S05.17: Catherine Coulter: Trailblazer
We’re thrilled to share our next Trailblazer episode this week—we had a great time talking with Catherine Coulter about her place in romance history as one of the earliest authors of the Signet Regency line—and the author who many believe revolutionized the Regency…by making them sexy.
She tells a million great stories here, and we talk about writing historical romance, about sex in romance, about the way she thinks about plot vs. story, about the way she’s evolved as a writer, and about revisiting her old books. All that, and Catherine has a lot to say about heroes. Thank you to Catherine Coulter for making the time for us.
Next week, we’re back with more interstitials, but 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
People Mentioned: publisher Peter Heggie, agent Robert Gottlieb, publisher Robert Diforio, editor Hilary Ross, editor Leslie Gelbman, publisher Phyllis Grann, editor May Chen, editor David Highfill, and marketing consultant Nicole Robson at Trident Media.
Authors Mentioned: Georgette Heyer, Rebecca Brandewyne, Janet Dailey, LaVyrle Spencer, Linda Howard, Iris Johansen, Kay Hooper, Debbie Gordon and Joan Wolf
Catherine Coulter Novels
Sponsors
Cara Dion, author of Indiscreet.
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Catherine Coulter 00:00:00 / #: At that point in time, Signet had sort of developed as kind of the classiest of the Regency romances, and there were some other little attempts, but with Signet, even their print runs, which were considered quite healthy, then were like, for the Regency, they were like 60,000. Then on the second book, I remember having, I got the plot idea and I told Hilary, we were down in Wall Street at a restaurant and we were having lunch. I said, well, Hilary, I said, the only thing is there was no sex in Regency.
00:00:49 / #: Absolutely zippo, nada. I said, I've got a plot, Hilary, but I want sex in it. It was at that point, which rarely happens, but it was an utter lack of noise in the restaurant, and everybody was on point, and we got a good laugh out of that. I told her what I wanted to do and she grinned and she said, go for it. As a result, the print run jumped up to like 130,000.
Jennifer Prokop 00:01:26 / #: That was the voice of Catherine Coulter, author of more than 80 novels, including some of the earliest Signet Regencies. We'll talk with Catherine about her time at the beginning of the Signet Line, her work, adding sex to Signet Regencies, and how she evolved into historical romances, and then of course into her longstanding career as a thriller writer. This is Fated Mates. I'm Jennifer Prokop, a romance reader and editor.
Sarah MacLean 00:01:59 / #: I'm Sarah MacLean. I read romance novels and I write them.
Jennifer Prokop 00:02:04 / #: You're about to hear a great conversation with Catherine Coulter. We're not going to spend a whole lot more time introducing it. We'll talk more on the back end. Without further ado, here is our conversation with Catherine Coulter.
Sarah MacLean 00:02:17 / #: We try really hard not to do all the fangirling, but I have to say The Sherbrooke Bride was like the Greatest Joy of my Life when I read that book, right when it came out. I'm really very delighted to be talking to you today. Thank you so much for making time for us.
Catherine Coulter 00:02:37 / #: Well, thank you for asking me, and I'm so delighted that you like The Sherbrooke Bride. It seems to be everybody's favorite, and it's an 11 book series.
Sarah MacLean 00:02:47 / #: Well, we're going to get into why and why you think it is. We are in our fourth season of this podcast, because we really love romance novels a whole lot. Over the last year, we have been interviewing the people, many of the people who we believe built the house of romance, so to speak. Part of the reason why we're doing that, and I'm sure you've noticed this, is that romance doesn't get a whole lot of attention from the world at large.
00:03:18 / #: We feel like it's really important to collect the history of the genre as much as we possibly can. These conversations, these, what we're calling Trailblazer recordings are really conversations that are very far-reaching. We want to talk about all things you. I know that you have a book out next week, so we want to talk about that too. But hopefully, you'll give us a sense of your life through writing and through romance. But we are both really thrilled to have you.
Catherine Coulter 00:03:52 / #: Well, thank you very much. Those were lovely things to say. It's true, it's true. I'll never forget when I was started writing, "Oh yes, I'm a writer." "What do you write, children's books?" That was the most regular. Then, I think romance was next. You were almost embarrassed to say, "Well, yeah, you idiot." I want to make some money. Women are 85% of the retail market, so, excuse me.
Sarah MacLean 00:04:27 / #: Yeah.
Jennifer Prokop 00:04:27 / #: Yeah.
Catherine Coulter 00:04:27 / #: Anyway.
Sarah MacLean 00:04:28 / #: Yeah.
Catherine Coulter 00:04:29 / #: I think you guys are doing a wonderful thing and getting the history down. That's very good.
Sarah MacLean 00:04:35 / #: Catherine, can you tell us about how you started reading romance?
Catherine Coulter 00:04:42 / #: Well, my mother would read aloud to me when I was like three years old, and she read everything, everything. But my very, very favorite author is Georgette Heyer, and I believe she died in 1972. She was the one who started the Regency genre. You've read her right?
Sarah MacLean 00:05:09 / #: Yes.
Jennifer Prokop 00:05:10 / #: Yes. Yes. We know Heyer.
Catherine Coulter 00:05:11 / #: Okay. Yeah, I still think she's the class act, and I've always in teaching always say, you're allowed three exclamation points a book. Okay, that's it. She uses exclamation points after nearly every sentence.
Sarah MacLean 00:05:29 / #: Exactly.
Catherine Coulter 00:05:30 / #: But it's okay. It's the weirdest thing. She does everything that you shouldn't do, and it's wonderful, which goes to show there really are no rules.
Sarah MacLean 00:05:41 / #: Right.
Catherine Coulter 00:05:41 / #: But I don't think many people are on her level of just delight. Sheer delight. What was your favorite Georgette Heyer?
Sarah MacLean 00:05:51 / #: Well, my favorite is Devil's Cub.
Catherine Coulter 00:05:55 / #: Gotcha. That was a good one.
Sarah MacLean 00:05:57 / #: Which probably tracks very well with, you'll be unsurprised that then I really fell in love with The Sherbrooke Bride and lots of other books with similar heroes to her.
Catherine Coulter 00:06:10 / #: We call them assholes or someone we deem not all that much.
Sarah MacLean 00:06:17 / #: Yeah. Well, romance in many ways has not changed all that much. Right?
Jennifer Prokop 00:06:24 / #: What about you, Catherine? What was your favorite Heyer?
Catherine Coulter 00:06:28 / #: The Grand Sophy.
Jennifer Prokop 00:06:29 / #: Oh, of course. A classic.
Catherine Coulter 00:06:31 / #: Yeah. I just love The Grand Sophy. She was such a go-getter and Sylvester or The Wicked Uncle, talk about the classic asshole. It's wonderful.
Jennifer Prokop 00:06:43 / #: Okay, so you are reading Heyer and you're reading sort of voraciously. Tell us about your life at this point. Where are you living in the world? How do you start thinking about actually putting pen to paper?
Catherine Coulter 00:06:59 / #: Well, as you know, everybody has a talent, and it just depends if you, A, find the talent, B, if you try to do something with it. My talent was writing, but I never really recognized it. I just thought everybody could write a paper the night before and get an A. It was just very natural. It was just very natural. You really didn't understand why your classmates hated your guts, but they could do that. They could do their own thing.
00:07:30 / #: Anyway, I never really thought about it. Then, I went to University of Texas and then got a master's degree at Boston College. At that point, my husband was in medical school in Columbia Presbyterian in Manhattan. One thing, I've been extraordinarily lucky, you know how when you don't know if you should go one direction or another?
Jennifer Prokop 00:08:00 / #: Mm-hmm.
Catherine Coulter 00:08:01 / #: Then you might go the one direction and you think, "Well, what would've happened if I had... Well..." Anyway, it's at the same time, I was offered an assistant professorship at a college in New Jersey, and then the other was a speech writing job on Wall Street in Manhattan. I got to weigh both of them.
00:08:22 / #: My dad had been a professor at UT, and he would tell me that academia is the most, it's a viper pit. He said, "I've never seen anything like it. They cannot compare, businesses cannot compare to the viper pit that is academia.
Sarah MacLean 00:08:40 / #: Even Wall Street?
Jennifer Prokop 00:08:42 / #: Yeah, wow.
Catherine Coulter 00:08:43 / #: I chose Wall Street and I wrote speeches and for a guy who was the president of an actuarial firm, and your eyes are already glazing over, mind did. But I'll never forget in the interview, he was this kind of desiccated little old guy. He was very nice, and he was the president and he said, "I have to speak a lot." He says, "I don't know why people ask me to speak, because I'm not very good." He said, "Can you make me funny?"
00:09:12 / #: I said, "Sure, sure." Then at that time, my husband, as I said, was at Columbia Presbyterian. I saw him maybe 30 minutes a day over spaghetti. I was reading, oh, 10 to 15 books a week in the evening. Then one night I threw the book across the room and said, "I can do better." I thought that I was so, I thought that I was a trailblazer, that nobody had ever done that.
Sarah MacLean 00:09:42 / #: Now look.
