Kit Haley wrote In Your Court in eight weeks, 16 hours a day, as a secret side project hidden from their own publishers. On Thursday night, Sydney’s romance readers packed into Romancing the Novel in Paddington to celebrate what came out the other side.
The Bendigo author launched their queer tennis romance at Sydney’s first dedicated romance bookstore, with fellow author Joshua Hortinela moderating an intimate Q&A before a signing.
In Your Court follows Matteo Russo, an Australian and the first openly gay pro on the tennis tour, whose brilliant junior career was derailed by a freak accident. After losing yet again to rich, arrogant American superstar Miles Callahan, Mat dares him to play Wimbledon with no coach, no team and no fancy hotel. Miles accepts.
What follows is, in Haley’s own pitch, “lots of tennis details but very little actual tennis”, a searing off-court fling, and a crash course in laundromats.
Readers have been quick to draw comparisons with Rachel Reid’s gay hockey phenomenon Heated Rivalry, with one Goodreads reviewer calling it one of the few queer sports romances that actually deserves the comparison.
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Hortinela, who was so hooked he dog-eared the pages of his copy, set the tone early.
“That’s a testament to how compulsive and addictive this book is,” he said.
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‘It is a sport for rich people’
Haley, who grew up in what they called “an extremely sporting family” where the Australian Open was always on over the summer holidays, said the book started with an uncomfortable truth about the tour.
“The thing that people don’t know about tennis is that it has an enormous financial disparity between the people who are at the top of the game and the people who aren’t,” they said.
“The difference between the world number one and the world number 100 is an enormous financial gulf. Because it’s an individual sport, you have to pay your own way. They pay their airfare, they pay for everything.
“If you’re making millions, that’s fine. If you’re not, that’s not good. And I thought, what an amazing idea for a book.”\
The spark came while watching the Australian Open, after reading an article about a player ranked around 300 in the world who was living on beans.
“I like to have a sneaky side heart project that I don’t tell them about, especially not publishers,” Haley said. “I was desperately in need of one.”
Haley, who writes under two other pen names and had a fantasy series before this, said the book poured out in an obsessive rush before a scheduled surgery.
“It was eight weeks, but it was eight weeks, 16 hours a day,” they said. “I experienced it in an obsessive way as a reader-writer. I wrote it and learned it at the same time.”
For a book so steeped in the sport, there is one detail that shocks everybody: Haley does not play tennis.
“I am just an obsessive, obsessive watcher,” they said. “There is 11 months of the tennis tour, and I watched all 11 months of it. People think that there’s just four Grand Slams and that’s it. There is not.”
‘I’m just gonna write Australian’
Making Matteo an Australian was both a point of pride and a practical choice.
“A lot of romance is rich people and American people, and we don’t really get much of a game,” Haley said.
“The way I talk, and therefore the way I write, especially in first person, is going to have a naturally Australian inflection, and I can’t be arsed dealing with not doing that. I sound Australian, so let’s just roll with it.”
Pairing Mat with an American gave Haley an excuse to mine years of trans-Pacific confusion, including a friend’s attempt to tell an awards organiser that “hawk rhymes with pork”, and their favourite party trick for Americans: Melbourne rhymes with Brisbane.
“You just take out the vowels,” they said.
‘Do you owe people your queerness?’
The night’s most thoughtful stretch came when Hortinela asked about Matteo’s status as the sport’s first openly gay player.
Haley said they wanted to interrogate an idea often repeated in the queer community: that you don’t owe anyone your queerness.
“I don’t owe the person on the street, but I owe my community, has always been my thought about it,” they said.
“The great thing about being an author is that you can litigate these things instead of going to therapy.”
So Haley gave Matteo a hardline belief that he came out for the generations before and after him, then paired him with a man who is gay and closeted.
Writing it changed their mind.
“You just don’t know what anybody else is going through,” Haley said. “You can only ever meet people where they’re at. That was the lesson Matteo had to learn, and that was the lesson I learned by writing it.
“I have developed, as a person, a more nuanced thought about it by writing this book instead of going to therapy. It’s cheaper. I get paid to write the book.”
READ MORE: Review: Joshua Hortinela’s debut Hate You to Love You
The spreadsheet
Asked how they approached the book’s famously steamy scenes, Haley offered the advice they give every nervous writer: “Don’t worry, your grandmother won’t read it.”
Then came the confession that brought the house down.
“I had a spreadsheet,” they said. “I have an Excel spreadsheet of the sex scenes, with the chapter numbers, colour-coded to how graphically described they were, because you can’t put these things back to back to back.
“I come from fantasy novels, and we talk about this with fight scenes. You can’t just have two chapters with fight scenes. We need variation.”
From ‘nobody wanted it’ to Hachette
Haley’s agent took In Your Court out and, by the author’s account, nobody bit.
“Everyone was like, we’ve only got one sports romance, we can’t have another sports romance, even if it’s gay,” Haley said.
So they prepared to self-publish, as they had done with their very first book in 2019 before a US publisher picked it up. They commissioned an Australian cover designer and an Australian editor and put the book up on NetGalley.
Then the cover reveal landed, and the inbox changed.
Two offers arrived separately from imprints within the UK’s Hachette stable, Headline and Mountain Leopard Press, one of which, Haley noted with a laugh, had been sent the manuscript by their agent roughly a year earlier and never replied.
The clincher was the local release. Hayley said he has never had a book that had a separate Australian release before. So finally, it’s happened.
The book is published in Australia by Hachette Australia.
What’s next for Matteo and Miles
The good news for anyone who, like Hortinela, reached page 498 hoping for a secret page 500: there will be a sequel.
“They are 100% not done,” Haley said. “There’s so many interesting places to take this idea of a tennis couple. They would be torn apart by their own adoring fan base, in the way that we see on social media all the time.”
But it is not the next book. That one, Haley revealed, is about an umpire and a bad boy.
Haley has also started writing the entire book from Miles’ point of view for Patreon subscribers, starting with the chapter where he sees Matteo’s press conference and decides to go to the practice court.
The room
A launch at Romancing the Novel is as much about the crowd as the author, and Thursday night’s was a who’s who of Sydney’s romance scene.
Chief among them was Hortinela himself, whose debut Hate You to Love You was published by Atria Books Australia in September. I had read it a few weeks earlier and can confirm, after cornering him in person, that he is indeed working on something new.
Also in the room: romance author Jaci Dyball, BookTok creator Shae Winter, and Annabel Walsh of Bound & Co., which runs curated literary retreats, who took pity on awkward me hovering by the door and was the first to say hello. Thank you so much.
In Your Court is out now through Hachette Australia and available at Romancing the Novel, 2 Heeley Street, Paddington.
My full review of In Your Court is coming!
'A big romantic at heart': debut author Joshua Hortinela nails the second-chance romance
I judged this book entirely by its cover, and I’m not sorry.