Escape from the Holidays with Mischief Corner Books

There were days following the divorce of my parents when I would have done anything to escape the holidays. Once, before moving into my first apartment and starting new traditions, a middle sister invited a house full of smokers over for Christmas Day and, hiding in my room, I thought I'd been transported to a dump fire. For years at Xanadu, our home in New Hampshire's North Country, we've enjoyed Halloweens with our writers' group friends and an annual party with a story theme, our Thanksgiving open house and sit down dinner, and quiet Christmases, just us, the cats, a big dinner, and a movie.

When I read the call for Mischief Corner Books' new holiday line, "Escape from the Holidays", I wanted in. I'd published with this excellent company before -- first in Behind the Uniform and then in This Wish Tonight. I had one idea I felt would work, a contemporary M/M romance idea that first came to me in 1997 in a dream called Burning Down the House that had sat on a note card for decades and now screamed at me to long last write it. Seated on my sun porch, I put pen to paper and the pages flowed with shocking speed, the characters finally given their time. I dashed off the first draft (some 12,000 words) in four days and turned in my story. I'm thrilled to report that Burning Down the House, which aims to rewrite the definition of a family while keeping its bonds intact during one stressful holiday season, releases on December 1, 2018, as part of MCB's "Escape from the Holidays" line.

Starting on 11/28 with Kassandra Lea's Stay Awhile and wrapping on December 29 with Freddy MacKay's Waiting on the Rain, MCB is offering ten tales of holiday-themed escapist reading. Many of my fellow Escape artists shared the back-stories behind their wonderful. tales.

Kassandra Lea on "Stay Awhile": "In my short story, you meet Anson, who is asexual, and Daly, the man who stole his heart. It's closing in on Thanksgiving, but instead of the joyous holiday Anson is planning on, he's depressed about where his relationship stands with Daly. A few weeks previous at a Halloween party, Anson blurted out the fact that he's asexual. Will Daly be okay with this? The story came about for a few reasons. One, I'm a little burned out on writing Christmas stories and feel like Thanksgiving always gets overlooked. Two, there aren't enough romance stories out there with asexual characters and I want to help see that change. And finally, being gray-ace myself, I wanted to put into words some of my own fears and doubts that come along with relationships and acceptance. You could say that I'm basically Anson, in a way. While my relationship status remains a rocky road, I am fortunate beyond belief that my family and friends understand that my view of love is fluid. Now, if only I could manage to find someone like Daly!"

Evelyn Benvie on "Something to Celebrate": "This novella started in a lot of places, with a lot of things, before coming together into something cohesive. But if I had to pick one place in particular, I would say it started while working in retail over the holidays. There is nothing that has made me want to Escape from the Holidays more than having to work through them in close contact with the public every year. I knew I had to incorporate that perspective into my writing and it ended up becoming the basis for my first main character, an overworked and stressed-out grocery clerk in need of a bit of holiday magic. And that’s where the rest of the novella started: in the bits of random winter myths that have been knocking around my head for years. The Japanese Yuki-onna, the German Schneekind, the Russian Snegurochka, all these related/unrelated stories were the basis and inspiration for my second main character, a lost winter spirit looking for somewhere to call home. Add some misunderstandings, a prying best friend who may or may not be human herself, demi representation, and a lot of parks (I’m not kidding) and that is how Something to Celebrate came to be."

