This week I’m joined on my blog by Lilac Mills author of Christmas at Honeycombe Bay published on 29 September 2026. She is sharing with readers her top tip for feeling happy. Over to Lilac …
Thank you, Morton, for very kindly inviting me onto your highly informative and entertaining blog again (or, more accurately, I think I shoehorned myself onto it!).
I thought long and hard about my top tip for feeling happy, because happiness can be a fleeting ethereal thing that we’re constantly striving for. As someone who writes happy-ever-after for a living, I’m not going to look at the big picture stuff here – I’m going to focus on the little things.
A long time ago someone imported a piece of wisdom to me that I haven’t forgotten: “Will whatever is worrying you matter next week, next month, next year?” From that moment on, I’ve always stopped to consider whether the thing I’m fretting over is actually worth the negative mental energy I’m giving it. In other words, “don’t sweat the small stuff”.
Conversely, it’s also the small stuff that makes me feel happy: nursing the padded-bottomed weight of my tiny sleeping grandson; watching a bee foraging on a flower I’ve planted; seeing the morning mist lying in the valley on an early morning dog walk; enjoying the first cup of tea of the day, which somehow always seems better than the many cups that come after it.
I find joy and pleasure in the little things, the seemingly insignificant moments that could easily slip by unnoticed if I let it, and which bring me regular little bursts of happiness.
But most of all, for me, feeling happy is about appreciating and being thankful for the people I love, and who love me in return – my husband, my family, and my friends – and those nurturing, loving connections that bind me and support me, and make my life so rich.
Which segues nicely (or am I shoehorning again?) into my latest book, Christmas at Honeycombe Bay, which is primarily all about those loving connections, and how found family can be as equally full of love and joy.
About Lilac Mills
Lilac lives on a Welsh mountain with her very patient husband and incredibly sweet dog, where she grows veggies (if the slugs don’t get them), bakes (badly) and loves making things out of glitter and glue (a mess, usually). She’s been an avid reader ever since she got her hands on a copy of Noddy Goes to Toytown when she was five, and she once tried to read everything in her local library starting with A and working her way through the alphabet.
She loves long, hot summer days and cold winter ones snuggled in front of the fire, but whatever the weather she’s usually writing or thinking about writing, with heart-warming romance and happy-ever-afters always on her mind.
She also writes romantic fiction under the pen names Liz Davies and Etti Summers.
Find out more about Lilac Mills on her website, or you can follow her on Facebook and Instagram.
Website : https://lilacmills.com
Facebook : https://www.facebook.com/LilacMills
Instagram : https://www.instagram.com/lilacmillsauthor
About Christmas at Honeycombe Bay
An uplifting, heartwarming seasonal romance set in a quintessential seaside village in Devon.
Two Scrooges come together for a festive-free holiday season by the sea and find all their anti-Christmas plans going up in smoke when they decide to play Santa for a single mom and her child.
Eloise Garrett thinks Christmas is overpriced, overhyped, and overrated, and without any family to share it with, she feels sad, lonely and isolated. The “season for giving” is just a constant reminder that she’s single, sixty(ish), and staring down retirement. But not this Christmas. Determined to avoid the most magical time of the year, Eloise decides to spend Christmas in Honeycombe Bay. Surely a seaside village in the middle of winter won’t be too festive?
Ever since his wife passed away, Bartholomew Knott hasn’t felt up to welcoming visitors to his guest house. With the prospect of another long, lonely winter, and having become more Scrooge than Santa over the years, Bart is dreading Christmas. However, when he’s contacted by someone who dislikes decking the halls just as much as he does, Bart has the brilliant idea of opening the guest house to people who want to escape all things festive.
Christmas isn’t easy to ignore, though, not even in off-season Honeycombe Bay. So when fate forces Bart to give shelter to a single mother and child whose holiday has been devastated by a terrible fire, Eloise finds herself playing Mrs. Claus to Bart’s Santa-dragging the house’s other guest, a heartbroken teacher looking for a break during the holidays, into the action as well. But holiday cheer isn’t the only thing sparking under the mistletoe. Will the guests at Honeycombe Bay realize that, sometimes, the best way to escape Christmas is to let it into your heart?
Available in ebook, paperback and audio.
Purchase link: https://www.lilacmills.com/christmas-at-honeycombe-bay-purchase-links
The next book in the series, The Little Bookshop at Honeycombe Bay, is out on 9th March 2027, and is available to preorder now.
And Lilac also has the first in a brand-new Scottish romance, Rescue in the Highlands, also due out in March 2027, and available for preorder.
This is the blog for Morton S. Gray, writer of romance with a mystery to solve The Secrets of Borteen Bay Series set in the fictional seaside town of Borteen for Choc Lit Publishing an imprint of Joffe Books.
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The Secrets of Borteen Bay Series – Buying link here
