What's more dangerous than a horse? An interview with Cindy McDonald

Today I'm talking with Cindy McDonald about her book Hot Coco, a romantic drama and part of her family drama series, Unbridled series.

Cindy McDonald was born and raised in the Pittsburgh, Pa area. For 26 years she was a professional choreographer,she taught ballet, jazz, and tap. During that time she choregraphed many musicals and an opera for the Pittsburgh Savoyards. Most recently she has retired to write her novels. She resides with her husband on their Thoroughbred farm know as Fly By Night Stables near Pittsburgh.

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1) Please tell us about your book.
Let’s face it, everyone knows a beautiful woman who can’t walk through a room without tripping over the coffee table, or turning every situation into a total debacle. Trainers at Keystone Downs have been dumping Coco Beardmore and she’s landed in Mike West’s lap. The problem is that Coco is a complete klutz! Her driving skills are a real bang—into Mike’s horse trailer, and right through the barn wall! What’s more are her Thoroughbreds: one flips while being saddled, one sits down like a dog in the starting gate, and then there’s the one that’s an escape artist. It’s enough to drive a normally calm and collected Mike West to the very edge.

But Mike’s not the only one having problems with women. His father Eric has taken on more than he can chew, and he’s about to get spit out by two women: One that he’s in love with and one that thinks he’s in love with her.

Things have never been hotter around Westwood Thoroughbred Farm—and someone’s about to get burned!

2) Tell us about the inspiration for this book.

Blondes—everyone loves to think of gorgeous blondes as klutzy, air-headed, and basically stupid. I wanted to take a character and introduce her as one thing, and then morph her into another. I think I did a very good job with Coco. I started her out as a stereotypical blonde bimbo and turned her into something else—no, I’m not going to tell you what, but just know that everyone is touched and changed in this story—read between the lines, watch the subtext, it is there for you—if you pay attention.

I also left behind bread crumbs of my former life as a dancer/choreographer in this book—you will see them—I couldn’t help myself!

3) Tell us about your female lead, Coco, and your male lead, Mike.

Let me tell you what, I had a blast writing Coco’s character! It was fun getting her into hot situations and watching my characters stand back in total shock at what havoc that one woman could cause. But the great thing about Coco was how forgivable she was. She is beautiful and yet she is a kind person—who just can’t get out of her own way. But stay tuned—Coco has a surprise for you!

Mike West is the main character in all the Unbridled books. His heart is damaged by is ex-wife, Ava. She was unfaithful when they were married, and try as he might he just can’t let go of the feelings that he has for her, but Coco is a very chaotic distraction from his heartache—or should I say flammable distraction? ;}

4)  Are your leads partially based on anyone you’ve known?

Cindy: With arched brows and lowered voices, people ask me this question often. One person was very concerned that I had them in mind when I wrote the character, Ava West. She is gorgeous, she is manipulative, and she is a real witch. I felt bad that this individual thought that I felt that way about them, and I assured them that Ava was a figment of my imagination—nothing more. All of my characters are fictitious. They are part of my Unbridled stories, and that’s all.

5) What’s the funniest thing you ever saw during your time dealing with horses?

We have a Quarter Horse at our farm named Cody. Along with Thoroughbred racing, my daughter and I show Quarter Horses. Anyway, the first time we took Cody to a horse show we had him tied to the trailer while my daughter was getting dressed, and I was busy with something or other. When my daughter emerged from the trailer, there was Cody, hiding with his head under the hay bag that we had hung on the trailer for him to munch on. I couldn’t help but laugh and I quickly informed him, “Cody, you weigh fifteen-hundred pounds! Hiding just isn’t an option!”

Cody is quite the character, and I’ve featured him in the next book of my series, Dangerous Deception. As a matter of fact, I feature horses that have run for our stables in all my books—in Hot Coco a horse named Charlatan is featured—he was one of our favorite racehorses here at Fly-By-Night Stables.

6) What’s something that most people misunderstand with horse training and racing?

Horses can be dangerous. They can hurt you. As I pointed out in the above question, they weigh in excess of fifteen-hundred pounds. Fifteen-hundred pounds of disrespect can get a lot of bones broken and permanent damage to anyone if they don’t know how to properly handle these animals, especially a racehorse. Make no mistake, they are trained athletes, and they can be very high strung and moody creatures.