Catherine Coulter 00:09:42 / #: Well, it turns out that maybe 60% of writers started that way. "I can do better." I went in and told my husband and I have heard from so many women and I just want to take them out and shoot them. "Oh, well, my husband won't let me do blah, blah, blah." I go, "Oh, shut up." Kick the jerk to the curb. He said, "Sure." He took the next weekend off and together we plotted the first and last book, but that was the last one he helped plot.
Jennifer Prokop 00:10:16 / #: Yeah.
Sarah MacLean 00:10:16 / #: Oh, my gosh.
Catherine Coulter 00:10:18 / #: That was, what was the name of that? The Autumn Countess, which I later rewrote and made it into The Countess, which is much, much better, because it's funny. That's how it started.
Sarah MacLean 00:10:30 / #: That book was published in 1979. Were you read, is that right around, was it very quickly published?
Catherine Coulter 00:10:37 / #: Well, what happened was is since I was working full time, I would get up and write at like 4:30 and then get ready for work at 6:30. I've always been a morning person, so that worked for me. I took about a year. I'll never forget, I rode the A train, it's the express, down to Wall Street. There was this guy who worked at William Morrow.
00:11:03 / #: I said, "Oh, I'm writing a book." "Yeah right, honey." I think at the time, he wanted to get in my pants, and so he was all sorts of encouraging and nice. What he did was he gave me the name of a freelance editor in the city, and she was also a model. Of course at that time, nobody knew anything and nobody knew anything until RWA was founded-
Jennifer Prokop 00:11:33 / #: Right.
Catherine Coulter 00:11:33 / #: ... in the early 80s.
Sarah MacLean 00:11:34 / #: Right.
Catherine Coulter 00:11:35 / #: And that's when things started opening up. But at that time, it was a black hole, publishing, but I was at least in the center of it.
Jennifer Prokop 00:11:43 / #: You were reading romance novels at this point? So you-
Catherine Coulter 00:11:46 / #: Well, I read that, but I don't know if you know this, but I would say that a good 90%, maybe more, of all of my books have mysteries in them.
Jennifer Prokop 00:11:57 / #: Right.
Sarah MacLean 00:11:57 / #: Right. Yes.
Catherine Coulter 00:12:00 / #: I love mysteries. It was just a natural thing to have mysteries in it. I read tons of mysteries and I read, and there were the early bodice rippers, which were a hoot. We have the 18-year-old virgin at the beginning, she loses her virginity, he's the hero. They're separated for 500 pages and then they get together at the end. Oh, I love you. They were wonderful. They were absolutely incredible.
00:12:29 / #: This editor said, "Well, let's go for it." What she had was the top Regency publishers and the top editors. At the time it was New American Library, they had the class act with Signet Regencies, and they were the only really class act in publishing. You can now take courses on writing query letters, you know 101.
Jennifer Prokop 00:12:58 / #: Yeah.
Catherine Coulter 00:12:58 / #: I like, well, dear boss, this is my book. I hope you like it. It's so stupid. Again, you never know. There are usually three reasons why you're bought in a house, back then and now. Number one is a whole lot of writers, the majority of writers are always late. The writers under contract are always late turning in manuscripts. They're going, "Ah, what are we going to do? What are we going to do?"
Jennifer Prokop 00:13:32 / #: You just called out Sarah real hard and it's pretty amazing.
Catherine Coulter 00:13:35 / #: Sarah, come here and let me smack you.
Sarah MacLean 00:13:39 / #: I'm sorry, I'm sorry, Catherine. I'm sorry.
Jennifer Prokop 00:13:42 / #: Meet your deadline, Sarah.
Catherine Coulter 00:13:43 / #: Oh, well, you drive a house crazy, because then they're having to do this, that and the other. Or they might buy a book because they really, really love it. But those are the two main reasons. I really don't know which one I was.
Jennifer Prokop 00:13:59 / #: Oh, I know.
Catherine Coulter 00:14:01 / #: Well, Hilary Ross called me three days later, asked me out to lunch and offered me a three book contract. I was very, very lucky. She loves to tell the story how she pulled me up by my bootstrap son of a bitch. That could have been true, I guess. She still lives on the West Side of New York.
Jennifer Prokop 00:14:25 / #: Oh, that's great.
Catherine Coulter 00:14:26 / #: She was a character, and so it was very strange. But she loved my book, so what can I do, but love her back?
Jennifer Prokop 00:14:33 / #: Of course.
Catherine Coulter 00:14:34 / #: I didn't have an agent. When the three book contract was coming up, because I was such an idiot and didn't know anything, I asked my editor if she could recommend an agent. She recommended a very good friend of hers. I realized that I could have negotiated myself a better contract. That's how it all started.
Jennifer Prokop 00:15:00 / #: Hilary Ross, did she found the New American Library. For people who don't know, New American Library became Signet, correct?
Catherine Coulter 00:15:08 / #: No, no, no. New American Library was subsumed by Putnam.
Jennifer Prokop 00:15:13 / #: Okay.
Catherine Coulter 00:15:14 / #: Okay?
Jennifer Prokop 00:15:15 / #: Yep.
Catherine Coulter 00:15:16 / #: Then Putnam, of course, was subsumed by Random House. There used to be the big seven sisters in New York, and I think now we're down to four.
Jennifer Prokop 00:15:24 / #: Yeah, right.
Catherine Coulter 00:15:24 / #: We won't go into Amazon who just did wonderful things.
Sarah MacLean 00:15:28 / #: I am currently holding up an original copy of the Rebel Bride. Look down at your app right now, and you'll see the covers of the original Signet Regency. Could you talk a little bit about Signet as a line, because we talk a lot here about category romance, but we haven't talked really at all about Signet, which is one of the reasons why we were so excited to have you come on, because we want to talk obviously about your historicals and how much of a powerhouse you had become. But in those early days at Signet, what was the vibe? What were people thinking there?
Catherine Coulter 00:16:03 / #: Well, at that point in time, Signet had sort of developed as kind of the classiest of the Regency romances. There were some other little attempts by other houses, and I cannot remember any other imprints at this-
Sarah MacLean 00:16:25 / #: Sure.
Catherine Coulter 00:16:25 / #: I just can't remember. But with Signet, even their print runs, which were considered quite healthy then, for the Regencies, they were like 60,000. Then what happened was on the second book, I remember having, I got the plot idea and the second book, was that The Rebel Bride?
Jennifer Prokop 00:16:51 / #: Yes.
Catherine Coulter 00:16:52 / #: Okay. I told Hilary, we were down in Wall Street at a restaurant and we were having lunch. I said, "Well, Hilary," I said, "The only thing is," there was no sex in Regencies. Absolutely zippo, nada.
Jennifer Prokop 00:17:10 / #: Right.
Catherine Coulter 00:17:10 / #: I said, "I've got a plot, Hilary, but I want sex in it." It was at that point, which rarely happens, but it was an utter lack of noise in the restaurant and everybody was on point, and we got a good laugh out of that. I told her what I wanted to do and she grinned and she said, "Go for it."
Sarah MacLean 00:17:39 / #: Oh, great.
Jennifer Prokop 00:17:39 / #: Wow.
Catherine Coulter 00:17:39 / #: As a result, the print run jumped up to like 130,000.
Sarah MacLean 00:17:45 / #: Oh, look at that.
Catherine Coulter 00:17:46 / #: They were like, because everybody loved it. Then Joan Wolf, who's a friend now, always, always, and she was at Signet at that time, and so she stuck her toes in. But that was really the start of putting sex in Regencies. It was not discreet. In those days, they truly were bodice rippers. The sex could be extraordinarily explicit. I did extraordinarily explicit sex, I think through The Sherbrooke Bride series.
00:18:23 / #: Even toward the end of that, I just kind of lost interest in it and really spent much more time on the plot and the characters, because I'd read so many books. I go to conferences where editors would say, "Now, you want to have a sex scene every three chapters," or every 20 pages, or whatever. It was like it was gratuitous. That's when I realized you don't want anything gratuitous in a book, because it pulls the reader out of the book, which it did me, and I'm a reader, big reader.
00:18:59 / #: I said, "What are you doing? Who cares? These are just parts and it doesn't mean anything." In other words, most of the time, the sex scenes did not forward the plot. They detracted, they were just blah, they were just thrown in. I just kind of lost interest in it. That's when I just kind of went down, down, down, down, down, and stopped with explicit sex. Most people didn't.
00:19:27 / #: In fact, today, again, I wish that people writing romance would not depend so heavily on this really, really explicit sex, because it's not necessary. If you're going to do a sex scene, you want to have humor in it. It shouldn't be body part A, and body part B, and oh, this is so serious, and blah, blah, blah. No. Blah. Anyway, all right. I'm now off my bandwagon.
Jennifer Prokop 00:19:54 / #: That's okay.
Sarah MacLean 00:19:54 / #: I love a bandwagon.
Jennifer Prokop 00:19:58 / #: This week's episode of Fated Mates is sponsored by Cara Dion, author of Indiscreet.
Sarah MacLean 00:20:04 / #: All right, here we go. Are you ready?
Jennifer Prokop 00:20:06 / #: I'm ready.
Sarah MacLean 00:20:07 / #: On her 21st birthday, our Heroine Min is stood up at the opera by some jerk, but there just happens to be somebody in the seat next to her.
Jennifer Prokop 00:20:18 / #: Very handsome. I'm sure.
