Today I am pleased to welcome for a guest post James Thompson, author of the Kari Vaara series. Lucifer’s Tears, the second book in the series, following Snow Angels, will be released on March 17th, and Jim has been kind enough to share an amazingly frank and powerful story about what was going on in his life during the creation of the book.

The other day, someone asked me how much like Kari Vaara I really am. It hadn’t occurred to me that I was much like Vaara at all, so I asked what prompted him to ask the question. He said, “You look like Vaara, you speak like Vaara, you act like Vaara, and I have a pretty good idea that you think like him, too.”

I guess because Vaara is a Finn, and I’m not, after thirteen years here, I’ve come to think of myself as neither American nor Finnish, but something in-between. But he had a point. There are other similarities. My wife is twelve years younger than me, as with Kari and Kate, except our nationalities are reversed. I have a disease in my knees, the name of which I can never remember, and a busted hip from an accident in the army, so I have a limp. Sometimes, it’s barely noticeable, my left foot just turns in more than in should. Sometimes, it’s quite pronounced. In fact, I’m on partial disability as a disabled veteran. There are major differences as well. Kari’s father beat him mercilessly. My father, God bless him, is a kind man and has never laid a hand on me.

But mostly, Kari and I both value silence. My life just isn’t anybody else’s business. It occurred to me recently that not a single person in this world knows my entire life story, and for some reason, I took a perverse pleasure in it. A friend recently expressed surprise that I have a family, because in the six years he’s known me, I’ve never mentioned them. He assumed they were dead and so, afraid it was a sensitive issue, never raised the subject. I tried sharing more personal things when I first started blogging, but somehow, it made me feel icky. Another person told me that sometimes, even by Finnish standards, my silence is sometimes disconcerting.

It’s not that I have anything against chatting. I think that when I moved to Finland and was unable to speak the language, I was couldn’t participate in conversations and just got out of the habit. It’s probably also why I became such a compulsive writer. Because I needed an outlet for my thoughts.

Today though, I’m going to tell you a story about myself known to very few. It seems timely because it relates directly to how Lucifer’s Tears, which will be released next