Original character sheets
Joy
Joy McLedon came up to The Wreath to get out of her old small town. She has two exes, both bear shifters, and isn’t looking to date again. Sean reminds her of her exes.
Sean has to convince Joy that she’s ready to love again, and that he’s the bear for her.
Appearance: Artsy type, [Bohemian] style, lots of patterns and layers, hair in braids
Favorite dessert: apple cider donuts
Author’s note: Joy always had two exes. She was initially artsier, and she had a favorite dessert that was going to be relevant to the plot. The appearance and fashion styles of the women, and their favorite desserts is something I abandoned later on.
Sean
Alpha’s son, an athlete who is a runner, literally and figuratively running from his problems
Sean Jackson
Author’s note: I guess I must’ve edited this character sheet because this is basically Sean to a T.
Angelica
Angelica Smith is a poor girl.
Ryan’s the heir to a billionaire uncle’s fortune.
Style: very basic, thrift store clothing (jeans, shirts, sweaters) that she has made look “nicer” but that are still noticably used
Favorite Christmas dessert: gingerbread cheesecake
Author’s note: Ryan and Ethan and Sean and Connor were originally swapped around in various ways. I guess for a while, Ryan was going to be a billionaire. Angelica’s fashion style moved to Carol, and it was relevant to Carol’s plot. It wasn’t really a ‘style’ as much as it was a reality. At this point, Dancer Claws featured a Cinderella story, rather than a Little Red Riding Hood story.
Ryan
Ryan Rex
Author’s note: that is literally all it says for Ryan in his file. I guess he got a lot more developed later on in the writing process.
Carol
Carol is sent to deliver pastries to the lumber camp, which is why she has a Little Red Riding Hood type of story. Ethan is a gruff guy, and after making a bad first impression as a “wolfish” dude, he has to earn Carol’s trust back, by showing that he can reform from being a bad boy to being on the nice list.
Favorite dessert: Eggnog fudge
Author’s note: originally, the gals delivered goods to the island, but I realized that didn’t make a ton of sense. Ethan originally was gruff. At this point, Prancer Claws featured a Little Red Riding Hood story, rather than a Cinderella story.
Ethan
Ethan McLean
billionaire who has money so doesn’t think he needs a matw
He learns it is better to give than receive
Let his vanity as a member of the clan get him in trouble, it was Mate Madness
Author’s note: this was pretty much Ethan…except the mate madness stuff was not relevant to his behavior before the events of the books.
Candy
Candy is sweet and human, and doesn’t care that Cain doesn’t seem to have a mate mark (yet). She’s the first human he’s ever dated. She teaches him to love himself?
Favorite dessert: candycane brittle
Author’s note: I think that, for a while, the Naughty mark was explained as a tattoo, rather than a mate mark, by the heroes. I have no idea why her being the ‘first human’ he’d ever dated was relevant. She did end up teaching Cain he wasn’t a beast.
Cain
playing bad boy doesn’t understand why someone would settle down
- Slept around with no intent of finding his Fated Mate, to hide the fact he was upset about not finding her
Learns the true meaning of Christmas is love
Author’s note: Cain’s playboy angle was originally played up more. He didn’t have a job. I have no clue what he was doing at this point, other than being a playboy.
Noel
Noel’s seven brothers are in town from NOLA to visit her for the holidays. With family around, how will Connor compete for her affections? He’s going to have to win over her family to win over his mate.
Connor has seven older female friends (not sisters) back home who also visit him. Noel thinks Connor is in a ménage with them and they like Connor, but they don’t. They used to babysit him. They’re all grizzly shifters too.
In the end, Connor + Noel get together, and so do their seven friends! We find out in the epilogue who paired with whom.
Noel’s seven older brothers:
- Antoine
- Jean-Claude
- Henri
- Hubert
- Eric
- Lucien
- Germain
Connor’s seven older female friends:
- Aileen
- Catriona
- Enda
- Gael
- Maire
- Nora
- Ethanne
Dessert: pumpkin pie filled beignets with pumpkin spice sprinklings on top + candied pralines
Author’s note: originally, Noel was from NOLA, but I had visited Florida that May, rather than NOLA, so I made Noel a character from Miami instead. Connor’s au pairs became sorority sisters. The French and Irish angles were abandoned. There wasn’t an issue regarding reverse harems at the time. It was about overprotective siblings, who didn’t approve of the hero and heroine, but, I didn’t like that plot…so I changed it.
