Six years ago, I wrote a short story for my MFA program. It was September, and with the baseball Post Season quickly approaching, it seemed like a good focus for my first workshop story.

In workshop, a big topic of discussion was about the relationship between the two characters – even then, I guess there was just something about Steve and Mason. People wanted to know why Steve was so worried about Mason playing (no spoilers, but if you’ve read the book and made it to Chapter 14, you know what I’m talking about). My professor in particular – a baseball fan – kept pressing the issue and asking the question until, finally, I decided that it was because Steve loved Mason. Except, while that resolved the short story question, it opened up the door to so many more questions about how that story could play out.

Five years ago, in the lull of Covid when there was no baseball, I really started to build on that short story. It still exists in the book today (Chapter 14 again), but I wanted to figure out how those characters got to that point. I didn’t just want to write a baseball story, and I didn’t want to write just another love story. I wanted to write a story that was a love letter to baseball, a story that made people want to fall in love – not just with Steve and Mason, but with the game they loved as well. The love story and their obstacles was easy, creating a fictional baseball team and giving them a realistic season with actual game stats and a real schedule facing off against real teams? Not so much.

Three years – and two full manuscript rewrites later – I decided that my not-so-short baseball story was one I wanted to share. I’d gotten some feedback by some beta readers; some were baseball fans, some were romance fans, and they loved to debate whether this was a baseball story or a romance story (you know who you all are). The sports romance genre seemed to be building momentum – and it still is, though hockey seems to be the prevalent sport of choice – and I thought I could find a good niche for my story somewhere out in the publishing world.

Two years, another re-write, and 50+ agent rejections later, I wondered if I’d been wrong.

Most sports romances only had one athlete in the relationship and never two that played the same sport for the same team. Steve and Mason’s story wasn’t a college style meet-cute, their relationship was more complicated than just a player falling for a fan, or a trainer trying and failing not to like the bad boy superstar. Most sports romances were still about hockey, but football was starting to gain traction as were other sports, and the number of LGBTQ sports romances in the main market weren’t many. It seemed like my story just wasn’t hitting those needed plot points that agents were looking for when they said they wanted sports romances. Rejection after rejection had me thinking that my baseball story may never make it past the confines of my computer storage.

Seven months ago, I was in LA for AWP – it was my first writing conference, and I’d gone in with dreams of meeting an agent or a publisher and finally being able to get my story off the ground. I’d practiced my elevator pitch, printed out query letters, synopsis, and even the first chapter, just in case someone asked. And I did meet agents across a few panels (including a few that I had queried at one point) and I did meet some publishers. But only one actually seemed interested and willing to read the materials that I had brought with me.

Seven months ago, I met with Atmosphere Press to discuss my novel and the possibility of turning it into something real. Seven months ago, I signed my first contract. And this week, my debut novel was released.

I can talk about all the work that’s gone into making this happen – the rewrites, the editing, the proof reading, deciding if the smallest change on the cover would actually make a difference. And I’m not sure that I could name everyone who played a part in making this happen. But I want to say thank you regardless. Thank you to everyone at Atmosphere Press for giving me this chance to make my own World Series dreams come true. Thank you to all of my friends who have heard me groan and complain about writing this story and all the rejections over the last several years, and to those who have read multiple drafts over and over just because I asked. Thank you to my family who always believed that I could do it – even if they may not have understood the finer workings of the industry (to be fair, I didn’t and still don’t either), I knew that I had their support.

A Single Season came out last Tuesday, and yesterday, I held my first ever book signing. I hope it won’t be the last – the last signing or the last book, because I have so many more stories to tell. After all, if you can win one game, why can’t you win them all?