Robert A DukeRobert "Bob" Duke has been a full-time nonfiction writer his entire professional life. He has written marketing, training, and technical material for nuclear weapons maintenance, the aerospace industry, computer hardware and software, manned spacecrat, and the petroleum industry. His clients included Northrop Corporation, McDonnell Douglas Aerospace, IBM, Xerox, GTE Information Systems, Control Data Corporation, Unisys (nee Burroughs), and other For-tune 500 companies. Duke made his way into freelance writing in 1979, ran his own publishing business, and supplemented his income by producing articles for national and regional newspapers and magazines. His favorite subject? Boating. Since 1982, he's authored more than six hundred boating, fishing, and travel articles. He was a regular writer for Sea magazine's Hands-On Boater, Mexico Report, and Stem to Stern columns. He was Northwest Editor for Dockside, and contributed features about renovating, commissioning, and repowering yachts. In an effort to "have his cake and eat it too," Duke managed corporate communications for the world's largest avocado growers' co-operative in Santa Ana, California, where he worked twenty-five hours per week with summers off for nine years. This allowed him to pursue his boating interests and to travel all summer with his professor wife, Shearlean, who also had summers off. Eventually the couple relocated to Bellingham, Washington, where Duke began writing course material and sales and marketing literature for Alaska on the Home Shore, a Southeast Alaska sea kayak charter business. He developed and co-instructed Home Shore's Inside Passage Training Cruise.In August 2009, when Shearlean was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer, Duke became her full-time caregiver and advocate, working 24/7, 365 days a year for eighteen months, managing her treatment and care. He wrote Waking Up Dying and devoted most of his recent writing to raising funds for the Shearlean Duke Memorial Public Relations Scholarship, which he founded at Western Washington University where she was working as chair of the Journalism Department when she died. Read More Read Less