Sarah MacLean 00:20:19 / #: So handsome. They have an instant attraction. They bond over their love of music and opera and they have a one night stand, as one does. They leave the opera immediately. Have a one night stand, Moonstruck style.
Jennifer Prokop 00:20:33 / #: Moonstruck style. I love it.
Sarah MacLean 00:20:35 / #: Exactly. Except, Jen, what do you think happens the next day when Min goes to her university opera program?
Jennifer Prokop 00:20:46 / #: Is he her professor, Sarah?
Sarah MacLean 00:20:47 / #: Oh my God. He's totally her professor. Totally. It gets-
Jennifer Prokop 00:20:51 / #: You could not be more delighted by this, and I love it.
Sarah MacLean 00:20:53 / #: My favorite, this is my favorite, I cannot wait to read this. This one is for anybody who, like me, loves a professor-student romance. This is very forbidden. It's all about secrets. There's a little bit of an age gap in here, if you like an age gap romance. All I have to say about this is, it sounds frickin' great.
00:21:14 / #: There's a secret dark shadow from Mins past, makes their entanglement even more complicated. This is my favorite part. The music that drove them both forward and bound them together could also be the thing to tear them apart.
Jennifer Prokop 00:21:31 / #: Amazing. You can find Indiscreet in print, ebook and on KU. You can find out more about the author at CaraDion.author on Instagram. Thank you to Cara Dion for sponsoring this week's episode of Fated Meets.
Sarah MacLean 00:21:49 / #: You wrote seven Signets and seven Regencies, and then you moved to what you call historicals.
Catherine Coulter 00:21:58 / #: Well, no, I call them hystericals.
Sarah MacLean 00:22:02 / #: Oh, you're amazing.
Catherine Coulter 00:22:03 / #: Yes. I wrote long hystericals. That was interesting, because at that point, after I finished that contract, I had the brain to say, "I think I need a real agent and not the editor's best friend." I had met Peter Heggie, who was the Secretary of the Authors Guild in New York. I gave him a call. We had moved to San Francisco, because my husband was doing his residency here at the University of California San Francisco.
00:22:40 / #: Of course, a writer is totally portable. At that time, my company, I was kind of the golden lass. They even moved me out here to do a job that I had no knowledge, that I couldn't do, because it was installing a computer system on the West Coast. Okay.
Jennifer Prokop 00:23:00 / #: Right.
Catherine Coulter 00:23:00 / #: Honey, I can't even do Zoom. All right? Anyway, that's neither here nor there. But so I called Peter Heggie from San Francisco and told him I wanted a female agent. He gave me the name of two women and then he gave me one man. When I came back to New York on business and so forth, I met these people, and I swear to you, I do not even remember the women's names. I went to William Morris, they're a great big agency in New York.
00:23:36 / #: I met with the guy he recommended. His name was Robert Gottlieb, and he'd been out of the mail room, and that is still spelled male. He was in kind of this closet with no window. He'd been out of the mail room for like six months and we talked and I said, "What do you want to do when you grow up?" He said, "I want to be on the board of directors of William Morris by the time I'm 45."
00:24:10 / #: I never forgot that. Anyway, he became my agent. He absolutely enraged Hilary, absolutely enraged. The head of the house, of New American Library had to get involved to calm things down. My darling, this is over a 10,000 book advance, a $10,000 book advance. Because we're back in 1980.
Sarah MacLean 00:24:36 / #: Sure.
Catherine Coulter 00:24:37 / #: Okay. 1981. That worked out. Robert and I have been together longer than all of his marriages, but I give great gifts. I give great gifts.
Sarah MacLean 00:24:50 / #: You are the reason why.
Jennifer Prokop 00:24:51 / #: Yeah.
Catherine Coulter 00:24:53 / #: Oh, boy. I'll never forget this, just to aside. I'll never forget, he called me in 1987 and he was hyperventilating. He was so excited. He was on the board of directors of William Morris when he was 37.
Sarah MacLean 00:25:11 / #: Oh, that's great news.
Jennifer Prokop 00:25:12 / #: Oh, look at that news.
Catherine Coulter 00:25:12 / #: Yeah. It's a great story. Then he got out sharked by Michael Ovitz in 2000 and then started Trident Media. That started a new chapter of his life. He also married Olga, who was an orienteer at Olympic in Russia.
Sarah MacLean 00:25:33 / #: Wow.
Catherine Coulter 00:25:33 / #: He's a Russian fanatic. Anyway, and so they're still married. They have two grown kids, well almost grown kids now. Everything is good with him. As I say, we've been together for how long? Years and years.
Sarah MacLean 00:25:46 / #: That's a long time.
Catherine Coulter 00:25:46 / #: Well over 30 years. In the mid-80s, Bob Diforio, who was on the sales team for New American Library, he became the President. He and I met, and I really didn't know who he was, but we just had an immediate relationship. He was in part, he started pushing me immediately. I'll never forget, it was a Fire Song.
00:26:21 / #: It was the first, yeah, it was the book in the medieval series. They decided, you're going to love this. He decided that they were going to have a Fire Song perfume. They attached these little bottles of perfumes to all the books and shrink wrap them. The problem was...
Sarah MacLean 00:26:45 / #: Oh, my gosh.
Catherine Coulter 00:26:49 / #: They were shipped and were shipped in trucks and whatever. The perfume turned horrible.
Sarah MacLean 00:26:51 / #: Oh, no.
Catherine Coulter 00:27:00 / #: I must have gotten 2000 emails saying, not emails, letters saying, "Blech, ew."
Jennifer Prokop 00:27:08 / #: Oh, no.
Catherine Coulter 00:27:10 / #: Oh, that was so fun.
Jennifer Prokop 00:27:12 / #: Still you survived it, Catherine. The books must've been great.
Catherine Coulter 00:27:17 / #: Oh, things just. There's so many just cute little things that happened through the years.
Sarah MacLean 00:27:23 / #: That Song series. I think I read every one of those books a dozen times. I would get one and then just read them straight through-
Jennifer Prokop 00:27:32 / #: Read them all.
Sarah MacLean 00:27:32 / #: ... and then immediately start again. I wonder if you could talk a little bit, just in general, about what it was like writing. When we talk now about, when we look back on the 70s, the 80s, the early 90s, that period of time really felt like the heyday of romance. It's never been like that since.
Catherine Coulter 00:27:54 / #: It was the golden age, I call it. It really was the golden age.
Sarah MacLean 00:27:57 / #: Do you feel like you knew at the time what you were a part of?
Catherine Coulter 00:28:04 / #: Oh, no. You never do. No, no, no, no. I look back now and realize it was the golden age. Of course, this was pre-Amazon and everybody was just, the print runs were outrageous. They were over a million copies, and it was-
Jennifer Prokop 00:28:25 / #: That's wild.
Catherine Coulter 00:28:27 / #: Yeah. It was a wild time. But you really, you're writing and then a book comes out and it does like this. When we negotiate a contract and we're going to conferences and you just don't think, "Wow, I'm a part of the golden era." Because at the time, you are still a part of it and you're not looking back. You're not looking back. You're looking forward, always, always forward.
Sarah MacLean 00:28:56 / #: Tell us a little bit about what the readers are like at this point. What are these conferences like?
Catherine Coulter 00:29:01 / #: I think the last one was an RWA, but when I compare it to the ones throughout the years, they're not that different at all. They're really not. I will tell you, the big writers, like Janet Daly was huge then. Absolutely huge. I remember she would travel to a conference with her handlers. Okay. There'd be her personal handler, and then there'd be somebody from the publishing house, and then they would answer most of the questions.
00:29:42 / #: In the other workshops by the unsuperstars had then, as you had now, is people will stand up and say, "Okay, you want to do this, this, this, and this, and don't do that and don't do this." People are out. They want to get published. That's what they want more than anything in the universe. They're taking wild notes. I can remember thinking then, "This is nuts. What you want to do, darling, is to write a good story. Forget the rest of the shit." Okay?
Jennifer Prokop 00:30:15 / #: Yeah.
Catherine Coulter 00:30:17 / #: I just had a few do's and don'ts, but mainly even back then, I'd say, "Sit your butt in a chair and write. You cannot edit a blank page. It doesn't matter if you write crap, it really doesn't, because now you have something to work on." But people, they would preach. There was a lot of preaching, because I'm published and you're not. I don't know if it's still like that today.
00:30:51 / #: It was, the last time I was at a conference, it was more or less like that. These were kind of superstars, like what's her face? Oh, she retired and stopped writing. LaVyrle Spencer. You had, again, a huge disparity between the superstars and the people who desperately wanted to be published. This has been true forever. Forever.
Sarah MacLean 00:31:18 / #: While we're talking about authors, other authors, could you give us a sense of who was your community? You obviously, you're very busy, you have a day job, a high power day job, your husband is studying.
Catherine Coulter 00:31:31 / #: No, I quit my job in 1981, because I could no longer afford to work.
Sarah MacLean 00:31:39 / #: Right. It's the dream. Right?
Jennifer Prokop 00:31:40 / #: Right.
Sarah MacLean 00:31:41 / #: Of course.