7) Can you tell us a bit more about the books in the Unbridled Series?

Cindy: The first book, Deadly.Com was released September 1st, 2011. But before you read it you’d better make a note: never agitate a madman. Successful Thoroughbred trainer Mike West just made that mistake, and he’s gonna pay—more than he ever realized. But it’s all in the family; his sister, Kate, has been the object of the madman’s desire on the social network site “My Town”. Her constant rejections have infuriated him. People who seem to be in his way start turning up dead, and he’s got Kate and Mike next on his list!

A November release is planned for Dangerous Deception, the third book in the series. When the West’s ask aging jockey, Vic Deveaux, to take an easier position at the farm, he becomes enraged. He teams up with two greedy stable hands in a plot to kidnap Shane, only Vic finds himself between the rock and the hard place when he soon discovers that his partners have murder on their minds!

My books are always available to reviewers. If you would like to read and review Deadly.Com or Hot Coco, please contact me: cindys.mcdonald@gmail.com

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Thanks, Cindy.

You can read more from Cindy at http://www.cindymcwriter.com.

Hot Coco can be purchased at Amazon and a book trailer can be viewed here.

Family, love, and art: an interview with Uvi Poznansky

Today I'm talking with artist and author Uvi Poznansky about her novel APART FROM LOVE.

1) Tell us about your book.

My novel is an intimate peek into the life of a uniquely strange family:
Natasha, the accomplished pianist, has been stricken with early-onset Alzheimer’s. Her ex-husband Lenny has never told their son Ben, who left home ten years ago, about her situation. At the same time Lenny has been carrying on a love affair with a young redhead, who bear a
striking physical resemblance to his wife, but unlike her, is uneducated, direct and unrefined. This is how things stand at this moment, the moment of Ben’s return to his childhood home, and to a contentious relationship with his father.

2) What inspired this story?

Over a year ago I wrote a short story about a twelve year-old boy coming face to face, for the first time in his life, with the sad spectacle of death in the family. Stunned, Ben watches his father trying to revive his frail grandma. Later, Ben attempts the same technique on the fish tilting upside down, dying in his new aquarium.

I set the story aside, thinking I was done with it. But the character of the boy, Ben, wouldn’t go away. He started chatting incessantly in my head, keeping me awake at night. So I asked myself, what if I ‘aged’ him by fifteen years? Would he still admire his father for ‘blowing life’ into the old woman--or will he be disillusioned at that point? What secrets would come to light in the life of this family? How would it feel for Ben to come back to his childhood home after a long absence, and have his memories play tricks on him?

What if I introduce a girl, Anita, a redhead who looks as beautiful as his mother used to be--but is extremely different from her in all other respects? And what if this girl were married to his father? What if the father were an author, attempting to capture the thoughts, the voices of Ben and Anita, in order to write his book?

3) You've mentioned in the past that you've had difficulty describing what you're story is about. So, I put that dreaded question to you in a slightly different way: what sort of fundamental themes do you feel your story conveys?

You’re right! At first I found it difficult to sum up the complexities of the story. I suppose I was too close to it. Which is why I truly admire the work of several Amazon Top reviewers, who reviewed the story with such ease, and rated it five stars out of five.

The fundamental theme in Apart From Love is a struggle, a desperate, daring struggle in each one of the characters--Ben, Anita and Lenny--to find a path out of the conflicts between them, out of isolation, from guilt to forgiveness.

Finding that path is not easy, because at present, they are ‘apart from love’. As Anita puts it, “Why, why can't you say nothing? Say any word--but that one, 'cause you don't really mean it. Nobody does. Say anything, apart from Love.”

And as Ben puts it: “For my own sake I should have been much more careful. Now--even in her absence--I find myself in her hands, which feels strange to me. I am surrounded--and at the same time, isolated. I am alone. I am apart from Love.”

4) The aims and purposes of art are always a hard thing to pin down, no matter the format. What do you feel is the fundamental purpose of art? 

