Previews and Memories: An #Author's Inspiration #IAmWriting #Fantasy

PREVIEWS AND MEMORIES

I never realized what a long ride it was from Recife, Brazil to Atlanta, Georgia until this week. It is a three-hour flight from Recife to Sao Paulo, about 1600 miles. The ride to Orlando was over eight hours covering the 2600-mile length of Brazil, and flying over Georgetown, Guyana and Ciudad Bolivar, Venezuela. This is the principal location of my next book, A Diamond In The Rough.

This is the story of Gil Devos, a man who spent forty years buying rough diamonds from the miners who labored to extract the hardest, most precious stones out of an unyielding earth. Actually, diamonds do not become dangerous until they find themselves in the hands of men who will risk everything to own them, steal them or even kill for them.

Gil lived the story I tell in the book. Mountain Springs House will release A Diamond In The Rough on June 27, which just happens to be my 77^th birthday. Well, it just so happens, Gil Devos will be meeting me in Odessa, Florida where we will once again visit our mutual friend, Jack Wylie and do a little water skiing and a lot of storytelling. Who knows, Gil just may come up with another story about chasing diamonds again. He has never lost “the love for the rough,” as he calls it.

As I continued sitting on the increasingly hardening seats of TAM Brazilian Flight 8110, it carried me 40,000 feet over the Atlantic where, an hour later we passed over Ponce, Puerto Rico and I was barely able to see the old Air Force Base at Roosevelt Roads on the east coast of the island. This is the location of the action that takes place in my first book, “Five Miles Deep,” the story of Marina Victoria, Queen of an ancient civilization living five miles deep in the Puerto Rican Trench. This is the second deepest location on the planet.

I was able to see the darkened water where the 35,535-foot depth of the trench exists.

My imagination kicked in as I visualized the team of scientists and Navy Seals descending in the NASA built submersible, into the trench depths in an attempt to rescue the citizens who have lived under a protective dome in a pristine, ideal world since before the ice age. Yes, Five Miles Deep is a science fiction story. But, it is so close to reality that the reader can imagine the events really happening.

And, as the Airbus A 330 continued tracking north, I was already missing my daily walks on miles of sandy beaches in Brazil as they disappeared further behind me. I even had a few memories of the events that occur in the sequel to Five Miles Deep, “The Return of Marina Victoria,” in the Tiger Shark Terror. This is book two in the series that takes place in Recife, Brazil, in the State of Pernambuco in a place called Suape. Mountain Springs House in the fourth quarter of this year will release this book. 

Reality kicked in several hours later when the Air Tran Boeing 200 touched down in Atlanta and I put on my jacket for the first time in six months and stepped outside in the cold 70-degree weather of north Georgia.