Hello readers, I have a guest post for you today. Astraea Press, publisher of my romance novella, Maya's Vacation, is having a blog tour to promote all of their winter holidays books. Today, I'm playing host! So read on for a message from Astraea Press and a synopsis of a pair of Astraea's holiday books. You'll also find out how to into to win a free $50 giftcard from Astraea and a free Astraea book of your choice!

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays from Astraea Press! We love this time of year!Is it the cooler weather? The fires in the fireplace? Family gatherings? Or our sweethearts under the mistletoe.... We do love mistletoe ;)

Whatever the cause, we want to celebrate Christmas and this holiday season with you. This is one of the many stops on a two-week tour. Check out the rafflecopter at our website or the end of this post for a chance to win a free Astraea Press Christmas book of YOUR choice (eep!). There is also a chance to win a $50 Amazon gift card!

I want to thank Rebecca and all the other blogs who have offered to help. All of their facebook pages and/or twitter are on the rafflecopter. I hope you get a chance to visit them all.

So... MERRY CHRISTMAS from Astraea Press and our authors. Thanks for a great year.

~Kelly from AP

Here is a Christmas book from bestselling author Patricia Kiyono:

Jess Tate is trying to make a life for herself and her teenage son after her husband's sudden death.  Running the family’s struggling landscape business in Northern Michigan has been hard work, and her son hasn’t been much help.  She’s managed to get by, learning to run the big equipment herself, but between snowplowing early in the mornings and working her daytime job in town, she often wonders if there will ever be more to life than endless work.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

For this installment of my Thursday bragging series, I'm giving away 5 copies of my e-book, Maya's Vacation! What's that? You like to win things? Well, entering to win is easy. Just leave a comment on this post by next Wednesday, 5/9, and I'll reveal the winners on Thursday.  Not familiar with Maya's Vacation? We can fix that easily!

Twenty-year-old Maya knew, as she watched Dean walk away from her front door, distraught at her silence and her father’s threats, that she would never love anyone with the intensity that she loved him. He was her painter, her artist, her soul mate and being apart from him hurt too much. She tucked those feelings away, determined to enjoy the safe and secure life her parents approved of: business school and a marriage to Chuck, a successful real estate agent.

Thirty years later, Chuck has cheated on and divorced her. But when he comes back, begging for reconciliation, Maya follows her intuition and takes a vacation to think it over. Her love of art, food, and wine combine at this retreat in the woods, and she prepares for a week of making new friends, tasting exquisite wines, and learning to paint again. What she hasn’t prepared for is the familiar voice she hears the first morning at camp . . . a voice that makes her skin tingle and brings back memories of who she used to be before Chuck. Has Maya buried her passion too deep to find love with Dean again.

You can also listen to me read from Maya's Vacation, so if you're interested in an excerpt, what better way to get one than by listening to the author speak for her characters? Each clip is about 3 and 1/2 minutes long, and you do need javascript enabled for the clips to work.

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Don't want to wait to see if you won the contest? You can purchase Maya's Vacation now in any e-book form direct from Astraea Press (direct from the publisher is where I get the biggest cut, hint hint), Amazon, and Barnes and Nobles.

Next week, along with the contest winners, I'll share some of my favorite reviews of Maya's Vacation. There are some great ones out there!

I wouldn't call it a resolution, but I am attempting to do a better job of that self-promotion part of writing. I hate self-promotion. I want people to magically find all my published work, become instant dedicated fans, and beg me to create more stories for them. Funny enough, that doesn't happen on its own! Or at least not at this stage in my career. But this stage in my career is actually pretty awesome, because I've been published several times now, and that's a huge building block in terms of ego and confidence to keep going.

Here's my plan: I'm going to point you all to my published pieces one by one in case you missed them the first time they were published. I'll report links to my interviews on other blogs as well, maybe revel in that time---ok, two times now---that Durham magazine interviewed me on the Triangle dining scene or those times---ok, two times now---that the Independent Weekly mentioned my name. Eventually, I'll even  tell you all about how I'm writing the occasional post for WRAL Out and About, the first of which will be coming out soon. Yes, I've known that for weeks, submitted my first review last week, and I still haven't told the interwebs about it---I really am that bad at self-promotion, folks.

Consider this the first installment in my bragging series, to be posted at least every other Thursday. Our first installment is Last Complaint, a horror short story that won me third place in WOW! Women on Writing's Flash Fiction contest back in 2009. In it, a grumpy old woman finds out that airing her grievances isn't always the wisest plan. Here are the first few paragraphs:

She parks her station wagon under the "No Vacancy" sign. This is the first inn she's passed since dinner at that horrible truck stop diner. Her bowl of clam chowder had been lukewarm and the waitress had the gall to try and make her pay for it. She doubts she'll be treated any better at this place, but she can feel her eyelids drooping.

"Bellboy!" she yells into the dark lot. No one comes. She sighs, then pulls out her suitcase and wheels it towards the small front office that glows with a pale green fluorescence.

"Can I help you?" grunts the middle-aged man wearing a stained gray uniform at the desk. He flips the channel on an old television set that's perched on the countertop behind him.

"I need a room," she says. "How much?"

"We're full up. No vacancy," he gestures towards the sign outside then stares at her, his mouth hanging open.

"That's ridiculous," she insists. "I have a nephew who manages a Hyatt." She waits for this to affect him but his expression does not change. She continues, unperturbed, "There are always extra rooms available, that's what he told me.  Even at the Hyatt."

To continue reading, head here, and scroll down the page about halfway. You'll find my picture and the rest of Last Complaint there. This picture was not taken with the story in mind, but it captures the mood of the latter half of the story, stumbling through a dark hallway half asleep.

Enjoy! And let me know what you thought.