Sunday, December 15, 2013

Happy Holiday Books!

Hi all,

Well it is that time of year when book sales temporarily slump as people are too busy to read, only to be followed by a surge in sales once everyone gets a chance to unwrap their new ereader and get to work loading it with new material.

In particular people love to buy books that are holiday-themed, which is one reason I've written so many holiday books myself. For example there is this book: Christmas With Sarah.

I wrote this book a long time ago, one of my few contemporary romance novels, set in Northern California. My heroine is an artist living in Big Sur who falls in love with a wealthy man in the software business and his young daughter, Sarah. Molly misses her family holiday traditions and wants nothing more than to spend Christmas with Sarah... hence the title of the book. I totally enjoyed sticking every tradition I could think of into the book, including making cookies, bread dough ornaments, and heading to see a local production of The Nutcracker.


Another story I wrote where holiday traditions come in is my fantasy short story, Perfect Hero. I wrote the first version of this as a free story, then expanded it when Ellora's Cave did a holiday collection. In this story my hero has been freed from the computer game the heroine was working on and he creates a magical Christmas to convince her he is just what she needs in her life. It is a fun happy story that I very much enjoyed writing.

My next title, Ghosts Of Christmas Past, is a little more serious as both my characters are battling the depression the holidays can bring. In the case of my hero, he's a vampire who always had happy memories of family Christmases but now that the last of his mortal family has died, he takes a seasonal companion to ward off the loneliness he feels. This year he's found a young woman who is also battling depression and it turns out that the pair of them have a lot in common. This was one of my most popular short Hollywood After Dark stories.

Finally I have one title that is a futuristic story about the first Christmas celebration on Mars, a story I titled Reflecting The Future. In this novella length story I have a perky young woman who is the "morale officer" of a Martian mining colony who wants to liven up the station by reinventing holiday traditions. This was another fun title for me as I tried to come up with what a group of miners and their families would use to decorate for Christmas... for example, just what would you substitute for a "tree"?

In all of these stories I injected as many holiday traditions as I could, and they all reflect in one way or another my love of the season. Many of these stories are very cheap: for example, Christmas With Sarah is only $1.49 at Amazon, and even though it has Cricket Starr's name on it, it is a Janet Miller level sensuality book.

I hope that everyone has a great holiday and happy New Year.

Cheers,
Janet Miller/Cricket Starr

1 comment:

Ana Morgan said...

These sound like perfect holiday gifts, Janet. I love the "moral officer." Made me think of cheering up with sex, not just decorations. I'll have to buy and find out.