REVIEWS—New Holiday Story Releases

I recently read two Advance Reader Copies of two quintessential holiday reads. I hadn't read either author prior to this but these won't be the last books from these authors I'll read.

I thought I'd share them with you here. I also ask you to bear with me for invoking Christmas in mid-October. Me and the stores, huh? Can't escape it, can you?

The first story is written by Sheila Roberts and she will be my guest on October 29^th. 

The Snow Globe

Author: Sheila Roberts

Publisher: St. Martin’s Press

Format: Hardcover, 176 pages

On Sale: October 26, 2010

Price: $10. 80

Rating: 4 stars

Back Cover Blurb:


On a blustery afternoon, Kiley Gray wanders into an antique shop and buys a beautiful snow globe.


“There’s a story behind that snow globe,” the antique dealer tells her, and explains that the original owner lost his wife and son right before Christmas. When he received the handcrafted snow globe as a Christmas present, the grieving widower saw the image of a beautiful woman beneath the glass—a woman who would eventually come into his life, mend his broken heart and bring him back to the world of the living. For years, the snow globe has passed from generation to generation, somehow always landing in the hands of a person in special need of a Christmas miracle.


When Kiley shares the story with her best friends—two women with troubles of their own—they don’t believe it. But they’re about to discover that at Christmastime, sometimes the impossible becomes possible and miracles really do come true.


My thoughts:


The whole season of Christmas is based on miracles but in our day and age, few believe in the phenomenon.


Ms. Roberts tells a lighthearted and fun tale of three women who, despite diverging lifestyles, have remained friends through thick and thin, good times and bad. Each is facing a crisis in their personal lives. All three are dreading Christmas for differing reasons. They don’t know it, but each is in need of a bit of Christmas magic.


Kiley has lost a job and a fiancé—to her sister no less. Heart sore and depressed she allows her two best friends to take her for a weekend get away. While window shopping Kiley feels drawn to antique store and goes in and sees an old-fashioned snow globe, which she buys. When she relays the story the shopkeeper told her to her friends they don’t believe it. But Kiley believes.

"Actually, Kiley was a big believer, period. She’d been sure Santa was real until she was ten and even after waking up on Christmas Eve to discover her father hanging her filled stocking on the mantel, she kept pretending for another two years. She’d believed in Prince Charming and Mr. Right clear through college. She’d even believed in happy endings until just this past October when her boyfriend, Jeremy Horne, dumped her at her own Halloween party (how was that for tacky?) announcing that he couldn’t fight his attraction for her sister any longer."

When Kiley’s vision comes true she decides to pass the snow globe and it’s magical gift to each of her best friends. What ensues is a heartwarming, fun story about the power of miracles.


I love stories that combine the magic of Christmas and a touch of the supernatural. This one is a real winner and a perfect read for the holidays!

 Book Two:

An Amish Christmas
Author: Cynthia Keller
Format: Hardcover, 256 pages
On Sale: October 26, 2010
Price: $16.00
Rating:  4 stars


Back Cover Blurb:


Meg Hobart has everything: a happy marriage to a handsome, successful husband, a beautiful home in Charlotte, North Carolina, and three wonderful children. But it all comes crashing down around her the day she learns that her husband, James, has been living a lie—and has brought the family to financial ruin. Penniless and homeless, the Hobarts pack up what little they still possess and leave behind their golden life for good. But it’s not the material things Meg finds herself mourning. Instead, she misses the certainty that she should remain married to James, who has betrayed her trust so thoughtlessly. Worse, she is suddenly very aware of just how spoiled her children have become. Meg wonders what her family has really sacrificed in their pursuit of the American dream.


A frightening twist of fate forces the Hobarts to take refuge with a kind Amish family in Pennsylvania, where they find themselves in a home with no computers, no cell phones, nothing the children consider fashionable or fun. Her uncooperative brood confined to the Amish world of hard work and tradition, their futures entirely uncertain, Meg fears she can never make her family whole again.


Celebrating life’s simplest but most essential values, packed with laughter and tears, this is a story of forgiveness and the power of love. You will never forget the special moment in time that is An Amish Christmas.

