Rear Admiral Tim Ziemer is a Vietnam War Veteran. Born in Sioux City, Iowa, he was raised in Asia as the son of missionary parents serving in Vietnam. Upon graduation from Wheaton College, he joined the U.S. Navy, completed flight school, and returned to Vietnam during the war. He commanded several squadrons, naval stations, and an air wing supporting the first Gulf War. He served as executive director of World Relief, based in Baltimore, until June 2006, when he was appointed to lead the President’s Malaria Initiative in controlling malaria in Africa.

A reception will follow in our Activity Center.

Bring your friends and family as we pay tribute to those who paid the ultimate price and honor all veterans and service men and women.  Come in military uniform or wear your medals and hats.

For more information, contact Pastor Ron Erb, at 610-432-2200 x 268 or rcerb@cedarcrestbfc.org .

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As of 7 May 2013

I’ve received a number of questions about The Loving Husband Trilogy, so I decided to answer some of the most frequently asked questions here. Some of these I’ve answered in bits and pieces in various interviews. Today, Part 1.

1. Where did you come up with the idea for The Loving Husband Trilogy?

Here’s my answer in this previous post. Between watching True Blood, reading Charlaine Harris, Anne Rice, Bram Stoker, and the Twilight books, believe me, I had a brain full of vampire waiting to get out. Luckily for me, that vampire turned out to be James Wentworth.

2. Did you always know it would be a trilogy?

I did. From very early in the idea gathering process for this story I knew the connection between James/Elizabeth/Sarah and I knew the ending as we find it in Her Loving Husband’s Return. The further I went into mapping out the story, the more I knew I wanted to cover several different historical periods. In order to keep the story as I saw it a manageable length, I split it into three books. In an earlier interview I said as a joke that I wanted to avoid writing a 900-page tome that would send readers screaming for mercy. I wasn’t too far off. The combined page count of the Loving Husband Trilogy is 818 pages.

3.  How did you come to set the stories in Salem? Have you ever lived/visited there?

I decided to set the story in Salem by accident. I was deciding where to set the story, and I deliberately stayed away from the Pacific Northwest and Louisiana in the U.S. since other well-known literary vampires live there. I thought of my hometown Los Angeles or where I live now in Las Vegas, but neither of those felt right. Too bright, I think. Then I decided that if I wasn’t going Northwest how about Northeast? I pulled up a map of the U.S., looked at the Northeast, saw Massachusetts, and there in a little dot near Boston was Salem. That’s it. It took me as long to decide to set the story in Salem as it took me to write these sentences.

I have never lived in Salem or anywhere in Massachusetts. I was born in New York, but we moved to the West Coast when I was seven and I consider Los Angeles my hometown. In fact, I had never even visited Salem when I wrote Her Dear & Loving Husband. Thank goodness for the Internet, websites about Salem, and Google Earth. I did finally visit Salem in July 2011 while I was writing Her Loving Husband’s Curse, and I loved it. In fact, I wanted to move there. Luckily, everything in Salem was where I thought it should be. You can see my posts about my trip to Salem here.

4. How did you decide which historical periods to use?

The decision to use the Salem Witch Trials was a no-brainer once I decided to set the story in Salem. Since I wanted the historical periods to echo what was happening to James and Sarah in the present day, I needed to choose the historical periods carefully. The Trail of Tears and the Japanese-American Internments happened to coincide with the way I saw the story progressing. To a degree, you could say the history informed the story; in other words, once I decided on the historical periods that helped me shape the plot.

5.  How long did it take you to write the books?

It was four years, almost exactly to the day, from when I first pressed fingers to the keyboard typing out the ideas for Her Dear & Loving Husband (in April 2009) until Her Loving Husband’s Return was published (in April 2013). It took longer than a year for me to write Her Dear & Loving Husband because it took time for me to find the narrative thread. The plot was more complex than other novels I had written, weaving the way it does between the past and the present, and it took time for me to work it out.

I read about these authors who publish 3, 4, 5 books a year and I’m amazed by them. When all is said and done, it takes me about a year to write a book. Keep in mind I’m not writing the whole time. I have to live with an idea in my head for a while before I ever start writing. I have to kick the idea around, soften it up, pull it here and tug it there to see if there’s anything in those odd daydreams. I kicked the idea around about the vampire missing his long-dead human wife for about six months before I ever began writing about James and Sarah. Once I start writing, it can take anywhere from 4-6 months for me to have a draft I’m happy with, and then the editing process is intensive because I’m persnickety about how the words read on the page. The editing process for me takes 1-2 months.

6.  Do you have editors/beta readers?

You betcha. It’s imperative to have other sets of eyes read your fiction. As authors we can get caught up in our own heads and we forget to make our stories cohesive for our readers.

Her Dear & Loving Husband wouldn’t be the story it is without the help of an amazing romance author and critique extraordinare, Laurin Wittig. I saw the story so clearly in my head, but I was having trouble articulating it on the page. With Laurin’s sharp eye and finely tuned comments, I was able to finally write the story I meant to write in the first place. Once I figured out what I was doing with Her Dear & Loving Husband, writing the next two was an easier process, though I always have editors/other readers helping me.

