Guest Post with Cindy Dorminy

Hi Everyone!

I am excited to be here today to bring you a guest post by Cindy Dorminy. Please help me give her a warm welcome to the blog!

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What inspired me to write In a Jam

There are so many reasons why I felt compelled to tell Andie and Gunnar’s story. First off, I love fish out of water stories. I love throwing someone completely off kilter and make them sweat for everything they want (or in this case, what they ‘think’ they want). Not many people move to small towns, so it was fun to see Andie squirm under the watchful eye of the hottie policeman (and the Jackson sisters).

Another inspiration was that I was born in a tiny town, but grew up in the burbs of Atlanta. However, my husband was born and raised in small town in southern Georgia, where I got a lot of my inspiration. From the once thriving to run down Main Street, to the larger in life folks, to even the chickens crossing the road, his hometown gave me more information than I could ever put into one novel. My husband also was a policeman in his small hometown for a few years, so yeah… J

I also wrote In a Jam because, being from the south, I felt like a fish out of water the first time I visited Boston. So I envisioned what it must feel like to be transplanted into the deep South and needing a English to Southern dictionary just to be able to communicate with the locals! Poor Andie.

Lastly, there were two movies that gave me some ‘what if’ moments which eventually led to this story. I love movies and quite often get ideas for novels from watching. I guess I can consider movies research, right? Brewster’s Millions and It Could Happen to You were my movie ‘what ifs’. In Brewster’s Millions, Richard Pryor’s character has to spend a million dollars in order to get one hundred million, but he can’t tell anyone about his quest. In It Could Happen to You, Nicolas Cage’s character promises to give the waitress (Bridget Fonda) half of his lottery winnings as a tip if he wins. He does win and things get crazy after that. Both movies show how much fun it could be to suddenly have a ton of money, but also how money changes people, sometimes not for the better. If you haven’t seen either of them, I highly recommend them. Of course, In a Jam isn’t anything like either of those movies, but they did give me a starting place.

I hope you like Andie and Gunnar because they were so much fun to write. Actually, I kind of miss them. Perhaps I shouldn’t abandon them or the town just yet!

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Thanks Cindy for the post! :) 

 
Happy Reading!