Christmas Movies and Why We Watch Them
This post is part of a Christmas blog hop initiated by my friend, historical author Marin McGinnis! Read an excerpt of my brand new release CAN’T STOP LOVING YOU on her Dec. 8th blog and check it out every day this month to discover some great new authors! Thanks for including me, Marin!
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The other night, I was watching the end of a Hallmark channel movie when my husband walked into the room.
“Don’t ruin it,” I said. (He can’t help himself. His urge to say something, usually sarcastic, is too great.)
“Are they about to live happily ever after?” he asked, sitting down beside me.
“Shh,” I said. “Don’t talk. Just watch.”
The heroine was climbing up a ladder, her job to place the star atop the community center Christmas tree. (The community center that was saved from the wrecking ball, of course.)
“She’s going to fall, and the hero is going to catch her,” he predicted. (That’s the other thing he does. Tries to guess everything that’s going to happen. Anyone need a spare husband?)
“The hero is across the room,” I said. “She’s not going to fall. Please go away.”
At the top of the ladder, the cute German Shepherd that was in the movie nudged the ladder, causing the heroine to wobble precariously. The hero bolted across the room and was there in a flash!
Sure enough, she fell right into his arms, creating a beautiful moment where they shared a Christmas kiss. (No tongue. Because it’s Hallmark!) The movie ended.
“I should’ve been a romance writer,” my husband said, complimenting himself on his ability to predict things.
Honestly, I did not see that coming. Know why? Because I was under the magic spell of Hallmark Christmas movies. Sometimes (okay, often) sappy, always emotional, they bring out everything we love and hate about Christmas. But in general, they are about love. About mending fences. Facing up to your past. Correcting past wrongs. Finding someone who loves you for who you are and brings out the best in you (never the rich guy with lots of money and terrible parents).
“Let’s watch another one,” my husband said, putting his arm around me and settling in. Because secretly, he can’t resist the pull either. Now if only I could get him to watch in silence!
About CAN’T STOP LOVING YOU:
Lovers of romance understand that these stories, both on the screen and between the pages, touch longings deep within us to reconcile our own pasts, forgive ourselves for mistakes, and experience our deepest hopes and dreams for a loving relationship and family. Things are often far from perfect in a lot of these story worlds. But we latch onto the hope of things getting better for the hard-working but flawed heroine and the sincere, heart-of-gold hero. We want them to find happiness just like we want ourselves and our loved ones to find peace and a good, loving life.
The couple in my new release, CAN’T STOP LOVING YOU, truly have a lot of fence mending to do. Separated by a tragedy in their teenage years, they haven’t really spoken in twelve years. The story is about love, loss, friendship, family, and the idea that you have to confront your past in order to move on to the future.
Arabella D’Angelo worked hard to escape her past and move on—not an easy feat in her small town—until one day it returns in the form of her 6’2” darkly handsome, enigmatic first love, Roman Spikonos, who is settling back into town to take over his grandfather’s orchards, right next to her traditional Italian family’s garden center.
Arabella fell in love hook line and sinker with Roman Spikonos in high school. Their love was explosive, wonderful, and all-consuming…until she found herself pregnant, causing her to leave her private high school and give up her scholarship to the out-of-state she’d dreamed of attending. Yes, she was that girl in high school. And just like that, all her dreams fell apart. The life she’d imagined was nothing near the life she was suddenly forced to live.
And because of the anger of her traditional Italian father, she had to make an awful, heartbreaking choice that cost her everything. And then she had to somehow find the strength to move forward with her life.
My heroine undergoes a tremendous amount of growth as she is forced to confront feelings she’s swept under the rug for years, not only with Roman but also with her very supportive friend Ethan, and last but not least, her own father. CAN’T STOP LOVING YOU is a romance, and is told from both the hero and heroine’s points of view, but I consider it first and foremost Bella’s story.
I hope the end result is an emotional but hopeful read and a beautiful love story that took a very bumpy path to come full circle.
Buy CAN’T STOP LOVING YOU at these retailers!
Bio:
Miranda Liasson loves to write stories about courageous but flawed characters who find love despite themselves, because there’s nothing like a great love story. And if there are a few laughs along the way, even better! She’s a former Golden Heart winner who writes contemporary romance for Montlake Romance, Entangled, and soon for Grand Central. She lives in the Midwest with her husband, three kids, and Posey, a rescue cat with attitude.
Find me on Social Media here:
Website Facebook Author Page Twitter
Instagram Goodreads Amazon author page
Lastly, check out my release week tour with Rafflecopter giveaway here.
Release Week!
Just a quick note to say that many things are happening during the week ahead!
—CAN’T STOP LOVING YOU releases Tuesday, December 6th. It’s an emotional second-chance love story about love, loss, friendship, family, and one woman’s journey to confront her past so she can move on to her future. I hope you’ll check it out!
