Christmas Confession

I have a confession to make.  I love Christmas books, stories, movies and television episodes.  I don't care how trite, or over simplified, or sickly sweet the story line is.  I love them.

I know that not everyone gets a happily ever after.

I know that Christmas can be super hard for so many people.

Knowing that doesn't change the fact that those books and stories where good triumphs over evil, where the lonely person finds community, where the lost are found and God's Love shines on everyone are some of my absolute favorites.

As I'm working on my Christmas book (due next year) I'm trying hard to stay within the bounds of reality.  But this book will be filled with happy surprises for a main character that has come to expect life to be hard and cold, not warm and loving.

My main character in this book is very different from characters I've written in the past.  The book will follow her journey of discovery of the tangible evidence of God's Love.

I'm really excited about it.  As the story develops, I'll share excerpts on this blog.  Here is a small part of the introduction to my main character:

"Having grown up in the foster care system, and being bounced from home to home,

Lacey had no one to turn to when hard times hit.  Her mom, who had been in and out

of prison for Lacey’s whole life would never relinquish custody, so adoption wasn’t

possible.  And some of the people who were foster parents shouldn’t be.  And it

seemed like every time Lacey ended up in a good home, her mother got out of

prison and took her back.  So the few good homes she had been in she had lost

touch with.  And then Lacey’s mom finally died from an overdose when Lacey was

nineteen.  She’d really never had anyone she could depend on.  Except Kyle. 

And again, she didn’t want to dump all her troubles on him when he was deployed,

so she put on a happy face when they got a chance for a call."

A Christmas Story

 I had this great idea about three weeks ago for a Christmas Story.  Energized, I sat down at my computer and started to write.  The whole story developed in my mind, I thought that I would crank out a novella in a week, and have it ready for Christmas.

You would think that I would know myself better than that by now.  Three days in, I realized my novella would be another novel.  Six days in, I remembered it takes three months to get a copyright.  Hopefully, Christmas Blessings will be ready for publication Christmas 2021.

But, a good thing happened anyway.  I write best when I am working on multiple projects at once.  That way, while I am stalled on one story line, I work on another, and am able to be productive every day.

I'm learning that I have a pace to my writing, and it isn't fast.  The best I think I will ever do is one book a year.  It is so much easier for the stories to form in my mind than it is to translate those stories to words on a screen.

Writing down my stories is my gift to myself.  Writing is the reward I promised myself for working and saving for all those years.  I hope that some of my stories end up being a gift to my readers as well.