Some stories take years to form. Others take a lifetime.

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My father’s story as a POW during World War II first took root in my imagination when I attended film school. For a class project, I asked him to write down his experiences as a prisoner of war. What he gave me was a nine-page narrative—raw, unembellished, and profoundly moving. At the time, I didn’t fully understand the significance of what I was holding, nor did I realize how much it would shape the storyteller I would become.

For many years, those pages percolated in my mind, waiting for the right story to bring them to life.

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The second thread of inspiration came from a casual conversation with family friends. They spoke about the women who stepped into wartime jobs—not just as factory workers or riveters, but in professional fields, taking on roles they’d never been allowed to hold before. One story in particular—a woman who fell in love through letters with the soldier whose job she had taken—stayed with me. A love story born out of war.

The third piece of the puzzle was my career in advertising. I’ve spent years immersed in the art of persuasion, but I was especially drawn to the untold history of the War Advertising Council—the force behind some of the most influential wartime campaigns. Their work changed minds, shaped policy, and ultimately helped win the war, yet their story has never been fully explored in fiction. It felt like fertile ground for a novel.

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These three elements—my father’s POW experience, the war replacement love story, and the advertising war effort—came together to form Two for Victory.

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At its heart, this novel is about resilience, sacrifice, and the power of words to shape both war and love. It’s about two people—CC Gallagher and Joe Butler—who find each other through ink and paper in the midst of a world at war. It’s about the unsung women who stepped up when the world needed them and the men who lost themselves in war only to learn to live in peace once more.

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Also, all of the advertising campaigns in the novel have been fictionalized. I made every effort not to use original campaigns, though keeping everything completely clean of real-life references proved challenging. However, my intent has always been to honor the spirit of wartime advertising efforts without directly replicating them.

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For me, writing Two for Victory has been a way of honoring those stories—the ones passed down, the ones nearly forgotten, and the ones that still shape who we are today.