Today is the release day for my New Year’s Eve story, Resolutions for an Arbitrary Holiday. Happy release day to me! 🎉🍾🥂
Two strangers, a twisted ankle, an ancient stone ship, and a New Year’s Eve they’ll never forget
Petter sneaks out of the New Year’s party he didn’t want to go to and treks to an old burial site he’s dying to see. Alone. Without telling anyone on a freezing December night. Without cell service…a huge problem when he twists his ankle.
Someone passes by Isak’s house on the path leading to the stone ship. When the person never returns, Isak worries and sets off to investigate. What he finds is Petter, a pack of sparklers, and an instant connection.
Under a starry sky, they learn they have a lot in common. Will the attraction burn hot and fizzle out like the fireworks going off over their heads when they return to the real world? Or will it deepen, grow, and turn into something real? Something everlasting like the stone ship?
M/M Contemporary / 20851 words
Buy links:
JMS Books | Universal buy link
Usually, my stories are set in a vague, undisclosed place because the location isn’t important for me. But Resolutions for an Arbitrary Holiday is different: it’s set in a real place in Sweden, Ale’s Stones, an ancient stone ship erected about 1400 years ago. Me and my husband visited this place in July (I wrote about it here) and I was in awe. I love history, so visiting that monument was fantastic.
I took some liberties with the place: not the stones themselves and the ocean below, but the village at the foot of the hill where the stones are located, so if you’ve been there and are thinking What the heck is this? you know the reason. 🙂
Anyway. To celebrate the release of the book that I wrote after my visit there, I thought you might like to see some pictures from my trip?
A glimpse of the village at the foot of the hill. The real one, not the tweaked one from my story.
The dirt path leading up to the stones, the one Petter planned on crawling down on New Year’s Eve since he sprained his ankle and couldn’t walk and support his weight.
Isak is strong and hauls me to my feet without any trouble. “Wow, that was easier than I thought,” he says. “You don’t weigh much.”
“No.” I’ve always been small, short, and lean—verging on skinny—with eyes too big for my face and pale skin. I’m also swishy and emotional and impulsive, which is why people are still treating me like a kid, I guess.
“That’s all right. That’ll make this whole thing a lot easier than if you’d been the big bodybuilder type. It was easy enough to think you were under that huge jacket. I would have had to go get one of the cows to help carry you down if that had been the case.”
The thought of being slung across the back of a cow and carried down the steep hill is ridiculous and makes me giggle again. I’m usually more self-conscious about my giggle and try to remember to chuckle like a manly-man would—yeah, right—but for some reason, I don’t care around Isak. “You have cows?”
“No, but my neighbor, old Mr. Berglund, does.”
Quote from Resolutions for an Arbitrary Holiday
Maybe these cows are old Mr. Berglund’s? 😀
The actual stones
The ocean next to the stones
And finally, Nell in front of the stones 😁
The story about the stones, written on the site itself.
If we’re ever allowed to travel again and you’re passing by the south of Sweden, I warmly recommend a visit to Ale’s Stones. Until then, you can experience it through Petter and Isak’s eyes in Resolutions for an Arbitrary Holiday.
I hope you’ll enjoy it. 🙂
Nell Iris 