About Bonnie McCune:
BONNIE MC CUNE has been writing since age ten, when the Saturday Evening Post rejected a submission. She lives in Colorado and is the author of novels, novellas and short stories. Her entire family is book-mad. Her interest in writing facilitated her career in nonprofits doing public and community relations. Simultaneously, she’s been a free-lance feature writer. Her secret love is live theater. Had she been nine inches taller and thirty pounds lighter, she might have been an actress. Her civic involvement includes grass-roots organizations, political campaigns, writers’ and arts’ groups, and children’s literacy. For years, she entered recipe contests and was a finalist once in the Pillsbury Bake Off. Now her true passion is fiction. Her credits include five women’s novels, short stories, and a number of writing awards. Bonnie’s writing explores the highs and lows of everyday people and their unique lives with humor, close attention, and appreciation. Her blog addresses “ordinary people, extraordinary lives.”
What inspires you to write?
Persistent curiosity, desire to know why things are the way they are, psychological release
What authors do you read when you aren’t writing?
Current list of best books ever:
Love and Garbage, Ivan Klima
Out Stealing Horses, Per Petterson
The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood
Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan
The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien
White Teeth, Zaidie Smith
The Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing
Caramelo, Sandra Cisneros
In Defense of Anarchism, Robert Paul Wolff
The New Jim Crow, by Michelle Alexander
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, Sherman Alexie
Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger
The Doomsday Book, Connie Willis
The Number One Ladies Detective Agency (series), Alexander McCall Smith
Anything by Carl Hiaasen
I Capture the Castle, Dodie Smith
Main Street, Sinclair Lewis
The Tin Drum, Gunther Grass
Several by Roddy Doyle, including The Woman Who Walked into Doors
Violet Clay, Gail Godwin
Let the Great World Spin, Colum McCann
The Life of Pi, Yann Martel
White Noise, de lillo
Lost in the Cosmos, Walker Percy
Tell us about your writing process.
II think anything rooted in the creative process begins with the question, "What if?", whether writing, art, composition, inventions, or research. I've collected notes and ideas since childhood, thinking they'd fit into a piece of writing. Something about a person or a situation tempts me into thinking more and more about it, growing organically until I need to work on it. I go through several stages of organizing, then spontaneous writing, then back again. It's like growing a garden–you need dirt, seeds, water, hard work, over and over.
For Fiction Writers: Do you listen (or talk to) to your characters?
I sometimes "hear" their thoughts and this initiates a section of writing. To me they become real, like a person I know but not so much they have a conversation with me.
What advice would you give other writers?
It's the journey, not the destination.
How did you decide how to publish your books?
I wanted to know that someone other than myself thought my work worth publishing. Plus my background in marketing had already taught me what a challenge doing it for my work would be. A publisher helps with marketing.
What do you think about the future of book publishing?
My biggest fear is that people will stop reading, substituting social media, sensationalism, gossip, and complicit ignorance for it. I keep trying to convince myself that visuals are fine, just another form of communication, but I haven't succeeded. The written word for me combines information and knowledge with the opportunity to think and judge for myself. A unique merging of thought and feeling. I imagine publishing will continue, but whether it will contain anything of value, I don't know.
What genres do you write?: Clean romance, humor
What formats are your books in?: Both eBook and Print
Website(s)
Bonnie McCune Home Page Link
Your Social Media Links
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All information in this post is presented “as is” supplied by the author. We don’t edit to allow you the reader to hear the author in their own voice.
I love the idea of starting with “what if.” I tend to use writing as a form of self expression and exploration, so my pieces usually revolve around something resembling my daily life and the things I see around me; how wonderful could daily life be if we all focused on the possibilities.