From Trader Joe’s to Ghostwriting: How the Practice Got Built
“The book becomes the version of your life that survives. That is why getting it done well, and getting it done in time, matters.”
For over three decades, I ran enterprise IT operations. I built multimillion-dollar systems, led teams of dozens, and spent twenty years as Director of Computer Operations at Trader Joe’s. The work was substantive and the responsibility was real, but it wasn’t the work I would eventually be known for.
My wife died of lung disease. After that, I picked up a camera. Photography was the first creative discipline I committed to, and it taught me something I hadn’t learned in three decades of running systems: how to pay attention to what other people miss. I wasn’t trying to become an artist. I was trying to figure out how to keep going.
Writing came later. It started as my own books. Eventually that grew to 113+ of them across fiction, memoir, business, and technical work. Then clients started asking if I would write theirs. That turned into a ghostwriting practice that has now produced 54+ books for clients across memoirs, executive books, business strategy, fiction, and personal histories. Some of those clients had stories that would otherwise have disappeared with them. Others had careers that needed a book to reach their next chapter. The work matters to me because the stakes for the people whose stories I’m writing are real.
The ghostwriting practice grew because clients kept coming back and referring people. Executives wanted books that established their thinking publicly. Memoirists wanted their stories captured before time took the option away. Coaches and consultants wanted methodologies in book form rather than scattered across slide decks and client emails. The reasons varied. The work was the same: structured interviews, careful drafting, manuscripts that read like the client wrote them.
The 54+ ghostwritten books span clients including senior tech executives, coaches, founders, spiritual teachers, and people whose specific experience was worth recording. Some wanted to build authority. Some wanted to leave a record for their families. Some wanted both.
The thirty-three years in enterprise IT before writing became the work taught me how executives think, how decisions actually get made inside organizations, and what executive language sounds like when it’s not performed for an audience. That experience is why ghostwriting executive books works the way it does in this practice.
Alongside the ghostwriting practice, I host the podcast Leaders and Their Stories, where I interview founders, executives, and people whose careers took unusual paths. I’ve also been a guest on 100+ shows, including The Chris Voss Show, which reaches over a million listeners. The full list of podcast appearances is here.
📣 Featured guest on The Chris Voss Show (over one million listeners), The Entrepreneur Way, High-Performance Mindset, and 100+ podcasts across the internet covering ghostwriting, executive book strategy, and the publishing industry.
The Early Years: Reading My Way Out
My older sister Debbie died as an infant before I was born, and the circumstances around her death cast a long shadow over the household I was raised in. I was born shortly after, on the heels of my mother going into labor aboard a cargo plane returning from the Philippines. We were a military family and moved often, eventually settling in San Bernardino, California. My father worked as a civil servant and graphic artist at Norton Air Force Base. He was a difficult man to live with.
Books got me out. At five, I fell hard for an illustrated copy of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, the original versions rather than the sanitized ones most people read now. My mother noticed and bought me an encyclopedia set, then dragged me, against my protests, to the local library. A kind librarian gave me a cookie and a tour. I came out of that visit understanding that the world was much bigger than the one in front of me.
After that I read constantly. I tracked the books on library art projects, filling out dinosaurs, spaceships, and castles with reading badges, then taping them to my bedroom wall. History books were the first category I went deep on.
Science fiction came later, at a swap meet. A magazine called Fantastic Stories introduced me to Jack Vance and the idea of a planet with only a narrow strip of habitable land. I was hooked. My grandmother’s storage boxes eventually delivered Stranger in a Strange Land and The Astounding Science Fiction Anthology into my hands, and the genre stuck for life. I learned to game the Science Fiction Book Club system to collect as many books as cheaply as possible. The reading taught me what it feels like when a story is structured well and what it feels like when one isn’t, which turned out to matter later.
My parents were entrepreneurial. My father eventually left civil service to open an art gallery in the San Bernardino mountains. They sold wildlife prints and handmade crafts, and the business ran on the kind of margins that taught me early how hard it is to make a creative practice pay rent. I watched them figure out which prints actually sold and which ones they kept making because they liked them. The distinction stuck with me.
At seventeen, I ghostwrote my first book. It was unpaid, built from interviews and journals from my grandfather, who was a World War II prisoner of war. Working from his recordings taught me what ghostwriting actually is at the technical level: how to listen for the moments that carry the meaning, how to preserve the speaker’s voice rather than overwriting it with your own, how to structure decades of memory into something a reader can follow. The book got finished. The skill stuck.
