It's Christmas in July!

Well, sort of. For those of you who still prefer print books over e-books, my short Christmas romance, A Candlelight Courting, is now available in a "gift size" paperback!

Margaret (Literary Chanteuse) wrote the following about A Candlelight Courting:

"The author has created one of the most unique love stories I think I have ever read. Christina, a compelling young woman during medieval times . . .  is faced with marriage instead of fulfilling her dream of dedicating her life to the church. How she manages to find love and a guardian of her heart in Burthred, her betrothed is amazing. An excellent choice for Christmas or anytime of the year."

A Candlelight Courting: A Short Christmas Romance is a 2012 RONE Award Finalist. Print copies are currently on sale at Amazon for only $3.75. (Regular price $3.95.) How long this sale will last is up to the caprices of Amazon, but if you'd like to snag a copy for yourself and a few copies for stocking stuffers, now might be a good time. :-)

A Candlelight Courting is also available in Kindle, Nook, and multiple e-book formats for $1.99.

Sweet Saturday Samples

Welcome back to Sweet Saturday Samples, where authors share sweet, clean excerpts from their works. Yes, I know, I haven't participated in this hop for quite awhile, but I wanted to jump back in and share with you a sweet little taste of my new Christmas story, A Candlelight Courting: A Short Christmas Romance (rated G).

Here is the opening of A Candlelight Courting.

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England 1168

Norgate Castle

Christina ran her thumb over the third smooth bead and repeated another Ave. Her parents had taken away her devotional table, with its carved crucifix and kneeling bench and a rest support for her arms while she repeated her rosary. They thought they had taken her rosary, too, but she had hidden a second one under her mattress.

“Hail Mary, full of grace ...”

Her chamber’s floor chafed her knees through her woolen skirts. Her parents had removed her prayer pillow, too. She should have thought to dispose of that comfort herself. The austerity her father viewed as punishment only prepared her for her chosen future. She had blessed him for the reminder and promptly blown out her candles and doused the coals in her brazier, as well. Her teeth chattered against the chill air that seeped through her gown’s coarse fabric, but she pressed doggedly on with her prayer.

“ ... blessed art thou among women ... ”

Her voice pitched higher and louder as the strains of the music swelled from the great hall of Norgate Castle below stairs, until her determination to drown out the competing noise nearly left her shouting. Why were they not singing solemn hymns on this holy night, instead of dancing like heathens? She had been compelled to attend enough of her father’s Christmas feasts through the years to recognize the driving beat that thrummed the timbers of the floor as one of the lively carole dances Lord Alun was partial to.

She imagined her father roaring in his deep bass voice, “The holly and the ivy,” as his heavy body lumbered around in an otherwise lightly skipping circle that included her mother and uncles and aunts and cousins and more meddlesome neighbors than she cared to number. “The rising of the sun, the running of the deer,” they would sing in their turn in united refrain. When her uncle the abbot reproved them, they would widen their eyes and innocently deny the words held any pagan meanings, but rather a mystical symbolism so wise a priest as he could surely discern.

He had frowned at them for eighteen years, but this was the year she would prove his strictures had fallen on one pair of listening ears.

Her thumb moved to another bead. “Hail Mary, full of grace ... ”

She wondered if God objected to being bellowed at on Christmas Eve. Or to grumbling stomachs that rumbled a low counterpoint to prayer.

Between the music, her determination to ignore her hunger, and her vociferous invocation, she did not hear the tread of footsteps outside her door. A sudden blast of pipe and drum warned her too late that someone had flung open the door. She sprang up from her knees and tucked her hands with the betraying rosary behind her back, thankful for the protective gloom that hid her motion. She wondered if she could cast herself onto her bed in pretended slumber before the intruder saw.

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Thank you for stopping by! If you'd like to read more, A Candlelight Courting: A Short Christmas Romance is only $1.99 on Amazon, Smashwords, and Sony. Also available in the Apple Bookstore. (I'm still waiting for the Nook version to go live. In the meantime, you can download epub copies from Smashwords, if you'd like.)

Now click here to find some more Sweet Saturday Samples.

InD'Tale Review of "A Candlelight Courting" ~ 4.5 stars and a Crowned Heart!

I was so excited to see this review of my new medieval e-novella, A Candlelight Courting: A Short Christmas Romance in InD'Tale Magazine that I just had to share! Here's a portion of what the reviewer, Beth Chamberlain, had to say:

"What  an enlightening and enjoyably tender read! Though short in length (the only downside of this story), it is long in understanding. The morals and morays of the middle ages are brought out in this story regarding the place of women and their choice of the roles they were to live. In the telling of this tale the dialogue is written with a sensitivity and a knowledge of the history of that time period. As one reads, one comes to understand that some of the things that we have taken for granted, were once very precious to those who came before us, and their sacrifices, hopefully, were not in vain.
Beautifully done, Ms. DiPastena!"

