"Writer" Cindi Myers

Hi, I’m Cindi Myers and I’m a writer. 

Do you think it’s merely coincidence that these sort of introductions sound as if they should take place at a 12-step meeting? While I don’t think of my writing as a destructive disease, I’ll admit it has been a life-changing obsession. And if I happened to mention to strangers that I have people living in my head who talk to me, they would probably take a few steps away.     

When I’m writing a book the idea does begin to take over my life. My characters do talk to me and I think about them much of the time. I talk about them at the dinner table and my husband smiles and nods, the way he would if I went on and on about any other person he’d never met. 

The characters in A Soldier Comes Home certainly moved in and made themselves at home while I was writing the book. I’d be cooking dinner and Chrissie would insist on telling me all the reasons she really couldn’t fall in love with Ray. Falling asleep at night, Ray would pop in to riff on how much harder being a single dad was than he thought it would be.  

The inspiration for A Soldier Comes Home came from a series of newspaper articles that ran in the Rocky Mountain News about the men and women serving in Iraq and Afghanistan and their families. One article featured soldiers who received “Dear John” letters while they were overseas and came home to, in some cases, empty apartments. Reading that article made me so sad. As a writer, I wanted to make the story come out differently. There was another article about Native American soldiers from the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. That became the basis for the subplot of the book, and for the free online read that’s running on eHarlequin.com right now. “Finding Home” is a prequel to A Soldier Comes Home and you can read it at http://www.eharlequin.com/article.html?articleId=1349

Being a writer does require the ability to look at the world a little differently, to want to create different endings for situations, and to make imaginary people real. I’m guilty as charged and I wouldn’t have it any other way. So yes, I’m Cindi Myers, and I am a writer. 

P.S. I have a video for A Soldier Comes Home that I’m pretty jazzed about.

You can view it here