![]() If you don’t know what I’m talking about, this is the All For the Game series by Nora Sakavic, also commonly known as the Foxhole Court series. Finding nothing to do after reading the series for the millionth time and still feeling like your emotions have been carved out of your chest? Have you read through all the extra content by the author and just winded up more depressed? Read through the headcanons and reposted all the fanart you can find? Have you ever found yourself suffering from post-All for the Game/Foxhole Court depression? A book hangover, if you will. As for her next projects? “One’s about an ace teenage witch in San Francisco, and the other, well, if I ever figure out how to summarize it, I’ll let you know.Original Photo by Tomáš Malík from Pexels ![]() “The thought of walking into Powell’s and finding something of mine nestled on the shelf is just so exciting,” she says. Sakavic says traditional publishing is still a dream of hers. “Tumblr’s community is really enthusiastic and creative, and the books would be nothing without the legwork put into talking about them,” she says. It was Tumblr users who found and championed the books. Many of her friends still don’t know she’s a writer. (While she’s proud of the series, she also refers to the books as a “self-indulgent angry mess” that wasn’t intended for public consumption.) When she finally self-published the series, she didn’t tell any of her friends. Part of this reluctance was initially motivated by a fear of how the books would be received. “I’ve done almost squat to promote the books,” she says. There is no contact form on her blog for readers to reach her easily. In a world where indie authors spend hours a day promoting their work across social media platforms, Sakavic is an outlier. “To have so many people take a chance on such a strange story is so far beyond what I’d hoped for that sometimes I don’t even know how to handle it,” she says. The three books remain atop the Smashwords bestseller lists and are among Amazon’s top digital sellers in their category. (This is where you’ll find things getting hot and heavy between Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy, Margaery Tyrell and Sansa Stark, or Jack Frost and Elsa.) Sakavic decided to try her hand at writing her own M/M stories. Sakavic was immersed in the world of “shipping”-a fan-fic staple that involves pairing up real or fictional characters for romantic relationships that are unlikely or nonexistent in their respective worlds. It started as an interest in fan-fics and anime. So, how did a non–sports fan end up writing something like All for the Game? Sakavic isn’t quite sure. In the series, exy is a type of lacrosse played on a court the size of a soccer field, with all the physical violence of ice hockey. “One-third research and two-thirds fudging anything I could get away with,” she says. She’s played both soccer and lacrosse, but notes that, because her series features the fictional sport of exy, there was little sports research involved. Sakavic says traditional romance readers were initially wary of reading something sportscentric-and she admits she isn’t a huge sports fan herself. The series is heavy on violence and includes scenes of physical abuse, drug use, and plenty of swearing. Although, Sakavic says, romance is a lighter and kinder word for what Neil, her main character, gets involved in. ![]() In other words, they come for the romance rather than the sports. “It’s a ‘Hey, I see you, you are valid, we’re in this together.’ ” She notes that it’s the prospect of the M/M relationships that has attracted readers to her books. “Coming to terms with your sexuality can be really difficult-even dangerous-and being able to see yourself in the books you read is comforting and empowering,” Sakavic says of the importance of LGBTQ representation in the media. The website Gay Book Reviews sums the work up nicely: “Rough, raw and violent. The series, which comprises The Foxhole Court, The Raven King, and The King’s Men, features a setup that would be hard to come by in traditional publishing: the adventures of several gay male characters who play on a fictional college sports team together. There is fan art in almost every medium-homemade team logo T-shirts, graphic novel interpretations, and photo collages. There are hundreds, possibly thousands, of posts on Tumblr about the series and its characters. They’ve also racked up more than 13,000 ratings and 2,000 reviews on Goodreads. The self-published books have been #1 bestsellers on Smashwords and top-10 bestsellers in Amazon’s sports fiction category. ![]() Nora Sakavic’s sports-themed All for the Game series has become an unlikely hit for an author who does zero self-promotion.
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