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.

The Diamond Trade: Great Rewards Attract Dangerous Risk

GREAT REWARDS 

ATTRACT DANGEROUS RISK

Gil Devos with his wife, Nina. His daughter, my friends and I hosted Gill at Lake Keystone in Odessa, Fl recently to work on the book and play in the lake.

The life and times of Gil Devos is chronicled in my next book, A DIAMOND IN THE ROUGH. The book will be released in June from Mountain Springs House publishing. The story is about a man from Brussels, Belgium who walks into an Antwerp diamond district merchant’s office and lands a job because he did not know a thing about diamonds.  

Gil had trained to be a mercenary and worked out for months with Claude Goetz, the karate instructor who taught Jean Claude VanDamme. In fact, after quitting a job as an advertising agent prior to that, Gil became a beer distributor in the jungle of Central Africa. Gil probably would have been fighting some tribal lord’s personal war in another remote country had he not accepted the beer distribution job.

This is not the story of a rich kid that goes to college and becomes a success just to please his father. Gil didn’t know his parents very well. A loving grandmother raised him. He struggled to find good jobs. His good looks and “street smart” ways led him to eventually become one of the premier diamond buyers in the business. The merchants of Antwerp taught him well. He learned the craft and the dangerous business of buying rough diamonds from the people who actually flushed the stones out of the mud, rocks and rivers of South America and Central Africa. He made millions for himself and billions for his sponsoring employers in Antwerp.

The unsavory and dangerous part of the diamond business also cost many lives, as great risk always does. It ruins careers and governments as well. Diamonds have also cost Gil well over two million dollars to learn who to trust, and who not to trust.

The book is in the hands of Lee Porche, my very capable and demanding editor. After the manuscript was finished, my friend, retired bush buyer Gil Devos took off on another risky adventure to Sierra Leone, Africa. At 78 years old, he is not much of a trained mercenary anymore. But the lure of an eighteen million dollar potential diamond buy has once again dragged him out of retirement. It could be big. It could be a waste of time. It could be deadly. I can’t wait t see how this adventure unfolds.