I write nonfiction about a subject that keeps appearing in different forms throughout my life: how people understand reality, make decisions, solve problems, and remain capable when the system, plan, information, or assumptions they depended on stop working.

My background has taken me through Army maintenance and recovery operations, Human Intelligence and counterintelligence support, approximately two years supporting the Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force in Afghanistan, more than two thousand interrogations, interviews, debriefings, screenings, and other human-source interactions, federal service, investigations, aviation, business, technical projects, art, music, and entrepreneurship.

Those environments look very different from one another, but they repeatedly taught me the same lesson:

Reality does not care about the plan.

The work has grown into an eight-book nonfiction project built around practical resilience, adaptive intelligence, evidence, human behavior, critical thinking, accountability, and decision-making under uncertainty.

Six books are now complete.

The manuscripts are currently being prepared and submitted for traditional publication. I will add publication information, release dates, and purchase links here as they become available.

The Modern Ghost Field Manual: 116,000 words, 82 chapters, 6 parts, 12 operational appendices. 

The Modern Ghost Field Guide: 11,000–12,000 words, 137 operational tools rather than conventional chapters. 

The Unscripted Operator: 55,000 words, 30 chapters, 5 parts. 

The Modern Ghost: Urban Fieldcraft: 65,000 words, 41 chapters. 

Human Intelligence: 51,000 words, 22 chapters, 4 parts.

The Accountability Gap: 43,000 words, 56 chapters.

Approximately 116,000 words
82 chapters
6 major parts
12 operational appendices
542-page current finished-layout edition

The Modern Ghost Field Manual is the largest and most technically detailed book in the collection. It is an integrated civilian resilience manual built on a simple reality: emergencies rarely stay in one category.

A power failure can become a communications problem. A communications failure can become a navigation problem. A water failure can become a medical problem. A stolen phone can become an identity, financial, and security problem. A severe storm can simultaneously affect transportation, electricity, communications, food, medical care, sanitation, and access to information.

The book is built around those connections.

Rather than treating preparedness, privacy, first aid, communications, wilderness survival, digital security, and disaster recovery as unrelated subjects, the Field Manual brings them together as parts of one system.

It covers emergency planning, risk assessment, communications, PACE planning, navigation, power generation and storage, water procurement and treatment, food, sanitation, shelter, extreme heat and cold, wilderness survival, trauma and first aid, medical continuity, evacuation, vehicles, disaster response, recovery, digital security, privacy, surveillance awareness, artificial-intelligence-enabled video systems, facial recognition, gait and behavioral biometrics, license-plate recognition systems, mobile and RF tracking, drones, public-space observation, community resilience, and long-term recovery.

The book is deliberately technical where technical detail matters. Instead of simply telling the reader to buy a generator, battery, radio, filter, or medical kit, it teaches the reader to understand capacity, limitations, failure modes, measurements, transition criteria, and verification.

A major theme runs throughout the manual:

Preparedness that has never been tested is an assumption.

Readers are taught to build capabilities, test them, document the results, identify weaknesses, establish backups that fail differently from the primary system, and improve the system before an emergency does the testing for them.

The result is not a conventional survival book and not an apocalypse manual. It is a practical reference for people who want to become harder to surprise, less dependent on single points of failure, and better able to function when normal systems become unreliable.

Approximately 11,000–12,000 words
139-page current edition
44 rapid-reference cards
57 field worksheets
36 skill-proficiency cards
137 operational tools

The Modern Ghost Field Guide is the portable working companion to The Modern Ghost Field Manual.

The Field Manual explains the doctrine, technical background, calculations, reasoning, limitations, and supporting research.

The Field Guide answers a different question:

What do I need in front of me when it is time actually to do something?

Instead of conventional narrative chapters, the book contains 137 practical operational tools designed for rapid retrieval, planning, training, documentation, and field use.

The rapid-reference cards condense essential information into formats you can consult quickly during communications, navigation, power failure, severe weather, medical emergencies, evacuation, water, sanitation, security, recovery, and other disruptions.

The worksheets help readers turn abstract preparedness into an actual household or individual system. They provide structured places to document emergency contacts, communication plans, inventories, capabilities, equipment, routes, medical information, power requirements, water needs, family plans, recovery information, and other details that are only useful during an emergency if organized beforehand.

The proficiency cards address another problem: owning equipment is not the same thing as knowing how to use it.

Readers can use the cards to practice, evaluate, and document critical skills rather than assuming those skills will appear automatically under pressure.

The Field Guide is designed to be written in, customized, printed, carried, practiced with, and periodically updated.

If the Field Manual explains why and how, the Field Guide helps the reader execute.

Approximately 55,000 words
30 chapters
5 major parts
311-page current finished-layout edition

Most people spend their lives inside systems built by somebody else.

There are procedures. Checklists. Job descriptions. Training programs. Policies. Algorithms. Standard operating procedures. Best practices. Accepted explanations.

