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Michael Reed McLaughlin is a recent graduate of the prestigious Odyssey Writing Workshop. He grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico, went to Newport Harbor High and then Del Norte High Schools, before moving to Southern California, where he wrote and lived on a 32' sailboat for many years. After a near death experience in his late twenties, when his sports car skidded off a cliff on Mulholland Highway, Michael decided to pursue his dreams and go to film school. While a student, his first short film, The Fourth Trimester—set in a not-too-distant future in which the Constitution has redefined the right to life as beginning 20 years after conception—won him a Student Emmy® for the Best Dramatic Short for his region. Believing that one learns by doing something rather than just by reading about it or being taught it, he also wrote, directed, shot, edited, and sometimes acted in a scene or short film on video every week during the years he was in film school, all done outside of classwork, as well as watching fifteen classic films a week outside of class. Just before graduating, Michael came back to Los Angeles and formed a production company to shoot an independent film. The company was MRM Productions; and the film was Of Love & Betrayal, a simple character study he intended to shoot on 16 mm film, on his own sailboat, with some friends from film school. The project snowballed into a 35 mm film project shot on a 76' schooner on location in the Bahamas. There were several tropical storms, hurricanes, dealings with drug dealers, DEA agents, two murders, and the usual cast & crew love affairs along the way; and none of that was even in the movie he was making. What fun! Although he believes his primary talent lies in directing film, he does a great deal of writing, both for the screen and for the press. He is the author of Rüneglaive: Sword of Heroes, the first book in his trilogy The Hero Sagas. He has also penned several other books set in the high fantasy world of Ĭndrēl, including his prequel trilogy, The Hero Within.

An adventure on the high seas, discovering sunken treasure, buried desire, and lost hope. The novel upon which was based the feature film "Of Love & Betrayal. "When Jack O'Conner finds a gold piece of eight off the Florida Keys with the partial coordinates to French pirate Jacques de Une Oue's sunken hoard of stolen Spanish doubloons etched upon it, he steals his boss's 50' sailboat and sets out to recover the treasure. What ensues is a series of steamy romantic encounters and bitter personal betrayals, for the remaining two pieces of eight with coordinates on them belong to two women, Sandy Sequoia, a mid-level drug dealer from Miami, and Portia Pennington, the repressed daughter of an English merchant tycoon, both of whom Jack invites onto his sailboat to go with him in search of the Spanish doubloons, and with both of whom he falls in love. When the infamous Hundred-Years Storm arrives just as the three recover the treasure, they must decide between petty selfishness and their tentative love for one another.

Kindle Price: $3.03

Category: Sports & Outdoors