Skip and the twins attempt kidnapping the Slave.
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twins
Happy 13th Birthday Jimmy & Billy McGee. Or is it? Stuck at home on account of Mama & Daddy’s stupid house rules, these Mississippi-born twins are going stir-crazy and driving their Mama to her last nerve.
In the collection of conversations I’ve had around the topic of character & setting details in a literary work, I have heard an overwhelming response of folks in favor of authors who provide vast amounts of detail when describing a character’s physical description. And the same goes for a setting if its a key location (such as the town or street where a character lives, a room where important pieces of the story take place, etc). For example, chapters 1 -3 of The Diamond Thieves well-depicts the main characters physical description and personalities. This is especially important since they are identical twins yet extremely different personality-wise. I have only heard of readers preferring that a character be more left up to that reader’s imagination for minor more utility role characters & places in a book. The beginning chapters also provide an abundance of visual imagery to describe the small, fictional, Southern town of Eugene, Mississippi.
Whoever has taken the journey through the climbs and tumbles of storytelling can attest that the creator is NOT the only writer of that story. What I’m about to share may qualify me to some as a bizarre. mental case, but it would only be fair to give a portion of the writing credit of Extra Innings to the fictional characters themselves. Certainly, I created identical twins Jimmy & Billy McGee and all their family, friends and enemies, however, I’m sure that any writer would agree that after a while, the characters begin to tell the story themselves. After some initial personality and circumstance development has been established, a characters’ behaviors and reactions to incidents flow far to easily for my naked brain to deserve all the credit. At times, I do recall moments of writer’s cramp in terms of plot direction and development, but once each incident was etched into words, the reaction of each character involved was told by them specifically. This is particularly illustrated in Book 3 (“A Hero Among Thieves”) which includes poetry and music written by Billy while he was away at USAF Boot Camp and stationed overseas in Korea. I’d love to consider myself a gifted writer, but I must give a great deal of credit to the fascinating characters who live and lived through the pages of the Extra Innings Trilogy.
Teenage TWIN brothers Jimmy and Billy McGee are fictional characters, from a fictional town in Eugene, Mississippi. The story begins on their 13th birthday in their attic bedroom of their parents home. I was nineteen years old when I began writing Extra Innings. The plot begins with the twins and their friends confronted by the neighborhood bad boys threatening to take full possession of the school’s baseball diamond. A dispute of this gravity can only be settled but one way … the boys would have to play for it. Whichever team wins the game will claim dominion of the baseball diamond forever.
After the game, I took a few years off to focus on college. Then I moved to Massachusetts to start the Rock ‘n Roll band that was intended to launch my musical stardom! I had one particular semi-successful run before our brotherhood fell apart after which I escaped to NYC for a brief blink of an eye until the tragedy of 9/11 overhauled my perspective on the importance of family and I moved to Ohio to be with my parents, sister, brother-in-law and newborn nephew Brevan.
I was broke, living back with my parents and heavy-hearted from a soul searching quest for my identity. Finally, I landed a decent paying job. . That’s when my creativity got squashed by small-corporate America and I began craving a therapeutic outlet from the Real World. Being a few years older and more mature, I felt ready to tackle the heavier subject matter of the latter half of the twin’s teen years and finally, Extra Innings, the book, was completed in 2008.
Most authors probably don’t require ten years to write a modest 600 + page novel … but maybe they do. I loved the story and the characters but the storytelling did not meet my vernacular standards for a “smooth and easy read.” I wanted a piece of work that readers would breeze through without feeling any sort of burden from its length. Many sentences and paragraphs were awkward and clumsy. Perhaps this is from my lack of experience as a reader. I’ve only ready maybe 10 or less books in my entire life (including all school literature reading assignments as most of them I didn’t actually read … shhh! – don’t tell anyone) so, as a result, revising Extra Innings to make it more reader friendly took years!
The book is now being edited. I can’t wait for everyone to read a finished copy!