Andrea Maxand's Blog: New Novel in October!

Thank you to everyone who entered the giveaway for Dreams Fall Like Rain, and congratulations to all the winners! Don't hesitate to leave a review on Amazon when you're done reading!

If you really wanted to read the book but didn't win, the ebook for Dreams Fall Like Rain will be available for a discounted price ($2.99) on Amazon for the next week.

Dreams Fall Like Rain

Otherwise, Happy Valentine's Day and have a wonderful weekend!

-Andrea

My love affair – and that’s what it is, a love affair, in the makes-me-blush sense of the phrase – with Jeff Buckley’s music is multi-faceted.

There’s his voice, of course. Range, pathos, humor, grit, angst, gentleness – it’s all there. Then there are his guitar skills, something I did not appreciate at first, but appreciated more when I started paying attention to his live recordings. “Oh, WOW, he actually did that LIVE? While singing?” (Jaw drops open.)

I love his lyrics, too; his visceral and unforgettable imagery is forever burned into my consciousness. Lines like “born again from the rhythm screaming down from heaven” or “our mutilation is to gain from the system” or “a heart that beats as both siphon and reservoir” rattle around in my head, pushing to the foreground when they seem to fit the moment.

But there’s more to my appreciation of Jeff’s music than the nuts and bolts of vocals, guitar, and lyrics. Another thing that continually amazes me is the way Jeff Buckley was able to completely inhabit and own the songs he chose to cover. So much so, that many fans and listeners tend to think of the covers as “his” songs.

The most obvious example of this is Jeff’s cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.” If you search the song’s lore on the internet, you’ll invariably come across at least a few people who think Jeff wrote “Hallelujah.” Within the last month, I was in an online conversation where someone asked me who Jeff Buckley was: “Wasn’t he the guy who wrote Hallelujah?” Personally, I love that. It’s a testament to JB’s power to make a song fully his own.

Another example of this phenomenon I noticed was when I attended a few online Jeff Buckley tribute shows this year, around his birthday. I’ve always avoided these tribute shows in the past – I’m not sure why. Maybe I’ve thought it would be too painful.

But this year I was down for it, and what struck me, at both shows, was that it was perfectly acceptable, at a show dedicated to Jeff Buckley’s music, to cover songs that he’d covered. Some of the performers only covered songs that he’d covered. A few musicians covered “Hallelujah,” of course, but I also heard covers of “Calling You,” “Be My Husband,” (which Jeff changed to “Be Your Husband”) “The Boy With the Thorn in His Side,” “Lilac Wine,” and “Corpus Christi Carol.”

That’s another thing that thrills me about Jeff Buckley: the range of music that he tackled and mastered. The inclusion of “Corpus Christi Carol” on Grace was a significant part of how the album got its hooks into me.

A couple years before I discovered Grace, I’d been working on a minor in music at Western Washington University. While I worked on the minor I was immersed in music: taking ear training, music theory, singing in choir, taking piano lessons, and practicing piano about four hours each day.

For our winter choral performance, we tackled Benjamin Britten’s A Boy Is Born, which includes “Corpus Christi Carol” within the variations (“Op.3 – Variation 5: In The Bleak Mid-Winter” if you need to get specific.) Performing A Boy is Born was a spiritual experience for me, not necessarily because of the subject matter, but because of the beauty and tension in the music itself. Showing up for the performance was a requirement for class. But when we performed A Boy is Born, the experience transcended fulfilling a class requirement and became something else, entirely.

I remember standing on the choir risers, in the middle of Variation 5, and feeling like something mystical was happening while we were singing. I was even sad when the performance was over, because I wondered if I would ever experience that exact feeling again.

Enter Jeff Buckley’s record, Grace.

In an earlier blog, I described how I was turned on to Jeff Buckley’s music, and the experience of listening to Grace for the first time. A significant part of that experience was the inclusion of “Corpus Christi Carol” on the record.

