Happy Christmas To You

 Peanut Butter. Jelly. Socks. Shoes. Batman. Robin. Tom. Jerry. What do all these things have in common? They are all part of a famous pair.

Famous pairs surround us at every turn, and no doubt you could add some great ones of your own to the list, but none is as exciting to a Christmas enthusiast as Christmas and July. An unlikely twosome you say? Perhaps you don't realize how much the celebration of Christmas in July has growing in popularity.

Although it likely began at different times and for different reasons in various parts of the world, in the U.S., it is thought to have been started by Fannie Holt, the director of a summer camp for girls in Brevard, North Carolina in the 1930's. 

To offer the campers some unique summertime fun, Fannie had the girls sing Christmas carols, exchange gifts, and even host a visit from Santa himself. It makes sense that the duplication of this wonderful holiday was the brainchild of someone who worked with kids.

In the 1940's a comedy starring Dick Powell and Ellen Drew bore the name, and if you fast forward to current day, society has given us everything from songs about the subject, to summer cocktails with names like Mistletoe Kiss, to an entire month of Christmas themed movies from the Hallmark Channel.

Why on earth do humans have such an obsessive fascination with Christmas that we have to celebrate it twice in the year?

Perhaps it's the fun that comes with a change of pace.

For those of us in the Northern Hemisphere, celebrating Christmas at the midpoint of the year allows us to combine what is usually a winter holiday with the fun and sun of summer. This opens the door to all sorts of wacky and wonderful events like getting Santa to a luau on the beach.

 For the citizens of the world who dwell in the Southern Hemisphere, the opposite is true, and they take every advantage of the snow/rain to decorate their gardens with festive decor and set up European-style Christmas markets.

Alternatively, it could be the green stuff. Cha-ching.

Marketers, of course, have a field day with yet one more opportunity to lure us in with sales and specials. As if we needed an excuse to shop.

Maybe people want to take their matching pajama picture early so it will be ready for the postcards in time for real Christmas.

Or maybe, if we set cynicism aside, it's as simple as the fact that Christmas, with all its trappings and traditions, makes people happy. And why not infuse more happiness in the world? We might as well have two Thanksgivings, three birthdays, and a month of Valentine's, complete with Brach's candy hearts available in small boxes at all times. Plus Cadbury eggs. Don't forget the eggs.

Is it necessary? No. But is it fun? Absolutely. A quick internet search turned up the following festivities just within a sixty-mile radius of my house.

A murder mystery dinner called The Most Wonderful Crime of the Year

A free ornament-making workshop

A concert of Christmas-themed music put on by the Chamber of Commerce

A Christmas Toy Drive benefitting Shriners Children's

And $200 credit for anyone who books three nights at a nearby resort

With these options and more, how can you be a Grinch? Just jump on the celebratory bandwagon and put Feliz Navidad on repeat for the next 174 days. 

I would be remiss as an author if I didn't at least mention the way that I am celebrating Christmas in July. Although I have three chapters left to write, I will be releasing Book Two in my Home for Christmas Series during the last week of the month. 

The Long Way Home began as a novella and has blossomed into a full-length novel. Book one, Finding Home is the fifth novella in the 5-author anthology entitled Christmas In The Cascades.

Being from Southern California, it is definitely strange writing about wreaths and snowstorms as I blast my AC, but stirring up themes of family and community as well as joy and hope seem fitting for any time of year.

Check out Christmas In the Cascades on Amazon and KU and keep your eyes peeled for The Long Way Home. Until then, stay warm or cool, whatever your case may be, and munch on a candy cane from last year's stocking. 

It's been a pleasure contributing to Cowboy Kisses, friends.

Happy Christmas to you.

The Long Way Home

Sweet With Faith Christmas

By day, Cynda Marks produces a celebrity baking show. On the side, she works on her own series about small towns and the fascinating people who live there.

When she discovers a failing toy store at a Christmas tourist town in the Cascade Mountains, Cynda hopes to include it in the series and help the owner raise the money she needs to keep the store. Discovering that a reclusive “secret santa” hand makes all the toys in the shop fuels her desire to tell the story. The owner shuts the idea down to protect the toy maker’s privacy.

John Carter has all but withdrawn from society. He has his reasons, and nobody needs to know them.

The only person he maintains contact with is his dead friend’s wife, Maggie, and that’s because he owes her—big time. When it appears she’s going to lose the family toy store, he stretches his social limitations to look for work that will help her hold onto it.

A knock on his workshop door in the middle of a snowstorm introduces him to the pushiest, most talkative woman he’s ever met. He turns her proposal to film him down flat despite the money she promises and sends her on her way into the stormy night.

Her second knock brings an offer he can’t refuse, and before he knows it, he finds himself living in Cynda Marks’ home, practically in view of the house and memories he's spent his whole life running from.

