Chloe Holiday's Blog

Hooray for Indie Bookstores! They can be the literary heartblood of a town, in touch and supportive, and with a nice section on local history and local authors.

Turns out I’m one of them, this Saturday, February 17th from 11 am to 1 pm! It’s part of the Chocolate Crawl (does that not sound fabulous?) in downtown Monroe, Washington.

Stop by and see me, check out my books and all the others that Main Street Books has to offer, and adore the bookstore’s cat! If you hang out, you can also see my author friend Sierra Hill, at 1 pm!

Hope to see you there!

The post Yay for Indie Bookstores! first appeared on Chloe Holiday.

Photo by Oleg Gosporadec, Unsplash

Hooray for the Winter Solstice! You don’t have to be a pagan to be thankful for the arrival of the longest night of the year, if you live in a northern latitude. Dusk at 4 pm gets old, and it’s much harder to do outside projects in such a short window. So I’m looking forward to a reset, and the coming year ahead.

Need something to read to pass the long nights? Check out the Winter Romance collection at Book Cave, and you might score some book money, too! But grab ’em quick–it ends on New Year’s Eve!

Or take a peek at this fun interview, about Finders, Keepers (#ad) on Darlene Deluca’s blog! It’s a perfect, quick read to warm up cold nights; read more on my website here: https://www.chloeholiday.com

Best holiday wishes to all!

The post Hooray for the Winter Solstice! first appeared on Chloe Holiday.

No, not my new lead male–my new male ON a lead! Here’s little Brimstone, modeling his new baby goat training pack! And you can see his little goatee (why I never before made the connection with that particular type of facial hair, I’ll never know).

The post Isn’t he adorable? first appeared on Chloe Holiday.

Today only, you can get Love is a Drug free on Kindle! (it’s affiliate link but the story’s free)

The post Need a Quick Escape? first appeared on Chloe Holiday.

Score a billionaire for 99 cents! Helios (affiliate link) is on sale now through the morning of the 7th, but today and tomorrow is less than a buck.

That’s a lot of … bang for the buck! The hero also has a very big … yacht. Prefer audio? I’m expecting that out this fall.

Now, let us speak no more of it!

The post Score a billionaire for 99 cents! first appeared on Chloe Holiday.

Go with Jason, adventure-racing in the Alps, Peru, and Morocco!

It’s way too hot to do anything but curl up and read. Get Hard Truths free through 8/19! (Affiliate link, but it’s free 🙂  ).

What’s in it? Enemies-to-lovers, action, workplace drama, humor… Oh, and a turtle.

Enjoy!

The post Too hot for your own adventure? Go with Jason! first appeared on Chloe Holiday.

Tonight is the peak of the Perseid meteor shower!

Photo by Colton Sturgeon, Unsplash

Last night, there was a wonderful show, including some “fireballs” which are extra-vivid meteors that can leave a lasting trail. I’ve always loved celestial events, staying up for eclipses & such, and usually it was the mosquitos that finally drove me inside. Putting on repellant is messy and my family all gets swollen, itchy bites if we miss a spot. Now I have a secret weapon and am over the moon! With it so darned hot and the baby goats, I’m spending more time out after dusk, so I decided to try this gizmo: https://amzn.to/3OxqaZo (affiliate link).

It works! Holy cow, it really works! Plus, it’s not stinky, nor can I hear it, other than its starting peep. It’s only now that I realize how vigilant I’d been before, and how much time waving and swatting. Now, I’m tempted to switch to a night owl schedule, which was always better for writing, anyway.

The Perseid shower is one of my favorites; you can read more about it on my previous blog here.

The best stargazing is with one of those lawn chairs that tip way back, so there’s no neck strain, and a place without a lot of light pollution.

Can’t watch this one? There’s always next year, or you can catch the Leonids in November!

Wishing everyone a safe and happy summer!

The post Great Balls of Fire! first appeared on Chloe Holiday.

Whew! It’s hot even up here in the Pacific Northwest, and good grief–the temps down South and Southwest! Now even some commercial airlines are having flight delays because of the heat.

Ordinarily, summer’s a great time to fly–clear skies, great visibility, and longer days. It can get hot on the tarmac, though, while one’s doing a preflight, or waiting for clearance to taxi or take off. Once airborne, it’s cooler up there, though many small aircraft don’t have air conditioning. For those who don’t, they make blower system retrofits that circulate air flowing over ice, but they are bulky, heavy, and expensive. I will confess that as a student pilot, I occasionally took one of those “freezo” packs and tucked it beneath my shirt–all that glass in a small plane sitting on a runway can make one feel like a frog in a pot. There’s a scene in Fly Boy that alludes to this.

Still, these are merely issues of discomfort. It can get too hot for planes to leave the ground, though: the lift required to defeat gravity is provided by the air molecules rushing under the wing. It’s the same force you may remember as a kid, sticking your hand out the car window. If the air heats up, it expands, and the molecules get farther apart–less force to lift the plane off the ground. It doesn’t happen that often for a huge commercial jet, but it’s common for smaller planes, particularly at high altitudes or with shorter runways, to have to look at the temperatures in the summer, and arrange their departures for early in the morning, when the air is still dense.

Too hot to fly is perfect for reading, though! Take a VIP flight on me now through Tuesday, 7/25: Fly Boy is free. (Available everywhere but you can ask your library to get it to listen free–it’s on all library distributors)

Be safe out there in this heat, folks!

The post Too hot to fly? first appeared on Chloe Holiday.

Out for a training walk. Look how polite they are, and how they wag their tails like dogs when they’re happy!

The post Playing With Fire–and Brimstone! first appeared on Chloe Holiday.

Bopped in to chat about A Boy & his Dog with Chelsey Ortega via her fabulous blog.

On the Fourth of July, my dogs are always optimistic about scoring some dropped holiday food though, like Mojo, they hate the sound of fireworks, even from a distance.

My earliest memories of the holiday were from back in the day of Unsupervised Kids Gone Wild, and my older brother shot bottle rockets toward the chickens roosting in a tree 50 meters away, which caused outraged squawking from both the chickens as well as me and my sister, animal lovers that we were. He ignored us, and luckily never got close, though I wonder if the poor birds had ringing in their ears later. Despite his mischievous start, my brother grew up to be a decent human.

I still like the smell of powder and the colorful displays, and I loved the sparklers. I’m not sure parents now would let their kids run around holding a sharp metal stake that could set something on fire, but that was normal behavior then. My favorites, though, were the black snakes: a small dark pellet that looked like a thick button. When ignited, they morphed into twisting black ash that resembled snakes. Turns out that they’re mostly powdered sugar and baking soda–who knew? The sodium bicarbonate creates carbon dioxide gas, so the bubbles make the snake “grow”, kind of like bread rising on fast forward, and the sugar creates the black ash that encapsulates the C02.

No fireworks for me this holiday, though I might see a real snake in the garden. Here’s wishing a safe and happy holiday to all those who celebrate it!

The post WOOF! first appeared on Chloe Holiday.