swimmer | Marianne Sciucco, Author

Swim Season FREE meme 2

Girls Varsity Swim Season starts in mid-August.

For ten years my life revolved around swim practice, swim meets, fundraising, travel, and one swimmer in particular.

My daughter’s swim career ended in February, 2017. The previous October, I published my Young Adult novel Swim Season, which was inspired by my years of sitting on those cold, hard bleachers cheering her on.

I got more than a sore butt. She and her teammates inspired me to write this novel, and it took five years for me to put it together. It covers the entire season, from tryouts, to dual meets, to county and state championships.

It also covers the highlights of senior year: Football games, dances, friendships, first crush, college prep, and a host of other anxieties, including divorce, a blended family, a Wounded Warrior, PTSD, incarceration, and more.

There’s a lot in the 593 pages that comprise this book.

Book Description

Sometimes winning is everything.

Champion swimmer Aerin Keane is ready to give up her dreams of college swimming and a shot at the Olympics. As she starts senior year in her third high school, Aerin’s determined to leave her family troubles behind and be like all the other girls at Two Rivers. She’s got a new image and a new attitude. She doesn’t want to win anymore. She’s swimming for fun, no longer the freak who wins every race, every title, only to find herself alone.

But when her desire to be just one of the girls collides with her desire to be the best Two Rivers has ever seen, will Aerin sacrifice her new friendships to break a longstanding school record that comes with a $50,000 scholarship?

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To honor these swimmers, I’m offering Swim Season for FREE on Kindle August 27-29. Pick up your copy here. Also available in paperback and audiobook.

To learn more about Swim Season, read my post Write What You Know and Then Some – Researching My Young Adult Novel “Swim Season.”

My daughter had been swimming competitively for five years when I came up with the idea to write a novel about girls’ varsity swimming. Sitting on those cold, hard bleachers season after season gave me more than a sore you-know-what. It sparked my imagination, creating a story line and cast of characters that would show in written form what high school swimming is like for these girls. As I wrote the story, they were always at the heart of it. I wrote it for them. And I wanted it to be as accurate and realistic as possible.

In many ways, writing Swim Season was natural and easy. Through many autumns, I’d watched my daughter and her team swim their hearts out, beside parents rooting for their own swimmers. In the beginning, I knew next to nothing about the sport, about swim meets. But as the years went on, I learned.

I learned simple things, like the order of events. Try finding your kid on a pool deck swarming with dozens of young swimmers in caps and goggles when you’re not sure which event it is, or whether your child is swimming in it or not. Impossible. Continue reading →