I have great news to share!  The Twelfth Window, my first book, has been announced as a Finalist in Foreword Magazine's Book Of The Year awards, Fiction/Religious category.  A record number of books (1600 titles) were submitted before the January 15 2008 deadline.  The Twelfth Window is one of twelve finalists in its genre!  Foreword Magazine is a prominent literary trade publication dedicated to independent publishers, librarians and bookstore owners.  I am honored that my work has been recognized!

Good evening... Hope you are well.   Remember that The Twelfth Window is available on www.12thwindow.com, which lists online stores where it's available for purchase.  Occasionally, when there are online coupons, I post them on the website for your use towards buying my book.

Chapters 7 through 11 have no particular subtext except to mirror the courtship portrayed in Song Of Songs in the Bible.  (From here on out, I'll refer to it as The Song of Songs, since the title The Song Of Solomon usually evokes to mind the novel of the same title by Toni Morrison.)  On a human experience level, these chapters represent how a person might first explore Christianity, finding in it something deeper and more wonderful than he or she was expecting.

On a side note, www.12thwindow.com provides a page-by-page Bible reference guide, citing book, chapter and verses that are key to the meaning behind the story.

Chapter 12 is my way of stating two things:  first, a new Christian may have atheist friends who don't understand the first giddiness of the new Christian's transformation.  The new Christian finds new energy and enjoyment and refreshment in abiding with Jesus.   Friends without faith see the physical side of this; friends with a dab or two of faith see the transformation as a positive thing, and those friends with faith readily welcome and support the new life.  Now you guess who is who in these chapters! 

The other thoughts that occured to me in writing chapter 12 stem from the ending sentences of the account in Scripture about the end of Jesus' fast in the desert.   Imagine what the angels--super-intelligent, supernatural beings--must have wondered when they ministered to Jesus, and wondered at how their Almighty King showed respect to His family and His synagogue elders on earth in the same way that they showed Him due reverence?...

Finally, Chapter Twelve stands out as the very first regular-and-italics chapter; it's where the story begins the long, difficult process of binding together Heaven and Earth. 

Good evening!  Remember, The Twelfth Window is available for purchase online at www.authorhouse.com and www.amazon.com, among others...

Chapter Five introduces another character, rounding out "the gang."  There is no explicit Biblical allegorical message in this chapter, although in hindsight the frogs reminds me of one of the Ten Plagues of Egypt. 

Chapter 6 is our first all-italicized chapter.  I use italics to tell the spiritual side of the story.  Later in the book, there are no italicized chapters and I'll explain why at that point.  We start the chapter showing that Lisa's new crush has an unusual home life.  This life would be strange to her and her friends as it is to the angelic creatures now.  I wanted to show how Jesus is both human and divine.  There are some circles that say Jesus was one of the guests of Abraham on the way to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah.  I showed the First Person of the Trinity in the prologue and Chapter One, so consider this chapter the depiction of the Second Person of the Trinity.  The character David Lechner is introduced in this chapter as well.  David Lechner represents not only Saint Joseph but the Hebrew clergymen--the custodians of the Word--and Saint Simeon in the Temple. 

I showed the particular duties of the five angelic creatures in order to give myself room to write one of the sequels to The Twelfth Window, but in the Bible we notice that, for example, Gabriel is the announcing angel and that Raphael is the healing angel.  So I take my cues from Scripture on developing these characters for this story.  What is not in Christian Scripture but written in Jewish scriptural commentary is the book character Luceus, who represents Enoch. 

As the story continues, the reader will find more and more allusions to Judaism... the punchline is that I wrote these without looking anything up.  Later on I did some research on Judaism and there it was... Enoch is considered to be in Heaven with God as His voice.  In a sense, The Twelfth Window can be considered almost a Jewish way to tell a Christian story.

Oops!  That's what happens when you blog about The Twelfth Window while watching pundits on TV.

