S06.06: Trailblazer Nalini Singh
Our Trailblazer conversations continue this week with legend Nalini Singh, whose groundbreaking paranormal series changed the game. We talk about the early days of her writing (when she was a kid!) about building her career in New Zealand, about how she came to publish in the US, about her beautiful relationships with readers, about the way she thinks about her series and how the stories hang together, and about her moves into contemporary and beyond.
We are so grateful to Nalini Singh for making time for us, and for her amazing books.
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Show Notes
Welcome Nalini Singh, author of dozens of romance novels, including several popular paranormal series. You should subscribe to her newsletter on her site! We did a deep dive of Caressed by Ice in Season 4.
Preorder her new thriller, There Should Have Been Eight, coming November 21st, right now.
Authors & Books: The Time is Short by Nerina Hilliard, Christine Feehan, Sherrilyn Kenyon, Jayne Ann Krentz, Yvonne Lindsay/EV Lind, Karina Bliss, Louisa George, Helen Bianchin, Emma Darcy, JD Robb, Meljean Brook.
Publishing Professionals: Berkley editor Cindy Hwang, bookseller Barbara Clendon owner of Barbara’s Books.
A transcript (by a human being!) is available for this episode.
Books Mentioned This Episode
Sponsors
Andrea Jenelle, author of No Doubts, available at
Amazon, or with your monthly subscription to Kindle Unlimited.
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Lumi Labs, creators of Microdose Gummies
Visit microdose.com and use the code FATEDMATES
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Transcript
Nalini Singh 00:00:00 / #: Back then think back to whatever the opportunities were in, say, the US North America for publishing. This is, we have to say this is pre-Indie publishing, pre-eBooks even. Whatever the options were, you have to narrow that down again and again and again by the time you get to New Zealand because very few publishers were taking submissions from outside either the US or the UK. And even books had to be set in America quite often. Or if you're going for the UK publishers that had to be set in London. And I hadn't traveled anywhere at that point. I was a high school kid. And one of the only publishers that was accepting worldwide submissions and were publishing books at Worldwide was Harlequin, Mills & Boon. And then later Silhouette became part of that too. So for me, thinking of how am I actually going to get published, it made a lot of sense to start with the contemporary side of things and start by submitting to Harlequin or Silhouette.
Jennifer Prokop 00:01:15 / #: That was the voice of Nalini Singh, one of the first women of color to write extensively in the paranormal romance space, which is something she's going to talk about with us. Author of both the first and second seasons of the Psy-Changeling series.
Sarah MacLean 00:01:33 / #: I love that. I love the way she thinks about that.
Jennifer Prokop 00:01:36 / #: Along with the Guild Hunter series, the Rock Addiction series and category romances. We're going to talk to Nalini about her journey through romance, the way she perceives herself, the role of New Zealand romance authors, and what it's like to send your first manuscript off when you're a teenager.
Sarah MacLean 00:01:59 / #: The best. This is Fate of Mates everyone. I'm Sarah McLean. I read romance novels and I write them.
Jennifer Prokop 00:02:06 / #: I'm Jennifer Prokop, a romance reader and editor. And without further ado, here's our conversation with Nalini Singh. Welcome, Nalini Singh. We are so excited to have you on Fate of Mates as a trailblazer.
Nalini Singh 00:02:21 / #: I'm so excited to be here. I love the conversations you both have had. Oh, well I obviously, I cannot speak English, on the previous episodes. I really enjoyed. So yeah, it's really fun to be here.
Sarah MacLean 00:02:38 / #: Well, we're so thrilled to have you. We're so thrilled always to have somebody who can talk to us extensively about a subgenre. We immediately, the second we started the Trailblazers, your name went onto the list. So we're so excited to finally be able to do this. Why don't we start with where we start with everyone, which is, how did you come to romance? Why romance?
Nalini Singh 00:03:08 / #: I'm one of those people who has been a lifelong reader from childhood. So I was born in Fiji, which is a very small dot of an island in the Pacific. I think the last time I looked, the entire population is something like 800,000 people across. And it's not one island. We say it's actually islands, lots of islands dotted about. But I remember then, there used to be one big library in Suva City, but then the little mobile book buses would come to school. And that was my favorite.
00:03:43 / #: And I always used to get on and be like, okay, I can't wait until I'm old enough, until they let me go into the grownup section of the book bus because I had to be in the kids and young adult section. And when we moved to New Zealand, there were all these libraries and each of the suburbs has a library, and then there's the big Central City library. And I was just like, this is heaven. So I think my love of writing definitely came from my love of reading. And in terms of how I found myself in romance particularly, I think I started reading romance quite early at the Mills & Boons.
Sarah MacLean 00:04:26 / #: Same.
Jennifer Prokop 00:04:27 / #: Us too.
Sarah MacLean 00:04:29 / #: So do you remember who those authors were, the books that really brought you to the genre?
Nalini Singh 00:04:35 / #: Yeah, yeah. I went to see my aunt at one point, and she was a huge Mills & Boon reader, and she gave me this whole bag of books that I literally brought back on the plane. And I had people like Betty Neal's and is it Anne Mather?
Jennifer Prokop 00:04:54 / #: Ann Mather, sure.
Nalini Singh 00:04:54 / #: Emma Darcy, Miranda Lee, Robin Donnells-
Sarah MacLean 00:05:00 / #: The classics.
Jennifer Prokop 00:05:01 / #: Yeah.
Nalini Singh 00:05:02 / #: Yeah. The classics. I grew up on those and there was this one book that really made an impact. And I think she only ever wrote six romances, Nerina Hilliard.
Jennifer Prokop 00:05:12 / #: Oh, I know that name.
Nalini Singh 00:05:15 / #: Yeah, the Time Is Short. That's the title. And I was obsessed with this book, and it's one of the old school Mills & Boons that were quite thick, quite big books. They weren't the shorter categories now. And it's classic, classic romance. She's dying of this brain tumor. And then she goes to this island and she's falling in love with this guy who's this billionaire kind of thing. I need to reread that because I've still got the copy still. Still got my old copy.
Jennifer Prokop 00:05:44 / #: I have also bought the first romances I ever read from the bag in my grandma's basement. And listen, they're still bangers. They're still so good.
Nalini Singh 00:05:53 / #: They're so good.
Sarah MacLean 00:05:54 / #: So she miraculously survives the tumor?
Nalini Singh 00:05:57 / #: I think there's an emergency surgery at one point, and I think the surgeon had a traumatic pass, so it was also his... Because it's a bigger book, so you could have some flux and all of that. But yeah, I just fell in love with those books. And I think it was the emotions that looking back, when I was younger, I obviously didn't analyze them in that way. I was just reading for the joy of it. But I think that the emotional impact of those books really, really struck me hard. And that was my gateway into romance. But then I was also reading a lot of science fiction and fantasy, and a lot of those books actually have a thread of romance. And I was realizing that I wanted more romance in my science fiction and fantasy and more world building fantasy stuff in my romance. So that's how I got into Paranormal Romance. I just squashed together everything I loved. And I remember finding the first paranormal romance as I read, and I was like, "Wow, it's a thing. It's a thing."
Jennifer Prokop 00:07:11 / #: So what was that for you? Because I feel like we talk a lot about 2005 and 2006, there's this huge explosion, but there definitely were vampires before, right?
Nalini Singh 00:07:23 / #: Yeah. Yeah.
Jennifer Prokop 00:07:24 / #: So what were the things that you were reading before you started writing Psy-Changelings?
Nalini Singh 00:07:30 / #: Oh, they were actually published before then. So I think some of the authors I was reading was like Christine Feehan, her Dark series was probably one of the first and Sherrilyn Kenyon, those are the two big names that were ahead of the curve. But even more ahead of the curve was Jane Ann Krentz, who under Jane Castle. And even under her Krentz name, I think she wrote-
Sarah MacLean 00:08:01 / #: Sweet Starfire.
Nalini Singh 00:08:03 / #: Yes, Sweet Starfire, Crystal Flame, all of those books. I am an obsessed fan-girl of her just so you know.
Sarah MacLean 00:08:10 / #: So are we.
Jennifer Prokop 00:08:10 / #: We had her on-
Sarah MacLean 00:08:14 / #: If you haven't listened to the Jane Ann Krentz episode of Fated Mates go immediately to do that. It will change your entire life.
Nalini Singh 00:08:21 / #: Oh my gosh.
Jennifer Prokop 00:08:21 / #: It's so good. Yeah, I think about it all the time.
Nalini Singh 00:08:26 / #: She's such a good speaker. I haven't got to that episode yet, so now, I'm just going to fast-forward through everything and get to it. But yeah, she was doing stuff I think, before almost anyone else. And I have spoken to her and I have listened to her speak and she's like, "Oh yeah, I almost killed my career doing that because nobody was ready for it."
Jennifer Prokop 00:08:48 / #: Well, and that's it too. It's like if you're before the wave, it's easy to just go under as opposed to writing it into claim and a fame.
Sarah MacLean 00:08:58 / #: So can we talk about that wave? Because it feels like it was a huge crashing wave in the early aughts. And I wonder if you could talk a little bit about how it felt at the time. Was it clear that it was just paranormal was everywhere or coming everywhere?
Nalini Singh 00:09:20 / #: Yeah. There was definitely a lot of authors coming up with paranormal. The funny thing is most people don't realize, but I came in on the end and I remember my editor, so my editor, Cindy Hwang, who I've had for well, 18 years now, I think, something like that. She said they were actually not buying any more paranormals when my book ended up on her desk.
Sarah MacLean 00:09:50 / #: Oh, interesting.
Nalini Singh 00:09:52 / #: Yeah. But she loved Life Dissensations so much she actually went to the publisher and said, "I know we're not buying paranormals, but I think we should buy this one." So I came in when they said paranormal was actually on the down trend.
Sarah MacLean 00:10:08 / #: Interesting.
Nalini Singh 00:10:08 / #: And I think I do believe the reports of its demise were too soon. Too early.
Jennifer Prokop 00:10:14 / #: Yeah.
Sarah MacLean 00:10:16 / #: Yeah. It didn't feel like it ended that already.
Nalini Singh 00:10:17 / #: It didn't. But yeah, so that was an interesting time because there are a lot of big paranormal names already. The big series were already out there. And then, so I came along and yeah, so it was really good. I found an editor that got me and here we are. But it really was, I think, the heyday of paranormal as a subgenre, because I remember you both probably do as well, on Smart Bitches, Trashy books. They did the Save the Contemporary campaign.
Jennifer Prokop 00:10:52 / #: Save the Contemporary.
Nalini Singh 00:10:53 / #: Yeah. Because-
Jennifer Prokop 00:10:54 / #: Doesn't that seem wild now?
Nalini Singh 00:10:57 / #: I know. And now, contemporary is everywhere, but back then, it was historical and paranormal were really ascendant and you didn't really have very many contemporaries taking the spotlight. And I think it's flipped now. Contemporaries are just rolling the roast and the other subgenres are at the back of it a bit. But I think if you've been around long enough in the industry, you see the cycles. Yeah.
Sarah MacLean 00:11:24 / #: Yeah.
Jennifer Prokop 00:11:26 / #: There are huge boom and bust cycles. I feel like whatever romance gods there are also ruled like the stock market and the Rockefeller's Bank account, like boom and bust. That's all we know.
Sarah MacLean 00:11:39 / #: Well wait-
Jennifer Prokop 00:11:40 / #: No nothing in the middle.
Sarah MacLean 00:11:41 / #: Before we go much further, I want to name though, that your first book was not Slave to Sensation.
Nalini Singh 00:11:47 / #: No, no.
Sarah MacLean 00:11:48 / #: So could you take us back a little bit and talk to us about the very beginning? Why did you start writing? What were you writing? How did you become a published author?
Nalini Singh 00:12:02 / #: Okay. So like I said, obsessed with romances, obsessed with writing. And I decided quite early that I wanted to write a novel. And funnily enough, one of the first things I wrote was looking back as a science fiction romance. It's like [inaudible 00:12:20 / #]. It's like about a prince with lasers coming out of his eyes and he can't fall in love because there's lasers killing everybody.
Jennifer Prokop 00:12:28 / #: Perfect.
Nalini Singh 00:12:29 / #: I was quite young, okay?
Jennifer Prokop 00:12:30 / #: No, this is perfect.
Nalini Singh 00:12:34 / #: But part of it was the reason... So I started in category romance, and one of the reasons I started, well, there's multiple reasons. One is that I think for world building, I needed to learn all the stuff and I didn't feel... I was still doing it, but I just never had that sweet spot where I felt like I created something different and unique and that everything felt shallow at that stage that I was building. But I had the romance down. I felt like I had the romance down at least. And back then, think back to whatever the opportunities were in, say the US, North America for publishing, we have to say this is pre indie publishing, pre eBooks even.
00:13:27 / #: Whatever the options were, you have to narrow that down again and again and again by the time you get to New Zealand because very few publishers were taking submissions from outside, either the US or the UK, and even books had to be set in America quite often. Or if you're going for the UK publishers, they had to be set in London. And I hadn't traveled anywhere at that point. I was a high school kid and one of the only publishers that was accepting worldwide submissions and where publishing books at worldwide was Harlequin, Mills & Boon. And then later, Silhouette became part of that too.
00:14:14 / #: So for me, thinking of how am I actually going to get published, it made a lot of sense to start with the contemporary side of things and things start by submitting to Harlequin or Silhouette. And I did my first submission in high school, okay?
Sarah MacLean 00:14:34 / #: Amazing.
Nalini Singh 00:14:35 / #: I was so proud. It was a terrible book, but I'm so proud. I wrote a whole book and it was called-
Sarah MacLean 00:14:41 / #: Yeah, that's amazing.
Nalini Singh 00:14:44 / #: The heroine had a broken leg and the title was, and A Broken Heart too. I still have that book, you guys. I made my best friend at high school read it and she was like, "I guess it's good." She wasn't a romance reader at all.
Sarah MacLean 00:15:08 / #: Wait, so what happened? Now I need to know. So you submitted?
Nalini Singh 00:15:13 / #: Oh my God, I should have pulled out.
Sarah MacLean 00:15:14 / #: Did you get a letter back? Did you get letters back?
Nalini Singh 00:15:18 / #: I got not a letter. It's like a, what you call it? Compliment slip.
Sarah MacLean 00:15:23 / #: Yeah, like a little slip.
Nalini Singh 00:15:23 / #: Basically said, no, we don't want it.
Jennifer Prokop 00:15:23 / #: We received mail from you. That's all we're willing to say.
Sarah MacLean 00:15:30 / #: No of those slips are legendary. Yeah.
Nalini Singh 00:15:33 / #: I know. I still have it.
Sarah MacLean 00:15:36 / #: Oh my gosh. But Baby Nalini did a thing. That's amazing.
Jennifer Prokop 00:15:40 / #: Yeah.
Nalini Singh 00:15:40 / #: I did. And I'm so proud because I knew nobody in the industry. I knew less than nobody. I actually called up the distributor for Mills & Boon in New Zealand and said, "Oh, how can I submit to them?" And they were so nice because Harlequin has those, I don't know if they still do, they had these forms that they had the information on how you could submit. And the distributors like, "Oh, we've got one of these, shall I send it to you?" This is New Zealand guys. They're so nice.
Sarah MacLean 00:16:09 / #: Amazing.
Jennifer Prokop 00:16:09 / #: That's amazing.
Sarah MacLean 00:16:13 / #: You know, Nalini, somebody else we talked to had this story.
Jennifer Prokop 00:16:16 / #: It was Mary Balogh. She sent it to the warehouse and somebody read it and passed it on.
Sarah MacLean 00:16:21 / #: Forwarded it on. Yeah.
Nalini Singh 00:16:23 / #: Yeah. You have to be a self-starter in this industry. And I think back then, that was how you did it. You had to get in front of somebody, and if you didn't know anything, you just rang around and until you found some information.
Sarah MacLean 00:16:38 / #: So at this point, because now there's a very robust community in New Zealand, a romance writing community in New Zealand. But at the time, at least you didn't know about it.
