Interview With Novelist Lucas Malone On His Sex Opera

 

 

1. What inspired you to write this book?

It started partly out of frustration. I wanted to read a huge, glossy, adult commercial story about gay men that wasn’t afraid of sex, melodrama, danger, money, family, fame, suspense or terrible decisions. I couldn’t quite find the book I wanted, so in a moment of poor judgment, I decided to write it.

 

I grew up fascinated by enormous popular stories like Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls and Jackie Collins’ Lucky, along with films like Gone with the Wind, Basic Instinct, Showgirls and Any Given Sunday. They weren’t embarrassed by scale. They gave you glamour, sex, ambition, heartbreak and spectacle.

 

I wanted to take some of that DNA and build a modern queer version of it. Eventually I stopped trying to explain exactly what shelf Hard Count belonged on and called it what it was: “a gay football Sex Opera.”

 

2. What exactly is it about and who is it written for?

Hard Count follows Piper Ashton and Noah Reyes, two rival professional quarterbacks whose relationship collides with fame, money, family, sexuality.

 

At the center, it’s a love story. Around that love story is a much larger world of obsession, power, celebrity, manipulation, suspense, dark humor and sex.

 

I wrote it for people who want a ride.

 

That includes romance readers, gay men who may not normally pick up novels, people who love thrillers or erotic fiction, and anyone who misses big commercial stories where characters are allowed to be a mess.

 

You don’t need to know football. You just need to enjoy watching beautiful people make their lives incredibly difficult for themselves.

 

3. What do you hope readers will get out of reading your book?

First, I hope they’re entertained.

 

I’m not trying to assign homework. I want readers to laugh, get nervous, get turned on, get angry, care about these people and occasionally wonder what the hell I was thinking.

 

But underneath all the spectacle, Hard Count is also about freedom. It’s about the cages people build around themselves because of family, ambition, reputation, money, masculinity or fear, and what happens when somebody finally decides they would rather blow up the cage or once they start to realize their there is life after the cage.

 

If readers finish the book having had an absurd amount of fun and then realize it left a bruise somewhere, I’ve done my job. 

 

4. How did you decide on your book’s title and cover design?

Hard Count is a football term, and it plays a pivotal role in the novel, but I’m not above a double entendre. I write Sex Operas. I was never going to call this thing Love on The Field.

 

The cover was much more deliberate. I didn’t want the traditional visual shorthand of a romance novel. I wanted to bring back that classic 1970’s style. No couple staring meaningfully into the middle distance. I wanted something darker, cleaner and more cinematic that could signal football, power, sexuality and danger without explaining the entire book before someone opened it. The designer I worked with, Erin Craig, has done iconic covers like Virgin River and Heated Rivalry. She made the process seamless and a lot of fun.

 

5. What advice or words of wisdom do you have for fellow writers – other than run!?

Respect the reader. 

 

You are asking for a lot from them. 8-10 hours of reading time is huge commitment, and I believe you owe it to the reader to put your all in. 

 

Also, learn how to separate useful criticism from someone merely wishing you had written a different book. Those are not the same thing. Listen carefully when people identify a problem. Be much more suspicious when they prescribe the solution. And protect whatever makes your work strange and you. There is so much sameness in the romance genre and I believe the reckoning is coming.

 

You can improve structure, pacing, clarity and craft without sanding off the thing that made you want to write it in the first place. I think writers sometimes become so focused on fitting into the marketplace that they accidentally edit out their soul.

 

Write like nobody is watching. There will be plenty of people watching later. Whether you take their notes is on you. Nothing special happens when you flinch.

 

6. What trends in the book world do you see – and where do you think the book publishing industry is heading?

Books are increasingly being sold through shorthand: tropes, micro-genres, aesthetics, algorithms and highly specific reader promises. Some of that is useful. Readers want signals.

 

I just don’t think they need the entire emotional itinerary before page one. My job is still to surprise you.

 

I also think the line between traditional publishing, independent publishing and creator-led entertainment will continue to blur. Writers have more ability than ever to build their own audience, control their work and create an identity outside the traditional gatekeeping system. The downside is that everyone has also been handed a megaphone, so discoverability has become its own form of blood sport.

 

My hope is that we eventually swing back toward books feeling like events. Fewer disposable pieces of content and more stories with enough personality that somebody tells a friend, “You have to read this insane thing.”

 

That’s much more interesting to me than trying to manufacture Book Number 47 for an algorithm. I write incredibly slow. Taking an hour to write a paragraph is worth it if I am respecting the reader and giving them a good time.

 

7. Were there experiences in your personal life or career that came in handy when writing this book?

Absolutely, although I’m much more interested in stealing emotions from my life than events.

 

My professional career is in consumer marketing, so I naturally think about audience, positioning and why people choose one thing over another. That became extremely useful once I had to publish and market the book. Unfortunately, writing the actual novel stubbornly refused to behave like a PowerPoint presentation.

 

On the personal side, I understood many of the book’s emotional themes very well: ambition, control, family expectations, identity, reinvention and the desire for freedom.

 

The circumstances are fictional. The emotional weather is not.

 

That was probably the most important thing I brought to it. The emotions are somewhat autobiographical, the world is a work of fiction.

 

8. How would you describe your writing style? Which writers or books is your writing similar to?

Fast, cinematic, emotionally sincere and slightly unhinged. I block a scene before I write it in my head almost like a screen play. My first love is movies, so I write the movie I am seeing in my head. Having a giant, sprawling football sex opera running through my head at all hours is exhausting at times, but it’s all worth it. My therapist is thankful for the extra hours.