Catherine Coulter 00:31:42 / #: Yeah. I was full-time writer from 1981, got a computer in 1981. It was $10,000. It was a Vector and it had a five-inch floppy disk. It took a week to learn how to do it. But I expected that knew it, but it got rid of all the crap, because if you made mistakes before on an electric typewriter, you had to retype a page.
Sarah MacLean 00:32:02 / #: Retype, right. Mm-hmm.
Catherine Coulter 00:32:06 / #: But you just press a little button and crap's gone.
Sarah MacLean 00:32:08 / #: Sure.
Catherine Coulter 00:32:08 / #: It was an amazing, amazing thing. Graham Greene, another writer. I'll never forget, he said in the mid-80s, "You're not a real writer if you use a computer." And I was thinking, "You idiot."
Jennifer Prokop 00:32:19 / #: Oh, Graham.
Sarah MacLean 00:32:21 / #: Oh, Graham. That's cute. That's cute. Graham.
Catherine Coulter 00:32:24 / #: Oh, lord. In 1985, I was in Houston. I had a couple of medical writer friends who sort of dropped out a little bit later, dropped out of the picture. But in 1985, I was in Houston, and this is when Rebecca Brandewyne was really big.
Sarah MacLean 00:32:45 / #: Of course.
Jennifer Prokop 00:32:45 / #: Oh, yeah.
Catherine Coulter 00:32:48 / #: Her mother, she really wanted to have lunch with me. I said, "Well, this will be fun to see what she has to say." She was an agent, Rebecca's mom. Then I'll never forget, she kissed me off for somebody else to have lunch with. I was kind of looking around and I see an empty chair at this table, and I go up and I say, "Can I sit here?" We met, and this was Linda Howard and Iris Johansen and Kay Hooper.
Sarah MacLean 00:33:21 / #: Oh, the whole crew.
Catherine Coulter 00:33:22 / #: We became best friends at that point. We have stayed that way forever.
Jennifer Prokop 00:33:26 / #: That's nice. That's great.
Catherine Coulter 00:33:29 / #: Yeah.
Sarah MacLean 00:33:29 / #: My gosh, and all four of you have just, you're still all writing. That's rare when you make a group of friends when you're young at the job and that you're all still there.
Catherine Coulter 00:33:41 / #: Yeah. Everybody became successful, everybody, all four of us, which was very good to happen, because you wouldn't want one or two people not as successful as you when we'd go on trips and stuff together. It worked out very, very well. I don't think there was no jealousy. Everybody was very supportive of everybody else, so it worked.
Sarah MacLean 00:34:06 / #: Around this time, one of the things that's interesting is you really had a productive period in the 80s where you were writing historicals. You wrote a few Silhouette Intimate Moments. You were clearly starting to transition into doing mystery thriller. Did you feel like you got guidance through this process? Or was this something that you just really were like, "These are the things I want to write?"
Catherine Coulter 00:34:30 / #: Well, that's a good question. I remember, I think it was in 1985, and we were in Europe on a train in Switzerland, and this entire plot came into my brain, which had never happened before, and it was contemporary. I said, "Go away. I don't want to watch contemporary go away." It didn't. I wrote it when I got home and I realized it was a short contemporary romance, and I had no idea what to do with it.
00:35:00 / #: I called a friend, Debbie Gordon, who's no longer writing, but she was very big at that time at Silhouette. She said, "Okay." She said, "This is what you tell Robert, this is what he wants to ask for." I did it, and he did, and I was with Leslie Wenger, and so it was a three book series, Aftershocks, the Aristocrat and Afterglow. She said, "Okay, now I've got the A's. What are the B's going to be?"
00:35:33 / #: I said, "Honey, there ain't no more water in this well." So it was just those three, but they were fun. They were like a little dessert, a little dish of sorbet. Because they're only about 65,000 words, as opposed to 100, 110,000. No, there was no guidance. In 1988, it was, the idea came to me. It wasn't a plot then. It was just an idea. Just to back up one second.
00:36:07 / #: This was False Pretenses, and it was my very first hardcover. It was a romantic suspense, not a suspense, a romantic suspense. The heroine was a concert pianist. When you change genres, the most important thing you want to do is to eliminate as many unknowns as you can. I picked the piano, because I'm a pianist. My Mother was a concert pianist, organist, and I knew everything about it. I knew all the music, so I knew-
Jennifer Prokop 00:36:44 / #: Interesting. Yeah.
Catherine Coulter 00:36:44 / #: ... what I was talking about. We're in New York City, and then it was of course a mystery, but it was a romantic suspense, because you can't be a romance unless there's a central core that's a man and a woman getting together in a relationship. Then, everything else can be around it. It doesn't matter. It can be Mars, it can be murders or can be anything you want, but to be a romance, you have to have the central core being the relationship.
00:37:16 / #: That's what it was. They wanted to push it as this. I don't even remember. I said, "No, it's a romantic suspense." They said, "Okay." That was the first hardcover. Then I wrote probably four or five more contemporary romantic suspense, which were a lot of fun to do. Anyway, I was writing probably three or four books a year. It was easy. Now, of course, I write, never mind, because now I'm an elder.
00:37:48 / #: But anyway, I was writing a whole lot of books a year, and I'll never forget. Then Putnam and Putnam had bought, as I said, New American Library. The head of Putnam was Phyllis Grann. She's Probably the best woman publisher, she was, in the world. I absolutely would kill for her. She would call me up and say, "Catherine, I need a quote." I said, "What would you like me to say?" Whatever she wanted from me, she got, because she was absolutely wonderful.
00:38:27 / #: They went back to New York and there was this big round table at the plaza in the tearoom there in the court, and I was introduced to my new editor, and they made an offer that was just outrageous, absolutely outrageous. I'll not tell you what it is, but it was outrageous. I went there, and what they wanted was the hysterical romances.
Jennifer Prokop 00:38:58 / #: The hysterical romances.
Catherine Coulter 00:39:03 / #: Well, I try to make them funny. I really do. Oh, one thing I wanted to add, talk about luck, those first six or seven Regencies, I went back and rewrote them.
Sarah MacLean 00:39:17 / #: Yeah, I want To talk about that.
Catherine Coulter 00:39:20 / #: I made them so much better. I turned them into historical romances and I made them funny. Then they hit the New York Times, because they were no longer Regencies.
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Sarah MacLean 00:40:50 / #: Did you go to Putnam and say, "I want to rewrite these?"
Catherine Coulter 00:40:53 / #: Yeah. Yeah. I said I really would like them because I think that they're kind of a bummer to me now, and I don't think I can make them 1000% percent better and make them longer and richer and funnier and all that. They said, "Sure, go for it."
Sarah MacLean 00:41:10 / #: That's incredible. What is that process like? This is the mid-80s, so it's only five or six years. It's not even a decade, since they came out. What was that process like as a writer to revise essentially yourself-
Jennifer Prokop 00:41:31 / #: Right.
Sarah MacLean 00:41:32 / #: ... at a distance?
Catherine Coulter 00:41:33 / #: It was easy. It was very, very easy, because the book was already there. I didn't have to worry about, oh dear, is that plot going to work here and there? No, no, no. I didn't have to worry about it. All I had to worry about was let's make this really, really fun.
Sarah MacLean 00:41:49 / #: Was it driven by, I'm a better writer now. I've had more practice?
Catherine Coulter 00:41:56 / #: Yes, yes.
Sarah MacLean 00:41:57 / #: Or the rules don't apply to me in the same way anymore, or both?
Catherine Coulter 00:42:00 / #: Both. Both. Of course, Regencies, ever since Joan and I were big at Signet, Regency started changing.
Sarah MacLean 00:42:10 / #: Well, they got sexier.
Catherine Coulter 00:42:11 / #: Yeah. That was because of Joan and Me, which was, and I can take credit for that and so did she.
Sarah MacLean 00:42:18 / #: Good.
Catherine Coulter 00:42:18 / #: That was fun.
Sarah MacLean 00:42:19 / #: You're at the Plaza, they want historicals?
Catherine Coulter 00:42:23 / #: They wanted historicals. In a period of three and a half years, I wrote three trilogies.
Sarah MacLean 00:42:30 / #: Wow.
Catherine Coulter 00:42:31 / #: The Wyndham Legacy, the Legacy Trilogy, the Fire Trilogy, and another trilogy that escapes my brain at the moment. But it had never happened in my life, but I was burned in my toes.
Jennifer Prokop 00:42:44 / #: Yeah, I'm sure.
Catherine Coulter 00:42:46 / #: Absolutely burned in my toes. It was in 1995, and I was at family reunion in Texas, and my sister, who has never done this before or since, walked up to me and said, "Have you ever heard of a little town on the coast of Oregon called The Cove? They make the world's greatest ice cream and bad stuff happens." I just went on point.
Sarah MacLean 00:43:17 / #: What?
Catherine Coulter 00:43:17 / #: I said, "Oh my heavens, my heavens." I told my editor, and of course, I understood their position. If it ain't broke, why fix it?
Sarah MacLean 00:43:31 / #: Sure.
Catherine Coulter 00:43:32 / #: But I really dug in my heels.
Jennifer Prokop 00:43:33 / #: Well, they'd milked to you for nine books in three years.
