Tag Archives: wiffle-ball

Kick Back on my “Porch”!

Posted on by

This Thursday October 3rd, direct from the offices of Grassy Gutter Press, the independent publisher of all seven of my novels, I’ll be reading a short selection from THE PORCH ROOF CLASSIC, my semi-autobiographical coming-of-age tale set in a small Western Massachusetts town in 1970. The three video readings, running on three consecutive Thursdays, can be viewed on Facebook, YouTube, TikTok and will be linked on this page that day.

It’s long been sage advice to “write what you know”, and it was fun to weave a number of my adolescent memories into the story of Joey Tosh, a bullied 14-year-old who with the help of a new female friend, spends the summer growing the guts to fight back by challenging his nemesis to a no-holds-barred Wiffle ball game. Five esteemed published authors have already praised the book, and many who enjoyed my recent podcast version can now order the slightly revised, limited print edition here.

I won’t deny it: My novels are on the quirky side, and do not easily fit into predetermined market categories agents and mainstream publishers tend to look for. It’s the main reason (other than my innate impatience) why I’ve continued to launch my books independently. Marketing your own stuff ain’t easy, and last night I had to delete the Grassy Gutter Press Facebook page I created years ago after discovering that a tsunami of disinformation trolls, ads, and random postings from non-members had taken over my “news feed” there.

After sending out numerous unsuccessful queries for The Porch Roof Classic, I did manage to get it into the hands of a reputable New York agent who had shopped around an earlier novel of mine decades earlier. One week later, he sent me a nice rejection letter that said “I wouldn’t know how to best position this in today’s marketplace.”  Stories featuring “underrepresented voices” on a personal journey, usually diverse women or LGBTQ characters, have been the book industry rage for years, particularly in the perceived “young adult” category. To paraphrase Seinfeld, not that’s there’s anything wrong with those, but I just happen to be an older white guy with a story that ANYONE who grew up in the 1970s can relate to, especially longtime baseball fans, and felt it was more important to design the book myself, talk my talented illustrator friend Jennifer Field into doing the cover, and get the thing out there the quickest way I could to let the readers decide. 

So if you need an enjoyable, nostalgic escape—and who doesn’t?—from the current toxic news cycles and dark forces creeping over our world, check out the comic innocence of THE PORCH ROOF CLASSIC!*

*By the way, the sequel will be the book that agent shopped around back in 2007—as soon as I rewrite it and make it even better.

Gone With the Wiffle Wind

Posted on by

Feast your eyes on this photo of “Little Fenway” in the backyard of Pat and Beth O’Connor’s house in Essex, Vermont. If this place had been around in 1970, when me and my friends spent our summers playing Wiffle ball about three hours south near Springfield, MA, I may have journeyed north and never left.

The Porch Roof Classic is my 16-episode “podcast-novel” currently running on most podcast networks. It’s a nostalgic, PG-13 coming-of-age yarn geared for many ages, but especially for the guys in that photograph: longtime baseball fans who yearn for the days before steroids, social media, endless strikeouts and Rob Manfred.

My original intent was to lure an agent and publisher to get the novel out to the masses, but with the current book market—particularly for young adult fiction—heavily filled with female and “underrepresented voices”, it was going to be a long, brutal search. So then I thought: With our country in such a dark, dysfunctional place these days, why not do the novel first as a serialized fiction podcast, a quick and easy escape to the more innocent summer of 1970, when overnight camp, mosquitoes, the town bully, budding romance and Wiffle ball games were everything? Hell, I had some acting experience in high school and it would be fun to do all the voices. Plus building an audio audience for it might even help sell the book down the road.

A few listeners have asked me if some of the bigger events in the story actually happened. Some did, but many did not, and the characters, inspired by people from my past, are largely reworked creations. My aim was to capture the humid, languid days of a Western Massachusetts suburb in the year after Woodstock. The political and cultural climates may be entirely different now, but with narrator Joey Tosh recounting his summer, the dreams, laughs, and anxieties of being fourteen shine through as universal truths.

Hopefully you can give The Porch Roof Classic a listen. Beginning this week, new episodes will appear on Wednesdays and Fridays at the links below, and other places.

APPLE

SPOTIFY

GOOGLE PODCASTS