Around the same time, an older friend named Lola, who must have been in her seventies, introduced me to geology. After that, I went deep on continental drift, mountain building, mineralogy, and rock collecting. The geology path was a real alternative to the writing path for a while. If a few things had broken differently I might have ended up cataloging Pacific Northwest mineral specimens for a living instead of writing books.
My first real job was night manager at a liquor store in Lake Arrowhead. My father didn’t ask if I wanted a job. He said it was time. I was an introvert, much more comfortable with books than with people, and retail forced me to develop a working version of customer-facing skills I would otherwise never have built. The job included a run-in with the local police over an underage sale I didn’t realize I’d made.
The store’s owner was a gruff older man who claimed to be a former Nazi U-boat captain. Whether or not the U-boat story was true, he ran the store like he was still running a submarine. He taught me discipline by demanding it. I left that job knowing I could function in environments I would have avoided if given the choice, which turned out to be useful preparation for nearly everything that came afterward.
The early years gave me a lot of raw material. A complicated family. A father who pushed when pushing was the right move and pushed when it wasn’t. Books that opened up rooms in my head I didn’t know existed. A first ghostwriting project that taught me what the work actually is. A liquor store that taught me I could do hard things. All of that fed into the writing eventually. I didn’t know that at the time. Most of what we use later we don’t know we’re collecting when we collect it.
What Enterprise IT Taught Me About Writing Books
Before the writing practice, I spent thirty-three years in enterprise IT. The career started when assembly language was still how you talked to computers directly, byte by byte. It ended with twenty years as Director of Computer Operations and Technical Services at Trader Joe’s, where I was responsible for the systems that kept a multi-billion-dollar national grocery operation running.
The Trader Joe’s job covered supply chain logistics, HR systems, cybersecurity, merchandising software, and the national data centers. I built and led the disaster recovery operations. I managed the Oracle, SAP, and SQL environments. I ran production infrastructure across coast-to-coast teams. Before Trader Joe’s, I was VP of operations at two technology firms. Earlier still, I did SCADA work for water utilities, including Las Vegas Valley, New Haven, and Ojai.
Three things from that career shape how the ghostwriting practice works now.
The first is structural thinking. A book starts as a pile of material: interview recordings, half-formed ideas, recurring stories the client tells, things they care about but haven’t articulated yet. Turning that pile into a manuscript that reads cleanly from first page to last is a structural problem before it’s a writing problem. Thirty-three years of building systems where every component had to fit into a working whole taught me how to do that work without flinching at the size of the pile.
The second is high-stakes listening. In enterprise IT at the executive level, you cannot afford to mishear a problem. If you misunderstand what an engineer is actually telling you about a system failure, you can take down payroll or lose a data center. That trains a particular kind of listening. It is not soft listening. It is listening for what the person actually means underneath what they are saying, and asking the follow-up questions that surface the real issue. The same skill applies in client interviews. When someone says “I’m not sure how to say this,” the answer is rarely to suggest clever phrasing. The answer is to ask better questions until what they actually want to say comes through.
The third is operating under deadline pressure without losing precision. Enterprise IT runs on real deadlines, often in the middle of the night, often with money or compliance on the line. Books also run on deadlines, though the consequences are different. The carryover is the same: I know how to keep a complex project moving without dropping pieces of it along the way.
Engineering and ghostwriting are more similar than people expect. Both require taking a complex system that exists in someone’s head and rendering it in a form that other people can use. Both require structure, sequence, and the discipline to leave out what doesn’t belong. The fact that one of those systems is a database architecture and the other is a CEO’s career, a coach’s methodology, or an executive’s argument about their industry doesn’t change the underlying work.
Claudia
I met Claudia at church. On our third date, at the ultra-romantic Wendy’s, I proposed.
“You’re kidding,” she said.
“Nope. Let’s do it today.”
She called my bluff. We tried to pull off an impromptu wedding, but two of my best friends objected mid-ceremony. (“They don’t even know each other!”) The wedding was called off temporarily. Two days later, after some well-earned groveling, we rescheduled a beautiful potluck wedding surrounded by friends, food, and more than a little laughter.
