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Hello Fellow Traveler!

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I've spent most of my life going looking for the places other people warn you to stay away from,  condemned buildings, old cemeteries, roadside attractions and oddities nobody else stops the car for. I love rusty parts, gears, and steam opperated machines. With a background in engineering, I taught STEM related classes for over thirty years before I traded a classroom for a keyboard. Most recently, I've stood inside of CERN, collected rocks on Mount Mont Blanc, and cruised around the western Carribean, which probably tells you everything you need to know about where my curiosity tends to wander. I believe, all the way down, that our scars are what make us beautiful, not despite the cracks, but because of them.

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So maybe it's no surprise that when I go looking for a story, I go to sea.

 

There's something about a ship at night that I've never been able to shake, the way the ordinary rules loosen a little once the shore disappears. I love cruising for the same reason I love a good roadside attraction: you never know who you'll meet leaning on the railing at midnight, or what they'll tell you, or what they're carrying that you can't see. I've built a career out of collecting those moments, from speaking at Author Nation and various conferences, to facilitating workshop rooms full of teens figuring out who they are, to making friends on steam trains and cruise ships, meeting strangers who become, for one conversation, the most interesting people in the world.

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The Meridian Line grew out of that same hunger. Five ships. Twenty voyages. Every one of them carrying its own haunting and its own second chance, because I've never believed those two things are opposites. Grief, love, longing, and second chances have always shared a cabin, in my experience. The Amber-Star sails first, a ship built from the bones of one that came before her, remembering things her passengers would rather forget. I didn't invent that idea from nothing. I've watched real ships hold real stories longer than any of us expect them to.

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This fall, I'm doing what I always do before I trust a story completely, I'm researching and experiencing what my characters experience. I'll be aboard the Enchantment of the Seas, the real ship behind the Amber-Star, walking her decks and sleeping in the cabin that anchors the whole haunting. I'll come back with salt in my hair and, I suspect, a few more ghosts than I left with.

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​If you love later-in-life romance, found family, ghost stories that are gentler than they are grim, and the particular magic of a place that only exists between one shore and the next, welcome aboard. I think you're going to feel right at home.

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Course is a choice. I hope you'll choose this one with me.

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​Sheley Rayne

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SEE MY OTHER BOOKS HERE  >>>>>> 

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SEE MY WORKSHOP HERE   >>>>>> 

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