Happy Mothers Day! (US only),
As mentioned last week, we’ve reached the halfway point of The Twelfth Window. You can bypass the week-by-week breakdown and buy your own copy… www.twelvewindow.com, www.amazon.com, www.12thwindow.com …
Let the record show that I hoped to reach teen readers in writing The Twelfth Window. I presented many of the same feelings and situations that a suburban-dwelling American teenager would face, as I did. It just so happened that a story about faith was woven into The Twelfth Window, to maybe reach a new audience or perhaps just “put the question out there” about faith, religion and spirituality. Since I wrote the original manuscript in high school, a teenaged reader can be sure that I was not talking down to him or her. I saved notes that me and my best friend used to pass back and forth in school. I looked at my high-school yearbook signatures to research the particular language of the 80s. Some items I had to update for parental sensibilities, but most have still been left in the book in order to be true to what I meant to get across in the story.
That being said, Chapter 36 is Lisa Chess’ lowest point in the story. She has surrounded herself by the worst people and suffers for it. She wants to be free of it but doesn’t know how… and then something happens like a miracle. But she is ashamed about what has happened and does not fully embrace it. While I wrote this chapter and Chapter 37, I had in mind the freeing of the people of Israel from their hardships in a foreign land while God punishes those who enslaved the Hebrews. I had a blast writing the whole book, but these chapters stand out to me as some of the more fun to write. My editor, Rachel Crick, deserves much of the credit for pushing me to really dig into the scene. She knew at the outset that it was a pivotal moment of the story. Call me old-school, but I think the pivotal moment in a narrative should be in the exact middle of a book, and so Chapters 36 and 37 are.
…Bible verses that were alluded to in these chapters were: Sirach 31:39-30, Psalm 38, Revelation 20:7-10 and Hebrews 10:31.
–JM Norwood
