I’m podcasting the director’s cut of my novel, False Alarm, a female Jerry Maguire story, free on iTunes. I’ll be reading the novel and talking a bit about working at a sports management firm. Kate McCabe, my alter ego, is trying to make it in the boys’ world of professional sports management. I’m from this world—handholding athletes through their tax returns and drug tests, and badcopping them about their spending and their driving without insurance. Just like Kate, I’ve worked as the Chief Financial Officer—a fancy title, but more like parenting. No one cared much about my spreadsheets, anyway—I could round up fast cars and insure them.

In a sports firm, schmoozing with the clients means everything. You manage by the seat of your pants—and better to wear pants. As a woman, it’s hard to fit in. I was told in that business that “boys are used to talking to boys.” But I loved the job and found the situations very amusing—they inspired my short story One of the Boys that was published by the literary magazine ZYZZYVA, and later became False Alarm.

The first edition of False Alarm was called “Humorous and lively” by Publishers Weekly and Rod Gilmore of ESPN said “It is absolutely dead-on.”