Shelby, a born rebel with a talent for entertaining others, is a deliverer of singing telegrams - the only practical job her theater major prepared her for. But beneath the glamour of playing Wonder Woman and the Indignity of wearing an inflatable banana, Shelby fears that despite her eccentric attempts to rejuvenate it, her life has become a series of ten-minute spots of entertainment for people who don't appreciate her. Her marriage to her chemist husband Max has lost its spark, and her home life sometimes seems to be as much an act as her telegram deliveries.
Her bathroom falling into the basement, drunk men hitting on her, and her husband's preoccupation with a possible scandal at the chemistry lab only reinforce her feeling that she's spinning out of control. To complicate matters even more, Shelby realizes that the only thrill in her days is her growing attraction to Hadley, her husband's best friend and colleague.
Accidents and the possibility of fraud in Max and Hadley's chemistry lab become the catalyst of their lives, throwing Hadley, Max, and Shelby into physically and emotionally dangerous proximity, forcing them to make hard choices about morality, futures, friendship, and marriage.
Check out my web site!http:ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/jenball.
My novel is about chemists in a rock band in Manhattan, scientific fraud and a love triangle. The Source Magazine in Albany described Catalyst as "a cinematic, pulsating galaxy of truth, lies, friendship, sex, love, lust and all that is human and confusing."
Jennifer Ball, the author, sings and plays the French horn in the rock band Free-Range Chickens in San Diego. (Her husband plays guitar.) She currently writes for the San Diego Reader.
A sampling of Catalyst
Chapter One
"Combustible: capable of catching fire and burning . . . easily excited."
—The Random House College Dictionary
A feeling of lethargy overtook her, the way she always felt just before she delivered a singing telegram. It wasn’t that delivering a singing telegram was so hard or required much talent. In fact, it was amazingly easy: walk in, sing, make sixty dollars, how hard could that be? It was the humiliation of knowing that this was the result of a degree in theater, a rash decision she’d made in her youth that now haunted her daily. She was unequipped for anything else, except perhaps fraud. Deception was something she lived with daily. The pretense that you were loving every minute was essential to a telegram—not easy when your audience was a gaggle of pinheads who obviously didn’t know how to have their own fun. When they laughed, you knew they didn’t really know what was funny, so it wasn’t much of a coup.
Shelby knew she would never get famous doing singing telegrams. One always heard stories about aspiring actresses delivering telegrams to big producers and then getting cast in a starring movie roles, but she believed this like she believed there were alligators living in Manhattan sewers. It had never occurred to her to hire a singing telegram herself because she hated enthusiastic, chipper people who moved too quickly in small spaces. Fortunately, though, clerical people loved them. It was the most excitement they would have in a month, the closest they would get to the entertainment profession. (Not very close, in other words.)
