Author: Cindy

I'm irritated because my posts won't publish.

Where In The World Is Cindiego?

On an airplane, that’s where.

Coming home. Back to Canada.

Which means I’ve been somewhere. But where? And for how long? How could that crafty Cindy go away without her trusty blog readers suspecting something?

  • 2 points to anyone who guesses how long I’ve been away.
  • 4 points if you can correctly guess where I went.
  • – 16 points if you knew where I went, because I told you, but you pretend you didn’t know because you WANT THOSE FOUR POINTS!!
  • + 80 points for creativity.
  • – 13,000 points for rudeness.

You need hints? I got hints!

  • I went there last year, for my birthday. This year, I took My Liege along.
  • We stayed with my parents.
  • There was sun.
  • And water.
  • Probably taco sauce.
  • A margarita or two.

By gum, you got it! Alaska! (Not).

*Fine Print. Correctly guessing wins you nothing. Cindy is under no obligation to confirm that your guess is correct or to reward you in any way. In fact, Cindy might be making this whole thing up, because that’s her line of work, and you’ll never know, will you? Can you trust her to eventually tell you the truth? Will she prove her absence by posting pictures? Will you believe she took the pictures? These and other questions may or may not be answered in upcoming episodes of When Cindy’s Gray Matter Churns.

February Blog Tour

HEAD OVER HEELS will release in audio book from AudioLark on Valentine’s Day. Next week! February 14th, for you non-romantic types. I’m setting up a bit of a blog tour to celebrate the release. Yes, for once, Cindy is going on a blog tour instead of hosting an author who’s on one. Not to worry, I’ll announce the blogs here the days they post. But just to get organized…

Thursday, February 17th, you can find me at the new group blog, 4 Writers, For Readers.

The following week, Wedneday, February 23rd, I’ll be at author Edie Ramer’s blog. UPDATE: This date may be changing. I’ll post next week with the new details.

Lastly, the week of February 28th, I’m getting interviewed at The Pen Warriors, although I’m not sure of the exact date yet.

Two blogs and one interview. Cyberspace will get sick of me.

I’m also sending out a new copy of my newsletter next week, to coincide with the audio release of HEAD OVER HEELS. If you’d like to sign up before I do, there’s a handy-dandy little newsletter sign-up box at the top right of this page.

And Now Television…

While I’m blabbing about my childhood influences, I might as well confess my childhood TV addictions. Because I think they also influenced my desire to become a writer. And my tendency to write humorous/comedy. Even when I’m writing emotional contemporary romance, I like my characters to possess healthy senses of humor. At least one of them, anyway. The other one can be serious. I’m flexible like that.

I tend to believe I’m one of those writers who was born a writer—or at least a reader. I learned to read early (aged 4, so family legend goes), and once I started reading, I couldn’t stop. Yes, we had TV, but for years we had one, maybe two channels. And neither of those channels was dedicated to children, let me tell you! (“Let me tell you!” is something my grandfather used to say all the time, so when I say it, I think of him, let me tell you). Oh, we had a couple of Canadian children’s television shows, like The Friendly Giant and Mr. Dress-Up. And we had The Walt Disney Show on Sunday nights. If we kids were good, we were allowed to watch The Ed Sullivan Show following Disney. And Ed had that little mouse who told jokes and made everyone laugh and feel good about themselves.

My father loved The Red Skelton Show. I watched and loved it, too. And so comedy seeped its way into my veins.

No one could top Red for me until The Carol Burnett Show happened along. I LOVED Carol Burnett. She was funny, too. Especially her pitiful Eunice character. Tragic and sad, yet, in the midst of all that dysfunction, laugh-out-loud funny. Suddenly, funny seemed so natural to me. When you’re shy as a child, humor is a great way to break out of your shell. Every once in a while I run across someone who tells me I was shy when they first met me. Usually, they just tell me I was weird.

Well, I was raised on Topo Gigio, Red Skelton, and Carol Burnett, with a healthy dose of Bugs Bunny and Grover from Sesame Street thrown in (I didn’t discover Grover until I was 15—long story involving a coveted color television set and my high school that year being on split shift and not starting until afternoon).

And people wonder why I’m a bit odd. Now you know.

Childhood Literary Influences

Laura Ingalls Wilder’s LITTLE HOUSE ON THE PRAIRIE books are the earliest influence I can remember (other than Dr. Seuss) that made me want to become a writer. Well, Dr. Seuss didn’t make me want to be a writer so much as he made me want to learn to read. And I did learn to read as a preschooler, through the Dr. Seuss books. I didn’t go to Kindergarten (it didn’t exist in my little backwoods community and this was a few decades ago!), and, because I’m born in January, I was 6 and a half by the time I entered grade one. I would have been bored to tears if I hadn’t learned to read before grade one.