It shows up near the end of the album, Track 8. By that point you’ve already been through hard-hitting tracks like “Mojo Pin” and the title track, “Grace.” You’ve been torn apart by Buckley’s versions of “Lilac Wine” and “Hallelujah,” and you’ve cried through “Last Goodbye” and “Lover, You Should Have Come Over.” And then this very spare, intricate arrangement of “Corpus Christi Carol” appears.

That mystical feeling, the feeling from the choir concert, when we’d performed A Boy is Born – the feeling I thought I would never feel again – came rushing back to me as I listened to Jeff Buckley’s rendition of “Corpus Christi Carol.” It was like finding out that the feeling was actually a place, and Jeff Buckley had the power to show me where it was. Not only that, he had the power to reinterpret the feeling.

“Corpus Christi Carol,” as this article observes: https://ig.ft.com/life-of-a-song/corpus-christi-carol.html is a strange mix of Christ imagery and Arthurian legend. For me, that makes it the perfect introduction to the holiday season, because our Christmas traditions are a wonderful mishmash of christian and pagan traditions, anyway. I love winter festival and solstice imagery. Christian Christmas imagery – with animals gathering around a baby in a manger – pleases me too. (Mostly because I love animals. Animals gathered around a child, animals gathered around a special tree deep in the woods, I love it all.)

I’m using “Corpus Christi Carol” to kick off my holiday festive season this year, and I’ve decided that, for me, this season starts in November, right around the time it begins to get dark in the early evening. My festive season comes early enough to encompass all the light-in-darkness traditions, including Diwali, Thanksgiving, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Christmas, the Winter Solstice, and anything else I’ve left out, that falls within that time period.

Because, with so much darkness, I need festivity. Good food. Great music. And maybe a little mystery, too.

***

Lyrics for Corpus Christi Carol:

He bear her off, he bear her down
He bear her into an orchard ground

Lu li lu lay lu li lu lay
The falcon hath bourne my mate away

And in that orchard there was a hold
That was hanged with purple and gold
And in that hold there was a bed
And it was hanged with gold so red

Lu li lu lay lu li lu lay
The falcon hath bourne my mate away

And on this bed there lyeth a knight
His wound is bleeding day and night
By his bedside kneeleth a maid
And she weepeth both night and day

Lu li lu lay lu li lu lay
The falcon hath bourne my mate away

By his bedside standeth a stone
Corpus christi written thereon

I’ve started a Kindle Vella story!

“The Foggy Ghost” is a novel I started about eight years ago. Now, however, it feels like the time to finish the story. I’ll be posting new episodes every Thursday and Sunday.

Serial writing is an old art form, and I’m pretty excited to be part of this modern incarnation of the serial story.

What’s “The Foggy Ghost” about? It’s about a lot of things: finding your way while entering adulthood, falling in love, love triangles, friendship, betrayal, and music, music, music! In one sense, this story is very much my love letter to rock music.

You can find “The Foggy Ghost” at Kindle Vella. If you want to know more about the story, you can watch the book trailer on my Twitter page.

The first three episodes of “The Foggy Ghost” are free. After that, if you’re new to Kindle Vella, Amazon provides 200 free tokens to every new user. You can use the free tokens to unlock additional story episodes. After that, you can purchase tokens in packages ranging from $1.99 to $14.99.

I hope you’ll delve into this serial writing/reading adventure with me! There are tons of great stories already up on Kindle Vella, take some time to check them out. I mean. Reading is good for you!

Several years ago, I wrote a blog for a music website about my discovery of Jeff Buckley’s music. That website has since taken down the blog. So, I’m going to try to reproduce it here, simply to document how much he and his music mean to me.

I discovered Buckley approximately a year before he died. I was trying to learn how to play the guitar, because I wanted to play in a rock band. I had been raised playing the piano. Like many suburban kids, I’d taken traditional piano lessons. But I wanted to approach the guitar differently. Creatively. I picked a guitar teacher who I knew played in a local rock band. I think I was hoping his energy would rub off on me as much as – or even more than – I wanted him to teach me how to play the guitar.

