OPENING DAY IS TOMORROW!!!
(I had to double-check that because I write these newsletters the night before they publish, so I always have to make sure I put my Wednesday Hat on even when I’m still sitting in my Tuesday Clothes lol.)
In honor of the best, most anticipated time of year being upon us, I thought I’d talk a little bit about three baseball romances coming out this year (mine, You Should Be So Lucky by Cat Sebastian, and The Prospects by KT Hoffman), and give you an opportunity to win physical ARC’s of all three!
I feel a special kinship with both Cat and KT because we all happened to be interviewed for the same article that came out on Valentine’s Day in The Athletic about baseball romance. I didn’t talk about it then because, well: a) I’m not always great at remembering to plug the things I’m supposed to plug at the right time and in the right order; and b) the article is behind a paywall so you’re not going to be able to read it unless you subscribe to The Athletic lol. BUT I’m hoping that I won’t get in any trouble for talking about it now, pulling out some quotes from the article that I wanted to share or say more about.
I’m also going to start sharing with you more of the songs off my playlist for The Art of Catching Feelings, including one of the more slightly head-scratchy ones — “Stand” by R.E.M.
What can I say, I love this song!! It makes me happy, it makes me want to dance, it is unironically motivational to me because sometimes I DO think you need to just “stand in the place where you are,” as it were. Your feet are going to be on the ground! Your head is there to move you around! (Remember that your girl is authentically emotional about “Tubthumping,” so it doesn’t take much!)
At the start of building my playlist for The Art of Catching Feelings, a lot of it was just “songs I think might make good walk-up music,” since that becomes a *thing* in the book. This was one of the first songs I added! I love “walk-up music” as a genre, and it’s one of the many reasons I love baseball.
My first quote in the Athletic article was about how I *used* to feel about the sport (pre 2008 or so), and how much that’s changed:
“It used to be my nap time. I was like, this sport is boring as hell. Nothing happens . . . And then I got really into it. I don’t know, I just think it’s a really smart sport. I think it’s really interesting. I think it’s really fun. It’s really weird. I enjoy how weird baseball is.”
LOL I REALLY DID SAY “REALLY” THAT MUCH. Whatever. I stand by every word! Even all the “reallys!” And how inspirational that you can go from napping while a sport is on to being AS OBSESSED with it as I am now, right? Am I using the word “inspirational” correctly?
The article went on to talk about the role of heckling in my book, since it’s the basis of the entire meet cute, and what inspired me to write a story about a baseball player who was struggling and the woman who heckles him.
“I do think a lot about how much pressure it is and how hard it must be if you’re dealing with something personal to kind of like just go out there and, you know, execute this thing that you’re supposed to do that you’re really good at, that you’ve been doing your whole life, and it’s muscle memory to you, and it should be easy.”
I have a whole essay in me at some point about mental health in baseball — about mental health in publishing, fuck — and all the things I was trying to say with this book. When I did that sports romance panel back at Love Y’All, I remember one thing that came up was people talking about how maybe one reason we gravitate towards sports romance is because of the hyper-competence, like these are people at the very top of their game. I think there’s truth to that, but I’m almost always more interested in the other people. The ones who play 157 games a year but won’t make the All-Star team. The ones who are used to being the best but have lost that somewhere and don’t know how to get it back. The ones who are Going Through It, in the most human way possible, but are still held to a superhuman standard because that’s what we expect out of public figures.
Anyway. Then the writer of the Athletic piece (Kamila Hinkson btw, who could not have been lovelier to chat with) pivoted to talking with Cat Sebastian about her queer historical romance You Should Be So Lucky, which I am literally in the middle of reading right now and which I am OBSESSED with, I keep wanting to text people about every line. Cat talked about how much KD Casey’s Unwritten Rules series reignited her love for the sport (which, YES, if you haven’t read these books yet you have to!!).
Cat’s book also very much deals with a player who is Going Through It, and I love the way she writes about that especially in that mid-century American context where people were still poring over box scores in the newspaper.
“In my mind, baseball is like, virtually a historical thing. It’s super nostalgic, the way we talk about it; it was nostalgic even in the ‘50s when people talked about it. It has never not been part of the lore we tell about our country . . . so where are the historical baseball books?”
All I can say is, man, I’m glad Cat’s writing them! I can think of no one better!!! The DETAILS in You Should Be So Lucky are so good, it feels so lived in. When Eddie and Mark talk on the phone! Putting change into the coin slot until Mark says, just give me the number and I’ll call you back on it.
Cat also writes with such nuance and thoughtfulness around what it would actually mean to be a queer baseball player in that era, and the ways that queerness had to be navigated, even for a journalist who writes for the arts beat and lived with a man and existed in that fraught in-between space where like, people kinda know . . . but also it’s never been said aloud . . .
“Figuring out levels of outness is something that queer people still do today, you know what I mean? There are plenty of people who are out everywhere except work . . . so I wanted that to feature in how they navigate their future.”
Imagine me sitting with that one like those blinking cursor “How are we going to save enough for retirement?” commercials. Ooof. It’s so true. I’m really savoring this book; Cat is such a beautiful writer.
Finally, the Athletic article focused on KT Hoffman’s debut romance, The Prospects, which is coming out in LESS THAN TWO WEEKS! (The time! Where does it go? I somehow feel like I’ve been waiting forever for this day and also can’ believe it’s almost upon us.) KT’s novel follows Gene, the first transgender man to play professional baseball, and his relationship with Luis, a fellow player who Gene has History with — as former college teammates, then as estranged friends, and now as quasi-rivals on the same minor league team. KT perfectly summed up Gene’s character and some of the themes of his book when he said:
“I think for a lot of people, especially those of us who are marginalized, or who, as Gene would say, don’t look like the people you’d expect to see on a baseball card, hope is often all we have because it’s like, oh, I’m not allowed this but I can hope that, like, someday, even if it doesn’t happen to me, someday it will happen . . . But no one told us we can want those things for ourselves.”
