The dreaded “What’s next?!?”

Inevitably, when you finish a book, and sometimes even before you finish, you get the question. What’s next?

Sometimes you know. Sometimes you do not. And sometimes you want to run screaming from the entire process and swear you will never write another book again.

I cannot speak for fiction authors. And the world of screenplays I’ve lived in is a very different world, but that is a whole other conversation. With nonfiction, it is not just storytelling, it is fact telling, and proving those facts, too. Hence the bazillion pages, or what feels like a bazillion pages, of endnotes in the new book.

In the case of The Dangerous Shore, this was not an expected next step after INDIANAPOLIS. Lynn and I were still out on the paperback book tour when a friend, Kirk Wolfinger, reached out to my agent with an idea for a book about USS Eagle PE-56. At the time, Kirk had been filming the Nomad Exploration Team, a dedicated group of amateur wreck divers. The team had just located the long-lost wreck of Eagle off the coast of Maine after years of searching. Their discovery revealed the ship resting some 300 feet below the surface. Combined with years of research by historian and attorney Paul Lawton, this work helped set the record straight about what really happened during Eagle’s final days in April 1945.

I cannot give too much away, since Eagle plays an important role in The Dangerous Shore narrative. But I can say this. There were striking parallels between Eagle’s tragic end and that of Indianapolis. And after a lot of digging, I discovered there was far more to the story of this small World War I era sub chaser than I ever expected. Like Indianapolis, she had largely been remembered only for her final moments and the injustices that followed.

Eagle became one of the backbones of the narrative, woven throughout the story alongside another extraordinary ship of the era, SS Normandie. What can I say. I am a sucker for grand ships with incredible histories and tragic ends.

You will have to read the book to see how all of these glorious vessels are woven into a single story. A girl does have to sell some books, after all. But I can promise you this. By the end, you will care about these ships as much as I do.

And if you find yourself wanting to ask that familiar question hovering on the tip of your tongue, well… I may still be somewhere in the running and screaming phase of the process… but I am just beginning to tiptoe back into the realm of… what’s next?

Stay tuned.