I mentioned a few posts back that I’d been thinking about writing a holiday-themed short story featuring one or more of my side characters. It’s an idea I’ve been kicking around for some time, especially since it would provide an incredible opportunity to get to know the supporting cast a bit better. As the temperatures turned cooler here in Arizona — and since I had a few weeks before starting work on my latest full-length novel — I decided to go ahead and give it a try.
Ultimately, I wound up writing two — Snow Drifts and Baubles. Both of them are from the perspective of one of my regular side characters — Suzanne Kellerman and Alejandro Ortega-Cortez, respectively — and both take place during that most magical moment on the calendar, i.e. the days surrounding December 25th. About the only mystery these stories delve into the nature of love itself, making them wonderfully light tales with a nice holiday twist entirely appropriate for the Hallmark Movie Channel’s Christmas Marathon. I don’t normally write within the romance genre, but I have to admit it was a startlingly refreshing change of pace to be able to focus purely on the emotions of my main characters, leaving the usually darker aspects of my investigative procedurals on the shelf.
Sadly, I have to hold Baubles back until next year as it unfortunately contains material that would seriously spoil the next two books in the Vasily Korsokovach Investigates series. I tried to make up for that mistake by setting Snow Drifts in that tiny window of time between the events of Blindsided and the second Sean Colbeth Investigates book, Outsider, a period when the relationship between Suzanne and Sean seems to have blossomed (without us seeing it happen). And I have to admit, I have something of a penchant for going back in time and filling the blanks; oddly, it’s far easier to do now that there are more books in the series that you might think. That’s not to say there weren’t some surprises that appeared as I was writing — even Suzanne can make her own version of a left turn, it seems. Like I always say, I might have created these characters, but they seem to have taken on a life of their own.
Snow Drifts is also the first ebook I am making available on multiple platforms. I’m not sure I will do that with the mainstream novels, but then again, we’ll see how it goes. I hope you like what I created — make sure you get your copy when it appears on November 7th on whatever platform you choose for reading.