As John and Cynda work toward the same goal of helping Maggie save the store, Christmas miracles stir and create a heartwarming journey’s end for the prodigal who took The Long Way Home.

When Everything You Wanted Is Nothing You Expected

Authors: Have you ever written a book that doesn't neatly fit in your catalog?

Readers: Have you ever stumbled upon one of these books and wondered what on earth the author was thinking?

All That Glitters is that outlier for me. I started my brand on cowboys and the Montana countryside. As I went along, I created categories for series that had faith themes, series that had lots of chemistry, and series with suspense but all of them were easily digestible.

When I got to All That Glitters, I screeched on the brakes. I knew the story I had crafted was too intense for most of my audience.

It addresses the issue of harassment and se+ual assault in the entertainment industry. A country star on his way up and a country star on her way down cross paths and the story unfolds.

To be clear, the threat is not from within the relationship, but even so, the characters are far from perfect.

Flaws, uncomfortable circumstances, and painful revelations led me to label this book sweet WITH GRIT.

I still call it sweet because there is no language and intimacy is fade to black, but I knew even fade to black would shock some of my readers. So why did I write it this way?

I wanted to explore what I think are the very complicated reasons this reality can exist right under our noses.

I wanted to highlight dreams, ambitions, brokenness, rejection of family values, greed, power and depravity. To bring these to light, I couldn't write characters who behave in the most pleasing, conservative ways.

Real life is complicated. People are gritty. Decisions made in a moment impact us for a lifetime. Everyone doesn't want to read a story like this, but some people do.

All That Glitters doesn't prescribe whether the reader should feel judgment or compassion, anger or grace, but hopefully by the time the Happily Ever After arrives, themes of resilience, forgiveness, and hope will be locked into your heart.

Is this one for you?
Check the blurb and the reviews.

All That Glitters
Cat ❤️ Billy

Just Google It

This one’s for all those researchers out there.

True confessions: I am old enough to have used microfiche.

Yes, I know. It’s not cool to be that old, and certainly not cool to admit it, but I know I’m not alone, and I do consider it quite an accomplishment to have survived all the way from microfiche and card cataloguing through the traveling encyclopedia salesmen at my parent's door, all the way to googling (it’s a verb) and commanding Siri to look stuff up. Right here is where I’d like to insert the wide eyed emoji displaying my shock at how much the world has changed in my lifetime. 🤯 ( Also, an exploding head.)

While many losses of the good old days could be lamented on a topic like this—such as flipping through 30 volumes of the Britannica before bed—we’ll save those for another more nostalgic day. Instead, today I’d like to revel in the sheer madness of now having the world at our fingertips.

The information superhighway—or the internet for those who don’t like fancy terms—is literally full to the brim of everything you might ever want to know about. This is excellent news for those of us authors who like researching while writing our books. Even better news if your library card is expired. (Mine is not. I’m just saying.)

I am always highly entertained by the social media posts where authors reveal their google search lists. The index of weird stuff people look up when writing books is in some cases more interesting than the book itself. The memes about how we are authors, and not serial killers could crack me up for days. (The large number of people being harmed in books, though, is something to ponder.)

Of course, I don’t need to know about toxic gas that smells like sulfur in my real life. Even though this is obvious to me, if my neighbors saw my list, would they be worried? Would I be the focus of the evening news interview where the whole neighborhood is surprised? She seemed so normal. Do the police have a tracker on my search bar? Could they show up at my door some afternoon wanting explanations? (Just because I use the internet doesn’t mean I understand how tracking my search bar works.)

These questions should give me pause, but do they? Nope. I just google away, fingers racing over the keys, learning about everything from guns with silencers to how fast a car can drive before it explodes into small pieces. Where do criminals attach under the car bombs? Which wires exactly need to be touched together to hotwire a car? (Can you tell I’m writing a suspense novel?)

Siri doesn’t judge me when I ask what’s considered a misdemeanor in Oklahoma or if you can wear your hair long when you’re an inmate at a super max prison. It’s none of her business. She just sprints out to find the answers and brings them back to me lickity split. I’m pretty sure I would’ve had to look through a lot of microfiche to find those answers. (I think Google has made me a smarter person. For real.)

So whether you’re a spry young tech lover or an old dinosaur like me, I’d like to recommend you give Siri and Google a try. You’ll be amazed at what you can find out there in the wild wild west (www) of knowledge-land and if you’re lucky—you’ll even find a video on how to hotwire a car because readers LOVE those realistic details. (Don’t get me started on the videos. They are amazing.)

Here’s a few search terms for my recent WIP:

Average income of Mendocino County California

Distance from Tonga to Hawaii

Polymetallic nodules

Is it called a highway in Virginia?

