Checking Him Out...For the Holidays! Festive fun with Sol and Adam

It's the holiday season!

Fun first...

 And a thought...

I'm not going to get ranty, but however you celebrate, if you are one of the fortunate, take that little spark of festive magic and do something wonderful with it. It could be life-changing for someone else, and it will make you feel nice.

Now the hard sell! :)

Me? Hard sell? As if! I had a job doing door-to-door canvassing for a kitchen company once. I lasted a day.

But! I am selling something, so here goes...

I wanted to officially launch Checking Him Out For the Holidays, which is available to buy for around $2 / £1.25 via Beaten Track, Amazon (Kindle), Smashwords, All Romance eBooks, and a few other places by now, I would imagine. If you went torrent hunting you might even find it there, but I'd rather you bought it.

I took it as a sign that I was finally getting somewhere when my recent novel, Crying in the Rain, made it to the file-sharing sites within three days of release. There's nothing I can do about it, but each of those downloads means a little less income for me, and this is my job. Needless to say, I'm hacked off, but hey! People wanted my work enough to steal it. Like diamonds. ;)

What perhaps stings more is that I give away a lot of my writing as it is. Aside from always having one or two books available for free on my website, Checking Him Out (whence came Checking Him Out For the Holidays) is a free, full-length novel. I wrote it earlier in 2014, as part of the Love's Landscapes anthology, and in November decided to upload it to Amazon, ARe and Smashwords. It's been downloaded almost 30,000 times in five weeks.

That's a lot of free, I'm sure you'll agree!

And that's great. I'm so happy that people are reading AND enjoying my stories.

Which leads me rather marvellously into explaining how this little festive tale came about.

I love my characters, I do. Eventually. For those of you who have read Checking Him Out
you'll know that Sol Brooks - the main character - isn't an easy man to get to know. And that's how it was for me when I began writing. I think it was somewhere around Chapter Eight before Sol finally started 'speaking to me'. Until that point, I was a little puzzled by his behaviour and his thought processes, but then he revealed his secrets to me, and it all started to make sense.

Sounds mad, I know, but the characters become very real to writers in the process of telling their story. We miss them when it's over. So if a few readers suggest that they'd like to read more, and there's more story to tell, we'll often happily oblige.

Hence, a holiday story was born.

Didn't I make that sound easy?

It wasn't - this isn't me complaining. I love writing, but to put in context my frustration at the illegal downloads mentioned earlier, we're talking 150+ hours of work to create a 24,000 word holiday story.

Just thought I'd say.

So anyway, here it is: a story filled with gifts for my readers, to say thank you very, very much.

Special thanks to Alexis Woods, K.C. Faelan, Nige the Pige, and Andrea Harding. You are wonderful.

Happy Holidays!

Checking Him Out For the Holidays

Freelance engineer Sol Brooks doesn't do the festive season. He thinks it's boring and overly sentimental. With the rest of the household laid up with 'the flu', Sol's planned on using the time to crack on with some work.

His mother, however, has other ideas.

And so does Sol's husband, Adam.

A stand-alone holiday special featuring Sol and Adam from Checking Him Out.

Buy Checking Him Out For the Holidays