I have been waiting for Christmas.  I love eating the cookies and giving the presents and all the holiday cheer.  And I love the special HOLIDAY PRESENTATIONS.  Over the next few weeks, I’ll take a break from my deadline every now and again to watch a few with my family and enjoy!  Here are my TOP TEN in no particular order. 

1 ) A CHRISTMAS STORY - “It was … Soap Poisoning” and “Fudddggge” and “I triple-dog-dare-you!” and the Bumpiss Dogs and “You’ll shoot your eye out, kid!”
2 ) HOLIDAY AFFAIR - heartwarming romance with Robert Mitchum and Janet Leigh.  Don’t miss it!
3 ) A CHRISTMAS CAROL - w/George C. Scott is the best
4 ) CHARLIE BROWN CHRISTMAS - “And that, Charlie Brown, is what Christmas is all about.”
5 ) A YEAR WITHOUT A SANTA CLAUS - ”I’m Mr. Heat Miser, I’m Mr. Sun” (You know you want to sing along!)
6 ) WHILE YOU WERE SLEEPING - Hey, it happens at Christmas!
7 ) MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS - Garland sings “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” and I choke up every time
8 ) BERNARD AND THE GENIE - Charming!
9 ) MIRACLE ON 34th STREET - The Original, BTW - “Oh, I do believe, I do believe…”
10) Dr. Seuss’s HOW THE GRINCH STOLE CHRISTMAS “He even stole the roast beast.”  Ba-who-dorray, Welcome Christmas, Christmas Day!

What are your favorite Holiday Presentations?  Do you have a favorite line to quote along?

68 Comments »

I used to have a muckety-muck job where I was responsible for several different departments. I was a model of efficiency–I could juggle the facts for multiple projects in my head. I was very good at making sure a lot of things got done in a very short time period. When I left that life as a public administrator to write full time, I thought it would be a piece of cake. How hard could it possibly be to do one project at a time?

OH.MY.GOD. I don’t know what happened to my organizational skills, but I enter every holiday season in complete dishevelment, totally unprepared for the many tasks that lie ahead. I have no time! I mean seriously that I cannot squeeze enough hours out of the day! And this year, just to exacerbate things, I managed to wind up with a book deadline of oh…FRIDAY.   So NOTHING has been done. No shopping, no decorating–I even snapped at my mother when she asked me what dish I was bringing Christmas day. I said something like, “HOW CAN I POSSIBLY KNOW THIS FAR OUT, MOTHER?!?!” Yeah, I am just a little stressed–fortunately, my mom learned to take me in stride a long time ago.

So with all that hanging over my head, today I got a few hours of me time, and what did I do? Did I get the decorations down? Lord, no! Did I work on my book? A teeny tiny bit. Do any shopping? HAHAHAHA. Oh no, I screwed around on photoshop making fun holiday pictures of me, like I am not already totally into myself as it is.

I don’t know what has happened to me! It was like I finally had the time I had been looking for and I couldn’t face the responsibility of it! I totally blew it, and now I am even farther behind the eight ball. This is really so unlike me — I usually exhibit a degree of self-discipline, or my publisher would have fired me a long time ago.

Today, I am busting it, trying to finish the book.

What about you? When it comes to the holidays, are you on top of it, or are you like me, using your time inappropriately? What scares you the most about the season: the shopping, the cooking, or the family all gathered in one place? Finally, what do you think Jack London would do to me if he discovered I had put his head on a figure skater? hahahaaa

37 Comments »

For Refreshment Only Sunday brings you A Very Special Moment:

His gaze flickered over me, his eyes as dark as the merlot that gleamed in the crystal wine glass that even now dangled from his long, sensual fingers.

He caught my uncertain smile and captured my hand and placed a warm kiss to my fingers, sending a tremor through me. “Forgive me,” he said, “for not keeping up my side of the conversation; this is a new experience for me.”