My thoughts:


A family is supposed to be one of our greatest joys and the bedrock of our society. The sad fact is, for the most part, we’ve lost the concept of working together as a unit for the benefit of the family. In today’s world there are so many conflicts, financial problems, and so many gadgets to distract us from what a family is all about. A person’s worth is defined by their financial standing which seems to give the whole family, and children especially, a false sense of entitlement. It also creates spoiled, disrespectful children who have, along with the parents, lost sight of the qualities of love, mutual respect, the value of spending time as a family. These are some to the common issues Cynthia Keller deals with in An Amish Christmas.


It truly is a heartwarming story of a family reconnecting and learning what truly is important is each other and not what they have or don’t have. Important lessons of forgiveness and love and there is a scene in the book that really brings that message home to the Hobarts.


Just before Christmas, the Hobart and Lutz teens are trusted to take homemade goods to a town store where they are sold. The buggy belongs Jonathan, one of the oldest Lutz siblings, and is special but he trusts his brother to drive it into town. Young Will Hobart tries driving the buggy—he’s not supposed to, and an accident occurs. Amanda Lutz is injured when the buggy overturns, the buggy and baked goods are destroyed, and a trip to the hospital is necessary. This is a scenario that could cause all sorts of blame, anger, and division. Meg and James Hobart are absolutely appalled by their son’s carelessness in the face of such open generosity of the Lutz family. The Amish family assigns no blame and totally refrains from putting the Hobart teens in a defensive stance. The next morning, James and Meg are sick at heart and have no idea what to expect; Lizzie and Will were “pale and practically shaking with guilt.” Both families step up to replace the destroyed goods to meet their obligation to the store. The huge Lutz family warmly welcomes the Hobart women into the kitchen to help. The men welcome James and Will to repair the buggy. What’s done is done and forgiveness extended, but now there are things that must be fixed.

The stalwart sense of values the Amish family has touches the whole Hobart clan and gives them a better set of lenses to look at both the world around them and themselves.


An Amish Christmas is well paced, has strong, well-defined characters and emotional impact. It was a story I truly enjoyed reading.

Defending Inspiration

My guest today is Samantha Hunter. She’s written sixteen books for Harlequin. She's worked as a university writing instructor for ten years and Sam's been writing full-time since 2005. Sam loves to cook, being outdoors and she’s a quilter who makes some gorgeous bags, and a self named bag addict.

As with anything creative, inspirattion plays a big part. That's true whether you're doing a painting, decorating a home, doing crafts, writing music or stories. The best of those endeavors comes with being inspired and the excitement of creating that mental picture. Being involved with crafts and writing; I’d say Samantha Hunter is well familiar with the concept of inspiration.

I saw a comment on Twitter yesterday, where someone posted a quote that said “If you wait for inspiration, you’re a waiter, not a writer.” As quippy as it is, that made me sad.

A lot of writers dismiss inspiration, and I have to admit, that’s not me. I believe in the magic, the spark, and the muse. I consider myself a writer who does wait for inspiration – and that hasn’t kept me from producing sixteen books for Harlequin to date with several more that have either not been published or are in the works.

To me, inspiration is not antithetical to the work of writing, but it is the air that writers breathe – it’s what keeps us going. It’s the initial idea, the premise, the strike of brilliance, the trigger, whatever you want to call it. It’s the “roll” we get on or the thing that breaks the block. It’s the power behind the words, the thing that makes craft more than mechanics. It’s that feeling that pushes us through a book, and I think in the best of cases, the reader can feel it, too – when they are completely sucked in, or find a moment in a book making them laugh or moving them to tears.

When we get inspired, following a spark, we can work like we’re on fire, write page after page, barely able to keep up. Then the work starts to suggest itself, the book starts rolling out in front of us – the work fuels inspiration this way, too. The more we write, the more ideas we have to keep writing.

What I have found is that the process of being inspired is a lot like meditating – if you relax, if you open your mind to the world and the possibilities, it works. A lot of people don’t want to stake their careers on that, but I can’t imagine having a career without it, if only because it’s part of the joy of writing. I’ve found that the only time I am really happy and writing my best is when I am inspired, and I’ve also found that the more you encourage it, the more often it comes. But that’s just me.

