Charles had always wanted his Grandparents to meet their great-grandson, and it was with that intent that Charles, his then-wife and newborn son moved across America and settled down in Zephyrhills, Florida. Having fulfilled the huge goal of introducing his son to his grandparents, Charles was satisfied. He spent from 1989 to 1993 living the life of an independent sports memorabilia dealer, which he calls "the second greatest form of earning a living, right behind writing."

During his time in Florida, disaster struck. Charles was diagnosed with cancer on his right ankle in 1991. Charles' doctor informed him of the only two options available. "This is how it is," the doctor said. "You're a young guy, so you're probably going to want to keep your leg, which is fine, but you're only going to live another year ... year and a half, tops. Or we can amputate a few inches below the knee and you'll stand every chance of making a full recovery." Charles was 22 years-old at the time, and more active and sports-oriented than ever, which turned the news into a devastating blow. Nonetheless, having thought about the choices for mere seconds, Charles recalls, "It really wasn't much of a choice to make. Be proud and stupid and keep the leg ... and count every day I have left to live ... or have it hacked off and move on."

To this day, Charles does not resent the decision. It did, however, come at a heavy price. With almost no warning, Charles' first wife divorced him. "I'm not the least bit interested in rehashing the reason she gave for it," Charles recalls. "Let's just say it was cowardly and the most selfish thing I've ever seen or heard of anyone ever doing to another person. And ... quite frankly, it turned out to be the best thing that's ever happened to me." 

In the meantime, Charles left Florida and headed west. He admits having no direction or goal. "Why would I?" he says. "I'd spent years thinking I'd found the right woman, someone I could love and who would love me back and live up to the vows we both swore to, and we'd just had a son together. So you can see how, when that little piece of paradise turned out to be nothing but a web of lies and deceit, life really ran out of direction for me." Charles ended up at the home of a close friend in North Hollywood, California, on January 17, 1994 ... just after midnight. It was just down the street from the epicenter of the 6.7 Richter Scale Northridge Earthquake that shook Los Angeles for 20 seconds, completely destroying whole sections of major freeways around the area, killing 72 people. "I'd been through a few earthquakes before that, but this thing was officially listed as having the highest ground acceleration ever instrumentally recorded in any urban area in North America. I'd fallen asleep on my friend's living room couch and ... WHAM! That earthquake literally threw me off the couch and across the room. After picking myself up off the floor, I ran into my buddy's bedroom, woke him up by screaming about the whole house shaking like crazy, and then stood dumbfounded as he told me, 'It's just an earthquake, man.' Well, just an earthquake or not, I wasn't about to stick around for a second helping." Charles recalls grabbing his friend's pickup truck keys, telling him, "I'll let you know where you can pick up your truck. I'm out of here! Call ya later!"

And within seconds, Charles sped off into the still pre-dawn darkness, alone and startled.

Having arrived in Las Vegas hours later, Charles recalls, "I pulled into a hole-in-the-wall casino on the edge of town. The marquee sign out front advertised ten cent beer! So, after the recent changes in my life, and still only hours after that whole earth-shaking thing, I figured ten cent beer was right up my alley. I flipped open my wallet, counted the amount I had in bills inside, did the math and figured out that I had enough money to spend pretty much the entire day there, and decided Las Vegas was the place for me. Think about that. No earthquakes there, no blizzards, no hurricanes, tornadoes, or anything else, really. I figured, what's the worst that can happen there? I'd spend every day waking up to weather forecasts warning me of pleasant, sunny weather for all eternity. Oh, sure, there was always the possibility of going outside and having my flesh melt right off my skull as small animals burst into flames in front of me, but the heat was everything I was willing to trade for in order not to have to deal with snow for the rest of my life."

And a few months later, coming home from a long walk across the city, Charles says, "I opened my door and there she was ... just sitting there at my chess board ... as if she'd been there all along. The most beautiful vision of my life ... just sitting there." The "she" was Amy and she'd accompanied a friend (Jennifer) who'd gone to spend time with her boyfriend (John), Charles' roommate. It was love at first sight.

Then and there, Charles vowed to make Amy his new wife.

Charles and Amy Chilton married on September 10, 1996 and moved across town to a quaint house beside Nellis Air Force Base until April 1999, when Amy decided she had had enough of life in the desert. Having grown up in Las Vegas, she wanted to see America, so she and Charles moved back to New England, Charles' boyhood stomping grounds. They lived in Framingham for a brief period, both working jobs they hated for companies they hated even more, before Charles became fed up and suggested a move deeper into New England, to Maine, where they resided until 2003.

It was there that Charles took up the idea of writing for a living. "I'd toyed around with a few plot ideas before, always wanting to write, but I just never did," he recalls. "But there's something about Maine ... something that jump starts the creative engine in a person. I mean, I must be right, because it's where Stephen King got his start and he's pretty damn successful."

Six years later, Charles' stable of work includes 650 short stories, 25 novelettes, 32 novellas, and 4 feature-length novels. "A Song of Independence is easily my best work," Charles says, "and that presents me with a pretty big problem, too, because it was written early in my career. So it sets a pretty high bar in how and what I have to write in order to top it. And that, above everything else, is the goal I've been searching for all my life."

Charles said at the time that he owed his entire writing career to Amy. "It was all her fault. It all started as a way for me to tell a story to just one person ... one Ideal Reader ... her. She's who I used to write for. She's who I constantly sought to entertain with my work. It was her opinion I valued most, even above my own. I figured the day I handed her a manuscript that she didn't enjoy reading, I'd be done. I'd have been gone from writing that very day. I figured until that day came, I'd continue pounding out as much material as I could, as often as possible. Because, if not for her, I'd never have known I could write for a reading audience. To honor her memory, I owe it to her to write as much as I can ... while I can."

