Finding Scrooge: or Another Christmas Carol

By Jason C McDonald, Samuel Morgainne Blight and Steve Oliver

Once upon a time – of all the good days in the year, on Christmas Eve…

Bob Cratchit and Ebenezer Scrooge are busy preparing for their holiday celebration. Five years have passed since Scrooge’s miraculous transformation, the strange circumstances of which no one could ever quite account for.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AJ Charleson Publishing LLC
• Release date: Dec 1, 2018
• ISBN: 9781732368019

Jason C McDonald

Jason has been telling stories his entire life. He entered the professional writing world at eight years old, joining his mother's formal critique group as a participating member. Since that time, he has written over half a dozen stories in all genres, from murder mystery to high fantasy, children's adventure to historical fiction. Finding Scrooge is the first of these manuscripts to reach publication, with many more set to follow. His non-fiction work has also been widely read online. In addition to fiction writing, Jason is a speaker, songwriter, and computer programmer. A traumatic brain injury at age 16 fundamentally changed his outlook on life, ultimately turning his focus to communication and education. The unique blend of these passions, paired with a broad academic background, flavors everything he creates.

Book preview

Finding Scrooge.

Finding Scrooge title page

By purchasing this book legally, you are supporting the creators first and foremost, as well as everyone else involved with this publication. Making and distributing illegal copies robs the author, artist, printer, distributor, and booksellers of their only means of profiting from this work.

Support independent authors. Buy legally and don’t make illegal copies.

This book is set in Libre Caslon font.

Finding Scrooge

Published by AJ Charleson Publishing LLC

Hayden, Idaho

ajcharlesonpublishing.com

The characters and events in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to actual persons or events is coincidental.

ISBN: 978-1-7323680-1-9

Copyright Ⓒ 2018 by Jason C. McDonald.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

2018—First Edition

To the legacy of Charles Dickens;

Whose stories have meant more to us

Than words can ever express…

Scrooge by the fireplace.

Foreword

by Steve Oliver.

A Christmas Carol is a story that has been told many times since Charles Dickens first dazzled the literary world in 1843, and I have often wondered what he would have thought about his work being enjoyed 175 years later.

Dickens turned to A Christmas Carol in order to give voice to his campaign to help those in need and to ‘deliver a sledgehammer blow’ to society so they’d take notice. If he was to embark on one of his famous nocturnal walks though London today, or indeed any major city, I am sure that he would be horrified to see how little has changed. Homelessness, street gangs, addiction, violence, prostitution and poverty are all still visible; we have come so far in some ways, yet the heads of those in charge are still buried in the sand. The workhouse and the debtors’ prisons might be an unpleasant footnote in history, but are we any better off with crippling interest rates that follow a payday loan and a reliance on foodbanks? This was the basis of an idea I had for a time travel take on A Christmas Carol in which Dickens himself sees visions of the past, present, and future and finds himself in 21st century London where little improvement can be found.

Each adaptation adds its own twist of the writer’s making. In the 2004 film A Christmas Carol: The Musical we see Ebenezer Scrooge’s father being dragged off to prison, and Scrooge and Marley as up-and-coming money lenders refusing Fezziwig a loan. Albert Finney’s Scrooge became the Devil’s clerk in Hell. Other versions take place away from Victorian London, such as An American Christmas Carol in depression-era New England, and Scrooged starring Bill Murray as television executive Frank Cross.

Following the lives of the characters after A Christmas Carol has been attempted several times. One of my searches for such a piece of work in 2017 led me to the book you are now reading. Originally titled Another Christmas Carol, we the readers are transported to five years after the events of the original, assuming the original took place in 1843.

Of all the re-imagining, sequels, and works loosely based on A Christmas Carol, Finding Scrooge stood out for me as the best. Almost as soon as I had finished reading, I emailed Jason C. McDonald to congratulate him on such a detailed and Dickensian work. We became email pen pals, and Jason told me in May 2018 that Finding Scrooge was going to be published. As a thank you for my support and encouragement he asked me to write the foreword, which I can say in all honesty is an honour.

What impressed me from the start was Jason’s research. Rather than just throw out a story, he dug deep into the London of the early 1800s and learned about the city and its people. Events, laws, geography and money have been carefully considered, not to mention several re-reads of A Christmas Carol. Jason spent time pondering the characters and their development in the unrecorded five years between books.

Readers of A Christmas Carol will also get a kick out of the clever call backs that are employed throughout Finding Scrooge right from the first line, and the setup in Stave One which refers back to