Nalini Singh 00:16:48 / #: I didn't know it. So I'd actually submitted, I would say probably three or four manuscripts, or maybe three. By the time I saw this little article in the local newspaper about the Romance Writers of New Zealand conference. And I think at that time, maybe it was maybe the third or fourth conference, so, I hadn't been around super long, and I was like, "Wow." It's the first time I heard of other people in New Zealand trying to do this, and I knew that Robin Donald and Susan Napier and Daphne Claire wrote for Harlequin. So I knew there were authors in New Zealand who did it, but the idea of actually meeting any of them was just completely... They were celebrities and how was I going to meet them, this kid from the suburbs kind of thing.
00:17:41 / #: And so my mom actually paid for me to go to the conference as my birthday present. So she's always been so supportive. She had to sit there. I was sitting in the kitchen reading the prints with the lasers coming out to her. She's like, "Oh yeah, that's really good." And she's cooking dinner.
Sarah MacLean 00:18:00 / #: Oh, I love that.
Nalini Singh 00:18:04 / #: Yeah. So that was the time I actually met a group of writers, basically any writers. Before then, my only access to writers was probably literary fiction writers that came to school to give talks and stuff. And I still remember walking into that room and it was a very small conference back then, I would say probably less than 50 people. And so it was, we were all in one room and just chatting. And they had speakers and they had actual editors from Mills & Boon because they had offices down here, and they would come and wow, it blew my mind. I learned a lot from RWNZ and it's a really nice community of people and it's very small. It's not associated with any other bigger group, so RWNZ is its own entity. And it's always kept, I think it's heart very well.
00:19:05 / #: And I think when you have a smaller group, it tends to be like that. You tend to stick together more because I think even now, the entire membership is something like 300 people. So it's tiny, just super supportive and so much knowledge. And that's where I learned to actually do proper submissions and stuff. So all this time, I'd just been sending them manuscripts, single-spaced because it cost less money to [inaudible 00:19:32 / #].
00:19:34 / #: Yeah. So that's when I really started to do some crafts, so now, I've learned some crafts. But a lot of my learning, I would say, came from just obsessively writing because I just did it over and over and over again. And then I started submitting and then I actually got picked up out of the slush pile in New York, and I didn't sell the first I think, book that got picked up by the slush pile, but the editor said, "Send it to me directly next time." So I did the next book. And I wasn't even writing three chapters in a synopsis. I was writing four books because at this point, it's book 10. And she asked for revisions and I did the revisions and yeah, that was the book that sold.
Sarah MacLean 00:20:23 / #: Who was that? Do you remember?
Nalini Singh 00:20:26 / #: Yeah, Diane Deitz at Silhouette. She's not an editor anymore. She was my editor for I think, two or three books. But I'll always remember her because she was the one who bought my very, very first book. Yeah.
Jennifer Prokop 00:20:41 / #: And so how old were you when that happened?
Nalini Singh 00:20:48 / #: I got the call for the sale the day before my 25th birthday.
Jennifer Prokop 00:20:54 / #: Wow, that's amazing.
Sarah MacLean 00:20:56 / #: And you'd written 10 books already.
Nalini Singh 00:20:58 / #: Yeah.
Sarah MacLean 00:20:58 / #: Oh my gosh, what a hustle.
Nalini Singh 00:21:03 / #: I just wanted to do it, the passion of it. That's what I wanted to do. Yeah.
Sarah MacLean 00:21:10 / #: This week's episode of Fated Mates is brought to you by Andrea Janell, the author of No Doubts, the fifth book in the Willow Creek series. So as we know, Willow Creek is a nice little small town and Alaric, who is a driven astrophysicist, who has twin daughters who need a chance to reconnect with their aunt, also needs a little bit of time to finish his book, which-
Jennifer Prokop 00:21:38 / #: He probably needs a quiet small town.
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Jennifer Prokop 00:22:18 / #: No, he can't deal with her sunshine, that's Sarah. He's so grumpy.
Sarah MacLean 00:22:21 / #: He cannot deal with the sunshine she is providing turn down service of all kinds, I think. And listen, if you love a bed and breakfast, a grumpy astrophysicist hero and a heroine who just wants to give him a little love, this is for you.
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00:23:01 / #: So when you then really transition from category to paranormal, did you have a sense that you were really, I don't know, it just became such a massive success, the whole Psy-Changeling series? Or did you really feel like it was, like you said earlier you were too late for it. When did you realize that maybe they weren't quite right about paranormal being over?
Nalini Singh 00:23:30 / #: I think when I started to actually, when I became full-time as a writer, because that took several years as well. And also, because I'm super-conservative, even though I quit my day job after selling my first book, people don't do this. I was young and I was like, "You know what? If I'm probably going to quit my day job at any point, it might as well be now, during my eating noodles every night if I have to." I kept doing part-time work for a long time because I really was like, I need to be in a position where I can support myself. Because writing income is very erratic. It's not like a job where you get paid weekly or bi-weekly.
00:24:19 / #: Yeah, I think when I actually went full time, I was like, okay, yeah, this is happening. These books have got legs and yeah. Maybe. Yeah. And I think also, I think it was probably around the same time that the first book actually, so the first book to hit the big bestseller list was I think the fourth book in the Psy-Changeling series. So Mine to Possess hit the extended New York Times bestseller list. And yeah, it really felt like, okay, because prior to that, I was very aware that series don't always get room to spread, that readers don't get interested in them, or for whatever reason, it doesn't strike a chord. And then that's it. Back then, there was no way to finish them. You stopped and you started writing something else. And so it felt like, wow, this is actually picking up readers as it goes along, which is a really nice feeling when you're starting something completely new. Yeah.
Jennifer Prokop 00:25:38 / #: So you started the Archangel series. So at some point, you had two paranormal series going. You're a very prolific writer, you produce. So was that something you just had a urge to write, another series in another world? Or were you trying to branch out? What was your thinking about starting a second new series when we already know that series can be a little dicey.
Nalini Singh 00:26:09 / #: Yeah. So you know how I said I wrote obsessively all through school and stuff? So I wrote through uni and I went to law school as well. So I wrote through that. I wrote through being a junior lawyer. So by the time I got to be a full-time writer, I was like, "I have so much time. I have so much time." Because I was so used to writing in really concentrated chunks. I would have 45 minutes maybe, if I was lucky in a day, and I would just write. And so once I got over the, I don't know, if you find this, Sarah, but when I went full time at first I was like, I have so much time. It takes a while to sit.
Jennifer Prokop 00:26:49 / #: Yeah, yeah. You waste so much time. I think when you-
Nalini Singh 00:26:52 / #: So much time. Because you don't realize. Yeah. But once I settled down, I realized my writing pace and the way I wrote was such that I had a lot of room to do something else. And I said to my agent, I've already got this one series and it's quite a complex series, and I knew what I wanted to do with it. And I knew the complexity was going to grow. And I thought, I'm going to write some standalones in between, so I'll write standalone stuff, which will be easier on my brain and it'll refresh me between the Psy-Changeling books. And what I did not realize is, I write series-
Jennifer Prokop 00:27:40 / #: Yes.
Sarah MacLean 00:27:41 / #: Is that you can't stop world building.
Nalini Singh 00:27:43 / #: Yeah. So especially in paranormal or urban fantasy spaces, I wrote Angel's Blood and I kept telling myself it was a standalone. And so now, a lot of people look back and say, "Oh, you put the seven in place and they were all going to have books." No, they weren't. They were just going to exist in this one book was, that was the plan.
Sarah MacLean 00:28:06 / #: That's against the rules of romance.
Nalini Singh 00:28:07 / #: It's quite funny. Everybody was like, "You know you're writing a series?" I'm like, "No, it's one book." But, it was an accidental series, that one. It was just by the time I got to the end, I was like, okay, well, I can't stop now. The world was too big and there was too much I wanted to do with it.
Sarah MacLean 00:28:30 / #: Did you have a group of, because I'm fascinated by writing on the other side of the world right, right now, we're however many hours apart, you're in tomorrow as we talk. Did you have a community of other writers in New Zealand who you were connecting with or were you connecting with the other paranormal authors around the world? What was your community like during all of this?
Nalini Singh 00:28:59 / #: So at first, I had my local group, they're amazing. And you have to remember, the online spaces just didn't really exist the way they do now. So I think there were a few message boards and stuff, but I just wasn't on them. I just wasn't aware of them. I think at that time, you were really online if you were a bit more techy, if you had the knowledge to get into those spaces. So I was very local and I had such an amazing group of people here. I am still friends with them to this day. We still get together regularly.
00:29:38 / #: My friend, Yvonne Lindsay, she wrote tons of books for Desire and she's writing thrillers now under EV Lind. She was one of my first friends. And then Karina Bliss, she wrote the Rock Star books. Louisa George, Tessa Radly, there's so many names. My friend Shah, who is more into marketing side of things. My friend Pera, these are people who have been in my life for 20 years and counting. And it was just such a nice group of people and we supported each other and on the next level up, so these were people I grew with. We all started on the ground floor, we're submitting, we're writing stuff, we're trying things out, we're sharing information.
00:30:25 / #: But on the next level up, we had people like Robin Donald, Daphne Claire, who were really, really generous with their time and just really helped support younger writers coming up. They used to run a romance writing course up north, and they actually invited me up there at one point and they were just so encouraging and telling me, "Yeah, you can do this. This is what maybe you need to do with your work to take it to the next level." So they were brilliant. And then we had the writers from Australia who came over and the conference and stuff like Helen Bianchin and Emma Darcy, just so much knowledge in those heads.
00:31:18 / #: And on the other side of things, there's a bookseller here, Barbara Clendon, she used to run Barbara's books and she's retired from that now. But she was just a wealth of information because she was a small Indie bookseller and she used to bring in books from the US like books we would get nowhere else in the major bookstores because you know the major bookstores just had general spread of books. She was the one who had Christine Feehan and then Sherrilyn Kenyon and JD Robb. And she literally put JD Robb in my hand and said, "You're going to like this book."
00:32:00 / #: I have now read every single J.D Robb ever created. So she was right, but she's still a friend of mine. And just the information that she would share with us, because she kept us up to date with what was actually happening in the industry. She used to actually give little talks and say, "This is what's selling, and this is the new books coming out." And see, I had a really, really lovely community here, and I think I really started to build connections overseas after I attended my very first conference in the US, which was I think in 2006. Yeah, 2006. I was meeting people face to face. And prior to that, oh, I know the Harlequin boards, there were the Harlequin boards. That's where I met people before the conference.
Sarah MacLean 00:32:57 / #: These boards, I was never on those boards, but they were legend. People talk about those boards. They were incredible.
Nalini Singh 00:33:06 / #: I think they were one of the biggest spaces for romance readers and writers to interact. And I made a lot of friends on there that I met for the first time at that conference. And then from there, I felt like I was online a bit more. And so I started to make connections with people in my subgenre because there wasn't really anybody writing that here. So to make those connections, I had to go online and it helped that to Berkeley, my publisher, published a lot of people who wrote Paranormal, and so I was making friends. I got along really well with Meljean Brooke.
00:33:49 / #: And then, yeah, the names are just going [inaudible 00:33:56 / #] on my head, like I said, but there were so many people and we used to get together and do promotion things together and all organized online. So the community has grown now, I think considerably because I've been around a long time and I've met a lot of people, but also, I've met people just online. There's people I've never met in real life, but because we've been friends for so long online, it feels like it's a friendship just as deep. Yeah.
Sarah MacLean 00:34:30 / #: This week's episode of Fated Mates is sponsored by Lumi Labs, creators of microdose gummies.
Jennifer Prokop 00:34:36 / #: Well, Sarah, let me tell you, as you know, I have been sick.
Sarah MacLean 00:34:40 / #: I know for weeks. Poor baby.
Jennifer Prokop 00:34:42 / #: For weeks. I've never really been this sick. And I am taking a lot of medicine, but I've also been supplementing with some gummies because there have been times in particular, where I'm just so overtired, I almost have a hard time falling asleep. Or another thing that was happening was just the cough. I was coughing so hard and I just wanted to just chill out ever so slightly. And so I have really found, once again, the microdose gummy has really come into play for me. So in that case, it was just managing my pain and helping me sleep a little bit, which is one of the very many benefits of microdosing, which you can find out more by going to microdose.com and finding out about how these gummies can deliver the perfect entry level dose of THC to help you feel in this case, a little bit better.
Sarah MacLean 00:35:38 / #: When you have whatever Jen has,
Jennifer Prokop 00:35:41 / #: Bronchitis forever.
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00:36:16 / #: So you mentioned readers earlier, so can you talk to us a little bit about your reader community? Is there a moment you can share about the personal or emotional impact that your books have had on readers?
Nalini Singh 00:36:33 / #: Yeah. I remember getting my very first email. That was pretty amazing. It was a fan mail, and it was from Nigeria. The first person ever to write to me was from Nigeria. So apparently, it was a huge romance reading community over there, and I actually got letters from there as well. But yeah, one thing that happened after Slave to Sensation, which I guess I wasn't ready for because I hadn't realized what I'd done, so this sounds weird, but I started getting letters saying, "Oh my God, it's so nice to see a person of color as the heroine." And okay, I am a person of color. And I had never realized that all these paranormals I'd read had no people of color as the heroine, the main protagonist. And so I was like, whoa. And then I went back and I looked through all these books and I was like, wow. Yeah.
00:37:42 / #: And so I felt like I did something there that I was giving something to these readers that hadn't existed before. And so that was one thing that happened that really struck me, and it struck with me to this day getting those messages because they just started coming organically. And then I've heard some really heartbreaking letters from readers over the years who've read something at a time when they just needed to read and escape. And that's why I say when someone says romance is escapism, and I say, "What's wrong with that?" Sometimes you need to escape in a really bad situation. And I've cried, some of these letters are so heart-breaking. Actually ended up becoming friends with a lady who wrote to me and said she was going through chemo, and she really wanted to know the end of this particular thing. And she wasn't sure it was going to be out by the time because she was in a bad situation.
00:38:56 / #: And so I actually told her what the... I'm going to cry, but she did beat it. And then we stayed in touch for a long time, and then one day, she didn't reply anymore. And I still think about that, and I think that in the end that she did pass away. But it's these moments that you build connections with people that maybe you will never meet and having an impact on their life, whether big or small.
00:39:33 / #: There's one letter I remember where someone wrote to me, and they just had a bad day. They just had a bad day. Someone yelled at them at work, they got splashed by the bus while they're walking home. They were completely wet. And they came home and there was bills on the floor in the litter box, and they were just crying. And then they saw their book had come, and then they just decided, you know what? They dried off. They opened the book, they made a cup of tea, and they read. And they just found a little piece of happiness. And I think that's just as important. Just those moments we give readers. So I never take it for granted. I think it's such a beautiful connection we can make. Yeah.
Sarah MacLean 00:40:18 / #: Well, and you do such powerful reader service. You're so connected to readers. I'm a subscriber to your newsletter. I see how much work you put into your newsletters. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about all of that craft that you do, the writing that you do that is for readers without any... They don't have to buy it, you just provide it to them. And I think that's really special and very unique. I don't think there are that many writers who do that kind of work for readers.
Jennifer Prokop 00:40:57 / #: And for people who don't know, you have so many short stories, for example, in the Psy-Changeling world, there's all these on ramps that are, it's not just the novels. There's so much extra stuff, and it really is delightful as a reader to feel that there's just more out there.
Sarah MacLean 00:41:15 / #: Well, and it feels like a gift every time an email comes through.
Nalini Singh 00:41:20 / #: So thank you for that. Yeah, it started because I was writing stuff just to explore characters and things, I would just write... Because some of them are vignettes. They're not full short stories, so you have to know the characters to appreciate. And then some of them are full short stories with the beginning and middle and the end. And I remember, because I'm a reader, I am a reader at heart. So it's like, what would I like to get as a reader? And I was like, "I want to know more about my favorite characters." I'm the person who's making up the story in my head after the final page of the book because I want to know what the next bit of the story is. And so I actually asked my readers, I said, "Do you want the stuff?" And they're like, "Of course we want this. What are you talking about?"
Sarah MacLean 00:42:13 / #: Yes, we want the stuff.
