Category: ThrowbackThursday

I recently attended the wonderful Coastal Magic Convention and after took a few days to visit with a friend. We had a lovely time visiting the Navy Seal Museum (more on that next week) as well as the Elliott Museum and Refuge Houses. I’m a car buff as you might guess from automaker Owen in What Happens in Summer. In STAY THE NIGHT, my contribution to the STRENGTH & HONOR charity anthology, there’s also an emotional thread about the hero’s connection to a 1960s seafoam green Ford Falcon that was left to him by his grandfather and lovingly cared for by his wife while he is deployed overseas. The hero in that story is a Navy Seal who is coming home to a wife who is nothing like the young woman he left behind. But back to the Elliott Museum and Refuge Houses. What an amazing collection of automobiles and Florida history! While the museum doesn’t have a lot of space, they have what I guess you could call a car vending machine as you can see from the video below. You choose a car you want to see and a series of elevators, platforms, and rails bring the car down for you to view. Awesome! After we viewed the other exhibits at the Elliott, we went to their related Refuge Houses which are a series of small buildings intended to be havens for shipwrecked sailors along the Florida coast. It was so interesting to see them and the beautiful views along the coast. Turquoise waters and even a shark sighting! If you’re in the Martin County area, I highly recommend you visit. P.S. The STRENGTH & HONOR anthology is available for pre-order and all proceeds go to benefit stopsoldiersuicide.org. You can find out more at https://books2read.com/StrengthAndHonor.

When my daughter and I both worked in New York City, we did many fun and exciting things on our Friday Girls’ Nights. Korean BBQ. The Rose Mansion. 260 Nomad Sample Sales where we scored some amazing clothing, shoes, and a beautiful Mont Blanc crystal fountain pen ink bottle that I still have to find a place to display! But one of the most fun things we did was visit the Color Factory which bills itself as an “interactive art museum.” How can I explain this place? It is an immersive and interactive series of rooms and experiences that fill your senses with color and joy. Today I’m sharing some pictures from our trip and if you’re ever in New York City, I would recommend checking it out. They also have locations in Chicago and Houston! P.S. If you want a story that also gives you a taste of life in Manhattan, check out One Summer Night. Although that book is part of my Jersey Shore-themed series, Maggie and Owen also live and work in New York and you get to see many places that I love in the city.

My daughter, her sister-in-law, and I hit our local IKEA to look for some cute items for the nursery we’ll be putting together in a couple of months. We found some fun items, but the one that had us chuckling the hardest was this demo display that IKEA put together for a gaming station. It hit us as being so accurate even down to the empty DAIM candy bag on the ground. What do you think? Did IKEA nail this display? P.S. – I could totally picture billionaire software developer and gamer John Wilson from Biscayne Bay Breach having a station that looks like this, maybe even messier as he works on finding out who’s trying to hack his uber-secretive program. You can find out more about Biscayne Bay Breach at https://amzn.to/497fWYa.

We saw so many amazing places in and around Seoul, Korea. If you get a chance to visit this wonderful country, DO IT! The sights range from ancient temples and palaces to ultra-modern you-can’t-believe buildings. One of the interesting locations I visited was Yongin Dae Jang Geum Park on the outskirts of Seoul. It’s not a “park” in the traditional sense in that it’s a vast area owned by MBC (Munhwa Broadcasting Corporation). MBC is a South Korean television and radio broadcaster and uses the park to produce an assortment of historical dramas, and the site has also been used to film music videos like “Daechwita” by BTS member Suga.

The park has areas reflecting three different Korean dynasties and we were able to all the different areas which were actually quite different in style. By the time we reached the end of the tour, we ran into a movie crew that was getting ready to film another of MBC’s historical dramas. I even got a picture of one of a young boy who was taking part in the production. It was so interesting and I could imagine using this location as a setting for the new romantic suspense book I want to write, and which will be set in Korea.

Picture this (said in a Sophia voice): The hero, a baseball player who is also working for the CIA, meets the heroine in the ancient amphitheater where a party is being held by the billionaire who may just be a traitor selling secrets to North Korea and the Chinese. But is the heroine in on that duplicity as well?

Hopefully, I’ll get to work on that soon, but in the meantime, if you’re looking for a cinematic kind of read, check out Darkness Calls, my very first vampire suspense book. I actually had a producer interested in pitching this to Lifetime, but the day after he picked it up, a similar project got picked up by one of the cable channels. So close. So close! Darkness Calls is free on Kindle Unlimited and specially priced at 99 cents for the month of February. You can download it at https://amzn.to/3SMhqSr.