Merry Christmess!

Pre order the book today and get 25% off!

Hey, loners,

A special midweek email just for you because if you've been thinking about pre-ordering Merry Christmess, my first solo book, now is the time. From June 23–26, Barnes & Noble is offering 25% off all pre-orders, including ebooks and audiobooks.

I wrote Merry Christmess last year. A few years ago, Sara and I dreamed up Stevie and Jordan, 11-year-old twins, together. With her blessing, she let me run with the ball—or in this case, run with the Christmas tree—and write a story about them all on my own. The result is Merry Christmess, my very first foray into fiction chapter books!

Stevie and Jordan live in a fictional small town in central Saskatchewan, called Etheridge, with their mom, who runs a community centre. Their dad is a successful musician who tours the world with major artists, which means they don’t get to see him very often. The story takes place over Christmas break and is, in some ways, a modern take on The Parent Trap. The twist is that Stevie and Jordan know they are twins, and aren’t trying to get their parents back together. In fact, their parents were never really together. What they want is something much simpler: one Christmas spent together as a family. So actually it’s nothing like The Parent Trap. But who doesn’t love Lindsay Lohan references?

I had so much fun writing this book. It was an enormous leap for me creatively to write a work of fiction entirely on my own, and I feel incredibly proud of what came out of that challenge. Like all of our middle-grade books, there’s plenty here for adults, too. While this is a chapter book rather than a graphic novel, all of my earliest readers were grown-ups and they loved it. Whether you’re eight or eighty, if you enjoy funny, heartfelt holiday stories, I think there’s something here for you. The most exciting part? I’m already working on the sequel. Whether you’re planning to read it yourself or gift it to a kid in your life, I hope you’ll consider pre-ordering today or picking up a copy when it arrives on September 1.

I’ll be doing events throughout the fall and holiday season, and I’ll tease this now: some of those events will include Sara, a couple of new Christmas songs we’ve written together that will be released later this year, and maybe even a screening or two of some of our favourite Christmas movies.

A very merry 80s Christmas. Us with our mom, and cat Taya.

Thanks, as always, for supporting my work. It means more than you know.

Have a good week!
Tegan