Debbie Viguié's Blog, page 21

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Welcome to the commentary for the final chapter! Remember to post a comment in order to be entered in the drawing. In a few days one winner will be selected from all the comments on all the commentaries and they will receive signed copies of the first 3 books in the series.

Okay, chapter nineteen!

You can bet that Geanie and Joseph’s wedding will be at the heart of a future story.

January is the perfect month to get married. My parents got married in January and my husband and I also got married in January. It stormed on my parents’ wedding day to the point where manhole covers were floating on top of geysers of water in the streets. When it rained between the wedding and the reception on my wedding day I felt truly blessed. I’m a total rain lover.

“Our password was Righteousness.” Hmmm…there’s a book coming up in the series with the title In the Paths of Righteousness. Think there could be a connection???

In the very next book you’ll have a chance to find out why Otto missed his appointment. A careful read of an earlier scene will show you this line of dialogue from Otto: “Nein. Not absolution. Restoration.” The next book is titled Restoreth My Soul. Coincidence…Hmmm…

Reread the last line of the book. But first, read this: Cindy, you’ve just been rescued from a gruesome kidnapper. What are you going to do now?

Anyway, there you have it! Commentary finished. Next month I’m going to do a commentary for Vanquished, the final book in the Crusade trilogy I’ve written with Nancy Holder. The book comes out next week. You can see all your options to preorder your copy by clicking here.

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Welcome to the commentary for chapter eighteen! Remember to post a comment in order to be entered in the drawing. Once all commentaries are up one winner will be selected and they will receive signed copies of the first 3 books in the series.

Okay, chapter eighteen!

When I was a kid and I couldn’t sleep I used to hold my breath and time myself to see how long I could do it. When I took SCUBA lessons, I had to swim from one end of a pool to the other with all the gear on blowing out bubbles the entire time. That familiarity with the desperate feeling of wanting to suck in air actually helped get me through that swim because I knew how long I could push past it.

I have seen dolphins up close in the ocean and also snorkeled with sharks circling under me. Both are thrilling experiences. Dolphins like to escort ships by swimming in front of them oftentimes.

I am a sucker for happy endings. However, I have been known to kill off important characters, even main point-of-view characters in my books. My favorite author is Zane Grey who wrote about a hundred books. About 6 or 7 of those either had tragic endings or disappointing endings. Those upset me, but it made reading each new book very thrilling because I never knew for sure if the main characters were going to live or die. That bit of uncertainty kept the edge on the stories.

The time spent waiting to get released from a hospital can be some of the longest time in the world!

I love having people actually meet me inside baggage claim. It makes you feel special.

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Welcome to the commentary for chapter seventeen! Remember to post a comment in order to be entered in the drawing. Once all commentaries are up one winner will be selected and they will receive signed copies of the first 3 books in the series.

Okay, chapter seventeen!

Reefing is where an old ship (usually one belonging to the navy) is sunk to create an artificial reef that will attract fish, divers, etc. This has happened a few times in Hawaii.

It was important for me that Cindy step up and be part of the actual fight. This and the events in the pub in the previous book really show how she’s beginning to learn how to stand up for herself.

The end of this chapter is a callback to what Cindy learned in the first chapter about the events that happened during the attack on Pearl Harbor. The final scene in this chapter was the first thing I really knew I wanted to be in this book. The heroism of the men who saved others during the attack on Pearl Harbor moves me very deeply.

Mitsuo Fuchida, the pilot who actually led and coordinated the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, later became a Christian and toured the world telling his story. When my parents were kids they actually met him when he came to speak at their church.

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Welcome to the commentary for chapter sixteen! Remember to post a comment in order to be entered in the drawing. Once all commentaries are up one winner will be selected and they will receive signed copies of the first 3 books in the series.

Okay, chapter sixteen!

When you’re under extreme stress it seems like one of two things happens: you either go into hyper-observant mode and your mind races a mile a minute or you go into shock and it feels like everything in yuor head slows down.

Hesitation has been a problem in this book for both Cindy and Jeremiah. Earlier she hesitated too long in deciding to jump. Here he hesitated because he didn’t want her to see him killing someone and it nearly costs them their lives.

I feel incredibly bad for Cindy for how many times I’ve knocked her out in this book.

Have you ever seen that drawing of the bird trying to swallow the frog and the frog trying to strangle the bird? It usually has a caption that says something like never give up. That’s a great motto for life and it certainly is the attitude Cindy and Jeremiah have had to take the entire book.

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Welcome to the commentary for chapter fifteen! Remember to post a comment in order to be entered in the drawing. Once all commentaries are up one winner will be selected and they will receive signed copies of the first 3 books in the series.

Okay, chapter fifteen!

The bit where Kapono threatens to put Jeremiah back on the plane and then Jeremiah reaches out and pats Kapono’s arm where he was injured was a very definite threat on Jeremiah’s part. It was his way of saying he wouldn’t go nice, and he wouldn’t play fair.

