Tennis lover

I played sports since I was a wee thing and have loved many a sport, most notably, basketball, that is, until I fell in love with tennis one day, watching Boris Becker and Stefan Edberg on Centre Court at Wimbledon. Since that day, I was absolutely taken in by the sport, but we lived an hour outside of any sort of civilization and when I begged my mother for lessons, she told me I'd have to wait until we moved closer to town...which sadly, might be never. So I watched every tournament I could get my hands on, and cut out newspaper clippings and stored them in a green plastic jar covered in stickers that I'd pull out every so often and read. I'd visualize myself on the court, racquet in hand, serving like the pros and winning every match.

Magically, one day, my mother informed us that we were moving to WA state and into the city (as much of a city as Puyallup can be). The first words out of my mouth, other than, when can we go to a Beach Boys concert, was, now can I get tennis lessons? Happily, she agreed, and the rest is history!! I played all through high school and a little into college. Even now, my love for the game has not diminished, even though I don't get to play the 20+ hours I used to play a week.

As a small substitute, I'm writing a novel about an aging professional tennis player, aptly named Karen Keeler (yes, I purposely spelled her name wrong!) and it's been a joy re-living some of my matches, and doing research on line (watching youtube videos of old matches, watching after-tournament interviews, reading tennis biographies, etc...) The novel is about 1/3 of the way finished. I'm planning on entering it into the Christian Writer's Guild annual contest in October, but to do so, I have to get to 75,000 words. I've completed one other novel, but it was only 50,000 words, so this will be the most I've written all at once.

As we near Wimbledon season (late June, early July), I'm pre-warning you in advance that I will be making some commentary on the pros as they battle it out for the most prestigious of tennis prizes! And hopefully by next year, I'll be able to tell you that my book, Ace, will be getting published, followed by the other two books in the series I'm planning to write next!