Tag Archive | Christmas stories

A Baby Shower Means the Baby is Coming Soon…

I’m excited to say I figured out some backstory and a plan for the United Shifter Force Christmas for the Christmas anthology I’m doing with a group of shifter authors. I’m not sure of the list. It keeps changing. But when I have it, I’ll share it. I think it’s coming out in December. More on that later.

My 4thewords Avatar. My granddaughter loves to help me dress her. lol I have trouble dressing her the way I want, unless she’s not around. I’ve earned all this by writing to fulfill quests.

I had to look up writing prompts for Christmas stories and I had it! So much fun. The thing about writing prompts is they’re so generic that anyone can used them and come up with a totally different story. I already have some backstory on the human homicide detective and I’ve started the story in different ways twice already, but now I have it. The first story didn’t have him. The second, he was working on a homicide. I write romantic suspense so writing them during a Christmas story is par for the course. But this time, I wanted to write something lighter. No murders this time. At least that’s what I say. What do I know? As I get into the story, a dead body might show up.

But for now, it’s more lighthearted and different fun. As I was brainstorming the hero and heroine I came up with a connection they’d had years earlier. I can’t plot out a book but at least I can set up the motivation and goals and occupations of the persons involved. The heroine also works at the United Shifter Force, but she’s a gray wolf.

Writing prompts are great because it gets me out of my own mindset and gives me ideas that I can twist around and use. Here were a couple. You can do all kinds of different things with a couple of prompts like this.

  1. A Christmas card arrives in the mail fifty years after it was delivered.
  2. The Christmas ornament is supposedly enchanted.   

If I were writing a fantasy, the Christmas ornament one would be fun. But it could be anything: it shouldn’t have been there. It was tossed years ago. She saw it in a store, but nobody admits they bought it for her or how it got there. She swore something moved inside it when she was looking at it. Like a glimpse of a Christmas past–of snow and ice skating on a lake and then in a blink of an eye, all she can see is her own reflection. Just anything that gives the imagination a run for the money.

Maybe I can find one of these to use for the Christmas story I need to write for Red Wolf after Billionaire!

So I went to the grocery store yesterday morning first thing and they were still out of some things, and a lot of items had limit signs on them. This is all due to the ice storm, I think.

I turned in my marketing materials yesterday morning for White Wolf and I’m working on proofing Dreaming of the Wolf 10th anniversary book. It’s 410 pages with the new novella included, and I’m up to 86 pages so far. I did work on the print version of Saving  the White Cougar’s cover also today. I wish I had gotten more done! I had dinner with the kids and then today is the baby shower for a couple of hours, but before that, I hope to get a lot more of Dreaming done.

I was working with my granddaughter on writing her numbers. It’s interesting how she always starts from top to bottom. I’m trying to teach her the “right” way because what if the teachers don’t like her writing the “wrong” way and mark her down? But the thing is, if she can draw her letters, and her alphabet, and they look great, what difference does it make?

I remember my son having trouble with math in school, and I was teaching him how to do some of it the way I learned to do and he was doing a great job and coming up with the right answers finally. But the teacher told him, no, you have to do it her way! What way matters if you can get the right answer? Right?

So I try to teach my granddaughter how to do her numbers and letters the way they want them done, but if I were queen? I would let her do it the way it works for her, if in doing so, she did a great job. When my son was young, the teacher told them to draw something for class and it was Thanksgiving, so the other kids all drew sailing ships. My son drew a Star Wars fighter plane.

Let the creativity flow and you never know what brilliance you might discover. He’s the one who has just created a game that he plans to release this summer. Though he tells me there’s a lot of math involved in game development, and guess what? He does just fine.

I have too much to do, too little time!

Have a great day!

Terry

“Giving new meaning to the term alpha male where fantasy is reality.”
Connect with Terry Spear:
Website: http://www.terryspear.com
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/421434.Terry_Spear
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TerrySpearParanormalRomantics
Twitter: https://twitter.com/TerrySpear
Wilde & Woolly Bears: http://www.celticbears.com
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Cookies for Santa–Cougar Style

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Cookies for Santa

Terry Spear

Trish made the best ever gingerbread cookies this year, just for Santa. Why? She hoped this Christmas, Santa would bring her a daddy. Not just any kind of daddy, but a fun-loving cougar daddy. One who would run with her brother and her through the woods with their mommy, and who would go swimming with them too. Course her twin brother, Jeff, wanted their daddy to ride horses with them when they went to Hal and Tracey Haverton’s horse ranch too.

Mommy said they needed to ask for something other than a daddy because Santa, even a cougar Santa, couldn’t always find the right daddy for a family who needed one.

And Mommy was right. Christmas came and no daddy was sitting under the Christmas tree.

Trish sighed. She wasn’t giving up. So her New Year’s resolution was to be the best little girl ever, and then maybe her mommy would find a daddy for them.

But Mommy said that the year was a very long time. And making a resolution like that might not mean they would get a daddy either.

So Trish decided to be herself. To help her mother, to play with her brother, to do what she was supposed to do, when she wasn’t doing what she wasn’t supposed to be doing, and like Mommy said, there was always next Christmas.

They never even made it to Christmas because something happened in the summer. Something wonderful, and bad, and everything in between and it all started when they took a trip to see their Great Aunt Emily, who was like a grandmother to them.

She was almost like Santa Claus. Yes, Trish thought, she was Santa Claus—a summer Santa Claus.

And this Christmas she was making gingerbread cookies for Aunt Emily.

The End

If you want to know what happened that summer, be sure to read Double Cougar Trouble!

I have a couple of more authors sharing Christmas stories for a few days too so be sure and stay tuned!

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Trouble doesn’t always come in twos.

Jack Barrington still has an army obligation that takes him away from the woman who had enchanted him when they were both in college, but Dottie Hamilton refuses to marry a man in the military because of the problem of raising cougar shifter cubs in foreign lands and the worry he may be killed while overseas like her cousin was, leaving a wife and three little ones behind. When Jack returns home to see his family and Dottie’s only living relative, her aunt, she convinces Dottie to bring her twins home to see her—and to see him. Jack has two-and-a-half weeks to convince Dottie to wait for him while he finishes his last three months on active duty. And learns the truth. Dottie’s twins are his own flesh and blood.

Dottie has made a lot of mistakes in her life, including providing a father for her children by marrying a man, who turns out to be an arms’ dealer. When Jack returns to her after finishing his army obligation, he’s determined to prove he’s the mate she needs in her life, and he has every intention of being the father to his four-year-old twins. Now the criminal deeds of Dottie’s dead ex-husband have come back to haunt her. And she and Jack and their cougar friends will have to band together to stop the arms’ dealers before they destroy what the cougars hold dear.

Amazon:  https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01MSSMACE

Kobo:  https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/double-cougar-trouble

Smashwords: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/685839

Barnes and Noble:http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/double-cougar-trouble-terry-spear/1125245644?ean=2940157024727

iBooks:https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/double-cougar-trouble/id1180650778?mt=11

Google Play:https://play.google.com/store/books/details/Terry_Spear_Double_Cougar_Trouble_Heart_of_the_Cou?id=0oCZDQAAQBAJ&hl=en

And the print version is in process also.🙂

Terry Spear

“Giving new meaning to the term alpha male where fantasy is reality.”

Connect with Terry Spear:

Website: http://www.terryspear.com

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/421434.Terry_Spear

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TerrySpearParanormalRomantics

Twitter: https://twitter.com/TerrySpear

Wilde & Woolly Bears: http://www.celticbears.com