The Story Behind Visions of You by C.Y. Bourgeois

Shelby Leight is a wise-cracking, lighthearted teenager, looking forward to a fun-filled senior year in high school.  She already knows the pain of losing a loved one, but has worked her way through the grief to come out on the other side.

Then, in the fall of 1975, in the sleepy, picturesque town of Palmer Alaska, the unthinkable happens.  There’s a serial killer on the hunt and one of Shelby’s best friends has disappeared.

The sudden loss of her friend in such a violent manner awakens something in her, an ability to communicate with the dead….visions.  In the midst of all this, Shelby falls in love for the first time only to discover the shocking truth about her boyfriend.  Can she accept him for who – what he is?  Can her friends and family accept him?

Shelby has a vision of the killer stalking another of her friends and is desperate to stop him before it’s too late.  Instead of an enjoyable senior year of high school, Shelby and her friends must come to grips with life and death – and all they hold – in their quest to find a monster before he kills again.

The Story Behind Visions of You

By C.Y. Bourgeois

I met a woman who had lost both of her parents and was trying to sell their house.  I took my mom there to look at it because my dad had moved into The Pioneer’s Home, a place where he could get the care he needed.  It was in Palmer, Alaska and Mom wanted to move into town to be near him.

We walked through the house and eventually made it to the basement.  There were some shelves and a workbench that contained a few things belonging to the woman’s father.  As we headed back upstairs I noticed the lady had tears streaming down her cheeks.  I asked her if she was okay and her reply nearly floored me.

She said, “I feel like they were never here.”

I thought about her words many times after that and three years later when my dad died, I was determined he would not just disappear from this earth as though he were never here.  I started writing a story about Dad.  It was really emotional for me so I stopped and started several times over the next five-and- one-half years.

Somewhere during the process of writing Dad’s story, I read the Twilight series.  I enjoyed it, but wondered why everyone writes about vampires as superhuman creatures; glittery skin, leaping tall buildings in a single bound (oh, wait that’s Superman), climbing trees at the speed of light, immortal, etc.  I’d heard that there really are people out there who believe themselves to be vampires, so I did some research and Visions of You sprouted in my brain.  It started out as a story about Paul, a young man discovering that he is a real-life “vampire”, but as I wrote, the story started coming from Shelby’s point of view and turned into a thriller, with Paul’s condition used as a back story.

I finally finished my dad’s story.  It’s a novelette entitled The Concrete Gnome and is available now through Amazon (Kindle only).

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C.Y. Bourgeois is a freshman author and an avid reader. After having spent countless enjoyable hours over the years reading other people’s narratives, she realized that she too has stories to tell.

C.Y. considers herself a native of Alaska, having lived there since the age of two.  She and her husband recently moved to northern Idaho where they now reside with their two dogs and three cats and where she is currently working on her second Shelby Leight novel, Visions of Mortality.

Her latest book is a suspense thriller (bordering on YA) called Visions of You.

Please visit C.Y. Bourgeois’ website at http://cybourgeois.authorsxpress.com/