Nalini Singh 00:42:16 / #: So that's how it started. And I still do it for the fun of it. I write these at night usually, or just randomly, I'm sitting in an airport, I write it. Because these characters live and breathe in my head, particularly in the series, because I've lived with them so long. They have their own personalities, they have their own quirks, and the timeline of their story continues past the books. And so in the newsletter, it's such a nice way to be able to share that with readers. And yeah, it's just been very organic. And I always think, in my newsletters, what do I like getting from other writers whose newsletters I subscribe to? What makes me happy? What makes me want to open... Because I've always thought of my newsletter as a connection with my readers, so I don't want them to see it and they think, oh, another newsletter, it's just really silly, because we're all subscribed to so many things these days.
00:43:22 / #: So I want it to be something that they actually want to open, that they want to read, and that actually gives them a little bit of happiness in the day. And I always find it so cool when people email me and say, "Oh, I saved it to read with my cup of tea in the afternoon," kind of thing. And I thought, that's so cool. That's what I want. And I used to do it completely on my own. I have an assistant now, so she helps with putting links and all of that, doing the formatting and stuff. So that's really helpful. But the writing is still me because I think it's really important that I'm the one that's speaking to my readers with their newsletter because it is a one-on-one connection with each reader. And I have fun with it.
00:44:04 / #: And I think if somebody else was going to think about doing stuff like this, you have to have fun with it. You have to enjoy it as a writer. And that's what comes through. I write these fun little stories about the bear cubs getting covered in flour because they decided to make a cake in the middle of the night, and that cracks me up. I'm laughing along as I'm writing, and so it doesn't feel like work. It's just like I'm just having a bit of fun.
Jennifer Prokop 00:44:35 / #: It's just joy.
Nalini Singh 00:44:36 / #: Yeah, it's just joy.
Jennifer Prokop 00:44:37 / #: So I have two very good friends named Kelly, and one of them is a huge Psy-Changeling reader. And I was like, "Okay, Kelly, what do you want me to ask Nalini?" And she said, "Is Alice Eldridge ever going to get a story, a vignette? An anything?" And I was like, "I'll ask her." Let's see what she says.
Sarah MacLean 00:44:57 / #: This is the first time for a Trailblazer interview where we've-
Jennifer Prokop 00:45:00 / #: Yes, I know. I was like, I have a very personal question from a friend of mine. Alice Eldridge, what's going to happen?
Nalini Singh 00:45:06 / #: So Alice is an interesting character because even though we have known her for a long time in the book world, the timeline hasn't actually moved very fast. The Psy-Changeling series started in 2079 and we're in 2083 now. And so Alice hasn't had a lot of time to adapt to what's happened. So I've never forgotten her. I never forget any of these people. But with the Psy-Changeling series, there is a very strong overarching story structure. And so it's always like, who is important to this part of that story structure? So sometimes, it's like, well, I can't actually get a character in just because I want to see them, right? Yeah. So the answer is, I haven't forgotten her. And it is possible. It is possible something will happen, but she's not growing really old or anything out there.
Sarah MacLean 00:46:15 / #: I have a structure question for you. I wonder, sometimes you talk to authors, especially authors who do such intense world building in paranormal or urban fantasy, and the series is complete in their head. They maybe haven't gotten to the end, but they know what the end game is. They know how many books there are, they know what the plan is. But Psy-Changeling, there's this intense world building. But it sounds like what you're really saying is you don't have an end in mind. Is it expansive in that way? Or do you have a, eventually we're going to get to this place, idea?
Nalini Singh 00:47:00 / #: So I'm a little bit in between. So basically I think it's really important when you start a series to navigate because it stops the tangential meandering off into-
Sarah MacLean 00:47:11 / #: These extra-
Nalini Singh 00:47:12 / #: La La Land. Yeah. So if you look at the first series of the Psy-Changeling series, book one to book 15, it is a very specific, can I just spoiler things? I'm just going to spoiler.
Sarah MacLean 00:47:24 / #: Yeah.
Jennifer Prokop 00:47:24 / #: Yes, that's fine. Yeah.
Nalini Singh 00:47:26 / #: So we begin with silence and by book 15, silence has fallen. So that was the main arc of that first season. That's what I wanted to do. And originally, I thought that would be where the series ended because we have the beginning and we have the ending. And I was really satisfied with the story I told, but then I realized when we got to that point that, what now? I messed everything up for these people.
Jennifer Prokop 00:48:01 / #: [inaudible 00:47:59 / #]. Right?
Nalini Singh 00:48:01 / #: So the problems are still there. So the next season began very naturally from that point, which is okay, we are at that point where silence has fallen, but the silence is not in a great place. They still have the issues that led them to choose silences, choose this life without emotion. And so what were they going to do now? And then I actually had to sit down and think about what I want to do in season two. So season two also is going towards a particular point. So I'm always leading readers towards a particular point. The one thing I don't know is how many books it'll take to get there, because that part, I allow to just happen naturally. It could take 10 books to get to the end of season two, it could take eight books. I don't know. It could take another 15.
Jennifer Prokop 00:48:52 / #: I love that you talk about them as seasons. It feels right.
Nalini Singh 00:48:58 / #: Yeah, because I learned this from watching television because if you look at a really well-written series of television, you'll see the arc, it's complete. And you have that satisfaction even though you might be going into season two with a different arc. And so a really good example of this, it's an old series, is Heroes. The first season of Heroes is really, well-written it. It's structured, so you can see where it's leading. And then you see the series where they start out with a really good concept, but they actually haven't thought of the ending.
Jennifer Prokop 00:49:28 / #: And it's messy.
Nalini Singh 00:49:30 / #: And then you don't get... It's messy. So I didn't want the mess. And so always, I consciously... I'm not a plotter as such book by book, but I plot that series arc. I know where I'm taking my readers. I know where we're going to end up, and for me, that's enough. If I have that, it keeps everything else in order if I have that overarching storyline.
Sarah MacLean 00:49:55 / #: And when you say where you're going to end up, is that as clear for you in terms of the couple that that book is going to be? Do you think about it from the character perspective too like there is a big book that we'll be moving toward?
Nalini Singh 00:50:13 / #: Sometimes. Sometimes. And then every so often, I get a bit of a shock because it doesn't quite work out how I think.
Sarah MacLean 00:50:21 / #: Yeah, same.
Nalini Singh 00:50:23 / #: So I leave that open. That's why people say, oh, is so-and-so going to get a book? Maybe. We'll see.
Jennifer Prokop 00:50:29 / #: Yeah. With you.
Nalini Singh 00:50:32 / #: Yeah, because there is growth in the series as well. I am not a person who has mapped up my character arcs five books a ahead. So every so often, someone comes along and is like, I'm really interesting, or there's something unusual happens. And so I like that. I like having the flexibility, but again, because I know the overall arc, it doesn't matter so much. I can let my characters grow naturally and just go with it. Because if a character is growing towards the main story arc, they're the one who's going to end up with the book. And if a character is growing away from the main story arc, they'll still be there in the series, but they might not end up as a main protagonist.
Jennifer Prokop 00:51:25 / #: So you go from paranormal to a rock band and rugby players, and Rock Hard is probably one of my favorite books of all time. I've read that book so many times. So what made you want to step away and do a contemporary series in the middle of all that?
Nalini Singh 00:51:50 / #: I think it was, again, that thing of needing a change for my brain, because at that point, I was writing two paranormal series, so the Guild Hunter Series is a little bit more urban fantasy, and then I've got my paranormal paranormal series, and I was like, I really need something different. And I do like to challenge myself as well just to see if I can do stuff. And quite often, I would just write it, I'll write the book and then give it to my agent is a whole thing. I don't advertise it. I don't tell anyone I'm doing it because I think it's good to just do stuff as a writer for myself and without any pressure. And if it doesn't work, then it's fine. Only I know about it.
00:52:39 / #: Yeah. But the funny thing with Rock Addiction, which started this contemporary books, is I actually started writing that years ago, years before it was published, but I just wasn't in the right head-space to do it. I feel like, I don't know, it just didn't feel right. And then one day, I was going through my works in progress and I was like, oh, I remember this one. And that day, I had it. It just worked. And so I ran with it and it didn't feel different or unusual to me because I did start with category romance, which is contemporary romance in a short format. So I just was able to move into contemporary romance in a longer format, which I think suits me better. I was never a very good category writer. Honestly, I could not sell hardly... I wrote Slave to Sensation because I was just enraged, [inaudible 00:53:35 / #] because I could not sell into category because it's the square box, round whole thing. I just didn't-
Jennifer Prokop 00:53:42 / #: It was the wrong distance for you, right?
Nalini Singh 00:53:44 / #: Yeah.
Jennifer Prokop 00:53:44 / #: Some people run a marathon, some people run a 10K.
Nalini Singh 00:53:49 / #: It was too long. I just like to write longer and stuff. Yeah, so, it just felt really natural to do contemporaries. And so the same with my thrillers that I write now, it's something different. So I have a bit of a break between the paranormals, which I love. I will always write speculative fiction in some way, I think, but it's really nice to do these other things as well. And I feel like I learn new writing techniques with each different thing I do.
Jennifer Prokop 00:54:25 / #: So what would you say are the hallmarks then, of a Nalini Singh book?
Nalini Singh 00:54:31 / #: So it took me a long time to figure this out. Some of my friends are like, oh yeah, this is my... Oh, they used a particular word. There's the fingerprint-
Jennifer Prokop 00:54:41 / #: Core story.
Sarah MacLean 00:54:42 / #: Core story.
Nalini Singh 00:54:42 / #: The core story, yeah. Yeah. And I was like, I don't know. It took me a long time and I realized it's the same thing I like to read is the same thing I write, which is I write families, so not just like blood related families. I write found families. I write friendships that are like family. I have the Arrow squad which is a lethal assassins, but they're all tightly bonded to each other. I have the brothers in the rugby series, [inaudible 00:55:18 / #]. I have the rock band and it's really, really rare for me to write books that are a couple in total isolation. I've realized I write community books, which is, there are links all over the place. People are connected. Probably one of the ones I've written where it is a very isolated story for the romance is Heart of Obsidian.
00:55:44 / #: Yeah. They are very much alone for a lot of their book, but the characters themselves are not alone. So Caleb, who is determined to walk alone and determined not to make any bonds, has somehow still managed to have two best friends.
Jennifer Prokop 00:55:59 / #: Him and his ravine.
Nalini Singh 00:56:01 / #: Him and his ravine. He just wants to be alone in there except for Zahara. And so I don't tend to write super isolated characters because I really love exploring all the bonds of relationships, the romance, of course, the love, but also, friendship, family, what does it mean? What does loyalty mean and what do people do for each other because of the love? Or not just even the positive emotions, but the negative ones as well. Because they're quite complex. People can make choices where you think that's a bad choice, but you can see why they made it. So I love all that stuff. I guess, how would you say it? All the rivers of the human heart. That's my core story is the community. Yeah.
Jennifer Prokop 00:57:03 / #: Well, to that end, what are the books that you hear the most from readers about? Is there a book that you just hear about all the time?
Nalini Singh 00:57:15 / #: Heart of Obsidian. Heart of Obsidian, yeah. It's from the Psy-Changeling series, and then from the Guild Hunter series, it's any of the Elena and Raphael books. Because I think with that series, it's unusual in the sense that it's a romance series, which is there together, but it's like an urban fantasy series, which is they keep coming back in the books. And so a lot of people, it's a long love story, and so people are excited to see them again, but of a single book that is probably Heart of Obsidian.
Jennifer Prokop 00:57:53 / #: I believe it. I feel like it's so hard when you are looking forward to a book for books and then to have it be even better than you thought it would be. Right.
Sarah MacLean 00:58:02 / #: What a gift.
Jennifer Prokop 00:58:03 / #: Yeah. Right? It's amazing. It's amazing. So Nalini, I know that this is an impossible question, right? Because we love all of our children equally, but is there a book that is really special to you for any reason? One that you're especially proud of or you had trouble leaving behind or whatever that means to you?
Nalini Singh 00:58:31 / #: So I think, okay, so I'm going to cheat and I'll say two because-
Jennifer Prokop 00:58:35 / #: Allowed. That's allowed.
Nalini Singh 00:58:37 / #: It's for very similar reasons. So Desert Warrior will always have a special place because it was my first published book. I have the poster on my wall, and I remember all the feelings of holding that book in my hand and feeling like, wow, I did it. This voice is out there in the world.
Jennifer Prokop 00:58:58 / #: Well, especially since you really walked the road for a long time for that.
Nalini Singh 00:59:04 / #: Yeah. I did it the hard way. And then for the same reason, Slave to Sensation, because Slave to Sensation really catapulted my career into just a whole different level. But I just remember writing that book just compulsively. The story was just in my head, and most of my first drafts are terrible. Nobody sees my first drafts, but this book, a lot of the first draft is in the book, the published book, because it was like the story had been growing and growing and growing in my head all these years, and then it was ready and I just had to type it out. Literally, that's all I did. I lived, breathed that book, and yeah, it is a seminal book in my career, and it is the place where people really heard my name.
01:00:02 / #: When it came out, a lot of people actually said, this is a debut, because they had never heard of me even though I had six other books. So it just is a whole... Yeah, those two books are really pivot points in my life, in my career. So yeah, they'll always have a special place. And the original purple cover of Place to Sensation just still makes my heart thud, because I remember looking at that cover, and I was in Japan at the time I was working in Japan, and the cover came through and I was like, oh... I had a quote by Christine Feehan on it.
Sarah MacLean 01:00:46 / #: Oh, which is so special.
Jennifer Prokop 01:00:47 / #: Oh, yeah.
Nalini Singh 01:00:49 / #: I know, I almost died when she gave me a quote because it was like, she read my book. I was just overwhelmed. And yeah, so two very special books. But it's true. We love all our books. I think every book is the favorite. That's why-
Jennifer Prokop 01:01:10 / #: Yeah, but there are some that are more special. They do feel special. Amazing. Well, thank you so much for being with us.
Sarah MacLean 01:01:21 / #: Yeah. This was a real joy. I'm so grateful.
Jennifer Prokop 01:01:24 / #: We're so grateful to have you.
Nalini Singh 01:01:26 / #: This is really fun. You two are so easy.
Sarah MacLean 01:01:31 / #: Thank you for your gorgeous books, and thank you for leaving such an indelible mark on the genre.
Nalini Singh 01:01:37 / #: Thank you. I'm still going. We'll see what's next.
Sarah MacLean 01:01:40 / #: Yes.
Jennifer Prokop 01:01:40 / #: Keep going.
Sarah MacLean 01:01:41 / #: Oh, no, absolutely.
Jennifer Prokop 01:01:41 / #: I think we are hungry for more, right? I open that newsletter every time it comes in, so, yeah. I'm here forever.
Nalini Singh 01:01:51 / #: Oh, yay. It makes me so happy.
Sarah MacLean 01:01:55 / #: She's great.
Jennifer Prokop 01:01:56 / #: She's great. I really was... The story about sending off manuscripts when she was a teenager is amazing.
Sarah MacLean 01:02:05 / #: What an amazing kid. She must have been. My God, when I was a teenager, I was no more prepared to do anything like that than I was to fly.
Jennifer Prokop 01:02:12 / #: I could barely write my college essays, everybody. So clearly that was not...
Sarah MacLean 01:02:15 / #: She's writing book after book after book, first of all, and a Broken Heart too.
Jennifer Prokop 01:02:24 / #: Honestly. Amazing.
Sarah MacLean 01:02:24 / #: The Greatest.
Jennifer Prokop 01:02:24 / #: The Greatest.
Sarah MacLean 01:02:26 / #: The Greatest.
Jennifer Prokop 01:02:26 / #: We're going to all be scouring KU for the next couple months, seeing if it'll pop up.
Sarah MacLean 01:02:31 / #: Yeah. No, but what a great story. Every single one of these authors has such a unique story, but it was really interesting to me because you caught it too, as she was talking about how being in New Zealand, she called the warehouse in New Zealand because what else do you do? And I was like, I think Mary Balogh told that same story.
Jennifer Prokop 01:02:54 / #: Yeah.
Sarah MacLean 01:02:56 / #: Mary Balogh also did not live in the United States, although I think at the time she lived in Saskatchewan. But it's just so interesting because you hear so many stories that is a real old-fashioned way of submitting a manuscript. Gone are the days when we wrapped up our paper and mailed it to God knows where in New York City.