Our marriage was twelve and a half years. The years had real substance to them and also real difficulty. Claudia lived with chronic illness through most of them, which meant long stretches of pain, multiple comas, and a years-long fight with opioid dependency that started from prescribed pain management and a separate fight against the lung disease that eventually killed her. Through all of it she stayed who she was: sharp, funny, willing to call me on anything I needed calling on. When she died in 2005, the grief nearly broke me. The fact that I loved her is the most important thing that ever happened to me. The work I do now, especially the memoir work, is shaped by what those years taught me about how time runs out faster than people think it will.
Years later I wrote a book about those years. Buttercup is the memoir of the marriage, told from the perspective of Claudia’s cat. Buttercup was with Claudia for ten years, then mine for a few weeks, then dead of grief two weeks after Claudia died. The vet said cats can do that. I did not know they could until Buttercup did. The book is what those years actually looked like from the floor, from the back of the couch, from the doorway at three in the morning when something was changing in the room and the cat knew before I did.
Photography
After Claudia died, I picked up a camera. I wasn’t trying to become a photographer. I was trying to find something I could do with my hands and my attention that would get me through the days. The camera turned out to be that thing.
The early work was state and national parks, including Anza-Borrego Desert State Park. Then I found Renaissance faires and went hard at them. I photographed more than three hundred across the country over a few years and became known on the circuit as “the Renfaireguy.” My work ended up in The Original Renaissance Pleasure Faire Fiftieth Jubilee hardcover coffee table book. The recognition was nice. What kept me coming back was the people who showed up to those faires year after year. Renaissance faire regulars are some of the most unguarded, openly weird, openly kind people I have ever met.
Southern California’s belly dance community adopted me next. I became their unofficial court photographer, shooting performances, backstage moments, and the running chaos that happens around any organized event. I also helped some of the dancers organize charity shows for shelters serving women fleeing domestic violence. The Renaissance faire photos eventually got picked up for tarot card decks.
The work expanded out from there. Supermodels. WWE wrestlers. Historical reenactors. One-on-one portrait shoots. I was the photographer for the First Annual Mermaid Convention and World Mermaid Awards at the Silverton Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, which was exactly as visually overwhelming as it sounds. I also got some large tattoos on my upper arms during this stretch. The whole period was about reconnecting with the world after grief, mostly by pointing a camera at it.
For years I photographed the Rose Parade. That meant arriving at three in the morning in freezing temperatures, camera in hand, fingers barely working. One year I shot the whole parade through icy rain just to catch the moment sunlight first hit a float.
I also chronicled the Labyrinth of Jareth Masquerade Ball in Hollywood, with its Venetian masks and old-world atmosphere. And yes, I shot vampire balls. Fangs optional but highly encouraged.
The photography years made me a better ghostwriter. Photography teaches you to notice things you would otherwise have skipped past. The specific tilt of someone’s head when they’re hearing something they didn’t expect. The half-second pause before they answer a question they don’t want to answer. The body language that tells you whether the person across from you is comfortable or just being polite. Those observation skills carry directly into client interviews. Most of what makes an interview useful is paying attention to the parts of someone’s answer that they didn’t plan to give.
The other thing photography did was force me out of my own introversion. Before the camera I was uncomfortable approaching strangers. With a camera in hand I had a reason to be where I was and a way to make contact. Years of doing that built a working version of social skills that did not come naturally. Client interviews now run on that same operating system: a structured reason to be in the conversation, and the willingness to ask the question after the question after the question until I understand what the person is actually saying.
Where it started
Long before the camera, I was chasing stories as a teenager. From 1975 to 1978 I belonged to the Flying Buffalo gaming club, part of a group at Rim of the World High School that spent its weekends on wargames like Empire of the Petal Throne and Nuclear Destruction. That is where I first learned that a good story is really a good system: characters with something to lose, rules that create pressure, and choices that matter. I have been building on that foundation ever since.
The bellydance community I photographed gave me more than images. I produced and sponsored shows including Bellydance Kaleidoscope, Around the World in 80 Days, Mythical Creatures, and Scarlett’s Nightmare, with the proceeds going to local battered women’s shelters. When I sponsored an event, I covered the venue and the food so every dollar raised could go where it was needed.
These days the stories are books, and I am still drawn to the people who make them. I founded the Clearwater Science Fiction Writing Critique group because writers get better in the company of other writers, and because the communities that grow around stories are worth building. That instinct, the one that started with a handful of teenagers and a stack of wargames, is the same one I bring to every book I write for a client.