Two more of Lisa and Kim's s friends make their debut in Chapter Four:  Richard and Jenny.  Also introduced in Chapter Four is Dorman Tapson, aka Dormey.   He is the class nerd, quiet and even-minded.  I suppose I've always secretly admired people like him.  This was cemented during the years that I was a member of the Sci-Fi/Fantasy Club in high school.  That club was nothing but people like him, and a meeting with that club was like stepping onto an oasis on the desert of.... but I digress again. 

Dormey's character represents both the Old Testament prophets and the socially-undertrodden of Jesus' time.  At this point in the story he seems to represent more of the latter, but as the story moves on, the way he is the rep for the prophets will be pretty obvious because of whose close and loyal friend he becomes.

The point of these blogs is to reveal between-the-lines of the story.  I will do my best to not give away the plot.  You can purchase a copy of The Twelfth Window on www.authorhouse.com, www.barnesandnoble.com, www.amazon.com, www.booksamillion.com (but they might take quite a while), www.target.com, www.bordersstores.com...

Good afternoon!  I just LOVE three-day weekends.  Too bad this is the last one until Memorial Day at the tail-end of May.

Chapter Three of The Twelfth Window is simple, really.  For one, I used it as a chance to introduce another character, Amanecer, to the story.  For those that understand Spanish, it basically means "to be the dawn."  Dawn.  I purposely named several characters after my high school friends... with prior permission, of course.  It's also a nod to the Latino community.  Their wonderful culture and peoples made me decide to learn Spanish.  I'm now fluent in the language after having taken seven years of language instruction... but I digress.  I've also used Chapter Three as a way to show Lisa's life as a normal 13-year-old and the concerns that a girl her age would have on the afternoon of a school dance. 

The other character I introduce here is Monty Ray, Lisa's crush.  Monty Ray looks good and is popular.  This points to the human soul's original proclivity to sin.  Lisa is not popular and envies Sarah's position.  This represents today's Christian's position in the world (oftentimes).  It does not mean that the world in itself is bad; just that all too often one has to curry favor with people on the inside to get anywhere career-wise.  I also meant this to echo the sentiment in Israel that led to that nation telling Samuel to ask God for a king, because everyone else has a king.  This comes up in later chapters, too. 

While I have you here and since Chapter Three is so short, I'll move along to Chapter Four.  It opens with another retreat scene that I meant to represent the Annunciation to Mary by the angel Gabriel that she was to bear a Son.  This is the most concrete and tangible announcement of the arrival of Christ.  Not long after that, a new student shows up at Lisa's school, to her class.  [I think that] the arrival of Jesus to the world is like the New Student.  Think back to when you were in school.  Remember the arrival of a brand new student, not knowing (or honoring) the social rules, ready to make friends there, and having left friends behind.  Lisa's reaction to this arrival changes her instantly.  While writing the book, I felt a little guilty about portraying Christ allegoricially as a handsome person, but a Muslim man was the only person to tell me that Jesus was the most beautiful man that ever walked the earth.  That statement stuck with me, and it shows throughout the remainder of The Twelfth Window.

Good evening... I'll quickly go over the message behind the second chapter of The Twelfth Window... I hope your weekend was great!

I used this chapter to give my commentary on religious education.  Having taught Sunday school two years ago and weekday religious education back in 1993, I can tell you that it is quite obvious that the Holy Spirit is definitely working towards the building up of the Kingdom of God on earth.  The kids are naturally restless, there seems to be a sort of chaos at intra-class events, teachers are flustered, and the educational materials can seem a little corny.  What a humble Lord we serve!  More than once, I thought a bolt of lightning should have decimated the classroom.  But God knows His children.  Contrast those scenes with my two visits to Vatican City or my weekly dose of TBN and Word Network viewership.  Somewhere back in the day along the way, one of those unruly kids in Sunday school went on to lay the foundation for Vatican City, paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, and start a powerful Christian network to spread the Gospel.  We worship an awesome God, indeed! 

