You may know her as a former Georgia state politician. You may know her as a whiny loser in the last Georgia gubernatorial election. Stacey Abrams has another career path not so well-known. She’s a romance novelist. One of her books is under development with CBS to become a television series.

Stacey’s writing career may be news to you because she writes under a pseudonym, a nom de plume – Selena Montgomery. She has eight romance suspense novels published to date, totaling combined sales of 100,000. The book that CBS has picked up is titled “Never Tell”.

The fact that she’s a romance novelist was briefly disclosed during her campaign for governor but nothing much came of it. Hollywood has come to the rescue of her failed political campaign and given her a new title – Executive Producer, assuming the television project goes to production. As one writer aptly put it, “Hollywood is the entertainment arm for the Democratic Party”. The business takes care of its own. In the case of Abrams, they had to reach all the way back to 2004 for this book. Suddenly, “Never Tell” needs to be turned into a television series.

The project from CBS Television Studios and PatMa Productions is being written by Talicia Raggs, a co-executive producer of NCIS: New Orleans. It centers on a star linguistics professor with a complicated past who joins forces with a charismatic investigative journalist following the discovery of a cryptic message that’s the only clue in a missing persons case. It sets them off on a partnership working cases for the New Orleans PD.

Granted, a television series isn’t guaranteed but it would be rather embarrassing for CBS if the network decided to take a pass after the development process has started. That would not bring about favorable publicity, now would it, for the network to decide to walk away from a popular potential vice-presidential candidate. Of course, if Joe Biden is the only Democrat seriously talking to Abrams as a potential running mate, then that vice-presidential run likely will not become reality anyway.

I do ponder why CBS picked up this book out of her others. Abrams has cashed in on the romance novel genre because it is a huge market and quite lucrative for its popular authors. In 2018 “Minority Leader: How to Lead from the Outside and Make Real Change” was published, under her own name, as she ran for governor. It seems to me that if she is such a rising star in national politics that her own story would be one chosen to turn into television production, maybe a made-for-television movie. Her rise to Minority Leader in the Georgia House of Representatives is her political high-water mark. She is the first African-American to run for Governor of Georgia. Alas, “steamy”, as her romance novels are described, sell.

CBS could film the television series in Georgia and that would be an added bonus for Abrams and all her fellow Georgians. When others in Hollywood were calling for a boycott against the state over its abortion laws, she went to California to beg executives to continue filming in her state. She organized a “#StayAndFight” coalition and asked that studios used their financial power to support pro-abortion candidates instead of fleeing the state.

In the meantime, she can put “Executive Producer” on her resume if the television series comes to fruition. It’s a nice consolation prize for losing the gubernatorial race. I guess whiny loser is the look Hollywood likes to promote.