It’s that time of year. Holiday lights are hanging,
Christmas trees are being decorated, and in the bustle of the season all I want
is to sit down and read a good book. Something to give me the warm, fuzzy
feelings of Christmas.
When I was growing up, my mother would give me a book for
Christmas every year. And once we had finished opening our presents on
Christmas morning, I would curl up in the corner with my new book. Sometimes I
would finish it that day. Sometimes it would take me until New Year’s, but it
was one of my favorite parts of Christmas break: sitting down for hours and
reading a story that I wanted to read.
I didn’t realize until much later that once I hit about
fifteen the books my mother was giving me were actually sweet adult romances.
Nothing naughty in them, of course, but the characters were adults. This month
my very first Christmas story was published, and it is a sweet adult romance, built
to give all the warm fuzzy Christmas feeling with a little bit of daring humor
thrown in. With ballet and taxidermy how can you go wrong?
I’m usually a YA author, but for Christmas I was automatically
attracted to writing about adult characters. So I started doing a little
research, and there are, in fact, a good group of YA Christmas stories available.
And not even like Harry Potter I-mention-Christmas-for-a-few-chapters. These
are real Christmas stories.
But I’d never heard of any of them.
I suppose that’s one of the problems with writing for a
specific season. Your window of opportunity to publicize and sell your book is
remarkably short, so finding traction to create a huge reader base would
require a miracle of Lifetime Original Movie proportions. Especially in YA
where being new and hot feels even more important than in adult romance.
I know by now you’re probably thinking that my point is
clearly that anyone who writes a Christmas story is insane and should never be
published. But it’s not. Expectations need to be tempered, and promotions need
to be done with even more intensity than a normal project. But I think it’s
worth it. To be the author that put someone in the holiday mood, who gave a
reader that warm and cozy feeling while they curled up with your characters, is
worth the stress of releasing during the holiday season.
And who knows? You might just become a Christmas tradition.
So tell me, what’s your favorite Christmas story?