 

I like short chapters, strong momentum, big characters, dark humor and very high emotional stakes. I’m interested in what happens when you take material that could easily become camp and treat the characters’ feelings completely seriously.

 

The literary ancestors are people like Jacqueline Susann, Jackie Collins and Jilly Cooper: writers who understood that commercial fiction could contain sex, ambition, glamour, cruelty, humor and enormous emotional stakes without apologizing for any of it.

 

I wouldn’t compare myself to those writers in accomplishment. I’m talking about DNA, not altitude.

 

9. What challenges did you overcome in the writing of this book?

The largest challenge was that I had never written a novel before.

 

I didn’t come through an MFA program or spend my life planning to become a novelist. I have an MBA and spent more than two decades in consumer marketing. Suddenly I was teaching myself structure, pacing, character development, dialogue and approximately nine thousand other things novelists apparently knew I was supposed to know.

 

The book also went through substantial revision. I cut tens of thousands of words, rebuilt sections and learned the unpleasant but necessary skill of killing my darlings. Occasionally I later discovered I had murdered the wrong darling and quietly dug it back up.

 

The other challenge was accepting what the book actually was.

 

For a while, I kept trying to make Hard Count fit comfortably inside an existing MM romance category. Eventually I realized the uncomfortable parts were the interesting parts. That’s where the idea of the Sex Opera really came from.

 

I stopped trying to get invited into the village and became the witch in the forest outside it.

 

10. If people can buy or read one book this week or month, why should it be yours?

Because you probably already own several perfectly respectable books.

 

Try the weird, messy sex opera.

 

Hard Count has rival quarterbacks, sex, glamour, family warfare, villains, suspense, dark humor, obscene amounts of money and a love story at the center that I actually care about.

 

It is not trying to act like everyone else. It is just trying to entertain you.

 

My argument is simple:

 

Come for the sex and spectacle. Stay for the humans.

 

About The Author: Lucas Malone is a novelist, who writes commercial fiction. His debut novel, Hard Count: Book One of The Piper Ashton Saga, introduced the gay football Sex Opera, his modern reinvention of the classic bonkbuster. Inspired by the unapologetic storytelling of Jacqueline Susann and Jackie Collins, and the glorious excess of films like Showgirls and Any Given Sunday, Malone creates larger-than-life stories where sex, suspense, glamour, power, dark humor, and human vulnerability collide. His ambition is to make books feel like entertainment events again, with gay characters occupying the center of the spectacle rather than its margins. His debut received a Kirkus Reviews “Get It” recommendation, a 9.5/10 BookLife Prize Critic’s Report, and was named a 2026 NYC Big Book Award Distinguished Favorite in LGBTQ Fiction. The second installment, The Tight End, is planned for March 26, 2027. Having abandoned the pursuit of conventional genre labels, Malone has embraced his identity as the witch in the forest outside the romance village. Please visit: https://lucasmalone.com/

 

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About Brian Feinblum

This award-winning blog has generated over 10, 400,000 page views. With over 5,700+ posts over the past 15 years, it was named one of the best book marketing blogs by BookBaby http://blog.bookbaby.com/2013/09/the-best-book-marketing-blogs  and recognized by Feedspot in 2026, 2021 and 2018 as one of the top book marketing blogs. It was also named by www.WinningWriters.com as a "best resource.”  Copyright 2026.

 

For the past three decades, Brian Feinblum has helped thousands of authors. He formed his own book publicity firm in 2020. Prior to that, for 21 years as the head of marketing for the nation’s largest book publicity firm, and as the director of publicity at two independent presses, Brian has worked with many first-time, self-published, authors of all genres, right along with best-selling authors and celebrities such as: Dr. Ruth, Mark Victor Hansen, Joseph Finder, Katherine Spurway, Neil Rackham, Harvey Mackay, Ken Blanchard, Stephen Covey, Warren Adler, Cindy Adams, Todd Duncan, Susan RoAne, John C. Maxwell, Jeff Foxworthy, Seth Godin, and Henry Winkler.

 

His writings are often featured in The Writer and IBPA’s The Independent (https://pubspot.ibpa-online.org/article/whats-needed-to-promote-a-book-successfully) and (https://pubspot.ibpa-online.org/article/10-things-my-dog-taught-me-about-marketing-books). He was recently interviewed by the IBPA: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0BhO9m8jbs

 

He hosted a panel on book publicity for Book Expo America several years ago, and has spoken at ASJA, three times at BookCAMP, Independent Book Publishers Association, Sarah Lawrence College, Nonfiction Writers Association, Cape Cod Writers Association, Willamette (Portland) Writers Association, APEX, five times at Morgan James Publishing Red Carpet, and Connecticut Authors and Publishers Association. He served as a judge for the 2024 IBPA Book Awards.

 

His letters-to-the-editor have been published in The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, New York Post, NY Daily News, Newsday, The Journal News (Westchester) and The Washington Post. His first published book was The Florida Homeowner, Condo, & Co-Op Association Handbook.  It was featured in The Sun Sentinel and Miami Herald.

 

Born and raised in Brooklyn, he now resides in Westchester with his wife, two kids, and Ferris, a black lab rescue dog, and El Chapo, a pug rescue dog.

 

You can connect with him at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brianfeinblum/ or https://www.facebook.com/brian.feinblum