Backstop: A Baseball Love Story in Nine Innings

You know Backstop. He plays catcher for any team in any city in America with a major league ball club. You cheer him when he delivers, and boo him when he doesn’t. You don’t have to be a fan of the game to be taken by Backstop’s story, told in his own words during the deciding game of the World Series. In what could be his last game after a 14-year love affair with the big leagues, Backstop chronicles his rookie season, takes the reader to Chicago, where he finds romance, and reveals the heartbreak he endured in the aftermath of his one indiscretion. You’ll cheer for Backstop, on and off the field, as he plays the most important game of his career — haunted by the ghost of his father, who died before Backstop achieved stardom — and fights to win back the heart of the woman he loves more than the game.

January's Thaw

In this second volume of my life’s story I attempt, however clumsily, to conclude what I started in the first volume, One Hot January. Here I chronicle the events that lead to my appearance in a future one hundred years removed from where my story began. But there is more, as the opening paragraphs perhaps indicate. Although the backdrop for my story is time travel and an alternate reality, the underlying theme is a more human one — of love lost, another love found only to be lost, and of a decision, the result of a single regret brought about by the realization that my self-professed courage to never risk my heart to love was instead cowardice, to rectify a wrong in a long life filled with regrets.

By the end of this account, assuming you’ve read its predecessor, perhaps you will understand why I risked giving my past self the chance at the happiness that has long eluded me. I failed and my past self paid with his life. Since then I’ve many times considered making another attempt. Was I justified to try even once? You may judge, as it is man’s nature to judge others, but before you do I ask that you read the words that follow and then ask yourself if you would have acted any differently.

-- Joe January

One Hot January

My name is January. Joe January. I was a private investigator from the South Bronx, circa 1940. Was once described as an indignant Humphrey Bogart. Who am I to argue? The difference between Bogie and me is that I was the real McCoy. Where he took the scripts that Hollywood wrote for him, I took on the tough cases nobody else would. Unlike Bogie’s, my bumps and bruises were the real deal, not makeup. Although in retrospect I can see that this could be construed as one of those Hollywood type scripts that Bogie might have been interested in bringing to the screen were he alive today.

In truth, I’m no Joseph Conrad, but I wrote every word on these pages. This is my story, but make no mistake, it’s anything but make believe. I know. You’ll say it reads like science fiction, spanning two centuries and dealing with time travel and alternate realities. Some might find a less than satisfactory denouement, while still others will accuse me of arrogance in my self-depiction, creating a sort of comic book superhero; but in truth, in youth we often view ourselves as invincible. It isn’t until later in life that we come to realize how fragile life really is; furthermore, that we come to see the repercussions of our actions. Yet given the chance to live life over again, avoiding the mistakes made during the first go-around, would you turn your back on the chance? Hence the real meat of my story is about missed opportunities, how, through my own foolishness, I lost the one woman who meant the most to me, not once but twice.

And so begins the saga of Joe January, the character first introduced in January’s Paradigm. In One Hot January, January, a fast-talking wise guy private investigator from the South Bronx, unwittingly uncovers a seemingly impossible plot of time travel and an alternate reality in which Germany has won World War II, by grudgingly agreeing to help a pretty young woman locate her missing father — a Professor of Archeology from Columbia College who must prevent the secret of Hitler’s location from falling into the wrong hands… January gets more than he bargained for in terms of mystery and intrigue, action and romance. One Hot January is literary science fiction on a grand scale.

I’m seeking representation or a publisher willing to support and promote my second novel as well as my nearly completed third novel, January’s Thaw, the final book in the January series.

My first novel, January’s Paradigm, was published in 1998 by Minerva Press, London, England.

January's Paradigm

Current Entertainment Monthly, Ann Arbor, Michigan writes:

"Guest holds the reader's attention here by pulling out all the stops on his powers of imagination... Personal identity — the slipperiness and the malleability of it — makes up the major theme of the story... (readers) will not be able to put it down."

Book Description: January's Paradigm is a groundbreaking novel about coming to terms with marital infidelity — from the male perspective. Can novelist Robert Porter with assistance from Joe January, the protagonist from his novels, right the wrongs of his own tormented present and, through letting go of the past, find hope for a better tomorrow?