Interview with Cindy Myers | Sound Authors Radio
October 30, 2008
Dr. Kent: Welcome to the show today. It’s June 6, 2008 and it’s actually been 40 years since Senator Robert Kennedy died in Los Angeles. The day after he was shot tragically. A lot of us I are thinking about Robert Kennedy now that Barack Obama is the democratic candidate. I sure hope that he stays safe because it was a real tragedy 40 years ago. It’s also just starting to feel like summer out here in New York. It’s rainy and cold today but it’s getting there. I have four guests on the show today, actually I have three guests. I’m doing something unprecedented here at sound authors and I’m going to be the fourth guest and talk about my other life as a musician and play some songs. My three guests today are Cindy Myers, Olof Ericksen, and Steven Wax. My first guest is a romance novelist. She’s going to come and clarify what romance novels are and her newest book is called A Soldier Comes Home. Welcome to the show Cindy Myers.
Cindy Myers: I’m very happy to be here today.
Dr. Kent: Tell me a little bit about A Soldier Comes Home.
Cindy Myers: A Soldier Comes Home is about a solder who gets a Dear John letter while serving in Iraq. He comes home to an empty house and a two year old son he doesn’t really know. He needs to get his life back together and he meets a young widow who’s husband was killed earlier in the war. So we have two people who are sort of casualties of the war at home who are trying to overcome that and of course being romance they fall in love and do find a way to overcome it.
Dr. Kent: Well it’s good to get into right away. Romance novels often carry the stigma of oh, you’re reading a romance novel, it’s a bit of trash; clarify that for me.
Cindy Myers: I think the people that say that haven’t really read romance novels. Romance writers tend to explore the relationships. Writers as a whole I think explore the things that interest them. So maybe a thriller writer will want to explore the mind of a killer or the psychology of fear; and maybe a mystery writer is interested in solving puzzles. So romance writers, the thing we want to delve into relationships.
Love is one of the most powerful emotions. What is it that’s so compelling about love and the experience of falling in love? Romance novels just look at that and all the different types of people fall in love and the different obstacles that might come to people who fall in love. So I think that’s the attraction of romance novels and maybe its why some people don’t understand it, maybe they’re leery of delving into that or it’s too touchy feely for them. Obviously they’re not for everyone but for me the big attraction is what is it that makes people fall in love and why is it so strong and compelling?
Dr. Kent: What was your first romance novel that you read?
Cindy Myers: My first romance that I read was A Knight in Shining Armour by Jude Deveraux. I had never read one before and a friend gave it to me to read and I was just blown away. I was intrigued by the story, I couldn’t put it down and I thought wow, I want to read more stories like that. I found it very satisfying.
Dr. Kent: Were you immediately in love with that genre?
Cindy Myers: I was. I really was. Like I said it was brand new to me, I wanted to go out and find more books that gave me that same feeling.
Dr. Kent: So how about you grew up in was it really a town called Cut and Shoot?
Cindy Myers: Yes it is; Cut and Shoot Texas.
Dr. Kent: Can you tell us more about that?
Cindy Myers: Well it’s a little small town in east Texas. It has a fire station, a post office, six churches and about six bars. It’s a real wide spot in the road but it’s a neat little town. It claims to be the same as the hometown of Roy Harris who was a doctor, who was a former Miss America.
Dr. Kent: What do folks down there in cut n shoot think about your romance novels?
Cindy Myers: Well my brother still lives there and I went to school there so I still know a lot of people there and they seem really pleased. I had a book signing there very early in my career and had a really good turn out. I think I wrote one novella that was actually set in Cut and Shoot and they seemed to get a kick out of that.
Dr. Kent: So tell me a little bit about now specifically you’ve now written a romance novel that’s not I guess its not what I’m expecting when I’m going to pick up a romance novel. Not that I actually to pick up romance novels but were I to read them and there’s many, many people that read them, why A Soldier Comes Home?
Cindy Myers: Well, the idea came to me when the Rocky Mountain News did a series of articles about soldiers in Iraq and one of the articles was about soldiers who get Dear John letters while they’re over there and I thought it was just so sad and one of the guarantees of the romance novel is a happy ending. I can’t give happy endings to all those soldiers in real life but I could do it in the pages of a book so it was sort of cathartic I guess to make things come out better than they perhaps do in real life. So that’s what really attracted me to the story.
