Introducing my new mini-book which also functions as a Christmas card!
Knowing how rubbish I am at sending Christmas cards to people on time, on a sudden whim last night I decided to go off piste and produce a little book as a substitute instead. It even includes in the title page a Christmas greeting plus the space to add your own message, if you’d like to buy it to send to someone else.
What’s inside? Well, you’ll find out when you unwrap it – i.e. open the book. I’ve brought together for the first time in print two short stories that I’ve previously published only in ebook form, as stand-alone single story ebooks. (They’re not featured in my other festive story collection, Stocking Fillers, which includes 12 short stories about Christmas.)
The two stories are slightly different in tone, but I hope you’ll find both of them heartwarming.
“Lighting Up the Dark” is about a young woman who wrestles with her fear of the dark on the night of the winter solstice, and it’s also a heartwarming story about her relationship with her late aunt and her sister.
This is how one reviewer describes it on Amazon:
“A delightfully endearing story of a woman battling her fears and finding a guardian angel within. There’s a lovely self-deprecating tone to this heroine, and a deft touch with characterisation throughout. A ghost story to make you smile, not shiver.
“The Owl and the Turkey” is a gentle comedy that purports to explain the real reason we eat turkey at Christmas, via a medieval folk tale. It isn’t, of course – I made up for a bit of fun, after mishearing something on the radio that sparked my imagination.
Here’s an extract from an Amazon review:
“Carefully crafted and entertaining, it draws you into the tale much as you were drawn as a child. You know it cannot be true, but can’t help but enjoy the storytelling. Lovely.”
A Book for the Price of a Card
Instead of a Christmas Card is just 40 pages long and retails on Amazon at £2.75 – about the same as you might pay for a fancy Christmas card you might buy for someone special in your life. If you’re on Amazon Prime, you could even send it directly to that person as a gift and save yourself postage. It’s not currently available in bookshops, and is only on Amazon for now while I await delivery of my next batch of Hawkesbury Press ISBNs (my author friends will know what I’m on about there !)
If you’d prefer a longer collection of stories, Stocking Fillers is currently available in various local bookshops including The Yellow-Lighted Bookshops and in Henleaze gift shop Kondi Gifts, as well as from the usual suspects online.
If you’d like to read my confessional pieces about my epic failure on the Christmas card front, check out these posts:
The Tyranny of the Christmas Card
Happy Chinese New Year (and sorry Christmas passed me by)
And in less of a mea culpa mood, you might like to read about my best childhood Christmas memories in:
What a clever idea, Debbie!
You won’t be kept down, will you, Debbie? Like trying to keep corks under water!