Publication Day

I almost forgot! Kringle Through the Snow has gone on sale on Kindle today!

Sierra DuBois doesn’t know what to do with the Grinch thrown into her holiday gala plans. It doesn’t help that the Grinch is the sweetest guy she’s met in Rolling Hills. Wade Nelson, the Grinch, finds himself getting into the role — and Sierra, the event planner. He’s a nerd with a side of geek, and she keeps a secret she feels is a deal-breaker. For two people worried about their baggage, it will take much honesty and some Santa Magic to get to a happily ever after.

I don’t think most of my readers go for Christmas romances, but give it a try. It’s a light romance with the trappings of the Christmas season, Hallmark as if a geek girl had written it.

Find Kringle Through the Snow here.

Me and My Romance

I am almost done with Kringle Through the Snow, which is the Kringle (Christmas romance) book I almost didn’t write. I thought I was done with the Kringle series (this makes six of them) until one of my Facebook friends told me I needed to write more. It took little arm-twisting, but I always wonder if the current book is the last.

I never thought I’d write romance. And, in fact, my romance is clean (only implied sex) and funny. It’s much more relationship based, although it promotes the Instalove trope, which means people getting attached quickly; I think because that’s always been my personal experience. There’s also several friends-to-lovers, enemies-to-lovers, and one age gap. (Two if you count the 100,000-year-old Su and the 6000-year-old Luke.)

Is romance realistic? It’s not supposed to be. It’s grounded in its society (whether that society be modern American, fantasy, science-fiction, etc) and fantastical in its romance elements. Some of the things that happen in romance would not or should not happen in real life (borderline stalkerish behavior, grooming, teacher-student romances) and some only happen in very defined and conscientious contexts in real life (S&M). Some things that happen in romance are just unrealistic. But romance is a type of fantasy — define the rules of the world and you can dream freely on the other parts.

To find my books, click here.

Progress on the Work in Progress

I have been working on preparing the Christmas romance novel Kringle on Fire with Richard, and we are way ahead of our goals. We are adopting a variation of the method I use to plot a book:

Use a Scrivener template (Romancing the Beat or other variants on the Save the Cat method). I do this because I want to make sure the story develops as expected by the reader.
Write character sheets for each character with appreciable dialogue (Scrivener has these).
Use the writing template in 1) to lay out descriptions of action at each plot point.
Write the book using these plot points as guideposts.

This is the writing method known as plantsing — neither as structured as planning, nor as free-form as pantsing (aka flying by the seat of your pants). We’re planning a bit more than usual because I want to make sure that Richard has enough input into the book to justify co-authorship. (In other words, I want to work his butt off.)

The goal: a decent plan by November 1st so that I have a foundation to write this book. And an enjoyable November listening to Christmas music and writing.