My teacher set me up with scales and chord progressions to learn; it strangely felt a lot like piano lessons. But one day, I told him what my existential struggle with guitar was: I had classical music training, but I wanted to approach the guitar with raw creativity. I felt like my classical training was stifling that sense of creativity. My teacher’s solution was to tell me to go out and get a Jeff Buckley cd.

I still remember that moment of going to the record store (when those were still a thing) and finding “Grace” under the “B’s” for Buckley. To be honest, I thought Buckley looked ridiculous on the cover in his glitter jacket. The album cover is now iconic, but it offended my sense of the grunge/alternative aesthetic that was the THING in the 90s. Still, I liked and trusted my guitar teacher, and he had told me I would love Jeff Buckley. So I purchased “Grace.”

I took the album home to my apartment. It was a college kid’s apartment, and the living room was covered with lush green shag carpeting. I popped “Grace” in my boombox (yep, a boombox) and lay down on the green shag to listen. I wasn’t actually expecting much.

I was hooked from the first hypnotic notes of “Mojo Pin.” I’ve been a fan of Jeff Buckley ever since. “Fan” isn’t even the right word. It sounds cheesy, maybe even gross, but “lover” is a better word. I listened to the whole album, stretched out on that hideous green shag carpet, and at the end of the album, I felt like a different person. Buckley quickly became my favorite solo musician; he still is.

I never saw him play live. I thought I would some day; I fully expected he would have a long career, and that I would see him play live eventually. Soon after finding Buckley, I did start playing in a band. It was a time before widespread internet culture. So when Buckley drowned in 1997, I didn’t hear about it. I was working on my band, working on myself, and discovering other music.

In July of 1998, my older brother was in a car accident. My dad called me to tell me my brother was in the hospital in Seattle, and that it didn’t look good. In the weird way of life in a college town, I was living that summer with a guy I barely knew. He wasn’t even often at the apartment; most of the time I had the place to myself. But my roommate was there the day my dad called with the news about my brother. I didn’t have a car, and my roommate offered to drive me down to the hospital. My roommate had a truck, and he was doing something weird with it, so there was no passenger seat. I had to sit on a bunch of cushions on the passenger side, no seatbelt. As we pulled out of the driveway, my roommate popped in a cd.

“That sounds like Jeff Buckley,” I said. It wasn’t the album “Grace” which I knew well. But it sounded like Buckley’s voice.

“It is Jeff Buckley,” my roommate confirmed.

“Oh, he has a new album!” I exclaimed. “That’s great!”

My roommate was quiet for a moment, then he said, “He died, about a year ago.”

And that was how, on the day I found out my brother was going to die, I also found out that Jeff Buckley had died. As we drove down to the hospital, we listened to “Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk” on repeat. My roommate dropped me off and roared away in his truck. It was one of the most empty feeling moments of my life.

Soon after that, I bought my own copy of “Sketches” and listened to it incessantly. And then I put it away. I put Jeff Buckley away, too. Listening to his music hurt too much.

It wasn’t until much later, in 2009, that I came back to Buckley’s music. I was surfing on Youtube one evening, and a suggestion to watch Jeff Buckley playing live at Glastonbury came up. I had not been listening to his music; the suggestion seemed to come out of nowhere. I figured, “what the hell, why not” and clicked on the song. It was “What Will You Say” at the 1995 Glastonbury festival. By the end of it, I was sobbing. And just like that, the floodgates opened. I looked for every live performance, every interview, every documentary on Buckley I had never seen. Ever since then, I haven’t been able to shut his music out of my life. And I wouldn’t want to.

The world is full of talented musicians. But Buckley went somewhere special with his music. I wish he was still here. But since he isn’t, all I can do is keep talking about him, and hope more people, people who need his music, who need music in the way he did it, will find him.

I’m not someone who watches superhero movies. I don’t have anything against them; they’re just not my thing.

