Team Player ARRA Finalist

A crazy thing happened the other day and in my mad excitement, I haven't posted about it.

TEAM PLAYER was nominated in the ARRA Favourite Erotic Romance category for 2017. You can find the full listing of finalists here.

Other nominees are:

• Egomaniac by Vi Keeland
• Mack Daddy by Penelope Ward
• Sapphire by JA Low

Booktopia are the fantastic sponsors of the award. So if you want to check out any of the other finalists, have a look at Booktopia, let me give you the links for the other erotic titles:
Egomaniac
Mack Daddy
Sapphire
Team Player.

JA Low, me, Donna Gallagher, Cassandra Samuels, and Diane Cassar.

JA Low and I are flying the Aussie and the threesome flags :) I met her at the ARRA-organised Wollongong Writers Festival Sex On The Beach talk in Nov 2016, so to be nominated with her is such fun!

When you're nominated for an award, it's an odd feeling - well, for me anyway.

To have found a connection between my story, my weird imagination, and with readers is incredible.

I know some people who nominated me will be friends, and in a weird way that concerns me, but I hope they haven't just nominated Team Player because of friendship. I hope something about the story resonated with them. I hope it means that Charlie, Lyle and Hannah and their odd relationship was believable. That they liked the people in my head enough to wish them the best, to hope that they have a future, to cheer for them when people might jeer.

This story was born from some confused thoughts after I'd finished Deep Diving. Cooper and Samantha from Deep Diving are heterosexual, and while I was writing that story, I was thinking a lot about relationships with elite athletes and how they might work and how they may affect life beyond the professional one. At the same time, Australians were talking about the same sex marriage debate, which (I felt) was being used as a political tool, which annoyed me. Then I began to wonder about how that might affect someone playing professionally in Australia, especially in a male team sport where to date, no playing athletes have 'come out'. One guy came out after his retirement, which was an incredible thing because he opened up a dialogue and he was a tough player, so it vetoed the 'wimpy' gay male stereotype. I also enjoyed writing Lana, with multiple characters, so I was keen to explore that more. All these thoughts rumbled around in my brain and Team Player came from those.

And it's a threesome story where I didn't want a submissive female character. I wanted a relationship where the three characters held equal roles in the dynamic. I wanted a strong woman who knew what she wanted. I wanted a woman who wasn't blackmailing or conniving, but somehow connected with these two men. I wanted to show a solid relationship that could sneak by public scrutiny, but in doing so, I needed to show how difficult those choices are, without jeopardising the dynamic.

It was a struggle to get what I wanted from my head to the page. I had lots of help from my writing buddies to get things clearer. For all that hard work to be recognised by readers enjoying the story, and then going to nominate it as a favourite erotic read, is beyond incredible. It's humbling, it's exciting, it's wonderful, and it's terrifying.

This writing caper has days that are gold, mixed up with days of black despair and everything in between, but it is the best job in the world :)