–I’l be around the blogosphere talking about my book, the holidays,writing, and other fun things. If you’re interested in reading the interviews and blog posts, check my Facebook author page for the schedule.
–Thanks for all your support! I truly appreciate it!
Miranda
Hubby in the Kitchen
“What dessert shall I make for tonight?” I innocently said to my husband before our friends came over a few weeks ago.
As I pretended to contemplate the options…cake, cookie bar, blah blah blah,…he remained engrossed in reading. So then I pulled out the stops. “Maybe I’ll make an apple pie.”
He instantly looked up and got that gleam in his eye that only those two words can conjure.
My husband loves making apple pie. Baking pie to him is what running a marathon is to other people–a challenge, a competition to outdo his previous work, a science experiment, and a race in efficiency. It also reminds him of his dad, a fabulous baker…who like his son, adored kitchen gadgets.
The spaceship has landed!
“I can make the pie,” hubby said.
Yes! I did a secret fist pump and checked that task off my list.
Ten minutes later, the kitchen was abuzz. “Can I help peel the apples?” I asked.
“I think you should just stay out of the way,” he said, not unkindly.
No problemo, I said, backing away. But not before I saw the fancy gadgets he’d assembled.
One was a gleaming little machine that peeled apples–actually, it did nine of them in five minutes. And left the peels in one long string. I could’ve made apple noodles out of them.
My grandma’s tried and true masher.
The other looked like a bright orange alien space ship had landed on our counter. Something called a Dynacube, that chopped all the apples into perfect little square pieces, again, in the blink of an eye.
For my hubby, baking is a chemistry experiment and it’s all about creating the best product in the least amount of time…which in my opinion, sometimes also leaves the most amount of dishes, but hey, as long as he washes the gadgets, I’m okay with helping out.
I am an anti-gadget, take-your-time kind of cook. I’m the person who shuns the salad spinner because it makes three extra dishes to wash and it takes too much time to pick all the leftover lettuce pieces out of the holes.
Mr. Liasson and his biceps…oops, I mean pie.
I’m the one who loves my grandmother’s eighty-year-old potato masher, the most sturdy and solid masher I’ve ever seen, which I still use to this day. No cords, no assembly needed.
Gadgets or no, the pie was spectacular. And the entertainment along the way was priceless. And hey, there’s nothing sexier than having a guy with big biceps make pie for you!
Avon KissCon
Katharine Ashe speaking to the writers of NEORWA (Northeast Ohio Romance Writers of America).
This week I had the great adventure of attending the fabulous event Avon KissCon in Cleveland, where eight amazing Avon authors spoke to the public in a panel and also took part in a smaller reception that many of my writer friends and I got to attend.
Avon publicist Pamela Jaffee with authors Katharine Ashe, Toni Blake, Linda Howard, Linda Jones, Susan Elizabeth Phillips, Jennifer Ryan, Jill Shelves, and Shelley Shepard Gray.
Historical romance author Katharine Ashe gave a talk beforehand to our local RWA chapter (NEORWA), where she shared her writing goals, helped us to think about why we write romance and what we wish to achieve from writing, and reminded us that you can’t be happy if you’re trying to achieve other people’s goals. In a very competitive industry, that rang very true! It was an awesome talk!
SEP with my friend and author Cate Grimm
Katharine Ashe, who graciously tolerated my “help,” lol.
The best part of the night for me, besides chatting with SEP and getting some amazing advice from Jill Shalvis, (whom I was probably staring at dumbstruck for the entire time) was being an “author assistant.” My job was to stand behind Katharine Ashe while she signed books and “help” her–by giving her her books, by moving people along who might not want to leave, taking fan pics, etc. Lol, she truly didn’t need my help but it was so awesome to ‘bodyguard’ and essentially be a fly on the wall while she chatted with fans and signed books.
My writer friends and I were in writer heaven. And very proud to be part of this wonderful, generous community.
We went for burgers
My 19 yr. old is a fan of a local drive-up place where they serve burgers right to your car via a tray they stick in your window. Every time my son comes home from college, he heads there with his friends (usually late at night) and returns telling me in stomach-rumbling detail about the billion-calorie meal he just consumed which was often topped off by a milkshake. (And the car he used usually smells like ketchup for a couple of days afterward.)
Recently, after a rough evening of volunteer work (lol), my friends and I found ourselves starving. So on impulse, we pulled into this place. We, who rarely eat burgers and even more rarely fries! (When did we stop eating french fries?!) So there we were, four middle-aged moms sitting in a car eating burgers and fries and talking and laughing like we were a carload of teenagers.
The funny thing was, we felt like we were doing something edgy. Out of character. And it felt so good!
We left asking ourselves, why don’t we do this more often? Yes, why don’t we? Work-life balance is always an issue. Everyone is always busy. It was just funny how stopping the merry-go-round enough to do something like eat a cheeseburger with your girlfriends could be so much damn fun.