Christoffer Petersen

Authentic Arctic Thrillers

Advent

Yule at Aurora Station – 1st Advent, Part 1

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Things always take longer than expected, and it doesn’t help when I suddenly want to experiment with a new cover idea.

And see, I’m waffling already, when I what I should be doing is introducing you to a new story set on the first Advent Sunday of Christmas now available to download.

I explain more about the story on the page for Yule at Aurora Station, but I just thought I’d talk around it here.

As I’ve mentioned before, December in Greenland is incredibly dark, i.e. no sun. So celebrating Advent, especially if it fell in November, was an opportunity to get the decorations up fast to beat back the winter dark. This really worked in Uummannaq, with a red or green paper star lit with a light bulb in the window of nearly every house in that tiny town on a remote island in the Arctic. The snow reflected the Christmas colours and the Northern Lights blazed in the sky.

Romantic?

You betcha!

So, with that in mind, you might better understand my love of Christmas and the reason why I am often compelled to write a Christmas story.

Yule at Aurora Station is a Christmas story in four parts, one for each Sunday this Christmas.

It’s a little different than my usual crime novels and novellas, and with that in mind I’m giving away the first part for free via a link to my payhip store. (Please note, you will be asked for an email address to register the “sale”, but you are not being added to a mailing list.)

Readers of my Greenland Missing Persons series will be familiar with a certain five-year-old, and she’s back, but she’s all grown up. Luui Angakkuarneq stars in this cute, fantastical story about a pregnant polar bear – the last polar bear in a rapidly diminishing Arctic.

Die-hard crime readers have bailed at this point, and I don’t blame you. 🙂

But if you want to read something a little different this Christmas, then each short instalment of Yule at Aurora Station might be just what you need. It’s packed with Arctic goodness, goons, and mythical creatures. And a little magic, of course.

As I said, Part 1 is free, so you can try before you buy. Each part thereafter will be $0.99 and bundled for $2.99 later in December. Yule at Aurora Station is about 100 pages long in total. I will release the parts via links in a blog post and on the book page on this website.

Here’s a quick overview:

  1. Sunday November 28 Yule at Aurora Station – Part 1 (FREE)
  2. Sunday December 5 Yule at Aurora Station – Part 2
  3. Sunday December 12 Yule at Aurora Station – Part 3
  4. Sunday December 19 Yule at Aurora Station – Part 4

I hope you enjoy Part 1 as much as I enjoyed writing it.

Have a great Sunday! Oh, and apologies to readers from Australia, as I’m pretty sure it’s Monday already.

Advent Eve

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It really is a thing – Advent Eve. Rather, it’s the night before the first Advent of Christmas 2021.

Full confession, I’m not religious. I did find my baptism certificate the other day, but that’s as close as I get.

So the whole Advent “thing” is really just extended Christmas for me.

It’s also something that has stuck from Greenland.

December is incredibly dark in northern Greenland. In Uummannaq we had an hour or so of grey twilight. In Qaanaaq we had nothing. If there was no snow or ice on the ground to reflect the moonlight, we had less than nothing. One Christmas it rained, and the snow melted, resulting in super dark.

Not pleasant.

What is pleasant in Greenland over Christmas is the way every house – every house – has a coloured paper star with a light bulb hanging in the window. There are more lights, candles, decorations of all kinds all over the villages and settlements.

In the towns too, but I spent most of my winters in the more remote parts of Greenland.

Greenlanders celebrate Christmas with light to push back the dark. And then, at Christmas, there’s even more cause for celebration as we know the light is on its way back. It’ll take some time, but just knowing it’s coming is a huge boost to winter morale.

So, I hope you’ll celebrate with me this Advent Eve because tomorrow I’ll post the first of Luui’s Advent stories.

I’ll be back tomorrow with a link for the first part of Yule at Aurora Station.

Chris

Pre-Advent

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I wrote Scamp a short while ago to try out different ideas for stories with Luui Angakkuarneq. I needed her to be older, so it is set in 2040 when Luui is 25 years old. the basic premise of Scamp is that Luui is in the Far North – naturally – and she is working for an NGO tracking mammals etc. struggling in the face of climate change, i.e. even more so than today.

I can feel that this is going to be Luui’s thing, and it will allow me to explore different ideas and storylines centred around climate change.

So, the idea worked, in that Scamp was to be a proof-of-concept, and I had fun writing it.

That’s key for me.

Sure, I have plenty of books that sell better than others, but if I only wrote the books that sell best, it would get awfully boring. So I write a wolf crime book here, science fiction there, and Luui is just getting started!

Scamp is free from my payhip store, and if you’re interested in Luui’s Advent story – coming soon! – then you might want to read this one first.

Chris