Paula Altenburg

Welcome Our Guest Author Paula Altenburg

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Hello! Paula Altenburg here.

It seems so early to be discussing a Christmas book! And yet, here we are.

 

My latest release, the seventh book set in Grand, MT and number four in The Endeavour Ranch series, involves a retired professional bull rider, a cute baby, and a perky blonde elf.

A lot of The Cowboy’s Christmas Baby talks about forming new Christmas traditions. The perky blonde elf heroine, Tate, has lost her twin brother. The retired rodeo hero, Miles, finds himself starting a new chapter in his life with a brand-new daughter he didn’t anticipate. Miles and Tate both love their family traditions from Christmases past. Both recognize the need to move forward and create new ones—for the people they love.

I’d like to talk about traditions; more importantly, the role women have played in the creation of them. This is going to take a little backtracking on my part, so bear with me.

I have a degree in Social Anthropology, so even though I write contemporary western romance, when I want to understand the mindset of a culture or society, I look at its origins.

Montana’s history is fascinating.

If you’ve read Zane Grey or Louis L’Amour, or watched old western movies on television, you’ve no doubt seen the litter of old pianos and heavy furniture left behind on the trail as wagon trains crossing rivers and deserts are forced to lighten their loads. You’re also familiar with the absurdity of it—why would anyone think these frivolous things are important for survival when traveling into the wild west?

As it turns out, these weren’t frivolous items at all. They played a significant role in survival.

While doing research, I stumbled across a master’s thesis from the University of Montana: “A Little Bit of Paradise”: Women’s Search for Comfort in Late-Nineteenth Century Montana by Allison Badger (May 2003). The study focuses on middle class women, who history often overlooks because they don’t appear to have much at stake. That doesn’t mean triumphs and struggles didn’t exist for them.

The thesis talks about colorful handkerchiefs tied to poles so women on the prairie could tell which way the wind blew as a means of preserving their sanity.

But the author challenges this observation. One quote caught my attention:

“Western domesticity allowed Montana women to continue operating in their feminine sphere and gave women the means to cope with their circumstances.”

Not every woman who came west wanted to dress and act like a man or become another Annie Oakley. Many women saw turning their backs on civility and the rules of society as defeat. Clinging to things that made everyday life more familiar and “normal” came with a sense of pride—things such as social etiquette, home furnishings, and fashion. These women knew how to turn a house into a home.

I like to write my western heroines feminine as well as strong, to take after the women who blazed trails for them. I think Tate Shannahan fits their model quite nicely as she struggles to rekindle the joy in Christmas for others, even though she believes the magic is lost to her forever.

For a chance to win a copy of The Cowboy’s Christmas Baby, drop one of your favorite Christmas traditions in the comments below.

 

THE COWBOY’S CHRISTMAS BABY

Rodeo champion and buckle-bunny favorite Miles Decker is the “face” of professional bull riding. So when his famous face is badly scarred in a bull riding accident, he retires from public life and returns to Grand, Montana, to manage the new circuit rodeo on the Endeavour Ranch. He has few regrets—he’s made his money and has had his fill of beautiful women. But his future is upended when a surprise Christmas gift lands on his doorstep: an eight-month-old baby girl with his eyes and smile.

Local girl Tate Shannahan just lost her elf job, so being hired as the caregiver for Miles Decker’s baby is a godsend for an already difficult Christmas. Her twin brother’s death in a bull riding accident fractured Tate’s family, leaving her and her older brother to continue the Shannahan traditions alone—or not, as her brother decides. The baby is a joy, but working for a man who represents everything her family has lost isn’t easy.

Miracles happen at Christmas though, and as Miles and Tate discover new traditions together, can love grow where they least expect it?

 

You can purchase a copy of The Cowboy’s Christmas Baby here.

 

 

What Makes a Cowboy and a Giveaway!

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We’re so happy to have USA Today Bestselling author Paula Altenburg with us. She has a giveaway so scroll down. 

Thank you to Petticoats & Pistols for having me here!

Cowboys are made, not born.

But being a cowboy takes a certain type of personality, and those are the heroes I love to write.
Even though I write contemporary western romance, I do a significant amount of historical research, because real people are a product of their histories and their cultures. That’s one reason why you see so many successful marriages among childhood sweethearts. It’s also why no one will ever know you as well as your siblings do—they shared the same upbringing and understand where you come from. I say this from experience. (Not the childhood sweetheart part, though. My husband is Dutch. I will say that the majority of our disagreements over the years can be directly attributed to language nuances and having been raised in very different cultures.) This is a segue into European colonization, by the way.



The Irish in particular formed a strong presence in the American Old West. You can read a fascinating article on them here. Irish surnames show up all over the present-day west. In fact, two authors I use as writing resources have Irish names—Larry McMurtry (Lonesome Dove) and David McCumber (The Cowboy Way). McMurtry is Texan and McCumber is from Montana.

Grand, Montana was set up in my first series, The McGregor Brothers of Montana, as an Irish community. Grand’s fictional founders were two enterprising young Irish brothers (and ancestors of the contemporary McGregors) who made their money off selling liquor to soldiers. I’ve loosely based my Grand on real-life Miles City, Montana, which sits where the Tongue River flows into the Yellowstone River. I love the opportunities doing this offers me as a writer. If I need a setting detail, I can dip into the Miles City website and let my imagination run wild. The Miles City Chamber of Commerce is another great resource.


