Goodies General Notes and Table of Contents (read this first!)

Chapter One

One thing I like about this chapter is that it parallels the opening of Wake Me When It’s Over. Wake Me begins with Eric waiting in the back of the Assembly Hall while Rebekah performs in a Christmas concert. In The Counterfeit, Eric is again waiting for Rebekah, who is practicing for a concert, at Abravanel Hall (which, for those of you unfamiliar with Salt Lake City, is less than a block away from the Assembly Hall).

I don’t have a lot to say about this chapter, except that it’s not my favorite. It’s made up almost entirely of snippets of former manuscripts, all pieced together. There’s a lot of background information this chapter is trying to present, and it’s trying to do it without sounding too stilted.

The French words C’est nul mean something along the lines of “It’s awful”. I used three translators for the manuscript, Micah Bruner, Scott Carlson, and Katie Hansen (who also happens to be the actress cast as Rebekah for the marketing blog Trial of the Century). Micah translated the phrase originally as ca pu, meaning “it stinks”. Katie offered the c’est nul translation, and I went with that one, because it’s more visually recognizable as French.

Special Agent Jeff Harrop is named after a coworkers of mine, Jeff Harrop. He appeared at the end of Wake Me (page 247), and I used his name not thinking he’d be a recurring character. When I started working on Counterfeit, I wrote Jeff into several scenes, almost all of which ended up getting the axe. Too bad for him. (It amuses me endlessly that I make fun of him having a sissy name.) (Astute blog readers will recognize Jeff as my bald coworker, who I've referrred to several times.)

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