TL;DR

Frank DeCaire is a SciFi author with a degree in Computer Science and over three decades of software engineering experience. Frank lives in Salt Lake City, Utah, with his wife, who spends many summer days hiking trails in Utah and the surrounding states.

Frank spent six years of his youth in the U.S. Navy as an Electronics Technician and was stationed in Pearl Harbor on the U.S.S. Worden (CG-18).

Frank started writing books late in life, with his first published book in 2020. Most of his books are under the sci-fi genre, but there are some books in the Cozy Mystery genre under his pen name, Elliot Droit.

Do You Want To Know MORE?

Of course you do, otherwise, you’d hop off this page and move on…

The picture above is from 2017 when my wife and I hiked the trails at Bryce Canyon, Utah. Here are a few more recent photos of me as we hiked to 8,000 feet on Jacob’s Ladder trail:

I’m sure you want to know what it looks like from 8,000 feet up. Here’s my lovely wife looking off the mountain. That subdivision on the right-side of the picture is where our house is located, and the large lake in the background is Utah Lake:

That’s not even the top of Lone Peak (which is at an altitude of 11,260 feet. One day, we’re going to get there…

If you’d like to see places we’ve gone and hikes we made, you can go to my hiking blog at: hiking.frankdecaire.com.

Writing Career

I started writing around 2017 after stumbling upon an article from Craig Martelle. It was an interesting article that talked about publishing books as an indie author. In the article, he estimated how much he earned per day per book and decided he could live on $50,000 a year by producing 20 books. Like anyone who doesn’t have much writing knowledge, I thought to myself, “I can write a book!”

My wife told me to “Do it.” I mean, what did I have to lose? Well, as it turned out, writing a good book is way more difficult than I ever imagined. In fact, I struggled to write a full-length novel. From 2017 to 2019, I never made it past 33,000 words. Fortunately, I have a day job that pays an outstanding salary, so I really did have nothing to lose.

The breakthrough came when I decided to participate in the NANOWRIMO contest. Well, technically, I never officially signed up for it, but I put myself through the rules where I had to write a 50k rough draft during the month of November. The rules said it didn’t have to be a publishable book, just a rough draft, and rough it was. I actually made it too. Crimson Justice is the book. It came in around 57k in length. A small novel, but it met the minimum requirements, and it was a pretty decent story (if you have KU, you can read it for free on Amazon). I spent the next three months rewriting the book to make the story work and edited it like crazy (I really over-edited it). That’s when I decided that I needed to learn all the other pieces of being an author. So, I bought a business license, set up an account on Amazon, and uploaded the manuscript. Did my own cover (you probably guessed that). Then I did the brave task of hitting the publish button.

After that, I tried out Amazon Ads. I was too gun-shy to try Facebook Ads, but Amazon Ads was a learning experience. I only ran Ads for a short time, then shut them down, because I already knew a stand-alone book wasn’t going to make money.

Then… With my new awesome writing skills (that was heavy sarcasm, in case you missed it), I started my second novel called Doorway. Oh, you’re out looking for that on Amazon, aren’t you? Well, it never got published. The novel came out to over 69k words long, so it was a respectable SciFi novel. Here’s a blurb of what that book was supposed to be about:

When archaeologists Jacob and Annie Adkins are summoned to a classified military dig site in Nevada, they expect ancient ruins—not an impossible wall of symbols and a machine that shouldn’t exist.
But when their toddler son Johnny wanders too close, he slips through a doorway into something…else.

Years later, Johnny grows up haunted by ghost-like figures only he can see—visions doctors call hallucinations, but which feel disturbingly real. As the truth resurfaces, Johnny begins to suspect the military didn’t uncover history underground…

They uncovered a portal.

And something on the other side may have been watching him ever since.

Some day…

Yeah, I might give that book another shot. I need to redo the underlying story to make it work. The second act drags so badly that I set the book aside and decided to write some short stories so I could learn the trade. That’s where the MacKenzie Steele series came from.