But setting Grand up as a fictional town means I get to make it my own. I read Lonesome Dove to get a feel for the landscape and what cowboys were like in the latter part of the 19th century. I read The Cowboy Way because I wanted to see how ranching has evolved. While ranch practices have changed with the times, cowboys, as it turns out, have not evolved in the least.
                                            

Sheriff Dan McKillop is definitely a product of his history and his environment. He’s
hardworking, he loves women (maybe a little too much) and he’s uncomfortable with money. When he and two friends inherit the Endeavour Ranch and billions of dollars, the only positive he sees is the opportunity to give back to his community. It takes a lot to knock him off his stride, but firefighter Jazz O’Reilly manages to do exactly that.
The Montana Sheriff is the first book in the Grand, Montana series.

Buy now

Four books will release this year with two more arriving in 2023.



Also in 2023, USA Today bestselling author Roxanne Snopek will be joining me with a series of her own. It’s tentatively titled The Lost Malones and familiar faces will appear.

And now, as a thank you to Petticoats & Pistols for having me here, I’m going to give away three electronic copies of another Grand, Montana book (and my USA Today bestseller!), The Rancher Takes a Family. You can check it out on my website.

All you have to do to qualify to win a copy is answer the following question and drop it in the comments below. “If you could live in any story world, what world would it be, and why?”
I’ll be stopping by throughout the day to chat and answer any questions.

Follow Paula at:

It’s All In the Detail by Paula Altenburg

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Settings are something that, in a story, are a crucial element, and part of the reader’s sensory experience, but for the most part should be unobtrusive. You want the reader to feel as if they’re in the same time and place as the characters, but you don’t want the setting details to overshadow the story.

Don’t ask me how this happened, but over the past four or five years I’ve found myself firmly planted in the American West. I’ve written Demon Westerns in a dystopian future. I’ve got a paranormal “Cowboys and Aliens” alternate history story coming out soon.  And my current release, Her Secret Love (#3 in the Secrets of Cherry Lake series from Tule Publishing), is a contemporary romance set on the shores of Flathead Lake, Montana. (Check out those images. My husband wants us to move there.)

I’m fairly confident my love affair with the West began the same way as that of most western romance fans—by reading Zane Grey and Louis L’Amour. (How can those author names not appeal to romance readers?)My father recently gave me his entire Louis L’Amour collection—heaven. I tell him they’re Harlequin romances for men. I mean, come on. There’s always a strong woman character who needs a helping hand from the hero, but who can ultimately stand on her own.

The problem for me as a writer, however, is that I’m seriously setting-challenged. I’m an abstract thinker and not at all visual. I can’t read a map. (I once wrote an entire book with the locations upside down and backward from what they are in reality. So far, no one’s noticed.)Descriptive details bore me. And I live on the East Coast of Canada, surrounded by the Bay of Fundy and the Atlantic Ocean. We have a large dairy industry here, but if you try to compare our farms to Montana ranches…no.

This is what my world looks like:

 

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Here’s my personal experience with the American West:
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And in my head, here’s what I think the West looks like:Paula5

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Mix those with the chase scenes from Mad Max: Fury Road and I’m sure you can understand the challenge I face.

There are details about the world we each live in that, in our heads, are universal truths, but in reality, are anything but. When my youngest son began university, we took a few of his friends from Oman to see Peggy’s Cove, Nova Scotia. They kept asking if we could stop the car so they could explore the boggy wetlands that surround the Atlantic beach areas here. They live in the desert. They’d never seen wetlands before.

Cherry Lake, Montana might be a fictional town, but the location is not. Every time I had a bird chirp in Her Secret Love, I had to look up what kind of bird it might be. The trees are different. The grass is different. I had no idea what the seasons might be like. They turn at different times from what I’m used to. Sunrise and sunset aren’t the same. Not to mention, school starts so much earlier in Montana than it does here.

There are four books and one novella in the Secrets of Cherry Lake series.  (Small Town Secrets is free on Amazon.com if anyone wants to check out the series.) That’s four authors who all had to coordinate setting details for the town and its inhabitants. We were lucky in that one of our authors, Jeannie Watts (The Secret Bride), is actually from the area. She’s the Tule Publishing resident expert on All Things Cherry Lake.

Writing this series was a lot of fun. Creating Cherry Lake was a great learning experience, too. I hope to write more stories in this particular setting.

Cinderella's CowboyAnd I hope readers will enjoy the Secrets of Cherry Lake as much as we enjoyed writing about them.

Giveaway:

If you want to learn more about the Montana Born books offered by Tule Publishing, I’m giving away an e-copy of Cinderella’s Cowboy by USA Today Bestselling author Roxanne Snopek:

Sometimes princes look a lot like cowboys…

Chad Anders doesn’t know why mousy Cynthia Henley trips all over her tongue when she’s around him. Nor does he understand his undeniable attraction to this good girl. Wild and sexy is his type, like the dream-girl he caught a glimpse of years earlier he’s never forgotten.

Cynthia’s superpower is invisibility, especially with men. It’s better for everyone that way. Besides, she’s got a cat. She’s okay. But when playboy-rancher Chad hires her, she’s got a chance to shine. Professionally, at least. Until she learns of his fascination with a mysterious dream-girl, who was actually nothing more than a shy teenager on an ill-advised dare all those years ago. Cynthia knows she’s no man’s dream-girl and never will be.

But there’s magic at the ball. Princesses glow in the starlight, princes appear out of nowhere, and, sometimes, they look a lot like cowboys…

 

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