True, the seeming amateurishness of Sunday school is proof to an unbeliever that there cannot possibly be a God.  The seeming uncool-ness of those who give their time to teach the Christian faith is echoed in the second chapter. 

Lisa is told at the start to not bring up "that question" again.  I leave it to the reader's imagination to guess what the question was.  Can what is being preached match up to her personal experience of the divine?  I think adults have this problem more than the kids.  Lisa shows respect and deference to her parents and her religious instructors.  On another level, I meant this chapter to refer to the "is it here yet? is it happening? is it going to happen?" feeling just before Jesus' time.  We must be humble like children to enter into the Kingdom of God.

Good afternoon!  Soon you will be able to read this blog here and on another blog page that Christianbookpromo.com has created for me.  When I get it set up, I'll include a link to it.

Last week I explained the meanings behind the prologue of The Twelfth Window.

Now I will get started on the first chapter, which also begins the first Act.  The book is divided into five Acts, denoted in the actual pages of the book by three, small stained-glass window icons.  The chapters are separated by thred, small star icons.  Most books are separated with chapter names and numbers, but I wasn't moved to write it that way.  Instead, I tried to make the opening sentence memorable, so that when you go back and read past chapters, you know exactly what the chapter was about just from the feel of the opening sentence.  You will also notice the shortness of the chapters. I did that on purpose, too. 

"The place was empty..."  is about a dream that the heroine of the story, Lisa Chess, has about being in a house of worship and touching the scrolls.  Then she is abruptly awakened by her mother.  Lisa and her family go to worship and thoughts about her dream pervade the entire morning and she asks her father a kind of test question to see if his answer might provide meaning to that dream.   At the house of worship, she meets up with her best friend, who is an unbeliever, and their conversation just about makes Lisa's memory of the dream fade away.

It's not important to explain the windows' designs; I made the designs such that it would be obvious to any reader that the book is a fantasy book (come on, five points of the compass!)  What you should note is that there are twelve.  As in the 12 tribes of Israel.  Churches in real life have stained-glass windows because in the Middle Ages most people couldn't read, so the windows depicted Biblical stories to help towards worship.  The twelfth window is left blank; this is an allusion to the fact that in the Old Testament the story of salvation was unfinished, and remained so until the very first Easter Sunday. 

Dreams and visions, in Holy Scripture, are important ways that God communicated to men.  Jacob dreamed about angels ascending and descending on a ladder.  His son Joseph's dreams revealed the fates of his fellow inmates and helped get him out of prison, leading to Joseph being made second in Egypt only to Pharaoh.  Ezekiel had a vision of the Throne of God.  Daniel had visions about things to come.  And Joseph had the record set straight about his fiancee, the Virgin Mary, in a dream, where he was also told what to name the Son to be born.  So dreams are important ways that God communicated to His people.  That is why, in the book, I opened with a dream that will directly tie in to the end of the story.  The very title, The Twelfth Window, fell out of the sky.  I did not have a title for the book until almost a few weeks before I turned the manuscript in to the publisher.  All glory and honor to God!

In the book, Lisa asks her father about religion and gets an answer that might not necesarily have been the truth, but was the truth to him.  Looking back, I noticed that his answer refers to early pagan worship of the sun.  But at any rate, I meant to say to the reader that parents should be well-versed in the faith so that they can answer their child with the most correct answer about God. 

Last of all, in the book, we meet Kim, Lisa's best friend.  The two girls do not share the same ideas about faith; in direct contrast to Lisa's dream and question and reverence during worship time, Kim has no faith at all and thinks religion is a scam to make money.  Many Christians have atheist friends and doubtless get into religious discussions.  Of all that is seen and unseen, the atheist believes in only the seen.  Sometimes that view influences a believer's thoughts; most of the time it does (I hope) not.  But that doesn't mean that it isn't good, in my view, to have unbelieving friends.  The life and behavior of a Christian serves as a witness to God, and sometimes one just has to fall back and let the Holy Spirit do the work.

