Monday, November 5, 2012

Christmas 2012 Series: Let It Snow

Hey everyone, Annette here. Today we're featuring another Christmas story as we continue our Monday series on Christmas books releasing this year. This time, Yvonne Lehman is stopping by to share about her book, Let it Snow. Happy reading!

Welcome, Yvonne, please share a bit about your book, Let it Snow, releasing this month from Barbour Heartsong.

Twenty-five years ago Nancy Walker and Woodrow Lawing are neighbors, and friends until the night seventeen-year-old Nancy whacks Woody with a snowball and he chases her behind a tree. She kisses him and expresses her undying love for him. At his age of twenty-three, and being the best friend of Nancy’s older brother, Woody will not speak of love to this teenager, but stresses friendship.

After Nancy is an adult, and Woody can be open about his love for her, a misunderstanding keeps them apart. Both believe they have been rejected by the other, and go their separate ways.

Now that circumstances bring them together again, Woody a bachelor and Nancy a widow, each tries to revert to being friends. However, the misunderstanding that separated them is solved and they wonder if it’s too late to be honest about their enduring love for each other.

But then, Christmas is a magical time, when a soft snow falls…miracles can happen.

What makes your Christmas novel different than others you’ve seen or read?

The main characters, the female widow and the male bachelor, relate again after having lived separate lives for the past twenty-five years. They were neighbors when she was seventeen and declared her love for the twenty-three-year-old who began to take note of her but believed she was too young for him at that time.

How did the story come about? 

It is the third in a Washington DC series, and I wanted each book in the series to be different and at a different time of year so I chose the Christmas season for this one. Setting had something to do with it. Also, I thought it would be interesting to see what would happen with a couple who had been neighbors, their ages preventing them from getting together when she was seventeen and he twenty-three, but now are available.

What time of year did you write it and how did you motivate yourself to write a Christmas novel at that time of year?
 
Not sure, but it seems like it was Christmastime when I came up with the idea of the third in the series being set at Christmas. I’d already two others set in Washington DC and wanted a different season from the others. Most of the time, it’s the characters and their problems or conflicts that motivate me more than the time of year or setting. But Christmas is always an enjoyable time of year to write about. So many possibilities for scenes.

What’s next for you in writing?
 
I’m currently writing a series of three contemporary romance novels set in Savannah, Georgia for Harlequin/Heartsong. Recently finished the first one, The Caretaker’s Son, and now writing the second, Ghost of a Chance.

The date the book releases – Heartsong (Barbour) will release Let it Snow in November 2012, and then Harlequin Heartsong will release it in February 2013.

Thanks for visiting, Yvonne! 

Yvonne Lehman is an award-winning, best-selling author of more than 3,000,000 books in print, who founded and directed the Blue Ridge Mountains Christian Writers Conference for 25 years, is now director of the Blue Ridge “Autumn in the Mountains” Novelist Retreat. She mentors for the Christian Writers Guild. She earned a Master’s Degree in English from Western Carolina University and has taught English and Creative Writing on the college level. Her latest releases include eight ebooks for Barbour’s Truly Yours line, A Knight to Remember (Heartsong), Let it Snow (Heartsong, November 2012), and her 50th novel, Hearts that Survive – A Novel of the TITANIC (Abingdon).