Winning With the Wildcats

Cassie Clears the Bases, Pitchers and Catchers Report, and Designated Hitter

Here are my notes on the origins of the Winning With the Wildcats series, regarding the erotic adventures of Cassie Snow, a minor league baseball coach, part of my continuing “My Filthy Hobby” series for paid subscribers.

My softball career was very short, and not especially illustrious.

It started in seventh grade; my parents thought that I ought to try a team sport — I was perfectly happy spending my free time with my nose buried in a book, and I didn't see what the appeal of the outdoors was — and in the spring I agreed that I'd give softball a shot. I really liked watching baseball — my father and I were fans of the local professional team, always making time to watch when there was a game on and even going to the ballpark a few times to eat hot dogs and root for our favorite players — and I imagined that I might enjoy playing ball, too.

Alas, I was wrong.

Softball and baseball are so amazing to watch because they're actually quite difficult to play. It's a game of geometry and physics (no doubt why this bookish girl loved to watch it so much) — victory is found in the margins of unforgiving angles and velocities and distances, with the difference between being out and being safe on base can be measured in millimeters. I absolutely love watching a beautifully executed double play, because it requires such precise timing and confidence in execution; and a triple play — that's fucking orgasmic. The best players make it look casual and blase; but if the runners are at the top of their game, it's anything but.

And I had none of the necessary talents to be a good player: my hand-eye coordination was poor on a good day, my near-sightedness being perfectly adaptive for plowing through a stack of books on the weekend but abysmal for making a stick of wood connect with a fast-moving leather globe. In the field, I didn't have the reflexes required to move from catching to throwing in one seamless move, and my glove always seemed to be greased with butter. I toughed it out for three seasons, in deep right field where I could do the least damage.

In tenth grade, though, we got a new coach. I'll call her Miss Wentworth, because that's not her name. She was actually a substitute history teacher who came in the middle of first semester when our regular teacher had a serious medical issue to deal with, and became the de facto permanent history teacher when Mr. Johnson (also not his name) didn't come back. She had a laid back, breezy style, probably owing to her tenuous hold on the job, and all of us — girls, boys, other teachers, janitorial staff — had a serious crush on her because of her easy laugh and "aw shucks" attitude. When the softball team needed a substitute coach, Miss Wentworth — who was a phys ed teacher by training and really just slumming in American history — jumped at the chance.

She recognized right away that I was a poor but enthusiastic player who was showing up for practice because I loved the game and felt an obligation to the team, even if I wasn't really having much actual fun. Her solution was to make me the team statistician, which was an ideal job for a bookish, near-sighted girl who loves ball but couldn't play for shit. My job was essentially to watch the game, meticulously record every strike, foul, hit, error, and run, and then call in the scores to the local newspaper, radio, and television stations. It was a wonderful position to play: I got to wear the uniform, ride the bus to away games, and nerd out over the details of the game, but I didn't have to deal with the nerves and self-admonishment that came with my poor performance on the field.

This is not to say that Miss Wentworth was my model for Cassie Snow, the strangely oversexed batting coach of the Wasconaway Wildcats, but it's also not to say that she's not.

I started writing "Cassie Clears the Bases" in February of 2023, when we were still deep in winter where I live and I was itching for spring. "Ohio Johnson" had just gone out to all the ebook sites, and had absolutely zero traction; but I was thinking that maybe sexy stories might work out for me anyway as a fun side hustle, and I had spring, and baseball, on my brain. I was brainstorming sexy baseball situations, and the character of Cassie Snow sprang into my mind and started telling me dirty stories. That she looked a lot like Miss Wentworth was both not surprising, and also a little disturbing, considering that teenage crush situation.

My original outline for "Cassie Clears the Bases" looked a lot more like a contemporary steamy romance than the unabashed smutfest that it became. I wanted to have a meet-cute moment for Zane and Cassie, a gang of fun friends who would hang out with her at the Spangled Boot and encourage her budding romance with the grizzled player who was sliding from the majors to the minors, and some buildup to the eventual and inevitable (and steamy) coupling.

