymore.

I ran away from home around age eight. Announced it to my mother and everything. She laughed and made me lunch. I got maybe a mile before I turned around and walked back, because my sister was still in that house. I protected her through all of it. She runs a science education nonprofit now that’s reached over 325,000 kids. I left home for good at 19 with a U-Haul full of junk and no plan.

The Fire

Here’s the thing about a childhood like that. It either buries you or it sets something on fire that nobody can put out. Every person who tells you “you can’t” becomes kindling.

I was five years old when I fell in love with an illustrated copy of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, the original versions, not the watered-down ones most people read today. My mother noticed and eventually dragged me into a local library against my protests. A librarian gave me a cookie and a tour, and suddenly I found a world far bigger than the one I knew.

The librarians gave me stamps for every book I finished, little gold spiders, then scorpions. I was reading a book a day. Fifty years later, I still have the stamp page. I don’t remember the librarians who gave me candy. I remember the ones who gave me stamps.

My grandmother’s storage boxes delivered Stranger in a Strange Land and The Astounding Science Fiction Anthology into my hands, and those cemented my love of science fiction. I read Stranger in a Strange Land four times. One day at a swap meet I found a magazine called Fantastic Stories that introduced me to Jack Vance, and I was gone. A neighbor named Lola, she must have been in her 70s, had turned her house into a botanical wonderland and kept an incredible rock collection. She introduced me to geology over turquoise and petrified wood and conversations where my questions actually mattered. For a while I thought that was where my life was headed. I still have the rock collection. It’s crystals now.

A college teacher told me I was a terrible writer with no hope of improving. “Go do something else.” I listened to that man for decades and didn’t become a writer until my fifties. One sentence from one person, and it cost me 30 years. (The full story of how I became a writer.)

My first job at 17 was night manager at a liquor store in Lake Arrowhead, run by a gruff man who claimed to be a former U-boat captain, rigid and exacting, the kind of man who could make you feel measured just by the way he looked at you. Every employee before me quit. I lasted two years. When I finally asked him why, he studied me for a long moment and said, “Because you’re competent.”

The Machines

Instead of writing, I went into technology. It was 1980. (I wrote about those early days of computing in detail.) The machines filled rooms. Hard drives the size of washing machines that held 5MB. I worked on PDP-11 and VAX systems, fed them punch cards and paper tape in rooms that hummed with warm electronics and smelled like ozone. I did networking work on ARPANET before the internet had a name anyone outside a lab would recognize.

By 1981, a college teacher approached me to start a company, and suddenly I was a VP making $50,000 a year in my early twenties. That infuriated my parents. They wanted me to get a degree. My sister got the MBA. I got the paycheck.

Then came Trader Joe’s, and I stayed for twenty years. The store was the center of everything, and my job was to make sure the technology never let the store down. I ran their computer department, built private clouds, led digital transformation twice. The first time I dragged them from paper records into something that vaguely resembled modern technology. The second time I brought them the rest of the way. I handled PCI compliance, which felt like sitting through an IRS exam while someone held a stopwatch and checked 300 points at once, pass every single one or fail. I managed two help desks and kept 1,500 desktop systems running across 330-something stores. Christmas was the crucible, three times normal volume, and the pressure sat on your chest like a weight. If one register hiccupped in one store in the middle of a holiday rush, you felt it. It was always the store.

I hired veterans. Ex-special forces, ex-Marines, active reservists during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. My boss pulled me aside one afternoon. “Why are you hiring veterans? Why aren’t you hiring normal people?” I didn’t blink. “Because they get things done.” My grandfather survived four years in a Japanese POW camp. He didn’t make it through alone. They leaned on each other, looked out for each other, kept each other alive. I learned that from his story, and I built every team the same way. We once moved a half-ton server cabinet while 300 systems were live. Balloons, straps, and contraptions rigged up on the spot, and we didn’t lose a second of downtime. My boss wouldn’t set foot in the room.

Then one day they told me I couldn’t be CIO because I didn’t have a degree. My boss, who had a music degree, sat across the table and said it like it was reasonable. Twenty years of keeping the whole operation running, and it came down to a piece of paper I didn’t have. I cleaned out my desk.

