A warm welcome to author Kate McMurray joining us today to talk about her new release “Out In The Field”.
Hitting a Home Run
At this year’s RT, I was enormously lucky to be on a panel about sports romance with genre royalty Jaci Burton and Tracy Solheim. If you are not familiar with Jaci’s work, you probably know the smoking hot covers on her Play by Play series books. (Each features a sweaty, muscular male body with some sports props, basically.) And Tracy writes football romances and used to be a sportswriter, so she’s super knowledgeable about both sports and the behind-the-scenes stuff. We had a great time on the panel, even if I felt a little outclassed. I mean, these ladies are at the top of their game, routinely making bestseller lists. I can only hope to rise to their level someday.
The great thing about being a writer right now is that whatever you can dream up, there’s an audience for it. When I wrote the first edition of Out in the Field, I really thought maybe six people would pick up the book. I took the lack of sports romances (both gay and het) as a sign that people just weren’t that into sports and romance.
I was really, really wrong.
To me, sports and romance are a natural fit. On a shallow level, there are athletic bodies: muscles, six-packs, strong calves. But there are a lot of universal themes, too: triumph over adversity, working hard to achieve your goals, winning, losing, etc. And sports, to me, makes an interesting backdrop, because it’s the sort of profession the people who love it give their all to. If you’re a professional athlete, you train for hours every day, travel all over the country for games, obsess over your sport. How do you maintain healthy relationships in the midst of that? How does your partner cope with the risk of injury? How do you deal with the politics of the sport, with owners and general managers who want you to act a certain way in public?
That’s all fodder for a really compelling book about relationships, to me anyway.
Since the first edition of Out in the Field came out, sports romance has been having a moment, and I think it’s largely for all of these reasons. You don’t even need to be a sports fan to like them. Lots of fans of sports and romance (and both) are enjoying them. Some of the people in who came to see my panel with Jaci and Tracy at RT were just romance fans who liked the way my co-panelists wrote, or found something interesting in the plots of the books without being sports fans. Others were huge sports fans. I think there’s something for everyone there.
And as LGBT romance becomes a bigger part of the mainstream romance market, I hope there are many more sports romances.
BLURB:
Matt Blanco is a legend on the Brooklyn Eagles, but time and injuries have taken their toll. With his career nearing its end, he’s almost made it to retirement without anyone learning his biggest secret: he’s gay in a profession not particularly known for its tolerance.
Iggy Rodriquez is the hot new rookie in town, landing a position in the starting lineup of the team of his dreams and playing alongside his idol, Matt Blanco. Iggy doesn’t think it can get any better, until an unexpected encounter in the locker room with Matt proves him wrong.
A relationship—and everything it could reveal—has never been in the cards for Matt, but Iggy has him rethinking his priorities. They fall hard for each other, struggling to make it through trades, endorsement deals, and the threat of retirement. Ultimately they will be faced with a choice: love or baseball?
Buy link:
Kate McMurray is an award-winning romance author and an unabashed romance fan. When she’s not writing, she works as a nonfiction editor, dabbles in various crafts, and is maybe a tiny bit obsessed with baseball. She has served as President of Rainbow Romance Writers and is currently the president of the New York City chapter of RWA. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.
Website: http://www.katemcmurray.com
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/katemcmwriter
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/katemcmurraywriter
This is a really great book! Everyone who reads it will come away with a greater appreciation of the world of sports and the men and women who play them on a professional level.