However, this year, I’ve watched two: Suicide Squad, and Zack Snyder’s Justice League. I watched Suicide Squad because I’d signed up for HBO Max to watch a completely different movie, and I wanted to justify the monthly fee for the service. I’d been curious about Suicide Squad because Jared Leto is in it. (The infamous Joker role.)

I watched the Snyder Cut to continue to justify the monthly fee for HBO Max, because Jared Leto is in it, and because I was genuinely moved by the story of how Snyder was forced to leave the first round of the project due to a family tragedy. I’m a fan of second chances, so I was happy to see Snyder get one.

I enjoyed both movies. I got a bit lost in Suicide Squad; I chalked that up to me not being a fan of superhero movies. Maybe I didn’t get it. Or maybe it was the editing. At any rate, I still enjoyed the film. After having watched it, I didn’t understand what all the fuss had been about Jared Leto’s performance as Joker. I enjoyed his performance as Joker. But maybe that’s because (if you haven’t picked up on it already) I’m a fan of Leto’s.

I enjoyed the Snyder Cut the most. I used to watch the Super Friends cartoon when I was in grade school; the Snyder Cut reminded me of the cartoon, only it was darker and more epic. It was four hours long and I was entertained the entire time.

So why do people watch superhero movies?

I’ve seen this theory floating around the internet that superhero movies are a manifestation of a psychological need to have saviors. As in, we’d rather watch a story about a superhero saving the day than go do the things we need to do to save ourselves. (Personally, I’d thought the superhero movie craze was a sort of backlash against the “whatever man, everything is bullshit” ethos that permeated the Gen X era.) But who knows. Like I’ve said, I don’t usually watch superhero movies (unless Jared Leto is in them) so perhaps I’m not qualified to describe exactly how the current manifestation of the genre fits into the modern zeitgeist.

Still. Superheroes have been rattling around the culture for a long time, and, in general, I don’t agree a fascination with superheroes indicates abdication of responsibility for taking action in the world. Some folks, I would imagine, look to superheroes as examples of how to behave.

Human beings have this wonderful quality called “imagination.” We can take it with us wherever we go. If you want to sit at a table all day registering new voters while imagining you’re Wonder Woman, you can do that. And if it helps you slog through a long day of volunteering, why not? If the fantasy gets you out the door to volunteer in the first place, even better. Or, if sometimes pretending you’re Superman helps you achieve a personal goal, especially while you’re doing the (possibly mundane) things that actually get you to the realization of that goal: what’s wrong with that?

I can’t prove that superhero movies encourage activism in some people, as much as they may encourage apathy in others. I can’t prove that people who enjoy superhero movies often use the characters in those movies as a springboard for positive action in their own lives, and communities.

But I have a hunch at least some of them do. And if they do, and make the world a better place as a result: more power to them.

This isn’t a critique or review of the film. It’s a list of ten things that I loved about The Little Things.

First Thing: Denzel Washington. Washington is a strong, steely presence throughout the film. Washington’s character, Joe “Deke” Deacon, is haunted. He’s not a hero. (No one in this film is.) Still, even when he seems to be falling apart, and, especially, when events go off the rails at the end, Deke functions as an anchor who keeps all the other characters in place. Washington’s relatively quiet performance is the fixed point around which everything and everyone else in the film revolves.

Second thing: Rami Malek. I love how Malek’s character, hotshot cop Jim Baxter, starts out cocky, but then, as you get to know him better, he becomes more human. He has an ego; he also cares about his family. He wants to catch the killer — maybe both because he has an ego and because he’s the kind of person who cares. And then, at the end, he completely unravels. That Baxter unravels, instead of becoming a hero, is one of the main reasons why The Little Things ends on an unfamiliar note. Malek did a fantastic job subtly portraying Baxter’s transformation from confidence, to obsession, to brokenness.

Third thing: Jared Leto. I loved the combination of creepiness and humor Leto brought to this role, and I also admired his use of physicality in creating Sparma’s character. The end result was truly creepy and, in some places, truly funny. By the end of the film, Sparma was unforgettable. (I was glad to see Leto get a Golden Globe nomination and a SAG Award nomination this week for his performance as Albert Sparma in The Little Things.)

