This summer, I entered a short story contest for a Holiday anthology put together by my local RWA chapter. Romance Holiday and Christmas short story anthologies are my secret little passion. Like bags of gummy bears or cookies, I can’t resist them. My favorites are Regency Christmas stories: the whipped cream of amazingness in Holiday stories, but I don’t write historical. I tried to repurpose an old unfinished story of mine, so I found it on my hard drive and started writing. Well, it still has a man and women, and they end up at his apartment, but everything else is different. Lols.

I pounded out a version of Sorcha in Snowflakes in a week and sent it in. Somehow, I ended up with Irish-American Jewish girl, Sorcha Rosenbloom who falls in love with an Irish-Danish guy who came to the US for college and stayed. I like to think that Alexander is a Viking hangover from Naberius. I love the mixed up cultural melting pot aspect of this story because it reflects my life and lots of other people I know around the holiday season. Many people celebrate different holidays in the winter, some with blended traditions and some just pick one holiday so they can respect their spouse’s heritage or pass some cultural understanding to their kids. I see the cultural melting pot of a family as a profoundly romantic act, and it provides the backstory for Sorcha in Snowflakes. I wanted my heroine to have an example of a beautiful love story in her parents. Alexander mirrors that mixed background in a slightly different way.

The best part of working on the short story was that it gave me a mental break from working on Daimon Sip and when I returned to it, I was energized. Last week, I saw another short story contest and realized I had a story idea in my ideas notebook. I opened a new doc file and promptly went off the reservation with a whimsical story about a girl with a tail. I wrote it in the first person, which is new for me and I was required to keep it at 1500 words, which was ridiculously fun. The story is called Starlight’s Tail and is about second chances for ex-lovers.

Soon, I will announce the release date for the Holiday Ever After Winter anthology! I am going to go from being an unpublished author to a published author, so I am incredibly excited. Starlight is calling me back, though, she has more adventures she wants to share.