How far into water will bullets travel (There’s a video! A guy tried it in his backyard pool. 🤣)

Are assault rifles legal in California?

Can large ships evade detection?

Where do Navy SEALs carry their weapons when parachuting?

Have you been googling lately?

Drop some of your searches in the comments so we can all wonder what in the world your next book is about. (Plus, when the cops show up we can vouch for you and tell them you’re just an author.)

Until next time! 

The Making of an Anthology

 On October 25^th, I released my first Christmas novella as part of a five-author anthology. Christmas In The Cascades is a sweet romance collection with faith elements which tells the story of a single town over a one hundred and fifty year span.

The book takes the reader on a journey from the founding of the bell tower in 1874 to the near extinction of the town in 2024. The reader gets to stop along the way in 1910, 1967, and 1999.

If you are an avid reader, you have probably read various novella collections—maybe even holiday ones. But if you’ve never been involved in writing an anthology, I thought you might be interested to peek behind the scenes and learn a little about how the book came to be.

A couple of years ago, author Ginny Ytrupp hosted several author groups where she placed people in cohorts according to the genres they wrote. I was placed into a group with other romance authors. After meeting for several months two of the cohorts folded into one and Marissa Adams, April Kidwell, Marline Williams, Chris Daniel, and I found ourselves thrown together in a twice monthly meeting.

Our focus started simply as sharing our writing progress and goals, but before long, one of the authors, Chris Daniel, expressed a desire to write something together. We all knew of others who had done Christmas projects and everyone agreed it would be fun to try.

One of the earliest conversations I remember having—because this was a couple of years ago—was whether our book would have a theme. Would each of our novellas stand alone or be connected by some thread? We all liked the idea of a theme and some of the front runners included a family, music, or a Christmas object such as an ornament or gift that could be passed around through each story.

Once we made it to that point, it dawned on us that we all wrote in different eras and in order to write a book together we would need to choose one. It was a problematic thought because as much as possible we wanted to write for our already established readers, bringing them to the project as potential customers.

 The solution was a breath away. As each author shared their preferred time period, we realized that together we could cover a large span of time. What could survive a hundred and fifty year period, though? A family? Yes. An heirloom? Possibly. A town? Bingo.

As a western author it was important to me to locate our story west of the Mississippi and I sure was hoping for a ranch! Thank goodness everyone was on board with a western-ish vibe. One of our authors hailed from Oregon, and it seemed as likely a place as any for our setting. After poring over the map, our small fictional town of Dane’s Creek was born.

One person wanted mountains, another wanted a train station, there had to be a stream for gold panning, and we all thought our beloved town should have a bell tower. We decided the bell would represent hope—just one of the many beautiful Christmas themes we loved.

To keep track of all our ideas we started a Trello board. A depository of sorts for inspirational photos, character names, and the seedlings of our plots. We researched birds, filberts, the effects of the spotted owl protections on the timber industry, and modern day ranches in Oregon.

As our town began to take shape, one author mapped it out for us, and another took a field trip to a couple of real life bell towers to get a better understanding of how the bells worked.

After coordinating the placement of doors, staircases, uses of the attached building, and accounting for multiple changes to the tower over the years, we were ready to write. Our goal was for each person to write 25,000 words and be done by the end of December 2023. We came in mostly on time, lol. Some took longer and some exceeded their word limit (We shalt not name any names-grimace) but the project continued to roll on steadily.

A detailed timeline was needed to allow for time to read each other’s finished work, put the full collection through a team of beta readers, pay for editors, make revisions, hand it over to the proofreaders, and finally to pass it to the ARC readers and the book launch team.

Chris birthed the idea and encouraged us every step of the way. April created the collection cover and many of the individual covers. I formatted the book and communicated with betas and ARCs. Marline created a free cookbook download with recipes from our stories. She also booked a couple of podcasts, and she and April created a website - christmasinthecascades.com. Marissa agreed to house the book on her Amazon account as well as order author copies and distribute our earnings.

Overall, the experience of creating a book with a team of like-minded authors has been a rich and rewarding experience. Teamwork is not without difficulties and occasional disputes, but I don’t mind telling you we feel very proud of our accomplishment.

Several authors chose lines from Christmas carols as their titles. I tried to stick with that theme but couldn’t find anything that fit quite as well for me as the title I ended up choosing which was Finding Home.

Christmas In The Cascades is finally out in the world and while we’re not sure how it will be received, I hear whispers of a possible repeat. Might there be a sequel sometimes in the future? Time will tell.

Order your copy of this unique holiday romance anthology on Amazon. It is available in eBook, paperback and is on KU.  

Christmas In The Cascades

Hope you enjoy the stories.

Merry Christmas!

Cali Black