There were two problems with this approach: first, I had let my writing languish for so long that I didn't have the chops for the tension and characterization and plotting required. Second, I hadn't read a contemporary romance in such a long time that what I imaged was "contemporary" was very much "vintage" — romance is a fast-moving and demanding genre, far less forgiving than the horror and science fiction I had dabbled in ten years ago, and there was no way that I was going to pull off anything romance-like on my first outing.

But could I tell a story about a sexy minor league coach banging a hot player and maybe using sex as a training tool? Could I stretch that out into two or three titles coming in at 10,000 to 20,000 words? Could I imagine these characters cavorting across another three title story arc or two? Fuck yeah, I could.

After tossing aside several thousand words of failed meet-cute rom-com gal-pal false starts, I cut right to the chase: Cassie has a kink for showers at the clubhouse, the sexy players have a kink for showers at the clubhouse, let's all get together at the clubhouse for a shower and see if it helps the team's chances. If not, well, at least there were sexy times in the shower.

The plot of the first story — young batter has some issues to overcome to be the best player he can be, and Cassie's sexy ways can give him the confidence that he needs — is pretty simple.

The plot for the second story, "Pitchers and Catchers Report," is also pretty simple: the team has a potentially great pitcher and catcher combo, but they have personal differences of a psycho-sexual nature; Coach Snow has already demonstrated an ability to solve that kind of problem, so why not unleash her on the battery as well?

Part three just follows from the first two stories: we get to see the fruits of Cassie's "coaching" in a Wildcats win, and Cassie gets to celebrate with the team. There is joy — wonderful, kinky, no-holds-barred joy — in Wasconaway. These three stories are clearly not great art, or even necessarily adequate art, but I think they're fun: the characters are lively, the sexy action is fun, and everyone has a good time with no great psychological angst.

If I were going to get all psychoanalytical about these stories (eww, yuck), I'd say that I'm Charlie Maple: a player who showed great promise in his youth, met with adversity, and has returned to the game damaged and lacking in confidence. Cassie is my inner erotica writer — she's "good, giving, and game," up to whatever crazy activity is required at the moment and willing to say "fuck it" and launch into a foursome in the weight room if that's what the plot demands. Zane, on the other hand, is the steadying literary voice in my head: he's protective of his "mojo," controlling if and when he lets himself loose, and also attuned to the needs and dramas of his teammates. I suppose that I've let Cassie and Zane work their magic on me, encouraging my baser urges while also tempering the chaos.

I should, perhaps, say a bit about the setting of Wasconaway, as it has popped up in other stories and will no doubt continue to do so.

For most of my life, I've lived in "the northland," described by Porter Fox in "Northland: A 4,000-Mile Journey Along America's Forgotten Border." I have family on both sides of the United States and Canada border, and I've always moved pretty freely between them (except, of course, in the weird 2020 year, when nothing moved freely anywhere and it was impossible to get All-Dressed Chips and good Cadbury candies south of the border). When I wanted to create a little fantasy realm of my own, it was only natural that I would choose a place in this northerly zone of lakes and woods.

Wasconaway feels like a town in northern Wisconsin, or maybe northern Minnesota, or Michigan's upper peninsula; but it could be in Washington State or Idaho, too, or maybe Maine or New Hampshire. There's a common culture across all these places: a wariness of outsiders while also recognizing that the tourist trade is a big part of what keeps them afloat; a strongly self-sufficient, often rebellious streak; a neighborliness that crosses political, religious, and ethnic boundaries; and a hardiness in the face of adversity. The geography is important, too — the lakes, the woods, the Canadian Shield.

I've used this area as a setting not just in the Wasconaway Wildcats stories, but also "A Dip in the Lake," "The Night of the Storm," "Off the Leash", and other stories I'm working on. Astute readers will find references to the Wasconaway area all over my stories. Part of this is laziness, of course: why invent new places for every story, when I have a comfortable and familiar place into which I can drop the action? And part of it is the draw of world building, which I picked up not only from Tolkien but also Faulkner, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald — a reference to a person or place in one story from another lends a richness and depth that wouldn't exist if each story stood on its own. So, fair warning: if you continue to read my stories, you're going to run into Wasconaway, Zenith, Lakes Makonogin and Nakanawidah, and other locations in my own personal Yoknapatawpha County (which I hope is sexier than Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County, recognizing that his county is quite dirty in its own right).