Operation Awesome is participating in Rhonda Parrish's 2015 Giftmas Blog Tour. All the guest bloggers are welcome to write about anything they’d like so long as their post touched on a December holiday in some way, no matter how tangentially. The blog tour extends across many blogs as well, and you can find more on social media using the hashtag #GiftmasTour.
But wait! There’s more!
We’re also giving away a whole whack of prizes (check out the list here) which you can enter to win using the Rafflecoper code below. Whatever December holiday you celebrate (or don’t) winning a stack of books will make it better!
On This Day of Christmas, My True Love Gave to Me . . .
by Eileen Wiedbrauk
The first holiday romance anthology I ever read was The Christmas Cat. I was probably 13ish because I remember reading these on the bus coming home from middle school. My mother had been in the habit of buying me all sorts of animal stories like All Creatures Great and Small and Cat Stories by James Harriet. This was no James Harriet. Inside were indeed stories of cats. Cats who used their nine lives to bring together couples, either through traveling through time or reuniting lovers who shouldn’t have separated to
begin with.
Cats and sex as it turned out. Holy hot Lord of Misrule!
I was hooked on holiday romances from then on. And not just the sexy ones either.
But just about every made for TV Christmas movie. Have you heard the episode of
Ask MeAnother where they give two
contestants Christmas movie scenarios and try to get them to guess which are
real and which are made up? The contestants failed miserably. Meanwhile, I was
shouting at my radio, No, no, that one’s
real! I’ve seen it! Twice!
So
of course, as Editor-in-Chief of WorldWeaver Press, I wanted to put
together an anthology of fantasy and paranormal winter romances!
In 2013 we
came out with A Winter’sEnchantment, a three-novella
anthology of winter magic and loves lost and regained. They included The Devil inMidwinter by Elise
Forier Edie, a melding of Mexican and Central American folk and fairy tales
with a modern Mexican American girl who’s being pursued by a demon and a boy
who burns and burns. Both would have her for his own, but figuring out which,
if either, would help save her will be her real challenge. It also featured a
novella in the Fate of the
Gods series by Amalia Dillin, which follows the many, many lives
of Eve reincarnated. This one in Taming Fate takes plase in France in the Middle Ages, where Eve
is facing down the plague while facing a new marriage that isn’t . . . well,
just isn’t. And the third novella, Opal by Kristina Wojtaszek, is a gorgeous, lyrical melding
of many fairy tales into a bright new story following the intersecting lives of
a magical girl born as an owl and a boy trapped in a tower.
Then
when we launched Red Moon Romance, our first imprint, focused on—you guessed it—romance, we of course had
to come out with a sexier holiday anthology.
The Naughty List, edited by
Cori Vidae and featuring Tiffany Reisz, Alexa Piper, Pumpkin Spice, Elizabeth
Black, Doug Blakesee, and Wendy Sparrow, came out just last month. It’s a
blast. The ghosts of Christmas past, Krampus, cowboys and bourbon desserts, a
little holiday BDSM, and the son of Father Time put to the test on New Year’s
Eve. The stories range from sexy to sweet and prove love is better on the
Naughty List.
If
you’re a writer looking to submit to a holiday anthology, there’s always a
publisher out there looking to put together another bundle of holiday
romances—I’m not the only reader who’s hooked!
The
most important thing to keep in mind when submitting to a holiday anthology is
timing. Many publishers put out a call for submissions in the early months of
the year for holiday stories with a deadline as early as March, if they’re
anthologies, or August, if they’re magazines. When editing A Winter’s Enchantment, I couldn’t stomach the thought of reading
Christmas stories in the middle of a sweltering summer, so I purposefully set
our reading period as December and January to create extra time before bringing
out the anthology the following winter. It’s best to keep your eyes peeled as
these calls pop up throughout the year and are usually only open for short
windows since the publishers have much less date-of-publication flexibility as
compared to other projects.
Another
thing to keep in mind is that holiday romance anthologies are often filled by
invitation. This means that writers whom the editor knows are solicited by the
editor to send her a story. The best way to have a story solicited is to have
worked with that editor before or to have enough work out that you become known
to her. In both A Winter’s Enchantment and
The Naughty List, the final table of
contents was a mix of stories sent to us through regular submissions and
stories from writers whom we specifically asked for work.
Why
write a holiday novella or short story? If you usually write novels, a holiday
story can be a great tie-in, a chance to expand on already established
characters by showing them briefly in a short story. Jumping into an anthology or
bundle can also be a means of gaining the attention of new readers who come to
the anthology with the intent of reading another author in the anthology and
then discover your work. It can also be a great chance to explore and showcase
cultures, modern or historical seasonal traditions, and holidays that aren’t as
well known. The holidays have the tendency to bring out the best and worst in
people, and tension like that should not be overlooked in story writing.
Eileen Wiedbrauk (eileenwiedbrauk.com)
is Editor-in-Chief of World Weaver Press and Red Moon Romance as well as a
writer, blogger, coffee addict, cat herder, MFA graduate,
fantasist-turned-fabalist-turned-urban-fantasy-junkie, Odyssey Workshop alumna,
designer, tech geek, entrepreneur, kdrama devotee, avid reader, and a somewhat
decent cook. She wears many hats, as the saying goes. Which is an odd saying in
this case, as she rarely looks good in hats. She writes creepy fairy tales like this one and can be found on Twitter @eileenwiedbrauk.