Charles adds, "It helps that I have the most awesome readers and fans on Earth, too. Without them and Amy, I'd never have had a reason to do what I do."  

On Tuesday, January 12, 2010 at 11:51 PM, Charles held Amy in his arms as she passed away from a heart attack. All efforts to revive her were unsuccessful.

Life ground to a halt. “I had no idea how I was going to go on living,” Charles says. “I’d just lost the one person I loved most, who saved my life so many times I couldn’t even count. What the hell was I supposed to do without her? I’d always heard about couples dying just weeks apart, with the wife dying in her old age and then her husband following shortly after from a broken heart. I always thought that was how it would happen to me. And, honestly, when I was still alive eleven days later … I asked myself why. For the longest time I was actually offended. I remember talking to my favorite picture of Amy, asking her why the hell I’d been left behind like that. I didn’t want anything to do with life. I wanted to be wherever it was that she went. So I tried to will myself to die of a broken heart.”

Charles read everything he could about grieving and what happens after we die. “I watched countless documentaries and listened to hundreds of hours of talk radio shows, focusing all of my attention on finding out where Amy went, if there really was such a thing as Heaven or if we’re just wasting our time here on Earth. I just had to know what it was all about when we die. It really galvanized my life, looking for anything I could find to show me once and for all how it all works.”

Spending the following ten months almost completely cut off from the world, Charles immersed himself as completely in the grieving process as he could. “For me, I figured it was better to do it that way than to go through all kinds of counseling and the prescribed drugs they’d end up plugging into me. I don’t do drugs whatsoever, and it would’ve felt like a crutch, for me. And no counselor would’ve been able to tell me anything I didn’t already know or couldn’t have learned on my own. So I spent the longest time of my adult life … separated from civilization.”

On November 3, 2010, Charles says, “I learned not to care if my whole life was fiction or reality, because that night I met an angel. Her name is Linda and we met on a website called FUBAR ... in my old profile that was hijacked and deleted by someone who wishes us not to be happy. Linda and I had the single greatest night exchanging virtual shots of Jack Daniels (we call it our Jack Night) and suggestive banter ... and when it ended and we went our separate ways.” Charles found himself actually smiling for the first time in what felt like forever. 

The day after Thanksgiving, the unseen movie script that Charles felt he was living in caught up with him. “I got hit by a minivan while walking home from the commuter rail. It was a Sunday night. It was in a crosswalk. There were 25 eyewitnesses. All totaled there were plenty of sworn statements and they all said pretty much the same thing: The way I went under the minivan that hit me and came out from under it without being dead ... that can't have happened. It defied the laws of physics.”

“There's NO WAY I should have lived through that,” Charles says. He came as close as a person can come to actually bleeding out without dying. Then a blood clot managed to break free one day in the hospital and stopped his heart for 6 minutes. “So I have no business being alive to tell these situations. Yet here I am.”

His left leg was broken in what was called a catastrophic compound fracture. “Which is such a lovely term, don'tcha think?” Charles says. “Not just a clean break ... but the worst kind you can have. I remained conscious the whole time in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. And then the surgeon showed up and said it was absolutely necessary to get me into surgery right then to shove a titanium rod down the entire length of inside of the tibia and secure it there with 4 titanium bolts drilled right into the bone.”

He doesn't remember any other conversation after that. “Next thing I know, there I am in recovery ... waking up ... and the last 10 months were still there. I hadn't actually dreamt them after all. Fiction HAD actually happened to me the whole time.”

One month following Jack Night, to the day, Charles surprised Linda by messaging her to say happy one month anniversary of Jack Night. From then on they became inseparable. “The really freaky part of that,” Charles says, “is that it happened on my last night in the hospital for the accident. I realized I could get online from my room and I'd finally been taken off the heavy medication for extreme pain relief and was pretty lucid, so I decided to go online ... and there was Fubar in my browser as if I'd never closed it. I went back into Fubar with the idea that I'd send Linda that happy one month anniversary of Jack Night message and that would pretty well be it. She always says it means the world to her that someone would remember her like that. I always reply by saying HOW COULD I NOT??? I mean, LOOKIT HER, FOR CRAP SAKES!!! She's the sexiest, most beautiful of all of God's living creations ... and that Jack Night and the one month anniversary message brought us closer to being together forever.”  

Charles considers the accident to be a gift from the angels, because it caused him to be hospitalized and slow down long enough to be able to see Linda and recognize the chance at sheer greatness in a relationship and the chance at a lifetime of happiness “with the greatest woman who has ever lived. If not for that accident, I'd never have sent that anniversary message. And I wouldn't be ANYWHERE NEAR as happy as I am now. And certainly not in love, because who would there have been to be in love with?”

On December 20, 2010, Linda and Charles announced to one another that they were in love. “And I've never cared about anything else in life ever since,” Charles says. “We are engaged to be married. I can't wait for that. I will be the luckiest man to ever walk the face of the planet. I would give my life to ensure hers would continue. But as long as that's not necessary, I'll give it to her for safe keeping. Forever. The moral of the story here is that none of it matters. Not fiction. Not reality. Not even a weird mixture of each. What matters is that through great tragedy I was given the greatest gift of my life. MY LINDA. And I will adore and treasure and cherish her for all eternity. And I will love her as if the universe DEPENDS on it. It must, after all ... look at how much it made happen to me to cause me to be at rest enough to find Linda. It’s also a supreme gift from the angels in Heaven, for me to give the love to Linda that Amy gave to me. I know that is what she wants for me, to love again and to do it fully, with everything in me. So I will.” 

There are no great men, only great challenges that ordinary men are forced by circumstances to meet. ~ William F. Halsey

Charles and Linda are presently engaged to be married on February 8, 2012.