Fuck. That quote is so powerful to me, as is KT’s entire book tbh. I’ve been really privileged to know KT the past couple of years, and have the chance to chat LOTS of baseball over that time — once we watched a Mariners-Rays game together and live-texted each other all the way through it! It was delightful! And we commiserate sometimes over how it feels to love a sport that doesn’t always seem to love us back. That quote has a lot of resonance in publishing, too, where sometimes it can be SO HARD just to outright say, “This is what I want” or “This is what I’ve always dreamed of.” Especially for people who’ve been marginalized in some way to believe that they’re not meant to have those things, that they’d be foolish or naive to hope for them in the first place.
KT’s book is a love letter to baseball, and he made a comparison about how learning to love baseball is a lot like falling in love — it’s all about patience:
“You’re not really noticing all the nuanced things that are going on that are leading to the big payoff moment. I think that’s romantic.”
Like, yes!!! KT has such a gift for writing about those tiny little moments — whether about Gene and Luis turning a double play (HOT) or about Gene and Luis getting comfortable enough with each other that Gene knows to like, turn on the white noise machine and it’ll help Luis’ anxiety. I don’t know; I have a million of these. It was hard to pick one.
So FUCK YEAH bring on baseball season, FUCK YEAH to all the baseball romance, I am thriving!!! And I want you to thrive, too, which is why I’m offering a little newsletter giveaway. All you have to do is interact with this newsletter in some way — like it, reply to it, comment on it, whatever, and you’ll automatically be entered to win all three physical ARC’s of the books pictured up top — The Art of Catching Feelings, You Should Be So Lucky, and The Prospects. A few notes:
I’m happy to sign and personalize the ARC of The Art of Catching Feelings to you! Since this is the ARC I have the most control over.
The ARC of You Should Be So Lucky has already been signed by Cat Sebastian, but not personalized, and it’s in my possession so it can’t be personalized without a little light forgery lol. It’s also very much in my possession, in that I can’t send it to you until I finish reading it. Which I will have absolutely done by the time this giveaway closes so I don’t know why I’m even bringing it up.
Oh, and also the ARC of You Should Be So Lucky has some LOVING WEAR on it, in that some of the pages came still stuck together at the bottom and I may have slightly ripped some pages in the process of un-sticking them. Nothing that affects readability, I promise.
KT will be sending his ARC to you directly, and I can pass along any personalization request for him to add :)
This giveaway will close Sunday, March 31 at 11:59p.m. ET and I’ll contact the winner directly via email or Substack.
Okay, I think that’s it! A reminder that, if you’re into giveaways in general, there’s still one over at Goodreads for my book. If you’re interested in preordering, the best way is to preorder directly through my local indie Tombolo Books, because then you can get it signed and personalized any way you want (just write into the comments your request!).
Oh, AND, if you happen to be in the Brooklyn area on April 12, COME SEE KT TALK ABOUT HIS BOOK!!! WITH ME!!!! The other night when I couldn’t sleep I was like, “You know what would be cool? A baseball field made of felt, with little baseball players made out of felt that you could stick on to talk about different plays. And then a felt lineup card, which of course we would use to rank the hottest positions in order . . .” I am NOT a crafty person but the idea of this!!! I just want to stick little felt baseball people onto a baseball field made out of more felt!
Anyway. Can’t promise that, but the conversation itself is going to be a blast! PLUS not only will you obviously be able to get a signed/personalized book from KT at his event, but he has the most AMAZING art I’ve ever seen, including baseball cards of Gene and Luis illustrated by Sarah Corrente! If you preorder from The Ripped Bodice, you can also get the art even if you can’t make the event, just saying.
Currently reading . . . I’m about halfway through Holly James’ next romance Name Your Price and when I tell you I am having the MOST fun possible! Chuck and Olivia are extremely recent exes, whose relationship has always been of the “we fight as hard as we love” variety, and when a video of their breakup goes viral they get offered the opportunity of a lifetime . . . if they can live together for reality TV for an entire month without calling it quits, they get a million dollars. But of course it’s not going to be that easy, because there are all sorts of other constraints on them (the furniture-building scene, I’m sorry, I DIED), and worse, a whole lot of feelings still to work out . . . gah, I’m really enjoying this book.
watching . . . My family is still watching The Expanse and my daughter likes to refer to the character known for being kinda a stone-cold badass as her “pookie Amos.” It’s hilarious.
listening to . . . I have been listening to Paramore’s After Laughter album from start to finish, over and over, because a) I love it; and more topically b) I’ve been trying to write up a 33 1/3 proposal about it. It remains to be seen whether I will actually DO IT but if I do I promise to make my proposal available somehow, because I’ve really appreciated past writers who did that as I’ve been working on my own. It’s helpful to look through and see how people would’ve approached their books about albums, even if the book itself never came to be. THAT BEING SAID I already have a 33 1/3 proposal I wrote up years ago for Tegan and Sara’s The Con, and that I will never make public because I looked back on it recently and god, it’s embarrassing!! So earnest!
preordering . . . Dear LORD there are a lot of amazing romances out next week. A few on my radar:
What Is Love? by Jen Comfort
The Rule Book by Sarah Adams
Here We Go Again by Alison Cochrun
Old Flames and New Fortunes by Sarah Hogle
A Witch’s Guide to Magical Innkeeping by Sangu Mandanna
Me after April 2nd:
I’m so ready for baseball to take over in sports romance books!!!! 🔥🔥🔥🔥
So happy to have found someone just as obsessed with baseball as I am!! Also you are doing God's work releasing this in June at the peak of baseball season 😂