Behind the Scenes with Home for Christmas

Ooh, look at that date! Can you believe how close we are to Christmas already?

With that in mind, I thought I’d show you a glimpse behind the scenes of my festive series - Home for Christmas. This series consists of three standalone books: Baxter’s Christmas Wish, The Other Side of Christmas, and Christmas with Cary. They’re not connected in any way, except for theme - finding home at Christmas. And they certainly weren’t written as a series. In fact, the first of the three started life - just as the first Bramblewick novel did - as a People’s Friend pocket novel.

Baxter’s Christmas Wish began as All Because of Baxter, and was actually set in the summer. The inspiration for the story struck when I was at work in my day job. One of my colleagues had a boxer dog, and she regaled us with tales of how naughty he was, and all the things he got up to. This started the cogs in my mind turning, and before long I had an idea about my own loveable boxer dog and what his story might be.

When I’d finished it, I sent it to my friend, Jo Bartlett, who’d had a story published by DC Thomson as a pocket novel, and asked her opinion. She thought it would be perfect for that market, so I duly sent it off to DC Thomson and tried to put it out of my mind, knowing how hard it can be to be to get a story accepted by them.

I can’t remember exactly when I heard back from them but what I do remember was the sheer disbelief and euphoria when I got a yes! All Because of Baxter was published as a People’s Friend pocket novel, and was then picked up by Ulverscroft and published in large print as part of their Linford Romance Library. It’s still to be found in libraries and in fact, when I was part of a panel for the East Riding Libraries’ Festival of Words in 2023, I actually found a copy in the library at Hornsea, which absolutely made my day.

But I wasn’t finished with the story. I decided it would make sense to publish it myself to prolong its life and reach more readers, and for that purpose I thought that it would be better to adapt it, turning it into a Christmas story and changing the title to Baxter’s Christmas Wish.

The second in the series (although they can be read in any order as they’re completely standalone) is The Other Side of Christmas. If we’re being strictly accurate, this story actually came first, as it started life as a short story in an anthology called Winter Tales, which The Write Romantics had put together in aid of charity. They’d enlisted several author friends to contribute a short story each, to add to the ones they’d written themselves. When I met Alex Weston and Jessica Redland for the first time, they asked me if I’d like to contribute one, too. I said yes without hesitation, but then panicked all the way home. I didn’t know if I could write a short story! What had I been thinking?

Well, somehow I got the idea for The Other Side of Christmas. I’d love to tell you where the inspiration came from, but I honestly can’t. It just seemed to be there suddenly. I can tell you that its setting was inspired by a Holderness village called Easington and its surrounding area, and that I’ll be returning to that area with my new Skelsea Cross series later in 2025!

Anyway, this was a bit of an experiment for me, and not only because I wasn’t sure if I could write a short story, but because of the structure of it. Katy’s driving home for Christmas, and her journey is told in present tense, but I used past tense to recount the last few years of her life, what’s led her to this particular moment in time, and why she’s feeling so gloomy and not looking forward to Christmas at all.

The Write Romantics approved the story and it appeared in Winter Tales in November 2014 - my first published work!

A few years later, I decided to expand the story a little and turn it into a novella in time for a Christmas release. I really liked Katy and Luke, and I wanted to delve a little deeper into their romance. Because its theme was about finding a home for Christmas, similar to Baxter’s Christmas Wish, I thought I’d join them together as a series, and came up with an obvious series title: Home for Christmas was born!

The third and final book in the trilogy is called Christmas with Cary. It might be true to say that this is my favourite of the three. I love Molly and Cary, and their whole relationship tugs at my heartstrings. It really is a second chance romance - although it’s fair to say that these two had way more than two chances. It just kept on going wrong! But now it’s Christmas, and Molly knows there’s never going to be a better time to put things right. She just has to find Cary first…

Christmas with Cary was, without doubt, inspired by my love of Cary Grant films, and each chapter is titled with the name of one of his films. I got the idea when I watched Penny Serenade, in which he stars with Irene Dunne. This couple’s life story is told in the form of flashbacks, with each memory stemming from a record that means something to them.

My idea was that, instead of a record sparking a memory, it would be a Cary Grant film. So Molly has a stash of DVDs to watch as she settles into her holiday cottage in a cosy, East Yorkshire village, psyching herself up to seek out the lost love of her life.

Don’t worry if you’re not a Cary Grant fan, or you’re not familiar with his work. I ran this book past a few people who’d never seen a single film of his in their lives, and it all made perfect sense to them and they loved it just as much. (Well, nearly. You’ll probably get a teensy bit more out of it if you’re familiar with his work!)

Molly was desperate to find Cary and also to find a place to call home, so it fitted perfectly with the other two books and made a fitting finale to the Home for Christmas series.

If you haven’t read them yet, you can find out more about them and also their buying links here.

Happy reading!