A Novel of Christian Masculine Formation
Second Row
Book One of The Long Forge
A man, a war, and the slow work of being forged.
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Masculine formation written for men who found the church's version too soft to carry a rifle and the internet's version too hollow to carry a marriage.
The wedding seating chart puts Caleb's father in the second row.
Not because anyone dislikes Dale. Because he's the kind of man who won't make a thing of it, and everyone knows it.
Marine Corps veteran. F/A-18 avionics, 1989–1995.
Out October 27, 2026
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About the book
Sergeant Caleb Wright takes the call in a staging area in the southern Philippines, where he runs the radios for a Marine Raider team and a twenty-one-year-old Filipino Marine has died under his comms chain. Eight thousand miles away, his fiancée is arranging chairs so his mother won't have to sit near his father.
Some men get honored. Some men get managed around.
Caleb has a deployment left to run, a woman behind a 7-Eleven counter in Parang asking him questions no one back home thought to ask, and a decision waiting about what kind of man he intends to be.
The Series
One family. One cross. Nine hundred years.
The Long Forge follows the Wrights — a name that means maker — from the crusades to the present, through seven books of men handed the same question in different armor. Second Row is Book One. It is also the closest to now, which is why it's first.
What makes a man, and what does he hand down?
Every Wright man is one of three, or at war between them.
- The Warrior
- the one who goes
- The Craftsman
- the one who makes
- The Vowed Knight
- the one who binds himself
They are not three men. They are three faces of one inheritance.
The Second Row Trilogy
Caleb Wright, present day
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Book One
Second Row
October 27, 2026
A row of chairs.
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Book Two
The Gravel
2027
The place a man breaks.
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Book Three
The Shop
Coming
The place he rebuilds, and hands it on.
What Came Through the Fire
Silas Wright, Continental Marine — 1775
The Crusader Trilogy
1095–1129
Seven books, written so the reader arrives at the beginning last.
Members
Behind the Forge
Essays on leadership, written the way I'd say them to a staff sergeant who asked. Free to read — sign in with your email, no password to remember.
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Reps. Review. Refinement. Threshold. Tunnel.
A broken targeting pod at El Toro, a shot timer at forty-nine, and a boardroom whiteboard — the same method every time.
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The Gospel According to St. Puller
A creation account in the King James mode. Mostly a joke. Partly not.
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JJ Did Tie Buckle
What a 250-year-old recruiter, and one sergeant, still teach in the boardroom.
Coming in Leatherneck, 2027