I most likely “taught myself” to read because my older sister, two grades ahead of me in school, would sit and read with my parents for her homework. I was a bit competitive, so was in there like a dirty shirt. If Big Sis was learning to read, then, by gum, I was learning to read, too!

So by the time I entered grade one, at six and a half, I was reading at a grade three level. Big Sis was in grade three. Makes sense.

My grade three teacher, Mrs. Brady, loved the Laura Ingalls Wilder books and read them to us every day. I fell in love with them, too. I must have read each book three times over the next couple of years. I identified with Laura because she had dark hair and had to wear pink all the time whereas her blonde sister got to wear blue. Yes, my mother was forever forcing me into pink. I was a tomboy (which is weird, because I have no athletic ability whatsoever…oh, yeah, I was competing with my brother, the only boy, for my father’s attention—that’s why I was a tomboy) (have I mentioned I’m a middle child?). As I said, I was a tomboy, and what tomboy wants to wear pink?

We also lived in a very tiny farming community that, to this day, doesn’t have a stop sign or a store of any kind. Laura came from a pioneering family, and as a child I felt pretty much that way about myself. Especially when a bear happened into the yard.

Did you know there’s a blog devoted to all things Laura Ingalls Wilder? Well, there is. It’s called Laura’s Little Houses. And it’s worth a visit.

My favorite Laura Ingalls Wilder book was ON THE BANKS OF PLUM CREEK. Do you have a favorite Laura book? Or a favorite author from your childhood? One who inspired your love of reading or led to dreams of becoming a writer?

My grade seven teacher loved Ray Bradbury and read Bradbury short stories to us nearly every day. Ray was fun. But Ray wasn’t Laura.

It’s Laura for me!

Wordle Fun

You’ve seen tag clouds (those clusters of words in some blog sidebars that show the most commonly used tags or categories). I’m not a fan of tag clouds. The bigger words always look like they’re bragging. But I am a fan of having fun. I stumbled across the Wordle website and inputted the first three chapters of the book I’m currently submitting to agents. This was the result:

I like that the Wordle is shaped like a shoe with the hero’s and heroine’s names jutting out. #1, the book is a romantic comedy/mystery and the hero, Gabe, is a newbie P.I., so the shoe form = “gumshoe.” And, #2, the jutting out of the names looks fun.

I inputted my text block into the Wordle form, then opened a new window, took a screen shot, then expanded the screen shot as wide as my monitor would allow. I then pasted the screen shot into Photoshop and created this JPG (You can choose to post your creation to a public Wordle gallery instead of going to all this trouble. But you know me. I like trouble).

Like a tag cloud, a “wordle” highlights the most commonly used words in your uploaded text. Gabe is the hero and Ursula is the heroine, so their names should show up the largest. I’m pleased that they do.

Mackie is Gabe’s uncle. He has several point-of-view scenes in the novel and plays a major role in the plot.

The Wordle website has several font and color and shape variations. Play with your own Wordle then let me know about it in the comments section. When I have a moment, I’ll pop over to your blog and check it out.

Interview with Five Star Mystery Editor Deni Dietz

Recently, I interviewed Five Star Mystery Associate Editor, Deni Dietz. You can find the interview on my Articles page. My previous interview with agent Laura Bradford can now be found in Archives.

Deni is my first editor interview. Deni was also my editor for WHERE SHE BELONGS, my December 2011 Five Star Expressions release. As I’ve mentioned before, the Expressions line will close with the publication of my novel. However, Deni, who publishes under two names as well as being an editor, has also edited the Five Star Mystery line all along.  She will continue to do so. Some romantic suspense and romantic mysteries will qualify for the Five Star Mystery line. Deni says:

We have no “official” romance-to-mystery/suspense ratio. But as a crime fiction author since 1992, I know my audience. If there’s too much romance, the book won’t fly. If the romance is integral to the plot, the book will have wings as well as legs. Example: I was 50,000 words into a new Mary Ellen Dennis historical romance, The Midnight Bridge, when the Expressions line went belly-up. “Bridge” even has my favorite opening lines: “The solicitor smelled a rat. Twenty minutes later he didn’t smell anything at all.” I call my Mary Ellen Dennis novels “history-mystery-romances,” and Five Star said they’d consider Midnight Bridge for their mystery line. I thought about it, and decided that I, as an acquiring editor, would turn it down. The ratio was askew—more romance than mystery. So I guess what I’m saying is that I’ll know if the ratio works, and every submission comes to me before it’s reviewed for publication.

Deni also shares Five Star Mystery formatting tips in the interview and describes where you can find Five Star/Cengage books. Other delicious tidbits can be found in the interview. So hie thee over to the Articles page and lap it up!