Cindy Procter-King: An Author With A Touch Of Humor, Romance, Present Day Issues, And One Fine Dog

Everyone's Story welcomes contemporary fiction author Cindy Procter-King who lives in gorgeous British Columbia, Canada. I've met Cindy back some years ago during my RWA days and I'm glad we've remained in contact. A multi-published author, Cindy reveals how the right attitude has helped her pen her novels as well as to cope through difficult times.


Cindy would enjoy hearing from you...perhaps with your anecdote of the right attitude that has gotten you through a trying time. Or, a mention of your grandpa and the age he lived!

The February 2012 RT Book Reviews gave your new contemporary romance a 4-star review. Congratulations! Two things caught my attention. First, one of the themes explores the need for a child/adult-child to come to grips that a parent needs their own life and love. And second, that out of anguish comes hope. Can you please address this, perhaps relating it to your own experiences?

Thank you very much for the kudos on the nice review, Elaine, and thank you for having me on Everyone’s Story! It’s great to be here. Wow, you’re starting with a difficult question. 

As far as the mother-daughter relationship in WHERE SHE BELONGS goes, let me say up front that it is entirely fictional. I have a close relationship with my own mother. However, when I was 21, my then-boyfriend (now husband) and I backpacked through Europe. Upon our return, both my parents remarked that I now saw them as people rather than as authority figures. My mother felt a lot more freedom to share her emotional life experiences with me, and we have related to one another in a “friend” as well as a mother-daughter capacity ever since. I’ve often wondered what it would be like NOT to have a close relationship with one’s mother, because it’s such a vital relationship. So I explored that in WHERE SHE BELONGS.

Most of the anguish I’ve experienced in my life has been from losing those I love, usually to old age, but sometimes a precious soul is just snatched away from you and it’s difficult to understand why. I lost someone I was very close to when I was 21 (a pivotal year!). It was very difficult, but eventually  I chose to view his unexpected passing as a life lesson—that his death could teach  me how to live, to not be bitter and drown in what-ifs and what-might-have-beens, but to embrace the future with a positive attitude. When I hear people complaining about aging, for example, hey, I’m no more eager to turn 80 than the next person, but with every birthday I think of the years and love and joy I’ve experienced that the person I lost was not given the opportunity to experience. To me, that’s hope.

Danny in WHERE SHE BELONGS is nothing like the person I lost. Not the same age or personality or relationship or reason for passing. However, I was able to draw from the experience of losing a dear friend at a young age to explore how it might affect Jess if the boy she thought she would marry died.

You have two novels, HEAD OVER HEELS and BORROWING ALEX, released on audio. What was your reaction when you learned about this opportunity? How much of a role did you, the author, have over the recording of the books?

HEAD OVER HEELS and BORROWING ALEX were both originally published in trade paperback and ebook formats, and my contracts allowed me to retain subsidiary rights (like audio and foreign rights). I’ve always been interested in pursuing those rights. However, I’m not agented and that makes it more difficult. When I learned about the new (at the time) audio publisher, AudioLark, I asked some of the authors who had signed with them about their experiences. I liked what I heard and so I submitted my two novels. I was thrilled when they were accepted. AudioLark’s third-party distribution has grown since I became one of their authors, and in the summer of 2011 the audio book for HEAD OVER HEELS appeared on Audible’s ChickLit Bestseller list for several weeks. BORROWING ALEX is in the queue for uploading to Audible and will hopefully be available around mid-February,  as well as being available (as HEAD OVER HEELS currently is) on iTunes and Overdrive. Now, WHERE SHE BELONGS is in production, with a targeted publication date of March 2012.

As for author involvement, when you sell to an audio publisher (as compared to hiring narrators and producers and paying their expenses up front yourself, which would be the equivalent of audio self-publishing), the audio publisher has final say in all facets of production. They create a new cover and story blurb that differs from the paper versions, and they hire the narrators. The author doesn’t pay a dime and isn’t involved with production until the narration is complete. When narration is complete, I’m given a chance to proof the audio files (listen to them on my computer and advise the publisher of any errors). The narrator makes the corrections, and the publisher puts the audio book up for sale on their website and third-party vendors.

