Not long ago I discovered my grandfather’s wartime notes and photographs—documents I never knew existed. They recorded his service as an infantryman and his part in the liberation of concentration camps in 1945. I immediately began writing my latest short novel, In the Ashes, based on his diary.

Writing In the Ashes opened a larger truth: millions of similar stories are still sitting in closets and attics across the country. The veterans themselves are gone. Most families lack the resources to professionally recover and tell what remains. Those stories matter every bit as much as the histories of families who can afford to hire someone.

The World War II Series is the response.

The series will consist of ten tightly written historical fiction novellas drawn from the real experiences of World War II veterans—both well-known figures and the countless ordinary men whose names never made the history books.

The series opens with The Two Black Valleys, coming in January 2027. Set in West Virginia’s Blackwater Valley in the hard winter of 1937, it follows young men of the Civilian Conservation Corps. In the Ashes is book ten.

Each novella will be grounded in primary sources: letters, diaries, photographs, and family interviews. When the books are published, copies will be placed in social studies classrooms across West Virginia and southern Ohio so a new generation of students can encounter these lives.

These were not famous men. They were the quiet ones—farmers, miners, clerks, and small-town boys who left home, did what was asked of them, and came back changed. Their stories are disappearing. The World War II Series exists to bring them back into the light, one carefully told life at a time.