It’s already time for me to start planning my next Kringle novel. Why? It’s only May!
The Kringle novel I write for this year will be for Winter 2025, so it’s even more ahead of time. A year and a half for a novel?
The ideas start in May so I have a while to play around with them in my head while I work on other things. Plots often come up on car rides with my husband, and there are more of those in the summer season (which, in my academic calendar, starts about May 1).
There are so many tropes to play with in romance — two of my Kringle books so far have mystery elements, two are enemies to lovers, a couple are friends to lovers, one involves second love, but no boy next door, snowed in at an inn, billionaire, bad boy or mafia yet. (I don’t foresee doing the latter three, to be honest. I like cinnamon roll guys myself.)
Friday, on one of those car rides, we decided that the next novel would be another second love with a touch of snowed in at an inn, where a divorced woman goes for a lone Christmas retreat at a great lodge, only to meet a local bar owner who hasn’t met the right woman in town.
The actual writing doesn’t happen till the Christmas season, November 1st-to be exact. That’s the season for NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month. I won’t get it done then, but I will be well on my way. The benefit of this schedule is that I’m in the mood for Christmas, surrounded by the trappings of Christmas and immersed in Christmas carols, while I’m writing.
January through May is when I’m reworking the story, editing and refining. That needs to be done by October 1, which is publishing time. The cover gets finalized by the end of summer, and August is when I’m doing the mechanics of getting the novel uploaded onto the Kindle Direct Publishing site.
Other things are happening at the same time, of course. Teaching college from August – May, writing on other books and publishing them. I tend to keep busy, and I think it’s a blessing that I cannot be idle for too long. And that I love to write, and that there’s a Starbucks nearby.
My next Kringle-related activity is to go one more round through the 2024 novel, Kringle Through the Snow, which I actually wrote in January of this year because I thought I would never write another Kringle novel. But I can’t quit, because it’s now one of my Christmas rituals.
So Merry Christmas in May, and watch for Kringle Through the Snow on October 1!
Words Like Me 