Debbie Viguié's Blog, page 10

Welcome to hour 12 of the Festival! Don’t forget to pledge my Kickstarter by clicking here. Come on, you know you want a dead body in one of my books named after you!

Ah, so it is the dead middle of the night. Who’s actually up and who is reading this hours later? I have a fantastic giveaway from my own private collection. Seriously, this is incredibly rare. Before the Wicked series was published with its current covers books 1-4 were each published individually. I’m giving away an original edition copy of Wicked: Curse that has been in my possession since the day it came out. Seriously, these are very rare. So, to get it, tell me what you love most about Wicked. I’ll pick the answer I like best and send you this book.

Welcome to hour 11 of the Festival! Don’t forget to pledge my Kickstarter by clicking here. Make your dreams or someone else’s come true and support your favorite author in the process!

I was up for a writing job several years ago and they asked me to write a short, humerous scene. I submitted the following. What makes it great is that it is based on a true story. Some of it has been changed, but not as much as you would think.

Okay so, it wasn’t totally my fault. I mean it was really the hairdresser’s fault, she was the one who butchered my hair this morning and left me with that one lock hanging down into my eyes too short to go back in my barrette and way too long to be bangs. She wasn’t even supposed to cut my hair. Stefan, was supposed to cut my hair because we all know that gay guys know so much more about hair than women do. Stefan has been cutting my hair for three years and he was supposed to cut my hair today. But, Sue, the hairdresser from hell, botched a tint job she was doing and so he had to rescue her client and I was the one who got screwed. So, it was all Sue’s fault, either that or the hack beauty school that graduated her without teaching her how to tint. Still, I’m not entirely sure the school can be blamed, after all, she had some sort of responsibility to the hair she touched, you know like an oath to do no harm but only good. So, the waiter freaking out at Chevy’s was really her fault.

Or, it could have been my mother, sitting there in the restaurant complaining about my hair, telling me I looked like one of those “Animal” characters. Please, mom, Anime has dangling, eye-blocking hair that causes vision issues. Animals have fur. Ask Grandma, she’d never mistake Japanese animation for her mink stole, not in a million, which I’m sure is how old she actually is. Whatever. So Mom was totally ragging on me and so it was more her fault really. If she had just left it alone I could have dealt with it myself in the privacy of my own super stylish bathroom and then everything would have been fine. Josh, the hottie at school, who I’m sure is going to ask me to winter dance, wouldn’t have known. Mrs. Corban, my snobby, oh-so-perfect dance teacher, wouldn’t have seen it. And most certainly the waiter with the Ashton Kutcher eyes wouldn’t be looking at me like I was the freak of the weak.

See really, my future husband, the Ashton Kutcher wannabe, should be staring at Juliette. After all, it’s all her fault. She was the one who freaked out more than my mom and me. ‘Course, it was probably my mom going on and on about the hair that made her do it. I don’t think she could stand it anymore. She wasn’t raised in my family and so her tolerance levels for my mom aren’t up to my own natural immunity. Juliette kept staring from me to my mom to the hair. I felt like I was in some gangster movie where we were all going to draw our guns on each other simultaneously and then stand there with everyone freaking. And then it happened. Well, okay it didn’t exactly happen that way, I mean after all, Juliette was the only one who drew a weapon and even then it wasn’t actually a gun. It was more of a knife. A steak knife to be exact. Wielding the steak knife she lunged forward out of her chair and grabbed the lock of my hair that had caused so much anguish to so many. Before I knew it she was sawing away with the steak knife, giving me the most impromptu haircut of my life and triggering gasps of horror from my parents. Finished she hoisted the hair in the air with a kind of war cry. I turned and that’s when I saw the waiter. His eyes were huge and while I watched a wad of gum dropped out of his open mouth and hit the seat of Juliette’s chair. Nasty.

Juliette fell back onto her chair, realized she was sitting in something squishy and jumped back to her feet. The knife went flying out of her hand and we all followed it with our eyes as it shot upwards and impaled itself along with strands of my hair into the ceiling.

There was a moment of silence as we all stared from the knife sticking into the ceiling, which seemed in no hurry to dislodge itself, to the big glob of pink gum on the chair. Then everything seemed to explode at once. My father started yelling at the waiter and shrieking for management while waving his hands furiously in the direction of the gum. My mom started screaming, though whether at me or at Juliette the world might never know.

So there it is, Juliette’s fault, definitely. If it hadn’t been for her, the knife and the haircut (the one she gave me, not the one the stupid hairdresser gave me) none of it would have happened. Ashton Kutcher could have kept his job waiting tables; the woman at the next table wouldn’t have barfed in her pea soup (can you say “ew”), and caused all those other people to start barfing (double “ew”); my family wouldn’t have been banned from Chevy’s Restaurants all over the country; and I wouldn’t have been grounded, for like, life.

