Beach Rental (29 page)
Beaufort, North Carolina
Beaufort is one of the three key locations in
Beach Rental
. It’s where my hero, Luke Winters, owns an art gallery. His gallery is as fictional as he is, but Beaufort is a charming town—no fiction there.
It’s pronounced
bo-furt
.
Beaufort is on the Inner Banks and is North Carolina’s third oldest town. It’s a natural treasure trove for romance writers. Blackbeard hung out here. In 1718, he ran his ship
Queen Anne’s Revenge
aground in Beaufort. The ship was found in 1996 in the Beaufort Inlet. You can see the recovered artifacts at the Maritime Museum. The Old Burying Ground has been around since the early 1700’s and is worth a visit. Some of the shipwrecked crew members of the
Crissie Wright
who froze to death in 1886 are buried here in a common grave, as is the little girl who died at sea, but was brought home by her father to be buried—in a rum barrel.
Stroll along Front Street with its charming storefronts and the long, gorgeous waterfront on Back Sound. Enjoy the marinas, galleries, gift shops, bookstore, antiques, boutiques and a wide variety of restaurants and you’ll get a fine Carolina welcome in all of them. Tour the restored sites and Victorian homes and the B&Bs. There’s something here for the history buff, the romantic, and the shopper. I hear there’s fishing, too.
In the summer, you can get a boat ride over to Shackleford Banks to look for those elusive wild horses or to find sea shells—and those you’ll find in abundance. Be warned—there’s no shelter from the sun and no facilities!
Here are a few URLs in case you’d like to know more about Beaufort and Front Street.
Morehead City, North Carolina
Beach Rental
opens in Beaufort, but it really begins in Morehead City when Ben tracks down Juli.
Some people are born to luck, some aren’t.
Juli Cooke knows she’s one of the latter. She’s a cashier in a grocery store in Morehead City and works second jobs where she can find them. She’s a hard worker and proud of her self-reliance, but more and more she feels like she’s getting nowhere. She meets Ben Bradshaw while moonlighting for a caterer at a fancy party in Beaufort, but it’s in Morehead City where Ben finds her again and meets her for lunch at Cox’s Family Restaurant. The grocery store is fictional, but not the restaurant. I’ve eaten there and they have fabulous grilled cheese sandwiches and lots of other good food at great prices.
Juli and Ben stroll down the road to a vacant lot that overlooks Bogue Sound and, in the shade of the huge Live Oak trees, Ben proposes the ‘business arrangement.’
Morehead City is a sound-side mainland seaport. It was officially incorporated as a town in 1860. It’s known for its sport fishing, but in
Beach Rental
, it’s the annual Carolina Chocolate Festival that gets the attention. The Carolina Chocolate Festival, ‘Celebrating Charity & Chocolate,’ benefits a number of local charities. Check it out here:
www.carolinachocolatefestival.com
For more information about Morehead City, try this URL:
Romance and Stories
Romance writers write about romance. We throw other stuff in—suspense, grief, attraction, peril, faith elements—and create sub-genres, but, bottom line, it’s romance.
Beach Rental
is published as Women’s Fiction because, ultimately,
Beach Rental
is Juli’s story. But it’s also romance. And suspense. And a touch of Inspirational.
I’m told there are a limited number of story types or plots in romance. Let’s take a look at a few of them.
One of the concepts in
Beach Rental
deals with marriage as a business arrangement that leads to love, versus the love-at-first-sight falling head-over-heels kind of love. Marriage of convenience (or as a business arrangement) is an old idea well-used many times by authors through the centuries, and never gets old.
The next concept in
Beach Rental
is unrequited love—somebody loves someone who loves somebody else. Unrequited love is something most of us have experienced, painfully, often as a crush in school or even more painfully as an adult when our hearts are less quick to mend.
In the end
,
Beach Rental
becomes the story of two people, widely separated by circumstance, background and economics, who grow toward each other, finding in each other something they lack and, together, they are now whole—a theme similar to
Pride and Prejudice
. This is also the concept we hope is true for every relationship—that we see in each other something we lack in ourselves. Two become one.
Human beings want to love and be loved and the Romance genre embodies that basic need and explores it in variations of the theme. The fictional characters in
Beach Rental
also suffer deceit, grief and danger, but my characters forgive me because I give them a romantic, happily-ever-after ending—most of the time.
Here are some places to read more about Romance as a genre:
Kincaid’s Hope
Coming in 2012
What do romance novels have to do with real life? Especially the old-fashioned kind from many years ago? Beth Kincaid finds the answer to that question and discovers that some things never change—including human nature.
Beth Kincaid had left her tragic childhood behind, and her hot temper, too—the infamous Kincaid temper—the only legacy she had from her birth family. She had moved to the city a decade earlier, had sworn off emotionalism, and built a successful, well-controlled life.
Successful, until the day it all blows up.
Beth returns to her hometown, Preston, in southwestern Virginia, to settle the estate of her former guardian—and runs smack into the mess she’d left behind: her alcoholic father and the long-ago crush, Michael, who let her down, not to mention the poor opinion that almost everyone in town has of her. At first, all she wants is to sell her guardian’s house and get out.
Soon Michael is being friendly and attentive, and her ex-fiancé follows her to Preston to win her back, but for money, not love.
As she goes through her guardian’s possessions, Beth discovers that the woman who saved her and raised her had secrets, and the truths revealed begin to chip away at her self-imposed control. She begins to question her plans for the future.
But the future is not within her control. It’s the man she doesn’t know—the tall man with the freakish neon blue eyes—who could end, forever, Beth’s opportunity to build a better, truer life.
Thank you!
For purchasing this novel from
Turquoise Morning Press.
We invite you to visit our Web site to learn more about our
quality Trade Paperback and eBook selections.
www.turquoisemorningpress.com
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Turquoise Morning Press
Because every good beach deserves a book.
www.turquoisemorningpress.com
~~~~~
Sapphire Nights Books
Because sometimes the beach just isn’t hot enough.
www.sapphirenightsbooks.com