Connor
athlete who left shifter society running from fre
He learns the true meaning of Christmas is community
Author’s note: this was vague, had nothing to do with the final Connor, and I have no idea what ‘running from fre’ was meant to be. Maybe running from Fate? Freedom? French fries?
Holly
CHANGE THIS TO STELLAS STORYLINE
Holly needs to make gingerbread house kits for all the kids in town for their annual gingerbread house competition, however, soembody left a 0 off the first order. She didn’t need to make 20: she needed to make 200! Each unit is TEN gingerbread houses!!!
How is she going to bake 180 kits in a single night?!
Solution: Rowan helps make mini graham cracker-style kits for the kids. Kids don’t need a giant gingerbread house, they have small hands, big imaginations. While Holly makes 200 mini kits (because it’d be unfair for some people to have large kits while others had teeny kits), Rowan divides up decorations. The kids will learn to share, and they have a lot of fun with their miniature gingerbread village.
Author’s note: you can see that relatively early on, I realized that Holly and Stella should switch storylines. I left that all-caps note in this bonus section because this is supposed to be minimally edited concept art.
The idea that a heroine didn’t know how many kits she actually needed to make was already a bakery conflict idea relatively early on. In the beginning, there was going to be a subplot where the hero has the kids use small graham cracker kits, but instead, I decided having them spend time together, making the kits, was a better choice. It gave me an excuse to have the characters get snowed in.
At this point, Rowan was not going to do a single’s event at The Wreath.
Rowan
- Meddling too much in other people’s affairs to avoid finding his own Mate
True meaning is family
Author’s note: Rowan was always a meddler, I don’t know if he was always a matchmaker, but when I decided to tie the books to professions, that was the obvious choice of job. Family was a random thing to assign Rowan.
Stella
Stella doesn’t realize how special she is. She thinks she’s boring and “basic”. Kevin helps her realize how beautiful she is, inside and out, and also helps her unleash her wild side through some extreme winter sports that leave them cold, wet, and needing to be by a hot, dry fire, preferably in no clothes at all.
Appearance: Stella is curvy, with natural bleached dirty blonde wavy hair, and a penchant for wearing black yoga pants, toting around coffee travel mugs, and graphic shirts with funny sayings on them.
Favorite Christmas dessert: sugar cookies
Author’s note: originally, Stella was a star that didn’t know she shined. I changed this because I was trying to mix the books up, so I put a love triangle with two guys in Donner Claws, and a love triangle with two gals in Blitzen Claws. In each case, there is not a real love triangle, because the hero and heroine want each other and only each other, but whoever has a competitor in the book assumes that there is a triangle.
Ironically, Stella’s portrayal as a basic bitch was a rather basic bitch portrayal on my part, so it did not make it in. Instead, she was an heiress, because that gave me an excuse to bring Nivek into the mix.
Kevin
Bad boy criminal, Robin Hood type of story
Author’s note: this did not make it into the books as anyone’s backstory, and Kevin obviously became a forest ranger.
Hope
Hope’s name is ironic. She doesn’t have hope for the holidays at all. That’s why she never spends them with her family. Born on Christmas, her father’s sister, who was excluded from the birth for privacy reasons, cursed their family, hoping they would never have another peaceful Christmas.
Hope has gone to The Wreath to work during the holidays, as something to do, but didn’t expect the town to be hustling and bustling. She isn’t into the Christmas spirit at all.
Things are Topsy Turvy — town is JAFFy and she studies Jane Austen as an English professor at a local community college, so she likes the Austen — not the Christmas parts.
He encourages her to do a JAFF Christmas parts for her students, and to go to the ornament making party.
Eamonn convinces Hope to get into the Christmas spirit.
Eamonn is the reason Hope pricks her finger on an ornament when she’s at the party, because he encourages her to add their ornament to the tree. An anemic, she faints after not being able to find a bandage. Hope goes to the hospital and Eamonn is sure of what he wants for his Christmas wish: for Hope to get better.
His kiss wakes her up, and Hope laughs. If that’s the worst thing the curse can toss at them, they are going to be fine. She was worried that the “curse” was, Eamonn would leave her for not being Christmasy enough.
Appearance: “bad girl” with alternative hair, tats, and a penchant for black clothes and sarcasm, she’s a hard worker who doesn’t open up easily, especially about her birthday and the Christmas curse. She finds the fact she believes in the curse to be pathetic, and doesn’t want anyone else to know.
