Christmas--in 3-Part Harmony- Justiss, Burrows and Brisbin

My Favorite Christmas Carol by Terri Brisbin

I tend to like the old traditional carols best. “Silent Night” sung during Midnight Mass always gives me the chills. “O Holy Night” does the same thing. I can even remember standing on stage, in the third row (because I was tall for my age), in my berry-red skirt and white blouse during the fifth grade Christmas play singing harmony in “O Holy Night” and just feeling the excitement and splendor of the Season.

I still love that carol, especially Josh Groban’s version of it, but. . . a little confession here….I also like the South Park version of it! Yes!! It’s terrible but I laugh all the way through it as Cartman tries to sing the right words and his ‘friends’ shock him when he doesn’t. I also like “A Christmas Wrapping” by the Waitresses, “Christmas Eve in Sarajevo”, “Wish Liszt” and “Wizards in Winter” by TransSiberian Orchestra. And pretty much anything on a Wyndham Hill Christmas collection, especially music by Nightnoise.

So, yes, I’m torn between traditional and modern. But one place and event when those two come together is in Walt Disney World at Christmastime. Every year, they present the “Candlelight Procession” in Epcot and it includes professional singers and musicians as well as high school and college choirs. The process onto the stage and are led through the story of the Nativity by a celebrity narrator and the show includes all the best traditional carols as well as a few modern ones, too. The most rousing song in the show is an old song called “Rejoice with Exceeding Great Joy” and it was made even better when I watched the sign language interpreter expressing the song in wonderful gestures and smiles.

If you want to take a peek, here’s a link to a video of it on YouTube. What’s your favorite Christmas or Holiday song? Traditional or modern?

No matter which, I hope you enjoy it as you celebrate this coming Holiday Season!

Terri Brisbin

Christmas--in 3-Part Harmony- Justiss, Burrows and Brisbin

Julia Justiss: Thoughts on a Carol

The theme of my Christmas story is miracles—the original title was “Merry’s Christmas Miracle”—though this refers not so much to supernatural happenings as to having something wondrous occur long past the time when one has given up all hope of it. Meredyth Wellingford, who lost her chance to wed when her fiancé was killed in India, believes it impossible to find again a love like the one she once knew. But as all true romantics know, miracles do happen—especially at Christmastime!

I have to admit, the real reason my favorite carol is my favorite is because it has beautiful harmony and a wonderful alto line. Having sung in choirs since I was six years old (and thus probably holding the world record for the number of “d”s sung in a lifetime—fellow altos, you know the note I mean) I was thrilled to discover the interwoven melodies in the old German carol, “Lo, How a Rose E’er Blooming.”

Incidentally, the song just happens to feature miracles, beginning with a “floweret bright” blooming “amid the cold of winter.” (Yes, I’m a passionate gardener too.) Even non-gardeners know roses do not bloom in the snow, yet the lyricist has us believe that God’s love allowed the rose, Mary—a virgin no less, another miracle--to bear a midwinter child who would “from Sin and Death now save us/and share our every load.”

I find unison melodies boring, preferring the complexity of interwoven chords. Which probably explains why secondary characters are so important in my stories; I like my heroes and heroines to reveal themselves not just in relationship to each other, but by interacting with a range of people who add richness and depth to their character.

Love, human as well as divine, truly is a miracle that can help us bear all our burdens, illuminate our lives with joy and spur us to acts of unselfish heroism of which we would never have believed ourselves capable. May you find and cherish such miracles at Christmas and always!

Julia Justiss

Christmas--in 3-Part Harmony- Justiss, Burrows and Brisbin

Annie Burrows's Favourite Christmas Carol

One of the things I like best about Christmas is singing all the seasonal hymns of celebration that you just don’t get to hear at any other time of the year.

I love ones that evoke the weather, such as “In the Bleak Midwinter”, even though I suspect it is a highly inaccurate depiction of the nativity. Do they have snow in winter in Bethlehem?

I love the slightly bizarre tale of “Good King Wenceslas” and his hapless little page boy, being dragged out in all that snow to deliver food and wine to “yonder peasant”. At the church I used to go to when I was little, the congregation always used to split into parts, with the men taking the words of Wenceslas, and the ladies and children the little page boy.
But my all time favourite is “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing!” John and Charles Wesley, who headed a great revival in England, made sure that they encapsulated the full gospel in the words of that hymn. I sometimes wonder why it is never sung at any other time of the year, but is, inexorably associated with Christmas time.

The tune itself is stirring, particularly when you get to the verse where you can have a go at singing the descant part. (In my case, to the detriment of anyone’s ears in the near vicinity.) And so it was, that when I was asked to write a story to go into a Christmas themed anthology, I found myself wandering round the house, singing “Hark the Herald Angels Sing” with great gusto. Well, while everyone else was out, anyway, so that they could not complain.

And the line that particularly inspired me was, “God and sinners reconciled.” I soon found myself wanting to write a story about reconciliation, and second chances.

That, to me, is what is at the heart of what people truly celebrate at Christmas, be it in a cottage in Regency England, or now, in the glitzy twenty-first century.

Annie Burrows

Karen Fox: Late Bloomer...