Read the entire review at http://indtale.com/reviews/candlelight-courting

A Candlelight Courting: A Short Christmas Romance is available for only $1.99 on Kindle and Smashwords.

Cover Reveal: A Candlelight Courting

I just received the cover art for A Candlelight Courting from the always amazing Jaimey Grant at An Author's Art! I think it's beautiful. I hope you do, too!

When Burthred comes courting on Christmas Eve, Meg rejects his advances. She has her heart set on becoming a nun and insists that he call her Christina, the spiritual name she has chosen for herself. She tries to make him swear on her box of holy relics that he will not pursue her, but he carefully words his oath to allow him to stay in her candlelit chamber and try to change her mind.

What Meg does not confess is that her reliquary box holds a secret.

Burthred needs a wife, and no one will satisfy him except Meg. He swore on his father’s deathbed that he would marry her. But Burthred has a secret, too. When they come together before the Yule fire, their shared revelations will either join their hearts together or tear them apart.

A Candlelight Courting: A Short Christmas Romance

Coming October 2012

Short stories update

I have a few exciting bits of news to share with you! Isabel's story has finally received a shiny new title, Caroles on the Green, and will be appearing in October in a new romance anthology series called Timeless Romance. The first release will feature six sweet winter romance short stories by the following well-loved historical romance authors: Sarah M. Eden, Heidi Ashworth, Annette Lyon, Donna Hatch, and Heather B. Moore. These lovely authors were kind enough to invite me to join them. The cover has been designed and I'm excited to share it with you. Ta-dah! What do you think?

No, I didn't design it, but I admire the person who did.

Meg's story also finally has a title: A Candlelight Courting. Stay tuned. Cover coming soon!

The best postcard I ever received

A dear friend recently sent me this postcard from England. The pictures are taken from the King's Chamber in the Great Tower of Dover Castle. According to the description on the back, this room has been restored by historians "to re-present the rooms in a late 12th century style."

My friend chose this postcard for me because this tower was built by order of King Henry II of England, and she knew how much I love Henry II. What she didn't know was that by sending this particular postcard to me, she was providing me the answer to a research mystery that I had so far been unable to resolve through several late night internet research sessions. My research question seemed simple enough: Did they or didn't they sleep on pillows in the Middle Ages? Not surprisingly, my first assumption was, "Well, of course they did!" But I discovered several contradictory opinions on the internet, many sources insisting that pillows came into use much later, and that most people used bolsters. I have a scene in one of the short Christmas stories I'm working on (Meg's story) that involves a pillow. I had been wracking my brains for a way to rewrite it when I received this postcard, and lo and behold, what did I find on this postcard of a restoration of a "late 12th century style" bedroom?

Those look mighty like pillows to me! (A little blurry. They didn't blow up well from the postcard scan, but still, they're clearly pillows!)

By the way, that round thing the pillows are leaning against is a bolster.

So I think I'll keep my pillow scene in Meg's story, and if anyone questions me on the matter, I'll just hold up my postcard and say, "You don't believe me? Ask the historians at Dover Castle!"

Summary Sunday

As I mentioned in my last post, I finished my first draft of Meg's story this week, and started a second story about a woman named Isabel...so of course, for now, I'm calling it Isabel's story. :-) Here are a few new lines from each for this week:


Monday: The reliquary hit the floor with a great clatter of metal and wood, tottered, and fell on its side, jarring the lid loose and tumbling out its contents. (Meg's story)


Tuesday: Like the sideboards set up for her father’s men and the meddlesome neighbors he had invited, the high table was still strewn with the remains of an extravagant Christmas feast, including the picked off head of a wild boar that must have come from Burthred’s hunting chase and the browning core of the apple which she knew had been stuck in the poor beast’s mouth. (Meg's story)


Wednesday: She wondered if this was the expression he had worn when he had defeated three knights at once. (Meg's story)


Thursday: “It frightened me, Isabel, to see you weep so.” (Isabel's story)


Friday: “I would not flitter so if you would give me something more amusing to do than embroider more shirts for Father.” (Isabel's story)


Saturday: It had appalled her, however, to discover Ronwen so insecure in the knight’s budding devotion as to feel the only way to secure him safely and permanently was to see Isabel married to another man. (Isabel's story)

What Am I Writing Now?

