The many Layers of Breaking and Holding: Enjoy it as You Choose

                                                                      &nbs…

                                                                                                                                    "Golden Galaxy" by Varun Aditya

Preorder Breaking and Holding for August 2nd delivery and enjoy the novel in one or many ways.

Read it as a page-turner—for the pleasure of plot twists and unpredictable responses. Or read it for style and the way the story is told.  

Enjoy its light remembrance of the 1970s—of history, song, fashion, pop culture, and women's issues in the era. Read it as a story of two women—one struggling for career success in a New York advertising agency, the other for the courage to leave her desolate marriage. (More? The domineering boss of the first is the controlling husband of the second!) 

Love tennis? Read Breaking and Holding to relive the first Golden Age—when wooden rackets were still around, along with short white shorts; when Borg played with icy calm and stoicism while Connors and McEnroe, with their "bad boy" antics, took the sport to new levels of entertainment and popularity.

Read the novel for its Gatsbyesque strain—for the 1970s instead of the 20s; the Me Decade instead of the Jazz Age; and for Lynn Hewitt as Nick Carraway, caught in the middle of an illicit triangle, trying to prevent its implosion.

Or read it as my writing group suggests, tongue in cheek: The Great Gatsby meets Mad Men. Or: Love, sex, and tennis—what more could a woman want?  

Most of all, read Breaking and Holding as the story of a love too big, rich and obsessive to ever let go.  

Preorder it now! Open it August 2nd!

Musician, Marketer, Novelist. What Gives?

If you wonder about the connection between those three professions, it's the thing I love: language. 

As a soprano in graduate school, I loved the texts of art songs as much as their melodies and harmonies, the poetry of Goethe and Heine as much as the music of Schubert and Schumann. When I began my marketing career—no jobs for classical singers in Savannah at the time—I learned to develop strategic plans and analyze results, but crafting brochure and advertising copy was the work I did best and enjoyed most. Writing enticing descriptions and stories of life in the coastal South brought other stories to mind. Some I'd written long ago—like the serialized Nancy Drew mystery that I passed around chapter by chapter to the other girls in my fourth grade class; or the rambling pages that were boxed and yellowing in my attic at that time and could have been loosely called a novel.  After many years, those pages became the story I had to write—Breaking and Holding. 

How I came to love tennis is another story—a good one, but for another day. How tennis became the conceit of my novel is, once again, language. Love, fault, double fault, break, hold—those words form a sturdy foundation for a tale of deception, betrayal and love that won't let go.