Waiting until closing time on Christmas Eve to get a present for his Mom certainly wasn’t one of Tim’s better ideas. Especially not since the store only has a self-service wrapping station and Tim is utterly hopeless at gift-wrapping. Lucky for him, the lively and unconventional Shannon is there to lend a hand.

Tell us about these people.
My main characters are Tim, a lawyer without a clue regarding how to wrap gifts, and Shannon, an unconventional young woman who works as a high school teacher, because she didn’t know what else to do with her life. They meet during the pre-Christmas shopping rush and hit it off.

What genre is this story?
Christmas Gifts is a short and sweet contemporary holiday romance.

Who will it appeal to?
Everybody who likes a short romantic tale to take his or her mind of the holiday stress.

If you like Nick Hornby, you’ll love my book.

It’s true. An editor at a Big 5 publishing house once compared my writing to Nick Hornby. Of course, she wasn’t a Big 5 editor back then, but just a student attending the same creative writing class at university. Still, I get the bragging rights. Besides, Christmas Gifts really is a bit Horbyesque.

Have you written any other books that we should read next?
37 of them, actually. They’re mostly shorts and novelettes in a variety of genre from science fiction to romance.

If you enjoyed “Christmas Gifts“, you’ll probably also enjoy “The Hybrids“, because it also features a wintery setting and two very different people finding a personal connection. Though “The Hybrids” is not set during the pre-Christmas shopping rush, but after an apocalypse which killed off 99.99 percent of the human race. Though come to think of it, Christmas Shopping can seem very post-apocalyptic as well.

Tell us a bit about yourself.
My name is Cora Buhlert. I was born and bred in Bremen in North Germany, where I still live today – after time spent in London, Singapore, Rotterdam and Mississippi. I hold an MA degree in English from the University of Bremen and am currently working towards my PhD. I have been writing, since I was a teenager, and have published stories, articles and poetry in various international magazines. When I’m not writing, I work as a translator and teacher.

Do you have a website where we can keep up with your work?
Yes, I do. The url is http://corabuhlert.com

What about Facebook or Twitter?
No Facebook or Twitter, but I have Google Plus.
http://plus.google.com/u/0/+CoraBuhlert/

How easily do new storylines come to you? If we give you four random words – Man, Woman, Airport, Darkness – can you give us a brief storyline?
Few things are creepier than a completely deserted airport by night. Yet to the young woman who works as a cleaning lady at a major international airport, the deserted airport is her normal, everyday or rather every night workplace. Until one day she senses something  or rather someone moving in the darkness, watching her. But who is the strange man who disturbs the peace of an airport closed down for the night? Is he a terrorist or a heroic federal agent hunting down terrorists? And does it matter, when he is so smoking hot?

That’s great. We’d buy that book.
What’s next for you?
I have two more stories coming up before the end of 2014. One is the German translation of “Love in the Times of the Macrobiotic Muesli”, a romance of the counterculture set in West Germany in the early 1980s. The other is “Elevator of Doom”, the latest novelette in my Silencer series, which was inspired by the pulp heroes of the 1930s.