Broke, about to lose his house, and hopeless on Christmas Eve, former professor finds a way.

Feb. 16, 2009 - PRLog -- NEW YORK, NY - October 2, 2008.  From the outset, former professor Butch Regent knew it was more than just a cavernous Victorian house in the Adirondacks.  After all, for the past half century it had been a nunnery.  Before that, a tuberculosis sanatorium.  

It was falling down, but fixing it up and giving it yet another worthy incarnation would bring meaning to his restless life.

The star-in-the-east promise of the start turns destructive when Regent goes broke.  Never mind renovation - he can’t even afford to repair the broken plumbing.  He can barely keep up with the mortgage payments.  

But Franklin Manor is a special place.  Even as it seems about to destroy Regent, it reaches out through the good offices of resident angels and long-dead former residents to bring him from the edge of despair to new hope.      

A Franklin Manor Christmas was first published online in 2004 by North Country Public Radio in Canton, New York.  In 2007, NCPR broadcast a radio-play adaptation performed by Pendragon Theatre of Saranac Lake, New York.  

Paul Willcott is a lapsed Texan with a Ph.D. in foreign language education and a law degree.  He has lived in Baghdad, Tehran, Amman, London, Hong Kong, Zurich, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere.  He is a frequent contributor a commentaries and other work to North Country Public Radio.  He now divides his time between Manhattan and the village of Saranac Lake in the Adirondack Mountains, where he and his wife have spent the last ten years renovating a former Carmelite Monastery.  

A Franklin Manor Christmas by Paul Willcott, 15 illustrations by Walle Conoly.  144 pages.  $16.95. ISBN 978-0-9816716-1-1.  Also available - a 3-cd set of the author reading the story.  978-0-9816716-2-8.  $28.95.

Distributed by Atlas Books. Available from Atlas, Baker and Taylor, and Ingram.

To look inside the book and for further information go to www.wordstruckpress.com and click on “fiction.”