Protection for Hire Behind-the-Scenes: Wings Domestic Abuse Shelter

In chapter 1 of my humorous romantic suspense novel, Protection for Hire, the setting is Wings domestic abuse shelter. My heroine, Tessa, is driven to champion women, and I naturally wanted her to work with women who needed her help. I didn’t want to use a real San Francisco shelter for my book for various reasons, so I created Wings but based it loosely off of a real women’s shelter in San Jose called Heritage Home.

Heritage Home is a shelter for pregnant women run by CityTeam Ministries, and they provide shelter, training, and spiritual encouragement for homeless pregnant women. They’re run out of a glorious Victorian house in downtown San Jose, which is maintained by volunteers and donations, and which provides a real atmosphere of “home” for women who are at some of the darkest points in their lives.

I’ve donated to Heritage Home and also taken a tour, meeting some of the staff and some of the women. Their stories and their courage were the seeds that made me write about Tessa, her client Elizabeth, and Wings domestic shelter in Protection for Hire. Since I made Wings a domestic abuse shelter, it’s a bit more secretive than Heritage Home, and I gave Wings a rather hefty security team, which made for some fun scenes in both Protection for Hire and the opening scene of A Dangerous Stage.

I’m re-releasing an extended version of Protection for Hire! To hear when it’ll be available, join my Camy Tang newsletter.

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Poll for the title of my book!

Captain’s Log, Supplemental Blog book giveaway: My Thursday book giveaway is The Wedding Caper by Janice Thompson . My Monday book giveaway is Thanks for the Mammogram! AND Reconstructing Natalie , both by Laura Jensen Walker . You can still enter both giveaways. Just post a comment on the blog posts above . On Thursday, I'll draw the winner for The Wedding Caper and post the title for another book I'm giving away. Pick my title! The Zondervan Marketing Department is torn about which title would be best for my debut novel. So you guys get to weigh in! Here are your choices: Solo Sushi Sushi for One Single Sushi Solo Sashimi Leave a comment about which you prefer and WHY. I’ll run this poll for a couple weeks to figure out which will be the title for my new book! TMI: Writing: I posted another "Health and the Writer" post at WriterQuotes , and an agent post at my Story Sensei blog . And in case you missed it, my review of The Guy I’m Not Dating by Trish Perry is ...

Mansfield Park (BBC 1986)

Captain’s Log, Supplemental Blog book giveaway: To enter, go to the blog links below and post a comment there. Valley of Betrayal by Tricia Goyer It Happens Every Spring by Gary Chapman and Catherine Palmer Jane Austen miniseries I love Jane Austen. She’s my favorite classic writer, and I even bought audiobooks of her novels and listen to them again and again. I also love Amazon.com and visit my Gold Box every day (not that I buy that often). One day I had a deal for the entire set of DVDs of miniseries produced by BBC of Jane Austen’s novels. No, I didn’t buy the set—but it made me curious, and so I put the miniseries on my Netflix queue. The miniseries are all rather old. I just finished Mansfield Park . I’m quite divided on it. Costumes: score 4. They were mostly really rather nice, appropriate to the character’s background and income, and not too flamboyant, although there were several places the women’s headgear was just way over the top. Acting: score 4. I l...

Got my books!

Captain's Log, Supplemental Okay, I'm still at the library and Captain Caffeine sent me these pics since I wasn't home when they arrived: MY AUTHOR COPIES ARRIVED! Wow, that's just so cool. And I'm so glad Captain Caffeine sent me pics!

Mon afghan

Captain's Log, Stardate 02.24.2009 I am extraordinarily proud of this. For Christmas, I wanted to knit something for my parents that would be really cool and personal, and sort of an heirloom. So I took the five family crests I had for my family (in Japanese, a family crest is called a “mon”) and graphed the designs on knitting graph paper so that I could knit intarsia panels of the mons. I knit 5 intarsia panels and 4 plain panels and then sewed them together to make an afghan. In Japan, family crests are carried by both male and female, so I used mons from both my parents' sides. Traditionally, mons are passed down from mother to daughter and from father to son, but there are sometimes cases of a son taking a mother’s mon or a husband taking his wife’s family’s mon and things like that. I know we have more than 5 family crests, but we’ve lost some of them. My mom tried to find them all several years ago, but could only find these five. The fans mon was actually...

Tabi socks, part deux

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