Holiday Memories
Authors draw on their own experiences, their memories, their desire to give their stories an authentic edge.
Not that I’ve ever run across a dead Santa Claus as does my heroine in HOLIDAY IN CRIMSON...
Crawling around to see what had tripped her, Shelby froze, the breath caught in her throat.
“Oh, Lord!” she croaked hoarsely, unwilling to believe her eyes. For before her, the Christmas lights danced across a ludicrous scene: Santa Claus lay sprawled on his back next to her, eyes open and staring, mouth slack behind the fake beard and mustache. “Hey, Santa, wake up.”
But of course, Santa doesn’t...
So what about HOLIDAY IN CRIMSON comes from my own experiences?
As a child, I used to look forward to the day when Mom would take me to downtown Chicago to see the holiday windows. My favorites were always windows at the iconic Marshall Field’s, a department store that took up a whole block on State Street. The windows always told a story that captivated me. So in wanting to tell a holiday story, I immediately thought about a department store and a heroine who was in charge of the windows.
That isn’t the only thing about Shelby that comes from my past memories. Shelby lived in my first apartment in the city. Her love of the holiday came from me. She buys one special new ornament each year, so that she has a tree of memories. I used to do that with my husband Edward until a few years ago when I stopped having trees. Now I have lights and wreathes and special ornaments that I hang in the windows.
A really special memory is the scene where Shelby and Rand get to know each other better while cross-country skiing. That was taken from my own experience. Neither Edward nor I had ever been on cross-country skis before. But that year, they did indeed rent them out in Lincoln Park, and we had a huge snowfall. We were terrible at it. I kept breaking through the snow crust and getting stuck with a ski two feet below the surface. I remember having to take off the ski and let Edward help me get it back on. It was an exhausting day. And a magical one. And I had great fun using it in this story.
What makes Christmas magic for you?
Share a holiday memory...
With 95 novels and 7 million books in print, New York Times and USA Today bestselling author Patricia Rosemoor is fascinated with "dangerous love" – combining romance with danger. She has won a Golden Heart from Romance Writers of America and two Reviewers Choice and two Career Achievement Awards from RT BOOKreviews, and in her other life, she teaches Popular Fiction and Suspense-Thriller Writing, credit courses at Columbia College Chicago.
You’ll find Patricia at Website | Twitter | Facebook | Goodreads
Westbrook Department Store’s Christmas party wasn’t that wild–but Santa ended up dead! Window designer Shelby Corbin suddenly finds herself the prime suspect in his murder. CEO Rand McNabb’s romantic attentions both thrill her and frighten her. Is Westbrook’s impossibly sexy co-owner really helping Shelby search for the truth about that fatal night? Or does Rand have a deadlier motive for courting the only possible witness to the crime…
In Nightmare in Crimson
Last holiday, Pippa McNabb’s faithless husband was found murdered in a Santa suit after a Christmas party. Another year, another Christmas party, and another dead Santa – this time, run down by eight tiny reindeer and a sleigh. And this time, Pippa is the prime suspect. Sexy sleigh driver Sky Thornton seems intent on helping her, but is the man who knows too much about her really trying to clear her name, or is he trying to frame her for a murder he committed?
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