Common Ground

I used to hate baseball. When I was growing up it seemed everyone around me was fixated on the sport. I was horrible at playing it, I never understood the rules and when a game was on TV everything else stopped.

Then I grew up, went to college and found out there was more to sports than watching the event. There were things that went with the games, like discussions and parties, general socialization. I still didn’t like baseball, but I liked joining in on the things that went with it.

A little while later, I married a man who loved baseball of all things, and had children. Those children like their father, enjoyed baseball. I didn’t like baseball (or its cousin softball) but I was a regular attendee. Eventually I became a single mother. The entire time my kids were growing up one of the biggest challenges was to find things to do we all liked and that were affordable.

Attending baseball games (and later basketball) became our common ground. My kids played softball through school. When she was older my daughter was on a flag team for her high school band, so her brothers and I attended those sporting events as well. Many of the prizes the kids won in school were cheap baseball tickets. We live in Cleveland, Ohio. Indians tickets were cheap in the 90’s.

When my sons grew old enough to join an adult softball league I took the dogs and my daughter and I often went and watched. The half-naked, sweaty, in shape men on the softball teams had nothing to do with our interest—honest!

In one of my recent releases, Electric Candle, Jonas Forge is a 239 year old vampire who has been a vampire for a bit more than 200 of those years. He meets his soul mate, a 29 year old vampire, Blair Turner. Blair has been a vampire all of five years. While these two men may outwardly appear close in age there is actually a 210 year age span between them.

Talk about your May/December romance.

Forge and Blair begin their romance and relationship on shaky ground. The nature of their soul mate bond provides for attraction physically to one another and an emotional bond that grows into love.

It does not, however, help them like one another.

So often, in romance, we are so focused in the characters falling in love that we forget they also have to fall in like as well.

It was a challenge finding common ground for these two. They struggled to find a place for themselves as a couple. By the book’s end they’re still on shaky ground, but it’s not as shaky as when the book began. Blair has an passionate interest in history and Forge lived through quite a lot of history. While Forge is a movie fan, Blair is a graphic novel reader, but they both enjoy a good hero saga.

Forge and Blair gradually discover they each have valuable insight to offer each other. They also realize that their differences aren’t so great and they have much more in common than they first thought.

Then, of course, there is baseball.

A detail that didn’t make it into Electric Candle, but will probably show up eventually, is the fact both these guys are baseball fans. I suspect the teams they root for are going to be different and provide some interesting exchanges between them.

Go Tribe! (I’m now a confirmed Cleveland baseball fan).

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