The minute I heard the title for Witch High, the story for "Late Bloomer" jumped into my head. Memories of those high school days came flooding back far more easily than I expected. Of course, I was one of those weirdos who actually liked school. I got good grades and participated in many extra-curricular activities. I actually stayed one semester more than I had to because I was having so much fun (and I wanted to graduate with my class).

Yep, that weird.

But that doesn't mean I didn't experience some of the same high school horrors that many of us did--the unrequited love for that guy sitting behind me in choir, the terminal shyness that made me blush every time a boy even talked to me, the agony of not going to the dance, the fear that I wouldn't have the answer when the teacher called on me.

My heroine in "Late Bloomer" experiences some of that and more. In a school specifically for educating witches on how to use their talents, she has no magickal ability. Sort of like being the only one in class with a horn growing out of your head. Naturally, she's picked on. She doesn't fit in and doesn't think she ever will. But she perseveres and makes friends and learns that sometimes the best way to fit in is to be yourself.Gee, wish I 'd known that decades ago.

What stories do you have to tell from high school? Your favorite moment? Your worst? Comment here until the end of October. We'll pick the one we like best and award a copy of Witch High, autographed by myself, Deb Dixon and Pam McCutcheon, to the winner.

Karen Fox. Visit her website.

Witchy Words of...er...Wisdom from Pamela Luzier

Menopause sucks. They tell you about the hot flashes, night sweats, and mood swings, but they never tell you about the truly horrible part of menopause: noun loss. Ever since I started through "the change," I've been losing my nouns. I'll be talking away, using verbs, articles, adjectives and adverbs with ease, then I'll come upon a noun and be totally stumped. Especially proper nouns. Names? Ha! Forget it. And what's that small black thing in my front yard the postman stuffs with bills and magazines?
Not a clue. I know exactly what it is, but can't for the life of me figure out what it's called.

When I told my doctor about the problem, she laughed. She said a lot of women go through menopause and realize they're having a problem with their memory, but only a writer would identify the part of speech we lose. She promises me it's not dementia, not a sign of incipient Alzheimer's. No, it's simply menopause. My friends laughed, too, until it began happening to them as well. Who knew hormones could mess up your brain so much?

Wait. Hormones screwing with my brain? Oh, yeah. I've been there before...I forgot about puberty. Well, I didn't actually forget. I remember it very clearly (no nouns involved, you see). So, when Denise Little asked me to write a fantasy short story for the Witch High anthology, about a special high school that catered to witches, I said yes. Who doesn't remember high school and the whole gamut of emotions that go along with that?

In my story, "Chemistry 101," fire witch Kenina Bailey is gearing up her courage to ask her chemistry lab partner to the Sadie Hawkins dance—he's a total hottie, even for a water witch. But when a blaze breaks out in the lab, the water witches accuse her and call for her expulsion. How can she clear her name and find a date for the dance?

Luckily, my noun loss problem isn't visible to my readers. If I have a problem remembering one, I can always come back later to fill it in and no one is the wiser. But make me feel better, will ya? Tell me it happens to you, too. If it doesn't, I'm not sure I want to know.

While I'm waiting for your comments, I'll take a break and see if I have anything to drink in the...uh, oh crap, you know--that big white thing in the kitchen that keeps food cold....

Pamela Luzier -- Visit Pam's website

Debra Dixon: Learning how to say "Nookay..."

It will suprise none of my friends that I'm up at midnight or that I have to be at the airport tomorrow morning at 8:30 a.m.. Neither will it surprise them that I have at least two more hours of work to do before I can go to sleep. (That would be two more hours AFTER writing this blog, which will be the last fun thing I do until my head finds the pillow.)

Sleeping is something I do very well, but not nearly often enough lately. (Who are we kidding? I haven't slept since 1993.) I thought I was supposed to stop burning the candle at both ends once I became a "grown up." I'm supposed to know better. Well, maybe the problem is that I'm supposed to "no" better. I suck at "No."In fact my sucking at the word "no" is responsible for my writing "Coyote Run", a Young Adult story for the anthology WITCH HIGH.

Picture the scene: a writer's conference, a room full of editors, a need to make chit-chat. I say, "Hey, someone told me about the anthology you're doing. WITCH HIGH sounds fabulous."

The editor says, "I have room. Would you like to write something for me?"

I say, "Nookay."

Doh! It's the extra letters in "no" that get me every time! In this case though I was thrilled to have over committed myself. In research the YA market, I found fabulous books and authors. Any reader will tell you that finding a whole herd of new authors is akin to hitting the lottery. I literally had to force myself to stop reading and write my darned story, "Coyote Run."

On the day we meet my young water witch she’s just finding out she is officially the last of her class without a familiar. Worse, if your familiar hasn’t bonded with you by the time you’re seventeen, it’s not going to happen. In two weeks she’ll be turning seventeen.

And so her misery and the schemes to find a familiar begin. Little does she know she’s about to have a much bigger familiar problem that will make NOT having a familiar seem like a piece of cake. Toss in a mysterious young man from Ireland, the emotional scars she carries from her mother’s suicide when she was younger, a new stepmother, one of the darkest familiars of the craft, and you have "Coyote Run."

I hope you enjoy! And maybe even discover some fabulous new authors.

Visit Debra's website or blog with her at Riding with the Top Down.