The books that I’ve sold to audio have all already been through the editing process with their “paper” editors, so it’s not necessary to do more editing. They go to audio “unabridged,” that is, narrated as they were originally published in paperback. The books are not shortened for audio (which is what “abridged” means).

You’ve traveled to many exotic and fascinating countries that some of us can only imagine. Do you have an experience(s) from one of these trips that perhaps inspired your writing, whether story-wise or personal motivation-wise?

I did travel when I was young, the backpacking trip to Europe part way through university, but other than writing conferences and taking the kids to Disneyland and Disney World, my husband and I didn’t begin to travel again until our children were in their late teens/early twenties. For our 25^th anniversary, we went to Peru for three weeks and we are now planning a trip to Ecuador. We also had an opportunity to visit Newfoundland last year, and in the future we plan to visit Australia (he has cousins there) and Chile. To be truthful, my traveling has not inspired my writing story-wise, but it might some day. For example, if I wanted to write a story set in South America, I like knowing I’ve been there (I’m a research hound). As far as motivation goes, I suppose I’m motivated to finish a project before I leave on a trip!  However, traveling has taught me, more than anything, that life is about more than the next publishing contract. It’s necessary to refill the creative well, and traveling helps me do that. Plus, learning about other cultures broadens the mind, in my opinion. If travel motivates me in any way, it’s to do more of it! I just love “exploring.” 

Tell us about your beloved grandfather, William, and how he had inspired you to persevere in the face of tough times. 

Cindy's Grandpa is the smiling man in the middle.

My grandfather, William Procter, was always known as Duke. The story has it that when he was three, he strutted around “like the Duke of Wellington” (if you can imagine the Duke of Wellington strutting around in the backwoods of British Columbia). His father, William George Procter, started calling him Duke, and he was Duke until the day he died at 106…and a half. 

Duke enlisted to fight in the Great War (WWI) when he was 16. He might have been 17 by the time he got to England (I’m not sure), but he was still underage. Many underage men were sent to France to fight in the trenches, and Duke planned to be one of them. They felt they were doing their duty. One of the reasons Duke volunteered for the army was because he didn’t want to get sucked into logging back home. Well, somebody upstairs had a different plan in mind for him, because the very day he was lined up prepared to board the train to travel to the English Channel and cross over to France, he was plucked from the line-up not only for being underage but also because he knew how to log. They needed men in Scotland to log wood required to build the trenches in France. My grandfather was sent to Scotland for the duration of his time in the War (three years). He felt a great guilt about this, because most of his regiment/battalion (I can’t keep the terms straight) were killed in France. Those who didn’t die overseas were affected by the gas. Duke carried his survivor’s guilt throughout his life, but he also believed in living life to the fullest, especially as he aged, to, in a way, help atone for the young men who died in his stead.

He was a man who didn’t know the meaning of “can’t”. He raised three sons during the Great Depression as a farmer/rancher. I once asked him what it was like living through the Roaring Twenties. His reply? “The Twenties didn’t roar down on the farm. It was just darn hard work.” He darn-hard-worked his entire life.

When he was in his early sixties, I believe it was, a tree fell on his head while he was clearing land for a pasture, and he required surgery. He nearly died. For the rest of his life, he had this soft spot in his skull, like a baby.  They didn’t have steel plates to put in his head in the sixties, I guess. But did that slow him down? No. When he was 81 or 82, he participated in the first Terry Fox Run (a run that raises funds for cancer research, named for Canadian Terry Fox, who had to end his cross-country fundraising venture when his own cancer returned). Now, Duke had never run as a sport in his life. In fact, he didn’t own runners. He wore his square-dancing shoes. My grandmother died when Duke was around 90. He took up five-pin bowling and didn’t stop square-dancing (he became very popular with the widows). He bowled his last strike at 104 or 105, before the last of three falls (that had occurred over a period of years) that finally made him have to move to a nursing home at 105. He lived on his own from about 90-105, albeit beside my parents. He canned his own fruit, changed his own tires in his nineties, drove until 100, and played horseshoes every day in the front yard from the time he was 75. At one time, he was the oldest competing horseshoe player in Canada, and when he died he was the oldest surviving British Columbian WWI veteran. So he knew a lot about perseverance!

