About me
V.B. John — Ship Captain | Storyteller |
When I was a kid, I didn’t dream of the sea. I dreamed of breaking the stratosphere, an Airforce pilot flying so high the sky turned black while I pulled stunts across it. As a teenager, I wanted to be a scientist, to decode the mysteries of the world with my mind.
What I did instead was pack a huge bag and vanish over the horizon as a deck cadet.
For eighteen years I have navigated the world’s oceans. I trained at the Indian Maritime University and Solent University, UK, learning to read storms, to trust the stars, and to command a ship through the thin margin between safe passage and disaster. I climbed from cadet to Captain.
But here is the truth the sea never told. It didn’t make me a writer. It just gave me the one thing I truly needed: silence.
The real seed was planted long before I ever held a helm. As a pre-teen and teenager I was a feral reader, devouring books that built a lighthouse in my chest, a beam that kept sweeping back to the same question: could I ever do this? I tried again and again. I made failed attempts at writing the way a ship makes failed attempts at a bearing in a gale ,pushed off course, swamped, forced to start over. It was only in 2018 that I learned the art of completing books.
The brutal loneliness that finds you in the middle of an ocean at midnight became the catalyst for my stories. You are the only soul awake on the vessel. The horizon dissolves. The sea becomes sky, the sky becomes sea, and you are suspended in an infinite, star-dusted void. In that emptiness, the stories I had been choking on for years finally had room to breathe. They didn’t knock anymore. They simply arrived.
I am not the kind of author who sells lakhs of copies overnight. But reader by reader, my community is growing ,steadily, quietly, like a tide coming in. They are the ones who found my voice in the vastness and decided to stay. They are the crew I never knew I was sailing toward.
I have left the safe harbour. The trade winds are filling my sails, and I am bringing with me the tales that only eighteen years of solitude, storms, and star-fixed midnights could forge.
“I must down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky, and all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by.”
V B John 