You noticed that the first half of "The place was empty..." is in italics.  Get used to it.  It's my way of contrasting the events and conversations in the spiritual world with the events and conversations in Lisa's world.

There's probably other allusions that jump out at you that I may not have mentioned or thought of yet.  That's only part of the fun of reading The Twelfth Window.  Happy reading!

Happy Martin Luther King, Jr. Day to all...

If you live in the Los Angeles area, pick up a copy of RSVP News, December 2007 issue, where can be found a blurb about The Twelfth Window.  Props again to Pam Broussard on that!  If you received an eblast from BCBP, thank you for visiting www.12thwindow.com and this blog.  I promise you that you will enjoy The Twelfth Window immensely, and I'm not just saying that as the author.  I'm saying that as someone who reads voraciously and considers herself a Christian.

I said in the last entry that I would break down each chapter of the book here.  So here goes:

The prologue was first inspired by a stained-glass window that I saw two Christmases ago in a church in northern Virginia, and I thought it politic to use the feeling I experienced from seeing the winter sun shine through that window, a depiction of Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane. 

The mention of how Lisa's temple feels to her in winter and summer months is the drawing from my direct experience of the same sentiments that I had in a large cathedral in northern Baltimore, off Charles Street not too far south of I-695.

Lisa's religious name, Lisare, is purposely an anagram of the word Israel.  I set the stage for the story being a true allegory and true fantasy (I am pretty sure that the name Lisare is as fantasy-like a name anyone could come up with).  There is another allusion to a passage in Revelation about the name on the white stone that only God and the owner of the stone know.  This is covered in the passage of the prologue where Lisa considers her religious name a secret name. 

Finally, the title of the prologue matches the carving inside of the ring on the back cover of the book.  I'm old-school; I appreciate books that are a complete presentation from cover to cover.  The easier to lose oneself in the story, I say.

Off to bed... well, to bed and watch the rest of Dreamgirls on cable TV.

Good morning. 

I promised the fine, fine folks at www.yabookscentral.com that I would mention their website in my next blog.  They have treated me very well; they have helped me get the word out about The Twelfth Window.  Big ups to Kim and to Becky.

Whenever one gets something new and expensive, one tends to overprotect that item.  Such is the case with my new laptop.  I always hide it before I leave the house.  Yesterday evening I was so focused on the New Hampshire returns that I forgot to un-hide the laptop.  So today there is a new hiding place to protect it both from thievery and from election news coverage.

Premiering tomorrow or Friday:  Explanation #1, revealing the subtext behind the prologue of The Twelfth Window.

Good morning and happy new year... extended winter break is over and I'm back in the blogging game.

I hope you had the chance to get in on the online coupons to buy The Twelfth Window a couple of weeks ago.  As usual, I'll keep posting such coupons.

Now, either later this month or early February, the LA Sentinel newspaper will run a full interview by Ms. Niele Anderson about me and The Twelfth Window.  If you live in the Los Angeles area, pick one up.  They're online too but I'm not sure if the entire content is free.  Also next month, an interview about The Twelfth Window by Mr. Lee Harris in Consciousness Magazine, which can be purchased at newsstands etc. on the eastern seaboard and the Chicago area.

For your convenience, I've had godaddy.com, the company that hosts www.12thwindow.com, redirect all possible spellings of The Twelfth Window to the above website, so it's easier to find if you don't exactly remember the address.

I've decided to go ahead and explain the sub-subtext behind each chapter of The Twelfth Window, once a week.  That will keep me busy blogging for at least a year! 

Finally, I've begun the plot outline for the next book in this Cychaea Series.  It will be the pre-prequel to The Twelfth Window.  I'lll reveal the title and general story synopsis around Memorial Day weekend.

Again, happy new year!

 

--J.M. Norwood