Did I mention that he went skydiving for his 100^th birthday? What can I say? He was a Leo.

I grew up either down the road or next door to him until I left for university. It’s hard NOT to be affected by such a strong personality. How can I not persevere when I had this fellow as a role model? When I think of all he achieved when he didn’t have a formal education, to me, with the opportunities available to me and my children that just were not available to Duke in his youth, it’s silly not to persevere. It’s practically disrespectful.

You’ve done an amazing job designing your own website and blog. Kudos. Are you a techie at heart? Any advice on how-to or what not to do?

Thanks! Oh, gosh, no, I’m not a techie at heart. I’m a terminal do-it-yourselfer, and also, when I first published, I could not afford a website designer. So I bought the necessary software, bought a bunch of how-to books, and taught myself enough HTML web design to build my first website. My current website was the third I designed. I also designed a site for an author friend and another for a business.

I discovered that I love web design! But it’s a time-suck. So I had to choose—web design or writing. I chose writing.

If you are a do-it-yourselfer and have time to take away from your writing to devote to web design, the great thing is YOU’RE in control. And it’s fun! But, for example, when I built my website, free software like WordPress, which a lot of web designers now use to build entire sites, not just blogs, was around but not in common use for web design. If I had it to do over again, I would probably design a site (the look) and then hire a professional to transport my design into WordPress. These types of sites are easy to update on your own. Even with my current site design, I had to hire a professional designer to code the blog so it looked like the rest of my site. I can understand HTML but CSS layout is like Martian to me.

And for fun: which authors do you tend to gush over during the writing conferences you attend?

I don’t gush because I don’t want to make authors feel uncomfortable. Can you imagine being a celebrity and people are gushing all over you? That sounds like a weird experience to me! After all, to you you’re just…you. But my favorite romance authors are Jennifer Crusie and Susan Elizabeth Phillips. I have sat in on their workshops and talked to them briefly at signings, but I can’t say that I’ve gushed. I’m more likely to gush over my personal author friends, because then they’ll buy me cheesecake. 

I’m in it for the cheesecake.  

Author Bio:
As a child, Cindy dreamed of becoming a writer. Well, okay, thanks to her grade three teacher reading a chapter of The Little House on the Prairie books to Cindy's class everyday, Cindy actually dreamed of becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder. It made so much sense. After all, Cindy's blond older sister always got to wear blue while Cindy with the "dark as cinders" hair was often relegated to wearing dull old pink­just like Laura. Laura was part of a pioneer family, and until Cindy went to school she lived in a minuscule farming community where her father and grandparents were born. What further confirmation for her future does an eight-year-old with an avid imagination require?

When Cindy realized becoming Laura meant learning to travel back in time and using­gasp!­outhouses where she believed evil trolls were hiding to gobble her up, she decided to remain in the present and become a writer instead. Her first poem began, "My father is a logger, He stirs his coffee with his thumb, He has a dog named Blackie, And in his truck they both look dumb." Thus another illustrious literary career was born.

Cindy earned a first class B.A. in English Lit. from the University of Victoria before unleashing herself on the unsuspecting workforce. However, she quickly realized her aversion to fluorescent lights and the numbers 9-2-5 wouldn't gain her kudos from her various bosses. Luckily, she married Steven King (note the lack of a "ph"), who whisked her to a tiny logging town where she couldn't find a job...unless you count her stint as secretary to the warden of a minimum security prison. There, Cindy began writing novels, and she hasn't looked back. Because, honestly, what other employer in their right mind would want her?

A Romance Writers of America Golden Heart® nominee, Cindy's mission in life is to see her surname spelled properly­with an E. So take heed. That's P-r-o-c-t-E-r. Not, no, never, under any flippin' circumstances should you spell it with two O's. Cindy lives in Canada with her husband, their two amazing sons, a tortoiseshell cat obsessed with dripping tap water, and Allie McBeagle.

Links:
Website: www.cindyprocter-king.comFacebook: www.facebook.com/cindyprocterkingauthorTwitter: www.twitter.com/cindypkGoodreads: www.goodreads.com/cindyprocter-kingAmazon Author Page:  www.amazon.com/author/cindyprocter-king