Imagine you were abducted by aliens and taken away to their home planet. After living there awhile, you learn to speak their language, and then actually become a pretty well-known author. You were a huge baseball fan back on Earth, so you decide to write a book about baseball. You know that none of your alien readers have ever heard of baseball, but you think it will make a great story, and besides, you really love the game… .
As you attempt to write it, you quickly find yourself entangled in words with multiple meanings, like ball and run . When you try to describe a triple play, you get so bogged down explaining the rules about force-outs that the excitement of the play itself is lost.
That was the predicament I put myself into when I wrote The Cardturner . It's not about baseball but about bridge, a card game that was once extremely popular but that, unfortunately, not too many people play anymore, especially not young people. In fact, the people who do play bridge seem to live in their own alien world.
My publisher, my editor, my wife, and my agent all said I was crazy. "No one's going to want to read a book about bridge!" they told me on more than one occasion.
Still, I really love the game… .