Jennifer Prokop 01:03:25 / #: The thing that's amazing about it too is, her first book was published in 2003. We are not talking about that long ago. So it really is, when you think about it, when you live through a revolution, it just seems like that's how it happened, and it's no big deal. But when you think about the sea change in publishing. Like she said, there was no self-publishing. You had to go through a traditional publisher. There were only two places that would even consider you if you weren't in the US or the UK. It's almost impossible for us to imagine that now.
Sarah MacLean 01:04:02 / #: No, absolutely. Because now, the world is so small, but she kept... There were so many moments that felt that way to me when she talked about finding a community, which of course, at the time, in the early aughts, there wasn't a hugely vibrant online community of romance people that authors could go to and say, "How do I do this thing?" There was no place to ask questions. There was no hub. These women really were flying without a net.
Jennifer Prokop 01:04:32 / #: Yeah. The thing I kept thinking I should ask, and then she was just such an interesting speaker, I didn't really want to interrupt her necessarily in the things that she wanted to talk about, is, I do think one of the ways in which her books are singular is her ability to reboot a long series that is in progress. Right?
Sarah MacLean 01:04:57 / #: Well, she talked a little bit about that too, with Psy-Changeling and the way she thinks about it as seasons.
Jennifer Prokop 01:05:03 / #: Yes, right? Because many people have said you could start at Silver Silence, which is what I would assume would be the beginning of season two. And it's really interesting because I think that it's so smart for her to say, I took this vision from television seasons. Because if you are writing a long series, you have to provide those on ramps for people, right?
Sarah MacLean 01:05:27 / #: Well, there are movements. When we talked about IID in the first season of this podcast, we broke up the books in movements, and who knows whether or not Kresley Cole felt that those were the proper movements. But what I was getting at when I asked her could she speak a little more about characters and the way she thinks about prepping books or prepping a series for the long haul with characters. I think it's really interesting and it speaks to her obvious past with fantasy and sci-fi, that in her mind, it really is about the overarching world, that's whatever's happening outside of the characters themselves. Because you and I have talked about this so many times. We are obviously intimately familiar with a different paranormal series that is clearly moving toward a final book in the series that is a character book, not a plot.
Jennifer Prokop 01:06:29 / #: Right, not a plot. Yeah, exactly.
Sarah MacLean 01:06:32 / #: So I think it's a really interesting difference in the structure of the way you craft a series. I felt like this when we talked about Crest by Ice.
Jennifer Prokop 01:06:44 / #: Right.
Sarah MacLean 01:06:46 / #: The world building in Nalini Singh's books is just superior to most other paranormal romance series, I think. And that's not to diminish the world building of other series, but she's just superior.
Jennifer Prokop 01:07:02 / #: Yeah. Well, and I loved when she talked about essentially, I was going to do a little standalone and then then, oops, there are seven of them. What are you doing lady?
Sarah MacLean 01:07:14 / #: You grew up reading romance novels, you know the rules.
Jennifer Prokop 01:07:17 / #: You know how this works. Yeah. But I think the other thing that is also really interesting to me, and I think Nora Roberts is probably like this. I think Jane Anne Krentz is probably like this, is the people who are just, they're writing the books, but then there's all the other writing that they're doing. I think Christina of Christina Lauren is this, just writing all the time that writing is a reward. And I know for a lot of authors, writing really is work.
01:07:47 / #: And I think that the way that she has figured out a way to take those little vignettes and stories and just kernels of ideas and gift them to her readers is part of what makes, I think, it's just such a rich world. Yeah.
Sarah MacLean 01:08:06 / #: But don't you feel a little bit like this is particular to paranormal? You mentioned Christina, I think you mean Lauren from Christina and Lauren.
Jennifer Prokop 01:08:16 / #: I do mean Lauren. Yes. Sorry. I do mean Lauren.
Sarah MacLean 01:08:18 / #: So setting aside Lauren, who is a special case, I feel like every time we talk to a paranormal author-
Jennifer Prokop 01:08:27 / #: They're just always... Christine Feehan, certainly.
Sarah MacLean 01:08:29 / #: The world is enormous and expansive. And I'm always thinking about them. I think about J.R Ward saying, "I'm the scribe. They just tell me the story." And it sounds wacky when you think about it, when you're talking to one of these authors at a time. But now that we have the joy of the longevity of the series of the Trailblazers, I'm starting to really think like, oh no, this is like-
Jennifer Prokop 01:09:03 / #: Yeah.
Sarah MacLean 01:09:04 / #: This is paranormal.
Jennifer Prokop 01:09:07 / #: She mentioned Meljean Brook, who I have to say everybody, we talked about this when we did our Milla Vane episode, but Meljean Brooke is Milla Vane. And I want her to come on the podcast very badly so we can just grill her about Heart of Blood and Ashes. But also, that's another person who I think clearly is deeply invested in the world in a different way,
Sarah MacLean 01:09:31 / #: The world.
Jennifer Prokop 01:09:32 / #: Yeah.
Sarah MacLean 01:09:33 / #: And that's not to say that historical authors or contemporary authors aren't invested in the world, but its is different field. Or am I wrong?
Jennifer Prokop 01:09:42 / #: No, I think that's a really interesting observation. I think that there's just people who... I just was really fascinated by it. I really liked hearing her talk about how much joy she gets out of playing around in the parts of the world that are not going to be a whole book. But that doesn't mean-
Sarah MacLean 01:10:00 / #: Just writing a [inaudible 01:10:02 / #] and putting it out there. And there is a joy in receiving those as a reader when you're like... And I can understand her. I really appreciated her saying like, "Oh, I'm so glad. I'm so glad you enjoy them." Because I certainly have written a number of times, just a little tiny thing that's like, here's a little thing that the characters are still doing. And I think, is this navel-gazey? Is this just me satisfying my own desire to return to this world? Do readers really want this? So I don't know, that was very relatable content.
Jennifer Prokop 01:10:36 / #: Yeah. Well, and I think the other thing that is fascinating if you think about it is I don't think I'd put together the idea that the world is actually moving so slow. Right?
Sarah MacLean 01:10:48 / #: Oh, I know. I didn't realize that either.
Jennifer Prokop 01:10:50 / #: And I thought, that's wild.
Sarah MacLean 01:10:53 / #: So she has to put a character on ice for a while.
Jennifer Prokop 01:10:54 / #: Yeah, they're not ready. And I thought that was also really fascinating because of course, we're thinking in terms of it's been 20, however many books and she's like, it's been three years, everybody calmed down. Calm down.
Sarah MacLean 01:11:08 / #: I enjoyed hearing her talk about craft. I enjoyed hearing her talk about fan service and readers and talk about somebody who just obviously cares about the way the books are received. And of course, when we asked our question about how readers engage with the books, I loved that she was surprised too by this thing that I think we all, many of us were surprised by in the early aughts.
Jennifer Prokop 01:11:45 / #: I'm always really interested in the question about how readers respond in general. And we were looking at this before we started recording, right? Hunger Like No Other was the beginning of 2006. Slave to Sensation was the end of 2006. So it's like we saw the paranormal boom, just going and going.
Sarah MacLean 01:12:08 / #: The idea that by the end of 2006, Berkeley was like, "We're done with paranormal," and this was Kresley, J.R Ward, Nalini, there were so many huge series.
Jennifer Prokop 01:12:27 / #: And I'm sure they just thought that they were at capacity. How much of a market for this could there really be?
Sarah MacLean 01:12:36 / #: Well, and also, let's not forget, right? It's not quite the same as what's going on now in contemporary. Because when you acquire a paranormal series, you are acquiring a series. You're investing in however many of these books, obviously if it doesn't sell, you're not investing in that many. But the idea is this could become a thing. We could end up with two seasons, 20 books, however many things. Whereas right now, houses are buying one, maybe two books at a time.
Jennifer Prokop 01:13:13 / #: Right. Right. Right. So I think that part is really interesting. But I also found myself really thinking about what she said about starting in contemporary to get the romance beats down, but that her true love was always going to be in creating these big worlds, right?
Sarah MacLean 01:13:29 / #: Yeah. Obviously.
Jennifer Prokop 01:13:31 / #: I think that's obviously why I... And I think also though, I was really, look, when people talk about, she did not name names when she was talking about TV shows, that started with the great premise, but didn't have an ending in mind. But I always think of Lost. Right?
Sarah MacLean 01:13:45 / #: Lost.
Jennifer Prokop 01:13:45 / #: Exactly, I said it.
Sarah MacLean 01:13:46 / #: I was so mad.
Jennifer Prokop 01:13:47 / #: Right? And I just think it's a big reason I don't trust TV anymore, are shows like that. And so I think that to know that you're in... You know when you're reading one of Nalini's books, that you are in good hands.
Sarah MacLean 01:14:00 / #: It's tight. She knows exactly what she's doing.
Jennifer Prokop 01:14:04 / #: Yeah.
Sarah MacLean 01:14:04 / #: Yeah. And when I feel like there is a... Obviously, I want every book to feel that way, but that is a required quality for a paranormal. You have to know that it's going to hang together. My friend Carrie Ryan, who is a YA paranormal author or Y fantasy, she always used to say, the world building is where everybody gets caught up because you think to yourself, how does the magic work? What are the rules? And with Nalini, these characters, these identities have so many rules. Yeah.
Jennifer Prokop 01:14:48 / #: Well, and also she was like, listen, I don't have just one idea. I've got two. And they're in the place at the same time.
Sarah MacLean 01:14:55 / #: Yeah, exactly.
Jennifer Prokop 01:14:56 / #: And they've got this long history.
Sarah MacLean 01:14:58 / #: It's tremendous.
Jennifer Prokop 01:14:59 / #: Right? The books are amazing. And it didn't surprise me at all to hear her say that people, Heart of Obsidian is the book that really hits for people.
Sarah MacLean 01:15:08 / #: Well, because everyone was waiting for it.
Jennifer Prokop 01:15:09 / #: Yeah.
Sarah MacLean 01:15:10 / #: That's the [inaudible 01:15:11 / #].
Jennifer Prokop 01:15:12 / #: Right. Right. But sometimes that book doesn't deliver. But I think when it does, that's when you have people forever who are like, I can't wait to get to this book. And then it's so good.
Sarah MacLean 01:15:24 / #: Yeah. Absolutely. What I love is she was... I didn't know. I've never met Nalini. I had no idea. She was so young. And now I'm like, oh, great. We have decades more of Obsidians to come.
Jennifer Prokop 01:15:35 / #: Right? What a gift.
Sarah MacLean 01:15:36 / #: And I'm like right now thinking maybe I'll go reread that Rockstar series.
Jennifer Prokop 01:15:40 / #: Oh God, I love those books.
Sarah MacLean 01:15:42 / #: I know.
Jennifer Prokop 01:15:42 / #: I'm sorry, I had to ask about them. I really do.
Sarah MacLean 01:15:44 / #: No, of course. You asked about them. I wanted to know about them too. I'm particularly fond of the fact that you asked a reader fan.
Jennifer Prokop 01:15:52 / #: I know. Sorry. Well, this is everybody-
Sarah MacLean 01:15:55 / #: I'm afraid Poor Kelly is getting upset.
Jennifer Prokop 01:15:56 / #: My TFA friend, Kelly, I think she knew. I think she knew. She was like, I don't think anybody thinks it's really going to happen. But you know what? I wonder if her hearing the rationale-
Sarah MacLean 01:16:06 / #: She did give her a good reason.
Jennifer Prokop 01:16:09 / #: It was a good reason. It was a really good reason.
Sarah MacLean 01:16:11 / #: It's not like me when people ask me and I'm like, "No."
Jennifer Prokop 01:16:14 / #: You're just like, "No."
Sarah MacLean 01:16:14 / #: I don't want to do it.
Jennifer Prokop 01:16:17 / #: She's like, it's just not ready yet. She's still in the oven.
Sarah MacLean 01:16:19 / #: Maybe. Well, listen, Nalini Singh is going to be writing for another 20 years, everyone.
Jennifer Prokop 01:16:24 / #: So I think the thing about, like I said, I feel like there are authors who... She's just so good and every one of her books just sweeps you away, exactly. Right?
Sarah MacLean 01:16:37 / #: Yeah. And she seems to be able to do everything.
Jennifer Prokop 01:16:40 / #: Yeah.
Sarah MacLean 01:16:41 / #: Right?
Jennifer Prokop 01:16:42 / #: Right. Romance, thrillers, paranormal.
Sarah MacLean 01:16:45 / #: It's wild. I think some of us, we're just conditioned to do it more, better, different. And I think Nalini is one of them. She's one of those people who is just... We are lucky to be living at a time when she is writing.
Jennifer Prokop 01:17:05 / #: Absolutely.
Sarah MacLean 01:17:06 / #: Nalini's next book for everyone, it out in November. It is called, There Should Have Been Eight. And it is a thriller. Yeah.
Jennifer Prokop 01:17:17 / #: I haven't read her thrillers, so I haven't-
Sarah MacLean 01:17:18 / #: I haven't either.
Jennifer Prokop 01:17:19 / #: So this was going to be-
Sarah MacLean 01:17:19 / #: I'm going to go do that.
Jennifer Prokop 01:17:21 / #: I bet they're terrific.
Sarah MacLean 01:17:22 / #: Yeah. This one's set on a remote estate in the New Zealand Alps. And there are seven friends together. And it sounds like maybe there has at some point, been a murder. I love it. I love it. I'm into it.
Jennifer Prokop 01:17:42 / #: Her books are real comfort reads for me. I've reread Cross by Ice, which we read. I've read a couple times. I've read My favorite, I think it's Rock Hard. I can't, titles, a couple times. I love that book. What a delight.
Sarah MacLean 01:17:56 / #: Yeah. And those rugby books are great. Very fun. For those of you looking for just a great sports romance, she can do it all.
Jennifer Prokop 01:18:06 / #: Well, we are lucky to have her.
Sarah MacLean 01:18:09 / #: We are. We are.
Jennifer Prokop 01:18:10 / #: A treasure.
Sarah MacLean 01:18:11 / #: So, thank you so much to Nalini again for making time for us today. It was a real treat to have her. I am Sarah McLean. I'm here with my friend Jen Prokop. We are together, Fated Mates, and you can find us online at fatedmates.net on Twitter, at FatedMates, on Instagram at FatedMatesPod. And if you super-duper love hanging out with us and you just wish we were more in your ear holes, head over to Patreon and join our Patreon where you have access to our private Discord, where tons of Magnificent Firebirds discuss new episodes weekly and everything else, hourly, minutely, secondly, and you can find information on that at fatedmates.net/patreon. Thanks so much everyone.
S05.30: Christine Feehan: Trailblazer
This week, we’re sharing our fantastic conversation with trailblazer Christine Feehan, an undeniable force in the rise of paranormal romance in the early 2000s. We discuss the genesis of her work, the way she builds her far-reaching worlds, her relationship to readers, her heroes, her sex scenes, and the long and winding path of her career.
Our conversation covers a lot of ground—personal, professional, paranormal and powerful, and we’re so grateful to Christine Feehan for making time for Fated Mates. You’re going to love this one, Firebirds.
Next week, our first read along of 2023 is Tracy MacNish’s Stealing Midnight—we’ve heard the calls from our gothic romance readers and we’re delivering with this truly bananas story, in which the hero is dug out of a grave and delivered, barely alive, to the heroine. Get ready. You can find Stealing Midnight (for $1.99!) at Amazon, B&N, Kobo, or Apple Books.
Show Notes
Welcome to Christine Feehan, author of almost 100 romance novels. Her next book, Ghostly Game, is part of the Ghostwalker series and will be released May 2, 2023.
PEOPLE : editor Alicia Condon at Dorchester and now Kensington, and editor Cindy Hwang at Berkley.
BOOKS: Freckles and The Harvester by Gene Stratton Porter, Louisa May Alcott, The Bourne Identity by Robert Ludlum, Mary Janice Davidson, Gift of Fire and Gift of Gold by Jayne Ann Krentz, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, The Beekeeper’s Apprentice by Laurie R. King.
Books Mentioned This Episode
Sponsors
Goldie Thomas, author of The Rake and the Fake
Available now from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, or Apple Books
and
Lumi Labs, creators of Microdose Gummies
Visit microdose.com and use the code FATEDMATES
for 30% off and free shipping on your order.
