Covert Dreams: My World Travels and My Writing Guest Post

Imagine waking up remembering intimate details about a country in which you have never traveled and fluently speaking a language that you have never spoken. B.J. is living the ideal life. He has a great wife, a wonderful job. And yet he is experiencing life-like vivid dreams of Munich, a city he has never visited.

Stan Halsey is a professor in Saudi Arabia, who sends for his wife to join him. She arrives, and, in the blink of an eye, she vanishes, leaving no trace of ever being alive in either the United States or in Saudi Arabia.

COVERT DREAMS is a fast-paced international suspense thriller that moves from Munich to the burning sands of Saudi Arabia. What is real, and who is responsible for the terrifying nightmare?

COVERT DREAMS trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9drU4-um_U

BOOK PURCHASE LINK: Amazon

Genre: Suspense/thriller/mystery

My World Travels and My Writing 

a guest post by Michael Meyer

I am a recently retired college professor. I taught for over forty years at universities in Thailand, Saudi Arabia, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and I spent the last twenty-four years at a California community college. I live in Southern California wine country with my wife, Kitty, and our two other cats. As a recent retiree, I now have all the time I need to devote to three of my lifetime passions: writing, reading, and traveling.

 My wife and I travel extensively throughout the United States, and we travel internationally at least once a year. Last year we were in Italy. The year before that we toured Ireland. We just recently returned from a trip to France. The travel bug has bitten both of us, and we are hooked. We intend to travel as along as we are healthy enough to do so. Having traveled the world extensively, and having lived in a variety of cultures abroad, has greatly helped my writing. I am a keen observer of others. I have learned so much from having lived in and traveled in other cultures. I love being a part of different cultures, learning things that I would never have known if I had stayed only in my native California.

I have traveled extensively throughout the world, having lived in a wide variety of places: Asia, the Middle East, Europe, and the Caribbean. Every place I have visited has had some impact on me and on what ends up in my books. DEADLY EYES, for example, is set in the Caribbean, where I spent four glorious years on the idyllic island of St. Croix, where the mystery takes place. COVERT DREAMS, my first international thriller, is set in both Munich, where I have traveled to on many occasions, having lived and studied in Germany, and in Saudi Arabia, where I was a professor at the University of Petroleum and Minerals and traveled widely throughout the Middle East.

            World travel, I find, opens people’s eyes to new things. It gives them different perspectives about life and how to live that would not have been realized without the exposure to other cultures. World travel provides a better understanding of others. It teaches one a new respect for things that are done differently than at home. It makes one more understanding of others.

            I will continue to travel as long as I am able to do so. I will also continue writing as long as I live. The two go together for me. I wholeheartedly recommend world travel. It is one of the greatest educational experiences possible. The sugar-white sands of St. Croix and the burning sands of Saudi Arabia, as divergent as night and day, have both had an impact on me as a person, and both have found permanent homes in my writing. Yes, I have learned much from my international travels, and yet there is still so much more to learn, and I fully intend to do so, starting with our next overseas adventure.

Excerpt from Cover Dreams

The Munich all around her was bustling with activity. She could hear it from all directions. Munich was a wonderful city, a fun-loving place, the live and let live ebullience of the city emanating from its every nook and cranny. She had had a lovely stay here. All of it had been so adventurous, so new, so unlike life back home in Arizona. She could vividly recall the first time she had ventured into a Munich beer garden, where the liter mugs had been so huge that she had had to lift hers with both hands, and the giggles, from him, until he too had had to use both hands.

The fumbling noises he had been making came to an abrupt halt. He began stroking her cheek again. Gus looked so happy, so young, so full of life. It was so hard to imagine that he could be so heavily involved in all this horror.

Gus smiled at her once more. His eyes were soft, so gentle, so caring, so loving.

Maybe this was some kind of huge mistake. Maybe he wasn't going to kill her after all. Maybe everything would turn out happily ever after. Maybe. Maybe. Maybe.

But then suddenly she saw it clearly. It was no fairy tale. There would be no maybe. This was real, as real as the mixture of sadness and fear that now flooded her brain.

And then she died, with her eyes wide open, challenging, piercing his to the end.

Meet Michael Meyer
I have resided in and have visited many places in the world, all of which have contributed in some way to my own published writing. I have literally traveled throughout the world, on numerous occasions. I have lived in Finland, Germany, Thailand, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and Saudi Arabia, where COVERT DREAMS is set. I gained the wanderlust to see the world, to experience other cultures, at an early age, and this desire has never left me. If anything, it has only gained in intensity as I have aged. I try to travel internationally at least once a year. In the interim, I spend lots of time traveling around both my home state of California and other nearby states.

I spent my early years in the small town of Lone Pine, California, the home of almost every western movie, in addition to a wide variety of other genres, made in the 30’s, 40’s, 50’s, and 60’s. In fact, Hollywood still films parts of big-time movies there today. My dad, the town’s lifeguard at the time, personally knew John Wayne, Lloyd Bridges, and Lee Marvin, all of whom came to the town’s pool, the Memorial Plunge, at times to cool off after a hectic day of working in the sun. I was even an extra in a movie filmed there in 1957, MONOLITH MONSTERS, a B-cult favorite even today. I was ten years old at the time. Even though I resided in a small town hours from the big city, I was exposed to the excitement of action and heroes at a formative age, and, thus, my interest in writing novels of suspense such as COVERT DREAMS was born.

As a recent retiree from a forty-year career as a professor of writing, I now live in Southern California wine country with my wife, Kitty, and our two other cats.

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