Here’s a Loving Husband Trilogy F.Y.I: The original title of Her Dear & Loving Husband was The Vampire’s Wife. Laurin suggested that The Vampire’s Wife was too much of a giveaway about the story, so after stumbling across Anne Bradstreet’s poem “To My Dear and Loving Husband” I changed it to Her Dear & Loving Husband. The revised title has the same idea as the original title, but it takes a little more digging to figure out what it means. And I love that the poem was able to serve as a connection between James and Elizabeth and James and Sarah. Little things like that make me happy.

I don’t get enough sleep. I think too much about grammar and worry about the wrong things. I know that anyways isn’t a word and I should stop laughing when people say irregardless in a non-ironic way and when they pronounce epitome incorrectly.

I don’t care enough about what I look like when I’m naked and I drink more beer than a lady should. I shouldn’t like the taste. I like doing things more than I like doing people and I should be spending more time finding a date for Friday nights and worrying about who I’m going to be spending my future with. Someone should tell me that my future is as soon as I “get an education” and not when I want it to be.

I shouldn’t have a life goal of being a 23 year old educated writer with enough stability on her own to pay for a one bedroom apartment and groceries every month. Tell me there’s no point for me to be on a birth control and tell me to save my virginity for someone I love. Tell me I need to love someone to make life worth it.

I’m always wrong because there’s only one way to live and you’re winning and you know the way. Don’t believe me when I say I don’t like affection and I don’t like you. I should, anyway. How on earth is it possible for me to know what’s best for me when all I’ve ever been is myself?

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Have thighs that just won’t leave?

Or organs that are just holding you back?

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That is 1800-EATME, just to repeat, 1800-EATME

First thirty callers get a side of fava beans and a nice chianti.

Trust him, he’s a real doctor.

We all need to channel a little Jessica!

I guess the saying “silence is golden” holds true to life. If you can ever experience true silence then it will definitely be golden!

I’m not real sure silence exist. Even if I sat completely silent no typing, no bunnies or dishwashers….

Would I experience this golden silence? Hhmmm… I don’t know about you but my inner voice is loud!! :)

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• The sounds of silence (annabelfrage.wordpress.com)

The idea is, if the person you want isn’t providing you with what you think you need, you can step outside your door and most likely comfort zone and find someone who can, or will, or wants to. There are plenty of fish in the sea, yes. But one has to swim.

It’s a process: finding someone new. No one wants to start over again to have that blank slate with zero longing for a single soul in the world, just hoping that something different will happen and for some reason that person you think you know will get out of their seat and walk across the room to talk to the person who is ignoring them. How dare a person not know you are interested as you continuously pretend they have no existence?

It’s discouraging, it really is, when you see everybody already paired up, but who is it that you’re looking at? Specifically the people who are paired up? The people who are going after the paired up couples? We spend so much time on one person, not understanding that other lives are in a forward motion as you lie in your bed and beg for pity. A new beginning is sometimes the only good thing about the end.

The next time you decide to make Chocolate Chip Cookies, forget about chips or chunks and break out a baking bar. Blogger Leslie Beslie (seriously?) offered the tip and swears that chopping up a quality semi-sweet chocolate bar will result in more flavorful and better-looking cookies. I’m certainly going to give it a try on my next batch.

This week, my Sunday was free. TidBITS has hired Josh Centers as managing editor, who is taking over my weekly responsibilities. (See the TidBITS article here.)

I’m not parting ways with TidBITS. In fact, I’ll soon be writing more than my schedule has allowed recently; more on that in the weeks to come. But the publication needs someone dedicated to the “managing” side of the title, and my schedule writing books and articles for various outfits has left me mostly editing and participating in staff discussions. (I was originally hired as managing editor, taking over from Geoff Duncan; read about how we all got started here. We switched my title to senior editor a few years ago to better reflect my involvement.)

That 811 number isn’t entirely accurate. I remember needing to bow out of an issue or two when I was working on one of my original books (maybe the Palm Organizers Visual QuickStart Guide?) Occasionally circumstances pushed production to Monday, such as the Macworld Expo keynote that Steve Jobs shifted to Monday instead of Tuesday, requiring us to write and assemble the issue in the afternoon at a Starbucks near Moscone Center. But for the most part, the bulk of my TidBITS involvement has happened on Sunday nights, usually past 10 p.m., with coffee and music as my late-night editing companions.

When Adam told me that he and Tonya had hired a managing editor, my first reaction was feeling slightly unmoored — 811 issues over 16 years is a lot. But my second reaction, which surfaced maybe half a second later was:

Sunday nights free. Imagine that.

I did take a video yesterday, but it’s still on the camcorder, so I’ll have to make a post for that when I can actually get it.

But, basically, Dad got a new tree that’s named after dead people. Or, rather, Dad’s neighbour gave him a serviceberry, which is so named because of its close European cousin, the Sorbus berry, but also because the flowers of it signaled that the Appalachian passes were open again and traveling preachers could come perform the services for those who had died over the winter. What a morbid name for what should be a beautiful tree.

It’s also closely related to the Saskatoon berry, which, if anybody has ever lived in the prairies, you will already know (and possibly be sick of) them.

There are lots more facts about the serviceberry in the video, most of which I can’t remember right now, but at least you’ll get to know them all next weekend.

In terrifying news, it’s 30°C (86°F) outside. It’s only May 5th! I’m dying!

Sol says I shouldn’t complain because they just had a blizzard there. HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA *BREATHE* HA HA HA HA HA HA HA

Sorry, Sol, but that’s kind of hilarious. Sorry, sorry. Sincerest apologies and I would send you 15° of this if I could. Just means you have to come over here where it’s warm, eh?