Christine Feehan 00:00:00 / #:
I'm not somebody who will ever cut and paste a love scene. It's a different couple and so, they react differently to each other and to whatever situation is going on. And I don't get embarrassed. It's just part of life, and I put that in. And part of the reason for that, and I know this is going to sound crazy, but so many girls that had had these terrible things happen to them would be very promiscuous, but they never felt anything. And I would say it's because you don't have a good partner. You're not in love with your partner. He's not doing anything for you, so I wanted them to know what good sex was. And writers should realize that the words they put down touch people. And you don't know who you're going to touch and you don't know what you say, what it's going to do to somebody.
Jennifer Prokop 00:01:11 / #:
That was the voice of Christine Feehan, paranormal author, extraordinaire, author of over 100 books and just a superstar of the genre and has been for decades.
Sarah MacLean 00:01:26 / #:
Her first book, Dark Prince, came out in 1999, right at the very beginning of the paranormal boom that we talk about. So, we talk to Christine about her life, how she came to romance, how she came to writing paranormals, and how she continues to write in this subgenre that we all love and wish there was more of.
Jennifer Prokop 00:01:50 / #:
Welcome to Fated Mates, everyone. I'm Jennifer Prokop, a romance reader and editor.
Sarah MacLean 00:01:55 / #:
And I'm Sarah MacLean. I read romance novels and I write them.
Jennifer Prokop 00:02:00 / #:
And without further ado, here's our conversation with Christine Feehan.
Sarah MacLean 00:02:06 / #:
Perfect. So thank you so much, Christine, for joining us. We're very excited, in large, part because it feels like you really came to romance in an interesting time and place and way. And so, I wonder if you could talk a little bit about how you found romance as a reader and then, again as a writer, or was it simultaneous?
Christine Feehan 00:02:32 / #:
Actually, it wasn't simultaneous at all. I started reading when I was very, very young, at a very young age and started writing when I was very young. The minute I could put sentences together, I started making up stories and I would write them down the minute I could, when I could put sentences together. And I think the first time I ever read a romance, I found these old, old books by Gene Stratton Porter, The Harvester and Freckles and those. And I realized there was kind of this romance thing going, and I found it really intriguing. I was probably 10 or even younger. I read books way over my head-
Sarah MacLean 00:03:32 / #:
Us too.
Jennifer Prokop 00:03:32 / #:
Us too. No problem.
Sarah MacLean 00:03:32 / #:
One of us.
Christine Feehan 00:03:37 / #:
And then, I started looking for anything I could read that might have some sort of a connection between a girl and a guy, because I wanted a happy ending or a happy anything involved in it. And so, that sort of started me down that path of looking for something happy in the book all the time, so that was sort of my intro to romance. And I found Louise May Alcott, of course, and read everything that she wrote, and I would read that to my grandmother whenever she was ill. I would sit and read to her, and then later, different ones that kind of inspired me for different reasons. Actually, The Bourne Identity, I liked the fact that they worked together. They were equal partners. People I think mostly saw the movie. They didn't really read that book the way it should have been read, but without her, he wouldn't have made it. She really was his equal partner in that book and I loved that. I really read that a couple of times to see how he made that happen and I really liked that. That was one of them.
Sarah MacLean 00:05:12 / #:
That doesn't surprise me at all, that the Bourne Identity is a text for you. I mean, it makes perfect sense now as a Feehan reader.
Christine Feehan 00:05:22 / #:
Yeah. And then, one really made an impact on me, probably that opened up the whole paranormal world for me, and I read it very early on was a Gift of Fire and Gift of Gold by Jayne Ann Krentz. And I forget how old I was when I read that, but all of a sudden, it was like it opened this whole world to me and I thought, "This is really what I want to write." Plus, I realized that my hero could be flawed and my villain could... I really like that the villain was rounded out so much.
00:06:11 / #:
And so, I started studying villains to figure them out. How did they write these villains and how did they become... You liked them and you didn't like... I mean, there were good things about them as well as bad things. How did they get to be who they were? So, I think they all had such an impact on me. One of the biggest impacts on me for all of my writing was Sherlock Holmes. I read Sherlock Holmes so many times that I literally could quote pages of Sherlock Holmes, of his work. And then, another writer was Laurie R. King, the Beekeeper's Apprentice. I thought that was such a fabulous take on... What she did, you would never expect her to put heroin with him and how she managed to make that work. That was an interesting pairing for me.
Sarah MacLean 00:07:24 / #:
So, at what point during this kind of reading, obviously, you've been an avid reader forever, did you start thinking, "I think I can maybe do this?"
Christine Feehan 00:07:36 / #:
I never did. I always wrote. I always wrote. I had hundreds of manuscripts under my bed. I'd write them and throw them, write them and throw them. I just wrote all the time. It was sort of a compulsion for me. I could not write, I had to write. I had so many stories in my head, I did not think about publishing them. Other people had movie stars and rock stars that they would scream and yell and, "Oh, my God. They're so wonderful. No, for me, it was writers. And so, I never looked at myself and thought I could ever be a writer like they could be, because I kind of worshiped those writers. They were amazing. My first job was in a library, and I would just read every book that I could in that library.
Jennifer Prokop 00:08:28 / #:
Living the dream. Well, it's, the other thing that's interesting though about that kind of list of books you named is I think one of the hallmarks of your style is an interest in the paranormal, but not necessarily... Even though the Carpathian series is very much about vampires, but like Jayne Ann Krentz, actually. Like telepathy and what the brain is capable of, so has that also always been interesting to you?
Christine Feehan 00:08:59 / #:
Absolutely. I research so much, and my belief really, is even with vampires, if you look at every society all over the world, you look at what their beliefs are going back hundreds of years, and all of them have something like that in their background. And where does it come from? You have to start thinking if every culture has something like that in it, where does it come from? And if every country pretty much has done these experiments with telepathy and with all these other things, why are they doing them? And after a while, you start getting these answers. You start hitting on things that, "Oh, this did work for somebody. This did work here. This did work there." And after so much research, you're catching up with the future things that they're already doing. Like my Ghost Walker series, I have a hard time keeping ahead of the game, and I research very hard to do that. And I always have primary sources, but it looks, when you write it, like it's way out there, but it isn't.
Sarah MacLean 00:10:29 / #:
Publishing wasn't even on the horizon, it sounds like. And I've done my research, I know you have a large family. So, can you give us a sense of Christine's world, at this point? How does it all fit together?
Christine Feehan 00:10:42 / #:
I taught martial arts for years and women's self-defense. Well, not just women's, I mean, I taught men too, but that was my world. I surrounded myself with that 26, 27 years of that. And I took in a lot of abused children, which you can see in my books and worked with unwed mothers and I had a complete whirl there. Writing was my escape, and when I took my kids to their gymnastics and their sports, I lived out in the country. I lived way out, away from things. So, I had to drive them and I would sit at their practices and write. That's what I did.
Sarah MacLean 00:11:40 / #:
Anybody with kids in sports has done exactly this.
Christine Feehan 00:11:43 / #:
Yeah. I didn't own a computer, I didn't own a laptop. There was no R.W.A., there was none of that. I didn't even know about R.W.A., I just wrote my stories and I did them for me. That was my escape. That was the one thing that I did for myself. And if the kids watched television at night, that's what I did, is I wrote. I wasn't interested in television. We played Dungeons and Dragons, and I told stories to the kids. That was our pastime and our fun together.
Sarah MacLean 00:12:26 / #:
So, at what point did it become... How did it happen? I mean, how did you become Christine Feehan published author?
Christine Feehan 00:12:36 / #:
The thing was that there came a time when I became very ill and my doctor said to me, "You cannot do martial arts anymore." And unfortunately, children want food.
Sarah MacLean 00:12:56 / #:
They do. Generally.
Christine Feehan 00:12:58 / #:
I convinced the, especially the boys, that they did not need to eat and the girls still wanted clothes. So, I had to find a way to feed them and to keep clothes on their back and to pay the bills. And I was working a couple of jobs, but it was minimum wage, and I was like, "Okay, this is not going to work." And my girlfriend said to me, "Send one of your books in." And I said, "It doesn't work like that." One, it was kind of terrifying. I didn't think I really wanted to send... The thought of giving away one of my stories was not a good idea to me, and I also told her they aren't taking anything with vampires in it. And at that point, I had been writing my Carpathian stories.
Sarah MacLean 00:13:56 / #:
That's so true. A paranormal was unsellable, we were told, in the nineties. And so, I guess I have two questions. One is, was it just that you thought, "I'm writing vampires and I'm not reading vampires? There are no vampires to be read. There was Anne Rice and now there is no one else?" Or did somebody tell you, "Oh, you can't sell vampires?"
Christine Feehan 00:14:23 / #:
Yes. I was told that... My friend, a girl girlfriend of mine was writing to sell, and she wanted to go to this thing in San Francisco that later I found out was an R.W.A.
Sarah MacLean 00:14:41 / #:
Sure.
Jennifer Prokop 00:14:42 / #:
Oh, Okay.
Christine Feehan 00:14:44 / #:
Which I didn't know. And she didn't want to go alone, so she asked me to go with her. And I said sure. And there were all these people in there, and I was a little embarrassed because they would say things like, "Well, I've been working on my office for four months, no book." And then somebody else said, "I've been working on my book for 14 years, and I've been working on my book for... I don't know how many..."
Sarah MacLean 00:15:12 / #:
God, this is the entire experience of R.W.A., honestly.
Christine Feehan 00:15:16 / #:
And this went on and on. And then, they get to me and I'm like, "I don't know. I have 300 manuscripts [inaudible 00:15:24 / #]." And a woman who was running the whole thing, later, she came up to me and she's like, "You need an agent." And I, at that time, was not interested in selling and I told her that. And I said, "Well, the latest thing I'm writing are..." She asked me what I was writing and I said romance. And I said, "But they have vampires in them." And she goes, "Oh, those aren't selling. You can't get an editor to even look at them."
Sarah MacLean 00:16:04 / #:
This week's episode of Fated Mates is sponsored by Goldie Thomas, author of the Rake and the Fake.
Jennifer Prokop 00:16:10 / #:
Sarah, this is a historical romance and it's a debut and the first in The Husband material series. This is a book that's really going to appeal to all of our listeners who love Tessa Dare and Joanna Shupe. And so, we have Charlotte, a seamstress employed at London's most renowned [inaudible 00:16:28 / #], and she is very aware of the class differences between her and the people that come in and partake of her services. And she runs a foul of Nicholas, a charming but badly behaved viscount, and his parents are insisting that he marry as soon as possible. After a maiden Manhattan mix up Nicholas's mother mistakes Charlotte, for this woman who she thinks Nicholas should marry, and there's just all of these shenanigans that happen. This book really deals with big class issues head on. And so, Charlotte, rather than being enamored with the excessive wealth that she is now seeing in real life is, instead like, "Wait, we really need to fix this." So Nicholas, Charlotte have to really figure out how they can be together given this huge difference between them.
Sarah MacLean 00:17:24 / #:
First of all, this sounds like a terrific read. I love it when historical romances really tackle class differences. And you can read The Rake and the Fake by Goldie Thomas right now in print or ebook, wherever you get your books. Thanks as always to Goldie Thomas for sponsoring the episode. Are the 300 manuscripts under your bed also paranormal adjacent?
Christine Feehan 00:17:53 / #:
No. They weren't at that time. No.
Sarah MacLean 00:17:56 / #:
So, how did we get to dark prints?
Christine Feehan 00:17:59 / #:
Well, at that time, I had quite a few children. My oldest son was in the Navy, and he came home to visit. I had two daughters who were pregnant, and he was helping out, building a little apartment for one of them. And he came home. He was with a friend, and he came home for lunch. He had a motorcycle, and I made him lunch and we were laughing and talking, and he went out the door and I said, "Did you put on sunscreen?" And he said, "Oh, mom, you're going to be saying that to me when I'm 90." And I laughed and said, "You bet I will." And he walked out the door, and five minutes later, maybe it was five minutes later, no more than that, the phone rang and my future son-in-law gets this call. He was on for if there was an accident. And his brother called him and said, "We've got a call. I'm coming to pick you up." And then, the neighbor called me and said, "I think your son was hit." And I said, "That's impossible."
00:19:26 / #:
But it was him and he didn't make it. And one of my daughters was... Both of them were due, and there was a birthday party I'd been planning the next day for my youngest child and a wedding I was planning. And it's a very interesting thing when you lose a child, and this is for any trauma that people suffer, life goes on all around you, it just keeps going. There's no way to stop it. You can't put the brakes on, and I had to keep planning a wedding. I had to keep two girls who were giving birth. I had a very small child who expected to have a birthday, and I didn't feel anything. I couldn't remember people talking to me, conversations.
00:20:45 / #:
And it lasted forever. It went on forever. I mean, I did everything I was supposed to do. I went to my kids' schools, I participated in everything that I was supposed to do, but I didn't feel anything. And it went on for so long and I thought, "I have to find a way back." And we always played Dungeons and Dragons together, and I always talked to him about vampires, made-up stories. And one of the things we talked about was, why would somebody want to give up your soul? And the more I thought about it, the more I thought, "If you have no feelings, if you can't feel anything and nothing can touch you..." And I honestly felt like I couldn't see in color anymore. Everything felt so dull. And I thought, "I have to find a way back to the people I love."
00:21:54 / #:
And that's when I started writing dark prints, and I started coming up with this idea that these men had to find that person that could make them feel again and see in color again. And that was my way back to... You never get over it. There's no way to get over it. But I've spoken to many, many people who've had many losses or had much trauma, and everybody has their own way of dealing with it. And that was mine. We shared something, it was Calvert's and I, we shared that. And my youngest son... He's not my youngest, but Brian, he always played Dungeon Masters with a Dragon. Anyway, he played with us and we would talk a lot about it together and eventually, it really helped me. And so, developing that world became very therapeutic for me. And so, that's how that world came about. And it's surprising when people read it. Some people have that, it has that same effect on them. They feel that same way, which I find interesting, that some people get it this, that have suffered loss, where other people have no idea.
Sarah MacLean 00:23:44 / #:
Yeah, but I imagine when a book comes like that and from such a place, it's impossible to imagine. First of all, it's all packed in there because when you write, that's how it goes, whatever you're living is in there. But also, I'm so moved by this story because the Carpathians are... That series is never-ending, right? It's 38 books now. And so, do you feel like every time you go back to them, that you're going back to a similar place you're mining that same love, that same world?
Christine Feehan 00:24:28 / #:
Sure. It's funny how grief will hit you at times, where it comes out nowhere. I mean, it's been a long time for my son. I've lost a granddaughter, I've lost a grandson and all of that is very difficult. You try very hard to, I don't know how to explain it, keep going as the world keeps going. But anybody who's lost parents, anybody, at times it just suddenly comes out of nowhere, and you don't know when it's going to happen.
00:25:23 / #:
But when I write, I can feel that connection, especially in the Carpathian world with Calvert, and it makes me feel very close to him again. And also, there's so many issues in those books, women's issues, miscarriages that women have. And over the years, with so many different friends and so many different young women that have had terrible things happen to them that I've dealt with through martial arts or through other things, I've been able to talk about those things. And then, had women be able to read about them, and then that helps them in their lives. So, I've been grateful to be able to have that opportunity when I no longer can do hands-on help.
Jennifer Prokop 00:26:32 / #:
So it's interesting to me too... Probably one of my favorite of your series is Torpedo Ink, and those are characters that are really steeped in trauma. And I mean, that's another thing that sort of ties your books together. People experience terrible loss or grief or trauma, and then this connection is like, how do they survive? Especially can they, through this, access almost parts of themselves, they didn't know that existed. So, when you talk about readers contacting you, is this something that... Like they write you letters, you get emails, how do you connect with readers who are also experiencing this world? Like the emotional... Your worlds are kind of terrible worlds, but people find each other in them. So, how do your readers come to you?