I finished my first draft of Meg's story (official title still to be determined) this week, and found a whole new cast of characters already clamoring to have their turn on the page. Since my life is a little topsy-turvy at the moment, making it difficult for me to concentrate on writing long forms (like, oh, say, another novel), I've decided to focus on a few short medieval stories over the next few months. My first two will be Christmas stories...well, more or less. Meg's a little less. My new story, which I'm currently calling Isabel's story, is a little more Christmassy. Or I hope it will be when I finish it, anyway.

I wanted to find some pictures of my two new heroines to share with you, but apparently these women only exist in my head because none of the pictures I found quite match my imagination. But here's a little tidbit for you. Meg's story revolves around a reliquary box. What is a reliquary? It's a container for holy relics, usually objects associated with the Catholic saints. Many reliquaries were quite elaborate, such as this one, currently housed in the Louvre.

Meg's reliquary is somewhat simpler, made of carved wood instead of gilded over in gold. Hers does have a cross carved on the top and some other scrolling around the sides, but instead of the figures decorating the four corners, Meg's reliquary has a jewel in each corner in this order:

Top left: jasper

Top right: a sardonyx stone

Bottom left: an emerald

Bottom right: an amethyst

My hero, Burthred, guessed the meaning of the first three, though not the fourth. Can you guess what each stone represents, too?

Summary Sunday

The end of Meg's story is in sight! Well, at least the first draft. Here are a few new sentences from this week:

Monday: “I like Meg. Heaven did not strike me down for kissing her, so perhaps it would not object if I married her.”

Tuesday: “I do not know what is so funny,” she gasped, even as she failed to curb her perplexing mirth.

Wednesday: "I vow, I will be quite proud of my pretty, plump wife.”

Thursday: (Another day out of town)

Friday: “Perhaps Christina could be content with a holy pilgrimage,” he said, apparently sensing his offer of a hair shirt had not been enough to persuade her.

Saturday: “If I were…different,” he murmured, his palms still over his eyes, “and could have my choice of all the women in the world, having spent this one night with Christina, I would choose her alone for my wife.”

Summary Sunday

I struggled between writing and research this week, but I managed to come up with a few new sentences for Meg's story to share with you.

Monday: “I wish you had been freckled or homely or fat,” he said. 

Tuesday: She stared at his profile, so grateful for his forebearance that tears started to her eyes again.

Wednesday: He was still tall, his face still pleasant to gaze at, his brown hair still slightly wavy, his eyes still steady and grey.

Thursday: “I have sworn you no harm, Christina, but I will not let the shadows hide the truth from you."

Friday: She smiled again, this time so that she would not cry.

Saturday: She snapped her head back and glared at him, unsure which made her angrier, that he should insist on denigrating himself this way or that he had spoiled the afterglow of her first kiss.

Summary Sunday

Here are a few new sentences from Meg's story this week:

Monday: She thought the corner of his mouth gave a quirk, but it may have just been a trick of the candle’s light.

Tuesday: What if the heavens smote her before she could strike these sins from her heart?

Wednesday: (Today was an out of town day. I wimped out on writing when I got home.)

Thursday: "‘Our lands will double in size when you are Burthred’s wife,’ my father never grows tired of reminding me."

Friday: How often had she come upon them conversing with frowns in low voices and caught her father mutter the name “Burthred”, followed by an impatient curse, before one of them looked up to see her and shushed the other.

Saturday: (My writing session turned into a research session. I discovered the Google Play Books app and downloaded it to my iPad, along with the free e-book, Saint Edmund, King and Martyr. Watch for a mention of Tolinus the sacrist if I ever finish this story.)

Summary Sunday

I'm taking a little hiatus from Emilie's story to work on an idea for a medieval Christmas short story. Yes, I know it's early and it certainly doesn't feel very Christmasy here at 100+ degrees, but I'm a slow writer, so I have to start now to have something by December. (I do hope to get a first draft finished well before then, though!)

My new little story is set in medieval England and is about a young woman named Meg. Here are some sentences I wrote for her story this week.

Monday: (Out of town, taking my sister to the airport, although I did make some starting notes when I got home.)

Tuesday: She stumbled back against her bed and screamed like a madwoman.

Wednesday: "I will not marry you and if I hear so much as a footfall, I’ll crack you over the head.”

Thursday: "Do you wish to spend eternity in a kettle of boiling water or roasting in a fiery oven or in a field of eternal lice while chattering, fork-tailed demons claw your flesh and laugh at your piteous cries?”

Friday: “If you try to harm me while these relics are in my hand, you will very likely drop down dead.”

Saturday: “Your former betrothed is dead.”