Barbara T. Cerny

I have wanted to write since the second grade. I was always coming up with stories to tell my friends at lunch or on the bus rides to/from school. I wrote through high school - on the journalism team, in creative writing class, on the teen page for the city newspaper.
My first story, Of Angels and Orphans, rolled around in my head for nearly thirty years. Life eventually got in the way and writing was shoved to the side. “Someday, I will write…” You know how it goes.
Well, that someday came in the most unusual way. I am a retired lieutenant colonel in the US Army Reserves, a twenty-two year veteran in our military. And I, like hundreds of thousands before me, was called up by my country to serve in Southwest Asia (SWA) in support of Operations Iraqi Freedom and Enduring Freedom.
I left behind two small children, aged eight and five, and a husband, who overnight became chief, cook, bottle washer, mom and dad. I bless him every day for the sacrifices he made to keep the home fires burning. He took the brunt of the deployment, not me. I love him with all my being: my heart, my mind, my body, my soul. My love for him is where my ability to write about the love between my two main characters is born.
In SWA, I worked six days a week, twelve to thirteen hour days for twelve straight months. My day off was sometimes a day off, sometimes only six-to-eight hours of work. I lived Groundhog Day for three hundred sixty-five days.
But I had time on my hands. No kids, no responsibilities outside the mission, no cleaning the bathrooms, no cooking or grocery shopping. I just had to make my bunk and take the bus to work. I lived in an open bay barracks with forty-eight of my favorite friends, walking three buildings to a shower/toilet trailer in 115º heat.
When I first arrived, I read voraciously, downing four-five novels in a week. In January 2006, I was able to take a four-day break to Qatar and lay around reading seven novels. I read two romance novels in those four days, a genre I rarely read as I like Stephen King, Tom Clancy, Robert Ludlum, Clive Cussler, and their brand of book best.
So there I was, reading a romance novel and wondering why I was reading other people’s books when I had Of Angels and Orphans still wandering around in my mind.
So I started to write. I wrote on my days off. I wrote on my evenings I wasn’t dancing - I taught ballroom and country dance lessons for the soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines on my camp. I wrote when my boss went on leave, I wrote when my boss went on business travel. From the first week in February to the first weekend in June, I wrote that book that I had dreamed up so long ago.
Since I had written it in my head, every activity planned to the nth degree, it flowed very quickly. I wrote the meeting between Nate and Audra first and the two whippings, the wedding day, then the wagon train, then the final sword fight between Audra and her brother as they had been detailed greatly in my mind over the years. The rest filled in fast without problem.
Bottom line, deployment gave me the time I had pushed aside for almost three decades so I guess I have to say, “Thank you, Uncle Sam!” for giving me the chance to actually put the life of Audra Markham and Nathaniel Abbot on paper.

I love to write descriptions (remember the four-page description of the dress Scarlett O’Hara wore in the first chapter of Gone With the Wind? Okay, I am not THAT bad). Dialogue is very hard for me and I struggle with it and have to really concentrate on it. The editor working on my fifth novel is constantly telling me to rewrite descriptive paragraphs into dialogue (she is diabolical to say the least). I would be perfectly happy to write everything in a description. However, knowing that would drive away my readers, dialogue and I have come to a truce of sorts. I love research and I love history. I pepper every novel with historical facts woven with the story. My readers always comment positively on the historical journey I take them on while telling my story.