This is the sixth of twenty-five blog posts to celebrate my twenty-fifth published novel, A Skye Full of Stars. It’s officially November which means Christmas is upon us. Let me tell you a bit about my journey into writing Christmas books…
My first Christmas book was The Christmas Promise, in 2016. It did brilliantly well for me, rising to #1 in the UK Kindle charts, but it was a long time in gestation because it was two or three years earlier that I was signing in a local Waterstones bookshop, and I watched Christmas books just walking out of the store. It seemed as if they were seen as ideal Christmas gifts, especially as the covers usually had a nice sprinkling of foil or glitter and embodied the cosiness of the festive season.
And I thought that I’d try a Christmas book too.
Originally, The Christmas Promise was planned as a novella called The Twelve Dates of Christmas. Then I signed with my current agent, Juliet Pickering at Blake Friedmann and, at her suggestion, developed the idea into a complete novel and dropped the twelve-dates structure. It was my good luck that the next book I’d begun was Just for the Holidays, a summer book, because Juliet offered Avon Books these two books just when they were looking for a ‘seasonal author’, who could write a summer and a winter book each year.
A Skye Full of Stars is my ninth Christmas book so, evidently, I like writing them! I think it’s because everything is ‘more’ or exaggerated by the season. Wonderful things like getting engaged or falling in love are made happier by being part of the Christmas joy. The reverse is true of sad things. Christmas is a rubbish time to lose your job or for a relationship to end, when others are exchanging gifts or rushing off to parties. These heightened emotions are what I give to my characters, making their stories just that bit more captivating.
How to ‘create’ Christmas
It’s also quite fun to choose Christmas gifts for my characters, or even a special outfit they buy for a Christmas event. And it’s not me who has to wrap the gifts up, however fiddly or oddly shaped, or squeeze myself into a tight, silver, stretchy dress.
I mentally collect Christmassy things. I see a notice about a Christmas tree competition and think, ‘A Christmas tree competition? Must have one of those in my next Christmas book …’ Or I try and think of something I haven’t seen included in any other Christmas book, such as a heroine who’s into sustainability and so wants her twinkle lights to be solar powered and her outdoor ornaments to double as food for wild birds.
In the research for A Skye Full of Stars I discovered that Christmas had actually been illegal in Scotland at one time! So that had to be incorporated, of course. So had the snowy mountains and frozen burns of the Isle of Skye, and the Swedish festive customs some of the characters bring to the book. Luckily, it seems as if readers share my appetite for Christmas as they’re among my most popular books.
