Ask Elnora--About Diamonds??? Lenora Worth

Hello, my sweet summer friends. It's always exciting when a new book is coming out. My next one will be out this August. It's a suspense--We love those, don't we? "The Diamond Secret" is set in New Orleans. What better place for a treasure hunt and lots of strange clues that all come together? My hero, Cullen Murphy, is Irish. Sigh. Irish and ambitious. My heroine Esther Carlisle runs an antique shop that she inherited from her stoic father. Cullen comes looking for an infamous diamond but discovers a diamond in the rough in prim little Esther. While she's always longed for a grand adventure, Esther is too sensible to fall for the good-looking adventurer. It's Indiana Jones meets Southern mystery. It was so much fun to write this book. After all, Elnora knows that diamonds are a girl's best friend! Unless someone is trying to kill you in order to get a diamond. That got me to thinking about grand adventures. Who amongst us has been on one? Who amongst us is afraid to go on an adventure? Recently, some friends took Big Daddy and I out on a boat ride. Elnora doesn't really like big bodies of water, except to look out on them while enjoying coffee and a good book and maybe some chocolate. It's safe to sit and read about adventures but ... to go on one? What if I break a nail or worse, a leg? What if bad guys do start chasing me? Anyway, I went on this boat with friends and we went out into the big bay. The really big bay. And we kept on going until we reached a little sliver of a sand bar that had a sign post at the end which told how far away certain places were. The sign also had the words "Skull Island" and "You are here" on it. So there I stood on Skull Island out in the middle of the really big bay and of course, my writer's mind was coming up with all sorts of scenarios. How did Skull Island come to be known as Skull Island? Were there really skulls on this island and did I really want to know that? While there, we saw a stingray and I thought about being out in the ocean on a raft with sharks and stingrays all around. Frightful. But it all ended okay since we got back in the boat and started home. The boat captain (we'll call him Bennie) also pulled the boat up to another kind of secretive place which could only be reached by boat or a long, long road that seemed to go nowhere. Of course, my mind went into imagination land again. Who lived on such a desolate, bug-infested place? Modern day pirates, drug runners, criminals and misfits, murders and mad men? I didn't want to find out. So when the boat got stuck in the shallows, I sent up a little prayer. I did not want to spend the night with whoever lived in the two houses we saw from the shore. Thankfully, we managed to get back out into deeper water and then we headed home. I had survived Skull Island and what was probably a band of pirates. The next week, our captain sold that boat so I won't be taking anymore trips like that for a while. But my mind is still out there, wondering while it's wandering. For Elnora, those few hours were grand and scary and interesting. What kind of adventures have you been on? Let's discuss this some more. I had fun talking about this over on the Love Inspired Authors Blog yesterday, so I thought we'd continue it today in celebration of my next book and in celebration of all the adventures, large and small, that we find in life. We are blessed to have adventures, right??? :))