Life & Work with Sandy Malone of Jekyll Island, Georgia

Today we’d like to introduce you to Sandy Malone.

Hi Sandy, we’re thrilled to have a chance to learn your story today. So, before we get into specifics, maybe you can briefly walk us through how you got to where you are today?
Ten years ago, I had a thriving 11-year Caribbean destination wedding planning business on Vieques Island, Puerto Rico, and had planned more than 500 weddings with my husband, a retired SWAT commander who claims weddings are more stressful than law enforcement. We’d starred in the TLC reality show “Wedding Island” about our business and were booked two years out. At the same time, I was writing several times a week for top publications like HuffPost and BRIDES. Then Hurricane Maria struck Puerto Rico as a Category 5, and we lost everything in a night.

We moved back stateside to the condo we’d kept in the DC area, and I went back to writing full time while we searched for the place that would become our forever home. My mom lived in Jacksonville, Florida, and had just been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s so we chose Jekyll Island, Georgia, because it was close enough to help her out.

I’ve always wanted to write novels, but I went to school for journalism and have spent the last 30 years doing news reporting, editing, and other non-fiction writing assignments. When we moved to Jekyll Island, I decided to take a leap of faith and write my first novel.

“Escape to Jekyll Island” is the first book in a series about 29-year-old Tally Davis, who loses her job, her house, and her boyfriend in Hurricane Maria, and goes home to Jekyll Island to start over. The books are not autobiographical, but I did use all the crazy I saw planning weddings, fictionalized to protect the guilty. The result: an absolutely hilarious series called Gem of the Golden Isles that follows Tally’s reinvention, nutty clients, and falling in love with the little boy next door who grew up to be a hot state trooper.

There are five books in the Gem of the Golden Isles series and right now, I’m working on a crossover series that takes place next door, on St. Simons Island and brings back some of my readers’ favorite characters.

I also have a new book coming out on Oct. 9th that is different from anything I’ve written before – it’s called “Thicker Than Blood” and it’s a dark story about a fictional patriarchal society family where money and influence are more important than anything else. The story is told through the eyes of three generations of women in the family who survived it. Two of those women succumb to Alzheimer’s. Imagine the first V.C. Andrews “Flowers in the Attic” cover with the big mansion with the little window. That’s the vibe I was going for when I wrote it.

The book is fiction but it’s an accurate depiction of my journey with my grandmother and mother’s battles with Alzheimer’s disease. I think it’s relatable because so many of us are dealing with it and having to parent our parents. It was really hard to write, but it helped me to explore what we’d all been through living with that disease hanging over our heads.

Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
I’ve had to start over or reinvent myself several times in my life. I started out writing and editing for political news publications. I wrote the Politics.Net column for the Wall Street Journal before they had a technology page. But I missed being in DC and I hated living in New York, so I turned to the dark side and accepted a job in public affairs and government affairs. My first big client was the Government of Puerto Rico.

When my husband was ready to retire after 30 years on his police department, we moved to our vacation home on Vieques Island, Puerto Rico. When we got married there, there was no wedding planner on the island. We knew we could open a destination wedding company that would take away that stress from other brides and give them perfect wedding weekends. So, we did it, and we were a raging success for 11 years.

Hurricane Maria wiped us out in one night. But I was lucky because writing is something I can fall back on and that’s exactly what I did. I became editor of Blue Lives Matter/The Police Tribune, and I put my husband to work as my cop Wikipedia on the couch. But that job was just a placeholder while we figured out where we were going to end up.

We found Jekyll Island, Georgia, a beautiful historic island that was the winter playground of the Goodyears, Rockefellers, Astors and other scions of industry during the Gilded Age. We chose it for its proximity to my mother in Jacksonville, but it’s the kind of bucket list place where I’d never imagined we could live. Shortly after we got there, my stepdad died and my mother lost her marbles and had to move into assisted living on St. Simons Island, next door to us.

That first year was a nightmare – my mother had been battling UTIs that took away a lot of her cognitive ability, and she was angry and frustrated and felt betrayed when we put her into a facility. She gradually got some of her mind back and found herself a boyfriend down the hall who made her days in assisted living far less boring. We visited her almost every day. My husband and my mom got their hair done together every few weeks and went to lunch. My mom wasn’t angry anymore and we were able to go on cruises and road trips with her, visiting mutual friends and attending funerals. My mom got a real kick out of each of my book releases and loved having me do signings for the other residents in her community.

Just when we figured we’d gotten a handle on living with her Alzheimer’s, she had a seizure. Doctors found multiple tumors in her brain and lungs and told us there was nothing that could be done. Mom was told that she was dying but she couldn’t retain it for more than a few minutes because she wasn’t in any pain. She just wanted to get out of the hospital in time for my book launch on Black Friday. She died in my arms on the day before Thanksgiving.

I’d spent so much time juggling work and my mom that I hadn’t built enough of a life for myself on Jekyll Island. But the few women I’d gotten closest to were there for me when my life turned upside down and I lost my best friend with no warning. Now, nine months later, I’m starting to feel closer to normal. But it’s been a rough ride, and I’ve had to reinvent myself several times along the way.

As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
I have been writing non-stop for almost 40 years. I fell in love with creative writing when I was young, but my mother discouraged me from pursuing it as a career. She wanted me to major in something I could go back to after I had babies. She was desperately afraid I would end up writing obituaries on the overnight shift at a newspaper in the Midwest.

So, I became a journalist instead of a novelist. I was a police beat reporter and campus editor at Ohio State. I won several big journalism awards in college and then I got a full scholarship to The Fund for American Studies’ Institute on Political Journalism at Georgetown University and that led to an editorship at Campaigns & Elections magazine and then the Wall Street Journal.

No matter what turns my career took, I always found ways to keep writing. I crafted countless op-eds that carried my clients’ bylines in major publications. When I started wedding planning, I wrote for every major publication that would give me freelance assignments and I started writing travel stories for Conde Nast, too. I wrote a traditionally published DIY wedding planning book and then I ghostwrote several books for other reality TV stars, including a Real Housewife.

I went back to news journalism right after the storm and it was a few years before I got brave enough to let myself have the time to write a fiction book. What have I proven to myself and what am I most proud of? I can write literally anything.

How do you think about happiness?
I’m happiest when I’m helping other people. That’s why I founded a nonprofit organization called The Pink Flamingo Society of Jekyll Island with some of my girlfriends. We plan fundraisers for good causes but we also do secret good deeds for neighbors in need.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://sandymalone.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sandynmalone/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SandyMaloneWIV
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sandy-malone-author
• Twitter: https://x.com/SandyMalone_
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@SandyMaloneBooks
• Other: Pinterest https://www.pinterest.com/SandyMaloneAuthor/ and TikTok https://www.tiktok.com/@sandy.malone

Image Credits
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