Lou Sylvre on "The Holiday Home Hotel": "Magical realism. That’s one way to describe The Holiday Home Hotel. It’s romance, it’s contemporary, and it’s also magical, but I honestly didn’t mean for it to be so. Magic is a stubborn little idea. Nearly every story I write, long or short, light-hearted or dark, pulls in the idea of magic until I can’t help but let it live there. Even my Vasquez and James series—contemporary romantic suspense—has a secret bit of magic in it, though only one reader ever told me they spotted it. But for today’s purposes, that’s really beside the point. The magic in The Holiday Home Hotel isn’t secret—not at all. Slavic goddess Lelia and forest spirit Leshy (who’s playing at being a brown-furred black bear) start their mischief right on page one. Lelia is Daren Slovak’s canine companion, a fluffy white Belgian shepherd, and when Daren plays fetch with her, he has no idea how very much more she truly is. And when I first started writing the tale, neither did I! She was simply going to be a dog named after a minor goddess of luck and springtime. I started thinking some of the things she did—like leading Gunny Schiller out of the wintry woods and into the Holiday Home—could be magic. And then I thought, what if…. A story transformed! Delightfully magical divine intervention, the promise of luck in love, and a sexy springtime romp in the cold middle of winter. See why I love magic?"

Mere Rain on "Celebrations in the Season of Long Nights": "It is set at Yalda, the Persian holiday of the winter solstice. Threatening supernatural forces are at their strongest on this longest night of the year, and it is traditional to keep the fires burning, the music playing, and the food and drink plentiful. Stay up all night celebrating with those you love. Unless you don’t have anyone to go home to. Or you’ve been tasked with fighting evil more directly. Yima is a demon-hunter, a duty passed down through his family. He doesn’t resent it, but it does get lonely, especially since his work is at its most difficult and dangerous when everyone else is celebrating with loved ones. After he rescues Shahin from a demon attack and finds that he has nowhere safe to stay, he takes him back to his flat. Yima has just arrived in town and doesn’t even have electricity yet, leaving the two men with little to do but talk. It isn’t a surprise when they end up in bed, though what at first feels like a temporary comfort grows over days spent together into a deeper bond. Can nomadic Yima find a way to stay without demons coming after his lover? And does Shahin want to risk his heart loving a man who constantly puts his life in danger? I will also be blogging about how to cook for Yalda for the blog tour organized by Other Worlds Ink, running from 12/3 through 12/15."

Angel Martinez on "Yule Planet": "The winter holidays are time for traditions -- lots of them. My holiday story from last year (Safety Protocols for Human Holidays) was a humorous lesbian space opera, so I thought I'd start a new tradition, too, this year being the Second Annual Angel Martinez Humorous Lesbian Space Opera, Yule Planet. I had so much fun with last year's that I toyed with returning to that universe and ship, but really I'd said what I'd wanted to say there. Instead, this year's story stems from something I've found equal parts fascinating and horrifying, and was reminded of again during a visit to Disneyworld the past September. Theme parks. In particular, immersive resort types of theme parks -- how they operate, how they keep guests trapped in a dependent experience, how they treat, portray and sometimes exploit employees. Naturally, since this is science fiction, I decided to take the theming to a planetary scale and the Yule Planet Resort Corporation was born. Happy holidays to you and I hope you enjoy this tale of a resort vacation gone terribly wrong."

J. Scott Coatsworth on "Slow Thaw": "Javier stood on the ice, staring up at the night sky. Behind him, the lights of Bettancourt Station lit the snow in a thirty foot radius. But out where he stood, absolute darkness ruled.

The stars above were brilliant sparks of light, far brighter than they ever were back home, especially on a moonless night like this. He wondered, not for the first time, if somewhere out there on another planet spinning around one of those stars. If someone else was looking up and wondering if there was inteligent life somewhere out there.

It was brutally cold out--negative sixty degrees celsius--but it suited him. It was the anniversary of Terry's death, and he needed the cold. Needed it to numb his soul.

Plus he needed a little space from Astrid. She'd been at the station for almost half of her rotation, and already he wanted to be rid of her.

He closed his eyes. They said the ice sang, that wind blowing over the ice shelf made a haunting, beautiful music too low for the human ear to hear. He imagined its strains, part of the great cosmic opera. The song that would continue long after humankind was gone.

Javier opened his eyes and returned his gaze to the ice.

Somewhere out there, someone new was waiting for him. Terry would send him someone to love, wherever he was. Somewhere past the ice.

He took one last look at the stars, and turned to trudge back to the station, now suitably numb."

