Writing has become a way for author, lawyer, and teacher Bobby Wilson to express his personal challenges and triumphs, as well as the corrupt issues of the country.

In his fiction novel, State of Mind, he used characters based on real Americans to describe the issues surrounding the nation’s financial crisis in a way that not many people knew was occurring until after it had unfolded.

“There was a tremendous amount of fraud and chicanery and just outright violations of the law that were taking place by the banks and the mortgage companies,” said Wilson. “No one ever was prosecuted, no one was ever punished, and all the outlaws just walked away scot-free.”

Out of his frustration and personal concern, he decided to publish his third novel, about the background of the crisis that not many people had yet been exposed to. He delves into the issues with the big businesses and how these companies were getting away with fraud.

“It just makes my skin crawl that these people did this disastrous thing to the American people again and they got away with it,” he said.

Wilson’s writing career began out of a life-changing event, as he described it, as a way to tell his story about the death of his family members.

In 1963, as a recent 18-year-old high school graduate, Wilson decided to enlist in the military. The Vietnam War was just beginning and he wanted to complete his patriotic duty to serve his country and make a career out of the military. However, this plan was interrupted by an event that changed his entire course of life.

While waiting for his orders to be sent so he could attend basic training, he was residing in his home with his mother and sister. Wilson described his family life as dysfunctional, and eventually this dysfunction resulted into the death of his mother and sister.

“There was about a weeks delay in getting my orders so I could go to basic training and one night, my mother came home from doing god knows what at about 3 a.m. and she went berserk,” said Wilson. “She tried to kill me, and in the process of trying to shoot me she killed my kid sister who was a year younger than me.”

The house was burned to the ground and when it was over, two people were dead and Wilson was left alone with no other relatives to turn to. The county charged Wilson with a double murder and arson.

After a grueling 10-year process of three different trials and spending eight months in county jail, all the charges against him were dismissed.

During the process, he decided he wanted to become a lawyer to make something out of his experience and because had seen the inside and outside of the legal system. He put himself through school at the University of Texas and gained a bachelor degree, then continued on into law school in Texas.

“I worked my way through law school between the three trials and by the time the last trial came around I was already a licensed practicing attorney,” he said.

His family and friends encouraged him to write a book about these traumatic events, which lead him to write a memoir about his life titled, Bobby’s Trials.

Wilson then published a second book, a sequel to Bobby’s Trials, titled Renegade Barrister. This novel follows his life after the trauma and three trials, by focusing on his career as a lawyer representing others going through the system.

His fourth and latest book was published after State of Mind, titled State of Unrest. This novel is about a man in Massachusetts who went into a school, killed teachers and students, after he first killed his mother.

This book caused a large uproar because he released it just six months before the school shooting in Connecticut, where the same situation occurred as what did in his book.

“In that book I predicted that some nutcase was going to go into a kindergarten and a preschool in Massachusetts and was going to kill a bunch of the teachers and the students, which would cause a huge uproar for gun control,” he said. “I just had a feeling something like that was going to happen.”

There were few differences in the actual event and in Wilson’s novel, but the main difference was that his took place in Massachusetts, while the actual shooting took place in Connecticut.

Wilson now resides in Arizona and uses his knowledge about the legal system to teach law at Rio Salado Community College in Tempe, Ariz.

For more information on the author and his four books, you can visit his website here.