De-blog

Another CV / character profile from the  Hiding Behind The Couch series . Profiles posted so far: Kris Johansson Charlie Davenport Sean Tierney Jess Lambert Dan Jeffries Eleanor Davenport Krissi Johansson Shaunna Hennessy Andy Jeffries Adele Reeves Ade Simmons Hiding Behind The Couch  is an ongoing series about a group of friends—‘The Circle’ (the original main characters in the series), which has expanded and changed over time to include the ‘extended circle’ (additional main characters, below the circle on the right). George is up today. He’s been in the series since the beginning and is quite close to the centre  of The Circle, which means…there’s only one more Circle profile to go—next week. :) (I will do some of the other main characters next year, though.) You can find both the writing and suggested reading order for the series on this page:  deb248211.blogspot.co.uk/p/hiding-behind-couch.html NOTE: if you haven't read as far as Sea...

WIPpet numbers for 14th December, 2016: ((14x12)/16)x(2+0)=21 paragraphs * * * * * I’ve missed a chunk out to keep this as short as possible, but this week, I’m following on from my last WIPpet post, when readers wanted to know: “Who’s staying in Pete’s bed?” Read on! In context, Eleanor is one of ‘The Circle’—the nine friends at the centre of the Hiding Behind The Couch series. Now aged 40, she’s the eldest of the Davenport ‘children’. Charlotte—aged 35—is third eldest and still lives with their parents, as does Pete—the youngest at 23. This scene takes place on the last Sunday before Christmas; the Davenports are getting ready to go to church before heading down to Ben’s (second eldest) for the Davenport family Christmas. Toby (in the snippet) is Eleanor’s son. Note: this is ‘hot off the keyboard’. “Who’s Pete got staying?” Eleanor timed the question badly, as her mum was on her way back down and heard her. “It best be nobody,” she grumbled on her way to the toast...

Yesterday, we finally got around to putting up our Christmas tree...which means we first had to buy one. A few years back, in an attempt to persuade the rest of my family, I compared the ecological impact of having a real tree every year vs manufacture and disposal of an artificial tree, thinking I'd win with logic and statistics. I lost. Unless we were to keep an artificial tree for more than five years, it's greener to stick with the real deal, especially if it's recycled after Christmas, which ours always is. However, finding a real tree this year was a bit of a trial. The place we used to buy from was only a mile down the road from us, but they stopped selling Christmas trees a couple of years ago, so we've had to go further afield. I also insisted on a Scots pine, which - according to the seller we got our tree from this time - is rarely being grown for the Christmas tree market because they're less reliable and not as uniform as the spruces. So now yo...

Slight blog overload this week, but life is unpredictable, so I'm posting a few days early. My Christmas novella, A Midnight Clear , is available for free until July 31st in the Smashwords Summer/Winter sale (use SFREE at checkout). If you're not a 'Christmas in July' person, you could download it and save it for later. ;) The blurb: It's a cold, desperate December when a young girl flees home, in search of food, shelter and the real Santa Claus. Stranded in George and Josh's hometown, she discovers that the spirit of Christmas can be found in the most unexpected of places. Includes the story of The Little Match Girl, by Hans Christian Andersen. Length: 26,000 words (75 pages) approx. Suitable for younger readers and adults, aged 12+.  A stand-alone story from the Hiding Behind The Couch series. Also part of Boughs of Evergreen - A Holiday Anthology (proceeds to The Trevor Project). * * * * * An excerpt: "Hey," George said ge...

Next Monday (December 15th) marks the release of my second Christmas story of the year, Red Hot Christmas , so we'll start as we mean to go on, by officially revealing the FABULOUS cover, created by Natasha Snow . Natasha's a brilliant cover artist / designer, and such a great person to work with. For both Red Hot Christmas and Crying in the Rain , I gave her a brief outline of the story and her first ideas were what we eventually went with, even though I fuss and fret and go all around the world before I reach the conclusion that she had it right all along. I think it's what comes of writing a series, whereby Crying in the Rain and Red Hot Christmas are chronologically #5 and #11 (full list at end of post), although I wrote Red Hot Christmas last Christmas, and wrote Crying in the Rain during the summer. By this point, the characters are so familiar to me that I have a clear picture in my head of what they are like - it's more of a psychological profile...

I've been tagged by Hunter Frost to take part in the Meet the Character blog hop. Hunter Frost is a very talented author of M/M erotic romance, and has been writing since high school. Her publications to date include the wonderful A Thoreau Affair  - a free short story about a former English professor and the student he can't forget - and the rather raunchy short, What Brown Can Do For You - where attraction blossoms between an IT geek and the UPS guy. You can read more about Hunter Frost here: hunterfrost.net/about . Hunter is one of 23 authors contributing to the Boughs of Evergreen holiday anthology , which is being published by Beaten Track Publishing on November 21st, and she came up with the rather wonderful idea of us taking a hop around the characters from our anthology stories. Last week, Hunter introduced us to the delectable Mitch Sterling - the main character of An Angel in Eyeliner . Meet Mitch Sterling: http://www.hunterfrost.net/meet-the-cha...