Twenty-six years in federal contracting. Multimillion-dollar portfolios across defense and civilian agencies, and three books written for practitioners who wanted the method instead of the theory.
Capture work is sequencing against a deadline nobody moved for you. You decide what the evaluator learns, and in what order, and then you live with the order you chose. Twenty-six years of that leaves you with instincts you cannot switch off at the end of the day.
Fiction arrived as a question the day job could not answer. What happens when the official story stops making sense, and you are young enough to believe a better one exists?
I set it in 1996, before everyone had a phone in their pocket and every question had a search bar. Isolation had to be engineered into a plot after that. In 1996 it came free. The shelf I wrote toward was the one I read at twenty, books that trusted a stubborn young protagonist to be smarter than the adults around her.
Sam Hadley is twenty-one, a satellite monitoring tech on a night shift, smart in ways that have not helped her yet. She hears something on a bird that stopped transmitting years before she was hired, and the official version starts coming apart in her hands.
Three books. One long unraveling.