From Gray Matter Splatter to Persona Non Grata

First and foremost, I want to thank everyone for making Gray Matter Splatter a huge success, especially everyone who reviewed the book on Amazon which is a huge help.  I had a great time writing it and it is a pleasure to see readers respond to it in such a positive way.

For a long time I had been thinking about the 5th Deckard novel which would be titled Death Blossom.  First, I envisioned a book that takes Deckard across Iraq, Kurdistan, and Syria fighting ISIS.  By now I have personal experience reporting in the region and have spent time with the YPG in northern Syria, the Peshmerga in Kurdistan, and with the Syrian regime in Damascus (where I was able to interview President Assad) so it seemed like the natural book to write.  As time went on, I knew that ISIS was not long for this world and perhaps I should shift the focus of the book to the more long term threat posed by groups like al-Nusra and Ahrar al-Sham.  Now things are moving quickly with major offensives on going in Mosul and Aleppo.  The situation on the ground is changing so quickly that my book would be outdated the moment I write it.

I will go back to this subject in a future novel but for the time being I plan on moving my focus to another novel I had wanted to write, one which envisions a younger Deckard launching vigilante operations against human traffickers in the United States.  The title will be Persona Non Grata.  This year I attended the International Association for Human Trafficking Investigators conference and suffice to say that our prosecutors, law enforcement officers, and social workers are fighting a war right here at home.  It won’t be a easy book to write, but with my fiction I have always strived to shed some light on things that the public would rather not hear about.

In the meantime, I have been hard at work writing non-fiction pieces for SOFREP.com.  Much of my recent work has been focused on an ongoing debacle surrounding American covert action programs in Jordan and Turkey.  I have also been writing Special Forces history pieces including a in-depth article on Blue Light which was America’s first dedicated counter-terrorist unit.  Another history piece on the clandestine Special Forces unit based in Berlin during the Cold War called Detachment A remains unpublished, held up in a DOD review process as requested by the Green Berets I interviewed.  Hopefully, we can publish that one soon.

Until Christmas, you can read all of my articles on SOFREP.com for free.  You should also nose around the website and check out everything else written by our staff of Special Forces, CIA, SEAL, and Delta Force veterans.