BEHOLD: THIS WISH TONIGHT!

This past Christmas was, perhaps, the best of my life. I spent almost the entire month of December hospitalized, struggling to recover from surgery. On December 22, the morning after the shortest day of the year, I pulled up to our home, lovely Xanadu, after twenty-four days away, and stepping into the house was like opening the biggest, most wonderful gift ever. Slowly and unsteadily, I moved from room to room, balanced on a walker (less than two weeks later, I abandoned that extra set of legs completely). During my hospital stay, I thought nonstop of spouse, cats, and Muse (who, I imagined, spent every second with me during my time away from home). Christmas was only three days later. We celebrated it with an amazing dinner, the first movie I'd seen in a month (we watch movies every Saturday night when I'm not traveling), savored the new propane 'wood stove' and its luxurious heat (it had been installed mere days before my hospitalization), and the gift of our small family's reuniting beneath the protective roof of our home. On Christmas morning, I wrote a story -- a long tradition I've maintained since I was fifteen. Yes, the best Christmas ever!

Waiting for me upon my return and adding to the joyousness were my beautiful contributor copies of This Wish Tonight, a holiday-themed anthology by the fine folks at Mischief Corner Books. Wish contains my novelette-length story of M/M love set during one troubled Christmas, in which a glass artist and a fireman meet, fall deeply in love, and ultimately solve a series of hate crimes in their fair New England town. The story came to me back in the summer of 2000, when I saw a neat magazine piece about a glass artist on TV's New Hampshire Chronicle (which would, years later in 2013, run a segment on my writing career.). At the end of last July, during a NaNoWriMo spell in which my pen was on fire, I dashed off the first draft of "Fear of Fire", a story I'd wanted to write for so long. It was accepted and appears with two other holiday-themed tales within the covers of an exceptional book. My fabulously talented co-authors shared the back-stories behind their stories in This Wish Tonight.

Wendy Rathbone on "Eve of the Great Frost": "My stories and novels often start with one image in my mind and go from there. Many of my stories come from phrases in my own poems. For this tale I was inspired by a December poem I wrote with images of a gothic castle made of ice, black carriages delivering party-goers and cloaked kings, and snow all around like rippled white satin. This was a seat-of-my-pants tale, meaning I had no outline, just an idea of a young man who has trained hard to become the perfect erotic holiday gift fit for a king. Because I love science fiction settings, I created a slice of alien culture with a ritual of giving people as holiday gifts to royalty. I set the story in the far distant future where the galaxy is human-colonized, and where starships and faster than light travel are taken for granted. Toss in the gothic images from my poem, mix them up with future technology, a grand party, and a male/male romance and everything started to come together. Many of my novels and poems are set in this future of mine which I call my Starshiptopia universe. It is not all that important to know that, though, when reading this story. It simply stands alone as a tale of a man who has high hopes and a single wish to become the king’s chosen on a perfect night of winter beauty and celebration…and then everything goes wrong. In spite of all that, he perseveres and ends up with a night to remember. A wish fulfilled."

J. Scott Coatsworth on "Wonderland": "I'd wanted to do a holiday story for this anthology since I saw the original call. But I didn't have time. Then the deadline was delayed a couple weeks, and suddenly I had a little space in my writing schedule. I tried (I really did) to make this a standard contemporary story, but it turns out I am just constitutionally incapable of writing a regular romance. So my story morphed into a post zombie apocalypse, midlife crisis, OCD romance. The OCD part necessitated a bit of research, so I ran the story by a few friends with OCD experience -- one therapist and two folks who have dealt with it in their own lives. I did learn an awful lot about it, too, including the fact that OCD can be brought on by a strep infection that goes to the patient's brain, a fact I used in the story. It has a cool name -- PANDAS (Pediatric Autoimmune Neuropsychiatric Disorder Associated with Streptococcus). And of course, i set it in rural Montana, a place I've never been to. So I got to look for a little town that would suit my needs, and to research it down to the last gas station, drug store and (now empty) grocery store. I really enjoyed writing a character with OCD -- it was a stretch for me as a writer. And I also enjoyed writing a love story for characters in their forties. Love shouldn't be limited to twinks."

