Look and Listen

Biography

C.D. Williams, known as “Chuck” by his friends” has lived a fairly exciting life. He was born in Sacramento, California in 1939. He had a flare for writing as far back as elementary school, but he had an even greater desire for adventure. When he was seventeen he forged his parent’s signatures on the enlistment papers, dropped out of high school and joined the U.S. Coast Guard. During the next twenty-seven years, Williams received extensive technical training, completed his formal education, served on four ships and traveled to many parts of the world. When he retired from the service in 1984 he was a Chief Warrant Officer stationed in Alaska. He remained in Alaska and worked first as the Risk Manager for the City and Borough of Juneau, Alaska and then as an Independent Insurance Adjuster. During his sixteen years as an Alaska resident he ventured to many parts of the state. In 1994, having experienced most of the adventures offered by that wild place, he relocated to Las Vegas. In December of 2001, after working six years in the Real Estate business in Southern Nevada he retired to try his hand at writing. During his Coast Guard career Williams ventured above the Artic Circle and walked the streets of Bangkok, Thailand. His travels have taken him to all but one of the fifty U.S. States, forty-seven islands or island groups in the Pacific Ocean and to more than a dozen countries. He has been on fishery law enforcement patrols in the Bering Sea, participated in wildlife and medical research expeditions, typhoon relief operations and a number of other humanitarian actions including search and rescue operations, including one involving over thirty injured survivors. He served in Vietnam in 1967. From 1969 to 1971 he was the medical corpsman assigned to an isolated U. S. Coast Guard station in a very remote area of the Southern Philippines. His final tour of duty was as Chief, Health Services Branch in the Seventeenth Coast Guard District Office in Juneau, Alaska. Williams used many of these experiences, bolstered by meticulous research, to create his debut novel Palawan which was published on October 24, 2006. Williams has walked everywhere his characters walk. With his first hand knowledge of the people and places he writes about, Williams is able to bring his readers into the action and give them a sense of being there. Since 2002, in addition to his first novel, Williams has completed several courses in creative writing at the Community College of Southern Nevada and has written a five thousand word first person piece titled “A Coast Guard Story” as well as a number of articles for online publication. He is currently working on a memoir and a second novel.

Inspiration

Everything inspires my writing. My life experiences, current events, the man in the street.