Those systems are useful.

Until they stop matching reality.

The Unscripted Operator is about what happens next.

The book develops a practical philosophy of adaptive intelligence built around five verbs:

OBSERVE. QUESTION. ADAPT. CREATE. BUILD.

Observe what is actually happening before deciding what it means.

Question the explanation, including your own.

Adapt when the method no longer serves the objective.

Create an option when the available choices are inadequate.

Build the solution, test it, measure it, and learn from what happens.

The book draws lessons from military work, intelligence and investigations, aviation, mechanical systems, business, entrepreneurship, music, art, leadership, and ordinary life to show that adaptive thinking isn't confined to one profession.

It examines ground truth, assumptions, cognitive bias, source reliability, uncertainty, systems thinking, bottlenecks, interfaces, incentives, probability, risk, reversibility, red teaming, pre-mortems, PACE planning, personal minimums, sunk-cost traps, decentralized decision-making, dissent, leadership under uncertainty, and after-action review.

But the book also places deliberate limits around adaptability.

Being clever is not the same thing as being competent. Improvisation does not override law, safety, ethics, expertise, physics, or legitimate authority.

The final sections move the reader from theory into practice through a 20-scenario Unscripted Operator stress test, a 30-day deliberate-practice program, practical tools, diagnostic matrices, and a final question that summarizes the philosophy of the entire book:

Did the process deserve to work?

The Unscripted Operator is ultimately about becoming the person who can still think when the checklist ends.

Approximately 65,000 words
41 chapters
225-page expanded edition

Modern cities are extraordinary machines.

Power arrives through an electrical grid. Water appears from a faucet. Money moves through networks. Phones provide navigation, communications, banking, identification, authentication, entertainment, emergency information, and access to much of a person's life.

When everything works, dependency can feel exactly like capability.

It is not the same thing.

The Modern Ghost: Urban Fieldcraft examines the hidden systems that make ordinary modern life possible and teaches readers how to preserve essential capabilities when those systems become unreliable.

The book rejects apocalypse theater and the fantasy that everyone needs to disappear into the wilderness.

Instead, it focuses on more realistic problems: blackouts, severe storms, water-main failures, cellular outages, cyber incidents, stolen phones, payment failures, apartment fires, transportation disruptions, wildfire smoke, medical continuity problems, identity theft, extreme temperatures, damaged infrastructure, and situations where several relatively minor failures happen at the same time.

The objective is not complete self-sufficiency.

The objective is to become less helpless.

The book teaches readers to map the systems supporting their lives and identify hidden dependencies, shared failure points, transition triggers, alternate methods, and backups.

It covers emergency electricity, water, food, refrigeration, sanitation, indoor air, extreme temperatures, fire safety, medical continuity, repair capability, apartment and high-rise resilience, communications, transportation, navigation, evacuation, family separation, pets and dependents, neighborhood resilience, financial continuity, documents, insurance, disaster recovery, and post-event fraud.

Urban Fieldcraft also examines the increasingly digital city.

Smartphones, connected vehicles, cameras, license-plate systems, access-control records, payment systems, apps, commercial databases, biometrics, drones, artificial intelligence, and other sensors can create enormous amounts of information about ordinary activity.

The book explains those systems without pretending that disappearing from modern society is realistic. Instead, it emphasizes privacy, data minimization, account security, evidence literacy, exposure control, and understanding the difference between an indicator and a conclusion.

Urban Fieldcraft combines the systems resilience of The Modern Ghost Field Manual, the adaptive thinking of The Unscripted Operator, and the evidence discipline of Human Intelligence.

The central principle remains simple:

Protect the objective, not your favorite method.

Approximately 51,000 words
22 chapters
4 major parts
Complete manuscript

Human intelligence is often portrayed as mind reading.

Watch the eyes. Read the body language. Find the tell. Use the perfect question. Detect the lie.

Reality is considerably messier.

A nervous person can be telling the truth. A calm person can be lying. A confident witness can be completely wrong. A cooperative person can omit the one fact that matters. Memory changes. Language is ambiguous. Motivation changes. Stress affects recall. People inherit stories from other people and can repeat false information with absolute sincerity.

Human Intelligence is about working inside that uncertainty without pretending it does not exist.

Drawing on my experience in Army Human Intelligence and counterintelligence support, more than two thousand interrogations, interviews, debriefings, screenings, and other human-source interactions, investigative work, federal service, aviation, business, and other disciplines, the book translates intelligence principles into practical civilian decision-making.

It is not a book about manipulating people.

It is a book about getting better information and becoming harder to fool, including by yourself.

The book examines interviewing, listening, rapport, questioning, memory, source access, motivation, behavioral observation, credibility, timelines, corroboration, documentation, information handoffs, cognitive bias, assumptions, competing hypotheses, uncertainty, synthetic media, artificial intelligence, and the difference between something being possible, plausible, probable, and proven.

