kelly mcclymer

About kelly mcclymer

Kelly McClymer is a USA Today Bestselling Author of historical romance, cozy mystery, and YA fantasy. She has been writing for forty years and has taught writing for fifteen years.

Christmas in a Book — Much Less Fuss and Muss

November 5, 2024 by kelly mcclymer Leave a Comment

Do you have a fantasy idea of the perfect Christmas? Do you create it for yourself every year? Or do you simply dream about it, but never make it happen?

My favorite childhood Christmases involved a lot of family, a tree we all decorated, and presents that were carefully wrapped and piled under the tree. When I grew up, and tried to recreate a similar Christmas for my own family, I quickly realized how time-consuming it was. I hear the same from other people — so much work goes into that fantasy Christmas that doing it once a year seems like more than enough.

And yet…that Christmas magic can be a pick me up in difficult times, which happen all through the year.

Which is where Christmas books (and movies, of course) can help. What kind of Christmas magic do you feel like experiencing (without doing all the work)? An old-fashioned oranges and nuts in the stocking Victorian Christmas? A Christmas fantasy getaway to a tropical island? A cruise? For someone else to do all the work to give you your perfect Christmas? A Christmas where miracles happen? Where old grievances are resolved?

Their daughter won’t be home for the holidays. So why not skip all the work this holiday and take a cruise?
But…it isn’t as easy as it seems to skip Christmas.

I’m collecting these books here on the Christmas page of my website for you to find whenever you need a touch of Christmas magic (full disclosure, I may earn a little from your click, through the use of affiliate links that are invisible to you.

I’ll start you off with a recommendation, which I’m calling a Jim and Kelly Quick Pick — we both read this book, and loved it. Considering that it was a Christmas book from John Grisham, the thriller author, with nary a murder to be investigated, we *had* to read it. Are you curious now? Click on the cover to check it out on Amazon.

And feel free to drop a Christmas book recommendation in the comments below and we’ll add it to our collection of Christmas reads for any time you need a little bit of Christmas magic.

Writer Giveaway! One Week. Better Hurry.

May 12, 2019 by kelly mcclymer Leave a Comment

I’m on a mission with my new Hack Your Muse initiative to help writers write when they want, how they want, what they want:

I Did a MOTH StorySlam

November 26, 2018 by kelly mcclymer Leave a Comment

Are you a sucker for oral storytelling?

Me too. I love the MOTH Radio Hour on NPR. Love it.

So, when I was visiting in the Bay Area, looking for somewhere to take my sister to repay her hospitality, I saw there was a MOTH Story Slam. No brainer. I got the tickets.

My sister is aware that, quiet and unassuming as I usually am, I sometimes do daring things.

Getting on a stage in front of a packed theatre and telling a story in 5 minutes or less is…daring.

My sister asked if I planned to tell a story.

I shrugged. Said, “I don’t know.” Because…scary.

Did I mention there are rules to a Story Slam? No notes. Has to be on a theme (this one was Wonders). Done at 5 minute mark whether you’ve finished the story or not.

BUT…I had been writing at a little coffee shop in Point Richmond (Kaleidoscope, stop in if you are ever nearby). The owner/manager was retelling fairytales to hone her oral storytelling skill. It just so happened that she told one of these stories on a night when I was thinking about how to tell one if I found the courage to get up on stage at the Moth Story Slam.

She set a wonderful example for what I’d need to do to tell my story well: lots of pauses (the equivalent of white space for novelists like me), hand gestures (like punctuation), and room for audience reaction (scene break!). Seriously — if you are ever in the area, GO. Amazing. And good coffee, too.

So I walked along the Bay, and in the park (I like to walk a lot when I’m in the Bay Area), and I told the story to myself. I chose one I’d told a lot, to others, over the years. But 5 minutes is not as long as you’d think, and I’m a novelist, so…I pared and cut and scraped away all embellishments to this story. And there were many.

Finally, I had a shape I could remember (no NOTES!!!). I had built in room for pauses and audience reaction.

We got to the theatre and sat down. You had to go up front to fill in a form if you wanted to tell a story. They would only pick ten.

My sister looked at me. “Are you going to sign up?”

“Might as well.” I acted casual, as if I hadn’t been practicing and obsessing over this story. I filled in the card and put it in the hands of fate whether I would tell my story on stage or not.

I sat back and enjoyed the storytelling of the first few participants, pushing down the butterflies every time my name was NOT called.