That same belief in what communities can build runs in my family. My sister and her husband Ken founded Schmahl Science Workshops, a nonprofit that gives kids of all backgrounds hands-on science and the confidence to chase it. Watching them do that work is a reminder of why any of this matters: the point was never just the book or the photograph or the experiment, it was always the people you bring along.
How I Manage People and Why It Matters for the Writing
Before the writing practice, my work was about managing people more than managing systems. As VP at two technology firms and Director of Computer Operations at Trader Joe’s, I ran teams of engineers, support staff, cybersecurity specialists, and project managers. The teams were diverse, the work was high-pressure, and the consequences of getting things wrong showed up quickly. Twenty-plus years of that work taught me how to build a team that performs under sustained pressure and how to keep the team functional when things get hard.
When I had hiring authority, I preferred veterans. Marines, Special Forces, anyone who had operated under conditions where preparation and execution actually mattered. Veterans showed up on time. They were specific in their communication. They understood that the mission came before individual ego. I hired vets because they made the team better, not because hiring vets was a gesture. The smart-business case for hiring veterans is real and underrated.
Outside of work, I spent years supporting nonprofit dance events that raised money for shelters serving women fleeing domestic violence. The work was practical. The events needed photography, organization help, and people willing to put in time. I had all three available. The cause was worth the time because women trying to leave dangerous situations need real material help, not statements of support.
That practical orientation carries into how the ghostwriting practice works. Most ghostwriting transactions are handled informally, with vague contracts, unclear confidentiality terms, and no published professional standards. I have written the standards I operate under publicly, in a Code of Ethics for Ghostwriters available on this site. Clients should be able to read exactly how I will handle their material, their identity, and their work before they sign anything. The code covers confidentiality, ownership, AI disclosure, what happens to recordings and notes after the project ends, and several other points that most ghostwriters do not address at all. Publishing it was an attempt to set a higher standard for the industry by demonstrating it rather than describing it.
Words with Weight: Author, Ghostwriter, Story Midwife
I have written 113+ books and ghostwritten 54+ books. Some have become bestsellers. Some have led to TEDx invitations, keynote speaker bookings, and traditional publishing deals. Some have supported successful venture capital raises totaling more than $30 million. The ghostwritten work is not credited to me, which is the right outcome for the client. The credit lives with the person whose name is on the cover.
My own writing started with the early web. I was hand-coding HTML in the mid-nineties and watching the internet figure out what it was going to be in real time. The website work taught me how to write for an audience that would not give you a second chance if the first paragraph did not earn their attention. You can read more about that thirty-year journey through the web if you want the detail.
When a client hands me their material, I treat it as work that belongs to them. My job is to render their thinking, their voice, and their argument into a form a reader can actually use. Most of the work is structural: deciding what goes where, which stories prove what claims, which sections need expanding and which need cutting. The writing itself is the smaller part. The larger part is figuring out what the book actually needs to do and then arranging the material so that the book does it.
Alongside the client work I write my own fiction. The current main project is the Peacekeeper series, a nineteen-book science fiction sequence (three prequels plus sixteen main books) about war, ethics, and what happens to identity inside a crumbling galactic empire. I also have a Victorian historical fiction series in progress, plus a nonfiction series called Enemies of You about internal forces undermining personal and national capacity. Three other novels deal with mortality and what might come after it. Reincarnation is a love story told across seventy-eight thousand years, following two souls who keep finding each other through dozens of lives, framed through a 1971 therapy office in New Haven. Grim is told from the perspective of an eternal functionary who has been assessing the dead since before language existed, and who starts to notice that the system he serves is not what he was told it was. The Eternal War is military science fiction told from Lucifer’s perspective, treating the conflict between Heaven and Hell as a command problem rather than a theological one.
The same craft applies across all of it. Whether the book is a CEO’s authority book, a memoir for an older client whose family wants the record preserved, or a science fiction novel I’m writing for myself, the underlying work is the same: figure out what the book is trying to do, then build it so it does that.
Imagination, Miniatures, and the Joy of Play
When I’m not working on books, I’m usually at my workbench or paying attention to my cat. I build model kits: tanks from every era, World War II aircraft, pirate ships, and cars that look like they were designed by someone who had too much coffee and not enough adult supervision.
I also paint pewter fantasy miniatures. Knights, necromancers, dwarves who clearly have opinions about something. The painting work is meditative in a way that nothing else I do is. You finish one figure at a time, and the figure is finished when it’s finished.