One of its central ideas is the Reality Loop:

Collect. Separate. Test. Calibrate. Decide.

Collect the available information.

Separate observation from interpretation.

Test the important claims.

Calibrate confidence to the quality of the evidence.

Then decide what the evidence actually justifies.

The book also develops practical frameworks including the Signal-to-Evidence Ladder, Diagnostic Mirror, Echo Elicitation Protocol, and Narrative Disruption Blueprint, while repeatedly emphasizing that no framework eliminates uncertainty.

Human Intelligence also examines what happens after information is collected. A perfectly accurate observation can become corrupted as it moves through people, organizations, reports, meetings, databases, media, or artificial-intelligence systems.

That makes provenance and documentation critical.

Where did the information originate?

Who actually observed it?

What did that person have access to?

What changed during the handoff?

What corroborates it?

What contradicts it?

What would make us change our conclusion?

The central question running through the book is one of the most useful questions I learned from intelligence work:

What am I missing?

Approximately 43,000 words
56 chapters
195-page updated edition

The Accountability Gap examines one of the most difficult questions in criminal law:

When does mental illness explain a person's actions, and when should it legally excuse them?

The book uses the Lindsay Clancy case as a detailed case study but deliberately expands the discussion beyond one defendant, one trial, or one diagnosis.

The central issue is the difference between explanation and legal incapacity.

Mental illness can be real and severe. Postpartum psychiatric illness can be real. Medication, sleep deprivation, trauma, neurological conditions, endocrine conditions, psychosis, depression, anxiety, and other factors can affect human behavior.

But identifying an influence is not automatically the same thing as establishing the specific degree of incapacity required by criminal law.

The book explores the difficult territory between two extremes.

One extreme treats mental illness as irrelevant whenever a physical act appears deliberate.

The other risks treating a diagnosis or causal explanation as automatic proof that the person lacked criminal responsibility.

The Accountability Gap asks what evidence the law should require before it crosses that line.

The book examines the Lindsay Clancy evidence and trial, Massachusetts criminal-responsibility law, the federal insanity standard, postpartum psychosis, forensic psychiatry, command hallucinations, intrusive thoughts, medication, brain evidence, expert disagreement, retrospective diagnosis, malingering and symptom-validity questions, burden of proof, juror psychology, cultural narratives, healthcare-system failures, civil negligence, and comparative insanity cases.

Cases involving Andrea Yates, John Hinckley Jr., Dena Schlosser, Deanna Laney, and others provide comparative examples showing how different facts, jurisdictions, diagnoses, legal standards, and evidentiary records can produce very different outcomes.

The book also examines the reliability problem created when experts reconstruct a person's mental condition after a catastrophic event. It asks readers to distinguish contemporaneous evidence from retrospective interpretation and to consider source access, timing, incentive, corroboration, and contradictory evidence before accepting a clean narrative simply because it explains the outcome.

The reader is deliberately placed in the jury box twice.

Near the beginning, readers get a compressed evidence file and are asked to decide the case.

Then they read the law, medicine, competing expert positions, comparative cases, arguments from both sides, juror psychology, healthcare failures, counterarguments, and proposed reforms.

Near the end, they are asked to decide again.

The purpose is not simply to tell readers what to think.

It is to make them examine how they reached their conclusion.

The final sections explore potential reforms involving evidentiary standards, independent forensic examination, clearer jury instructions, more understandable verdict language, evidentiary hierarchies, and better separation of diagnosis, causation, impairment, and criminal responsibility.

The larger theme extends well beyond insanity law.

When something terrible happens, society often looks for one person, one institution, one diagnosis, or one failure to carry the entire explanation.

Reality is rarely that clean.

A healthcare system can fail, and a patient can still retain agency. A professional can make a mistake without becoming the sole cause of everything that followed. A person can genuinely have a mental illness without automatically satisfying a jurisdiction's legal test for insanity.

Multiple failures can exist at the same time.

That space between understanding why something happened and deciding who remains responsible for it is the accountability gap.

Although these books cover very different subjects, they share the same operating philosophy.

The Modern Ghost Field Manual asks:

Can the system survive stress?

The Unscripted Operator asks:

Can your thinking survive the plan's failure?

Human Intelligence asks:

Can the information feeding the decision survive scrutiny?

The Modern Ghost: Urban Fieldcraft asks:

Can you preserve essential capability when the systems around you become unreliable?

The Accountability Gap asks:

Can we explain why something happened without losing sight of responsibility?

And The Modern Ghost Field Guide turns much of that philosophy into tools you can actually use.

Different environments.

Different problems.

Same discipline:

Six manuscripts are complete as part of an eight-book nonfiction project.

The books are currently being submitted to literary agents and publishers for traditional publication.

This page will be updated with publishing announcements, release dates, previews, interviews, and purchase information as each project moves forward.