About Cynthia

Without a doubt, I have always been a reader, and for most of my life, I�ve been a writer, too. I remember the first novel I started at the tender age of nine: it was about a guy, a girl, and a horse. The book�s life proved mercifully short when my mom found my attempt at back cover copy or the blurb, proclaimed it, �Awwww, how cute!� and proceeded to share it with any relative who would stand still for it.

I scribbled on, though, in secret, never letting many people see my �work.� Through high school and college and grown-up responsible jobs such as teaching, ad sales and journalism, I wrote � half-finished manuscripts that became casualties of life getting the best of me.

But in 2004, I made a New Year�s Resolution to finish the latest book I�d abandoned in a sticky spot in Chapter Three. I gave up Law & Order and CSI, both terrible addictions, and became addicted instead to rattling off chapters on my laptop. By March of 2005, I was finished with it, and it took its rightful place under my bed � for I had a new idea, and an appointment to pitch to an editor at Georgia Romance Writers, a group I�d only just joined.

That began a long journey of a novel that I wrote and rewrote and watched and prayed over as it made its trek from one editor to another � before finally, on August 4, 2006 an editor called me, and said those glorious words all writers long to hear: �I want to buy your book.�

I live in South Georgia with my husband and my daughter Kate, whom we brought home from China in March of 2002. We�re claimed by two dogs, two inside cats, and whatever cats show up for morning muster and mess hall.

The south to me is more than my home � it�s my roots, and those roots feed me and sustain me. I love its small dusty towns, its big brash cities determined to show off the south�s Sunday best. I love the quiet country roads, the old barns that are turning, year-by-year, into the earth that first grew the trees used to build those old barns. I love the song of blue jays and mockingbirds, of cicadas on a hot summer evening, the lightning bugs flickering under the trees, the spring rain drumming down on tin roofs. But most of all, I love its people, who reach out to families in times of joy and sorrow. They are not perfect by any stretch of the imagination � but neither am I. They take me as I am, and I, them. It�s what I write about, because, really, it�s who I am.