Fourth Thing: Highway Driving Scenes. The scenes of driving on the L.A. freeways in The Little Things have a distinct, tense, and realistic vibe. In the early 2000s, I took a road trip by myself. One leg of my trip went through California, and at one point I drove through L.A., as well as around the outside of L.A., when I stopped for a couple days to visit a friend. The scenes of Deke driving down the L.A. freeways gave me almost the same feelings I remember having while driving my rented car around the edges of L.A. Not all driving scenes in movies — especially a movie filmed someplace familiar to me — do that for me.

Fifth Thing: The first scene. The Little Things opens with a girl driving her car, singing to the B-52’s. She’s driving alone at night, and it’s dark and lonely on the stretch of road that she’s traveling. Then the killer appears, intimidating her on the road with his car. She’s terrified, and ends up getting out of her car at a roadside gas station (what the hell was she thinking!) frantically trying to find help. I was steeling myself for the inevitable violence-perpetrated-against-a-female scene that seems to be the price you pay if you otherwise enjoy police procedurals. But at the end of the scene, the girl survives. It wasn’t the scene ending I was expecting (and in a way, the unexpected ending of the first scene foreshadows the end of the movie.)

Sixth Thing: Jogger scene. One of the murders that happens on Baxter’s watch is the murder of a girl out jogging at night with a friend. She declines her friend’s offer to jog home with her. As she turns down one street and her friend goes down another, an ominous car slowly follows the girl down the street into the dark. (This is another scene where I was bracing myself for violence-against-a-female.) But again, the violence never happens onscreen. Instead, the camera pans up above the trees in the neighborhood, and then, the picture shifts from a scene of darkness to the light of sunrise. The trees turn from black to green, and the city comes into view. Birds are chirping. It’s a beautiful scene. But it breaks your heart, because you know the girl is dead: without ever having heard a scream, or having witnessed any excruciating fear, or blood.

Seventh Thing: Cop’s eye view of violence. All evidence of violence done to the murdered victims is seen through cops’ eyes. A body at the murder scene when the cops arrive, a body in the morgue when a cop visits. A cop’s flashback to memories of a past murder scene. It’s gruesome, gory, and horrible, but no scenes actually show the killer murdering the girls. The violence never hits you too hard, but the horror sticks with you.

Eighth Thing: Scary film score piano music. This music was used in a couple scenes, when Sparma was messing around with Deke on the highway, and also when Baxter was dumb enough to get in Sparma’s car so Sparma could, ostensibly, take Baxter to one of the buried bodies. It sounds like a real piano, played on the low end of the keyboard, in a staccato style. Nothing else to say about it, I just really dug that part of the film score.

Ninth Thing: The ending. Did Sparma do it, or didn’t he? We’ll never know, because Baxter, in a beyond stressed out moment of human rage, hits Sparma with a shovel and kills him. Could Sparma have done it? Likely. Could it have been proven in court with the evidence available at that point in the film? Probably not. Deke covers up Baxter’s accidental murder of Sparma, which brings up numerous questions and issues. Corruption among cops, of course. Also, though, the human-ness of cops. Most cop films reinforce the belief that cops are invincible. This film doesn’t. Also, less obvious is the idea that real life is messy. Crimes don’t always get solved. There aren’t always simple answers. Life often goes on with a good deal of uncertainty and uneasiness.

Tenth Thing: Symmetry. While there’s no big killer reveal at the end of the film, and while you never get to think of either Deke or Baxter as heroes, there is symmetry in the ending. Five years prior, professional friends covered for Deke’s mistake. Now, it’s his turn to cover up another cop’s mistake. The existence of this symmetry does not mean it’s morally okay for cops to cover it up when they accidentally kill victims or suspects. (It’s not okay.) But from a purely technical standpoint, Deke covering for Baxter’s sin, if you will, restores a sort of balance to the world of the film. It brings Deke to a certain (if not perfect) place of resolution. Since Deke feels like the unifying force in The Little Things, the fact that he reaches a kind of resolution at the end feels right.

