This week LUV is profiling author @kdcaseywrites who primarily writes romance books focused on Jewish characters and characters with disabilities. Her books have been featured in the New York Times, Iowa Public Radio, Book Riot, Hey Alma, Kveller, and LGBTQ Reads, among other publications. LUV: Critics have raved about your novels, including the New York Times: "Subtle and spectacular...every page serves up a stunner…Casey’s work feels as supple and lived-in as a fielder’s favorite glove, resilient but never rough." Can you tell us about being a romance writer and baseball enthusiast and how one passion influences the other? KD: I mostly write queer sports romance about Jewish baseball players. I’m also a pretty serious baseball fan—I’ve done some writing over the years for Baseball Prospectus, which is a baseball analysis website. I think nonfiction sports writing incorporates a lot of the elements of fiction: you have to have a sense of the stats, sure, but also how they fit into a broader narrative and make an argument about why a reader should care about them. For romance writing, I end up doing a good bit of research. Even though I watch a lot (a lot) of baseball, I often find that I need to know more about a certain aspect of the game in the course of drafting a book. For DIAMOND RING, my newest release, that meant researching players with certain career trajectories, and listening to and reading first-person accounts of how they dealt with various obstacles. Baseball, like many sports, also has a lot of built-in narrative, and I find that it’s easy to incorporate elements of that narrative, though I always want to interpret them through the lens of romance.

Posted by LUV Team at 2023-04-10 19:00:33 UTC