Loggers & Lumberjacks

When I knew I was writing a story set in the Minnesota Northwoods, I knew right away I had to write about lumberjacks. How can you not? Of course I knew next to nothing about them, so I had to go do research.
That turned out to be harder than I thought.

There isn’t exactly a wealth of information lying around the Internet about lumberjacks, except I can tell you the first thing I did learn is that they do call themselves loggers, not lumberjacks. And they do not, I am sad to report, call out “Timber.” I watched a few reality show episodes of Ax Men, but honestly I stopped because it was clear the reality of logging was seriously going to burn my stereotyped joy. Deciding they would be on a break since most of the book takes place during a blizzard, I learned as little as possible and got out with as much of my romanticism intact as I could.

Most of my Northwoods research came from high school memories, of Wisconsin, not Minnesota. Though I’ve lived in Iowa all my life, I spent two years in Appleton, Wisconsin, which though it’s not a terribly big place, was a sprawling city to me then. It didn’t take me long to acclimate to a bigger set of environs, and I was happy.
Then one day a science project took me back into the country. Trees For Tomorrow had five of us spend three days in the north country, where we would study trees and woods and other nature things. It was a weird field trip, because I felt like I had my feet in two worlds. On the one hand, I’d grown up in smaller, rougher places like we were, but at the same time, these were woods. We called our populated stands of trees “the timber” or “the woods,” but our stands of trees were just that, clumps of trees before we went back to fields.

Not here, not in the northern wilds. These were woods, the kind fairytales were written for. The trees went on endlessly, thick and serious and full of things that made freaky noise all night long. My city friends freaked out, and though I was more used to the countryside than they were, I wasn’t exactly reassured either. This place was intense.

We toured logging mills too, saw how boards were made, how trees were processed—it was this memory I used for the book, to imagine the places my loggers worked when they weren’t snowed in. But these memories are old and foggy, and it’s easy for the romance to slip back in.

Maybe Marcus and Paul and Arthur don’t shout timber while they work. Maybe nobody does anymore, if they ever did at all. But I promise I won’t hold it against you if you imagine them out in the tree stand, wiping off a line of sweat from their brow, shouting a warning as their quarry careens to the earth.

I won’t mind at all.

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The weather outside is frightful, but this Minnesota Northwoods cabin is getting pretty hot.

Stylist Frankie Blackburn never meant to get lost in Logan, Minnesota, but his malfunctioning GPS felt otherwise, and a record-breaking snowfall ensures he won’t be heading back to Minneapolis anytime soon. Being rescued by three sexy lumberjacks is fine as a fantasy, but in reality the biggest of the bears is awfully cranky and seems ready to gobble Frankie right up.

Marcus Gardner wasn’t always a lumberjack—once a high-powered Minneapolis lawyer, he’s come home to Logan to lick his wounds, not play with a sassy city twink who might as well have stepped directly out of his past. But as the northwinds blow and guards come down, Frankie and Marcus find they have a lot more in common than they don’t. Could the man who won’t live in the country and the man who won’t go back to the city truly find a home together? Because the longer it snows, the deeper they fall in love, and all they want for Christmas is each other.

Warning: Contains power outages, excessive snowfall, and incredibly sexy bears

Buy/Book Links: Amazon, B&N, Samhain, Goodreads, Excerpt

READ ELIZABETTA’S 4.5 STAR REVIEW ON LET IT SNOW: HERE

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ABOUT HEIDI CULLINAN

Heidi Cullinan has always loved a good love story, provided it has a happy ending. She enjoys writing across many genres but loves above all to write happy, romantic endings for LGBT characters because there just aren’t enough of those stories out there. When Heidi isn’t writing, she enjoys cooking, reading, knitting, listening to music, and watching television with her husband and ten-year-old daughter. Heidi is a vocal advocate for LGBT rights and is proud to be from the first midwestern state with full marriage equality. Find out more about Heidi, including her social networks, at www.heidicullinan.com.