Threw Our Shoes into the Ocean

Greetings! I have made it back from my Oregon Coast adventure. It was a few crazy days of traveling to the southern Oregon Coast, than back up to Florence and the dunes, and then back home to Central Oregon. I saw some very beautiful and striking landscapes along the way. I had never been to the southern part of the coast before, and the area was gorgeous. There were these incredible rock formations that jut up from the sand. One morning, we caught these towering boulders in the fog, and it was so atmospheric, and a little creepy, too. These seagulls cried out around them, and the birds sounded like babies wailing. It gave me chills, and the entire scene left me feeling very inspired.

In Drowning in the Dark, I always pictured the town of Freeport – the place where Sam and her family live -- to be farther up north on the Oregon coast. I mostly based it on the town of Newport, which was a place I used to visit a lot growing up. Newport has this beautiful lighthouse that sits on top of this grassy point overlooking the ocean, and that became the inspiration for Sam’s thinking place in Drowning in the Dark.

But even though the landscapes I saw this trip didn’t exactly fit in with my ideas of where Sam lives, they did inspire me for a new paranormal series. I’ve been working on a rough draft for this one, tentatively entitled, All of Our Tomorrows, for about a month now – ever since I finished revising the second Drowning in the Dark book (which will be out later this month, by the way!) The new series is about this teenage girl named Callie who lives in a small coastal town. One day, she boards a whale watching boat, and ends up falling off, into the icy waters of the Pacific. She’s presumed dead. Until two weeks later, when she’s found washed up on a nearby beach, half-drowned. Callie has virtually no memory of the two weeks. All she has is a necklace that doesn’t belong to her, and a single murky memory: man’s face that she doesn’t recognize.

Anyway, that’s the gist of the new series. I think I’ll most likely have it done by October. My plans are that by December, I will have the entire Drowning in the Dark trilogy out, along with the first of this series. It’s going to be a lot of work, but I feel inspired. Judging from my own experiences, it seems like inspiration can give you super human strengths when you’re a writer. So I’m hoping to hold onto it for as long as I can. Hopefully, it will take me through December.

So that was my trip to the coast. Well worth it for the inspiration it’s given me. For the rest of my vacation – about three days now – I’m planning on lying out in the sun on the deck, reading as many paranormal books as I can until nightfall – when I will switch to writing. I have some final edits to finish up with the second Drowning in the Dark book, and after that, I’ll continue working on All of Our Tomorrows. So those are my plans – I’m hoping the days will go by slowly :)