I had this idea to use some of the battles from World War II as context for space battles in a futuristic SciFi story. MacKenzie Steele, the main protagonist, is also a history buff and gets his ideas to beat the Arcnals (an alien race) in battles when humans come under attack. Each story is just a small 8 to 10k short that is set up like a “story of the week.” I wrote them individually until I collected 10 of them. Then I decided to continue for another 10 stories. Once I reached 20 total stories, I decided to try my hand at one of those scary novel-sized books. I ended up with 3 novels to finish the MacKenzie Steele series in 5 volumes (the first two are each 10 short stories bundled into one book). Then, I had bigger plans…

Oh yeah. I was a seasoned author now (again, this is heavy sarcasm). I had this fantastic story idea about humans in a galaxy that was not from Earth. This was similar to Battlestar Galactica, but the enemy is more like the Goa’uld on Stargate. Anyway, I leaned heavily into the religious part of this. I started to create the religious text (just a made-up pagan religion that was customized for the story), and I started writing the first novel. Oh, it was going to be huge!

Yeah, that didn’t work. I couldn’t seem to get the story right. After some reflection, I decided that I still needed more practice with shorter stories. Maybe a few more short stories. I set my big project aside and pulled out a single-sentence story prompt.

“A space trucker delivering goods to a space station discovers that the station is empty.”

Oh, that’s good. That’s really good. But what kind of story should I write? It could be horror…nah, then I thought about a dark SciFi story with really evil alien creatures that ate the crew of Novis Terminal… nah. Finally, I decided on something light and humorous. So, I got to my writing desk and began my first 5,000 word short-story…

And, after I wrote about 40k words, and wasn’t done, I decided this story would make a good novel. It was going to be sort of a detective story (of course, I didn’t know ALL of the tropes for a detective series). The original title was The Case of the Missing Station Crew. Ah, that was OK, except the book didn’t sell because everyone thought it was a detective story, and why was it being sold under a SciFi genre? So, I eventually renamed the book Novis Terminal. But the series didn’t end there. Well, I didn’t realize this was going to be a series until I got almost done with Novis Terminal and decided that I had a lot of material rattling around in my head for other books involving Daphne Blazefire and her quirky robot.

This turned into a year of writing Daphne stories. All for practice… of course.

I cranked up the Amazon Ads for this book series and had zero success with sales. Part of it was my lack of understanding of using Ads, and the other part was that Novis Terminal wasn’t a very well-written book. In fact, I didn’t even analyze the quality of my writing until I finished Supercomputer (book 5), when I decided to do an experiment. At the time, I thought that Nav Computer was one of the best, but it wasn’t getting much attention or reviews. So I ran a 99-cent promotion for about a month or two. I received comments in my Ad (Facebook Ad) questioning why I was advertising book 3 of a series. I shrugged it off and explained that the series was a Chronicle of Daphne Blazefire, thus each book can be read in any order (though it flows better if read in order). Then there was that two-star review. Ack!

I’m rather proud of this review. That made me scratch my head. Let’s set aside the insult about 99-cents (it was also on KU, btw). I wondered what precisely Joe meant by “depth.” Just to give context of where I was at this time, I had already consumed probably 30 books on how to write. A lot of the books I read had conflicting advice on how to write a good book. So, here I was looking for more information, when I stumbled across Dean Westly Smith’s learning series on writing. There are several lectures on “depth” itself, starting with one that is super-simple. I studied his lectures and discovered that, yes, I had no clue what depth was at the time.

That’s when I started another series of books. Oh, I had this brilliant idea: Write two books, both the first book of a series, run Ads, and pick the one that does best to finish the series. Well, I started with Desperate Action, then I decided to give the Archons another shot (that’s the huge BG-like series I set aside when I knew I had no skills). The Archons took extra time because the book was around 135k words long, plus I had to write the accompanying Tome of Revelations to go with the book. By the time I wrote that book, I still didn’t have much in the way of sales data on Desperate Action. I was left straddling two series and decided I’d better plunge myself into one of them and get busy. I chose The Archons (technically, the series is called Escape from the Abyss).

