Frosted Glass

A painful break-up/break-down chases high-tech marketing wiz Sandy Lowiltry from her Silicon Valley home. She comes to rest on the Oregon Coast, where she seeks solace in the opera-themed sanctuary of the Hotel Bel Canto and the arms of a handsome eccentric who spends his days combing the beach for sea glass.

Sandy soon learns what the tourist ladies already know - it's easy to fall for Frosted Glass Man. Besides great sex and alarmingly intricate campsite cuisine, Frosty offers do-it-yourself mythologies that would melt even the coldest heart. But will it be enough to quiet the whisper of ambition, the voice inside Sandy's head that chides her for settling? Will she really leave behind Silicon Valley for love in such a strange package?

Michael J. Vaughn was born in Brunswick, Maine, where his father, a Navy pilot, flew P-3 Orion submarine runs over the Atlantic during the October Missile Crisis. His childhood in the military subsequently brought him to Pennsylvania, Whidbey Island, Washington State (just across the Puget Sound from Bainbridge Island, the setting of "Gabriella’s Voice"); Hawaii, and San Jose, California, where he has lived since 1973.

Vaughn is a graduate of the now-defunct Peterson High School in Sunnyvale (one of his classmates was ice skater Brian Boitano), and earned a B.A. in Journalism with a minor in choral music from San Jose State University in 1984, singing tenor with the San Jose State Concert Choir. He has worked as a theater and opera critic since his graduation, mostly for Metro Publications in San Jose and the Palo Alto Weekly. From 1989-1992, he was publicity director for Villa Montalvo Center for the Arts in Saratoga.

Vaughn is the author of the choral novel "Frozen Music" (Northwest Publishing, Salt Lake City, 1995) and the illustrated storybook "An Agnostic Christmas" (Dragonfly Press, Chicago, 1999). For "Gabriella’s Voice," he received a 1998 Novelist Fellowship from Arts Council Silicon Valley. His poems have been published in more than two dozen literary journals, winning an Editor’s Choice Award from Plainsongs literary journal (Nebraska) and an Honorable Mention in the Emily Dickinson Poetry Competition (Arizona).

Vaughn lives in San Jose, California, where he works as an opera and theater critic, serves as Fiction Editor for The Montserrat Review literary journal, plays drums with the blues band Randie and the eDawgs, and plays shortstop and left field on various softball teams. Much of the background for "Gabriella’s Voice" was inspired by soprano Jennifer Der Torossian and the Bay Shore Lyric Opera Company in Capitola, California.