That Juliette, always getting me into trouble. I think that may be why she’s my best friend. Well, that and the fact that I know she’ll smuggle me pints of Ben & Jerry’s Cherry Garcia ice cream through my bedroom window for at least the first week of my incarceration. Maybe at some point I could even get her to smuggle me a Chevy’s burrito, I’m sure going to miss those.

You can download it on iTunes or listen below.

If you want to buy some of the things that I mentioned in the podcast, check out these links:

The Works of Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe Read by Vincent Price and Basil Rathbone

Dracula by Bram Stoker

The Haunting

Scream

Poltergeist the Legacy Season 1

I Am Stretched On Your Grave by Abney Park

My Old Flame by Spike Jones

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving

The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad

Sleepy Hollow

You won’t want to miss this! Here on the website from 4 pm Friday EDT until 4 pm Sunday EDT there will be prizes, freebies, contests, behind the scenes stuff, bonus stories, one-of-a-kind giveaways from Debbie’s personal collection, and more! Every hour will be thrilling. Why all the excitement? Think of this as an online version of an old fashioned telathon trying to get people to pledge to the Psalm 23 Kickstarter. But don’t worry, even if you’re not a Psalm 23 fan there will be plenty of amazing things for you to read and win!

Plus, get the chance to vote on what my next brand new book project is going to be!!!

Seriously, you will not want to miss this weekend. It’s going to be crazy! And, if you’re anywhere near Tampa, come and see me at the Fanboy convention there!

You can download it from iTunes or listen below.

You can download the episode on iTunes or listen below.

God has taught me a valuable lesson tonight. I just wish I’d learned it years ago!

As some of you know, the last 12 months or so have been the worst of my life. I agonized for the last 3 months over the decision of whether or not to beg friends, family, and fans to believe in me and my books enough to back a Psalm 23 Mysteries Kickstarter. I finally launched the Kickstarter 1 week ago because I felt that I had no choice, that my back was to the wall and there was nothing else in my power to do. As it stands, there is no earthly way that it will be successful. It would truly take an act of God. I do want to deeply thank everyone who has backed it and promised to back it. Your support means more to me than you could ever know.

For the last 3 months I’ve also been struggling with feeling like maybe it was time to stop writing books altogether. I’m tired beyond words and I’ve received some very harsh criticism of my work in the last year from multiple sources. This is a very hard business to survive and weather both emotionally and financially. There was one other time in my career where things were this bleak. I was told a few years ago that due to shifting forces in the marketplace that unless I was willing to write edgy books about young teens having sex that I wasn’t welcome in the industry. I refused because I didn’t believe it was right. Fortunately a boom in YA paranormal books caused another shift in the industry that allowed me to work again. Looking around today, though, it’s hard not to feel like all anyone wants to read are books like Fifty Shades of Grey. I can’t write that kind of book, and I won’t.

The despair that I’ve been feeling all week has been almost more than I could take. Many of you know that I’ve also decided to step out in faith and speak about spiritual warfare, something I feel strongly that God has called me to do. For a couple of years now Satan has been throwing everything he has at me. I know I’m living through a time of Job and I had reached the point where I was metaphorically sitting in the ashes of my life weeping because that was all I had left in me. A couple of wonderful fans realized how much pain I was in and spoke words of comfort to me which I can never repay them for.

Then, less than an hour before I sat down to write this, I was given a moment of clarity by God. He told me I have to let go of the stress, let go of the fear, and let go of my own hopes and plans for these books and others. If He wills this series to go forward, it will happen. If He doesn’t, no amount of begging, pleading, posting on Facebook, or anxiously checking the status of this Kickstarter will change the outcome one bit.

So, the lesson I’ve learned – All the odds can be against you, but you can’t let that steal your joy. God is bigger than the odds and sometimes we just have to step back and let Him do whatever He’s going to do.

I don’t know what’s going to happen with the Kickstarter, or the proposals I have out there being read by different editors, or if I’m even still supposed to be in this business, but it’s time for me to stop worrying about it and let God do whatever it is He’s doing.

Thanks for listening, everyone.

Susan and her friends must prepare for their most important battle with the vampire Richelieu, but they find themselves divided. Wendy has been kidnapped by a centuries-old enemy of her ancestor, Carissa. While they search frantically to save her, a greater danger threatens as Richelieu’s army of vampires and humans fills the crevices of Europe. Susan learns the rest of the ill-fated romance between Carissa and the formidable vampire Gabriel of centuries ago and soon realizes that history is repeating. But it is the secret of the cross that might save them all if she can discover it in time.

Download on iTunes or listen below!

My love letter to the best movie of the year.

You can download on iTunes or listen below!