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June's Featured Author: 
Shannon Myers

1) Your Journey as an Author…..My journey as an author is something that began when I was a young child. I loved making up short stories for my family and was even given a typewriter for Christmas one year. My earlier writings mainly consisted of fractured fairy tales and fan fiction, but I never imagined writing something that I’d release publicly. I got sick at the end of 2013 and had to undergo major surgery in early 2014. I was meant to stay home and recuperate for six weeks, but I went back to work after two. Instead of being released at my six week appointment, I was given two weeks of bedrest. I moped about for a couple of days, but then poured all of that emotion into my book. It took another two years to build up the courage and release it. I sent it to a couple of people who I knew would give me honest feedback and to my surprise, they loved it. After that, I began researching how to self-publish. The rest, as they say, is history.

2) What reading means to you.....Reading to me has always been necessary. It’s always been a nice escape from reality. I started at age six or seven, reading Calvin and Hobbes, and wishing that I could live next to a kid as cool as Calvin. He obviously wouldn’t have agreed, as I’m a slimy girl. I was a voracious reader from then on, devouring books weekly. In junior high, I read Gone with the Wind in three days—the book is around nine hundred pages. And just like that, I found the romance genre. In high school, I would save up money for mail order Harlequin romance novels, envisioning myself as the heroine. I’ve found that I’ll read just about any genre as long as the story is good. I read the Shopaholic series when I was struggling financially, and I loved that Sophie Kinsella wrote a character I could relate to on many levels—I may, or may not, have had a shopping addiction as well. I like books that leave me with a “book hangover,” where I cannot stop thinking about the story for days after and I wonder how everyone around me is going on with their lives. 

3) Whats next for you.....The next thing for me is to release the conclusion to Elizabeth’s story in From This Day Forward. Forsaking All Others is already being written and will be released in July. It’s important for me to leave my main character with a happy ending. In a life where nothing is guaranteed, it helps to know that our favorite fictional character will sort things out and live happily ever after. I am also working on getting the audiobook version released late summer. From there, I’ve got several other stories that I’d like to get on paper and see where they lead me. I know that regardless of what I’m writing—I’ll still be chasing my two crazy boys around the house, cuddling with Mr. Elvis the dog, and getting butterflies when Mr. Myers walks into the room. It isn’t always pretty, and at times it’s a bit chaotic, but this life is better than I ever could’ve imagined.

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