The Mother-Daughter Team Behind Sunset Cove Adventures

Most book series are written by one person alone at a desk. The Sunset Cove Adventures are written by two people who happen to share a family — a mother and daughter who have weathered their own storms, literal and otherwise, between the Gulf Coast of Florida and the Carolinas.

Two Writers, One Voice

Judy Pence is the mother half of the team, and a storyteller with a heart for young readers. She's a published author who previously wrote and promoted a book called A Helmet Away from Heaven, working alongside state and national organizations to bring it to readers. She knows what it takes to carry a book from a private idea to something a stranger holds in their hands.

Her daughter, Katy Cloonan, came to writing by a less obvious road. A registered nurse turned homeschooling educator, she brings a nurse's eye for detail and a teacher's instinct for making learning fun to every page. Between them they've built something rare: a single, consistent voice with two sets of experience behind it.

From Bedside to the Blank Page

Katy's path changed during the pandemic. Like a lot of families, hers had to rethink almost everything at once — and in that season of change, she stepped away from bedside nursing and into teaching her own two children at home. Homeschooling has a way of turning a parent into a curriculum designer, a science demonstrator, and a full-time reader of children's books. It also has a way of revealing what's missing on the shelf.

Drawing on a background in technical writing and her ongoing work with educational organizations across Florida and South Carolina, Katy began writing the kind of stories she wanted for her own kids: clean, funny, genuinely educational, and impossible to put down. Judy, already an author, was the natural partner. What began as a shared idea became a shared manuscript.

Where the Conners Came From

If the Conners family feels real, it's because they mostly are. Katy and her family split their time between Naples, Florida and Greenville, South Carolina — two communities, and two kinds of people, they love. The series is pulled straight from that life: years of Gulf-coast and Carolina storms, beach days, fishing lines, and family adventures that slowly grew into a fictional family of their own.

The stories aren't invented so much as remembered — the applause at a perfect sunset, the tourist scooping up live starfish, the hurricane that reroutes an ordinary Tuesday. Real life did the plotting; the authors did the shaping.

That lived-in quality is why the science lands. When Paul Conners explains how a storm forms or why you leave the shells where they are, he's channeling conversations these authors have actually had on actual beaches. It's the difference between research and memory.

Writing for the Whole Family

Ask either author what they're really after and the answer isn't sales or shelf space. It's the child who finishes a chapter a little braver and a little more curious than when they started — and the parent, teacher, or homeschooler who can hand the book over without a second thought. Honesty, responsibility, courage, and humor sit at the center of every story, folded into adventures kids actually want to read.

A third Sunset Cove Adventure, this one set in South Carolina, is already underway — drawn, like the first two, from the authors' own backyard.

A Partnership That Shows on the Page

There's something fitting about a mother-and-daughter team writing a series about family. The books are, at bottom, about the way generations look after and learn from one another — a theme that runs from the Conners kids all the way to the ninety-nine-year-old veteran at the heart of The Eye of the Storm. It's a subject these two authors don't have to research. They live it, one chapter at a time.

Want to know more about the writers behind the world? Read their full story on the authors page, or explore the books that grew out of a real family's real adventures.