Racheline Maltese's Blog

New ebook cover for The Opposite of Drowning

I like to call The Opposite of Drowning our best-loved but least discovered book. We’ve recently updated its ebook cover from the one we’re still using on the paperback to something that’s on-trend (illustrated) and reflects the publishing house and international travel settings of the book better. Since posting about this elsewhere we’ve seen a nice little flurry of sales for this title, so if you haven’t checked it out, maybe this is your moment.

The Opposite of Drowning includes tropes like age gap, found family, trapped by severe weather, alarming mythology, and soulmates. If you’re looking for an HEA that’s not about babies and marriage, but about finding your own path no matter how untraditional, this queer M/F romance is for you.

Miles from Nowhere – coming July 16, 2024

Now that That Special Something is out in the wild (ebook, paperback coming soon), it’s time to announce our next book: Miles from Nowhere.

Having spent the height of the pandemic working in the ICU, Amber Lee Molina is ready for change. Signing on to work as a nurse aboard a luxury cruise ship may seem like a counterintuitive choice for a woman from land-locked Arizona, but she’ll get used to the water — and the quirks of shipboard life — in no time. 

Cruise ship captain Eric Byrne rode out the pandemic on a tiny island in the Mediterranean, pitching in as the global shut down forced the tiny community to fend for itself. Now thrilled to be back at sea, the multi-year hiatus has eroded some of his discipline when it comes to never getting involved with his crew or their drama. He also can’t stop thinking about what it would be like to have home and family beyond the water and the sky.

When Eric and Amber run into each other during a break between voyages at a boutique hotel specializing in connecting travelers for their perfect holiday hookup match, life gets awkward fast. They have two choices: Forget it ever happened, or enjoy each other’s company and then forget it ever happened.

There’s just one problem: Neither of them wants to forget.

(While this high-heat romance acknowledges the pandemic in the experiences of its characters, it is not a plot point beyond acknowledging the world we live in now. No one gets sick, no one dies, and Covid precautions exist and are implemented.)

Tropes include: age gap (although both characters are over 30, and like… does it matter at that point), forced proximity, an island that is not what it seems, and a man in uniform (without anyone being a cop!). Book is high heat and has some kink.

You can preorder it now at Amazon.com and it will be available on more platforms as the release date approaches.

That Special Something – coming July 11, 2023

Yes, we still exist, and yes, we have a new book coming out!

Culinary school dropout Callie Giordano never intended to wind up in a small town with a terrible name, but after surviving a serious cycling accident in New York City, she needed a change of pace. At 26, she is now the sole doughnut entrepreneur living in Fly-Debate, Maine.

But Fly-Debate isn’t just a one-stoplight town deep in lobster country. It’s also home to the cast and crew of hit historical heist TV series, Hidden Cove. Beckett Brown, its star, may as well have a resume that says 44, single, and nesty, but between his celebrity status and a reputation for falling too hard and too fast, dating feels impossible.

At least until he meets Callie.

That Special Something is a high-heat, queer M/F romance featuring large quantities of sugar, bird watching, and more plastic prop lobsters than you can shake a net at.

This book revisits something we’ve done before — the Hollywood romance — in a way we’ve never done it before, which is as a celebrity/civilian romance. For us, this came less from the fantasy of a fan attaining the unattainable and more from a place of “wow, that looks hard.” In fact, our heroine Callie hates TV and has no idea who Beckett is when she first meets him, and when she finds out, she’s not best thrilled.

One of the recurring themes of this book is the gap between who we are as people who change and evolve and who other people think we are — either because they’ve known us forever but aren’t acknowledging our personal growth or because when one lives a public life there are lots of people with opinions out there who don’t know us at all. I think that’s a relatable experience; social media is just a highlight reel and our parents always see us as much younger, and more inept, than we are.

Meanwhile, although this book is an age-gap romance, our heroine has a thriving business, a secure financial position, and has Been Through Some Stuff. She doesn’t just want to be the heroes equal; she needs him to step up and be her equal.

Things you might want to know about this book:

Both the hero and heroine are bisexual. They are both cis. The hero has a complex relationship with his gender.The heroine is sexually harassed by a donut shop customer at one point and other people in the scene step up to deal with it, which she appreciates but she also notes she could have handled it herself.Late in the book, the heroine described the cycling accident she was in and her recovery. This isn’t graphic but the scene is very tense and may be stressful for some readersThe heroine has a challenging relationship with her family of origin. How to navigate that, including the option of going no-contact, is discussed in places in the book.There is a fair amount of discussion about pregnancy and having kids in this book. However, there are no pregnancies in the course of this book, nor are any characters trying to get pregnant or dealing with infertility.