Catherine Coulter 00:43:38 / #: But at that point, I had enough power. I said, "Give me a chance." Then, that's when I wrote The Cove. Then when they got it, they wanted to make it into a hardcover. I said, "No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no." I said, "Failure is well and good, but you don't want to fail in hardcover. Who knows how this book will be received?" They brought it out in paperback in 1996, I believe, and it really did extraordinarily well.
00:44:11 / #: I was very happy for that. Then the publisher called and I said, "Well, when's the next one in the series?" I said, "What series? What are you talking about?" I kid you not, this will happen. It happened. There was this voice in the back of my head, and he said, "Catherine, what about me?" It was Dillon Savage. Then, The Maze was basically Sherlock's book, and this is the book they got together.
00:44:45 / #: Then after that, you had The Target, which is one of my all-time favorite books with The Hunt, Ramsey Hunt, and Emma. I'll never forget, I wrote international thrillers with JT Ellison, six of them. I'll never forget, JT told me, he said, "Well, a series isn't really a series until book four." I was kind of laughing at her. She was perfectly right. She was totally right.
00:45:14 / #: The fourth book, The Edge, started that series, and then it just went from there. At that point, I was writing one historical a year and one FBI thriller a year. It worked very, very well, because they're such disparate genres and your brain gets unconstipated. You know what I mean?
Jennifer Prokop 00:45:39 / #: Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Sarah MacLean 00:45:39 / #: Yeah, sure.
Catherine Coulter 00:45:41 / #: Then it's just been about, I guess about four or five years ago, I could just do one book a year, and that was fine. That was perfectly fine. It's been wonderful. I feel blessed, very, very blessed, and very, very lucky and have met so many fascinating writers and publishers over the years. As I say, Robert and I are still together.
Jennifer Prokop 00:46:10 / #: Amazing.
Catherine Coulter 00:46:10 / #: He'll come up and talk about, yada, yada, it's wonderful.
Jennifer Prokop 00:46:15 / #: Can we return maybe to The Sherbrooke Bride for a second?
Catherine Coulter 00:46:19 / #: Sure.
Jennifer Prokop 00:46:20 / #: Sarah talked about it being one of her favorites. You mentioned that so many readers still talk about it.
Catherine Coulter 00:46:27 / #: Yeah.
Jennifer Prokop 00:46:29 / #: When we're talking about romance, why do you think this is the book that so many romance readers connected to? Is it the primordial Catherine Coulter book? What made it the one?
Catherine Coulter 00:46:41 / #: I think that everybody, women, I think that women respond visually to a real alpha male who's an asshole, basically. But he's a real alpha male, and it's how the woman, he ends up worshiping her toenails. I think women, it's on a visceral level, they love that. They're just fascinated by the alpha male. That's my own feeling.
Jennifer Prokop 00:47:14 / #: I also think, I was speaking to a friend of mine earlier today about how we were interviewing you, Catherine, and my friend Sophie Jordan, who also writes historicals was saying that, we talked about how you really mastered the grovel in your books. You put them through the ringer at the end, because they've been such assholes.
Sarah MacLean 00:47:38 / #: That is a great joy.
Catherine Coulter 00:47:39 / #: You're not going to find an Alan Alda character as a woman's hero. Let's get real here. A beta male is of no interest to anybody, except fixing your computer.
Jennifer Prokop 00:47:55 / #: But truthfully, I think that the magic of a Catherine Coulter book is that sort of sense, as you said, worshiping her to her toenails only once he has been clubbed over the head with how terrible he's been to her. It's that punishment too.
Catherine Coulter 00:48:12 / #: It's discipline. Men love to be disciplined, even if they don't admit it. They just love it. They love it. On the other hand, the youngest brother, Tysen, who starred in The Scottish Bride, that's probably my favorite, because he evolved. He evolved so much, and he was such a good man. I take it back about the alpha male, because Tysen was absolutely amazing to me. I loved him.
Jennifer Prokop 00:48:55 / #: Was it a challenge to write someone who then was really different?
Catherine Coulter 00:48:58 / #: Oh, no. No. I loved him from the moment that book started when he was dealing with his three children, and he didn't know what to do with them. He evolved so much and turned into such a kind wonderful person who was never an asshole. He was just stupid. He wasn't stupid, that's the wrong word. He was just caught up in this view, in this world view of himself that was so limiting.
00:49:39 / #: It was so very limiting. His brothers always made fun of him. I'll never forget in the beginning of Sherbrooke Bride, when they're having their quarterly bastard meeting. That just came out of my fingertips. I said, "What are you doing?" Then Tysen goes, "Ah," and runs out. He wants none of that. But that was great sport.
Jennifer Prokop 00:50:09 / #: As you think about your career, as you sort of look back, and obviously forward as well, you show no signs of stopping. Are there moments that you can sort of pinpoint of particular challenge as a writer or from the genre? Is there some lesson that you were sort of hard-learned that you can share with us?
Catherine Coulter 00:50:36 / #: Let me just say, I do not believe in writer's block, and I never have. What I believe in is a bad plot. It happened one time, and it was an FBI thriller. I don't even remember which one, but I got to page 85 and it had been a bear. Then all of a sudden it stopped cold and I realized, "Okay, this is a shitty plot." I threw the 85 pages in the garbage can and started over. Because if you're a writer, you have to be honest with yourself and what you're producing.
00:51:14 / #: When a book stops in its tracks and the characters look at you and say, "Please go away," it's a bad plot. It's up to you not to try to keep forcing it. The trick is you have to trust that there's another plot in the parking lot in your brain that's going to come driving out, and it will. It did. That was really the only time. But no, I'll never forget, this might be interesting to writers.
00:51:51 / #: With The Cove when I first wrote it, and my editor was the head of Berkeley, Leslie Gelbman, wonderful, wonderful editor and leader. When I first wrote The Cove, it was a brand new genre for me. I wrote the entire plot out in the first 50 pages. You know how she dealt with it? She called me up, she says, and she wanted to see what I was doing. She called me back and she was saying, "Catherine, okay, now, you know what the plot is. Tell me the story."
Jennifer Prokop 00:52:35 / #: Oh, I love that.
Catherine Coulter 00:52:36 / #: That's what she said.
Jennifer Prokop 00:52:36 / #: That's a good piece of advice.
Catherine Coulter 00:52:38 / #: I had written the whole thing out in the first 50 pages so the reader would know everything. Then she was just so matter of fact, "Now, tell me the story." So, I did.
Jennifer Prokop 00:52:49 / #: Amazing.
Catherine Coulter 00:52:50 / #: A good editor, you've got to be lucky in your editors too. I know some authors who have had nine editors at the same house, and this is never good. This is always sucky. I've been very, very lucky in my editors.
Jennifer Prokop 00:53:06 / #: Who is your editor now, Catherine?
Catherine Coulter 00:53:08 / #: My editor now is a brand new person. I'm with William Morrow, and her name is May Chen. She's fairly hands-off. Actually. I'd had David Highfill. He had the absolute gall to retire and move to Tuscany.
Sarah MacLean 00:53:24 / #: How dare.
Jennifer Prokop 00:53:25 / #: That's terrible.
Catherine Coulter 00:53:27 / #: I was just cursing him, "Don't you dare go anywhere." He said, "I promise that I have spoken to May, and she will do very good by you. Please trust me, Catherine, and don't shoot her." She's very kind. To be very honest, my husband is basically my editor on the FBI thrillers. He can't write his way out of a paper bag, but he's an incredible editor.
Sarah MacLean 00:53:56 / #: That's great.
Catherine Coulter 00:53:57 / #: Since I've become an elder, I've slowed down. I had decided with Reckoning, the book that's coming out next week, I don't want to be under contact anymore. I want to just write what I want to write, and then I'll sell it. Then they said, "Oh, please, please. Dah, da, da, da, da." I said, "Okay, but I don't want, make it two years." "Okay. Anything you want. Not a problem. Not a problem." I'm on page 80, and the outline is due a year from this month.
Jennifer Prokop 00:54:27 / #: There you go.
Sarah MacLean 00:54:29 / #: Well, so there you go. You can't stop.
Catherine Coulter 00:54:31 / #: You can't stop. You can't stop. But I guess five years ago, I was asked if I was a pantser or a plotter, and I didn't know what they were talking about, but I'm definitely a pantser, are you?
Sarah MacLean 00:54:44 / #: Yes. Yeah. Yeah.
Catherine Coulter 00:54:46 / #: Which means you're always rewriting and rewriting and changing.
Sarah MacLean 00:54:51 / #: Constantly.
Catherine Coulter 00:54:51 / #: [inaudible 00:54:52 / #] build up, we call it. Constantly, constantly, constantly.
Sarah MacLean 00:54:54 / #: Which is why it terrified me that you rewrote The Rebel Bride. I was like, "Oh God, I can never go back. I'll throw it all out and start over."
Catherine Coulter 00:55:04 / #: No, no, no. You don't understand. The book was there and the plot was there.
Sarah MacLean 00:55:08 / #: Yes, right.
Catherine Coulter 00:55:09 / #: So there were no hurries. Now, you're just putting on different tree ornaments.
Sarah MacLean 00:55:13 / #: Nice.
Catherine Coulter 00:55:13 / #: Different lights. It was wonderful.
