- How did you get started writing? I started writing Christmas and Easter plays for a local church I attended. In 2006, I was asked to write a full-length play for Still Useable Women’s Conference by the founder, and years later the play blossomed into a series titled The Other Side of Through.
- What genre (s) do you write in and why? I write Christian Romance. But not so Christian overpowered that anyone wouldn’t enjoy the read. The stories contain real life sticky situations people often find themselves in no matter their religious backgrounds.
- Tell us about your current series. I am currently writing The Consequence of Temptation, the sequel of The Opportunity for Temptation of the Temptation series. The series follows the lives of three football players and the temptations they encounter with the women they meet on and off the grid iron. It exposes childhood hurts that affected the type of adults the characters became, and exposes the behind closed doors secrets of broken marriages. In, The Consequence of Temptation, the danger of not closing emotional and relationship doors explodes in the lives of every character of the story. The series follows the nature of its title completely. It should be completed and ready for upload by mid-September.
- What inspired your latest book? It was inspired by an NFL football player named Torrey Smith (my favorite player by the way), who doesn’t drink or smoke. Those characteristics and values inspired me to reverse the aspect of women usually being the virgins in a relationship. I’m not saying if he was or wasn’t a virgin before marriage (that’s personal and his business). Only that his clean and responsible habits inspired the story behind the main character of the book. Outside of that fact, anything else in comparison to his life is coincidental.
- Where do you get the ideas for your stories? The first series The Other Side of Through is based on courses of events in my own life where I changed several of the instances to protect identities and other ideas come from my everyday surroundings. Still others were birthed out of current works when a scene or idea didn’t flow properly.
- What advice do you have for other authors wanting to self-publish? If you are certain that writing is your passion and mission… then keep going. Whether you have ten to twenty minutes or two to three hours to write… write every day. I once heard the phrase, “Words make sentences… sentences make paragraphs… paragraphs make chapters… and chapters make novels.” So, keep writing.
- What is most difficult for you to write? Characters, conflict or emotions? Why? I would have to say conflict. Mostly because 80% of the conflict in my novels have been personal battles. Oftentimes, I realized I wasn’t as over the situations as I previously convinced myself and my own emotions would threaten to take over.
- Tell us about your hero. Give us one of his strengths and one of his weaknesses. JaQuan Sulter is a rising football start who spent his life helping his mother care for his younger siblings when his father walked out of their life. He doesn’t drink or smoke, is a virgin and a Christian. He sees the heroine and immediately knows she is his wife. She, of course, has other plans. He endeavors to show her what the true love God designed of a husband in relation to his wife. His weakness is that he can be somewhat self-righteous and judgmental at times without realizing he is doing it.
- Tell us about your heroine. Give us one of her strengths and one of her weaknesses. Vanessa Banks is the counterpart of JaQuan Sulter. She is highly intelligent accountant for the football team JaQuan has been drafted to. She graduated high school and entered college at sixteen, and is faithful to a fault in relationships. She is running from the pure innocent agape love that oozes from JaQuan Sulter’s pores. She tends to allow her life to be controlled by and become the person she is dating. She is angry and afraid of God and wants nothing to do with Christianity… at first.
- What’s next for you? I am current working on a partial autobiography titled, From Abortion to Anointed: The Journey of a Serial Killer. This book has been on the back burner for well over a year and a half. You could say I have procrastinated a bit. I find myself revisiting areas where I assumed I had clarity and closure. This is a work I want to get perfectly right because it is destined to will minister to countless woman who suffer from the guilt of the abortion table. I look forward to speaking engagements and mentoring young women facing unsurmountable odds that have pushed them to considering terminating pregnancies.
Author Bio and Links
Cynthia Middlebrooks Harris is an ordained minister, native of Atlanta, Ga and Christian Fiction author who has published six books. She entered the US Army in 1984, where she met and married her husband of 32 years, Minister Kim Harris. Together, they have two children; Dominique and Stephanie. Cynthia is a true intercessor with a passion and heart to see the people of God healthy spiritually, emotionally and physically. She is a teacher, playwright, Christian mentor and is currently working to earn her degree as a Registered Dietician. Her work has appeared in Higher Connection magazine twice and her ministry expanded to Kaiserslautern, West Germany in 2014. Cynthia understands that her responsibility to God is to spread His word by any means necessary. It is her determination to do just that through the power of fiction, romance and sound & drama. Cynthia was born to write for such a time as this! She lives and breathes her motto, “Ministry is always… Required!”
Order autographed soft copies her books on her webpage www.tosotministries.org
eBooks and soft cover copies also available on Amazon:
- The Other Side of Through: All Things Work Together http://t.co/KQtBtDsDUI
- I Promise http://t.co/6V1klSeyls
- The Valley of the Shadow of Death http://t.co/sgL1PUmflT
- Legitimate Issues http://t.co/zFqLR4Dfkc
- The Fight for Life http://t.co/Rvjf8xwCtc
- The Opportunity for Temptation http://alturl.com/6z2pj
Connect with Cynthia
Email: tosotministries@gmail.com
Twitter and Instagram @Writtercynt
LinkedIn and YouTube: Cynthia Middlebrooks Harris
Blog: www.writingfortoday.wordpress.com
Facebook: T.O.S.O.T. Ministries, LLC