There’s two sentences in this chapter that have layers and layers of meaning. The sentences are: “I’ve got a writer who lives out here, in one of the hotels as a matter of fact, who I’m going to encourage to take a trip to your neck of the woods. Maybe send her to The Zone theme park, take in the sights.” Now, here’s why these sentences are significant. 1. The reference to the writer is a reference to a series I’ve been developing now for a couple of years. 2. The Zone theme park (which is also in Pine Springs) is the setting for my Sweet Seasons series. 3. The seeds for the plot of a future book in the Psalm 23 Mysteries series have just been planted there.

This is not the first time that Jeremiah has pretended to be Cindy’s husband to get him access to her. It cracks me up. It’s one of my favorite plot devices.

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Welcome to the commentary for chapter fourteen! Remember to post a comment in order to be entered in the drawing. Once all commentaries are up one winner will be selected and they will receive signed copies of the first 3 books in the series.

Okay, chapter fourteen!

We’re 2/3rds of the way through the book!

One of the things I hate is when you agonize over doing something and when you make up your mind to do it, you’re too late and you’ve missed the opportunity, often by mere seconds.

The Royal Hawaiian is a very old, historic hotel in Honolulu. And, yes, it is pink all over. It’s a very recognizable landmark. I have never actually stayed there, but a small writing desk we have in the library area of our house comes from there. When hotels get rid of old furniture and do renovations, there is a place on Kauai that buys the old furnishings and sells them to the public. The table is beautifully carved and has a pedestal kind of look with three legs. We were thrilled to find it. Then, a month later, one of the theater groups on the island that we did some acting with ended up getting one just like it at the same store for one of their plays. We sat down in the theater and we’re going, “Look! It’s our table!” Anyway, I do plan on staying at this hotel at some point in the future, at least once.

And here is where Jeremiah realizes just how many different crimes Cindy has been witness to in her brief stay on the island. It will make finding her that much more frustrating.

Unfortunately there is a small segment of the population that does believe in the whole Hawaii for the Hawaiians (even though there’s less than 100 pureblood Hawaiians left in the world). Some people that believe this way are not only against big businesses that come in but are also in favor of secession from the Union. Fortunately, though, it is just a small segment.

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Welcome to the commentary for chapter thirteen! Remember to post a comment in order to be entered in the drawing. Once all commentaries are up one winner will be selected and they will receive signed copies of the first 3 books in the series.

Okay, chapter thirteen!

Thirteen is my lucky number.

The air raid / natural disaster siren I describe here is very real. Strangely, where we first lived on the island we never heard it. This house, though, a couple of days after we moved in, it went off. It goes off around noon on the first of each month as a test. This particular speaker was in the park across the tiny street from our house. All the windows were open and it was painfully loud and it scared the cat and me quite a bit!

That siren went off once for real when we lived there. It was for a tsunami that was headed our way (and fortunately turned out to be no big deal). It went off at 3 a.m. My first thought was “It’s not the first”. My second thought was “It’s still dark outside.” Then we were up, had the television on, and within three minutes I had clothes on over my pajamas and was outside starting up the car on my way to the grocery store to stock up on extra supplies. From the car I called my parents (who hadn’t heard the siren where they lived) and had them pack themselves, my grandmother, and their cat up and head for our house. They weren’t in a flood zone, but if things got bad the roads between us would become completely impassable and we could lose communications as well and be completely cut off from each other. By the time I got to the grocery store I was one of the first to make it. By the time I was dumping the stuff in my trunk the parking lot was packed. This wasn’t hurricane season so people weren’t nearly as prepared.

A lot of people don’t lock their houses in Hawaii. We would occasionally get teased for always locking our doors.

Our house in Kauai was surrounded by the apple banana trees. We had hundreds and hundreds of bananas all the time. Farmers who lived on our street would come by once a month or so and cut down bunches and give us a couple of dollars for them and take them to sell at the farmer’s market. It was a good deal all around since we didn’t want them rotting.

This house is actually a mile or two inland from the ocean.

Sometimes God asks us to do things that we think we can’t do. Sometimes He wants us to trust and make the jump. For an earlier chapter I talked about the things that make up the core of a person. Here Cindy has to overcome her own terror and do what she thinks she can’t.

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Welcome to the commentary for chapter twelve! Remember to post a comment in order to be entered in the drawing. Once all commentaries are up one winner will be selected and they will receive signed copies of the first 3 books in the series.

Okay, chapter twelve!

The only time a closet of mine is ever empty is right before we move in or out of a house! Usually they are stuffed to the gills.

In Hawaii it is absolutely normal to see mansions next door to shacks. There is quite a hodgepodge of structures in most Hawaiian residential areas. It really is kind of fascinating.

High school kids in Hawaii do learn how to shoot guns. There are classes at school. Hunting is still a very large part of the culture in the islands. At the front of the telephone book for Kauai there are several pages of information about hunting seasons, when you can hunt, where you can hunt, what you can hunt, and with what you can hunt. (Some times of year you can hunt some animals using guns, sometimes you can only use crossbows. Some times you can use hunting dogs, sometimes not.) It’s very, very elaborate. I have never met someone who grew up on Kauai who couldn’t shoot. While I didn’t learn how to shoot while living there, I did get a quick lesson spearfishing from a local who also was our taxi driver when we went to the airport and who baked a mean chantilly lace cake. He was a man of many talents.