It’s the last Friday of the month and you know what that means! It’s ᖇEᗩᗪ ᗩᖇOᑌᑎᗪ TᕼE ᖇᗩIᑎᗷOᗯ time!
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This month’s topic is…
Summer/Seasonal Reads ~ Do I seek them out? Write them?
Do I seek out books with summer settings to read during the summer? No, not really. I don’t do that for any season. No…not even Halloween or Christmas!
Maybe it’s because I’m such an eclectic reader? Lot’s of genres, lots of tropes. Perhaps if I stuck primarily to contemporary romance, it might make more sense, but not when a big chunk of my reading is sci-fi, paranormal, or fantasy where the season rarely plays a part. Or historical, where (at least for Regency Romance) they are often set during the London social season. Don’t get me wrong, I love the contemporary and other historical stuff, too. I just don’t give a hoot if it’s set in the same season I’m reading it during.
As a writer, the season/weather generally doesn’t play a huge part in my stories, but there are a few exceptions:
- ’Til Death Do Us Part (Vows Series Book 1) ~ It wasn’t written as a summer story, though the weather through much of it is tropical.
- From This Day Forward (Vows Series Book 2) ~ Was definitely written as a summer story. It was for a call at my publisher’s for “Summer Lovin’” stories. ’Til Death had recently been published, and the MCs were still very much on my mind, so I gave them a little more drama and closure in a follow up novelette that was pointedly set in early summer.
- Déjà Vu ~ Is a Christmas-themed short story specifically written for a call for holiday stories.
- Captain Jack and the Snack Attack – is a Christmas-themed short story written for a free holiday-themed anthology (Make the Yuletide Gay). It was also given out as a freebie pamphlet short story at the Denver GayRomLit.
Several of the short stories that are now published in my collection, Snapshots, were originally written for seasonal-themed publisher calls way back in the day:
- The Straggler was written for the “Shades of Autumn” Taste Test trio of shorts.
- Moving On was written for a publisher call for Halloween stories.
- Moving Along was written for a publisher call for Christmas stories.
- Nevermore was written for the “Day at the Beach” Taste Test trio of summer/beach shorts.
Goodness! Once I list them all out, it looks like I’ve written a lot more season/holiday-specific reads than I would have admitted to off the top of my head, but in my defense, with one exception, they’re mostly short stories, and the most recent from the list were written between 2016-2018, and most of them were written way back in 2008.
My seasonal/holiday stories really are the minority overall. Those listed above are all represented in only four of the covers in this collage: Vows Box Set, Déjà Vu, Snapshots, and Make the Yuletide Gay. The rest of them (and half of the Vows Box Set) don’t highlight any season.
Anyway, in short, I don’t care if a book is summer-themed, or any other particular season or holiday-themed, or, most likely, generic in season. I’ll read any of them at any time of the year and don’t go out of my way to seek out books targeting the current season.
I sometimes have fun creating seasonal themed promotional images whether or not the book I’m promoting has anything to do with the season, because why not? I doubt I’m the only one who would love to be relaxing in a hammock beachside with any good book queued up on my reading app:
WEBRING ~ Read Around the Rainbow!
Be sure to flip through the webring to read your favorite authors’ takes on this topic! For your convenience, here are direct links to the other WebRing participants’ posts for this month’s topic:
Yay for team ‘I do not do seasonal reads!’ 🥰
I write lots about the weather in my books (just look at December Roses, it’s dripping with weather lol) but like you I don’t often tie it to the current season for some reason…
Count me in with the non-series readers, Addison! 😁