Christine Feehan 00:27:38 / #:
Well, okay, Torpedo Ink is actually my most difficult series to write. When I took in children, I found that boys were treated way differently than girls. When they're molested, they oftentimes are not given counseling. Sometimes they're rejected from their family. The fathers don't want them, and they often are like, especially if they're a little bit older, it's like, "Oh, hey, you should be happy," instead of... It's traumatizing for them, but nobody wants to even talk about it with a boy. And so, I promised myself that someday I was going to address that issue. And I didn't honestly realize when I started looking at files, what I was really getting myself into. Because you have to talk with professionals and you're looking at some file and you're reading this horrible thing that you don't even want to look at anymore. And then, you talk to a professional and you say, "All right, this happened to them.
00:28:59 / #:
What's going to happen to them as an adult?" And he's like, "Oh, he's not going to be normal. His sexual life is not going to be normal." So now, you're going to have to write about this and try to find a happy ending for him. Because to me, I want to make whoever's had anything close to that experience feel hope. That's what you're trying to do, is say, "There's hope for you. Don't give up." And most of the time I get letters. There's been a few times when somebody has come personally to me, when I'm at a convention or something, they've asked to meet with me, and I've talked to them. Most of the time it's a letter and 99% of the time, and it will start out, "Please continue to read this, but I was going to kill myself. And then, I read this book." And oftentimes, especially Torpedo Ink, I think, "I can't write another one of these. I just can't do it." And then, I don't know why I get a letter like that, and I think, "Oh, my God, Christine, now you're going to have to write..."
Jennifer Prokop 00:30:22 / #:
Keep doing it.
Christine Feehan 00:30:23 / #:
"Now you're going to have to write another one." And it's interesting because not everyone gets that those books are about trauma. They don't see it. They don't. And that's always interesting to me, that not everyone gets what the book is actually about. I try to put on there to be careful about reading it. There's triggers for people... But people sometimes just don't see that.
Sarah MacLean 00:30:55 / #:
One of the things that I keep coming back to as you're talking is Jen and I talk a lot on the podcast about how we bemoan the way paranormal has faded over the last decade. And one of the reasons why is because it feels like there seems to be so much more anger and confusion and frustration, and all the things that are happening in the world right now. Paranormal, in so many ways, makes us look at those traumatic or those dangerous or angry or wicked things and face them.
00:31:41 / #:
You said this is about hope, and we always talk about romance as the literature of hope. That is the promise. So, I wonder if you could talk a little bit about, as somebody who we really do think is without you, paranormal would not be here in the way that it is. How does paranormal... How did coming to paranormal and writing paranormal and building the sub-genre happen during that time? I mean, obviously, you told the remarkable story about how the Carpathians came to be, but you've never gone away. You've never left that paranormal world. Even when you do leave it, there's always a vibe, right?
Christine Feehan 00:32:29 / #:
Yeah. Well, because for me, I know that other people don't really believe so much in all those things, but I think the world is so big and there's so many interesting unsolved mysteries in it, and I can't stop doing research. I'm like the research nut, and I find everything so fascinating. And I don't necessarily... I know we use the word paranormal, but I always think there's so much out there. And so, to me, I just think maybe it's really all true, and we haven't caught up with it yet. So, to me, it's just extending my imagination and then, trying to find reality in it. And I try to put the book at least 80% facts. I mean, twisting those facts into my fictional world. And then, just a small amount of the paranormal so that when people read it, they're like, "Oh, this could happen. This could be." When I did Lightning Game, most of that was reality. I mean, it's amazing what they're doing with lightning, and you look at it and go, "Holy moly."
Sarah MacLean 00:34:07 / #:
So, could you talk a little bit about that paranormal? I mean, I'm using paranormal now, respecting what you just said, but at paranormal as a subgenre of romance. During that boom, where it just felt... I mean, it just felt like everyone was writing these kind of big, expansive worlds with these heroes who were just larger than life and these heroines who just could match them step for step. What was going on there? Are you able to look back on that time and go, "Oh, this is why we were all doing this thing together." Or, "This was why readers were really drawn to us?"
Christine Feehan 00:34:59 / #:
I think that different times call for different things. People are, at times, they need certain things in their lives, and they're looking for heroes and they're looking for things that make them happy. Unfortunately, I don't honestly know what's happening right now, where everybody seems so angry and weird with each other. It's so strange to me. I don't understand that, but I'm getting kind of old. But I think everybody's imagination was really big and everybody at that time really accepted it. And they went all out and readers were like, "Hey, what do you have for me? I'm willing to read it." And they went for it. So, I think that was a really good time, and people were in a good place. And as things started to crumble, the economy and whatever, then I think that things sort of went downhill. And also, when you get too many people doing the same thing, it runs out. You can only do so many of the same types, and then it gets... There's a lot of repetition. And maybe towards the end, there might have been, I don't know.
Sarah MacLean 00:36:50 / #:
Were there other writers who you were friendly with, who you were in your group, were inspiring you during that time?
Christine Feehan 00:37:02 / #:
Not in my group. I had a very core group, but I will tell you, I read Mary Janice Davidson, and she made me laugh so hard. I am not the best at writing humor. When I read her, I would laugh so hard and I would just about die. She made me laugh so much. There were certain ones that you'd pick them up and to be honest, I didn't read much in my own genre because I didn't want to step on somebody's voice, but I couldn't help it with her. Every time she had a book come out, I'd go get it, because she just was so funny. But like I say, I don't write very humorously, and I try, but my humor falls flat.
Jennifer Prokop 00:38:01 / #:
So, did you join R.W.A., you mentioned, sort of not knowing what it was? Was that something that-
Christine Feehan 00:38:09 / #:
I had to, at one point, because my house... I was with Dorchester at the time when I first... They were the only ones who would read my book and then they bought it.
Sarah MacLean 00:38:19 / #:
Who was your editor there?
Christine Feehan 00:38:21 / #:
Alicia Condon. Alicia Condon. Okay. Okay. And she was wonderful. She was.
Sarah MacLean 00:38:26 / #:
And she acquired you at Dorchester?
Christine Feehan 00:38:28 / #:
She did, yes. And people always said things about Dorchester, but they gave new authors a chance when nobody else would.
Sarah MacLean 00:38:37 / #:
And took such risk in terms of the content of the books. I mean, I was saying to Jen before we started that one of my very favorite... I write historicals, and one of my very favorite historicals is The Madness of Lord Ian Mackenzie, which, the hero... It's such a different kind of historical, and I just can't... I think it benefited from Dorchester.
Christine Feehan 00:39:03 / #:
I think that they did a really good job at getting people seen when nobody else would even look at them. Not one other house would've... Well, they wouldn't...
Sarah MacLean 00:39:17 / #:
Sure. Vampires, right?
Christine Feehan 00:39:19 / #:
Right, they wouldn't look at it. And she did, and she picked it up, so that was pretty amazing of her to do that.
Sarah MacLean 00:39:29 / #:
And then, you were with Dorchester until Dorchester folded?
Christine Feehan 00:39:34 / #:
I was already being looked at by Berkley. Cindy Wong had already made an offer for me, and I've been with her ever since. She's been my editor for years and years and years. So yeah, I was already with Berkley at that point, but they had a bunch of my books still.
Sarah MacLean 00:39:58 / #:
Because you're such a fast writer. Now, were you build... Now, how was that working? Were you pulling things out from under the bed or...
Christine Feehan 00:40:06 / #:
No, no.
Sarah MacLean 00:40:07 / #:
The bad manuscripts are still under the bed.
Christine Feehan 00:40:09 / #:
No, because the ones under the bed were not polished and they weren't that good.
Sarah MacLean 00:40:15 / #:
I don't believe it, but okay.
Christine Feehan 00:40:16 / #:
No, they're not that good.
Sarah MacLean 00:40:20 / #:
So, because you're so prolific as well, what is it? Almost a hundred books, is that right?
Christine Feehan 00:40:27 / #:
Yes, very close to a hundred books.
Sarah MacLean 00:40:30 / #:
And so, you are really... I mean, you still writing really quickly. You're writing at a self-published pace.
Christine Feehan 00:40:39 / #:
I actually am slowing down a little bit so I can go visit occasionally. Go see my mom, and not my mom, my sisters, occasionally. I have a lot of sisters.
Sarah MacLean 00:40:53 / #:
And do you feel like... You have a big fam... You have a large number of children, a lot of sisters. Do you feel like that those kinds of relationships are part of why you have been drawn so much to Pax? I mean, big communities of characters.
Christine Feehan 00:41:13 / #:
Yeah, I've always loved being in a big family.
Jennifer Prokop 00:41:18 / #:
This week's episode of Faded Mates is sponsored by Lumi Labs, creators of microdose gummies.
Sarah MacLean 00:41:24 / #:
So Lumi Labs, our old friends, you've heard us talk about microdosing and the concept of microdosing before on the podcast. It's commonly associated with psychedelics, with wellness, performance enhancement and creativity. If you're looking to consider microdosing, you can do a quick Google search or you can go to microdose.com and learn more about how taking a microdose gummy might help you just with a little bit of mood enhancement with maybe helping you sleep, which is what they do for me.
Jennifer Prokop 00:41:57 / #:
For me too.
Sarah MacLean 00:41:58 / #:
Pain, anxiety. Eric takes them for creativity and a general kind of joyfulness across the day. He said to me the other day, "You know what the thing is about these gummies? You take one and you just like, an hour and a half later, just feel like, "I feel like I'm in a good mood."
Jennifer Prokop 00:42:17 / #:
Yes. And listen, we all need that these days. If they didn't put me to sleep, they would definitely help me feel like I was in a good mood. Anyway, microdosing is available nationwide, and we have all tried these gummies, and we think you might enjoy them too, if they're something you're interested in.
Sarah MacLean 00:42:37 / #:
So, you can go to microdose.com and use the code Fated Mates to get 30% on your first order. They have all different kinds of flavors you can try. I'm a particular fan of cotton candy. Lately, I also like one that's orange flavored, so you should try, check it out, give it a try. And thanks, as always, to Lumi Labs for sponsoring this week's episode. Another interesting hallmark of your career is that you have several, very long-running series that you're essentially writing concurrently. And so, this is unusual. A lot of people will start and finish a series and you have a bunch that just are kind of continuing. So, what's your process for deciding what's next, keeping it all straight? That seems like a huge job.
Christine Feehan 00:43:40 / #:
It's very strange, my brain, how it works. A character will come to me and say, "I want my story told." And I can't write... I couldn't write two Carpathian stories in a row because I'd be bored with that world. So, I write that story and then, while I'm writing that story, all of a sudden, another character from another world will jump into my head and start pushing at me. And I have tell it to be quiet. Like, "It's not your turn yet. Wait till I'm finished." And then, that one will will... A lot of times now, because I'll have a contract and they'll want the stories in a certain order order. And so, I had to train my brain to say, "It's going to be like this." And if they mess up the order on me, it's actually difficult now, because my brain would be like, "We have to do it this way."
Jennifer Prokop 00:44:48 / #:
I'm not going to get the titles right, but the head of Torpedo Ink was the husband of the end of the series with all the sisters?
Christine Feehan 00:45:00 / #:
Right, yeah. Mm-hmm.
Jennifer Prokop 00:45:00 / #:
So, when characters intersect in that way, is that a surprise to you?
Christine Feehan 00:45:07 / #:
Because I wasn't planning on publishing Torpedo Ink. I wasn't going to. And when I had that in there, Cindy said to me, "Do you have these other characters..."
Sarah MacLean 00:45:21 / #:
We have this guy.
Christine Feehan 00:45:23 / #:
And I said, "Well, yeah, but I don't think they're something that I could publish because it's a pretty raw, edgy series." And she said, "Well, let me read it." And that's kind of how that ended up getting published.
Sarah MacLean 00:45:40 / #:
We've had several people on who are edited by Cindy, and it sounds like she is one of those editors who is willing to just again, take the risk with you and trust you to move forward.
Christine Feehan 00:45:55 / #:
She will take a risk. Yeah, she will. She's not-
Sarah MacLean 00:45:56 / #:
That's amazing.
Christine Feehan 00:45:57 / #:
She's pretty fearless, and she's not afraid. If I went to her and said, "I'd like to publish this." And it's like out there, she would say, "Go ahead and write it. Let's take a look at it."
Jennifer Prokop 00:46:14 / #:
Have there been other editors, publishers, I don't know, art directors?
Sarah MacLean 00:46:21 / #:
Oh, wait, can we talk about those early covers, first of all?
Jennifer Prokop 00:46:24 / #:
Oh, yeah.
Sarah MacLean 00:46:25 / #:
So, I'm so fascinated but... Listen, I could talk about romance novel covers all day every day. In fact, Jen will tell you, I kind of do, but those early covers, so that first cover of Dark Prints is a clinch. It's like a historical clinch, presumably because no one knew what the heck to do with these books, right?
Christine Feehan 00:46:45 / #:
Right.
Sarah MacLean 00:46:45 / #:
And then, can you walk us through... Are you able to remember or recall how paranormal became... How it started to look the way it did? Why we moved away from those clinches?
Christine Feehan 00:47:01 / #:
Well, there were funny, funny things that happened with some of them.
Sarah MacLean 00:47:05 / #:
I love it.
Christine Feehan 00:47:07 / #:
It was Jacque's book and they put him on the cover, and I said, "Well, this cover his spine." Except that he had, or she had red hair. It was a clinch cover, so they washed the cover red.
Sarah MacLean 00:47:32 / #:
Oh, my gosh. The whole cover?
Christine Feehan 00:47:34 / #:
The whole cover. So he is like sunburned. I called him Lobster Boy after that.
Sarah MacLean 00:47:41 / #:
What book is this?
Christine Feehan 00:47:44 / #:
It was Dark Desire.
Sarah MacLean 00:47:45 / #:
I'm looking it up right now.
Christine Feehan 00:47:48 / #:
So, he literally has... He's red and so-
Sarah MacLean 00:47:53 / #:
I think I know what this is.
Christine Feehan 00:47:55 / #:
I did. I called him Lobster Boy. So, every time anybody would refer to him, I would think, in my head, I'd turn it around and he'd be Lobster Boy.
Sarah MacLean 00:48:03 / #:
Oh, no.
Christine Feehan 00:48:06 / #:
And my girlfriend, one of my friends, she just loved him. She called him Pooky face. She'd be like, "Don't you call my-"
Sarah MacLean 00:48:14 / #:
He's orange.
Christine Feehan 00:48:16 / #:
Yes. He is.
Sarah MacLean 00:48:19 / #:
Everybody look down in your podcast right now. We'll show it to you. Yeah, he's orange.
Christine Feehan 00:48:24 / #:
Yeah.
Sarah MacLean 00:48:26 / #:
How funny.
Christine Feehan 00:48:27 / #:
Yeah. And here's the other thing that happened with that book. This is just a little... So, it starts off with, there was blood in the River of It Running or something, the first sentence. And I had worked on that first chapter a million ways, and he's insane. I mean, when he comes awake, he's totally insane. And if you don't know what happened to him, you would hate that guy because he's an ass. So, you have to start out with him and knowing what happened to him. And I think I wrote that first chapter 40 Different Ways. Well, when they got the book, they're like, "We have to change this first chapter because they have to know that it's a romance, and you can't start out this way." I'm like, "No, I'm not changing it."
Sarah MacLean 00:49:25 / #:
How funny.
Christine Feehan 00:49:27 / #:
I go, "Toss the book." "We're not tossing the book."
Sarah MacLean 00:49:36 / #:
Amazing. No. And then, when we first got on with you and you said, "Well, I don't know. Am I a trailblazer?" Christine, Christine...
Christine Feehan 00:49:43 / #:
Here's why.
Sarah MacLean 00:49:44 / #:
This is how paranormals begin, now with the heroes in trauma and then, you just sort of ride the wave until you get to the kissing parts.
Christine Feehan 00:49:54 / #:
I finally just said, "You know that Clinch cover? They're going to know it's a romance."
Sarah MacLean 00:50:00 / #:
Right, exactly. I think they'll know. So, at what point did it feel like... I mean, this is obviously a market thing. This is how the sausage is made a little, but when does everybody realize, "Oh, paranormals need a different look"? Is that just because it started to become... So the market just became more exciting?
Christine Feehan 00:50:21 / #:
I really think when I moved over to Berkley, I think that the marketing people at Berkley kind of-
Jennifer Prokop 00:50:32 / #:
Figured that out.
