Sunset Beach by Trish Perry

All right, I confess, I have a little bit of a partiality to this book. What's that you say? Not allowed? Oh well let me tell you why :-D
Two years ago at the American Christian Fiction conference, I had the most wonderful honor of chatting with the author, Trish Perry. It was so much fun brainstorming ideas for books while eating late night snacks with about 6 of us. Tosca Lee hosted the table after the awards banquet. We had a blast in a round Robin that pinged around more like hot potato game :-)

One thing led to another and Trish connected with me later on for the next book, ta dah, Sunset Beach. I shared a story with her about going on a mission trip to Mexico with 40 some-odd teens. While visiting the beach, we came across a wounded seal. She loved it and felt like that story could be tweaked to fit into her fictional world. How cool is that??

People ask authors where they get their ideas all the time. Well, they get them from real life. Those real stories don't get told exactly as they happened because in the fiction world, new characters are living them out. So the "real" situation is now seen through someone else's eyes. It becomes a foundation for a new idea. Think of it like this: a builder lays a square foundation for a home. A home is built. What does it look like?

Ah, you are beginning to see. Your imagination can fill in the details, but those details will be totally different from anyone else's. Your house might be brick while your friend might see a log home. Still has the basic foundation but is no longer the same. The truth is in the story even if the color or style of "home" appears different. That's why fictional worlds are believable--the truth is still in it.

You simply have to go to Trish's blog and sign up to win the book and a $200 prize! Here's the link.

Summary:Sonny Miller is tired of not knowing who she is. Soon she'll begin graduate school to earn her masters in Psychology. But how can she counsel future clients about their identities when she isn't even sure about her own? To that end she has cooked up a little meeting at a certain beach house in San Diego.

Sonny's mother, classical soprano Teresa Miller, isn't aware she's about to be reunited at the beach house with her sister, Melanie Hines, after 25 years of estrangement. And Sonny isn't aware her mother has invited a surprise guest of her own. Russian adoptee, Irina Petrova, finds herself dragged along on a trip so tumultuous she summons her handsome concert violinist brother for moral support.

The four women converge on the funky little beach house in San Diego, each with her own disappointments and hopes about family, identity, and love. For Sonny, the trip reveals all she expected and more than she ever dreamed.

Order Sunset Beach here.

Author Bio:
I started writing seriously about fourteen years ago. Up until then I thought I had finally figured out what I wanted to do when I grew up: I went back to school and got a degree in Psychology. I was drawn to how our minds and emotions work. But while writing for my classes, I found myself drawn to how we relate to one another's minds and emotions.

Hey, guess what? That's what stories and novels are all about (good ones, anyway)!

I started writing short stories—pretty bad ones. And I started taking creative writing courses to round out my degree. So I was in classes full of people just like me—lousy writers. But we were learning!

Then the Lord led me to a local writers' group, Capital Christian Writers, and the contacts and friends I made through CCW enriched my personal life and my writing life more than I can measure. Through CCW and through reading just about every book and magazine ever published by Writer's Digest, I started catching on. Now I'm writing full time and man oh man do I love it.

Before the writing began, I worked for attorneys in Washington, D. C. I worked for the Securities and Exchange Commission. And I was a stockbroker. A horrible stockbroker. How do people do that? Take responsibility for other people's financial futures? Yikes. I'm perfectly happy to take responsibility for the amount of time any one person wants to spend reading my books. If you enjoy the experience, then know that we both enjoyed it together. I love that about books.

In the midst of all that fretting over other people's money and writing about other people's lives, I racked up a few personal experiences myself. Some good, some bad, but all part of God's plan. Now I live in Northern Virginia with my brilliantly funny son. I have a savvy, gorgeous grown daughter who eloped at 19 and eventually blessed me with an amazing grandson.

Oh, and we have three lovable, goofy dogs and several feral cats who think they're our pets and force us to feed them.