Thank you so much, Caryl, for taking the time out of your busy schedule to spend a few minutes with us today! I must say, I am amazed at the number of books you have published and all you do (see bio below, lol)! I am honored to have you join me for coffee! I cannot express how grateful I am for your openness in sharing so much with all of us!

CM: It’s my pleasure, Paula Marie I love chatting and I love coffee, so this is a great place to be, especially here with you!

PM: When do you find the time to write? Where is your favorite place to write?

CM: Notice green walls, window treatments, bed set, etc. )   Well, I write pretty much every day. For me it’s like talking and you asking, “When do you find time to talk?” And there’s really only one place, and that’s at my husband’s desk on his computer. Both our desks are in our bedroom. I’m always busy on mine. It’s used mostly for marketing, staying in touch, making memes, organizing and planning Facebook cover reveal and launch parties, creating newsletters, and “thinking about” updating my website

When I’m on his computer writing, he plays spider solitaire on mine. He’s a grand master now or something at 97% with all four suits. We write together, taking turns and going over each other’s writing. Plus, we like everything being in the same room, because I’m sitting right there when he goes to bed at 8 or 9pm. And while I’m sleeping until 8 or 9 in the morning, he’s right beside me at either desk!

On the average last year, we wrote about fourteen hundred words a day. There’s an average of two hundred fifty on a page, so that’s about 5 or 6 pages a day or almost twenty-two hundred pages a year and that means over a half million words a year—which was our goal.

PM: What is one thing about you that your readers would be shocked to know?

CM: This is a hard question because, as Ron says of me, I go around pretty much all the time with my zipper undone. I’m liable to tell anybody anything at any given time.

 This isn’t a secret, I’ve mentioned it before, but some might be shocked to know that after five and a half years of marriage, I filed for divorce from my beloved. We were legally divorced for six months but only lived apart for two then remarried on our sixth wedding anniversary. We don’t even count it as bad time, and celebrated fifty years in 2018. (married at age eighteen—both of us—in 1968 after one year dating and another engaged)

I’ve long since repented for going against God’s Word—”“And unto the married I command, yet not I, but the Lord, Let not the wife depart from her husband:” 1 Corinthians 7:10 My faithful God has forgiven me. (See one of my latest blog posts “Wives Submit to Your Husbands” at http://www.heartwingsblog.com/2019/05/wives-submit/ )

PM: Who was your greatest influence when you decided to become an author?

CM: I can’t remember that far back as I wrote an essay in the seventh grade, age twelve, that I would be a inter-galactically famous author rocketing from planet to planet to sign books! I can say it was in my blood as my maternal granddaddy wrote a book and so did my mother Neither of those was ever published.

PM: If there was a news story about your life, what would the headline say?

CM: At the age of one hundred eighteen, prolific Christian author Caryl McAdoo releases ANOTHER book to bring God glory! That brings her total to one thousand eight hundred eighty-eight books. Caryl giggled and reported, “The number eight is for new beginnings, you know.”

PM: I see you have lived in the great state of Texas a long time, what is your favorite thing about Texas? I am a Jersey girl and have never been, so what would I absolutely have to learn about Texas in your opinion?

CM: Texas is an absolutely grand state with beautiful forests, beaches, desserts, prairies and mountains. She has it all, and the most interesting history of any state, my favorite thing about it, hands down. Texas is beloved around the world and like people here reenact the Renaissance period at festivals and mountain men gear up to live as our country’s first explorers, folks all over the WORLD play Wild West Cowboys, associated everywhere with Texas alone.

 We lived fifty-plus years in the DFW area, then ten years ago, God brought us three hours north and east to Red River County, Clarksville, Texas “The Gateway to Texas” and we have never regretted moving to the country!

PM: What’s the most difficult thing about writing characters from the opposite gender?

CM: See, I don’t have that problem at all. I make the heroines as feminine as I desire, and Ron keeps my heroes strong, brave, and totally awesome! Ask my readers!

What we tell other female writers when teaching dialogue, is write on then go back and cut fifty percent of your male’s dialogue. Before going on to the next chapter, do that again!

PM: If we were to open you your refrigerator right now, what would we find in it?

CM: A gallon of Vitamin D whole cow’s milk (or two), real butter. Two or four kinds of cheese, a big bottle of V-8 juice, all the normal condiments with jalapenos and picante sauce, Echridge jalapeno and cheese dogs (several packs), sour cream, cottage cheese, cranberry juice, apple juice, homemade pear preserves (by Ron and me), and a bottle of pro-biotics.

PM: What’s your favorite color? Any reason why?

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CM: SO EASY! GREEN! It’s been my fav since I was a little girl and my eyes were so green, perfect strangers often commented on them. Born in May, emerald is my birth stone. And I used to also say, “It’s the color of money.” But that isn’t appropriate as a Christian adult, so I replaced that one with, it’s the color that represents Life. Jesus said He is the Life, so having green all around me is having Him all around me!

I went through a time in my mid years where I only wore green. Ron finally asked did I dress for him or myself, because he liked me in other colors as well. SO I started adding other colors and now HE wears green! AH ha ha ha ha! That sort of backfired on my sweetestheart.

 My car, roof, purse, brush, mirror, toothbrush, phone, coin purse, checkbook, notebooks, folders, bathroom sin, kitchen counters, walls, suitcase, dishes, drinking glasses, pans, serving trays . . . are all SO green! Have plans for more. I REALLY love green

PM: I love mixing my reading between historical and contemporary, but how do you get in the mindset for writing the two different genres?

CM: I’ve never really thought about it. It isn’t difficult. When writing historical, prior to WW II, you cannot use “okay.” But like the word ‘bossy meant the best, really great in the mid-1800s, like it does today. I do a lot of slang research and sprinkle some of the fun ones in, liked characters who got drunk, got ‘soaked’ back then.

PM: How can readers keep up with you and your new releases?

CM: Read fast and review quick!

PM: Finally, coffee or tea? Cream, sugar?

CM: Black coffee for me, but I’m done with it by ten in the morning and on my Bragg’s Organic ACV (apple cider vinegar) water, iced, with a squirt of those calorie-less water enhancers, my favorite being Southern Sweet Tea. I drink as many as four of those (thirty-two ounces each) a day. It makes my hair grow, helps my eyesight (I quit wearing readers after using it), and enhances my cast-iron stomach/digestive tract

Paula Marie, it has been an utter pleasure visitin’ with you this morning and I thank you for inviting me over!

 I’d love to tout my new release REMI, book two of the Prairie Roses Collection, a multi-author covered-wagon-themed series this year! I organized the collection and plan to do another next year. Here’s some info about it. (See attached promo page)

 Coming up is BIPARTISAN LOVE in June, a “Companion Book” to my popular Texas Romance Family Saga. Readers met Cody Wayne Buckmeyer in SON OF PROMISE as a twelve-year-old. It’s eighteen years later and his kissing-cousin Cindy comes home!

Coming in July is JEWEL’S GOLD, another multi-author collection of mine The Gold Diggers. It picks up ancestors of characters in SINS OF THE MOTHERS, book four in that same Texas Romance Family Saga!