Sarah MacLean 00:55:15 / #: I bet, I bet. Catherine, tell us a little bit, I want to just talk a little about the shift from Catherine Coulter, romance trailblazer, to Catherine Coulter, real powerhouse in thrillers. Was it an easy transition in the world? Meaning did thrillers welcome you? I know that it's tough to be a woman writing thrillers in the thriller world. I'm wondering, did you have that experience or was it very generally welcoming?
Catherine Coulter 00:55:51 / #: That's a very good observation and the absolute truth is I never thought about it.
Sarah MacLean 00:55:56 / #: That's good.
Catherine Coulter 00:55:57 / #: The first time when they put, it took a while, they put the second book, The Maze in Hardcover, and it made the times, but it wasn't in the top five. But then they just kept getting stronger and stronger. By the time I went to, actually, I've never been to [inaudible 00:56:22 / #], I was just not interested. All my friends said they didn't like it. But anyway, ThrillerFest in New York City was a different matter.
00:56:32 / #: By the time I started going to ThrillerFest, the FBI series was really well grounded and was doing well. It wasn't like the third, fourth, or fifth book. It was like the eighth or ninth book in that series. There was never a problem. It was very welcoming. I really liked Lee Child. I just met a whole bunch of really, really nice people, men as well as women, like Lisa Gardner, who was such a sweetheart.
00:57:08 / #: I can't remember other names at the point, because I haven't been in three years, but it was just very, very welcoming. Well, the first year I went, it wasn't because I was interested. They had made me the interview of the year or something, I can't remember what they called it, where you're in front and you're interviewed by somebody, whatever. Anyway, so I just never experienced that. But again, a lot of people, men and women who go to ThrillerFest who are either unpublished or still in like the B rung, I do not know what their experiences are.
00:57:59 / #: Anybody I ever met was wonderful, and I'm not a jerk. I'll talk to everybody. It didn't matter. It was just never an issue. At the very beginning, "Oh, do you write children's books?" That kind of crap, but it just didn't matter. People would say, "Oh, you wrote romance?" I said, "Yes, yes, yes, yes." Because I'm not ashamed of them at all. I love them. I wish I could still write two books a year. One, a hysterical. When couldn't write two books a year, that's when I went to the novellas with Grace and Sherbrooke.
Sarah MacLean 00:58:38 / #: Right.
Catherine Coulter 00:58:39 / #: Are you familiar with those at all?
Sarah MacLean 00:58:41 / #: Yes. Yes. I've read them all.
Catherine Coulter 00:58:43 / #: Oh, well, you're so wonderful. Well, the sixth one will be out in October, because Nicole, who is God, and she heads up a digital division at Trident, which is Roberts agency. Oh, she's incredible. She is absolutely incredible. If you ever, her name is Nicole Robson. R-O-B-S-O-N.
00:59:11 / #: If you ever need anything to do, she's at the Trident Media Group in New York City, and she is smart. She's kind. She knows everything. She would help you without a problem. Anyway, she likes to put them near Halloween, because they're whoo-whoo.
Sarah MacLean 00:59:37 / #: Yeah. Well, that is the piece of the Coulter puzzle that I think is so fascinating as a writer, just looking at your career, you really have told so many different kinds of stories. For writers who are often told in a genre where we are often told, "Stay in your lane." I think part of the reason why The Sherbrooke Brides shattered everything I had thought historical was is because there was that ghosty piece.
Catherine Coulter 01:00:11 / #: The Virgin Bride, yeah.
Sarah MacLean 01:00:12 / #: Yeah, you'd never expect it. But I really feel like one of the-
Catherine Coulter 01:00:18 / #: And she lives in the past, I love it. She found her happy ever after.
Sarah MacLean 01:00:24 / #: Right. I think that there is, if you've never read Catherine Coulter's romances, I think there are so many different avenues to take, and that's really remarkable. You're a trailblazer. There's a reason why we reached out.
Catherine Coulter 01:00:44 / #: Well, you are so sweet. If you're kissing up, you're doing it very well.
Sarah MacLean 01:00:49 / #: Thank you. I'm really not. I really do think your books are great.
Jennifer Prokop 01:00:52 / #: Yeah, and we love the genre, and we love... God, we love romance so much. We just love romance.
Catherine Coulter 01:00:59 / #: Well, if you love romance so much still, I very rarely read contemporary romances because, I have found them still to be, we call it topping dicks. You tell a story and get rid of the stuff that's extraneous. It's like people are using horrible language. I stopped about 12 books ago. I never use bad language anymore, because it's gratuitous. You don't need it.
01:01:34 / #: There's always another way to say it without saying fuck. There is another way to say that. Sometimes that's appropriate, and I have to grind my teeth not to do it. But again, so many books, you have gratuitous bad language, you've read them, and you have gratuitous sex scenes. Stop it. Just stop it. Tell a good story.
Sarah MacLean 01:01:57 / #: Can I ask you a question? Do you think that there is a similar issue with gratuitous violence and thrillers?
Catherine Coulter 01:02:03 / #: Of course. Anything that's unnecessary is gratuitous. If you want to talk about ripping somebody's guts out and eating them, well, good luck. I'm not going to read your frickin' book. I'm not going to. Why do I care. You killed this person because of this, that, and the other reason, get on with the story. Yeah. Gratuitous violence, those three things are the major three.
01:02:31 / #: You hit it on the nail, it hit the nail on the hammer there, hit the nail on the head with a hammer. Okay, love that. I just hate gratuitous stuff. In the romances, it's still rife. I don't know why this is. I don't understand. It would seem to me that the genre would have weeded this out over the years, but it has not. Anyway, my soap box is now in the closet again.
Jennifer Prokop 01:03:01 / #: Catherine, I wonder, we end all of our conversations this way, so I hope you'll humor us. When we talk about trailblazers, we often come to the table with a preconceived idea of the answer to this question, but what is the hallmark of a Catherine Coulter novel? What is the thing you leave on the table every time?
Catherine Coulter 01:03:29 / #: Oh, you guys are just full of good questions. Let me just do the, address the FBI series.
Jennifer Prokop 01:03:37 / #: Yeah.
Catherine Coulter 01:03:38 / #: My promise to the reader is there is always justice at the end, and I will not kill off a major character. But there has got to be, it's always a good ending. Justice. We always have justice at the end, so there's no, what's the word, existential crap going on that leaves the reader wanting to streak. No, no, it's done. This chapter now is done, handled, although I do bring characters back a lot.
Sarah MacLean 01:04:12 / #: What about the romances?
Catherine Coulter 01:04:14 / #: The romances, I would say that after I rewrote those first six books, I realized that the trick really is to have as much humor as you can. If you are dialogue driven, which I hope most writers are, because after a page and a half, and this is another thing romance novels do wrong, page and a half of introspection, and you're already lost. You can't even remember what the character asked.
01:04:45 / #: The character asks a question, and we have a page and a half of introspection. What are you doing? Anyway, if you can say something allowed, you say it aloud, and if you can do it, have humor. If you have humor, just about anything will fly. I didn't do it in all the books, but there is humor whenever I can do it, and they're going to end well.
Jennifer Prokop 01:05:10 / #: Yeah. Wow.
Catherine Coulter 01:05:14 / #: But everybody's going to say that they're going to end well because a romance novel, because that's what the reader expects. These two people are going to go through the wringer, and then they're going to end out on the other side, and they're going to be mated for life. That is why women really like romance, because it's filled with hope. It's filled with hope. No matter what you endure in all of this, it's going to work out Well.
Sarah MacLean 01:05:39 / #: Well, thrillers too.
Jennifer Prokop 01:05:40 / #: Right, justice is served.
Sarah MacLean 01:05:41 / #: People often comment on, "Oh, so many romance novelists end up writing thrillers." The reality is, it makes perfect sense to us that that's a possible career arc. Because justice and hope being served are, they're both happily ever afters, in a certain sense, right?
Catherine Coulter 01:05:59 / #: They are. They're happily ever afters for that one plot. Okay. There are other things going on, of course, but no, you're perfectly right. You're perfectly right. There's hope and there's justice, and things are going to be okay. I promise you that. No matter what I do to those characters, it's going to be okay. Did you happen to get an ARC of Reckoning?
Sarah MacLean 01:06:25 / #: No. No, but I'm going to ask for one.
Jennifer Prokop 01:06:27 / #: We can ask Karen for them.
Catherine Coulter 01:06:29 / #: Well, I prefer that you bought it.
Jennifer Prokop 01:06:32 / #: I'll do that too.
Sarah MacLean 01:06:33 / #: Fine. We'll do that too.
Jennifer Prokop 01:06:35 / #: I'll take those orders. That's fine.
Catherine Coulter 01:06:38 / #: Well, there's a surprise at the end because readers have been bugging me about this for a long time, and I'm not going to tell you what it is.
Jennifer Prokop 01:06:45 / #: Okay.
Sarah MacLean 01:06:46 / #: Great.
Catherine Coulter 01:06:48 / #: I don't know if it's great, but we'll see.
Sarah MacLean 01:06:51 / #: I'm sure it will be. So Catherine, one last question. As you think about your more than 80 books, I think we're at now.
Catherine Coulter 01:07:01 / #: I'm on 88.
Sarah MacLean 01:07:03 / #: Number 88.
Jennifer Prokop 01:07:04 / #: Wow, yeah.