That same boss had once told me, “You’ll never make as much money somewhere else. You should stay here.” Keep that in mind, because it comes back.

Claudia

Before the writing saved me, I needed saving.

I met Claudia at church. She was Guatemalan, beautiful and complicated and nothing like me in any way that mattered for a marriage. By the third date we were sitting in a Wendy’s and something in me decided this was it. I proposed over fast food. She thought I was kidding. I wasn’t. We tried to pull off a wedding that same day, but two of my best friends showed up and objected right in the middle of the ceremony. “They don’t even know each other!” The wedding got called off on the spot. Two days later, after some groveling on my part, we had a potluck wedding surrounded by friends, food, and more laughter than any ceremony that almost didn’t happen probably deserves.

We had nothing in common on paper. I said what I meant. She spoke in silences and half-sentences and expected me to decode them. But Claudia was funny in a way that caught you off guard, vibrant in a way that filled a room, and tougher than anyone I’ve ever met. She could make me laugh when I didn’t think I had it in me. For a while, that was enough. She cooked Guatemalan food that could bring tears to your eyes, argued with the television like it could hear her, and loved harder than she knew how to say out loud. The problem wasn’t that we didn’t care about each other. The problem was that caring wasn’t the same thing as understanding.

When I asked her what was wrong, she said “fine.” It was always fine. Fine is the doom word in a marriage, the one that sounds like an answer but is really a locked door. Behind it, resentment was building in rooms I wasn’t allowed to enter.

She told me about the affair over dinner, the way you’d mention a change in the weather, and said she didn’t care what I thought about it. Her son came into my life at 14, angry from day one, fatherless since early childhood, and I was the stranger in the house he never asked for. We tried counseling. Claudia sat in the therapist’s chair with her arms crossed, there under protest, answering in monosyllables. The counselor looked back and forth between us like someone watching a language she didn’t speak.

WWE wrestling was our one shared interest. Monday nights, Claudia on the couch, screaming at the screen, standing up when someone got thrown into the turnbuckle, forgetting for a couple of hours that we were two people who couldn’t figure out how to be married. Those were the good nights.

Then she got sick, a few years into the marriage. Asthma, COPD, two packs a day catching up to her, and an opioid addiction that wrapped itself around everything else. The apartment closed in. I learned to do her IVs, sat with her while the drugs dripped, changed her leg dressings in the early mornings when the light was gray and the apartment smelled like antiseptic and stale sheets. She went into the hospital nine times. Nine comas. One lasted 27 days. Her mother died during that coma, and when Claudia finally opened her eyes, I had to be the one to tell her.

The apartment became a medical ward. We were locked in together, her in the sick bed, me running the IVs twice a day and then driving to Trader Joe’s to work 60-hour weeks. I’d come home late, check her breathing, change whatever needed changing, and fall asleep in a chair. The whole place smelled like rubbing alcohol and something underneath it that I tried not to name. It just got worse and worse. There was no getting better. There was only slower or faster.

I didn’t leave. Not because we’d found our way back to each other. Not because things were good. Because you don’t walk away from someone who can’t get out of bed. I stayed out of honor. Out of the simple, stubborn refusal to be the kind of man who leaves.

She passed away in 2005. We’d been married 12 and a half years.

The first thing I felt was relief. I was glad it was over. And then, almost immediately, the guilt for feeling glad hit me like a wall. How do you grieve someone when your first honest emotion is thank God? You cycle. Relief, guilt, sadness, guilt about the sadness, anger at yourself for the relief. Round and round, for years.

I couldn’t cry. My father had beaten that reflex out of me before I was old enough to understand what tears were for. For two weeks I moved through my days like concrete, heavy and blank. Then my cat died. I was sitting in a business meeting, fluorescent lights, bad coffee, strangers around a table, and something in my chest just cracked open. I sobbed in front of people I barely knew, over a cat, because the grief for my wife had been sealed in a room with no door and the cat dying blew the hinges off.

After that, I’d drive to the arboretum and sit on a bench under the trees and talk to Claudia out loud when nobody was around. Just the smell of eucalyptus and damp earth and the sound of birds that didn’t care about anything I was saying. Grief doesn’t leave on a schedule. It inches away, comes back, inches away again. Nine years before it finally let go.

