More Southern Heroes Novels In the Works

I've decided to work on this novel (or novella) along with Little Sister rather than Walraven Manor -- because it's almost baseball season!

Dumb Jock -- The Alex Austin Story is a novella that I had to put on the back burner over the winter. The tagline --  Can a sweet, shy woman change a minor league catcher's notions about predatory females? 

Brooks D Simpson might be interested in this, since he has shown an inordinate amount of interest in my novels -- critiquing them on his blog, though he hasn't read them. And last summer, for some reason, he actually downloaded the first working cover for Dumb Jock, though it was pretty awful -- hastily made of comp images, just so I'd have "inspiration" for writing.  

Though I know nothing about baseball to speak of, I've learned a lot online, and it has been very helpful to follow the Twitter feeds of several major and minor league players. Some of them are totally focused on baseball and rarely tweet about anything else. But others post about nearly anything and their personalities really come through.  

One of my favorite Tweeters is Bryan Peterson ("peteypipes"), an outfielder for the Miami Marlins, who had to have been a class clown in high school.  A few choice tweets from Bryan -- "Gonna try and fit in as many rightch'onder's as I can in some sentences tomorrow" ... "Have i told you how much I love breakfast burritos" ... "Nobody really goes to red lobster do they?"  But he can be inspirational, too: "We fear what we do see, when we should be hoping for what we don't see. #romans" ... "Why worry, when your foundation is the Creator."  
 

Thanks, Bryan, for helping to make baseball players real for me.

Alex Austin, like all my heroes, is a Southern man, and a Christian. As of now, he is from Tennessee (like Troy Stevenson) but that may change as the writing progresses.

  Little Sister is the third book in the Georgia Series. The tagline -- A college student interning at a social watchdog organization discovers information that could jeopardize herself and her family. This is Ainsley Kincaid's story, and was actually the first book in the Georgia Series.  Actually, when I started this story in 2006 or so, there was no series. It became one because Little Sister inspired a prequel (Sweet Southern Boys) which inspired its own prequel (Southern Man). 

I don't know whether the final cover will look like this one or an earlier one (there have been several different designs).  One of the opening scenes follows the cover --

 

On the last Monday in January, three weeks into the new semester, Ainsley Kincaid reached her limit in history class.

Professor Douglas Hobie, his thin face set with drooping eyes and framed with fly-away hair, put Ainsley in mind of the character actor Vincent Schiavelli. He delivered his lectures in a nasal monotone that lulled some students to near stupor. But it wasn't his delivery that bothered Ainsley; it was the content.

She took it as long as she could. Her patience ran out when he said, "Of course, the entire South is still racist, but there are pockets of racism that are immeasurably worse than the status quo, and this university is surrounded by one of them. Verona, Georgia."

Fury flashed through Ainsley head to toe and she slammed her history book closed with a loud pow that echoed through the classroom like a small explosion.  Her classmates turned startled expressions toward her as Hobie's lecture ceased mid-word and he stared at her, open-mouthed. Total silence descended upon the class.

Her face hard and her hands trembling, Ainsley scooped up her books and purse. Without speaking a syllable, without so much as a glance toward anyone, she flounced out of the room.

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