Favorite Christmas dessert: fruitcake. “It’s not bad, it’s just misunderstood”
Author’s note: Hope was originally someone who hated Christmas, rather than found the faux Regency stuff to be anachronistic. She originally worked at a local community college and picked up shifts at Bear Claw Bakery to supplement her income.
Initially, she pricks her finger on an ornament, but that wasn’t as strong a choice as having her cut a finger on a cursed cookie cutter. The finger pricking was later implemented as a red herring when Hope pokes her finger on a hairpin from Avery and Eamonn tells her to be careful.
The cookie cutter ended up being the object that caused problems because:
- It meant that Hope was technically doing baking at the bakery and was technically a Bear Claw Bakery baker
- It gave me an opportunity to reference the Secret Santana exchange back in Prancer Claws. When I came up with this cookie cutter idea, I went back to Prancer Claws and changed the Secret Santana scene to include the cookie cutters. The role of the cookie cutters in Blitzen Claws came after me writing me Prancer Claws, so I had to go back and fix it.
- The curse on the cookie cutters explains her deep magical sleep.
Eamonn
Military sniper who has lost hope and doesn’t believe people are innately good
Author’s note: this did not make it into the books as anyone’s backstory because I do not know how to write military books.
Avery
Christmas “elf”
Manager of the bakery
Christmas magic: knowing everyone’s favorite dessert (scrying)
Author’s note: most of this stayed the same. I think Avery can magically tell people’s favorite dessert, but it was not relevant to the plot.
Krampus
Character sheet
Demon goat
Hell won’t take him back
Has a switch, the Ruten (RU10), which is basically a magical cattle prod
Begrudgingly friends with his “cousin” Lucy Fur, who also goes by the name “Satan”
Gets himself mailed to Satan by a metalhead teenage Christmas elf who believes in Christmas
In charge of punishing the naughty lads
Krampus punishments:
- No coffee for a week
- No donuts for a week
- Losing rec time
- Earlier curfew
- Earlier wakeup time
- Bringing them to Santa and making them tell Santa exactly what they did
- Working in a harlequin costume given they wanna be a fuckin’ joker
demonic goat shifter who takes the place of [a reindeer I did not write about] with burning coal eyes leading the way, so powerful that Hell won’t take him back (and Santa DID try to deliver to that dimension), also a total DILF who looks [like Pan]. He’s Santa’s “man on the ground” in charge of the Kringle Crew of loggers who are stationed in Canada. If he has to take someone to Santa, that means they royally fucked up. He has the power of teleportation and is the one who teleports everyone around, because he can step through dimensions and make doors. The doors can be permanent or temporary, literal doors or just holes.
Author’s note: a lot of things changed.
Krampus was not banished from Hell.
The cattle prod did not show up. The name RU10 is a joke, because if you say it out loud, it means, ‘Are you ten?’ which would be an insult Krampus would say. That was abandoned for being a weird and unfunny gag.
Lucy Fur was not someone Krampus regularly saw in the end product.
I have no idea what I was going on about regarding a metalhead elf.
Krampus initially did more bitching.
Krampus originally had more punishments for the guys, but it turned into more training focused stuff.
Hell was originally not a place Santana could visit.
There used to be more members of the logging crew, rather than just two people, and it was originally in Canada.
Originally, he would bring people to Santana for punishment, but that didn’t make a ton of sense.
Krampus used to make doors I think he could, but it didn’t need to be put into my books, so it wasn’t.
Food order
Krampus is a yule goat and will turn back into straw if he doesn’t find his mate. He finds pieces of straw on him randomly.
Straw features in each of the first eight books start in book 2, in increasing amounts.
Four boxes of Christmas blend coffee, year-round
Twelve - linzer sables with marionberry jam and small goats cut out
Eleven - lady fingers
Ten - cinnamon rolls with piped icing
Nine - rum baba
Eight - milk chocolate chip cookies
Seven - cream puff swans
Six - ‘Goose Egg’ scones, big as a goose’s egg (not really)
Five - golden cake donuts
Four - bear claws
Three - French eclairs
Two - turtle-shaped sugar cookies
One - pear danish
Each book number - Krampus’s featured dessert
Author’s note: because this has to do with Krampus, I put this tidbit in the Krampus section. I decided this order didn’t make a ton of sense and wasn’t very practical, so it did not make it into the books. Each pastry was meant to correspond with one of the items from The Twelve Days Of Christmas, and each pastry was meant to be featured in a book.
