Hi Alana, thank you so much for joining me today. Can you tell me about your novel, A Modern Midlife Christmas Carol and what inspired it?

Thank you so much!

My book is about a frazzled wife/mother who is fast approaching burnout for the holiday season.

I am part of the “sandwich generation” myself, meaning I’m caught in the middle of helping aging parents, but I still have my own children at home to care for as well. I’ve had a lot of powerful conversations with friends and colleagues about navigating this challenging time of life and I drew upon our collective experiences, embellished and fabricated, to explore those feelings under the added pressure of holiday expectations.

I thought this stressed wife/mother character would make a fantastic modern day Scrooge and went from there.

What’s your typical writing day like? Do you like to write in a particular spot? Silence or noise? Any other writing rituals?

I don’t like to be around other people when I write, so depending on who’s home, I’ll either write with my laptop on the dining room table, or closed up in my office.

I prefer to have music playing when I write. I also create a playlist for every book I write. Certain songs act as theme songs for different characters, or they get me in the right frame of mind for certain scenes I’m writing. If I have to step away from writing for a few days due to life, the music will put me right back in the world I’m creating.

What were the challenges you found when writing your novel especially when A Christmas Carol is so well known?

I wanted it to harken back to the original, but not too much. Scrooge himself makes a brief appearance in my book, but I really enjoyed playing with the idea of an overtaxed woman who’s lost her Christmas cheer but is expected to make holiday magic for everyone in her family.

To give myself more direction, I wanted to keep the length of my book to about the length of Dickens’ classic. His is a little more than 30,000 words. Mine came in around 37,000.

Which songs would make up a playlist for your book? 

Continue reading →

by