BEHOLD: BEHIND THE UNIFORM!

On the night before I departed Camp Necon in July of 2012, I experienced a gritty, intensely romantic dream that left me reaching for a blank note card about a sex worker in a near futuristic war who learns he holds the key to stopping a ruthless alien invasion. That knowledge is delivered by a handsome colonel, who visits the camp where he works. As the dream played out, the colonel took on the face of my beloved muse, and I became Milo Hanover, the seemingly average, unremarkable older man who discovers he's anything but. I even dreamed the opening few lines, along with the title of the tale -- "The Head Shed", which was the nickname for Milo's place of employment and the service both he and it provided to humanity's war-weary defenders. I showered, hastened downstairs to the cafeteria for iced coffee before it was open to serve the wonderful writing conference's attendees, and began work on the story. I gutted out the first thousand or so words longhand, shocked at how formed the world Milo and the colonel inhabited was, and would have continued but then breakfast service started, and soon after I departed Rhode Island for my home in New Hampshire. "The Head Shed" went into a file folder, which then went into my works-in-progress filing cabinet drawer, and its note card found its way into my catalog of unwritten ideas. We bought a house and moved. Other projects and deadlines took front and center -- until this past March when I read about Mischief Corner Books' new submission call for Behind the Uniform, a M/M romance anthology. "The Head Shed" again jumped to the head of the line, and I soon dashed the remainder of what I thought would be a long short story as novella, loving every moment of my time together with Milo, Colonel Joe Dunnegin, their unconventional love, and their desperate plan to drive out the Grunk menace. Following my usual stringent edits, I sent "The Head Shed" off to MCB, who accepted it a few weeks later as one of three novellas for Behind the Uniform. This July, BTU has been published to some incredible kudos -- even before its launch, it became an All-Romance e-Book best seller, and continues to sell mightily post-release (print is due to be available shortly). It was my pleasure to speak to my two BTU co-authors regarding their contributions to this wonderful anthology.

Jon Keys on "It's the Hat": "The anthology subject grabbed my attention and didn't relent. Since I was young I've had a fascination with men in uniforms and their behind the scenes lives. But I already wrote a short story several years ago focused on two married police officers, so I wanted to go beyond the expected and find another field that met my needs. In my research I discovered forest rangers have the highest mortality rate of any of my guys in uniform. So I found my hero. Add to that a recent art school graduate working as a waiter who has a weakness for bad boys, and I was happy with the mix of characters. From there the setting flowed. I've visited Michigan's west coast on numerous occasions, and several items caught my eye. The area's beauty struck me first: Lovely blue waters and wide sandy beaches. The scenery is breathtaking. More notable traits, most of the towns survive from the tourist trade and a lot of those visitors eventually buy a cabin. This was more striking to me because it's so different from the southwest where I lived most of my life. Between all of these, I had the components from which the story grew."

Toni Griffin on "A Wolf in Cop's Clothing": "My short story is actually Book 7 in one of my most popular series. I'm constantly being asked by my readers for more from the Holland Brothers. After I finished book 4, the last in the main series, I said that was it, there wasn't going to be any more. However, the boys just never stop talking to me. As soon as I give them even the start of an idea in my head they take it and run. This is exactly what happened this time. I was sitting at my desk at work one day, checking messages from my author friends in the US. When the subject of the Behind the Uniform anthology was brought up. Men in uniform got my brain thinking about one of the Holland brothers, Marcus, who's a cop. It had been about 14 months since I'd allowed the boys to visit me and as soon as my mind even thought about them they took over. I had a furious messaging session with my friend, and within a half hour the entire story line had come to me and was just begging to be written. I was then stuck at work with this story busting to get out. When I got home that night the laptop was opened and the story flowed. It was written in less than 3 days. I hope you enjoy!"