What was your inspiration for this book? What gave you the idea to write it?
Inspiration comes to me from many places – literally as well as figuratively. In 2014, the good Lord decided to plop into my head the idea of a woman inside a Christmas wrapped box outside of a hotel room. He does this to me all the time … especially when I’m driving and can’t jot it down until a red light. It usually starts off with one or two words or a simple idea.
The Christmas Mistake started off as a one line pitch from out of nowhere. It sat in the back of my head for years while I worked on other novels. Then, the characters started demanding my attention. By that I mean that I would daydream about scenes, and they would swirl around my brain until I wrote them down.
In December of 2017, I had shoulder surgery. I watched a lot of Christmas movies. So much that I was inspired to get this story written.
As for particular chapters (or scenes), I write like I’m watching a movie. I take a lot of pictures when I go places, and I use these to help describe those places in my novel. Sometimes, those pictures spark other ideas either for the story I am working on or for a new story.
The Christmas Mistake was super fun to write, and at first I was going to write it all from Carina’s perspective. Then the idea hit to do one chapter in her point of view and then the next chapter to rewrite from Rad’s viewpoint. That really stretched my writing skills!
The setting for The Christmas Mistake is New Orleans and Baton Rouge. As I live in the latter city, it makes it easier to describe places around town. Additionally, adding local lore and traditions give flavor and authenticity. For instance, in The Christmas Mistake, I incorporate everything from dinner at The Court of Two Sisters in New Orleans to Mardi Gras Baton Rouge style.
Now grab a cup of hot chocolate and your favorite blanket because it’s time to get cozy on the couch with a sweet holiday romance story – The Christmas Mistake.
Enjoy!
The Christmas Mistake Josephine Templeton Publication date: December 1st 2020 Genres: Adult, Contemporary, Romance
Dressed in nothing but Christmas lingerie, Carina has a bellhop deliver her in a gift box to her fiance’s hotel room, but the last thing she expects when she is unwrapped is to see a sexy stranger in holiday boxers who looks like he just stepped off a magazine cover – definitely NOT her fiancé! How in the silver bells was she delivered to the wrong room?
As the owner of a small flower shop, Carina’s surrounded by romance on a daily basis. Her workaholic fiancé has been distant for the past several months, so she decides to drive from Baton Rouge to New Orleans to surprise him on Christmas Eve. However, that distance between them has brought loneliness, and the mere thought of the sexy stranger plucks at her mistletoe. When she discovers the reason for her fiance’s lack of attention, will she put him on Santa’s naughty list and take the stranger for a sleigh ride?
Josephine Templeton has six published novels that range from historical romance to urban fantasy. She has been to numerous conferences, including Heather Graham’s Writers for New Orleans, as well as a former member of Romance Writers of America.
This can be fun and challenging at the same time. In many of my novels I write about real historical figures so that’s a no-brainer, but for fictional characters I look up names that were popular in the era and try to match a name with the personality of a character. I have one manuscript where I have changed the protagonist’s name three times. The names just weren’t jiving with my vision of her personality. But, I finally settled on one that is perfect!
2. Talk about what you want to achieve as an author.
What is really important to me is connecting with other people through my books. Whether that connection serves to entertain, inspire, or educate, it’s all good to me. One of my favorite things to hear is when someone has read my books and it has inspired them to look into the history of that time period or that character to find out as much as they can about it or them. It’s great to have that particular interest in common with someone. I’d love to continue writing novels as long as I am able. I have so many different ideas, and writing novels allows me to transport to a different time period or reality, and it takes me out of myself. I plan to keep writing and being open to people and opportunities that come my way!
3) As an author – what do you enjoy most about writing process? What feels like a chore?
As an author it’s really fun for me to create a world and characters from my imagination. When I taught middle school I used to tell my students that when you write, you can be or do anything you want. It’s really so liberating. I also enjoy when I get into the zone and the words just tumble out. Characters will do and say things I never expected and then I find myself saying, “How interesting! Now, what am I going to do with that?” It’s always fun and always a challenge. The chore part, if you could call it that, is all of the publicity, promotion, and marketing that come along with the author’s life. That part alone could be a full-time job in itself, and it takes me away from what I really love which is living inside of my stories. However, it is a necessity and it can be fun in its own way. It gives me the opportunity to interact with readers and get to know people I never would have known if I wasn’t an author. So there’s definitely an upside to being a business person as well as an author.
