28 Monday Oct 2024
Posted in Holiday Stories
≈ Comments Off on Happy Halloween
The spooky season is upon us. Some specters decided to skip this year’s hauntings in favor of curling up to a new anthology from the multi-award-winning Bethlehem Writers Group, LLC, with twenty-one holiday short stories.
Click the title to get your copy today.
15 Tuesday Oct 2024
Posted in Holiday Stories
The wizards of publishing (and Amazon) have officially launched the new Holiday story collection. “Season’s Readings”.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1954675038/ref=sr_1_1
In this new addition to the “Sweet, Funny, and Strange” series of short-story anthologies, the multi-award-winning Bethlehem Writers Group, LLC, brings you twenty-one new stories that span the holidays from Thanksgiving through New Year’s Eve.
Get your copy today.
10 Thursday Oct 2024
Posted in Holiday Stories
≈ Comments Off on New Holiday Short Story Collection Available October 15
The multi-award-winning “Sweet, Funny, and Strange” series of short-story anthologies brings you twenty-one new stories that span the holidays from Thanksgiving through New Year’s Eve.
In this new addition, the Bethlehem Writers Group, LLC, returns to its roots in and around Bethlehem, Pennsylvania (also known as “Christmas City, USA”), with its eighth anthology to celebrate the holidays.
I am honored to be a contributor with two stories, “Millie’s Christmas Wine” and “The Heart Needs a Home,” to the collection.
Emwryn Murphy’s sweet tale tells about a chosen family’s “Friendsgiving,” crashed by a blood relative who might or might not be happy with what he sees in “As Simple As That.” Jerome W. McFadden once again reveals his humorous side in his story about a would-be Santa who gets into trouble in “Flue Shot.” A. E. Decker shares an intricate Christmas fantasy about “The Goblin King’s Music Box.” Paula Gail Benson gives new meaning to a traditional symbol for the New Year in “Star of the Party.” Beyond these holidays, Debra H. Goldstein writes about Pearl Harbor Day, Diane Sismour about Krampusnacht, and Peter J Barbour about Hanukkah.
Other favorite BWG authors, including Jeff Baird, Ralph Hieb, Dianna Sinovic, Christopher D. Ochs, Kidd Wadsworth, and Carol L. Wright, also share their holiday musings.
In addition, this volume includes award-winning stories from the 2023 and 2024 Bethlehem Writers Roundtable Short Story Awards. Sally Milliken, the first-place winner in 2023, presents “The First Thanksgiving.” From 2024, we have our top three winners with first-place winner Rhonda Zangwill’s “Oh! Christmas Tree,” second-place winner Bettie Nebergall’s “Just Ask Santa,” and third-place winner Mary Adler’s “Narragansett Nellie and the Transferware Platter.”
Available October 15 for $17.95 from Amazon and at https://bwgwritersroundtable.com/. Stay tuned for the Amazon link.
We hope you enjoy these holiday gifts and that all our readers have the very happiest of holiday seasons.
14 Sunday Nov 2021
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I’ve updated a blog from yesteryear on the writer’s site, A Slice of Orange. Squeezed between Halloween and Christmas, it often feels like Thanksgiving might become a holiday wannabe.
Click the link here to read – Happy Hallothanksgivingmas.
16 Wednesday Nov 2016
Posted in The Humor Zone
From: DepositPhotos.com
Did anybody notice I missed October? Who could tell? When I went into Walmart a few weeks ago to get some Halloween treats, the seasonal aisles had Christmas decorations. I found broken bags of candy in a bin near the exit. What’s that all about?
Hey, I’ve been chin-deep in a sci-fi story. Went upstairs the other day to refresh my caffeine drip and discovered October had come and gone. I didn’t even put out a pumpkin. All those damn doorbell chimes a couple weeks back? I thought they were church solicitors with an urgent need to save my soul. The Halloween candy I bought is still on the counter. I’m surprised my front door didn’t get egged.
26 Wednesday Nov 2014
Posted in Musing, The Humor Zone
≈ Comments Off on Are You Going To Eat That?
From: DepositPhotos.com
Diehards nationwide are lining up to run in the holiday Turkey Trot. Imagine a marathon of a different kind. Participants hop about like caged rabbits on too much caffeine, flabs of steel barely contained by Kevlar reinforced spandex. It’s a record crowd of sumo wrestler contestants with tattooed contest numbers emblazoned on their foreheads, waiting for the starting gun for this year’s Blubber Trot. First hundred finishers get to be first in line at the communal Horn-of-Plenty table. Those who don’t finish, have to watch Hunger Games 3 without popcorn. Paying spectators will be allowed wander the leftover carnage and ask, “Are you going to eat that?”
It’s my annual humorous take on what I blithely refer to as the advent of blubber season (see last year’s article, Tis the Season to be Gluttonous). The holiday season is like no other time of the year. We dust off the George Bailey personality left in a drawer from last year, greet everyone like family, and gorge like our prehistoric forbearers did when they felled a mammoth. Would you like leg meat or trunk?
24 Sunday Nov 2013
Posted in The Humor Zone
From: trainforthegameli.com
With Thanksgiving around the corner, thoughts turn to chilly days, roseate cheeks, the promise of snow, and the advent of blubber season. Some are of the opinion that our annual glutton festival begins at Halloween, evident by tacky fingerprints from stealth-diving into the kids goodie bag. As far as I’m concerned, the starting bell for the World Series of holiday binging, technically rings on Thanksgiving Day. Unlike our puritan ancestors, who ate foods native to the New World, our modern tables groan with big-breasted birds, carbs the density of a black hole,and sugar confections to send us all to diabetics anonymous.
21 Wednesday Nov 2012
Posted in Writing Dystopian Themes
I stumbled across an interesting blog article from last year’s Thanksgiving. Titled Thankful for the Right to Read: Dystopian Novels about Censorship. It was posted by Emily Kickinson, who is associated with the Daniel Boone Regional Library in Missouri. Given my interest in all things dystopia, Emily talks about the classic stories by Ray Bradbury, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, and mention of Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta. Censorship is the key theme of these classics. It is a noble premise in our current world where censorship has smeared the literary arts for centuries, and worth reposting.
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