And then my name was called.

And I told my story, with the pauses, and hand gestures, and in under 5 minutes.

Did I mention that the audience grades you? Yep. I didn’t know that either. I got a 9 out of 10, so I couldn’t complain. I didn’t win (did I forget to mention there is a winner, who gets invited to a bigger StorySlam?). I wouldn’t have been able to participate in the bigger StorySlam because I was headed home, so I didn’t mind. I’d won all I needed with the opportunity to tell my story to an audience, and hear them laugh and gasp exactly where I wanted them to.

If you’re curious, you can listen to it below.

Caution: Writing May Awaken The Wild Goddess Within You

September 9, 2017 by kelly mcclymer 10 Comments

This post is part of the Empowering the Goddess Within Blog Tour hosted by www.BraveHealer.com.

To read more entries and potentially win a fun prize, visit the tour page HERE, between today and 9/18/17.

How I Unwittingly Awoke the Wild Goddess by Trying to Write a Bestselling YA Fantasy

Do you hesitatingly set ambitious goals for yourself every now again?

Me too.

About a decade ago, after I’d published ten novels, I began to look very hard at how to write a bestseller. It seemed like a reasonable ambition, not too much for a busy mom of three with a day job. After all, in my experience, novels are written in neglected, cobwebby corners of the day between dusk and dawn. No harm, no foul if I didn’t succeed. No one would even know what I was doing unless I succeeded.

I had an idea I already liked, called (at the time) Twist in the Wind. It was a fantasy about a girl who could read thought dust (the leftover thoughts someone left after they touched someone). I’d written three chapters, and sent it to writer-friends for evaluation. They liked it, but…it was missing something that might make it a bestseller contender.

I researched the bestselling fantasy books at the time and noticed there were a lot of mythic and fairytale connections. Cool. I liked myth. I liked fairytales (my first historical romance was titled The Fairy Tale Bride, after all 🙂

But I didn’t want to use just any old myth or fairytale. No. I wanted to go somewhere not too many people had gone. So I looked to see where the oldest fairytales may have originated. I settled on Baba Yaga. There isn’t much about her with that name, but when you immerse yourself in fairytales and female myth, you quickly see that Baba Yaga is in every goddess, fairy godmother…and evil witch…in the most compelling fairytales and mythic stories.

So I started revising my simple Twist in the Wind. And rewriting. And plotting and planning and outlining. Ten years, yo.

The story world grew into a trilogy. And then a trilogy of trilogies. And then a set of seven serializations. With a companion 1,000 short stories. All set in the EverTwixt world.

EverTwixt was an official thing — but it was unleashed only in my computer, myriad notebooks, and my head. I didn’t see how I could ever unleash it out into the world. What had I done? This was too ambitious.

I tried to stuff everything I’d unleashed back into a neat trilogy-shaped box. But, like Pandora, I couldn’t.

Belatedly, I realized I had awoken my Inner Wild Goddess. And she looked, sounded, and acted, a whole like Baba Yaga.

The breadth and scope of my idea began to confound me. Something like this can’t be written in the cobwebbed corners of the day. “I can’t do this, find someone else,” I pleaded with Baba Yaga.

The wild goddess blew a cold wind on my neck and haunted my nightmares. “Your quest is hardly begun. You need companions to keep your will strong. Have you learned nothing from all the myth and fairy tales I’ve sent you to guide you on your way?”

Obediently, with no idea how to do what she was asking me (writers write alone, for the most part), I reached out to find readers who might want to play in my world early on and help propel me through the dense fabric of the world I was creating from the strongest but most gossamer of story threads.

I built an EverTwixt website and put up the first couple of episodes for free download. No one came.

Once again, I told Baba Yaga that I wasn’t up to the task. She laughed her weird, wild laugh and taunted me. “Did Cinderella make her dreams come true by staying home when I gave her what she needed to enjoy the ball?” she asked me. “You’ll have to leave your cobwebby corners and venture out into the wild of the world if you want to succeed at your quest.”

So I ventured out and began to pick up allies who had skills I did not. I joined a business accelerator program and learned what skills I would have to learn in order to create a stable, sustainable site. I joined a mastermind group to find allies who had woken their Inner Wild Goddesses and wanted to change the world as well. I talked to random readers and writers about my idea. I experimented with different marketing tactics and techniques to find the ones that might work for me.

