There is freedom to confessing the events in this book. I do so unapologetically for myself and my mother.
Writers usually use one of two methodologies to create a story. The first is the outline method, where the writer creates a road map of the story's direction. The second is the “pantser” who writes by the seat of their pants, spontaneously creating each chapter until the story unfolds from them like alchemy.
BAKER, LIAR, CON MAN, THIEF, previously titled ANATOMY OF A CON, was an amalgamation of both methods. Because it is my story, I knew the direction it would go. But like all life events, the time was messier than the telling. It is hard to distill events, motives, and consequences into a story that doesn’t meander in boring directions. So, there was more than a little planning.
Yet each chapter was almost composed by an Ouija board. I would fall asleep focused on the events of the time and wake up with a recall of the events and how they should be told. I did this on and off for about twenty years.
With each completed chapter, I gave a copy to my mother, my sister, and my cousin, who remembered the events of that period. They were my beta readers. For most of that time, I never thought of having the chapters published. It was simply to become a historical tome for my family.
Then, my mother passed away during the pandemic years, and I felt that the story should be told. While she was alive, my mother encouraged me to have the story published and it seemed the right thing to do in her memory. Another person who knew the story was not as encouraging, and she asked me to keep the story under wraps. I honored her wish for a time.
We started as scared fugitives and eventually gained confidence and hubris as the complex mechanisms of our crimes became easier to accomplish. Looking back, I have no real regrets, except that maybe I could have learned humility earlier in life.
There is freedom to confessing the events in this book. I do so unapologetically for myself and my mother. Each reader can judge how they would have handled the challenges we faced and whether they would have done things differently.
