Joseph was born February 16, 1950 in Jacksonville, Florida. He started life as the son of a commercial fisherman.  His father first took him to sea at age four.  He spent his early youth on the shrimping grounds of St. Augustine, Cape Canaveral and Key West, Florida.  Usually the fishing boats only went to sea in good weather but  one trip caught the boat on the edge of a hurricane.  The adults were frightened but for a seven year old, tied in the wheelhouse chair, riding the 30-foot waves and sliding downward into the trough between the waves was like a ride at a carnival.  The happiest times of Joseph's childhood were on those trips to the fishing grounds.

Joseph was abandoned in St. Augustine at age eleven. He was adopted by the O'Steens and settled into a life ashore.  His love of the sea never died. He visited the local docks talking to the fishermen almost every day. Joseph read every nautical book he could get his hands on and watched every movie about the sea, from pirates and age of sail to the modern stories of World War 2. His heroes were the great ships and the men who sailed them. Eventually the call of the sea was too strong. Joseph ran away in his senior year of high school to join the U. S. Navy.

Joseph spent two enlistments in the Navy where he completed 7 progressively advanced Navy schools from basic seamanship through Nondestructive Testing and obtained his high school GED and a few collage credits while working his way up to First Class Petty Officer. Joseph spent two cruises on the aircraft carrier John F. Kennedy that took him to the Atlantic Ocean, the North Sea, the Mediterranean and Caribbean Sea.  He visited ports steeped in nautical history in France, Spain, Italy, Greece, Turkey, Scotland, and Jamaica.

When he returned home to St. Augustine, with his growing family, he found a changed and dwindling fishing industry with no need for an 27 year old man with family responsibilities and too long out of the business.

Joseph used his Navy training and went to work at the local aircraft factory.  He soon discovered a knack for writing technical proposals, factory capabilities books, corporate policies/procedures and a few employee position descriptions. He has achieved positions as Inspection Manager, Industrial Engineering Supervisor and Facilities Planning Supervisor.

Joseph  never lost his love of the sea and sea stories. He has read all of C. S. Forester, Patrick O’Brien, Alexander Kent, Dudley Pope and dozens of other author’s sea stories. He read so many, so fast that they could not be published  fast enough. He would wait for months for the latest book to be published.

Joseph's wife, Chris, persuaded him to write his own sea stories while waiting for Alexander Kent’s ‘Second to None” to be published. He started writing as a naval officer at the Hart of Oaks role playing site on line, where he created Nathan Beauchamp, a British Naval officer in 1803. Soon the role playing was not enough. Joseph researched British naval histories and started to write the Nathan Beauchamp series. 

With his books Joseph  provides the reader with a fast paced, action filled, sea story without the great detail to ship and sail handling found in most books of this genre. His style provides new readers an entry to the much more detailed books of the great authors whose works he loves. Forester, Kent, Pope, Lambdin, Stockwin, O'Brian, White, Nelson and so many more have provided him with many hours of reading pleasure as their protagonists waged war in the age of sail.

Joseph hopes his readers will enjoy the Nathan Beauchamp series as much as he enjoys writing it.