My heart pounded a bit harder. All throughout dinner, he’d said very little, though his eyes hadn’t left me for more than a second. “A new experience? Then you’ve never been to this restaurant before?”

A smile flickered in the depths of his eyes. “Oh, I’ve been here before. Many times, in fact. But I’ve never been with such a beautiful woman. You, my dear, are breathtaking.”

It was in that moment that I knew that this was no light flirtation as was his usual wont. It was passion. It was love. it was . . . Christian Bale.

20 Comments »

Have any of you ever played this game, also known as Naughty Santa or The Best Gift or several other titles? If you’re not sure, read the rules to it. My old RWA chapter in New Orleans played it every year when I lived there (they still do, I think). Everybody brought a wrapped Christmas ornament that cost no more than $10, and then we commenced to stealing them from each other.

The game brought out the strangest behavior. First, there was the yearlong search for the right ornament to bring, since everyone wanted to have the most coveted one. Then there was the personality change at the party–generally kind and sweet ladies suddenly became sneaky and greedy witches in their determination to get (or keep) the best ornament. All the masks came off, and it was perfectly acceptable, because it was ALL IN GOOD FUN.

I loved it, but more than that, the writer in me found it fascinating to see how circumstances could temporarily change a person. That’s why I like Christmas. Because in the midst of a very harried time, people seem to rise to the occasion, as if the mere fact of a season imbued with so much sentiment and family tradition makes us all try to be a little better than usual.

One of the most famous examples of this is the Christmas Truce between the Germans and the British in WWI immortalized in several songs and movies (can you tell I just listened to “Christmas in the Trenches”?). For me, it’s the smaller things–the people you chat with in long lines, the random acts of kindness.

What about you? Have you ever been the recipient of an unusual act of kindness during Christmas? Have you ever witnessed one that made a lump rise in your throat?

23 Comments »

I am a gulper. I read romance novels in gulps. Two books a day for two weeks and then nothing for six months. I can’t read romance while I’m writing one, so that explains my system (if gulping can be called a system).

I know people who are sippers. They read one romance novel at a time and they read it at a certain time, like just before bed, and when that one is finished, they pick up another. They sip.

I know people who are intravenous romance readers. They have a book going at all times, usually multiple books, and they read it whenever they get the chance, like while driving. Like when the rest of the world is sleeping. Like when they’re being paid to work.

I would love to be a gulp writer. I would love to get an idea, sit down, and write it in one long gulp. If I could gulp write, I’d be able to write a book in four or five weeks. I am not a gulp writer. I am a sipper writer. I sip at one book and eventually, slowly, months later, I drain the glass.

Which are you? Which kind of reader? Which kind of writer? What are you reading now? And, here’s the million dollar question, is it possible to train yourself to be something else? 

64 Comments »

Join us Wednesday, 12/12 as the Goddesses welcome Elizabeth Boyle!

Elizabeth, a former pirate hunter for Bill Gates, started writing what she loved to read: romance novels. Since her first book was published in 1996, shes won the RWA RITA award, two Romantic Times Reviewers Choice awards and saw her most recent book, Love Letters from a Duke, make the New York Times Extended bestseller list. She lives in Seattle with her husband and two small sons, or heroes in training as she likes to call them.

8 Comments »

Want to win an ARC for my January release TO CATCH A HIGHLANDER? Then join in today as we write our own Christmas songs!

Use any Christmas song you love and rewrite the lyrics so that it’s about your time here at Mt. Oly.

I’ll do one! (I love to do these things.)

To the tune of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer:

You know Jeffries and Dain, Enoch and Jordan!!
Hawkins, and Rose, Gibson and London!
But do you recall, the best of Mt. Oly and ALL?

Perky, our Goddess Readers, have a very biting wit!
And if you ever read them, your coffee you would spit!
All of the other blogs, watch with massive jealousy!
They never had our great Readers, join in so fun and merry!

Oooooh! That was fun!

Anyway, you get the point. If you want TO CATCH A HIGHLANDER in your Christmas stocking, a MONTH before it’s released, then get to rhyming!

