In-the-Works
Knights of the Roundball
with Bill Drozdiak
A television comedic/ adventure series in eight episodes about a free-spirited American basketball all-star team barnstorming Cold War Europe in late 1960s during an unfolding terrorist bomb plot by the Italian Red Brigade and their radical allies. Fiction based loosely on real life adventures of Jim McGregor touring teams. (See the Sports Illustrated article “The Tour.”) WRITTEN/SHOPPING FOR BUYERS
The Peshawar Package Tour
The Peshawar Package Tour is a satirical, episodic novel about battleground Afghanistan starting with the bloody Herat Province uprising against compulsory coeducation in 1979 and ending with the tragically botched American exit from Kabul in 2021. The underlying theme is the historic and constant resistance to women’s rights by the fundamentalist Pashtun leaders promoted by Pakistan and, during the Soviet occupation, funded with billions of dollars in American and Saudi money. Initially ignored by American journalists caught up in the romance of the turbaned underdogs and intentionally stoked by American intelligence agencies in its proxy war against the Soviet Union. This critical mistake produced disastrous results for everyone involved, but mainly for Afghan women. Despite the tragically serious subject, the novel maintains a light tone (think Voltaire’s Candide; G.M Fraser’s Flashman and Waugh’s Scoop) through the exploits of its reluctant hero, Daily Explosion reporter Temple, and a recurring cast of hapless hacks including “Wrong Way” Whitmire, “Turtle” Cleghorne and “Major” Roberts who evoke an era when most foreign correspondents were monolingual, hard-drinking men who like to think of themselves as “cowboys.” The truth was usually the first casualty. (WORK IN PROGRESS. ESTIMATED LENGTH 50,000 WORDS)
The Price of Copper. Labor, Race and Suicide in a New Mexico Mining Town
Begins with the mystery and tension surrounding the tragic 1938 suicide death of the mine manager and family patriarch in Santa Rita, New Mexico. From that dramatic starting point, Tempest goes on to paint a vivid portrait of open-pit copper mining, labor conflicts, and corporate-sponsored racism in company mining towns across the Mountain West from the early years of the 20th Century to the first successes of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s. He ends with his reflections on a lost era and its enduring impact on his own American family in a chapter—borrowing from a mining term— “Angle of Repose.” Completed. 50,000 words. Under Publisher Review.
Accidental Saint
A picaresque novel about a young man's mid 19th journey from England to Salt Lake City and the two greatest influences on his life, Communism co-founder Friedrich Engels in Manchester and Mormon Assassin Porter Rockwell in Utah Territory. (IN REWRITE)