Interview wiht Ginny Aiken - FOR SUCH A TIME AS THIS - FREE BOOK!

Ginny, welcome to Infinite Suspense. So glad you could visit today. Like many of your fans, I love your books. Love the humor, love the fun, love the suspense in them! LOL. But anyway, why don’t you tell us a little about yourself? I am an alien—as my kids gleefully will tell anyone—a legal alien, since I was five and my parents fled Castro’s Cuba. I grew up in Venezuela, where I continued the ballet training I began at the age of three in Havana. As a total bookworm…well, while I wasn’t on pointe, practicing hours on end, I devoured books, and then wrote my first one at fifteen. Burned it when I got ‘smart’ at sixteen! I went to boarding school in Switzerland after high school, and received two university-level degrees while there. Came back to the US, went to college, married my college sweetheart, and had four wonderful sons. When I was pregnant with number three, however, I started writing again. Geoffrey being the…ahem...challenging child he was, I put the stories away while I was Mommy and freelance newspaper reporter, covering local government and the school board. But the writing bug wouldn’t let go, and when son number four turned eighteen months, I sold my first novel. I haven’t recovered from that bug yet, even after surviving four sons, various moves for my husband’s work, and twenty years in the publishing world. We currently live in Northwestern Indiana, and have an empty nest.

Tell us a little about your new release. Is it the first in a series or a stand alone? For Such a Time as This is the launch title of my new Women of Hope series for FaithWords. This series is a group of ‘books of the heart’, and one of my favorite writing projects so far. Each plot is lifted from Scripture, with each heroine facing the same kind of challenges faced by the women back then, the only difference being the external details and the setting of the tales. For Such a Time as This is the story of Queen Esther, tweaked a bit to fit into the American West in the 1800s.

How did you get the inspiration for this book? A reviewer of one of my earlier historicals made a perceptive comment years ago. She wrote that my book reflected the reality that Scripture remains relevant through all time since the problems people face are, when stripped down to the basics, the same—people are always the same. I began to ‘what if’ and The Women of Hope Series was born.

What kind of research did you do for this book?This one was a little more difficult, since I wanted to reflect issues related to a Scriptural character. Not only did I have to do the usual mountain of historical research (which I love! Can’t wait to dive into all those obscure details every time I begin a new historical project) but this time, I also had to read a lot of commentaries on the original Bible story. Trust me, there’s been a TON written about Queen Esther, and so I absorbed all that material, let it marinate, as my agent calls it, and then put together a story that reflects many of the circumstances the Queen faced, and puts forth the themes in her tale.

What do you hope your readers will get out of the story? I love Scripture, and turn to it all the time, especially when I face tough times in my life. I know the Lord will reveal Himself to me there, and the answers to my questions are already there. I hope my readers see how eternal the truths we see in the Bible really are. How we can trust it for our lives by seeing the examples presented there, the good examples as well as the bad.

Anything else about writing, yourself, or your books you’d like to add? Where can people find you?I love to interact with my readers, especially on facebook! I’m also available by email at ginnyaiken@gmail.com, and I have a new website which will be launching in a few days. As soon as everything is finalized (should have been a couple of weeks ago, but due to a case of stolen identity and checking account fraud, everything related to our business accounts as well as personal ones have had to be put on hold, awaiting the end of the investigation) I will be making the big announcement on my facebook page. Hope to see y’all there! And you can let me know how you liked For Such a Time as This ;-)

All right everyone, here you have it. I read this book in one sitting! It’s fabulous. You will be transported straight into the past and into the lives of characters you’ll want to keep reading about. I’ll be giving away a copy to one lucky reader. Leave a comment or ask Ginny a question and you’ll be entered to win. Thanks so much for stopping by!