Happy 2019! This is the year I’ll be leaving my longtime job as a public sector attorney to write full-time and travel on our new catamaran sailboat. My husband and I will be leaving the Carolinas in December of 2019, headed to the Bahamas for sailing adventures, scuba diving, and a new life away from our desk jobs. I’m super excited and terrified all at once.

For me, 2019 is already a great writing year. I submitted the first novel in a brand new contemporary series to Dreamspinner Press in December of 2018, and I’m just about done with the second series book. The third book is fully outlined and ready to write.

Coastal Carolina is a standalone series along the lines of my Blue Notes books. Each novel is a standalone story but the characters are interrelated and the books are all set at the Carolina coast (North and South Carolina).

The first Coastal Carolina series book, Cape Fear, is the story of ocean pilot Justin Vance and Reed Barfield, a reporter from New York City who travels to Wilmington, North Carolina to write a story. For those unfamiliar with ocean pilots (also called “harbor pilots”), these are the men and women who meet the huge container ships out in the ocean and sail them safely into port. Their job literally involves jumping from a small pilot boat to the enormous ship—a dangerous and sometimes deadly maneuver. Cape Fear is set before and during Hurricane Florence, which devastated the North Carolina coast this past year.

My current WIP, Chasing the Story, is also set in Wilmington, North Carolina. It’s about newspaper editor Zach Caldwell, a former TV anchor who left New York under a cloud of mystery, and TV reporter Brandon Josephson. Set after Hurricane Florence, the two men set out to discover the truth behind a series of house collapses.

Both stories mix romance and suspense as the main characters navigate killer storms, water rescues, and even bad guys who want them out of the picture. And, because you know I love to write about how people can change through loving relationships, there’s a lot of character growth and new directions to be found.

I’ve already completely plotted the third story in the series, In Plain Sight, which features a local sheriff’s deputy and the man who stole his heart years before, then disappeared. I can’t tell you how excited I am to get to work writing that installment!

I’m looking forward to sharing these books with you starting in 2019. Of course, I’ll be working on my other projects, as well, including the sequel series to The Mermen of Ea, entitled The Dragons of Anuki. But that’s a story for another time. Until then, happy reading in 2019! -Shira