People told me to sit with my grief, explore it, let it in. That’s a bunch of hooey. That would be like inviting your drunk uncle to a dinner party and wondering why the silverware’s missing. Grief is your enemy. You don’t invite it home. You get out. Go where there are people, trees, moving air. If you sit in a dark room watching TV, grief eats you alive. I watched too many people curl up into a ball and disappear.

The Camera

I picked up a camera a couple of months before Claudia passed. Not because I cared about photography. Because I was so painfully shy that “Can I take your picture?” was the only sentence I could push past my teeth to start a conversation with another human being.

I started at Joshua Tree. The desert at dawn, when the light turns pink and the rocks throw long shadows and everything is so quiet you can hear your own pulse. I hiked there about 60 times. One morning I lost my footing on a shale slope and slid 200 feet, grabbing at whatever I could. What I grabbed was a cactus, spines through both hands, and they had to send a rescue crew to get me out. Another day in Death Valley, I opened the car door and the thermometer read 137 degrees. The air hit me like the inside of an oven. I pulled the door shut.

Then a belly dancer named Marjhani changed everything.

I was at a Renaissance Faire, standing alone with my camera near a stage, trying to look like I belonged there. She walked straight up to me, piercings and tattoos and absolutely fearless. “You’re real shy. Who are you?” She hugged me before I could answer and started introducing me to every dancer within shouting distance. My hands were shaking. My stomach was in knots. “Oh my god,” I kept thinking. “Oh my god.” My whole life cracked open that afternoon.

Over the next eight years I became the belly dance photographer for Southern California. Twelve hundred live performances. Over 300 Renaissance fairs. Fifteen hundred women photographed. I shot masquerade balls in Hollywood where chandeliers threw gold light across rooms full of people in velvet and feathers. I was the photographer at the first World Mermaid Beauty Pageant in Las Vegas: 50 mermaids, two supermodels, sequins catching the casino light from every angle. I covered wrestling matches where the crowd noise rattled my teeth, circuses that smelled like sawdust and popcorn, salsa and ballroom events where the bass hit you in the chest before you even walked through the door. Over a million photographs across eight years. I was working 80-hour weeks: Trader Joe’s by day, shows at night, flying to different states on weekends. I lived in Hollywood for a while, one block from a war zone in either direction. One evening I sat on my front step and talked to a Crips gang member for two hours while the street got dark around us. We just talked.

My best friend Jannah was the one who truly broke me open. I met her at a tribal fusion show. She was goofing around in the front row, and something about her energy made it impossible to stay locked inside myself. We went to the Grand Canyon together. She danced on the rim in a belly dance outfit at five degrees Fahrenheit, right on the edge of a 4,000-foot drop, and a crowd gathered to watch. A ranger walked over and threatened a $300 fine, then looked at the cold and let it slide. When she stopped dancing, the sweat froze on her skin. The light was turning gold over the canyon. I shot about 2,000 photos. Still the best work I’ve ever done.

I used to pair strangers at Renaissance fairs for romantic photos and mail them the pictures afterward. I wonder how many marriages I was responsible for.

I threw birthday parties every year, rented community centers, and packed a hundred to 300 dancers into the space over two nights, with Renaissance reenactors performing alongside them. The dress-up room looked like a glitter bomb went off: sequins and scarves and eyeliner everywhere, the air thick with hairspray and perfume and laughter. I produced a dozen shows and built hundreds of friendships. The real conversations happened in the makeup room, where dancers sat for an hour doing their faces and told me things they probably didn’t tell anyone else. I was the photographer, and I guess that made me safe.

After 1,200 shoots, I didn’t need the camera as an excuse anymore. I’m still an introvert. But I’m not shy. It took a long time and a lot of patient people to learn the difference.

I got tattoos in Beverly Hills after Claudia passed, a phoenix for change and a dragon for myself. The artist was a guy named Zulu who sponsored dance shows. Zulu had a rule: wait one year. If you still want it after a year, he’ll do it. I waited, and I still wanted it. I sat in the chair for eight hours straight, the buzz of the needle the only sound in the room, while my best friend, a Bharatanatyam dancer, kept her one promise: to laugh every time I screamed. Orange ink burned the worst. Green I barely felt.