Krampus did leak straw over time, and I didn’t have Jack sweat over time, because I wanted the ice magic issue to become very urgent, be a surprise, and have Krampus’ leaking of straw act as a mirror to the sudden melting.
The reason the desserts did not make the cut:
- A lot of them were obscure, like linzer sables
- A lot of them weren’t Christmassy, and were only included for the pun, e.g. ladyfingers being a reference to ‘eleven ladies dancing’
- A lot of them had to be visualized to make sense, e.g., the golden cake donuts would look like golden rings, so that would make sense in an image…but it would not immediately be apparent when reading
- A lot of the pastries are things that just would not be offered for general sale, like rum baba, and it didn’t make sense that Krampus would get specially made pastries every single day
- A lot were really reaching, like the ‘goose egg’ scones being a reference to ‘six geese a-layin’’
- Any space dedicated to describing the dessert order was time that could’ve been spent writing anything else
- I was going to have issues keeping track of which desserts went with each story
- I was going to mention each pastry in each relevant book but abandoned the idea. Because there are only eight reindeer bad boy books, one demon book, and the last three books aren’t about Krampus or set at The Wreath, the last three pastries could never get mentioned, and readers would be left hanging trying to figure out what the last three pastries were, or I’d have to randomly mention it in a way that probably would not make a lot of sense.
Santana
Part of an adoptive line
Regularly gets a peppermint latte + cookies at the bakery
Grants each heroine’s “Christmas wish”
Santana Claus, polar bear shifter, [a lot of pop culture stuff]
Beats to hit in the Santa books:
- Sex in Santa’s sleigh
- Santa is also a mall santa
- MILF and cookies
Author’s note: basically everything changed.
There was no adoptive line — just Pandora.
Santana wasn’t a regular at the bakery at The Wreath.
He did not grant the heroine’s Christmas wishes. The hero had to do that.
He did not have many comedic moments in his book, like being a mall Santa. He does grant wishes and acts as a sort of mall Santa (in that he lets kids sit on his lap and get photos taken and stuff) in Miss Claws, but not in his own book.
Pandora
Pandora Claus, because box, and she’s a panda shifter
Proposals from Miss and Jack:
- Miss proposes to Jack in the book: he reads the books, skipping to their book, to see what she wished for, and sees the proposal, and he does it “by the book” as it were, but she was the one who put the bee in his bonnet
- Jack makes it snow, makes snow roses, makes ice gazebos, whatever
- Miss provides ring boxes that have the right rings inside, reaching into her pocket and pulling it out. It isn’t explained how she knows explicitly until the last book. She always just says “Christmas magic” and winks, and people think it’s a joke, but it’s real.
- The ring trick is inverted in the last book
The Clauses make Christmas Magic and have a rivalry with the Frosts, not out of bad blood, but because, in doing their job (conjuring weather), the Frosts make things harder for the Clauses.
The Frosts aren’t believed in at the level of the Clauses. Their power is waning, and they’re melting away. They think it’s because Father Winter doesn’t have a mate, but even when they get him one, although he’s happier, the power is still waning in Book 12. (Order needes to be Reindeer, Krampus, Santa, Old Man, and finally, Miss)
In the last book, Miss realizes she’s in love with her best friend, Jack Frost, and there’s hints he’s been melting away in books 1-11. Jack reveals at the midpoint of the book that he’s melting and that he can’t let her fall in love with someone who won’t be there for her. If he has any chance of being with her, he has to leave now, and find his cure.
also this is the in world reason for [global warming]
Miss is in love with him, but isn’t sure how to save him. That’s when she uses her Christmas Magic for her biggest, best work so far. She gets people to believe in the Frosts again, by conjuring up a series of 12 books: The Twelve Mates of Christmas, the biographies of the twelve shifters and elementals and mages that fell in love over the holidays. They’re put under the trees of millions of women in America, who read the books, and believe in the Frosts and elementals again.
OR (MORE COMPELLING):
Miss tries to solve it with Magic, and learns she can’t. She sits down and reads through her diaries that she kept through the last eleven books and thinks about what a good story they are. That’s when she gets the idea to publish them as romance novels, with some changes. The only problem is, what happens at the end of Book 12 of The Twelve Mates of Christmas? This needs to be a point of delibiration. She writes down what she wishes would happen.
