Michael DiMercurio

I’ve always been a writer. I loved school writing projects. I started a diary my second year at Annapolis. It grew to 30 volumes and thousands of pages. When my roommate would find me rereading a diary entry, he’d sarcastically remark, “I see you’re reading your favorite author.” When I first reported to HAMMERHEAD, I mentally outlined the plot of THE TITANIUM COFFIN (the title later changed to VOYAGE OF THE DEVILFISH by publisher Donald I. Fine). It just fell into my mind. I wanted to write a fiction novel that communicated how cool what we were doing really was, unlike a certain insurance-agent-turned-author who tried to write a submarine novel and got it all wrong. Was I jealous of his success? At first, yes. Later, I realized I have my own style and my own voice and I can tell you without reservation that my books are FAR better than anything he wrote. Many stories came out of my time on HAMMERHEAD and some of those have landed on the pages of my novels, but my plots don’t have anything to do with HAMMERHEAD’s operations.

My tactical and strategic thinking gifts are what drive my plots. Bear in mind, the tactical talents of the characters appear in both protagonist submarines and enemy submarines. In almost every novel, I get myself into a situation where I don’t think the good guys can win. It is much like playing chess against myself. Back when I wrote PHOENIX SUB ZERO, the deadline had passed, the manuscript was late, but it looked like the bad guys would win and all the good guys would die, and I just couldn’t figure out how to win. Despite daily prompting from NYC’s editor, I just put down the laptop for a month and stared into space, thinking. Finally, it came to me. A week later I delivered the completed manuscript. That same thing happened again when I wrote the latest, LION OF THE SEVEN SEAS, except it didn’t take a month to solve the problem. I just put one word in front of the other and tried to see what could happen.

No question. Lieutenant Commander Anthony “Death Toll” Pacino.

I fill my novels with technical information but it is balanced to keep the story moving and not just be a big data dump. In the novel I just finished, the one after LION OF THE SEVEN SEAS, the boat experiences a rod jump accident that kills forty people in seconds. That has to be explained, in layman’s terms. In the Navy, I taught thermodynamics, and it turns out I’m as good a teacher as I am a writer. When I describe something technical, I write it like I’m talking to someone who has no idea how nuclear power or weapons work. It makes for fun reading.

I write for the fans, whether they are veterans or submariners and just regular folks. A lot of my current fans are fighter pilots, SEALS and special operations guys, and of course, submariners. But civilians enjoy my books as well, giving them a vicarious view of submarine combat.

It’s a long story, but here it is –
THE LINE OF DEATH AND THE DEATH-RAY SONAR
Dateline 1984 COLD WAR
So there I was, minding my own business, when the boat (the Cold-War winning nuclear fast attack submarine USS HAMMERHEAD) got top secret orders from the president to penetrate the sovereign twelve mile limit of Libya to catch a Soviet nuclear submarine, NATO code name “Victor.”
So we slowly and quietly sneak up and approach Libya and the Gulf of Sidhra, where Libya’s dictator had decreed that any American warship discovered on the wrong side of the “Line of Death” from Tripoli to Benghazi would be fired upon. There was a Soviet anchorage near the shoreline. The Russians had been tipped off that we were coming, but they didn't know when, or they were given false intelligence saying we’d be there Thursday when we actually were in position Wednesday.
We sailed into shallow waters rigged for ultraquiet, tip-toeing through the ship. Creeping up at bare steerageway, half a knot, until we pop up the periscope for a half second, enough to see the gigantic towering form of the Kirov, a Russian nuclear-powered battleship. Orders were to hide in the anchorage by hovering right beneath the Kirov. An amazing feat of ship control it took, to hover and thrust until we were directly right under the Kirov's colossal hull. We had maybe five feet under the keel to the bottom and only enough water above us that we could just barely pop up the periscope without it hitting Kirov's hull.
For half a day we were there before the intel that we were coming arrived at the Russian anchorage, and the Kirov's active sonar lit up, transmitting so much power into the ocean that water on her sonar dome boiled and fish were killed within five hundred feet. That sonar sounded like a death ray, and was so loud it blasted into the hull. You could feel it in your chest, and you had to shout at a man standing next to you to be heard.
Loud noise over a prolonged period causes fatigue. Over days and nights, it can cause pure madness. For six days we got hammered by Kirov's sonar. We were undetectable, because we were indistinguishable from the bottom, and sonars are designed not to hear echo returns from things that are ultra-close. We were invisible. Mad, but invisible.
Finally, the sonar switches off. Something's afoot. We thrust out, pop up the periscope, and saw our prey, a Russian Victor class nuclear submarine a half mile away in the anchorage. The last boat was leaving it, and sailors and officers stood on its hull.
"Conn, Sonar," the overhead speaker rasped, "the Victor has started his reactor and steam plant and warmed up his main engines. He'll be weighing anchor any minute."
"Sonar, Conn aye." The section tracking party was stationed, and within an hour the Rooskie pulled up his anchor and sailed for deep water. With us shadowing him, he pulled the plug and submerged, and for forty days and forty nights we trailed him, two torpedo tube doors open, two weapons powered up. One false move, the Russian plunges to the bottom.
For the 40 days and 40 nights we trailed the Victor, we ran out of food and had an incident where we scraped his paint (that’s another story).

Even in a tense submarine combat novel, there’s plenty of banter between the characters. They relentlessly tease each other and tell funny – or embarrassing – stories from their past. So there is plenty of humor woven into each tale. That same humor and, perhaps, sarcasm, gives rise to my social media posts and essays. Write what you know, they say, and I do – office politics, bosses who are jerks, a woman who tried to murder me – three times – politics, and, of course, submarine operations.