I survived the Northridge earthquake. The house lurched sideways and everything came down. Car alarms screaming. Transformers blowing in blue flashes. Pools sloshing over their edges. Windows shattering one after another down the block like a chain of firecrackers. It sounded like a freight train tearing through the neighborhood. I ended up barefoot on the front lawn in the dark, holding a fire extinguisher, my dogs pressed against my legs, staring up at a sky full of stars that nobody in Los Angeles had seen in decades because the power was out for miles in every direction.

During a forest fire near Lake Arrowhead, flames closed in on all four sides of my car. I was maybe 20. I remember the heat through the glass and the orange light filling the windshield and the clear, calm thought: I’m dead. Then a fireman knocked on my window, climbed in, and radioed for a helicopter to drop water directly on top of us. I took CERT training twice after that. I keep five five-gallon water bottles and MREs in my house. In an 8.0, nobody’s coming for a while.

Florida

I left California in 2013. Timed my departure for my birthday, threw one last party with the dancers, and the next morning climbed into a moving van with Mira Devi, a Bharatanatyam dancer from Sri Lanka who flat-out refused to let me make that drive alone. We crossed the desert and Texas and the long flat nothing of the Gulf Coast, eating bad diner food and talking about everything and nothing, the kind of road conversation that only happens when neither person is in a hurry. When Thanksgiving came a few weeks later, she made me a vegan turkey in my new kitchen in Clearwater. I ate it and didn’t complain.

Clearwater was quiet. That’s what I needed. California runs at a sprint. Everyone is going somewhere, doing something, late for something else. Florida barely jogs. The pace slows down, the air gets heavy, and the beach is right there whenever you need it. My house backs up to a lake with alligators. Two of them showed up on my porch after a hurricane, just sitting there like they owned the place. A bobcat was in the tree. That’s Florida.

I needed income. I started selling things on eBay. Old books, collectibles, whatever I could find that someone else would want. Made $35,000 in a year. One set of old books went for $10,000, and eBay called me every single day until I shipped it. Apparently they’d never seen someone sit on a sale that size. I just hadn’t found the right box yet.

I tried affiliate marketing for a while. The money was decent if you didn’t think too hard about what you were doing. I thought too hard about it, decided it was scummy, and walked away.

Then I joined writing critique groups. That’s where things shifted. I’d sit in a circle with other writers and read my work out loud, and for the first time since that college teacher told me I had no talent, people said it was good. One of them was a ghostwriter. He listened to a few of my pieces, pulled me aside, and offered me a job. A thousand dollars a book. I did the math later. About $3 an hour. But I didn’t care. Someone was paying me to write. I showed up every day, turned in clean work, learned the craft from the inside.

Then that boss sat me down and told me I’d never make it on my own. Said it like he was doing me a favor.

Two bosses, same line. You’d think people would learn. I eventually wrote a whole book about it: My Boss is Insane.

I quit. Within 48 hours I had a $15,000 cybersecurity contract (which led to writing Family Cybersecurity and other security books) and a $10,000 novel deal. Forty-plus years after falling in love with Grimm’s Fairy Tales and devouring every book in the library, I was finally doing the thing. (Why I became a ghostwriter.)

Other People’s Stories

My first independent project felt like holding someone else’s nightmare in my hands. An Afghan politician who’d built all the roads in Afghanistan. He fled during the 1970s coup on a phone call that said nothing but “Leave now.” Crossed the Durand Line into Pakistan with $1,000 from the bank and the clothes on his back. Ten thousand skeletons were later found in the prison where he would have ended up. We sat across a table from each other for 12 hours, a broken English interpreter between us, the air heavy with the weight of what he was trying to say and what language couldn’t carry. He flew back to Afghanistan the next day. I never heard from him again.

That was over a decade ago. Since then I’ve ghostwritten 52 books and published 63 of my own, with 45-plus handbooks and two full courses written in 90 days. I charge a dollar a word. And I make more now than I ever did running computers for Trader Joe’s.