Reading and watching shaped how I think about story. Dune, The Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, The Eternal Champion series, and most of Larry Niven’s Known Space saga sit on the bookshelf along with Michael Moorcock and Mike Resnick, both of whom I will defend in any argument. My full desert island book list is on Master of Worlds if you want the complete catalog. On screen I was raised on Star Trek: The Original Series and Deep Space Nine, plus The Expanse, The Godfather, and Invader Zim. Phase-one Marvel before it lost the thread. The 2D Disney films. Rugrats and Looney Tunes still hold up.
I write about what I watch. The movie review archive on Master of Worlds runs to over five hundred reviews now, covering everything from canonical classics to obscure genre films most people skipped. The discipline of writing reviews regularly trains the same observational muscles that ghostwriting requires: what worked, what didn’t, what the filmmaker was actually trying to do, what the audience actually experienced. I also maintain a curated greatest movies and books list for readers who want my picks without scrolling through hundreds of individual entries.
Building is the through-line. Books. Model battleships. Painted elves with oversized swords. Five hundred movie reviews and counting. Whatever the project is, the satisfaction is the same: a thing that did not exist now exists.
Why I Call Myself a Polymath
Read back over this page and a pattern shows up. Enterprise IT for thirty-three years. More than 980,000 photographs. 113+ books across fiction, memoir, business, and technical work. Geology I nearly made a career of, model kits, painted miniatures, five hundred movie reviews, a science fiction series about a crumbling galactic empire. To some people that reads as scattered. For most of my life I thought it was, and plenty of people told me to pick a lane.
It turns out there is a word for it, and it is not a flaw. A polymath is someone whose knowledge and skill run across many different fields instead of down into one, and who sees how those fields connect. The photography sharpened the writing. The decades running systems gave me the transformation and disaster-recovery books. The years at the faires gave me the eye. The wells connect underground. That range is not a lack of focus. It is the shape of how my mind works, and it is the reason the ghostwriting practice can move between a CEO’s authority book, a memoir, and a novel without missing a step.
I wrote the personal version of that story on its own page: I Am a Polymath. What Does That Mean? It covers where the pattern came from, what it has cost, and why the range I once apologized for turned out to be the point.
Working Together
If you have read this far, you have a reasonable picture of how the practice works and how I think. The shorter version: I take client work seriously, I treat material clients share with me as theirs, and I operate under the published Code of Ethics so that what I will and will not do is documented before any contract gets signed.
The range of material clients have brought me over the years has been wide. Addiction recoveries. Whistleblower accounts. Executive memoirs from people who have been promoted, fired, or who left voluntarily and want the record straight. Survivors of things that were not survivable. Founders whose companies succeeded and founders whose companies did not. The shape of the project differs in each case. The professional handling does not.
On the home front, I live with a cat named Zeya who has strong opinions about whose desk she belongs on (mine) and what time the day starts (earlier than I would prefer). Before her there was Buttercup, then Midnight, then Tabby, and a rabbit named Fluffy who had more personality than most humans I have met. Pets keep the day honest. They remind you that whatever you think you accomplished, you can still forget where you put the tuna.
If anything on this page suggests we should talk, the next step is a discovery call. We spend thirty minutes on what you want the book to do, what you have already tried, and whether the practice is the right fit for the project. No pitch. No pressure. If we are not a match, you will leave with a clearer sense of what kind of help your project actually needs. Schedule the call here.
Why I Do This Work
There is a longer answer to why this work matters to me, and it lives on a separate page. The short version is that most ghostwriters come out of journalism or English-literature programs, and I came out of thirty-three years running enterprise IT systems for organizations where mistakes cost real money. That difference shapes how I conduct interviews, how I structure books, and what kinds of stories I am good at finding. It also shapes who I take on as a client and what I will and will not do during a project.
If you want the full argument, including how a debugging instinct translates into finding the story underneath the story a client thinks they want to tell, the relevant page is Why I Give a Damn. It also covers the friends and clients whose books shaped the practice, the 2024 study on business book ROI that backs up the financial case, and the Code of Ethics I operate under.
I wrote the personal version of that story on its own page: I Am a Polymath. What Does That Mean? It covers where the pattern came from, what it has cost, and why the range I once apologized for turned out to be the point.
If what you have read on this page is enough and you want to talk about a project, the next step is a discovery call. Thirty minutes, no pitch, no pressure. We figure out together whether the practice is the right fit for your book.
Stories outlast the people who lived them.
That is the whole reason this work matters.
Want more interesting facts about me? I listed 87 of them here.