Breakout Year is out in the world!
I’d like to think it’s a good one. Eitan and Akiva grew from the characters I first conceived them as — a baseball player and a romance author who happened to be staying at the same hotel (because uhhh that happened a number of years ago during the World Series) — into the people they would eventually become: a third baseman and a former pro pitcher tuned author’s assistant who conspire to fake date (for reasons) and (spoilers!) fall in real love.
With a book that took this long from conception to release, there are a lot of people I’m grateful for: friends, editors, and the readers who’ve stuck with me.
All of which is to say, I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. So, without further ado, grab it today!
Zon (eBook and print!)
Kobo (and Kobo Plus)
Barnes & Noble
Apple
Support your local library and request it from Overdrive (or save it on the Libby app).
Order a print copy from Bookshop.org and support your local bookstore.
#sportsromancebooks #baseballromancebooks #indiebooks #mmromance #queeryourshelves #romancebook
DIAMOND RING is out in the world! (Link in bio.) The book is about those close friendships you have in your early 20s and how they're reshaped as you get older, and the families we have and make for ourselves. Also, there's a dating app mishap that I will not spoil for you all but was very fun to write.
If you like pining (like... a lot of pining) and a ten-year romance with a sports movie feel, check it out.
Big shoutout to @stephaniedoig_edits , Deborah Nemeth, and the rest of the team at Carina, as well my agent @deidreknight , for helping polish this book until it shone. @harlequinbooks
P.S. I might have a little bonus scene for DIAMOND RING available later this week. Stay tuned!
.
.
.
Image description: Cover of DIAMOND RING with a man on a baseball field. “Read it today: Teammates reunite for one last run at a championship, fanning old resentments—and old sparks between them.”
#mmromance #baseballromance #sportsromance #sportsromancebooks #jewishauthors #carinapress #romancereaders #romancereadersofinstagram #romancebooks #netgalley #romancereads #queerromance #lgbtqbooks
Someone asked me about reading order/recommendations of where to start with my books, so I wanted to make a lil explainer.
I wrote the Unwritten Rules series so that you could, hypothetically, start with any book and get something out of it as an experience (and Breakout Year is completely standalone).
Basically, fire season is a prequel to unwritten rules, and diamond ring starts before the events of either of the first books and ends after the events of both of those books. One True Outcome runs parallel to the end of Unwritten Rules, but ends before the later events of Diamond Ring. I am never doing this again in terms series planning 😅
So basically start with what appeals to you and go from there!
Also I used the question as an excuse to make a graph because of course I did. See the last slide. 📉
#mmromancebooks #baseballromance
Happy three-year anniversary to Jake and Alex!! I cannot believe these two idiots (extremely affectionate) have been out in the world for all this time. Diamond Ring was, in many ways, the easiest book for me to write — I wanted it to have the feel of a sports movie (Ben Affleck and Matt Damon, if you are still looking for a baseball romance to adapt, call me). I watched the Last Dance and went… this but with kissing and baseball, then started typing.
In many ways it was also the hardest book — I was laid up from surgery and pretty much scratching the walls to get out. I watched a troubling amount of MLB TV … for me, so thank you to 2022 Max Fried and Sandy Alcántara for getting me through that. If this book is excessively sentimental about baseball, well, that’s why.
To celebrate the anniversary of their publication, have four quotes from both the book and the bonus materials about them being very silly (in love with) one another… and the most highlighted passage of anything I’ve ever written. (Also, the bonus scene is linked in my bio.)
In the words of @rubybarrettwrite , these two dummies could not find their way out of a paper bag so they just have to stay in the bag and kiss.
#mmromancebooks #sportsromance
Happy baseball season to all who celebrate! I’ll admit — the start of the season snuck up on me, mostly because I had such a good time watching the World Baseball Classic. (Congrats to Venezuela for winning it all and to Team Italy for embracing the spirit of the event and kissing each other.)
MLB decided to give us all a gift at the start of this season — players’ actual heights. (Basically, there’s a new system that automatically detects balls vs. strikes that requires having players’ real, actual, non-aspirational heights.) So, a bunch of players who were listed at six feet tall are now...5’10.”
If you’ve enjoyed the through-line in my books in which players are always (always always) lying about their heights, you know why I find this particular development amusing. Given that, I thought I’d do this as a bit of a height reveal and my reasoning for having characters lie in specific ways:
Zach says he’s shorter than he actually is because there’s a bias against tall catchers (this is changing) and because throughout the book he diminishes himself (sad sack All Star is quite a combo). Eugenio says he’s catcher six foot (five ten), because he’s (at first) trying to fulfill the image that MLB has imposed on him. I’d like to think that later in his career, he would adjust that number back down.
Reid inflates his height by an inch because he’s trying to live up to others’ expectations of him and feels that he has perpetually come up short (literally). Charlie isn’t lying about his height because when you’re a 6’6” future Hall of Famer with a few hundred million dollars, you don’t actually have a lot to prove.
#sportsromancebooks #mmromancebooks
(Cont in comments)
Are any of these numbers wildly different than what you'd imagined? LMK. Happy baseball season!
Today only!!! Tell your friends, tell your enemies!!
If you want a soft fake dating baseball romance with jokes about baseball players lying about their heights and also the Talmud… this is one. 🔗 the usual place.