A 76-year-old woman named Doris called me one day. She’d spent her entire life writing down her dreams by hand, night after night, decade after decade. The stack of paper was five feet high. She wanted a novel and gave me free reign. I turned those dreams into “Gaters in the Soup” and mailed her a copy. When she held it, she went quiet for a long time. Turned it over in her hands. Then she said, “This is almost as good as when my daughter was born.” Doris died from COVID. That book is still on Amazon. She’s still in it.

My first real client wanted to be seen by the CEO at a Fortune 50 company, not to sell a book but to be seen. The book earned him a foreword from the CEO, a promotion, a raise, and speaking invitations. He went on to raise over $30 million in venture capital and launch his own company off what we built together. He does keynotes at $20,000 a pop now. I wrote that man’s entire future, and his name is on the cover.

I ghostwrote science fiction for a famous rock star who had a passion for everything, all over the place, a different obsession every morning, and my job was to sit with him until we found the one that could hold a whole book. I’ve written memoirs for battered women who wanted the world to know what happened behind closed doors. I wrote a book for a car dealer about how car dealers rip you off, and now it sits behind his desk. Customers walk in, see it, and the whole dynamic shifts before he says a word. Every one of those books, no matter how different, started with the same question.

“What emotion do you want the reader to have when they close this book?”

Then I ask it for every chapter: angry at the end of two, hopeful at three, heartbroken at six. I build each chapter to land on that feeling like a plane touching a runway. That’s the difference between a book that sits on a shelf and one that changes someone’s life.

The Lines I Won’t Cross

A confidential FBI informant sat across from me and laid out a plan to write a tell-all exposing the mafia, every name and every operation. I looked at him and said no. You can’t spend money if you have a bullet in your brain.

That wasn’t the only time I’ve walked away from money that didn’t feel right. A client once wanted me to ghostwrite a book designed to destroy someone’s reputation. The facts might have been true, but the intent was revenge, and revenge books poison everything they touch, the writer included. I told him to find someone else. He did. The book sank without a trace.

I turned down a $200,000 contract for nine books because something in the client’s emails made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. Every time I’ve ignored that feeling, I’ve paid for it. I don’t do revenge memoirs. I don’t do academic ghostwriting, which is flat-out unethical. One woman’s parents had sold her into slavery at age 14. She wanted her story told. I wanted to tell it. But the weight of it was more than I could carry to the end, and I had to walk away. I reject more contracts than I take. I sleep fine.

How I Work

Every project starts the same way, not with writing but with listening. A hundred to 150 questions over a few weeks, just the two of us and a recording app. What drives you? What scares you? What do you need the world to know? I’m digging for the thing underneath the thing. That process is what ghostwriting storytelling really looks like. Most ghostwriters want facts with some emotion stirred in. I want the raw nerve.

A cleaning franchise client hired me. Any other ghostwriter would have written a book about cleaning. I wrote about how cleaning fits into the mess of real people’s actual lives. A French SVP at a Fortune 50 company wanted a book about the Internet of Things. I didn’t write a tech manual. I wrote a warning about what happens to companies that don’t adapt, with Sears and Kmart as the cautionary tales. The rock star had a passion for everything. I found the one that could hold 60,000 words.

I write chapter by chapter, sending each one for review as I go. I don’t vanish for a year and show up at the end with a finished manuscript. A project takes six months to a year. I juggle four to six books at the same time, 500 words a day per book, switching between them in 45-minute blocks with breaks to stand up and move because if you sit all day your back goes and your eyes go and your brain goes into the screen and doesn’t come back. Mornings and late evenings are my best hours. Midday in Florida, the heat presses down like a wet blanket and fighting it is pointless, so I nap.

I use dictation and can hit 5,000 words per hour when everything clicks. I tried Dragon Dictate, hated it, gave it one last chance before trashing it, and suddenly it worked. Went from 200 words an hour to 1,500. Sometimes the thing you want to throw in the garbage is the thing that rewrites your whole process.

AI and Writer’s Block

I use AI for research, flow analysis, and fact-checking. I don’t let it write a single sentence. I can spot an AI-written book in under five seconds. There’s something wrong on every page, like a face in a photograph where the eyes sit a fraction too far apart. The uncanny valley in writing. You can’t name what’s off, but your brain knows. “If you want a book that’s just as plain Jane vanilla as every other book out there, by all means, use AI.”

