We live in an outstanding area with a beautiful shoreline, colorful history, dazzling entertainment, wonderful theaters and talented local authors.

And ‘tis the season to discover local authors with the Connecticut Authors Trail (connecticutauthorstrail.org) now under way. Thirty eastern Connecticut libraries host annual programs from July to September introducing local authors and their work to the public.

The East Lyme Public Library recently hosted Niantic author Pat Kelbaugh, a creative and fun weaver of tales. Kelbaugh had a long career at Pfizer until she felt it was time to move on and focus on what she loved.

Kelbaugh writes fiction and poetry as an indie author. Her five-volume “Dreamtime” novel series is influenced by the paranormal and stars a new breed of citizen-vampires.

Also an accomplished, self-taught watercolor artist, Kelbaugh said her inspiration is rooted in a life spent on the southeastern Connecticut shoreline.

Her paintings can be found in Connecticut galleries and private and corporate collections around the world. She creates her own cover art for her novels.

Sometimes the creative arts intertwine. A Kelbaugh painting was on display during her talk in East Lyme, titled “Everybody Wants a Piece of Me,” symbolic of a poem written by one of her fictional characters.

But vampires are the stars of her stories.

The Law of Conservation of Energy states that all energy in the universe is fixed — it can neither be created nor destroyed. The great physicist Albert Einstein claimed that, since humans are nothing but buzzing masses of energy, when you die, “not a bit of you is gone; you’re just less orderly.”

What’s more fun than imagining vampires borne of our immortal atoms?

Through her “Dreamtime” novels, Kelbaugh has created a world in which vampires are not all evil and can live unrecognized among normal humans, thanks to a drug called Lexiri (remember, she worked at Pfizer) that, among other benefits, eliminates the craving for blood.

This new breed of citizen-vampires is a society unto itself, with a governing body, laws and a national education center in Nevada to help new vampires understand their lives and blend seamlessly into normal society.

But theirs is not a sedate lifestyle. There are good and bad vampires, and conflict abounds, as the good are kept busy eliminating evildoers. But they must be careful, as their sworn enemies are armed with a snail venom that’s deadly to vampires.

Adding to the fun, vampires can “Slipstream,” or time travel, between parallel dimensions of time and space. They can operate in different eras via a mode of transportation as convenient as the subway.

This is not so farfetched, as science has proven that time in the cosmos is very different than time as we know it. Crazy things happen in space-time.

On this night in East Lyme, Kelbaugh carries the audience through summaries of all five novels.

Her writing career began while she was still working. After enduring an argument with a difficult co-worker, Kelbaugh walked Old Black Point Road, by the marshes, to rid herself of all that negative energy. It occurred to her what a perfect soap opera villain that co-worker would make.

A story popped into her head, and she hurried home to begin writing. A year later, Darke House was published independently in 2011. She hasn’t stopped writing since, following up with the independently published novels “Summerland,” “Elixir,” “Island of the Shadow Woman” and “Light of the Blood Moon.”

A sixth novel in the works is called “Dead of Winter,” about a dark, dangerous place on the very edge of time itself.

Included in the novels is a map with a familiar-looking shoreline. Only the names have changed. Once you know the geography of the novel, it adds another dimension to the landscape to realize that Fullesport is New London, with its ferry dock, Commerce Street is Bank Street, Osprey Point is Millstone Point and Fallings Island is Plum Island.

Kelbaugh likes it when the good guys win: “I keep a thread going throughout all of them – that everything will be OK. Literary comfort food against the too-often very scary realities most of us face in our lifetimes. Escapism, for just a little while, with one foot in ‘what if?’ and the other in strange possibilities.”

These are not your typical vampire tales. Rather, they read like modernized detective stories from the 1950s, with breezy, smart dialogue that sweeps the reader along, smoothly slipstreaming between dimensions, while making perfect sense of it all.

The books are available on Amazon and at Thistle Beads and Gifts in Niantic.

Pat Kelbaugh will be giving a second Authors Trail presentation at the Waterford Public Library at 7 p.m. Oct. 10.

John Steward lives in Waterford. He can be reached at tossinglines.com.