A Love Letter To Lavallette
I start my first full-time job next week. My first 9-5 in the infamous corporate world. So, I’ve decided to spend my last days of freedom in my favorite place, with some of my favorite people.
Fall in Lavallette is a special time of year. It’s local summer, which means renters are gone and the Shore once again belongs to its own. It’s a time of sweatshirts on sand and bonfires during chilly nights, a side of the barrier island that not everyone gets to see. And after having spent many falls in Binghamton, NY for college, it’s the first time in years that I’ve been able to really enjoy this time of year here, tucked in this small corner of the world.
I’m not sure why this place has been such a muse to me. One day, I sat down, and just started writing about it. Writing can be like taking a photo, that knee-jerk instinct you get when you know you’re physically in a “good old day” before it’s old, so you want to capture that feeling, before it’s gone and nowhere to be found but in your memories.
I wanted to chronicle my time in this place, put them in a bottle, cork them, and take them everywhere with me. So, I started writing about a girl who served in the most popular restaurant on the island. I wrote about drunk nights, and hungover days, a ragtag group of fast-friends whose biggest responsibility was paying for alcohol and surviving the night shift. I wrote about boat days on the bay, undeniable service industry trauma bonds, and the kind of found family that an experience like that grants you, the kind that you know will be in your heart forever.
It’s a different type of grief when an experience like that is over. The kind that bores into your soul when you realize you have no choice but to grow up. The kind that rears its ugly head when you know that no matter how hard you try, you can’t will time to stop moving. But I think for me, grieving that experience became taking all the best parts of it, the best parts of me, and putting it on the page. Creating a talisman of the best time of my life, one page at a time.
This place is unlike anywhere in the world. It really does live and breathe all on its own. Hell, in my books, it’s practically another character. And the one element of it that exists in all my books is this unbridled way it’s been there for me all my life. When I needed it most, and even when I thought I wouldn’t, because I always will.
Summer Rayne is the the first in The Shore Summer Series, coming to Olive Press Publishing in 2027. One of the great loves of my life has and will always be this place, and I’m excited to bring it to readers everywhere.
-Julia ♥