I spent a good year and a half on that series, which was originally going to be between 10 and 20 books long. In fact, I was a year into it when I discovered the series was not going to sell. The premise was too complicated. It was extremely difficult to boil down the book blurb into an elevator pitch, which made the Ads tough to format. That’s when I decided I had to take a shortcut and finish off the series (can’t just leave a series hanging, even if it doesn’t sell, there are fans to consider). I ended up writing 3 more books to close it off, and those last three came out pretty darn good. Especially Nathanael. That was the first book I wrote using a first-person limited viewpoint. The story is pretty intense.

Anyway, I wrapped up that series, then decided I needed to close off Desperate Action. To short-circuit that series (which was going to be around 8 to 10 books), I decided to turn it into a trilogy. It didn’t really lend itself too well as a trilogy, but I brought it to a conclusion and closed it off. Well, technically, the story can continue on from there, but I doubt if I’ll ever return to it. I liked the story idea and had plans for subplots described in the first book, but I never went into depth on them when I wrote the trilogy. If only I had infinite time…

After I completed that series, I was thinking about my next series to write. That’s when I thought about the Daphne Blazefire series and how I had some threads I’d never closed. I really liked those characters and didn’t want to just abandon that series, so I decided to close off that sub-plot involving RUSTY’s Memories. Specifically, the fact that he had some memories in his CPU that were not connected to his main memories. RUSTY didn’t know what those memories were, and neither did Daphne. That fact shows up in a couple of stories. I think The Nav Computer was the first story that pointed that out. So, I decided to just write a Daphne book, you know… for the heck of it.

That was where RUSTY’s Memories came from. I plied my new skills, this time not as arrogantly as some of my earlier books. I didn’t expect much, but I wanted to gauge how far I had come, so I advertised RUSTY’s Memories using Facebook Ads, and wow, what a difference. In fact, it was profitable on its own. As I collected more data, I discovered (to my horror) that most of the potential sales that I lost were due to people clicking on the RUSTY’s Memory Ad, then going to the first book in the series and DNFing it. By that time, I was already committed to a new series…

Oh, I had this idea that SciFi wasn’t going to make money for me. You see, Romance is number one. That genre consists of half the books sold worldwide. But I’m not a Romance reader, so not gonna attempt to fake that. The next genre is murder/mystery. So, I created a pen name (Elliot Droit) and set up a website, came up with a series of cozy mysteries, which have sort of a science fiction twist to them (robot dog). I ended up writing the first book just before RUSTY’s Memories, then I wrote books 2 through 5 in the winter of 2025. Those books were super easy to write because they’re short and very tropey.

In the back of my mind, I wondered what would happen if I rewrote Novis Terminal? With the data I collected from RUSTY’s Memories, which I only advertised for a month or two, I thought there could be a path to making the Daphne series viable. Well, Novis Terminal was rewritten from the ground up. I literally wrote a list of what needed to be in the book (because books 2 through 5 relied on events from the first book). Then I reworked the beginning, the first act…

At first, I thought, “Yeah, Daphne’s going to rush in and rescue the crew of Novis Terminal so she can get her pay check.”

Yeah, that was kind of weak. Why would she risk her life for one cargo load? Then I thought, gee, the bank is going to repo her ship, and her company will go bankrupt. Yeah, that’s weak too. I mean, many people experience a company going bankrupt and just start a new one with better products.

That’s when I wrote down a bunch of ideas and came up with the idea that RUSTY gets abducted. OK, now Daphne wants her robot back. But then I had to come up with the fact that RUSTY is her best and only friend. I mean, that comes across as you read each of the following books, but I had to put in a scene to really nail that fact in the first book. In addition to this, it makes for good ads with a simple statement. Like: “They took the station’s crew, then they took RUSTY. Now it’s Personal!”

I wrote the second release version of Novis Terminal, then started the Ads and went on vacation to visit my parents in Michigan. That was Memorial Day weekend, and book sales roared to life. I was stunned. I discovered there were some typos (quite a lot, to be frank about it), which sent me into a panic. I re-read the story one more time (that was probably my fourth time reading and editing), then updated the published version (if you found any more typos, you can send them to my email address, Email: frank@galacticcorebooks.com, and I’ll fix ’em).