Miss wrote down what she wished would happen, but it happens, because it’s her wish, AND, it’s what she needs!
Santa prints the books with the elves and makes the boxed sets, and makes sure to leave the copies under every tree they can (anyone who wished “to believe in true love again”, a surprisingly sad and large number of people).
Miss doesn’t know what she conjures, and can’t tell, so there’s an anxiety about it all. According to the calculations of Krampus (who is a math magician) jack is going to melt on Christmas Eve. Miss stays with Jack for the last night they’ll have together, in the ice palace they make in the North Pole.
The magic “melts” at 6:30PM on Christmas Eve .Miss doesn’t want to leave him in cold storage, but, just as Jack left to save himself, she has to leave and do deliveries to save him. The Reindeer heroes come back to help with the season. They all “put on” their shifts and put in the work and help out. (Has to be a scene about how Miss doesn’t know how they’ll get all the help)
It doesn’t seem to work at first…because there’s a delay. The women need time to read the books, after all, but soon, the reviews stream in…under the name “Sable Sylvan”.
The elementals are all getting stronger and new ones are unlocking their powers (in a sort of [magical] event).
The epilogue is a series of fake reviews about how they believe in Christmas Magic again. To celebrate, Miss and Jack go on a tropical vacation. When asked if they’re not tempting fate, they just smile.
Author’s note: wow, this was long.
I don’t know why I referred to Pandora as Miss for most of this. I think I wrote the bottom part first, and put the name stuff at the top later, for my own reference.
Pandora was probably the book that was most set in stone from the start of the series.
Things that changed:
- Originally, Pandora and Jack meddled more with the proposals, planning them with the heroes. That was abandoned for more human proposals because although these stories have magic, they aren’t works of urban fantasy. They’re works of paranormal romance — human stories, paranormal world, and paranormal stories, in a human world.
- Pandora proposed to Jack by showing him the ending of book 12. Instead, Jack proposes.
- The ice magic issue was something addressed in books 1-11, but that would’ve given the books too many subplots for readers to follow.
- Jack leaves The North Pole in Miss Claws to find his own cure.
- Pandora ‘granted’ her own wish — no, her friends and family helped her save ice magic and made her wedding from the book happen. It’s more powerful to have everyone come together and help, rather than have Pandora snap her fingers and magically fix everything.
- The books were sent out to readers that needed to believe in love, rather than readers that already believed in love.
- Originally I was explicitly written into the book.
- The epilogue was originally fake reviews. I changed this to what happened in the future because people didn’t want some fake reviews. That didn’t make a ton of sense. That would’ve made the book far too epistolary, given there were already diary entries.
- Pandora and Jack were originally going to have ‘goodbye sex’ in a giant ice palace he made. This was too sad and emotional, and instead, I had Jack get frozen to be preserved. Miss Claws became about Pandora having to do things on her own, without Jack, to have a future where she could do things with Jack.
Things that didn’t change:
- Jack was melting because of a lack of belief in ice magic.
- Journals saved the day.
- There was a delay in reading the books, but it was originally tracked via reviews, rather than a type of magic barometer.
- Heroes came back to help. I wrote the prologues and epilogues of the books pretty close to the start of writing the series, and once the first eight stories were finalized, I wrote the prologue for Miss Claws. I had the Krampus pickles peppered through the first eight stories to set that prologue up.
Boreas
the original Old Man WInter from forever ago, an “Old God” of sorts, buds with Cthulhu who is a water dragon and racism elemental, is a penguin shifter, blonde haired blue eyed DILF with blue-ish skin. As he loses his powers, he starts to get gray hair and weaker powers. As he was originally human, he will not disappear if he loses his magic, but his magic keeps Jack alive.
Author’s note: originally, Boreas would quickly start to age due to losing ice magic. He used to be more eldritch. That plotline was abandoned.
The joke about Cthulhu being a racism elemental is a reference to H.P. Lovecraft’s work. I did my thesis on Lovecraft and atavism, don’t come for me.
Jack
ice elemental, he was a snowman that Father Winter breathed life into, so if the elemental magic fades, he’ll turn back into a snowman (needs to be a scene where Jack is frosty, and they put him in the cold storage). His frost elemental form is a firebird but with ice. He’s got bright red hair and an orangey nose with dark marks where his coal buttons were and he is prone to wearing stovepipe hats.
Author’s note: the firebird element was abandoned. Originally, Jack looked like a snowman, but it wasn’t very sexy.