Christine Feehan 00:50:33 / #:
Yeah, they were the ones. For me, for my team, they were the ones who kind of said, "Okay, we're going to do this differently." Interesting enough, in Germany, my books, all of them, even the Ghost Walkers, all of them have bats on the cover.
Jennifer Prokop 00:50:57 / #:
Okay. Sure, sure.
Sarah MacLean 00:50:57 / #:
It's a can of soup, right?
Jennifer Prokop 00:51:00 / #:
I know. I'm like, "Does Saphian mean Bat and German?" I don't know.
Sarah MacLean 00:51:03 / #:
That's funny.
Christine Feehan 00:51:04 / #:
Maybe. What else?
Sarah MacLean 00:51:05 / #:
Yeah.
Christine Feehan 00:51:07 / #:
They do very well but...
Sarah MacLean 00:51:10 / #:
Hey, listen. If it ain't broke, right?
Jennifer Prokop 00:51:14 / #:
You can tell I really love your books, but one of the things Sarah and I have talked about a lot is romance comes and goes, right? The way that what's popular as a trope, what kind of sub-genres are popular, what kinds of hero archetypes are popular. These things change over time. And right now, the romance hero has changed a lot, but I don't necessarily think that your romance heroes has have changed a lot. So, how do you... I don't know. Do you feel the push of market forces, or it doesn't matter, your readers are...
Christine Feehan 00:51:57 / #:
I don't look at trends and I don't look at that kind of thing at all. I have to go with whatever I'm passionate about and I have to go with whatever character's in my head, and I just hope my readers will love the story and love the characters. I write the best book that I can. I try every single book to improve and give a better story and sometimes, I succeed. I do my best, but there is no way that I can write a story to the market. It's not going to happen. And I know that, so I don't even try.
Sarah MacLean 00:52:41 / #:
Well, what's amazing is you've made a career out of arguably not writing to market. You wrote vampires before vampires were cool. You moved to shifters before everyone else moved to shifters and it's amazing, the inspiration that you give writers is write your truth.
Christine Feehan 00:53:03 / #:
Well, the series that I'm doing, I know it's a bad thing to call it the murder series. I really shouldn't-
Sarah MacLean 00:53:10 / #:
Not for me.
Jennifer Prokop 00:53:13 / #:
I think that might be more to market than we'd like to admit, honestly.
Christine Feehan 00:53:17 / #:
Well, I got into that one because one of my daughters does a lot of climbing. She used to live in Bishop, which is up in the mammoth area near Yosemite. And she knows these women and all of them have these incredible stories. And they all became friends, and they would go climbing together, and I would listen to their stories of where they came from. And then, they have these insane jobs. And I was thinking, "Wow, this is amazing." And one day, they were telling me about this hike they'd gone on, and I thought, "what a perfect place for a serial killer." I'm like, "Okay..." They were all going to go on a hike together and camping. And I said, "Okay, girls, I really want you to start looking around for a place where a serial killer might be hanging out, ready to-"
Jennifer Prokop 00:54:20 / #:
Just report back.
Sarah MacLean 00:54:20 / #:
It's totally fine.
Christine Feehan 00:54:24 / #:
So, after that, I started having the girls, every time they go someplace, do that for me. And the next thing I know, they're taking tasers with them.
Sarah MacLean 00:54:34 / #:
I was going to say they stop hiking. They're done with that now.
Christine Feehan 00:54:38 / #:
I kind of ruined it for them. We're talking murder every time we go to the restaurants.
Sarah MacLean 00:54:48 / #:
So, one of the questions that we often ask is, what's the hallmark of a Christine Feehan romance? When a reader picks up a Christine Feehan novel, one of your nearly-100 of them, what do they know they're going to get?
Christine Feehan 00:55:06 / #:
Well, for sure, they're going to get a happy ending. Absolutely sure they're going to get happy ending. I write, always, about, I think, hope and about finding your own version of family. It doesn't matter what the setting is or what the drama that has been... It's about... Or what I want to say genre, but of course, it's romance, but it could be military, it could be suspense, it could be anything. But set in that, there has to be that hope and the finding of family and that happy ending. That's what you're going to get. That's what you're going to find.
Sarah MacLean 00:56:04 / #:
And we didn't talk about this, but it's also going to be super sexy.
Jennifer Prokop 00:56:08 / #:
Oh, yeah.
Sarah MacLean 00:56:09 / #:
And I feel like we should sort of touch on this because I do feel like for me, those early Feehans were-
Jennifer Prokop 00:56:20 / #:
And the late ones.
Sarah MacLean 00:56:21 / #:
No, no. I mean, for me though, Sarah, when I stumbled upon Christine Feehan in the bookstore, it felt like I'd never read anything like this before. And I wonder, can you talk a little bit about that, about really bringing sex to the genre in a lot of ways? I feel like there was, not that it didn't exist before, but there's something about the Feehan sensuality that is different.
Christine Feehan 00:56:53 / #:
Well, to me, the characters are really real. People have asked me that before. I'm not in the book at all. When I'm writing that book, it really is the characters. I don't plot out the book. So the characters are so real to me that I know everything about them from the time they were little. And so, when they're moving through that story, it's all about them. And they're the ones that are having sex or not having sex or whatever's happening to them.
00:57:33 / #:
And so, I'm not somebody who will ever cut and paste a love scene. You're not going to get the same one because they're always... It's a different couple. And so, they react differently to each other and to whatever situation is going on. And I step back so far when I'm writing that I'm not there, and really, it's almost plays out like it's reality for them. And so, to me, it's just part of life. I don't get embarrassed. It's just part of life, and I put that in. And part of the reason for that, and I know this is going to sound crazy, but so many girls that had had these terrible things happen to them would be very promiscuous, but they never felt anything. And I would say, "It's because you don't have a good partner. You're not in love with your partner. He's not doing anything for you." So, I wanted them to know what good sex was, and if you have a book that you can read when no one's around and you can see what good sex is, then it's... When you have a partner, and I can tell you, this is another thing I get lots of letters.
Sarah MacLean 00:59:16 / #:
Oh, interesting. I believe that.
Christine Feehan 00:59:20 / #:
I even had letters from guys who told me they would not cheat on their wives, military guys, because they realized that their wife was too important to them. And I mean, it's amazing. And writers should realize that the words they put down touch people. And you don't know who you're going to touch, and you don't know what you say, what it's going to do to somebody. I mean, when I write something, I don't know who it's going to affect. But I deliberately did put sex in my books for that reason, because I wanted people to know there is good sex. No, that there is, and you should feel something.
Sarah MacLean 01:00:19 / #:
And I love the way you talk about it, as you are so distant from the book itself, you are just writing the book. And I think that's really what a Feehan... That's why it feels so different as a reader or did. In those early books, they felt transcendent because they did feel intense and passionate in that way, that sort of private way.
Christine Feehan 01:00:46 / #:
Yeah. Now, when I started the Leopard series, that was kind of my nod to erotica. Yeah, erotic wasn't a huge, huge thing then. Now, it kind of is, but it wasn't at the time. And so, I was like, "Okay, I'm going to just do a little bit of that." And that was before to Torpedo Ink. And so, I thought, "Oh, I'll put that in my leopard one because it made sense to go there." But then, I started writing Torpedo Ink and I'm like, "Uh-oh, now I've got two."
Jennifer Prokop 01:01:23 / #:
Yeah. That's hot, everybody. I'm okay with it.
Sarah MacLean 01:01:29 / #:
No, the Leopard series. I mean, I remember coming to the Leopard series and just feeling like nobody had ever done anything like that before.
Jennifer Prokop 01:01:38 / #:
Yeah. So, I think the question we love to end with is... So, it's kind of a two-part question, I guess. One is, there a book that you hear about over and over again from readers? And then, the question we have for you is there a book of yours that's your favorite, the one that you are most proud of?
Christine Feehan 01:01:58 / #:
Well, the one I hear about all the time from Readers is Dark Celebration. Every single person wants me to write that book over and over and over.
Jennifer Prokop 01:02:11 / #:
They can just reread it. They can reread it. Reread it, everybody.
Sarah MacLean 01:02:13 / #:
It slaps every time.
Christine Feehan 01:02:16 / #:
It's so funny.
Sarah MacLean 01:02:17 / #:
And why do you think that is?
Christine Feehan 01:02:19 / #:
I think because it revisits characters they love.
Sarah MacLean 01:02:22 / #:
Yes.
Christine Feehan 01:02:24 / #:
I think that's it.
Sarah MacLean 01:02:25 / #:
It's reader Karen Feeding, right?
Christine Feehan 01:02:28 / #:
So, I think that that's it. What book would I be the most proud of?
Sarah MacLean 01:02:35 / #:
Or the one that's most special to you? People take it in different ways.
Christine Feehan 01:02:41 / #:
Probably the one that's the most special to me is Dark Prince, for obvious reasons. That would probably be the one, I would say.
Sarah MacLean 01:02:49 / #:
Well, thank you for being with us today.
Jennifer Prokop 01:02:51 / #:
This was incredible. Thank you so much. Thank you for joining us and it's really an honor.
Christine Feehan 01:02:59 / #:
I really enjoyed being with you. Thank you for inviting me.
Sarah MacLean 01:03:06 / #:
Every single one of these goes differently.
Jennifer Prokop 01:03:10 / #:
Yeah, it's amazing. I think the thing I liked about our conversation with Christine is how personal it felt. I mean, obviously, not just the stories that she shared, but just you can really feel how reading and writing and thinking about hope and happily ever afters is really something she spent her entire life on. And there's a way that I think that just really came through in that conversation. It was so fascinating.
Sarah MacLean 01:03:39 / #:
Absolutely. She talked a few times about how readers have approached her and talked to her about how special her books are to them and how moving they are and how inspirational and important they are to readers. And every time she told them, I had the same thought, which was, "I think it must be really wonderful to have a conversation, a personal conversation with Christine." She feels like she's present in the moment the whole time, and it was really special.
Jennifer Prokop 01:04:14 / #:
I get very distracted by people. I feel like even in my classroom, I'm kind of constantly doing 800 things at once, but you really feel that she probably is such a great mom and a grandma. You know what I mean? Like the attention that she really gives and the way that she talks about... I mean, I'm fascinated too by people who say, "I am a writer. I've always been a writer. I love writing. There's 300 books under the bed."
Sarah MacLean 01:04:41 / #:
A Compulsive Writer. I love that. The sort of, "I would've written with or without publishing." I loved that story about how she got dragged up to an R.W.A. meeting and everybody was like, "Well, I've been working on the same thing for a while." And she's like, "I have 300 books, but I never intended to do this."
Jennifer Prokop 01:05:00 / #:
I also think that that goes hand in hand then with not really worrying about "the market". So, when you are writing in that way and you've had success writing in that way, and you've had readers respond to you in that way, then I think it's really powerful to see someone stay the course.
Sarah MacLean 01:05:24 / #:
I feel like if you are out there right now and you are looking at a manuscript and you think it won't sell you because of the market, hearing Christine talk must be so important and inspirational for you, because we've talked a lot about... We've talked to people like Jayne Ann Krentz, I loved, as she mentioned, Jayne. We've talked about Jayne... When we talked to Jayne, when we talked to J.R. Ward, we've heard the story of people who change genres because, as J.R. Ward puts it, they were fired or it just wasn't selling, so they pivoted. And we've talked so much about how writers have to be nimble to thrive in the genre. And I think what's fascinating is that Christine is nimble and she is full of ideas and shifting and changing, but she stays really true to her brand and to her point of view. And I think that's a really valuable thing to hold onto right now, especially, as we see romance really grappling with those big questions about what comes next and have we oversaturated and these kind of big issues.
Jennifer Prokop 01:06:40 / #:
We didn't have a chance to ask her. She has re-released some of her romances.
Sarah MacLean 01:06:45 / #:
Oh, we meant to ask.
Jennifer Prokop 01:06:46 / #:
I know, as a sort of-
Sarah MacLean 01:06:48 / #:
And then, we got distracted.
Jennifer Prokop 01:06:49 / #:
Author's cuts. With the rise of self-publishing, I think there's a way in which... There's always a market for something. There's always a small dedicated group of readers who are looking for whatever it is that you are selling. It's traditional publishing that has... It can't quite have that leeway to just be like, "Yes." And so, it's really interesting to hear her talk about that Dorchester imprint taking a chance on her and the difference that made. And it's funny because that is not a... I mean, Dorchester, I feel like is not a name I've even ever heard spoken about before in romance.
Sarah MacLean 01:07:36 / #:
I mean, it's really fascinating because I hadn't thought of Dorchester until-
Jennifer Prokop 01:07:42 / #:
We were prepping.
Sarah MacLean 01:07:42 / #:
I was doing research. We were prepping for this episode. You guys, these are the only episodes we actually prep for. We do actually do research before we talk to these people because we are trying to get them to think we're intelligent and so, we know what we're doing. But no, I mean, Dorchester... And now, of course, I want to go back and look a little more at Dorchester. But I was thinking about our conversation with Radcliffe, when we were talking about how these small presses were really the places where big adventures were happening in romance. And obviously, for Radcliffe and for E.E. Ottoman, that was a different kind of thing, that was happening because queer presses had to publish queer books because traditional publishers weren't doing that. But paranormal, I think about those digital-only presses, again, those kind of Ellora's Cave and Sam Haynes and those places that were taking big risks. And so, it doesn't surprise me that one of the mothers of paranormal came up through a place that doesn't exist anymore.
Jennifer Prokop 01:08:56 / #:
This is something I don't... I don't know that I've ever heard any author explicitly state as clearly, which is when you write from a place... When she told that, I mean, heartbreaking story of her son's death, that somehow there are some readers who can plug into that and see a, I don't know, see themselves in that too. And I think that's one of the things, we talk so much about romance being about the genre of hope, about feelings. Romance is about feelings, but it's our feelings as readers too. And I think that this is something that I was really impressed at how clear-eyed it felt like she was about that relationship. If I'm writing from this place, it's going to find the readers in that place.
Sarah MacLean 01:09:55 / #:
And I also think there is... Talk about a fearlessness in terms of character and theme, because she really does write about trauma. And maybe we'll put in the show notes a link to the discussion that Jen and Adriana Herrera have had about writing trauma and how romance and trauma kind of do go hand in hand a lot. But it's interesting because I think writing trauma is a thing that we are talking about a lot in the industry without talking about it, really having conversations about how you put these things on the page so that characters and writers and readers can see it in a raw way. I think she even used that word, raw. And these books are not for the faint of heart. They are rough reads, and she is writing into that space in a way that I think a lot of us are afraid to do. And I think it's because she clearly has seen it, she's faced it. And I loved every minute of that conversation.
Jennifer Prokop 01:11:19 / #:
Romance gives me so much. But when I kind of interact with someone who has the same root causes, and I've talked about this before. I started reading romance after my parents got divorced. The pain of that was the only thing that made me feel hope and better, was reading romance, that there are people out here who have also gone through painful things and they find a way to love each other. And so, it really is interesting, I think, for me, when you talk to someone who, I don't know, talk about the branches of the romance tree. It feels like we were planted in the same ground.
Sarah MacLean 01:12:01 / #:
Yeah. Yeah. Gosh, that was a very cool conversation. I mean, I should have expected it to be, but...
Jennifer Prokop 01:12:10 / #:
A lot of our trailblazers were really pushing for, "Tell us the story of publishing. Tell us your story through that journey." And that's not what her story was about, and I loved hearing it. It was amazing.
S05.20: Shifter Romance: Manimals!
You’ve been asking for a shifter interstitial, and we like to give you what you want. Today, we’re talking manimals! We go back to the beginning and touch on all the shifter/Lycae business that we dealt with in Season 1, and then we talk about all the ways werewolves have evolved into were-other things and then into DNA-splicing experiments. The recs get wild, the plots get weird, and there’s a lot happening!
Our next episode will drop Saturday in honor of the greatest of holidays, Derek Craven Day! To celebrate, we recommend rereading Lisa Kleypas’s Dreaming of You and then enjoying a full hour of our banter about our proudest achievement. In observance of DCD23, we will not be releasing a Wednesday episode next week, but we will be with you all the week after!
Our first read along of 2023 (in February) is Tracy MacNish’s Stealing Midnight—we’ve heard the calls from our gothic romance readers and we’re delivering with this truly bananas story, in which the hero is dug out of a grave and delivered, barely alive, to the heroine. Get ready. You can find Stealing Midnight (for $1.99!) at Amazon, B&N, Kobo, or Apple Books.
