History, Real Life and Faith
When I began researching Navy SEALs for my novel Bridging Two Hearts, I began at my local military recruiting center. I stood at the locked entrance and picked up a red phone to call in with my name and reason for visiting (since I obviously was not a candidate for enlistment). A camera overhead moved to settle on me and…
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Military life can’t always been explained, but there are books that can help others understand. My husband spent the first twenty years of our marriage as a serving naval officer. He was a submariner and we had the good fortune (thank you, American taxpayers) to live in all four corners of the United States and Hawai’i. When he attended basic…
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Where do you get your story ideas? Are they based on real people and real events? In my latest book, Bridging Two Hearts, the answer, like always, is “sort of.” 1. From real people’s characters This is Ben. He’s in the Navy and his experience trying to become a SEAL prompted me to think about the difficulties of being a…
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It’s tricky to get first-hand information about Navy SEALs, so I read everything about them I could find while writing my novel Bridging Two Hearts. I examined histories, novels and memoirs, as well as The Official United States Navy Seal Workout, revised edition. (I couldn’t do anything in it except the stretches . . . ) The best book by…
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Kindness and Navy Seals are not always words that go together in most people’s minds. But it did make a difference to my daughter. My daughter had the good fortune to spend her pre-school years living on the shores of Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. She grew brown and healthy in the warm island sun; knew the sweetness of plumeria on…
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My mother got her first passport as a newborn and left her homeland at six-weeks old. Her father was a “swallow,” a Sicilian man who left his family behind while he went to the new world to earn money for what they hoped would be a better future. Antonio first came to America in 1908 to lay the brick streets…
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