So why do so many writers dismiss inspiration, as if it’s something that gets in the way of work rather than something that fuels it? I suppose because they fear it won’t come to them, and that’s a scary thing. I’ve also thought that writers might think that admitting that they believe in inspiration might make them seem flighty or floofy…but that’s where the work comes in. I believe in being inspired, and I don’t think any of my editors or my agent would consider me irresponsible or not having a good work ethic – I have never missed a deadline. I consistently propose new ideas, I finish books. I write almost every day, and sometimes, I do write even when I’m not “feeling it,” because we have to, but if I am really uninspired, I really can’t write. Yes, that’s scary. But, usually, if I relax and remind myself what it is I love about what I do, and maybe go work in my garden for a while, it comes back.

In the end, it’s whatever works for you – writing is highly individualistic. What’s right for one person is not right for someone else, and that’s okay, but I reject the wholesale dismissal of inspiration in our world. Sure, we have to know the business, the craft, the market, etc but we can’t let it take over, and I find believing in inspiration is the best defense. Twitter being what it is, also offered up a quote I did like, one that balanced out the scales, and that was from Ray Bradbury, who said “You must stay drunk on writing so that reality cannot destroy you.” So, I’ll leave it at that. :-)

***

Samantha Hunter lives in Syracuse New York with her husband and several pets. Since January 2004 when she sold her first book to Harlequin Blaze, Virtually Perfect, she has gone on to publish several more with new releases on the way. Sam holds two Master's degrees and was a university instructor for many years before quitting to live the writing life.

Visit Sam's author Blog at www.loveisanexplodingcigar.com.

Author Cheryl Kaye Tardif is “Finding Bliss” on her iPhone 3G

My guest today is Cheryl Kaye Tardif, the Canadian author of four best selling suspense novels. What do you do if you have a great idea hit you for a story but nowhere to write it down? You grab your iphone. Cheryl discusses the newest phase of iPhone novels.


It all started when I saw a commercial for Hershey’s Bliss chocolates in their individually wrapped foil packages. I saw the word BLISS on the TV and thought, “Wow, that would make a really neat girl’s name.” Almost instantly a picture came to mind of a teenaged girl with scraggly dirty-blond hair and torn jeans. Foster child, street child, pickpocket, and unwanted, unloved-the complete opposite of the word “bliss”. And Finding Bliss was born.

I didn’t want to lose any of my ideas for this novel, but I also didn’t want to stop watching the TV show that was on, so I grabbed my new iPhone 3G. There is a Notes application and this was the first time I used it. What was really great was that I was able to type in my notes on this new novel idea during the commercials and then email them to myself. Later, I went upstairs to my office, opened the email on my PC, copied and pasted the notes into a Word document and-voila! —I had started a new novel.

About 2 years ago, a writing craze swept across Japan; cell phone novels took the publishing world by storm in this small country. In the first six months of 2007, Goma Books and Maho i-Land published more cell phone novels than the major Japanese publishers did print books. And now, North America has its first English language cell phone novel platform through Textnovel.

I am very familiar with Textnovel. CEO Stan Soper heard about my iPhone novel Finding Bliss and he personally invited me to check out Textnovel. Since I always like to try new things, I submitted three short stories, serializing them over a period of time. You can find my novelette Remote Control there. Stan has shown great interest in Finding Bliss, and there is a possibility that my iPhone novel might show up on Textnovel in the future.

Recently, I was a guest blogger on Book Marketing Floozy and I talked about how authors have to “think outside the book”. Sometimes a book can be marketed even before it has been published, and once in a while even before it has been written. That’s what I’ve done with my iPhone novel Finding Bliss, a novel that has only 2 chapters written yet has already received much media attention.

To date, I have appeared on a number of television and radio interviews, and in newspapers, because I have chosen to write a novel in a completely different way. Another major company contacted me about Finding Bliss a month or so ago, and they too would like to be the first company to “release” this novel to the public. Let the bidding wars begin!

‘Finding Bliss’ will be an emotional, heartwarming story of a damaged teenage girl who must fight to survive in a world of abuse, lies and loss. As she struggles to find herself, Bliss will discover exactly where she belongs and she’ll learn that she is worthy of love after all.” [You can read the first chapter of this novel of Cheryl Kaye Tardif on her website.]

There is no publish date on this book as I have not finished writing it. Once I am done, it will be handed to my wonderful agent Jack Scovil to pitch to publishers.

***

Cheryl Kaye Tardif is the bestselling author of Whale Song, The River, and Divine Intervention. She is currently working with a well respected producer interested taking the inspiring message in her novel Whale Song and making it into a movie. Her books are available on Amazon.com, canada.ca, and your favorite book store.