A newly traded, newly out third baseman on the cusp of his first major contract hires a fake boyfriend—not expecting him to be the former player who ghosted him years before. But as their star ascends in public, their feelings burn hot in private...threatening to expose what’s for the cameras—and what’s for real.
US & Canada, eBook, Amazon only
#baseballromance #mmromance
Every year, I make my reading goal to read books. Last year I... read books. I was a touch more specific about what I wanted to read (I set a number of small goals for myself in terms of genre, etc.) but here are some books I liked that that I think other people will like too:
Best nonfiction book translated from French that reconfigured my understanding of the 20th century: Revolutionary Yiddishland
Best 18th and 19th century vampire horror that also played with epistolary form: The Buffalo Hunter Hunter
Best historical romance that made me go, “wait, you can do that in a romance book?” over and over: Black Silk
Best second-chance hockey romance containing scenes set in a Halifax bar that I think I could smell just from the pages: The Shots You Take
Best YA trans girl book set in Western New York that taught me a lot about the art of being a kicker: One of the Boys
Best historical fantasy with very strong romantic subplot about a heist to steal the bones of St. Nicholas: Nicked
Anyway, recommend me a book that you’d think I’d like 😘
#sportsromancebooks #queeryourshelves
So, a little project I’ve been working on is this f r e e craft journal for writers based on one I’ve been keeping for a number of years. We often get told to read “critically” as authors but I’m gonna revise that to “read expansively but selfishly”… basically reading with the lens of “how can this inform me and my craft?”
The journal contains:
An introduction that discusses the intention behind this kind of reading and reflecting.
A how-to guide with examples.
Pages for recording notes and analysis about each book you’ve read and how that applies to your own craft.
Pages for analyzing multiple books across the same genre for their essential components.
Pages for recording your writing goals and other resources you’ve engaged with as a writer.
🔗 in bio for a pdf download. I’m working on a print version because I want a print version.
I’m accepting feedback about this (within reason) via d m or email so consider this a beta version.
Anyway happy new year, 😘 you all.
#authorofinstagram #journalsupplies
So yesterday I asked for recommendations for people new to queer sports romance who enjoyed Heated Rivalry... and y’all came through. (Like half of you said ‘you’ so I wasn’t gonna include myself but like... lol.)
This list is in no way exhaustive — I included books I’ve read and personally enjoyed. If you don’t see your fav, please reply in the comments! (Also, do not make categorical statements about authors’ genders, please and thank you.)
Out on the Ice, Kelly Farmer
Lucky Bounce, Cait Nary
Empty Net, Avon Gale
Faceoffs and Cheap Shots, Eden Finley, Saxon James
Tough Guy, Ari Baran
Scoring Position, Ashlyn Kane, Morgan James
Goalie Interference, Bringham Vaughn
Showing Him the Ropes, Christa Tomlinson
Caught Looking, Adriana Herrera
Cleat Cute, Meryl Wilsner
Diamond Ring, KD Casey
The Prospects, KT Hoffman
#sportsromancebooks #heatedrivalry
I’ve been thinking about what in my writing process might be interesting for other people, (mostly the process is crying, tbh.), and one of the things I spend the most time on are first and last lines. I do think these are perhaps too emphasized by a lot of writers (myself included): the job of the first line of the book is to get you to the second line of the book, and the job of the last line of the book is to get you (and I know this is a secret) to buy another book by that author.
That said, because I like to work a lot in parallels, I do spend a lot of time thinking about what the first and last line represent in terms of the narrative arc of the book.
For unwritten rules, the first and last lines are supposed to mirror each other in terms of Zach’s journey. In the first one, he is approaching a stadium that is named one thing but is actually a different thing, and it’s a fiasco to get there. In the last line, he is proceeding into the light literally clearly. So his journey is really about going from a lack of clarity to a literal clarity and from going from a place of needing to appear as one thing, but actually being something else, to simply being himself.
In fire season, the book starts with news and external parties talking about Reid as well as the sort of sensory note of a phone, vibrating against a plastic crate of a nightstand discordantly. In the last line, it’s about external parties talking about him, but in a way that is an invitation rather than a threat.
In diamond ring, the first image of Alex is the tension in his shoulders as he braces himself for something. (And unlike Zach and Reid, Alex is terse lol.) In the last line rather than being tense, he is getting down on one knee, which is inherently vulnerable.
Anyway, if you haven’t had a chance to check the books out, maybe this is an invitation to do so (or possibly spoilers).
#mmromancenovel #baseballromance #sportsromance #romancereads
By random memes, I mean funny things people have posted on the internet. Tag yourself, I’m “some guys are more touchable.”
BREAKOUT YEAR
A newly traded, newly out third baseman on the cusp of his first major contract hires a fake boyfriend—not expecting him to be the former player who ghosted him years before. But as their star ascends in public, their feelings burn hot in private...threatening to expose what’s for the cameras—and what’s for real.
🔗s in bio 😘
#mmromancebooks #baseballromance #sportsromance #indiebooks #queeryourshelves
So the baseball postseason is upon us and if you’re ambivalent about the teams remaining (or just want an introduction) here’s a little overview based on my books.
Who’re y’all rooting for? ⚾️🐦🚎🔱🍺
#mmromance #baseball #sportsromancebooks #baseballromance #indieauthor