Pre-order is now available on Amazon and will be rolling out to other platforms soon. A paperback release will come in a month or two after the digital release.

A QUEEN FROM THE NORTH one of the top circulating IAP Select books in 2020!

Yes, 2020! Great news from last year that we just found out about.

And a great time to remind you that all our titles are available to libraries through Overdrive, Hoopla, and the Indie Author Project collections. We love libraries and we love our books being in libraries. If you’re looking for a title — digitally or in print — and your library doesn’t have it yet, be sure to fill out a request. We make it easy for collections managers to get our books, so you’ll stand a good chance of success!

Top Circ’ing IAP Select Books of 2020!

INK AND ICE wins 4th Annual IAP Adult Fiction Prize for New York State!

INK AND ICE has been named the winner of the NYS Indie Author Project contest in Adult Fiction. As a regional contest winner, we’re now under consideration for the Indie Author of the Year Award, which will be announced in early 2022 and would, among other things, bring INK AND ICE to audio.

It’s particularly special for us to win and award that is not specific to the romance genre or the LGBTQ community, demonstrating that stories don’t have to reflect every individual’s personal experience to resonate. Also, seriously, it’s about selkies.

We also love libraries — we’re heavy researchers, so libraries are at the start of each of our novel projects and a significant market for us after publication.

A Queen from the North is a nominee for two SOVAS Awards!

You can see all the nominees here and read the announcement here.

The audiobook of A QUEEN FROM THE NORTH is a nominee for two Society of Voice Arts and Sciences Awards!

Our full cast, led by Jane Wing, have been nominated for AUDIOBOOK NARRATION – ROMANCE OR EROTICA – BEST VOICEOVER. And Ryan Manning has been nominated for AUDIO ENGINEERING – AUDIOBOOK – BEST SOUND DESIGN.

The eight annual awards will be announced in a ceremony in New York City on December 19, 2021. The audiobook of A QUEEN FROM THE NORTH was produced by Pagewater Publishing.

A Queen from the North is coming to audio!!!

Erin and I have been looking to get some of our titles into audio for some time, but the proposition was always complicated — in part because so many of our books require such specific voices, but we finally found an audiobook publisher willing to take on the challenge.

Pagewater Publishing will be releasing the A Queen from the North unabridged audiobook on June 1. It has a full cast (credited below), amazing sound design, and will transport you to the very weird world of a modern U.K., where the Wars of the Roses have never ended.

The book is narrated by Jane Wing, who is also voicing both Amelia and her mother. Arthur, King Henry, Lord Brockett, and the male narrator are being voiced by Simon Jackson.

You never really realize how much you’re asking of your actors until you hear them inhabit your words. We are in awe of the heavy lifting Jane and Simon are doing in bringing this book to life and also the Amelia and Arthur chemistry is Off. The. Charts.

Completing the cast are (in alphabetical order):

Max Blackman (Charlie, Footman, Chief Steward, Fashion Designer, Announcer, Escort)
Len Clarke (Cecile, Hyacinth, Reporter)
Robyn Holdaway (George)
Adrianne Jeffries (Robin)
Dee Meir (Priya, Violet, Lady Olivia, Helen)
Dafydd Morse (Mr Jones, Vyvian, Gary, Nick)
Jenny Steel (Jo, Docent, Wedding Coordinator, Head Seamstress, Aide)
JP Wright (Edward)

We’ve had the amazing experience of being super involved in casting and getting to hear each chapter as it is completed. I can’t tell you how often Erin and I email each other with some version of “[actor] is PERFECT” because it’s utterly constant. We hope to be bringing you more info about the cast and the production process soon as the release approaches.

If you’ve already read and loved A Queen from the North, we hope you’ll come along with us on the ride. If you haven’t experienced this contemporary romance full of ancient rivalries, we hope you’ll join us for the audio.

The audiobook will be available on June 1 from Audible and other audiobook platforms. Because we believe choice is important, we’re not going exclusive, which prevents us from doing a traditional preorder. But you can sign up here to receive a reminder of when the audio is available.

And yes, we are hard at work on the sequel, A Royal of Ravens. Robyn Holdaway was cast with this book (in which George is the main protagonist) in mind and we hope we’ll be able to bring that story to you in audio as well.

Great Review for AFTER THE GOLD at Smart Bitches, Trashy Books!

