Holiday Giving by Roni Denholtz

I’ve always felt it’s important to give to those less fortunate, and to be charitable during the holidays. My husband agreed. So when our kids were several years old, we started a tradition. Before Hanukkah, we would go to a toy store and I let them pick out a toy for a child their age (Amy would pick for a girl; Josh would pick for a boy). They knew these were for children from families who couldn’t afford to get them gifts.

They were delighted to pick out gifts that they themselves would like such as a Barbie or a Batman toy. We would then donate them to a toy drive or a women’s shelter. We would also pick out some non-perishable foods for the local food pantry; and we always picked up some treats for the local animal shelter.

I think this helped instill in them an appreciation for the satisfaction and happiness you get when you give to others. When both were in college, they were active in their university charities which raised money for children with cancer.

To this day, we all give to various charities around the holidays.

No matter what holiday you celebrate, it’s important to remember that some people are struggling, or alone, and the holidays are especially difficult for them.

I hope you have a wonderful holiday season!

More about Roni!

My first published romance, Lights of Love, was a Hanukkah reunion story. I decided to do another holiday book since I love to read all kinds of holiday stories during the holidays! A Christmas Carol has always been a favorite, and I enjoyed the movie about how Charles Dickens wrote it (The Man Who Invented Christmas) which I saw with a writer friend.

While searching for characters to celebrate Hanukkah, I wondered what would happen if a hero had the 8 nights of Hanukkah to convince the heroine he loved her. And so...Eight Nights to Win Her Heart was born!

Here's the back cover blurb:

Roslyn Stein is convinced that her boyfriend Ben Jaffe will never marry. Ben’s parents’ contentious divorce left him with emotional scars.

But Ben doesn’t want to lose Roslyn. So he asks her to give him the eight nights of Hanukkah, to prove he really does love her and deserves another chance.

As they light the candles on the menorah each night, Roslyn struggles with the decision of whether to let him back into her life. And Ben realizes how much she really does mean to him.

Will Ben be able to win Roslyn’s heart again?

Roni Denholtz is an award winning author of 16 romance novels and novellas--contemporaries, holiday stories, cowboys and historicals.

She is also the author of 9 children's books and hundreds of articles and short stories, published in magazines such as Baby Talk and Lady's Circle.

Roni's social media:

I'm on Instagram as Denholtzroni (for some reason I got locked out of roni denholtz which where I first was).  

Please friend me on Facebook  https://www.facebook.com/RoniDenholtzAuthor/

Check out my website http://ronidenholtz.com
And here's a direct link to the book!
https://www.amazon.com/Eight-Nights-Win-Her-Heart-ebook/dp/B07Y2FCW97/ref=sr_1_6?keywords=Roni+Denholtz&qid=1575138986&s=books&sr=1-6

Do you get warm and fuzzy? by Paty Jager

Who hasn’t read Clement C. Moore’s Twas the Night Before Christmas or Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol around the holidays and thought back to the first time they read or heard the stories?

Christmas stories are a way to connect with the feelings of Christmas. Not the commercialism that can overtake the real reason for the season. But a good story with family, friends, and good will. That type of heart-warming story is a way to bring the holiday feelings back into your heart. 

In the heat of the summer as I was finishing up a book in my Shandra Higheagle Mystery series, I decided to write a Christmas mystery.  It was the idea of bringing a large family Christmas to Shandra, an only child, and having her lovable, large, slobbery dog be an integral character in the story. What could be better than a huge dog that is a scaredy-cat be the one to find a dead body?

  

As these thoughts emerged, the story began to unfold in my mind and I couldn’t wait to write it. I had to have it available this Christmas. 

 

I used my suspect chart and started with a dead body. The one Sheba brings to Shandra in a sleigh full of gifts for foster children.  The man is a stranger to everyone. Shandra fears for her dog when they discover Sheba has a cut much like the stab wound that killed the John Doe. Having foreshadowed a bit of Detective Ryan Greer’s past in earlier books, I used that history as the catalyst that brought the stranger to Huckleberry Ski resort.

While my books are murder mystery and keep the reader puzzling over who killed the victims, they also read fast-paced like a suspense.  I love keeping the reader guessing as well as myself. There have only been two of the 7 books where I stayed true to the killer all the way through the writing of the book. I tend to weave in clues along the way that in the end, point to one of my other suspects as the killer. This book was similar. I started out with one suspect on my chart instead of four or five. But as the story grew so did the list of suspects.

This book also included many of the locals of Huckleberry Ski Resort, my fictional ski resort in Idaho.  I enjoyed showing readers Huckleberry at this time of year and the friendships among of the locals. I’ve grown fond of the residents of the little ski resort town and Shandra’s close acquaintances. Not only will this book keep you guessing, if I did my job right, it should give you warm and fuzzy holiday feelings.

