EXCERPT

Snowy Night with a Stranger (Anthology)

• The idea to put Charles Dickens in the story came to me while I was already in the second or third chapter of writing it. The hero had issues with Christmas, which of course made me think of Scrooge. And when I caught him saying something like "It's all a humbug," I thought, "Watch it there, that's awfully close to Dickens." That's when it dawned on me--wasn't Dickens pretty young at this time? I went to the timeline of his life and realized that the dates for my tale fit perfectly in the small window of time that his family was in London, but before his father went to debtor's prison and Dickens had to work in the blacking factory. I took that to be a good omen, and voila--Dickens was a character in my story!

• Snapdragon is a crazy holiday game they used to play in the Regency, where partygoers fished raisins out of a bowl of burning brandy. Yep, you heard me right. Brandy that is set afire. You put your fingers into the flames to snatch raisins. Don’t ask me why our ancestors found that entertaining, but apparently they enjoyed it so much that they even had a song to go with it. Of course, reading about the game wasn’t enough for me, so my husband and a friend and I experimented. Or rather, they watched while I experimented. They were oddly reluctant to thrust their hands into blue flames—I can’t imagine why! But it turned out that our ancestors weren’t so crazy after all. They used shallow bowls to make it easy to snatch the raisins and although the low blue flame seemed to put off lots of heat, the fire wasn’t deep and the brandy wasn’t that hot. My fingers got a bit sore, but that was all. I could honestly see how people might find it amusing to fight for the raisins. I even discovered that some people still play it! 

• The real inventor of the fuse was a guy named William Bickford. But hey, I don't think he'd mind my using him as inspiration for my romantic hero, do you?

• Christmas in Yorkshire is very interesting. Unfortunately, I couldn't use most of the information I found, but I did use an online source to determine what carols might have been sung then.

Nominated for a 2009 National Readers' Choice Award  for Best Historical Novella for “When Sparks Fly”