Writer’s block is real, but it’s rarely what people think. Almost always it’s a splinter (the real causes of writer’s block), something someone said that lodged under the skin where you can’t see it. “The book is great except for this character.” It sounds harmless, but it’s vague, and vague criticism buries itself in your brain and quietly shuts everything down. “Somebody makes a subtle remark, even just ‘that was okay,’ and that can devastate a writer.” When I help a client trace the block back to the specific comment that caused it, the block clears, immediately, every time. One reviewer told me my book was “suitable for charcoal.” That one I kept. I thought it was creative.

What Sells a Book

Two things kill a book: silence and a bad cover. If you don’t promote it, nobody knows it exists. If the cover looks like clip art, nobody picks it up.

I tried every kind of paid advertising, and every single one lost money. Facebook ads disappeared into a void. LinkedIn ads produced nothing measurable. Google ads were a vacuum cleaner hooked directly to my bank account, sucking cash with no return. Amazon pay-per-click was slower but just as effective at draining the budget. I spent thousands before I figured out what actually worked: showing up and talking.

The answer was podcasts. Several $10,000 contracts came from nothing more than walking into a studio and being honest for an hour, no pitch, no sales funnel, just two people talking, and the right listener happened to be on the other end. I host Leaders and Their Stories now, a daily interview show where I sit down with business leaders and entrepreneurs, and Conversations with Influencers, where both people drive the conversation instead of one person lobbing questions at the other. I’ve been a guest on over 55 other people’s shows. Eventually I hired a marketing company and handed the whole operation over. They told me, “Stop doing that. We’re doing that for you now.”

My marketing philosophy is one word: give. Tips, articles, free consulting, long blog posts, whatever someone needs. The more you give, the more you create a vacuum, and the universe fills it. Stop giving for two weeks and the phone goes quiet. Start again and calls come from people you’ve never heard of, through chains of referrals you can’t trace. I once wrote a 300-word article about resumes, spent 20 minutes on it. Ten thousand views overnight, and over 50,000 eventually. Hundreds of hostile comments, and I didn’t care, because I got several hundred new connections and one throwaway article outperformed a year of grinding.

The Books

“Focus on LinkedIn” was my Amazon bestseller. It’s outdated now, written before Microsoft bought LinkedIn and changed everything, but that book opened doors I didn’t know existed. CEOs started calling me to rewrite their profiles, then ambassadors. People who’d never heard of me before picked up the book and decided I was the person who could make them sound like themselves on a page.

“Cyber Heist” was a project for KnowBe4, cybersecurity disguised as fiction, the kind of book where you learn something without realizing you’re being taught. “The Ghostwriting Advantage” came out in April 2025, and I wrote it because nobody had ever written about ghostwriting from the client’s perspective. That seemed insane to me. The person spending $50,000 on a book has no guide for what to expect, what to ask for, or how to know if they’re getting ripped off. So I wrote one. Five or six other titles live under pseudonyms for material a little more controversial than I want attached to my name.

I run The Writing King at thewritingking.com. Ghostwriting, book coaching, self-publishing services. Two audiences: entrepreneurs who need someone to write their book, and fiction writers who want coaching. Everyone gets a free hour to talk first. My fiction catalog lives at masterofworlds.com, and the full list of nonfiction books is there too.

Off the Clock

I’m afraid of heights. Every year I climb into a hot air balloon, a piece of plywood a quarter inch thick between my feet and 3,000 feet of nothing. The ground drops away and my stomach goes with it. I go anyway. I’m claustrophobic. I crawl through caves where the walls press in and the air gets thin. I’ve jumped out of planes and squeezed through openings in rock that were barely wider than my shoulders. I’m still afraid every time. But knowing you can push through fear, that you’ve done it before and you can do it again, changes you in a way that’s hard to explain to anyone who hasn’t.

I collect butterflies, sustainably farmed from Africa and South America, pinned under glass in frames on my walls. There’s something about them that stops me. The colors, the symmetry, the fact that something that fragile made it across an ocean to end up in my house in Clearwater.