Yuletide Slaying published November 15^th.

Book 7 of the Shandra Higheagle mystery series

Family, Revenge, Murder

When Shandra Higheagle’s dog brings her a dead body in a sleigh full of presents, her world is turned upside down. The man is a John Doe and within twenty-four hours another body is found. 

Detective Ryan Greer receives a call that has them both looking over their shoulders. A vengeful brother of a gang member who died in a gang war is out for Ryan’s blood. Shandra’s dreams and Ryan’s fellow officers may not be enough to keep them alive to share Christmas. 

Buy Links:  Amazon / Nook / Apple / Kobo /  Windtree Press

Paty Jager is an award-winning author of 25+ novels and over a dozen novellas and short stories of western historical romance, action adventure, and murder mystery. She has garnered a RomCon Reader’s Choice Award for Contemporary Western Romance, an EPPIE Award for Best ContemporaryRomance, and a RONE for Mystery. All her work has Western or Native American elements in them along with hints of humor and engaging characters. She and her husband raise alfalfa hay in rural eastern Oregon. Riding horses and battling rattlesnakes, she not only writes the western lifestyle, she lives it.

blog / website /  Facebook / Paty's Posse / Goodreads / Twitter / Pinterest

Photo source: © Can Stock Photo / Bialasiewicz

My Go-to Holiday Book

By Courtney Pierce

Image: Dave Clegg

One of my greatest fears of getting older is that I’ll become a fuddy-duddy―a cynic, a com-plainer, a tiresome grump. Something happens to my psyche after eleven months of negative media: talking heads blathering about doom and gloom, celebrities sending career-ending tweets, kids bullying one another on Facebook, hackers stealing our souls, and politicians clawing for their nanosecond in the spotlight. People battle for parking spaces, get road rage in traffic, and cut in line. By the end of the year, I suffer from so much toxic buildup that I even bark back at the dog next door:

“Quiet! I’m trying to write over here! Geez.”

And another thing―all the big bills come in the fall: increases in health insurance, car registration, and property taxes. The relentless begging mail flows in to guilt me with pictures of abused animals and hungry children. After Black Friday, my faith in the human spirit has hardened like the pesky arthritic knot on my knuckle.

On the first of December, at sundown, my emotional alarm sounds. 

It’s time.

After washing my hands, I step to the den and run my finger over the spines of vintage books like a stick on a picket fence. I slide out only one and gaze at its olive-green cloth cover, the same book I’ve read every December for thirty-six years: an 1866 "Cheap Edition" of Charles Dickens’s Christmas Books, a collection of five holiday classics: A Christmas Carol, The Chimes, The Cricket on the Hearth, The Battle of Life, and The Haunted Man. I crack open the spine to savor the pulpy aroma of wisdom on the foxed pages.

Only one story will be read per day. And for that solitary hour or so, the world slows its spin as the sun crawls behind the Douglas firs. Golden sparkles peek through their branches and disappear, igniting those on the newly erected Christmas tree inside. An aroma of evergreen freshness fills the air. I turn on the lamp’s switch with a soft click. A gas fire flickers and warms the living room. I recite the tiny, two-columned prose aloud, making the cat curl upside down in my lap, her whiskers twitching when my speech takes on a melodic quality. The long-lost style of sentence rhythm and vivid descriptions allow me to taste the words. I save the best one for last: A Christmas Carol.

As I read―some paragraphs twice―my cynical thoughts shed like the last hangers-on from the maple tree outside. They, too, will fall and decompose to feed my garden. As with each passing year, I stand tall against Ebenezer Scrooge’s miserly declaration, refusing to “be boiled with my own pudding” and “buried with a stake of holly through my heart” should I deign to utter the words, Merry Christmas.

After closing the book, I gaze out the window, astonished at how a simple short story can restore me to a place of inspiration and charity. My dial is reset. I’m able to take stock in the good and catch all those quiet acts of kindness that people do, acts that no one talks about on the news. 

For the next six months, I’ll be a courteous driver and let the guy with a lonely can of soup go ahead of me in line. The free turkey, a reward for having spent so much, will be donated to one who has none. In spring, tulips will pop like a Monet with the unfurling of new maple leaves. Then, the dog days of summer will be too hot to wave at the neighbors. The ban on watering my lawn will make me thirsty, and some recall of tainted food might ruin the Labor Day barbecue. By Halloween, I’ll have shut off the porch light to protect my pumpkin from vandals. Woe be to the critters who dare ring the doorbell―they’ll release the fuddy-duddies inside.