I was proud of all that I had learned, even though I put little of it to practical use. Just like all the epic questers before me, I had gathered allies and knowledge about how to succeed. I had won — and lost — small battles along the way. I was epic. I was awesome. I was…

Baba Yaga laughed at me again. “You still have to launch to the world, you know. Only time will tell you if you will succeed in your quest.”

“I’m not ready,” I explained to her. “First, I’m going to create the most epic reader site ever known to readerkind, and then I’ll know enough to launch EverTwixt properly.”

Baba Yaga shook her finger at me. “You owe me. I whispered the truth to you until it became a fire in your veins. You must let it burn free, come what may.”

EverTwixt is about to relaunch, with all that I’ve learned so far. It will be a soft launch because it turns out my Inner Wild Goddess has much bigger plans for me. She’s happy to let EverTwixt grow like a wild-seeded garden over time. Turns out my next big quest is to create that epic reader site with some very strong allies.

But to do that, I have to let the seeds and early blossoms of EverTwixt free to spread themselves, however slowly.

My Inner Wild Goddess tricked me out of my cobwebby corner with a simple ambition, but I forgive her. I’ve met so many awesome allies along the way. I know there are more to come. Maybe my quest’s epic journey will not end with a bestseller. But maybe that was the only ambition Baba Yaga could hold out to pry me out of my cobwebby corner.

And now that I’m out…I’m not going back in.

How a Woman Changed Hospitals From a Place to Die to a Place to Live

August 24, 2017 by kelly mcclymer Leave a Comment

Do you remember when hospitals were the place people went to die?

Me neither. But my dad did.

My father was born in the early ’30s, and hospitals had actually improved quite a bit (thanks to the Victorian heroine you will meet in this post). But his parents, and myriad aunts and uncles had been born in a time when you would rather cut your own gangrenous arm off at home than go to the hospital and die. The reality began to change in Victorian times, but it was a slow revolution until medical science matured around the time my father was born.

Last year, I fell down the stairs. I broke my wrist and needed surgery. I did not want to go to the hosital, but I didn’t have major concerns that I was going to die there. I just wanted to wish away the whole broken wrist (you know I write fantasy as well as historical romance, right?).

Everytime I go into the hospital, I remember my father’s attitude toward hospitals – that they were places people went to die. He said it often enough. He knew better, but the lessons he had learned as a young boy in the ’30s stuck with him underneath his modern understanding that a hospital saved his life (twice).

For the Victorians, hospitals were not places of healing, as we know them today.

They were teeming with disease, infection and death.

Florence Nightingale, a true Victorian heroine, helped to change all of that. Having been influenced at an early age by Parisian Mary Clarke that women were equal to men, Florence dared to follow her calling.

Yes, really. Despite what we are often told, women did not wait to start changing the world until they got the vote.

Even more daringly, she did this during the Crimean war. She became known as “the Lady with the Lamp.” But Florence used more than her caretaker skills to save the lives of soldiers who had been injured. She used her powerful writing, speaking, and science itself to revolutionize medicine to value and prioritize clean conditions and good hygiene in treating wounded soldiers — and all the unfortunate souls injured badly enough they required hospital care.

Like my dad with his triple bypass, and colon cancer.

Like me when my wrist was broken and I needed surgery.
We sometimes have a tendency to overlook how influential women in the 1800s were, despite the restrictions they had. But all the rights and freedoms we have in the law today are the result of women who defied the law and convention to change the world. Florence Nightingale was born to a wealthy, educated family. She was born to marry well and raise sons who wold contribute to society.

Instead, she chose to change the world in her own right.
My father- and I-have a lot to thank her for. You can read more about her, if you’re intrigued, in a new biography of Florence Nightingale: Florence Nightingale, The Courageous Life of the Legendary Nurse, by Catherine Reef. You can buy it at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, iBooks, Kobo, or Google Play.

What about you? Do you have a hospital story that involved a courageous and compassionate nurse?

Fairytale Books for Fairytale Romance Lovers

July 25, 2017 by kelly mcclymer Leave a Comment

Welcome to the Glass Slipper Sisters Beach Reads Bundle Sale! All ten of the below titles are available at Amazon and other retailers for just 99 cents each from July 24-28. Then the pumpkin carriage turns back into a pumpkin. Some of these books have never gone down this low before, and you won’t see a deal like this again for quite a while. So, load up your e-readers this summer with some royal fairy tale reads.

Fooling Around With Cinderella 200x300