I paint fantasy miniatures. Tiny dragons and wizards with brushes the size of toothpicks, working under a magnifying lamp, the kind of quiet focus that empties your head better than anything else I’ve found. An hour disappears, then two. The phone doesn’t ring because you’ve forgotten you own one. I walk through botanical gardens when my brain won’t stop spinning, the kind with the heavy greenhouse air and the smell of wet soil and flowers you can’t name. That’s where I go when I need to reset.

I’ve never smoked, never drank, never had coffee. “It always seemed silly to me to put hot ash in your lungs.”

My weakness is French vanilla Haagen-Dazs. I buy the two-for-one half gallons, eat too much, sit with the guilt, and throw one away. My parents used sugar and chocolate to shut me up when I was a kid, so the wiring runs deep. I’m diabetic and I know exactly what I’m doing to myself. A weight-loss expert named Sora Vernikoff taught me her Green Technique right on my own podcast: before you eat, ask yourself how much is enough, then ask how much is too much, and separate the two amounts so you can see them side by side. I’m working on it.

What I Think About

I love Norwegian and Finnish films, the kind with long silences and gray light where nothing explodes and everything matters. The camera sits on a face for thirty seconds and you feel more than you would from an hour of Hollywood dialogue.

I’m obsessed with military history and geopolitics because geography makes nations who they are. The US is arrogant because oceans protect it. Russia is paranoid because open plains don’t. The Mississippi River built American power because water will always be cheaper than roads. Once you see the world through geography, you can’t unsee it. Every border, every conflict, every alliance starts to make sense.

I can call a movie’s ending within five minutes with about 90% accuracy. I want to write movie scripts someday, a completely different craft, as different from writing a book as writing music is from writing prose.

My favorite author is Mike Resnick: space opera, Westerns set in outer space. I own 100 of his books. He wrote the way I wish more people would write, with big ideas and bigger heart, stories that feel like they’re happening on the edge of the known universe but somehow land right in your chest.

My favorite marketing book is The Other Guy Blinked by the CEO of Pepsi during the New Coke wars. I’ve read it 15 times. It’s been out of print for years and good luck finding a copy. Everything I know about competitive positioning came from that book.

What I Carry

My father drank later in life. Both parents died alone, one from COVID. Everyone had gone no contact by then, and nobody called.

His anger passed down to me. I found that out in counseling, sitting in a quiet room with a therapist who asked the right questions and let me find my own answers. Once I saw where the anger came from, a lot of it loosened its grip, not all of it, but enough. I prefer therapists who use the Socratic method. “Screw your method. I want to get to my solution.”

I have almost no empathy. I’ve been tested. I know that about myself and I don’t pretend otherwise. I store emotions in my stomach, anger in one spot, anxiety in another, and it wrecked my body until counseling taught me to let it move through instead of sitting there. I tend toward catastrophism: my boss frowns across a conference table and I’m already rehearsing what I’ll say when they fire me. My grandmother lived through the Great Depression, and that anxiety may have traveled through my mother and into me like water finding cracks. I worked through it in therapy. I still go.

I describe my life in three phases. Childhood: dumb as a brick. Midlife: growing, building, the tech years. Now: the best chapter. Every morning I ask myself what I’m going to accomplish, what good I can do for me, for somebody else, for the world. I follow James Clear’s Atomic Habits: 1% better, every single day, compounding quietly into something you don’t notice until you look back. I cut toxic people out fast, days not years. Before I cut someone loose, I ask one question: “What am I doing to cause this?” If the answer is nothing, they’re gone.

My song is “The Long and Winding Road.” I reference Zork when life gets tangled: “a maze of twisty passages all alike.” My grandfather’s memoir, “Behind the Wire,” was published from his own journals. I helped write it when I was 17, my first real book, built from his interviews and the pages he’d kept. The lesson underneath everything I build, every team, every book, every choice I make: he didn’t survive four years in a POW camp alone. They worked together.

I won a major award once and they couldn’t get me on stage to accept it. Ten minutes before every podcast interview, I still want to cancel. I got kicked out of a meeting by a CEO once because I led with technical specs instead of business benefits. I’ve learned most things that way.

Competence is what keeps you alive. In a career, in a forest fire, in a room full of strangers. When everything else falls apart, it’s the one thing nobody can take from you.

“When you’re 95 years old in that hospital bed, you don’t want to be thinking, I should’ve written that book.” (Your memoir cannot wait.)