Again, it'll be time for my detox of Dickens.

And this, my last post before Christmas, I deign to wish you all a Merry Christmas and the best of every culture's benevolent holidays. Seven days from now, you'll find me reading by the fire. See you all on the other side on December 28th, newly inspired and getting ready to release my new book, Indigo Lake, into the world. 

Courtney Pierce is a fiction writer living in Oregon with her husband of thirty-six years and bossy cat. She writes for baby boomers. Her novels are filled with heart, humor, and mystery. Courtney has studied craft and storytelling at the Attic Institute and has completed the Hawthorne Fellows Program for writing and publishing. She is also a board member of the Northwest Independent Writers Association and is active with Willamette Writers, Pacific Northwest Writers Association, and Sisters in Crime.

Colorful characters come alive in Courtney's latest novel, The Executrix. When three middle-age sisters find a manuscript for a murder mystery in their mother's safe after her death, the book gives them a whole new view of their mother. Is it fiction? . . . or truth? Sibling blood becomes thicker than baggage when Mom becomes larger in death than she was in life.

The second book of The Dushane Sisters Trilogy will be released in early 2016. The cover will be an original painting. Indigo Lake continues the three sisters' middle-age orphan journey of life, love, and laughs. Protecting Mom's reputation might get them all killed―or give them the story they've been dying to live.



Visit Courtney's website at www.courtney-pierce.com. Her books can be purchased at Windtree Press, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo Books, and at several independent bookstores in the Portland area.

Ebenezer Scrooge -- Defying the Rules of Good Writing?

By Robin Weaver

Say “Ebenezer Scrooge,” and odds are most folks will immediately envision a selfish, miserly old man with no appreciation for fun or kindness. One-hundred-seventy-two years after his creation, the main character from Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol is not only instantly recognizable, but almost universally hated, evidenced by our society’s continued use of the term “Scrooge” to describe a miserable penny pincher.

Which makes me wonder why we continue to read after page one. According to the guidelines of good writing, the hero must be someone to whom we can relate, a person we can envision being. Thank goodness no one told Charles Dickens the main character had to be likeable.

Clearly we don’t like Scrooge, so why does Ebenezer work as the main character?

**Does Scrooge work because Tiny Tim is introduced early in the manuscript?  Ask anyone in advertising--babies and puppies sell. If you want a story to tug at the old heart strings, insert a spunky handicapped child. Works almost as well as a cute little Maltese (even when that child is played by Mary Lou Retton).

**Perhaps Dickens’ self-promotion contributed to the success of A Christmas Carol. Charlie was the first famous writer to read his work in public (at least, he was the first one according to my research).  And our self-promotion guru didn’t just read, he performed, creating a special version of history just for public recitation—with stage directions scribbled all over his script. Dickens dressed for the occasion as well, always wearing full evening dress, with a bright buttonhole, a purple waistcoat and a glittering watch-chain. And you thought creating a trailer was hard work. J

**Some might say A Christmas Carol works because. Ebenezer grows and changes. It’s fairly easy to identify the stages of The Hero’s Journey in Dickens’ tale. Only does Scrooge really change? Our hero only “sees the light” after some imaginary ghosts scare the Dickens out of him. Scrooge “changes” to save his own hide so is that really changing?  Sounds like a new version of selfish to me.  Furthermore, we all know how the story ends, but do we ever think of the “made-over” Scrooge? Nope, he’s the old miser who won’t say “Happy Christmas” to little Timmy Cratchit.

**Or maybe, just maybe—the main character doesn’t have to be likeable. Let’s face it, we American’s like our dirty Christmas stockings.  How else can we explain our fascination with the Sopranos, America’s Most Wanted and Keeping up with Kardashians (etc., etc.).  Let’s be honest, there’s a bit of self-righteous appeal in being morally superior—even it that superiority is graded on the curve.

Whatever the reason for the enduring popularity of A Christmas Carol, Dickens (in this blog author’s humble opinion) illustrates that of all the rules of writing, only one universally applies: If you tell a good story, you can break all the rules.

My Holiday Release....
FULL CONTACT DECORATING
Katarina Snodgrass believes she can get her life back on track. If she can regain her title as the Christmas Tree Contest champion and re-snare the man of her dreams. Too bad soap-opera star, Tripp Anthony, isn’t interested—at least he’s indifferent until Hunter Montgomery arrives and convinces Katrina she needs to make her former flame jealous.The plan succeeds, but Katrina finds herself equally attracted to Tripp and Hunter, the man she loves to hate. Her heart is torn, but can she truly choose either man while she guards a horrible secret?

Ebook available via Amazon November 30.

Print version available now at The Wild Rose Press.