The Story Behind the Story

 

 

Behind every story, there is another story, often even more interesting.  That is the case with “Tales from a Haunted House.”  The story behind Tales… begins in 2001.  I had a small business that made custom radio receivers.  Our biggest customers were for blind people to receive special news programs in what is called Radio Reading Services.  We also made radios for broadcast stations to receive emergency alerts.  And we made radios for the US Army and the army of an ally to the US.  It was small, but my company made a positive difference in people’s lives.

 

In early of September 2001, a supplier with which we had a just-in-time agreement failed to deliver a mission-critical part and our production was delayed for over three months.  Instead of laying-off my workers, I kept them employed and worked around the missing part.  Our income dried up and I had to borrow money to pay them.  I was unable to keep up with my withholding taxes.  Although I made regular payments to catch up, it was not good enough for the agent assigned to my business.  She was nasty and called me a liar, a tax fraud and a cheat.  I could not deal with her and so I hired some lawyers to deal the agent.

 

Shortly thereafter, I completed a major contract and received enough money to pay off the IRS.  I advised the lawyer to notify the agent that payment would be forthcoming, just as soon as the check cleared.  The lawyer told me not to pay the IRS because the agent had such great hatred for me that the payment would not be credited to my account.  The lawyer told me that the IRS was going to seize the business whether they were paid or not.  The only recourse was to file for bankruptcy.  The lawyers used the money intended for the IRS to cover the legal expenses.

 

Because of the cost of the bankruptcy, I had to turn away major contracts from Europe, the Middle East, South America, and the US.  I had to withhold payments from all business and personal creditors.  During the bankruptcy, most of my income went to the lawyers and I had to close the business.  I had to sell off business assets to pay the lawyers.  The business was completely destroyed.

 

But, then, some of the creditors claimed that they never received their payments.  I started to investigate and discovered that the bankruptcy was a fraud.  There is no agency that would investigate.  I went to the US Trustee, the IRS, the FBI, the Massachusetts Attorney General, the New Hampshire Attorney General, and even my local police.  The only agency with jurisdiction was the Massachusetts Board of Bar Overseers (BBO).  After a nine-month investigation, they determined that the fraud took place in the IRS, and the embezzlement took place in the bank.  They provided no proof!

 

I was overwhelmed by shame and guilt that people who trusted me lost money.  And I had to go into court and have arrogant lawyers tell a judge that I defaulted on an account.  I realized that I would face years of financial struggle.  I had lost my business, my life savings, my career, my reputation, and my good name because of this scam.  I saw no relief in site.  I decided to end my life to escape the misery.  I decided upon a peaceful way to die and made preparations.  I thought about my parents who were in their seventies.  They were depending upon me more and more.  I wondered what effect my death would have upon them.  I decided that I would just have to suffer through the rest of my life.

 

During those days, between lawsuits, I was attempting to rebuild my business, but hampered by depression and lack of resources.  One evening, feeling totally hopeless, I sat in front of my computer and started writing.  Years earlier, while driving home in a snow storm, I wondered what would happen if I slid off the road and had to make it home on foot.  I built a story around that idea.

 

I created a fantasy world with people that I understood and in most cases liked.  Each night I would spend a few hours writing.  In the second chapter, I created the woman of my dreams, married to a man whom I based upon myself.  And each night, I could drift into this world where good people struggled for happiness and success.  When I was in this fantasy world, I was no longer depressed and no longer felt hopelessness.  Each night, I wrote a few pages, and each night I drifted into the world that I had created where kindness and hard work led to happiness and success.  In a subsequent chapter, I created a woman with whom I was once in love.  But in this chapter, I married her and we had a happy life together.  In another chapter, a character based entirely upon me gave advice to a young protégé and it was the theme of the book and the principle upon which I live my life:  Always give more than you take.  The book has a “pay it forward theme” where small kindnesses are rewarded later in life.  By the end of the summer, I had written a complete novel.  It sat on my computer for years.

 

I had hoped that I could revive my career and I subscribed to electronic magazines.  One magazine had a weekly feature called EE Life.  It was a humorous compilation so anecdotes by engineers.  For Halloween, they ran a contest called “The Frankenstein Fix.”  They asked for stories about bringing a dead piece of electronic equipment back to life.  They were looking for humor.  I remembered that several years earlier, I had to repair a broadcast transmitter that was destroyed in a flood.  I wrote the story and then punched it up with lines from the Frankenstein movies.  I changed:  “There were some transmitter parts in the basement” to “There was a graveyard of old transmitters in the basement.”  And of course, when I tested the transmitter and it worked, “I screamed, ‘It’s alive!  It’s alive!’”  I won first prize and decided to submit my story to a publisher.  It is now available at bookstores all over the world.

 

My second novel is “The Last Summer” about a man who is told by his doctor that he will die in six months.  It answers the old question: would you want to know on what day you would die?  It ponders the premise that we gain wisdom too late in life.

 

I have written first drafts of other stories.  “The Song of a Dove” is about suicide and has a touching ending.  “The Lady in the Woods” is about a boy lost in the woods and will die if he is not rescued before a cold front approaches.  The search teams are looking in the wrong place.  A woman, all in white, leads him to safety and then disappears.  Another story is a sequel to “Tales… about a woman who puts money on a counter at a train station and asks the clerk for a ticket.  “As far as it will take me!”

 

 Maybe someday, I will finish the stories.

 

And so, now you know the story behind the stories!