4) How did you do research for your book?
The research for this book started long ago. So long ago, I forgot where exactly I got some of the information. My late father, who was such an inspiration to me, told me about the Penitente Brotherhood, a lay confraternity of Spanish-American Roman Catholic men who are active in New Mexico and Colorado. Bones of the Redeemed is very loosely inspired by this brotherhood, but takes their practices quite a bit farther. My book poses the question of what might happen if leadership in one of these types of organizations went off the rails—which, as we know can happen in deeply religious communities.
I did a lot of reading on the Brotherhood, and I also interviewed a couple of Catholic priests, one whose father and some of his brothers were members of the Penitente Brotherhood here in New Mexico.
For the archaeology aspect of the book, I actually took some graduate courses in anthropology and archaeology at Millsap’s College in Jackson, Mississippi when I lived there. I had a very early draft of the novel and I asked my professor to read it. He helped me tweak where necessary. More recently, I have a friend who is a retired archaeologist and she reviewed the book for me as well.
5) What’s next? Do you have any new books in the planning or writing stage?
I’ve started another series that has been so much fun to work on. The first book is called Grace in the Wings. Grace, the protagonist, is an aspiring costume designer working in the Ziegfeld Follies on Broadway, 1920. When her sister, the star of the show, is murdered, Grace has to step out from the wings of her backstage life and into the spotlight of stardom to find the killer.
Right now, I am working on the second book in the series titled Grace in Hollywood. Grace has left Broadway behind and has moved to Hollywood to work in the silent films of 1924. In this book, a big-time director is murdered and a young woman she is mentoring is accused of the crime. Grace sets out to clear the girl’s name, and in doing so, inadvertently sets herself up to be the next victim.
Join us for this tour from Nov 9 to Dec 4, 2020!
Book Details:
Book Title: Bones of the Redeemed (A Southwestern Mystery) by Kari Bovee Category: Adult Fiction (18 + yrs), 298 pages Genre: Historical Mystery (1952) Publisher: Bosque Publishing Release date: November 2020 Content Rating: R for abuse, does contain the f-word a few times,
Book Description:
A pit of corpses. An ancient cult. A quest for redemption that could leave her dead… New Mexico, 1952. Archaeology grad student Ruby Delgado is plagued by guilt after losing her son. So when her latest excavation drops her down a sinkhole filled with suspiciously mutilated bodies, she’s driven to bring the murderer to justice. But when digging deeper brings her dangerously close to a sinister religious sect, she could be their next sacrifice… Discovering some of the victims were crucified, Ruby pushes hard to give the evidence to the authorities. But when her trail crosses the path of a beaten man left for dead in the desert, she realizes she may be the only person who can save the community. Can Ruby stop the sacrifices and slay her inner demons, or will hers be the next body laid to rest? Bones of the Redeemed is a hair-raising standalone Southwestern mystery. If you like complex heroines, cult conflict, and hard-won redemption, then you’ll love Kari Bovee’s grisly tale.
When she’s not on a horse, or walking along the beautiful cottonwood-laden acequias of Corrales, New Mexico; or basking on white sand beaches under the Big Island Hawaiian sun, Kari Bovee is escaping into the past—scheming murder and mayhem for her characters both real and imagined, and helping them to find order in the chaos of her action-packed novels. Empowered women in history, horses, unconventional characters, and real-life historical events fill the pages of Kari Bovée’s articles and historical mystery musings and manuscripts. An award-winning author, Bovée was honored with the 2019 NM/AZ Book Awards Hillerman Award for Southwestern Fiction for her novel Girl with a Gun. The novel also received First Place in the 2019 NM/AZ Book Awards in the Mystery/Crime category, and is a Finalist in the 2019 International Chanticleer Murder & Mayhem Awards and the International Chanticleer Goethe Awards, as well as the Next Generation Indie Awards. Her novel Grace in the Wings is a Finalist for the 2019 International Chanticleer Chatelaine Awards and the International Chanticleer Goethe Awards. Her novel Peccadillo at the Palace is a Finalist in the 2019 International Chanticleer Murder & Mayhem Awards and the 2019 International Goethe Awards, as well as a Finalist in the 2019 Best Book Awards Historical Fiction category. Bovée has worked as a technical writer for a Fortune 500 Company, has written non-fiction for magazines and newsletters, and has worked in the education field as a teacher and educational consultant. She and her husband, Kevin, spend their time between their horse property in the beautiful Land of Enchantment, New Mexico, and their condo on the sunny shores of Kailua-Kona, Hawaii.
