JT Baldwin

I've been building the Blood & Steel universe for thirty years. Not all at once — in pieces. Characters carried around like emotional luggage from one notebook to the next, one failed draft to the next, one life chapter to the next. Peri, Kitt, Kataero, Wynne — they've been with me longer than most people I know.

The Blood & Steel universe is set in a world that lost everything digital and had to rebuild with what was left: muscle, iron, and the stubborn refusal to accept that civilization was over. The short story collections are the foundation. Wilted Crowns is the first full novel. Five books in the Ironforged series. Fifteen planned across the broader saga.

Not everything I write lives in that world. Evermore is contemporary noir on the Florida Gulf: two women, two secret escape funds, and one summer that breaks both plans. Warden is fantasy: a road walked every year, and the man who means to walk it alone. Different shelves, same interest in people who refuse to stay broken. I publish those as Baldwin, for mature readers.

Before fiction, before trucking, I spent a decade in the United States Air Force as an Aircraft Electrical and Environmental Systems Specialist. Then I earned my CDL, drove over-the-road, worked my way through dispatch and operations management, and now serve as Vice President of Operations for a refrigerated carrier in Rochester, Minnesota. Seventy-five trucks. Twenty-five years in the industry.

That experience became the Road Tested series — the career survival guides I wished someone had handed me when I started, and the knowledge I wish every new driver already had when they walked through my door.