My first five books—and three screenplays—are technically listed within the sports genre, even though I never thought they quite fit the usual criteria for sports fiction. Yes, sports do frame the narratives, but those stories hinge on human struggle, pivotal decisions, and the loyalty of family and friends. And while the leap from sports to fantasy seems staggering, Time Passages proved more familiar than I expected, since it’s built on the same foundation as Being Brothers, Madness, and Born for the Game. Yet Born for the Game stands out as Time Passages’ closest cousin, each anchored by a resilient heroine.
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Though separated by millennia, Ryan Stone and Valeria carve their paths in male-dominated realms—a dynamic that steels their grit and forges their determination. But Ryan navigates 21st-century L.A., and Valeria maneuvers Troy’s fortified walls.
Similarly, each book sprang from one repeating scene playing in my head. In Time Passages, I kept seeing a modern soldier with a rifle in hand, dropped into a Bronze Age battle. One man. One rifle. Thousands of lives.
If the familiar was my comfort zone, the unfamiliar felt like Hell Week in SEAL training. For ten years I ripped through novels in under four months—and fantasy/romance forced me to build an entire world before the story could even breathe. And navigating the many subplots of an extended cast sharpened my storytelling skills.
Writing historical fiction meant operating within rigid boundaries. Time, for instance—something we take for granted—didn’t exist in Bronze Age Troy. “Meet me in an hour” or “two months from now” are useless cues. I kept cutting anything that didn’t fit and dove back into research on how the ancients marked hours and seasons. What used to take three months stretched to ten, and five rewrites pushed me well past the one-year mark. By the end, comfort foods, and a nightly glass of Prosecco, were non-negotiable.
If building an entire realm and juggling diverging storylines felt tedious, so be it. But shaping the characters of this adventure was pure joy, like pulling on a favorite old sweat-shirt after a long day.
That’s always been my favorite part of writing, and it stayed true even when I was bringing to life people from millennia past. Our emotional core hasn’t changed over the ag-es. Shakespeare’s plays still remind me of that. He grasped what it meant to be human, and that’s his greatest gift.
I felt an absolute thrill typing “The End” on my manuscript. Sending that email to my editor felt like smashing a walk-off home run in a well-fought game…
I couldn’t help the comparison. It perfectly captures the rush.
Even though I’ve left sports fiction behind, baseball will always be a big part of who I am. It really is the ultimate metaphor for life.
I invite you to read Time Passages: Echoes of Troy. Now available on Amazon.
Available in eBook and Paperback Editions
Free to read on Kindle Unlimited