As both a writer and someone who often teaches fiction-writing classes, I’m often asked about what’s most important in the quest to become a published author. I know lots of people have asked and answered similar questions, and I have no doubt my answers will be similar if not identical to others, but I still think it’s important to reiterate a few key things.
You have to read. More than that, you have to love reading. I remember teaching a class on writing mystery novels to a group of people working on their first books. On the first day we went around and talked about the last book we read that we loved, a question I think is far more important than the “favorite book question” since it often gets at what keeps us reading, not what got us started. Everyone in the room was surprised when one of the participants proudly announced that he doesn’t read fiction. “Why do you want to write it, then?” someone asked. “Because I’ve got a bestselling idea for a novel, and I think it’s going to make me rich,” he replied. As any writer can tell you, a) it’s almost impossible to know whether you’ve got a bestselling idea, and b) it’s even less likely that the idea will make you rich, no matter how fabulous it is.
You have to write. You do not have to love writing, especially not the way you love reading, but you have to actually do it. It’s not enough to want to write or to dream of writing or to have always wanted to write or to plan to write or to contemplate writing over winter break or to be ready to start writing on Monday or when the kids are asleep or when you get up early one day. All these things might be components of getting you to write, but the writing part is what matters. It has to actually happen. That can be incredibly difficult, whether logistically or emotionally, but there’s no getting around this part.
You have to write well. You don’t have to be the greatest writer who ever wrote a sentence, but you also have to be able to communicate with an audience. Both 1 and 2 help with this—reading gives you a sense of what good writing looks like, and writing helps you practice making your writing better. You may not find it surprising that the individual who had a bestselling idea in my mystery novel class was an abysmal writer, and it wasn’t because of a lack of capability—that person had no idea what good writing looked like and had never attempted to write before. It doesn’t come out of nowhere; it takes work.
These are the three most important things at the beginning. All the other things people want to know about—agents, publishers, marketing, etc.—don’t matter until much, much later, and skipping steps is a poor recipe for success. Focusing on reading and writing well matters more than anything else, and let’s be real—they’re the fun part, so why not enjoy it?
Join us for this tour from Nov 3 to Nov 23, 2020!
Book Details:
Book Title: How to Pack for the End of the World by Michelle Falkoff Category: YA Fiction (Ages 13-17), 320 pages Genre: Literary / Mystery Publisher: HarperCollins (HarperTeen) Release date: Nov 20, 2020 Format available for review: Print, NetGalley Download (mobi for kindle, epub, pdf) Will send print books out: USA and Canada Tour dates: Nov 3 to Nov 23, 2020 Content Rating: PG-13.
Language is clean, no sex on the page but reference to it, dark subject
matter–wasn’t sure the best category based on descriptions.
Book Description:
If you knew the world was going to end tomorrow, what would you do? This is the question that haunts Amina as she watches new and horrible stories of discord and crisis flash across the news every day. But when she starts at prestigious Gardner Academy, Amina finds a group of like-minded peers to join forces with—fast friends who dedicate their year to learning survival skills from each other, before it’s too late. Still, as their prepper knowledge multiplies, so do their regular high school problems, from relationship drama to family issues to friend blow-ups. Juggling the two parts of their lives forces Amina to ask another vital question: Is it worth living in the hypothetical future if it’s at the expense of your actual present?
Michelle Falkoff is the author of Playlist for the Dead, Pushing Perfect, Questions I Want to Ask You, and How to Pack for the End of the World. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and currently serves as director of communication and legal reasoning at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law.
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