Cindy Frank

City of Tucson

By Leah Etling on Nov 1, 2012 in People

Cindy Frank is a Renaissance woman – who writes romance novels. A technologist, published author and artist, her diverse professional and personal interests keep her constantly busy at work and on the weekend.

As a staff assistant in the Tucson Housing and Community Development Department, Cindy found the perfect role for her background. She earned her doctorate from the University of Arizona in higher education, but the focus of her advanced studies was technology in the workplace.  (She had previously earned a masters’ degree in information systems from UA.)

“My interest is primarily at the intersection of technology and people. This place is ideal for me because we have a lot of social services people, and they’re not always comfortable with technology. That’s my forte – the intersection of people and technology,” she told us in a recent interview. She’s responsible for overseeing the use of Yardi Voyager by the City of Tucson to manage its public housing and Section 8 housing programs, assessing new technologies like mobile apps, and other IT-related job duties.

Outside of work, Cindy has several unique hobbies. She makes stained glass, expressing her artistic side. And she is an electronically published author of seven romances under a pen name. We promised to keep the moniker confidential, but we can say that you can find her works through publisher Ellora’s Cave, one of the first e-publishers to focus on romance. They accepted her first book right away with only minor revisions.

A lifelong reader, dedicating free time to writing books on the weekends has become Cindy’s second job. A typical novel takes three to four months to complete if she sticks to a regular writing schedule. Cindy tells us she enjoys science fiction as well as romance and has written several books with plotlines that cross over between the genres. A sneak plot preview: set in the future, mind-based computing will be the new norm.

“I write under a pseudonym so I don’t embarrass anyone, including myself,” Cindy explained. “I’ve proven to myself that I can write a romance novel and it will sell, so now I am experimenting with other stuff.”

She draws story inspiration from her travels around the country (a future novel might be set in Santa Barbara, Calif., where she recently attended the Yardi Advanced Solutions Conference), but reveals that the life of a romance novelist is not all, well, romance.

“Just like with detective novels, the author does not actually go out and kill anyone to get the experience. The same for romance. For some reason people expect that if you’re a romance novelist, you have done all that stuff you write about,” she shared. A healthy imagination and good friends willing to share intimate details and stories from their lives are two sources of creative ideas.

Like her readers, Cindy has made the transition to preferring a technology-based book format. She now reads novels on her Amazon Kindle, and got that first buzz of excitement from being a published author when she saw her first title not on the bookstore shelf, but as an offering in the Kindle store.

When she writes on the weekends, she works with an iPad and a laptop. The iPad is where she tracks her growing character maps and plotline ideas, and references a helpful visual thesaurus.

Technology has made the publishing world much more accessible to potential writers, and Cindy is among them. She knows we won’t be seeing the complete demise of paperback books anytime soon, though. Her own move to the Kindle was based partially on necessity.

“I don’t buy books anymore. I buy on the Kindle electronically, because I was running out of my room in my house,” she told us.