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.