78 Comments »

When I was a kid, we had an LP (or vinyl record, for you younglings out there) we always played at Christmas. It was one of many, and I only remember that it was some sort of collection of songs by different artists. This album was significant mainly because it had a scratch in it so that every time we got to The First Noel it would hit one particular part and then start repeating the same line over and over. For years I never knew what the line after “they saw a star, shining in – shining in – shining in– shining in–“ was.

To this day when the family’s all together listening to holiday tunes, without any prompting at all we three girls will get to that part and start repeating that line. It’s kind of our thing. I have a difficult time singing “the east, beyond them far”, probably because I learned it so much later than the rest of the song. This was a particular hindrance when I sang in my high school’s choir. Though I did sing the words correctly — I hope — in my mind “shining in – shining in –“ was pretty much where the song was supposed to end.

While I do have a special place in my heart for The First Noel, my favorite carol is actually God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen. I love the tune, and it sounds very 19th century to me. And most of the heroes I write have definitely “gone astray”, as the lyrics go.

My third favorite carol is The Twelve Days of Christmas, as sung by the John Denver and the Muppets. They have an entire album, and I highly recommend it.

What are your top three Christmas Carols? Do you have a particular reason for liking or disliking a holiday song? Did I get the lyrics for Noel right? (I always worry.)

45 Comments »

So a friend called me the other day wanting to know if I was all right. She’d just had a bad dream where I sustained a mortal injury while breaking up a fight between two neighborhood boys. The incident was real – I actually did break up a dangerous fight several months ago, which admittedly scared the devil out of me at the time! But thankfully my demise was just a figment of her nightmare.

But then the very next day I read an article that said some scientists believe dreams can actually foretell the future. So now do I have to worry whether my friend’s nightmare about me is gonna come true????

I’ve had bad dreams like that before, haven’t you? Where you or someone close to you meets an untimely end?

My own dreams tend to fall into three categories…. Good, Bad, and just plain Weird. I have a lot of weird ones that don’t make a lick of sense. I would just as soon not have those bad or weird kinds, but I don’t seem to have any control over what I dream.

I have another good friend, however, who really does try to control what she dreams. She’s big into analyzing and interpreting her dreams. She makes herself wake up several times each night and then jots down on paper everything she remembers. And then she spends countless hours trying to figure out what they all meant.

We all dream for several periods of REM sleep during the night, even though we often don’t remember most of them. Supposedly dreams are our subconscious at work, our way of making sense of our world. They make us better able to cope with problems. My dh believes that if he goes to sleep thinking about a work problem, he’ll wake up smarter. And a lot of the time he’s right – he’s actually solved his problem.

I like those kinds of good, helpful dreams. But what I want to know is, how do the Bad and Weird kind help solve anything? And do our dreams really mean anything?

Are you a big dreamer? What’s the weirdest dream you remember? Do you think your dreams are trying to tell you something?

47 Comments »

Don’t say I didn’t warn you. I was late decorating indoors this year – those pesky revision deadlines. But my sisters and mom and dad and nephews and niece pitched in on Saturday, and here are some of the results. The outdoor decorations – which do not include Stormtroopers, Julia London – will have to wait until next weekend, but at least now I can look up from the computer and see Christmas.

I love decorating for the holidays, though I detest un-decorating after the holidays. That will probably be another blog.

So here’s Gerald the Giraffe (she – yes, she – was named by my older nephew two years ago) in all her holiday glory with my Victorian-style decorated tree, and my living room coffee table with my little carriages. My entire house, you see, isn’t Hollywood/Star Wars/Lord of the Rings/Pirates of the Caribbean. The living room is more of an English Colonial-Africa in look. Hence the African mask, also decorated for Christmas.

Do you decorate the inside of your house for the holidays? Do you go all out, or are you more conservative? Or like me, do you have a house that explodes with holiday cheer some years, and is…spare in others?

35 Comments »