Dr. Kent: What in the story, how do you develop a character as opposed to I guess a non-romance novel. How do you develop a character, build conflict and then of course like you said romance novels always end well because that’s something that your readers actually entrust in you to do. Tell me a little about the form.
Cindy Myers: The focus of the romance novel is on relationships. So you look at the characters as how the relationship affects them. You develop a character just like you would in any other genre. They have problems that they need to overcome, but the focus is on how is love or their love interest helping them to overcome those problems. You have to avoid having someone fix them or an outside character come in and fix the problem.
The character still has to resolve their conflict themselves but the love interest helps them to see the conflict in a different way or gives them a different perspective or having this other person love them, giving them the confidence to say something. So it’s all about how the romantic relationship impacts them as a person.
Dr. Kent: Also in your biography you said you met your husband on a blind date and you were engaged after six weeks.
Cindy Myers: Yes.
Dr. Kent: Do you live a romance novel?
Cindy Myers: That’s very true; yes I have my own romance novel. I can say that I believe in love at first sight because it was pretty much that way for us. We have been married 29 years in December so it definitely took.
Dr. Kent: Through those 29 years of marriage was there ever a point when you said no, this isn’t really exactly like a romance novel?
Cindy Myers: Well of course real life isn’t like a romance novel in that it’s much longer and so you have lots of ups and downs but the basic love is there I mean, we’ve been very lucky. And I do think luck plays a certain point in it. I can say that my own relationship has inspired me to write about love.
Dr. Kent: So when you connect to your readers, there’s a lot of different readers that pick these books up because we’re talking about books that are in CVS Pharmacy, they’re in Wal-Mart, they’re in anywhere anyone goes. People pick them up and read them on vacation or they read them after a breakup or when they’re in a good relationship, so what kind of responses do you get from your readers?
Cindy Myers: It’s really interesting. I get lots of responses from readers and its amazing how many people will write and say oh this story is just like my relationship with my husband. Or, we had the same kind of problem and it’s really good to see people overcoming them. I’m really surprised by that and I love to get letters from people who aren’t in a romantic relationship who say I really enjoy reading this because I’m hoping to find that kind of relationship one day. I get people who are in relationships and people who aren’t.
Dr. Kent: What I find fascinating is your books have been translated into gosh, how many languages? Ten languages? Let’s say there’s someone in Japan or Korea or Holland who has a relationship and they read this book. How do they connect to the story?
Cindy Myers: I’m not sure. I don’t get very many foreign reader letters possibly because of the language barrier but they must be very popular because the books sell overseas in all kinds of countries. So I’m thinking that love is one of those universal emotions.
Dr. Kent: Have you ever thought of writing a Greek or Japanese romance?
Cindy Myers: I did write a series that had Greek characters in it. It was actually set on a cruise ship so it was very international and the two main characters were Greek. I haven’t written any Japanese characters but I might one day.
Dr. Kent: What projects are you working on? You’ve obviously been well published; you can do many different things if you want. What are you working on?
Cindy Myers: I have another three more books coming out this year and I’m writing books for next year. More romances; I’m working on one right now; actually I just finished it up. Sarah is a 40 year old single mom who’s pregnant for the first time and the dad is a single dad who’s trying to get custody of his daughter. He lost it and is trying to get it back so they’re dealing with those issues and that was really interesting to explore.
Dr. Kent: Very interesting. And you have a background in not just novel writing but you’ve also done all sorts of freelance work, correct? Newspapers?
Cindy Myers: Right, I wrote for a newspaper and magazine for a number of years. I did a lot of medical articles, travel articles, history articles.
Dr. Kent: Do you like romance the best?
Cindy Myers: I do, because you get to create your own world and I think that’s a real attraction of fiction. You have control over the characters, creating that world and going where it interests you whereas a freelancer you’re really bound by what topics your magazine is looking for and also it’s a constantly looking for work. At least a book lasts a little bit longer.
Dr. Kent: Tell us where we can find all of your books. I know your website cindymyers.com and in stores. But give us some more information.
Cindy Myers: You can also go to e-harlequin.com. They’re actually running a free novella that’s connected to A Soldier Comes Home and you can download that and read it for free to kind of get a taste of what the book is like. I have a MySpace page, so I’m all over the web.
Dr. Kent: We’ll keep in touch with you and we’ll see what your next project is. Three books this year; keep up the work and I wish you all the best.
Cindy Myers: Thank you for having me on the show today.
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