John D. Murray

My first experience at writing was actually a pop quiz my English teacher sprang on my class one day in high school. We had the period in which to write a story and turn it in for grading. Our choice of subject matter. The first thing that popped in my mind was to write a first person account of a battlefield during the revolutionary war, from the point of view of a canon. It described how it and a group of it's brother canon were dragged up a hill overlooking the battlefield. It told the tale of the ebb and flow of the day long battle. Culminating in it's position being over-run and being spiked. Ending with the impressions of the aftermath of battle and the bloody sunset.

I really wish I had made a copy of the story to keep. My teacher was very impressed and had me read it to the class the next day. I was actually very proud of that story. I'm not sure why it took me thirty years to take up writing again.

I spent many years working as an auto parts counterman. Using my earlier experience working on and reading about cars I had learned a great deal about how to, and not to handle, car repairs. I had, on a daily basis, customers who would come in with long lists of emission parts that a mechanic had told them they needed replaced on their cars. With the knowledge I had gained over the years, I knew that most of what they were buying was unnecessary. I would spend hours every day explaining why these customers could not possibly need more than one or two of these parts, and that the rest were just the mechanic padding his labor bill and costing the customer a fortune in both parts and labor. I realized then that there had to be a way to let customers all over know that they were being ripped-off. That was the seed for my first book. Unfortunately, it has been many years since that time. I ended up in a totally other type of job and forgot about writing this book.

Events over the last year have proven to me that it was definitely time for this book to come out. So there it is.