Sarah MacLean 01:07:05 / #: In 88 books, we've talked about books that your readers have really loved that have resonated. Is there a book that you think back on and think, "That was really fabulous? That's the one I wish everybody could read forever?"
Catherine Coulter 01:07:27 / #: Yes, indeed. My own personal favorite is Beyond Eden. I wrote it in the 90s, and it's my very, very own personal favorite. That book moved me profoundly.
Jennifer Prokop 01:07:39 / #: Why?
Catherine Coulter 01:07:39 / #: The heroine Lindsay. Her attitude on life and how she deals with what she goes through, which is a whole lot. Have you guys read it?
Jennifer Prokop 01:07:53 / #: I don't think I have read this one.
Sarah MacLean 01:07:55 / #: No, I don't think so.
Catherine Coulter 01:07:56 / #: Okay. Well, again, it's a contemporary and it's got a mystery in it. But again, it's a romantic suspense, and we have the hero in it is what you want every hero to be down to his toenails, which he buffs. Well, I don't know if he does. But it will move you, I hope, profoundly. It ended up right. It ended up right.
Sarah MacLean 01:08:33 / #: Wow. You know what's amazing?
Jennifer Prokop 01:08:35 / #: A lot of that was amazing.
Sarah MacLean 01:08:37 / #: Aside from that whole conversation, what's amazing is a lot of these interviews, it's as though no one has ever asked these women to talk about their life in romance. A lot of people have not been asked about that.
Jennifer Prokop 01:08:53 / #: Right.
Sarah MacLean 01:08:53 / #: And so the stories are just wild.
Jennifer Prokop 01:08:57 / #: One of the things that is really persistent in this generation of authors that we've interviewed is kind of their success feels really predicated on whether or not they were lucky enough to find good people. It was really clear from talking to Catherine Coulter that she felt really lucky and found a lot of really good people, not just friends, author friends, not just her husband, but in publishing itself.
Sarah MacLean 01:09:22 / #: Yeah, an agent who she felt supported by, editors who she felt were really doing the best work for the books. I loved that story about The Cove about when she, the first book, I love the whole story about her sister giving her the idea, et cetera. But also, I loved that she went to Leslie Gelbman, who we've talked about before, because Leslie was Nora Roberts's editor and was J.R. Ward's editor Jayne Ann Krentz's editor. Somebody who is in the ether as an important voice in romance, but when she talked about Leslie Gelbman responding and saying, "Okay, so this is the plot, but where's the story."
Jennifer Prokop 01:10:03 / #: Yeah, tell me the story.
Sarah MacLean 01:10:04 / #: It's so remarkable when, you're right, an editor just could have easily said, "This is not going to work for you," and then, right, she doesn't get to travel down that path.
Jennifer Prokop 01:10:19 / #: I think that part, I was really interested in because it feels like, and I think this is, you obviously are in publishing in a way I'm not, it is clear to me when I talk to people, to other authors now that there's still a real sense of it takes a village to be a successful author in publishing and who is that village and who's supporting you or your awareness of them as people that have helped you along the way and how long-standing. Her talking about Robert Gottlieb's many, his kids and his wife and the way that she knows people.
Sarah MacLean 01:10:57 / #: She's outlasted so many people in his life and these relationships, it feels different in a lot of ways. Obviously, I'm a writer, so I don't know what it's like to be other things, but I did for many years have a job in corporate America and the relationships don't feel quite so personal in those jobs. But this long-standing editorial relationship, long-standing agent relationships, these relationships where somebody knows your kids and knows your family, and we talk about books being orphaned, authors being orphaned by their editors, and it really does feel that way.
Jennifer Prokop 01:11:36 / #: We now are smart enough and record these kind of right after we're done.
Sarah MacLean 01:11:41 / #: Immediately after the conversation.
Jennifer Prokop 01:11:42 / #: Just got off the, and so it's interesting, because the first thing you think of is sometimes, not necessarily, but I was really interested in her talking about the golden age of romance. Of course you wouldn't realize it at the time, but looking back that she could say, "Of course."
Sarah MacLean 01:11:59 / #: Well, just the way the story goes. Where she went to a lunch at the Plaza with sales and they offered her a giant deal for more historicals at this lunch at the Plaza.
Jennifer Prokop 01:12:14 / #: Right. That doesn't happen anymore?
Sarah MacLean 01:12:16 / #: Gone are the days, maybe it happens for someone else.
Jennifer Prokop 01:12:20 / #: Colleen Hoover probably gets lunch at the Plaza. I actually don't know if you can have lunch at the Plaza anymore, but the point is...
Sarah MacLean 01:12:27 / #: It really does feel like there was this moment in time when so many writers were just powerhouses. Now what's interesting is I was thinking as she was talking, "Oh, well there is something going on right now." There are writers who are powerhouses right now.
Jennifer Prokop 01:12:48 / #: Yes.
Sarah MacLean 01:12:49 / #: But it feels like many, many fewer, she talked about getting letters from her readers, but powerhouses now sometimes are grassroots, right? Like readers-
Jennifer Prokop 01:13:00 / #: Like from TikTok.
Sarah MacLean 01:13:02 / #: Yes, right.
Jennifer Prokop 01:13:02 / #: The readers have decided that this person is a powerhouse, but she didn't talk very much about readers.
Sarah MacLean 01:13:08 / #: No, no, no. For her, it was very much, she seemed to feel as though it was a top-down kind of-
Jennifer Prokop 01:13:17 / #: She was part of the publishing ecosystem, right?
Sarah MacLean 01:13:20 / #: Mm-hmm.
Jennifer Prokop 01:13:21 / #: I thought that was also just really interesting to consider the way our relationship with authors have changed, but at the same time, she's really plugged into Facebook. She updates it every day. This is not someone who isn't disinterested in the reader's experience-
Sarah MacLean 01:13:35 / #: No, not at all.
Jennifer Prokop 01:13:37 / #: That's one big thing that seems very clearly different.
Sarah MacLean 01:13:39 / #: Yeah. I was grateful to hear you talk about burnout, because it's something that I think a lot of us are thinking about right now, nine books in three years in the early 90s.
Jennifer Prokop 01:13:52 / #: That was a lot. That is a ton of work, and it feels like that was a huge ask from her publisher. I'm glad that she talked about just like her brain kind of just fizzing out and needing to have a moment of something completely different to rejuvenate herself.
Sarah MacLean 01:14:11 / #: I loved a lot of that conversation, because I think that she is one of those people who made a career of writing as a writer and has evolved by virtue of luckily, her own passions and the way the market demanded.
Jennifer Prokop 01:14:29 / #: Then that was interesting because we see the clear evolution from romance to romantic suspense to kind of thrillers. Some of that had to do with, now I can just write one book a year or one book every two years. But I was also really interested in what would drive her to go back and then rewrite books.
Sarah MacLean 01:14:47 / #: Oh, yeah.
Jennifer Prokop 01:14:48 / #: That was fascinating because she's a writer, right? She's a craftsman. We've talked about this before that, and I don't want to put words in her mouth, because we didn't ask her this, but we've talked about this sort of, some people think of themselves as artists, and some people think of themselves as craftsmen. It feels like a true craftsman's choice to say, "That book bums me out," which is what she said.
01:15:13 / #: I think there further evidence of that is the discussion of you can't revise if there's nothing on the page, the first draft does not matter. That's just the raw material. That's the thing, the artist is like, "Okay, I've got one shot with this huge block of clay to make my sculpture," but writers are different. I thought that was also really interesting to hear her process, and it doesn't surprise me at all. It's a bit of a segue that someone who herself is so funny and so sharp and so observationally on point would think that humor is a really key ingredient of making a book.
Sarah MacLean 01:15:51 / #: Oh my god, the hystericals.
Jennifer Prokop 01:15:54 / #: Oh yeah, that's perfect.
Sarah MacLean 01:15:56 / #: Hilarious. The fact that right away when I called out The Sherbrooke Bride at the very jump, she was like, "Yeah, we call those heroes assholes." We totally do, but things are different, but they are also the same. I think that there's so much about what she said, especially when she spoke about conferences and the craft workshops, and this is the only way you can do it and throw everybody else's book out. You only use mine.
01:16:24 / #: The one thing that seems to run through all of these conversations, I think to a person is don't let other people's rules impact your book. Your story is your story. I hear so often, and you do too. We see it constantly on Twitter and in writing groups and all over the place, these kind of hard and fast. You must do it this way. You must traditionally publish this way. You must independently publish this way. None of these people followed.
01:17:00 / #: I don't think one single person we've talked to for this series has followed the bouncing ball. They've all had some moment where they've of deviated. I love, "I had lunch with Hilary Ross and I told her I wanted to put sex in a Regency, and she said, go with it." It made me think so much of Vivian Stephens and how Vivian just kept saying, "Yeah, do you, and that's what makes the books good."
Jennifer Prokop 01:17:26 / #: What a conversation. That was pretty awesome. Life goals, it's great. It's great.
Sarah MacLean 01:17:35 / #: Catherine's latest book is Reckoning. It came out in August, so it is on shelves now. We will put in show notes all the books that Jenn and I have loved by her over the years, or some subset of the books that I have loved over the years by her, because I've loved so many of them. Obviously, with the caveat that these are older historicals, so enter with caution, they're going to be bananas. I can promise that.
