Cadet's Crisis

Writing books for boys

I am currently working on a middle school Military Science Fiction book for boys: Cadet’s Crisis. I expect it to be available by Labor Day. I plan for it to be the first book in a trilogy.

I decided to write something for young boys after seeing several of them wandering into the selling space for a local authors group at a Christmas market last year and realizing there was nothing in our offerings for them. Plenty of kids books, but nothing for that key group between 10 and 14.

I just had a conversation last week with a retired middle school teacher who was enthusiastic about the idea. She related how hard she had struggled to get boys to read and stressed how important it was for writers to produce material especially for their interests. Accordingly, I am including danger, guns, and monsters in the book.

I am bouncing off of Robert Heinlein’s juveniles and have kind of mastered the rhythm of them. (Not that hard to do). I am reducing Heinlein’s technobabble and hard science; I’m more interested in fun reading than developing future engineers.

I’m setting the book in my existing Nowhere Navy universe. The Nowhere Navy was based on my own experiences in the Earthbound U.S. Navy, serving aboard a Korean War vintage minesweeper during the immediate post-Vietnam era. I was told once by an angry Chief that I was serving in “McHale’s Navy.” He wasn’t wrong.

In spite of that, I left the service with a lot of respect for the qualities it could impart to a young man. One of the aims of this book series is to try and give young boys a positive image of military service, of the adventure, challenges, and brotherhood it offers. I’m no militarist, but I think there is a lot of room in today’s culture for stressing values like duty, adherence to a code, and self-discipline to young men.

This has been such a postive expericnce that I am planning to continue the Nowhere Navy saga with a Tom Clancy-style space war epic The Fires of Aegir. Hang around, it should be available in 2028, LOL.

You can check out my Nowhere Navy books here.