To me, the purpose of my art is to give expression to something I care deeply about, marking it on paper or in some other medium) for others to see, hear and absorb, so they may find a reflection of my thought or emotion somewhere deep in themselves, in their memory, in their fears, their hopes.

In the case of writing, I can tell when I succeed in conveying what I wanted to express. I have read my stories in front of audiences, and by the end of the story a deep silence greets me. Here’s the way Lenny, the father in APART FROM LOVE, explains it:

“What I wish to open up is not me, but my characters—all of whom are parts of who I am—giving her the opportunity to know them, to come live in their skin, to see, hear, touch everything they do. Just, be there, inside my head for a while, which I admit, may be rather uneasy at times. If—if she cared to listen, which I doubt, she would allow me to pull her inside—so deep, so close to the core, that it would be hard to escape, hard to wake up.”

5) Do you feel there is a difference in the fundamental ability to execute the aforementioned purpose of art among the various art forms (visual, written, musical, et cetera) forms? Why or
why not?

Yes, I think there is a difference between visual art, and written or composed art forms. There is a fundamental difference between the ways we sense the world through the eye as opposed to the ear. The brain allows you to absorb a picture all at once, but a story--word by word, and a piece of music--note by note.

So when the subject at hand is too overwhelming, when words fail me, and I wish to convey the same feeling through my art, this is when I pick up my paintbrush. Other times, I chase my characters around with a pen.

6) Authors create characters from a variety of influences, but it is not uncommon to drawn upon their own experiences and psychology. Traditionally, this leads to characters that are, in some sense, similar to the author. You went a slightly different direction with your female lead. Can you tell us a bit about her creation and the process behind it?

At first I decided to model Anita as the diametric opposite-of-me. By which I mean a lot more that just her use of language (talking in sentences laden with 'like' and the dreaded double-negatives.) Anita, I decided, would be a bold and spontaneous girl, anything but repressed. Unlike the way I was brought up, she would be promiscuous.

Her voice would be shockingly direct: “In my defense I have this to say: When men notice me, when the lusty glint appears in their eyes, which betrays how, in their heads, they’re stripping me naked—it’s me they accuse of being indecent. Problem is, men notice me all the time.”

To my surprise, Anita started to invade my mind! She ended up taking center-stage in the story, not only because of how attractive she is, but most of all, because she serves as a strong contrast, both to Ben and to Lenny. She is a strong female protagonist trying to survive the complexities of this strange family.

7) Tell us about the POV structure of your novel. Why did you decide to use that sort of framework?

The dual points of view--he said, she said--gave me an opportunity to illustrate that we all view reality differently. Sometimes the same events, see from different angles and through difference experiences in life, are interpreted in an entirely different way. Which makes it a challenge for my characters, Ben and Anita, to find a path to each other.

8) Can you explain to us what you mean by "paint with a pen, write with a paintbrush"?

My art strives to tell a story, and my stories strive to bring you into the scene being painted. Sometimes a figure in one of my paintings haunts me, keeps me away at night, talking in a clear and distinct voice, and it would not stop until I write what she is saying, either in poem format or in a story. And sometimes it flows the other way around: the voice in the poem or in a story is so vivid in my mind that I have to flesh it out in a painting or sculpture. A good example of that is my poem From Dust, and for each verse in it, I created a sculpture where the pose expresses the text. See one of the sculptures here: http://uviart.blogspot.com/2012/03/from-dust-you-gather-me.html.

9) Given what you've just told us, can you tell us about your visual artistic influences and what influences they may have had on your choice of literary themes, character, and plots?

I love so many writers from around the world, and each one has had a different influence on me. To name but a few, I love Crime and Punishment by Dostoyevsky, The Odyssey by Homer, Of Mice and Men by Steinbeck, The Price by Arthur Miller, and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain, and the poetry of Edgar Allan Poe.

Using a broad brush I would say that poetry teaches me to cherish the beauty of language, its sound and rhymes, which is something I use often in my writing. Arthur Miller and other playwrights teach me to listen to dialog, and to make the most of it.

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Thanks, Uvi.

You can read more from Uvi at http://uviart.blogspot.com/ and also see her artwork at uviart.com.

APART FROM LOVE can be purchased in physical or electronic formats at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and electronic formats at the iBookstore.