It’s been a really good week for our figure skating novels (they are linked, but are each full complete romances with an HEA about different couples, they do not have to be read in order).

Not only did Ink & Ice get named a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award, SBTB reviewed After the Gold and really, really got it. And, most wonderfully, the reviewer dug Katie, who might be our most maligned heroine of all time.

Anyway, go check it out!

INK AND ICE Now a Finalist for the 2021 Lambda Literary Award in Gay Romance!

In my first year of college, in DC, I worked at Lambda Rising, one of the great gay bookstores of all time. I worked in the warehouse, shipping books in plain packaging to queers in far-flung places. This was 1990, before online shopping, and we took orders by phone and by mail. I remember unfolding the order slips in creaky handwriting, a money order for the fees tucked in the middle, and taking the long, long phone calls of someone in Alaska, who ordered several hundred dollars of books each quarter.

I had just turned 18 and was trying to survive an up or out journalism program that would only let half of us continue past sophomore year. My professor, a former Washington Post editor known as Puff, used to tell me that if it had been twenty years earlier and I’d been a boy, I wouldn’t need to be in college at all. I had what it took — I was fast and clever and knew to make friends with the cleaning staff.

I wanted to be a war reporter.

But working for the campus paper didn’t pay. And the gay bookstore warehouse did. Every day, me and a couple of the guys shrink wrapped books (and really anything else we could find — we loved shrink wrapping) and discussed our inventory of erotic coloring books, foot fetish magazines, and the blossoming world of queer literature with our callers.

College was not a happy time for me. I wound up campus famous for getting rape and death threats for being queerer than a three dollar bill and the whole thing was basically a disaster. But I loved that book store. I loved that shrink wrap gun. And I loved our clique of people — from the Deadhead to the seminary student — coming by after our shifts to go to the bars and cafes before going home to get ready to go to the clubs.

Lambda Rising was seen as a center of the gay literary scene thanks to our store’s owner, Deacon Mccubbin, publishing the Lambda Book Report starting in 1987. That led to the first Lambda Literary Awards in 1989. 32 year later. I’m nominated for one of those awards with Erin. For a gay romance novel about, among other things, the sort of war reporter I never got to be.

Puff died in 1997. The store closed in 2010.

And none of this was what I was supposed to do with my life.

But all of that is why I’m so very very very emotional about being named a Lambda Literary Award finalist for Ink and Ice.

Here’s the full list for 2021.

Current Finalists

Ink and Ice Now a Finalist for the 2021 Lambda Literary Award in Gay Romance!

In my first year of college, in DC, I worked at Lambda Rising, one of the great gay bookstores of all time. I worked in the warehouse, shipping books in plain packaging to queers in far-flung places. This was 1990, before online shopping, and we took orders by phone and by mail. I remember unfolding the order slips in creaky handwriting, a money order for the fees tucked in the middle, and taking the long, long phone calls of someone in Alaska, who ordered several hundred dollars of books each quarter.

I had just turned 18 and was trying to survive an up or out journalism program that would only let half of us continue past sophomore year. My professor, a former Washington Post editor known as Puff, used to tell me that if it had been twenty years earlier and I’d been a boy, I wouldn’t need to be in college at all. I had what it took — I was fast and clever and knew to make friends with the cleaning staff.

I wanted to be a war reporter.

But working for the campus paper didn’t pay. And the gay bookstore warehouse did. Every day, me and a couple of the guys shrink wrapped books (and really anything else we could find — we loved shrink wrapping) and discussed our inventory of erotic coloring books, foot fetish magazines, and the blossoming world of queer literature with our callers.

College was not a happy time for me. I wound up campus famous for getting rape and death threats for being queerer than a three dollar bill and the whole thing was basically a disaster. But I loved that book store. I loved that shrink wrap gun. And I loved our clique of people — from the Deadhead to the seminary student — coming by after our shifts to go to the bars and cafes before going home to get ready to go to the clubs.

Lambda Rising was seen as a center of the gay literary scene thanks to our store’s owner, Deacon Mccubbin, publishing the Lambda Book Report starting in 1987. That led to the first Lambda Literary Awards in 1989. 32 year later. I’m nominated for one of those awards with Erin. For a gay romance novel about, among other things, the sort of war reporter I never got to be.

Puff died in 1997. The store closed in 2010.

And none of this was what I was supposed to do with my life.

But all of that is why I’m so very very very emotional about being named a Lambda Literary Award finalist for Ink and Ice.

Here’s the full list for 2021.

Current Finalists