"Landing on best-seller lists has brought messages from readers wanting to know how much truth vs. fiction there is in 'Paper Targets’ … - Thank you, dear readers, here is some explanation" steve s. saroff

Paper Targets - the back story

I have severe dyslexia and did not do well in school. Then my mother died when I was ten, and my scientist father was mostly absent. I first started running away when I was 14. This was on the east coast, near D.C. I walked up the Potomac River to where I got on the Appalachian trail at Harpers Ferry and turned south. I was hungry and lonely most of the time. For the company in words, I started writing. My dyslexia became a superpower because I listened and looked at words as sounds and shapes, not as structured rules. Dyslexia has let me notice the world in ways most people don’t. In my early 20s, I lived off the short stories I was selling to magazines. Editors fixed my grammar and spelling. Not long after I started selling fiction, I found that I also had a knack for a different type of writing: code. So I started writing software too, which is another way to deal with loneliness. And dyslexia was also an advantage for understanding code, as it helped see connections that most people missed.

Paper Targets is based on the events of the world's largest and murkiest frauds. All of the technical parts of Paper Targets are true... and some of the non-techical parts as well (runaway, dyslexic, laborer, self-taught). I founded a company that became the 1st commercially successful web-based eMail software. I'm an author of a patent on the most unique part of FreeMail - its self-cloning ability (FreeMail functioned and propagated as a benevolent virus). But from that experience, I was pushed against a swirling world of theft, and corruption. And, like many inventors, I learned about betrayal and heartbreak. When billions of dollars are stolen, secrets swirl along the murky fringe...

I started writing “Paper Targets” more than 20 years ago. The software company I founded, FreeMail, had been acquired a few years earlier, and my life should have been good. But instead, it was a Herculean mess. I had just been fired by a billionaire whom I had accused in a board meeting of crimes, and now I was out of work and broke. It would still be four more years before Ebbers was arrested and sentenced to 25 years in federal prison — where he became blind and demented — for what was then the world’s largest fraud. But when I was writing the first words of “Paper Targets,” he and the other executives who had pulled me into their world of the “Lie” were freely strutting on the World Stage of Greed. But it was all corrupt, even as they were still scooping up investor money that would evaporate into headlines.

Writing has been my way to understanding mistakes and troubles. But whenever I try to write “Just The Facts,” my words scrunch into arrogant-sounding scribbles and add depression to my burdens. So I turn to fiction, as I have been doing since I left home at 14, to figure out what happened. And inevitably, the truth does come out; there is a lot of non-fiction in “Paper Targets,” but I have never killed anyone nor hacked for money, though I have known several that have. Then, in 2020 I became friends with Stacy Lear, a writer who was then a homicide detective and who also has a knack for solving financial crimes. I thought Stacy might appreciate what I had spent the last 20 years trying to figure out, and I read to her the first pages of what then was called “The Aether and the Lie,” some of which I had also read on my podcast Montana Voice. Stacy’s response encouraged me to finish what I had started and find a publisher for what became “Paper Targets.”

People who have created our technological world — the screens, wires, networks — are failable human beings, and some have done bad things because of greed. And others have been nudged into doing bad things because the border between right and wrong can be jagged and grey. But good still matters and ethics is more than an academic concept, and living ethically is a challenge but should be a goal.

click here for back story of the back story...
- steve s. saroff