I hope everyone’s getting into the swing of things with the new year, such as it is. We definitely live in frightening and dynamic times. It’s changing all of us, I think, but it’s too soon to accurately gage how, and how much.

Goals for 2021: I’m anxious to finish the sequel to “Boxing Day.” First, however, I have to finish my master’s thesis. The thesis is my project for January and February. So I won’t be doing much fiction writing for the first two months of the year. I feel so grateful I was given this opportunity to study history at the graduate level. The humanities have become “frivolous” in the minds of many, but in my opinion they’re essential for building a more compassionate and functioning society. Studying and reading history helps you understand how certain power and political dynamics persist throughout centuries of human civilization. In a broad sense, history can help you interpret and understand the present. However, there are also rich and endless differences between historical eras and topics. History is a field full of rabbit holes. (So if you love rabbit holes: give studying history a try.)

I feel silly saying this since I’m just starting out writing fiction, but I’m so grateful to anyone who has taken the time to read “Boxing Day.” Books are not fully realized until they’re read. Writing is a creative act, but so is reading. So if you’ve put in the effort to create with me, thank you.

Here’s to tackling 2021 with a blend of compassion and a fighting spirit.

Thank you to everyone who entered the “Boxing Day” holiday giveaway. Goodreads has now selected the winners! Thank you so much to everyone for entering and helping to give my novella some visibility.

Happy New Year!

One thing I love about this time of year is how many traditions celebrate the idea of “lights in the darkness.” Not that every tradition is identical, of course, but the element of light-in-darkness exists in many traditions. Diwali, Hanukkah, and Kwanzaa all have, as part of their celebrations, the lighting of candles. Many Christians light an Advent wreath. And, everyone knows this by now, I think, but Christmas trees are actually a pagan tradition, Pagan, and also adorned with lights. Depending on where you live, it gets pretty dark in December. Also depending on where you live, it gets pretty cold in December, too. (Hello, northern hemisphere.) A proliferation of light-infused celebrations helps to make a dark and cold time of year a little bit more cheery.

I’ve gone through a lot of different phases with the holiday season, or Christmas, as I learned to call it, when I was a kid. I called it “Christmas” but I had no sense of “Christ.” I was proud of myself because while other kids might spell it “Crissmas” or “Crissmiss” or even “Cwissmiss” I always spelled it correctly. (I was a good speller. I loved weird words that didn’t have logical spellings; I loved memorizing strangely spelled words.) So, to me, “Christmas” was one of those weird words. “Christmas” was a word like “honest” or “salmon” or “sword.” So, as a kid, that’s what the “Christ” in Christmas meant to me: a chance to prove what a kick-ass speller I was. (As you can imagine, this did not make me terribly popular with other children.)

My kid phase with Christmas was arguably the best, even though my parents fought quite a bit. They fought over putting lights on the tree, they fought over extended family. Like clockwork, they had at least one massive blowup fight before the holiday season was over. (It didn’t matter what the fight was about. I just knew it was coming.) But despite that, we always had great homemade food during the holidays: tasty meals and traditional sweets. We would set out a bowl of tangerines, and a bowl of nuts in shells, with a nutcracker. There were smaller bowls of Frango Mints scattered throughout the house, in case anyone had a chocolate craving. All the cooking, baking, and peeling of tiny oranges meant the house smelled awesome at Christmastime.

In the lead up to decorating the tree, we would pull out the tree ornaments and go through them. My favorite ornaments were my mom’s old knee-hugger elves from the 60s; I would play with them until we trimmed the tree. Throughout all these holiday preparations, Christmas music played constantly on our record player and stereo system. Harry Belafonte. A German choir singing carols. John Denver and the Muppets. I loved music, and I loved Christmas melodies. Most of all, though, I loved the lights. The lights on the tree, the lights on the house, the candles set in the middle of arrangements of fresh cut evergreen boughs, and holly, if we could find some in the neighborhood. Sitting in the dark gazing at all the glowing lights was one of my favorite parts of Christmas. Not for any religious reason; but because it was pretty, and sort of mysterious.