Some people might allege my “target” is women, but I don’t target them, I’m simply fascinated by them. I wrote two book-length online blogs about the pure absurdity of dating as a divorced middle-aged adult. I started counting first dates and writing about who the woman was and how crazy the date, or dates, went. When I hit number 100, I packaged up the stories into an online blog called THE HUNDRED GIRLS PROJECT. Sadly, it is offline now for reasons I can’t divulge. But the weirdness continued, eventually resulting in a second online blog, this one called THE SECOND HUNDRED. You could say that women are a fascination for me, in how vastly different they are from men, who are simple creatures. As an engineer, I like data, and I wanted to know what woman I’d be compatible with – would their be correlation with career? I dated doctors, nurses, lawyers, writers, dancers, airport tarmac workers, stay-at-home wealthy moms, and after 200 data points, I can conclude that there was no correlation on compatibility. What about hair color? Were blondes more fun? Did gentlemen, me, in this case, prefer blondes? And what about those crazy redheads? Still no correlation. How about age? A woman my age? Older? Younger? Still no correlation. Turns out, women are as varied as snowflakes. Each one must be approached as a unique creation in the cosmos, having nothing in common with her fellow females.

That didn’t take any particular courage, but was fueled by anger at what Putin did, allowing the Kursk sailors to die when Western divers could have rescued them. There were no adverse consequences. I suspect many Russians, including those who reported to Putin himself, agreed with my urging him to allow Western rescue. Fortunately, he did.

It’s 14 novels now, with number 13 being LION OF THE SEVEN SEAS, which is on Amazon for preorder and publishes in late November 2025. Novel 14 is submitted for editing and narration now. As to evolution as a writer, not much about my writing style or plotting has changed, but I think I have learned things about death and dying I didn’t know before, and I’ve experienced a lot of paranormal events in the last decade, and those experiences are finding the way to my pages. So, apparitions of beloved deceased partners or shipmates might appear in a moment of need.

The old process was rereading what I’d recently written for an hour or two, then writing the follow-on pages for two hours, then rereading what I’d written that day. The new process involves a rough outline or “plan” for what is going to happen in the plot, which I flesh out with more details as I write about a plot element. I work on the paragraph in the plan of what I’m going to write that day, then write it, then update the plan. At that point I try to see more of what is coming and if I do, I put that into the plan. This shortens the overall writing time from 2 years to less than 200 days. All that rereading is eliminated. However, this makes editing more important, because without all those hours of rereading, discontinuities happen. On page 238, the number one periscope was electronically fried and wouldn’t retract. On page 487, the number two scope gets blown completely off, and the captain orders raising and using the number one scope. The editor wrote me and said, “hey dumbass, you can’t use the number one scope on page 487 because you broke it to hell on page 238.” Plot holes get more severe with the new method and must be found and filled in. But even with a more involved editing process, the new method is much faster. I’d like to write 6 more novels before I’m done, and I couldn’t accomplish that with the old process.

I’ve had extensive experience with office politics, shady characters, funny characters, crazy events (bearing in mind that truth is stranger than fiction). These experiences find their way into my novels. I had a crazy boss named Rocket Ron, because he would launch himself in furious, volatile anger at bad news. So then, Commander Rocket Ron became a submarine captain in a novel. I also worked many international jobs, and my association with non-Americans has allowed me to write about enemy combatants and how differently they think from our guys. The project management work doesn’t have much to do with plotting and structure, which is more influenced by my submarine career.

When Novel 2 was given the title by publisher Donald I. Fine, ATTACK OF THE SEAWOLF, it gave me the idea that Novel 3 should have the name of a submarine in it, so it became PHOENIX SUB ZERO, which involved the submarine Phoenix and had an Arctic plot, so its name became obvious to publisher Donald I. Fine. “Final bearing and shoot” is a submarine combat phrase, so I knew I was going to use that, and once I plotted the outline showing the main submarine would be the USS Barracuda, the title became simple – BARRACUDA FINAL BEARING. Titles got difficult after PIRANHA FIRING POINT (“firing point” being a submarine term) because I’d run out of cute submarine phrases. So Novel 6 became THREAT VECTOR, Novel 7 became TERMINAL RUN, Novel 8 was EMERGENCY DEEP, Novel 9 was VERTICAL DIVE. Then, for Novel 10, the submarine is sent on a long journey with communications locked down, with the Navy calling that a “dark transit.” So…Novel 10 became DARK TRANSIT. Novel 11, PANIC SWITCH, had its title chosen just because it sounds cool. And then, Novel 12 went without a title until after it was finished, so I had my artist/editor/narrator friends help me write the title. Inside the book, a sub captain is giving a pep talk to his frightened crew before they go into battle, and he tells them, “Do not worry. This ship is the lion of the seven seas.” My narrator said, “how about ‘Lion of the Seven Seas’?” And now you know the rest of the story.

Novel 1, VOYAGE OF THE DEVILFISH, is very short at only 94k words, when my average now is over 200k words. I am writing the “author’s edition” of it by adding 10k to 20k words to flesh out some of the characters and the plot points. We will see how it lies on the page. If it makes the novel better, we’ll issue it as a different book with the title, “VOYAGE OF THE DEVILFISH – AUTHOR’S EDITION – THE TITANIUM COFFIN.” That last part was the original author’s title. If the experiment doesn’t work, I’ll put it into a file, forget it and move on to writing Novel 15.

The book cover banners that AllAuthor makes and the original tweets about what the novel is about are very helpful. I re-post them with a long promotional blurb, which makes for a popular post.

I also think interviews like this are great. Thanks for the opportunity to answer your questions.