Show Notes
Today’s show is apparently brought to you by 1983. The song She’s a Maniac was on the Flashback soundtrack, and Manimal was a television show.
We talked so much about shifters in Season One, you just have to go back. I’m sorry.
Derek Craven Day is coming this Saturday. Please celebrate responsibly.
Books Mentioned This Episode
Sponsors
Jess K. Hardy, author of Come as You Are
Get it at Amazon, free on Kindle Unlimited,
visit Jess K. Hardy at jesskhardy.com
and
Lumi Labs, creators of Microdose Gummies
Visit microdose.com and use the code FATEDMATES
for 30% off and free shipping on your order
S04.48: J. R. Ward: Trailblazer
The final Trailblazer of Season 4 is a very excellent one—we’re welcoming JR Ward to Fated Mates! Best known as the author of The Black Dagger Brotherhood (a series that blooded Jen), JR began her career writing contemporary romances under the name Jessica Bird before turning to the vampires the romance world adores. In this episode, we talk about the twists and turns of her early career, about the influence of her mother and other powerful women in her life, about the business of being JR Ward, about her process of writing the Black Dagger Brotherhood, and about her relationship to her characters.
We hope you enjoy this conversation as much as we did, and we are so grateful to JR Ward for spending some time with us.
Thanks to Avon Books, publishers of Beverly Jenkins’s To Catch a Raven, Blackstone Publishing, publishers of Nora Zelevansky’s Competitive Grieving, and Alyxandra Harvey, author of How to Marry a Duke, for sponsoring the episode. Stay tuned at the end of the episode for an audio excerpt of Competitive Grieving.
Next week, we finish out Season 4 as is traditional — with a deep dive episode on Sarah’s summer release, Heartbreaker! Get it at Amazon, Apple Books, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, at your local indie, or signed and with special swag (and a Fated Mates sticker!) from her local indie, WORD in Brooklyn!
Show Notes
Welcome J.R. Ward, author of the Black Dagger Brotherhood, a series of paranormal romances. She also wrote category romance under the name Jessica Bird.
We did a deep dive of JR Ward's Dark Lover in Season Two. Listen here.
People Mentioned: editor Hannah Braaten, publisher Jennifer Bergstrom, publicist Andrew Nguyen, editor and publisher Kara Cesare.
Authors Mentioned: Sherilyn Kenyon, Laurel K. Hamilton, Christine Feehan, Kresley Cole, Nora Roberts, Kristen Ashley, Christopher Rice, and Gena Showalter.
Books Mentioned This Episode
Sponsors:
This week’s episode of Fated Mates is sponsored by:
Avon Books, publishers of Beverly Jenkins’s To Catch a Raven, available at
Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books, Kobo, and your local indie.
Visit beverlyjenkins.net
and
Blackstone Publishing, publishers of Nora Zelevansky’s Competitive Grieving,
available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books, and Kobo.
Visit norazelevansky.com
and
Alyxandra Harvey, author of How to Marry a Duke,
available at Amazon.
Visit alyxandraharvey.com
S04.38: These Books Bang: The Sexiest Romance Novels
Headphones in, y’all. We have sixty-nine (that’s right, 69, by pure unplanned luck!) recommendations for you this week — everything from bonkers to bloody to blazing hot…naughty bits that we believe deliver the whole banana (and sometimes no banana at all, if you know what we mean). Pencils ready…your time starts…now.
This week’s episode is thanks to Julie Block, the Fated Mates listener who won an episode of the podcast in the Romance for Reproductive Justice auction sponsored by The Meet Cute Romance Bookshop and Fizzery in La Mesa, CA. Julie made a generous donation to the Collective Power Fund at the National Network of Abortion Funds, and in doing so, got to pick the episode topic — Books that Bang!
Thanks to Melissa McTernan, author of Married to the Fae Queen, the second book in the Fairy Realm series, for sponsoring the episode. Thanks, also, to Lumi Labs, creators of Microdose Gummies. Visit microdose.com and use code FATEDMATES to get free shipping & 30% off your first order.
Show Notes
Thanks to Julie Block for suggesting this episode and donating to abortion funds for the Romancing for Reproductive Justice Auction, sponsored by The Meet Cute Romance Bookshop & Fizzery, opening fall of 2022 in La Mesa, CA. It is not too late to donate to the Collective Power Fund at the National Network of Abortion Funds.
While we name checked some Fated Mates classic recommendations like Tessa Bailey, Jessa Kane, and London Hale, somehow we recorded this episode without once mentioning the name of Charlotte Stein. So raise a glass to her and all the other authors writing super hot books that we forgot to mention.
Probably you want to see Jen Porter's illustrations of the drilldo. (PS. Protip: you might put "drilldo" in the search field of twitter thinking that Jen's tweets will come up, and that would be a mistake unless you want to see it real and in action. Ask me how I know.)
The WTF Bucket
Bold & Bloody
Fun & Toys
The More the Merrier
Bondage and (chastity) Belts
The Bad Boy Mystique
Hot Historicals
Just Add Milk
Consent & DubCon
Voyeurism & Exhibitionism
I Have Tremendous Upper Body Strength
Oh, no! Feelings!
Just F'ing Hot
Sponsors
This week’s episode of Fated Mates is sponsored by:
Melissa McTernan, author of Married to the Fae Queen, the second book
in the Fairy Realm series, available in print and through Kindle Unlimited.
and
Lumi Labs, creators of Microdose Gummies
Visit microdose.com and use the code FATEDMATES
for 30% off and free shipping on your order
S04.31: Vampire Romance Novels
At the request of Instagram, we’re talking Vampires today! We’re doing some deep cuts, returning to Kresley Cole for a minute or two, and then digging into worldbuilding, morality chain, why these books lend themselves to massive series, and ultimately…why we love these big toothy jerks. If you’re a paranormal reader, get your pencils ready — especially if you’re new to it, because we’re taking everyone way back to the beginnings of the subgenre!
Thanks to Kelly Cain, author of An Acquired Taste, and Alyxandra Harvey, author of How to Marry an Earl, for sponsoring the episode.
Our next read along is Julie James’s Something About You. Get it at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books, Kobo, or at your local bookstore.
Show Notes
We’ve talked about vampires on past episodes: Kresley’s IAD vampires (Conrad is our favorite); Dark Lover by JR Ward; and last fall, we had Jenny Nordbak on for a monster interstitial.
If you’re in Brooklyn and looking for a bookstore that carries lots of PNR, try The Bookmark Shoppe.
In film, after 9/11, the rise of the anti/superhero to reconcile America's participation in a war. After the economic downturn, it was the rise of zombies to justify the way America was leaving poor people behind. And in this TikTok by Virgolikebeyonce, she suggests we're about to see media that reconciles our obsession with work/capitalism. We at FM have been noting a rise of the regular, blue-collar hero, which would track with this.
A hegemony explainer.
Tessa Bailey hit #1 on both the USAToday and New York Times bestseller lists with Hook, Line, and Sinker.
The Sherilyn Kenyon situation is truly weird.
Even eBooks can go out of print, for example, The Faustian Brothers series by Evie Byrne.
Our next read along is Something About You by Julie James.
Vampire Romances
Vampire TV Shows
Sponsors
This week’s episode of Fated Mates is sponsored by:
Kelly Cain, author of An Acquired Taste,
available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books, Kobo or wherever you get your ebooks.
Visit kellycainauthor.com
and
Alyxandra Harvey, author of How to Marry an Earl,
available at Amazon.
Visit alyxandraharvey.com
S04.06: Monster Romance Interstitial with Jenny Nordbak
We’re talking minotaurs and spiders and orcs and gargoyles…it’s Monster Romance week at Fated Mates! Jenny Nordbak of the Wicked Wallflowers and Bonkers Romance podcast joins us to talk about this explosive, extremely popular genre that both intrigues and perplexes us.
Our next read along is Uzma Jalaluddin’s Hana Khan Carries On. Find it at: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books, Kobo, or at your local indie.
This episode sponsored by Radish: Bottomless content; one cute app. Visit radish.social/fatedmates for 24 free coins and to read your first Radish story.
Show Notes
Welcome Jenny Nordbak. Her first romance, His Leading Lady, was just released, (Jen did the final developmental edit!) and she just started the Bonkers Romance podcast with Melody from the Heaving Bosoms podcast. Check it out!
Although there is lots of crossover with paranormal or alien, Jenny defines monsters as: creatures who don’t shift into humans, you’d definitely scream if you saw them running down the street, but human enough to be able to bang. Although no one mentioned on the episode, here is the single greatest monster explanation ever seen on twitter.
The cartoon Sarah refered to is called The Harkness Test, and it's a reference to Dr. Who.
More about what it means to go into the Amazon dungeon--this, of course, is related to attempts to deplatform sex everywhere on the internet. Besialisty cartoon that Sarah is going to look for
Baby Jenny imprinted on Fantasia, specifically the centaurs and Chernabog. She also loved the Gargoyles TV show and the orcs in Lord of the Rings.
Here’s listener Alyssa Long’s terrific thread about monsters and disability. Often, writers use ableist tropes in their monster-creation, and Alyssa’s thread talks about how and why this is harmful. (Any mistakes in the summarizing of this thread are Jen’s!) In that thread, Alyssa shared a great article about ableism in the horror genre, and although we loved The Witcher, it reinforced some of the most common problems with putting disabilities on the screen.
Sarah is hosting a writing workship to kick of NaNo--register here!
S03.31: Morality Chain Romance
We’re so thrilled to be talking morality chain romance! We’ve owed this episode to Katee Robert for nearly a year, and we have no excuses for how long this has taken, except that time in 2020 was a flat circle. Here, we get down to business—we tackle the definition of Morality Chain, and how it differs from Dark Romance, how it connects with mafia, criminals, pirates, highwaymen, and the original Alpha.
Check all your Content Warnings before you begin with these books!
Whether you're new to Fated Mates this month or have been with us for all three seasons, we adore you, and we're so grateful to have you. We hope you’re reading the best books this week.
Next week, we’re reading Alexis Daria’s You Had Me At Hola, one of our Best Books of 2020! Find it at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, or Apple Books.
Show Notes
One very important note: we highly recommend doing a thorough search for content warnings for all the books and movies we mention this week.
We love Katee Robert, who we had on as a guest for the menage interstitial. Katee bid on this item at Kennedy Ryan’s Lift 4 Autism auction. It happens every spring, so keep an eye on this page for the 2021 auction if you’d like to pick the topic for a future interstitial.
This week, Katee released Seducing My Guardian, the 4th book in her SUPER HOT Touch of Taboo series. If you'd like to read a morality chain romance written by Katee, we recommend The Bastard's Bargain.
“In springtime, the only pretty ring time” is from Shakespeare’s As You Like It. It's also possible Sarah knows it from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. She would like you to believe that it's from the former, but we'll leave you to draw your own conclusions. Either way, “If you liked it then you shoulda put a ring on it,” is from Beyonce.
As it turns out, Chicago is a great town for beach volleyball.
It’s hard not to talk about morality chain & dark romance together, but we think they are inverse tropes. The internet definition of Morality Chain is “is a character who is the reason another character is Good.” Jen and Sarah’s current definition is that in morality chain romance, the Love Interest pulls a hero towards humanity and goodness, while in dark romance, the love interest is pulled down into the hero’s lawless world.
Some examples in pop culture are Spike from Buffy and maybe Barney in How I Met Your Motherr. Also, check out a movie called The Professional, where a child (played by Natalie Portman!) befriends the assassin next door. The Jason Statham one with a kid is called Safe.
The Hero’s Journey is very common character archetype in literature and pop culture, but Sarah and Jen are both very taken with Gail Carriger’s description of the alternative archetype, The Heroine’s Journey.
If you want more about morality chain, so many of Kresley’s books from The Immortals After Dark series will work, so please listen to season one! Our favorites are Dark Needs at Night’s Edge, Lothaire, and Sweet Ruin.
We were divided on whether the character has to be a danger to others in order to qualitfy as morality chain. In the Gamemaker series: The Professional is about an assassin who is a danger to others, while in The Player he’s only a danger to himself.
Jen Porter wrote a long thread about what she thinks of as PEA, or problematic ever after, romance.
Mickey is "kind of a Fagin-y" as a character, but without the antisemitism. In interesting historical facts, Dickens rewrote Oliver Twist later in life to remove all anti-Semitic characteristics from Fagin, after he'd been criticized for the portrayal of the character. Of course, it's not that simple. Read more about it from Deborah Epstein Nord.
Scottie is the main character of Managed, and is classified more as grumpy one/sunshine one, which we argue is just morality chain dialed down.
More about how most writers have a “core story."
Next week, we'll be reading You Had me at Hola by Alexis Daria
MUSIC: Cardi B - Money
S03.10: Mafia Romance Novels with Nisha Sharma
This week, as part of joy month, we’re joined by Nisha Sharma, author of The Takeover Effect and The Legal Affair, to talk about her favorite trope — Mafia Romances! We talk about why organized crime works in romance, fill your TBR to the brim…and share some real life mafia stories. Or, at least, Sarah does. It’s a lot.
We’re putting read alongs on hold for a bit to spend the next few weeks hanging out with some of our favorite people and talking about books and tropes that give us joy, so we hope you’ll join us and keep a pen handy so you can add to your TBR list as needed!
Also! please join us for a Fated States phonebanking session with Indivisible.org on Saturday — it’s so fun! We love seeing so many of your amazing faces there, hanging out, and lifting each other up through absolute anxiety! Please join us, fellow Fated Maters, and special guests for Fated States Phonebanking Part 4 this Saturday, October 17th at 3pm Eastern to call Iowa! It’s easy, not scary, and there will be prizes!
Thank you, as always, for listening! If you are up for leaving a rating or review for the podcast on your podcasting app, we would be very grateful!
Show Notes
Welcome Nisha Sharma! She is the author of some of favorites: the YA romance My So Called Bollywood Life, and the Singh family trilogy.
The Fifty Shades movies are lying about lipstick.
Maybe you’d like to learn more about organized crime in Rhode Island, Cleveland, and Scranton. Sarah grew up in Rhode Island and recommends you listen to Crimetown if you're interested in learning more about how far-reaching the mob is there.
When it comes to Capone, we recommend the Chicago tour (if life ever returns to normal) but not the movie with Tom Hardy.
Nisha mentioned a 1970s Bollywood movie. It’s called Sholay, and Nisha said, “Technically it was like this small village bad guy...think old westerns but he had like a gang of hoodlums.”
The big Western movies seem to pop up every ten years, and Brokeback Mountain was 2005!
The list of mafia romance from Goodreads is here, and the queer mafia romance list is here.
Does your gender determine how you relate to mafia movies, books, and TV shows? Or if you participate in real life?
Maybe you want to watch Weeds or Traffic and see some kickass women who are antiheroes?
Erin from Learning the Tropes is on the hunt for books that have heroines that are named Erin, so let her know if you’ve read any. Jen’s list is Ivan and an old Loveswept by Barbara Boswell called Sharing Secrets -- the hero’s name is Rad Ramsey!
Speaking of Ivan and Erin, while working on show notes for this episode, Jen discovered that a second story with these two is coming out in a few weeks!
It is MMA fighting, which stands for Mixed Martial Arts.
We did a deep dive episode on Kresley Cole's The Master in Season 1. Listen to it here.
Jen’s love of Russian mobsters started with Viggo Mortensen in Eastern Promises.
Sons of Anarchy actually does predate the MC romance. The TV show aired from 2008 - 2014, and one of the first MC romances was Motorcycle Man (2012) by Kristen Ashley. After Sons of Anarchy ended, the MC romance genre did grow exponentially, including books like Reaper’s Property by Joanna Wylde (2016).
Jen said the Molly O’Keefe book with the mafia guy and the secret baby was Bad Neighbor, but it’s actually Baby Come Back. You should just go ahead and read them both.
All about the myth of the minotaur.
The big, bad Russians influenced American media for decades.
Online Advertising is the new cement shoes.
Sarah learned about money laundering because of pinball machines. Today's kids get to learn about it because of the President. Sure.
Books Mentioned on the Podcast