I also had an Advent calendar every year. Like the word “Christmas” the word “Advent” meant nothing to me. And, though one recurring fight my parents had at Christmas was over whether to attend church Christmas Eve (Mom wanted to attend, Dad did not) I still did not connect either “Christ” or “Advent” to Christmas. To me, “Advent” was an adjective to describe an awesome calendar with a pretty scene and a surprise picture to open every morning. To me, “Advent” meant a magical world where new mysteries were hidden behind the calendar’s face.

Eventually, I did find out about Christ and Advent. I went to church for awhile. I learned that these words were incredibly important to Christians. I even tried to be a Christian, for a significant chunk of time. I learned to infuse the holiday season with Christian religious meaning. Then, by and by, like a lot of people, I became dissatisfied with church. Why? For the usual reason: there often doesn’t seem to be much Christ-like behavior among Christians. There’s a lot of deciding who’s in, and who’s out; who goes to heaven, and who burns in hell, and also, most disturbingly, who should get preferential treatment while we’re all here on Earth. After awhile, church started to feel a lot like middle school, and going through the hell of middle school once was enough, thank you very much. After drifting away from church, I spent many Christmases caring only about getting some time off work, and maybe also getting a little tipsy.

But now, I’m finding I want to celebrate Christmas. I’ve had some terrible Christmases. It is not a time of year I assume will be automatically magical and wonderful. There’s a good bit of melancholy in Christmas for me now. There are people I’ve lost, relationships that haven’t worked out, and, this year, my beloved kitty cat is not here with me. She died in September, and I miss her. Then, there’s this year. 2020 has been a hard year for everyone. We’re still in the throes of a worldwide pandemic, and it’s been particularly lethal here in the United States. Still, this year, even though I was fighting feelings of being down and frightened, I decided to celebrate.

I did not celebrate to fulfill an expectation that I ought to be happy during the holidays, but rather to fight against the creeping feeling of horror that has been plaguing me this year. I bought decorations, including an Advent calendar. I put flameless candles all around. I purchased several vintage knee-hugger elves, the kind we had around when I was a kid. I put up a Christmas tree. I baked gingerbread, and shortbread Christmas cookies. I put together a four hour playlist of Christmas music, and played it in the apartment. None of these things brought me instant happiness, but they did make me feel better. It felt like fighting against the horror. Like pushing a little light into the darkness. It wasn’t religion, it was celebration in service of survival. It was human, and that’s what I am, a human. It’s the best I can do.

I published my novella “Boxing Day” one-year ago today. To celebrate, I’m running a Kindle promotion on it one last time, during the holiday week. It will be available for $0.99 through December 26 (Boxing Day, of course). After that, I won’t run any more promotions until I’ve published the sequel. So if you’re curious, or you don’t want to take your chances with the giveaway on Goodreads, or, if you’d rather read the story before it’s actually Boxing Day: this is your last chance to snap up “Boxing Day” for a buck. (See link to free preview on Amazon, below.)

What is “Boxing Day” about? Well, I suppose you could say it’s a story written from the perspective of the “other woman.” It’s also set during the holiday season; the story covers holidays from Thanksgiving through Boxing Day. So, if you like to read about people who live less-than-perfect lives during the holidays, this story might interest you. Plus, it’s a novella. You can read through it quickly. If you’ve made any pledges to complete a certain number of books by the end of the year, “Boxing Day” could help get you over the finish line!

If you’ve already purchased and read “Boxing Day,” thank you very much. You’ve all helped me get over the hump of publishing my first piece of writing, and I hope to publish many more in the future. I also hope people are staying well and as content as possible during these challenging times. Please think of others and wear a mask to protect them from getting sick. Also, please especially think of health care workers this holiday season. They are sacrificing so much so the rest of us have a chance to stay alive, and they need our support and cooperation.

Take care, and Happy Holidays!