Synopsis:

From the nationally bestselling author of Chef's Kiss and A Lady for All Seasons, a COVID-conscious trans romance in which a cryptid hunter searching for a mythical lake monster finds love with a grumpy skeptic.

Twenty-something Nathan Camber is fresh out of both grad school and ideas on what to do next. Dealing with a dire job market is hard enough as a gay neurodivergent man—so he doesn’t. Instead, he decides to pursue his lifelong hyperfixation: cryptids. Leaving the city behind for the rugged, pine-scented landscape of upstate New York, Nathan sets his sights on the Salamander Man, a Nessie-like local legend with none of the Loch Ness clout. (Start small, his therapist always tells him!) But Nathan’s new fifty-something landlord, Mack, is a grumpy, grizzled, handsome skeptic who wants to protect his peaceful isolation and hard-earned safety deep in the woods.

Nathan refuses to settle for a lackluster, normie life, though, and convinces the stoic recluse to help him find the creature. As the hunt (and their growing attraction) heats up, Nathan and Mack realize there’s more than one mystery to uncover in the lake. But if the secrets they’re keeping from each other come to light, they might both get dragged under. Kinky hijinks and monstrous mayhem abound in this queer, trans love story for our bizarre modern age.

Content notes here. (Contains spoilers.)

Y’all are going to go rabid for this. It’s got the horniness of Triple Sec, the yearning of A Gentleman’s Gentleman, and the somewhat unmarketable specificity of Second Chances in New Port Stephen. 👍

Preorder preorder preorder at your local shop or retailer of choice. This Bookshop link gives me a tiny bit of $ but I would also equally love if you preordered a signed, personalized copy from my local bookstore Word Up.

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Ask your local library to add this book to their collection (ISBN13: 9781668206645). It’s a win-win for me and for patrons. Don’t listen to the haters; libraries pay good money to keep our books on the shelves. Trans books are especially at risk of being quietly or not-so-quietly left out of collections, but when patrons ask for them by name, good, decent librarians can take that information to their higher-ups as proof that these books deserve their resources.

Forward this newsletter to any freaks (affectionate) you know who are into problematic age gaps, light kink, cryptids, small town drama, taking literally any COVID precautions, secret millionaire aunts, online friendships, weird looking dogs, and upstate autumnal bullshit.

Not to be emotionally manipulative or anything, but this book has been a long time coming and I am extremely nervous about it. If you’ve met me at an indoor convention or live event, you will probably have seen me wearing an N95. Masking was not popular when I got the idea for this book in 2023 and it’s even less popular now. I have been harassed way more for my mask than for being transgender, and that’s saying something. To be putting out a book with an immunocompromised main character and a plot that even mentions COVID is a risk, but it’s one I felt compelled to take.

The romance genre is often positioned as a safe space for readers to be immersed in a world where love is celebrated instead of mocked. When romance is criticized by people outside the genre, its lack of seriousness is often mentioned, but those people clearly aren’t familiar with current titles. Our books can be more real than a lot of the gritty, literary titles out there. Romance has the capacity to deal with difficult subjects, to confront traumas and struggles, and to illustrate the idea that there are good times alongside the bad.

However, I don’t know of any tradpub romances that include the pandemic except as a fleeting reference, something that happened in the past, but there weren’t any tradpub T4T romances when Chef’s Choice was published, same with Triple Sec and poly romances. But I got to tell you, there are times when I really wish I wasn’t alone in the pool. I don’t have any data proving that readers want a story like this, or even that readers won’t absolutely hate it. I only have a belief based on anecdotal evidence that there are people out there who need this kind of book. By the time Love and Lake Monsters hits shelves, it will be nearly 7 years since the pandemic started, and for a non-zero number of people, it never ended. That’s a harsh reality to make sense of in a light, entertaining romance, so obviously I put in a cryptid.

Look, what do cryptids, trans people, and COVID precautions have in common? Lots of people don’t believe in them. A number of people actively hate the idea of them. Romance is a place of comfort and joy, yes, but if you know anything about my books, you know I have used them as a vehicle to work through some pretty discomfiting things. There’s a bogeyman lurking in the background of all my queer romances: something out there wants us dead, but we are going to survive or die trying. As a trans person living in a country that seeks to eliminate us from public life, I can’t help but feel a kinship with other communities facing the same treatment. At its core, L&LM is a story about survival, and how hard it can be, but also how rewarding it is.

For example, readers who want to fuck that old man will finally see themselves on the page. A spoonful of sugar, am I right?

This was a difficult plane to land, but I did my best. I hope you trust me enough to take a chance on this weird book. Thank you, darlings. I’ll see you in those dark, dark waters.

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