Thinking about that series led me to the fact that I needed to close off other threads I left open in the Daphne stories…

If you read enough of the Daphne books, you’ll run into her boyfriend, Lowell, who taps into the military database and discovers that Daphne, who was an orphan, might have a living relative or two. That’s where I came up with Shadows in the Bloodline. That story is really fast-paced, which caused me to recategorize it as a thriller SciFi instead of just a humorous SciFi book. By the time I began to write this book, I had already dug out some of the other Daphne story ideas I had on my hard drive (Oh, I have 20 stories, and I could easily come up with lots more).

Of course, I didn’t want to put all my eggs in one basket, so I spent a tremendous amount of thinking time attempting to come up with another series. Something different from Dahne, but also a chronicle. That’s where Frozen Logic came from later in the fall of 2025. I figured I could flip-flop back and forth between the two series and get them both going strong. But then, I wrote Dust Bargain (the 8th Daphne book), and sales are going crazy. Dust Bargain was fun to write, and I brought back an old character from a previous book (you’ll just have to read it to find out who it is).

I had already promised to write the second book of the Robot Whisperers series, so I just completed Orbital Chaos. By the time I started writing Orbital Chaos, I decided that I’d better focus more on the Daphne series, and I ordered a cover for the next book, which is the one I’m currently working on (The Missing Link). This book will bring back several characters from books as far back as Dangerous Cargo…

From here, I’m going to focus on the Daphne series of books for a while and see where this goes. I’m not sure when I’ll get to book 3 of the Robot Whisperers (but I have to do book 3 or remove the last scene from Orbital Chaos). I have a cover for the tenth Daphne book, titled “To End the Silence.” I still need to plan it (beyond the collection of random notes I put down about how I want the story to go).

I don’t have any commitments after book 10, but I have ideas rolling around in my head. I might start a new Daphne series and write another 10 books (did I mention I have 20 story ideas? Yes, I did). I might just write two more Daphne books for the current series, bringing it to 12 books (and do 12-book sets). If that pans out, I could go further. Some authors write longer series, but the problem with a long series is the read-through. That’s where the first book brings in X number of readers, then 40 to 90% of those readers go on to read the second book, then fewer go to the next. In the case of Daphne’s books, RUSTY’s Memories has more readers than Supercomputer. That’s because people are noticing that books 2 through 5 were written in 2022, and they are skipping over to the newer book. All good. I don’t mind.

Will I rewrite books 2 through 5? Well, this is the big question, isn’t it, and don’t think I haven’t thought about this day in and day out since I published a successful second release of Novis Terminal. If I decide to do something crazy like that (oh, and I’m OK with crazy), I’ll rewrite Dangerous Cargo after I write To End the Silence. I have a lot of great ideas to improve Dangerous Cargo. It’ll be tricky to publish because the Ads are running and there are readers in progress. What I would probably do (assuming I actually go through with this) is publish the second release first, make it really cheap (whatever the minimum cost is), and probably do a 5-day free promo. That way, if someone just bought the set or the first release of that book, then they can get the new one as well and not feel ripped off (’cause that would really make me mad if some author dropped a 2nd release just after I bought the first one). Then I would delist the old book. For KU readers, delisting means the book will still be there for those in the middle of the story (Amazon takes care of all of that), but the Kindle and paperback versions would go away (other than the purchased Kindle books; they remain in the person’s Kindle reader until they delete it).

Then I would wait for a month or two (while writing another book) to see what the Ads do. I suspect the read-through would improve a lot. Currently, the read-through is 48% (over the lifetime of the book), just in case you’re curious how many readers I lose from book 1 to book 2. That’s a lot. For the readers who make it through Dangerous Cargo, the read-through is over 90%. All this means is that if I get a read-through of 90% from book 1 to 2, then it’ll drop when people get to The Nav Computer. That’s still a lot of readers who would now be reading Dangerous Cargo, and my fear (is it really a fear?) is that I would surrender to rewriting the remaining three books that were published in 2022. More work… more work.

Interesting statistics:

• As of January 2026, I’ve published 2,305,887 words and have written 2,659,071 words total.

And that’s the non-TL;DR version of About Me.