Jennifer Prokop 01:18:04 / #: Look, if the author was calling them hystericals as she was writing them, then the amplification of that can only be more amazing.
Sarah MacLean 01:18:11 / #: Well, I said with her that I spoke with Sophie Jordan this morning and we talked about the grovel. She really does it. She knows the job. When it comes to a grovel, these heroes have to be broken or what did she say? Disciplined.
Jennifer Prokop 01:18:25 / #: They like it though.
Sarah MacLean 01:18:26 / #: The other thing Sophie said to me was talk about taking the finger, and I think that's true. I think anybody, when you dip your toe into these old Catherine Coulter historicals, that's what you're going to get every time. A real take the finger experience.
Jennifer Prokop 01:18:40 / #: Perfect.
Sarah MacLean 01:18:41 / #: I'm Sarah MacLean. I'm here with my friend Jen Prokop. This is Fated Mates and you can find us every Wednesday. Thank you as always. To our sponsors, Lumi Labs and Cara Dion, be sure to check out Indiscrete, Cara's book, right now in KU or print.
S04.21: Sandra Kitt: Trailblazer
Annnnd….we’re back! This week, we’ve got a new Trailblazer episode: Sandra Kitt—the first African American author at Harlequin (Rites of Spring, Harlequin American #43)—joins us to talk about the early days of writing category romance in the US, about writing for Vivian Stephens, about launching romance lines at Kensington and BET, and about her longstanding career. She also talks about writing the books that speak to you first and finding an audience for them later.
This conversation is far reaching and could have gone for hours longer — our hope is that it is not the last time Sandra will join us at Fated Mates. We are so grateful to her for making time for us.
Find the full list of trailblazer episodes here. For more conversations with Sandra Kitt, please listen to her episode of the Black Romance Podcast.
Join us LIVE tonight, Feburary 9th, for our special edition IAD celebration/Fated Mates funtime/Munro/Very likely Derek Craven too episode! Tickets are “pay what you wish” at live.fatedmates.net, you’re welcome to join us for free, or make a donation to help offset the costs of transcribing this season’s Trailblazer episodes.
Our next read along will feature some of Sarah’s favorite quick & dirty books by London Hale, the pen name of authors Ellis Leigh and Brighton Walsh. Their Temperance Falls series is full of kinks and tropes and HEAs and while we won’t be talking about all ten books, we’ll definitely be talking about a few of them. Specific titles to follow, but Sarah is for sure going to want you to read Talk Dirty to Me, which is older mayor of the town heroine, younger firefighter and also phone sex operator hero because…obviously. The whole series is free in KU.
Show Notes
People Sandra mentioned: Vivian Stephens, Elsie Washington/Rosalind Welles, Georgette Heyer, Walter Zacharias, Beverly Jenkins, Jennifer Enderlin, Julie Moody Freeman, Kathryn Falk, Kathleen Woodiwiss, Patricia Veryan, Janet Dailey, Jayne Ann Krentz, Anita Richmond Bunkley, Eboni Snoe, Donna Hill, Gwynne Foster, Marcia King-Gamble, Brenda Jackson.
Sandra Kitt 00:00:00 / #: I remember back in the late '80s when I was really just getting started and people were really beginning to know my name.
00:00:06 / #: I once had a teacher said to me that she used to think of romances as being just trashy novels. And then she started reading them and she said, "I realized that my girls in school, these are important books for them to read." Because the stories were always pretty much middle-class and higher, and because there was always a happy ending, she said, "This is their first introduction to what healthy man-woman relationships could be like."
00:00:43 / #: The stories could be perceived as being a little bit of a fantasy, but she said, "These are pretty much on target. This is what we want. This is what we want in a relationship, a guy who's going to respect you, a guy who's going to make you laugh, who's going to talk to you, who's not going to play you." And so if they're 14, 15, 16 years old and they're reading these books, this is a pretty good start on what relationships could be like.
Jennifer Prokop 00:01:09 / #: That was the voice of Sandra Kitt, one of the first authors for Harlequin American under the new line formed by Vivian Stephens. And the first African American author to write for Harlequin.
00:01:23 / #: We are pretty excited to share what comes from this conversation. We're going to talk a lot about category romance and its evolution and some amazing stories.
Sarah MacLean 00:01:35 / #: Yeah, some great stories.
Jennifer Prokop 00:01:37 / #: Welcome to Faded Mates everyone. I'm Jennifer Prokop, a romance reader and editor.
Sarah MacLean 00:01:43 / #: And I'm Sarah McLean. I read romance novels and I write them. And this is Sandra Kitt.
Jennifer Prokop 00:01:55 / #: All right, we're ready.
Sarah MacLean 00:01:57 / #: So thank you so much for joining us. We are really thrilled to have you.
Sandra Kitt 00:02:01 / #: Thank you.
Sarah MacLean 00:02:02 / #: I told Jen right before we started that I had a little taste of ... I know some of your stories because we've had lunch together.
Sandra Kitt 00:02:12 / #: Oh, yes. Great fun. Great fun.
Sarah MacLean 00:02:14 / #: And maybe now-
Jennifer Prokop 00:02:15 / #: All you New Yorkers making new jealous.
Sandra Kitt 00:02:16 / #: I know.
Sarah MacLean 00:02:18 / #: Now that we're all getting vaccinated, it might actually happen again.
Jennifer Prokop 00:02:22 / #: Yeah, I think so.
Sandra Kitt 00:02:22 / #: I hope so. I hope so.
Sarah MacLean 00:02:23 / #: Exactly.
Sandra Kitt 00:02:24 / #: I hope so.
Sarah MacLean 00:02:26 / #: Sandra, let's start at the beginning. How did you become a writer?
Sandra Kitt 00:02:33 / #: Well, I guess I first have to say that I was not looking to become a writer. When this all happened to me, I was very happy in a professional career as an astronomy librarian at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. And it was-
Jennifer Prokop 00:02:52 / #: I love astronomy and the moon. I'm so excited right now.
Sarah MacLean 00:02:55 / #: It's the coolest job.
Sandra Kitt 00:02:58 / #: ... It was a very, very cool job. And working at the museum was just great fun. I met the most amazing people there, beginning with Isaac Asimov, with whom I became very good friends with him and his wife. And illustrated two books for him.
00:03:15 / #: And following through the whole astronaut era of being able to meet them up until, and even now, Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson, with whom I worked for almost 20 years before he went off to become a rock star. And I continued doing women's fiction and romances.
00:03:34 / #: So it was a wonderful` career. And actually what happened was it was very instantaneous and haphazard, really. I got an idea one day for a story. I had never written a story before, but going through school, I wrote a lot of poetry and little romantic scenes. I wouldn't call them stories. And I got this idea for a story, which came to me in my head, fully, fully developed in about five minutes.
00:04:04 / #: And I went home that evening after work and sat down and began writing. I had no idea what I was doing. I wasn't sure what the format of a book was supposed to be like. And I wrote this story in about six weeks, and it was over a 100,000 words. So that tells you how much it just absolutely flowed out of me.
Jennifer Prokop 00:04:23 / #: Amazing.
Sandra Kitt 00:04:24 / #: And this day, to this day, I've always, I still believe that was the book that I was meant to write. And ultimately, it was published as The Color of Love. So that was my seminal book. That's the one that I'm most known for. That's the one that continues to sell.
Sarah MacLean 00:04:44 / #: But that wasn't the first book that you published.
Sandra Kitt 00:04:47 / #: That wasn't the first book that I published.
Jennifer Prokop 00:04:50 / #: It's the first book you wrote.
Sandra Kitt 00:04:50 / #: The very first book I wrote.
Sarah MacLean 00:04:50 / #: Walk us through how that happens.
Sandra Kitt 00:04:55 / #: How it got from the first book to the first published book. Well, I had no expectations of getting published. I really wrote the book for myself. I'd never seen a story like The Color of Love. That was not the working title. It was something else at the time.
Sarah MacLean 00:05:10 / #: For everyone, The Color of Love is about a white police officer and a Black heroine.
Sandra Kitt 00:05:15 / #: Which remains so topical even today.
Jennifer Prokop 00:05:20 / #: Right.
Sarah MacLean 00:05:20 / #: Right.
Sandra Kitt 00:05:21 / #: Yeah. It did have a white police officer. The story took place in New York where I was born and raised. And the heroine was an African American book designer who worked in publishing. They met in a very strange, fortuitous way, purely happenstance, again. And because of the way they met, she came to his aid one morning when she found them outside of her house.
00:05:44 / #: He returned six weeks later to thank her. And he was both stunned that he had done that, and so was she. But it began a friendship. And of course, ultimately what happened with the friendship, once they got over their qualms about being interested in someone of another race, they began to fall in love.
00:06:02 / #: And it's a story about how they overcame all of the obstacles, of which there were many, in order for them to commit to their love and to show each other how much they really believed in each other and loved each other.
00:06:17 / #: I'm very proud of that book. I thought what I wanted to do, besides write an interracial story, because I was looking at the world I lived in, in New York, in the country. And we don't talk about it, but it's not as if interracial couples have never existed before. But I wanted to not only see if I could write a story that was credible about an interracial relationship, I decided to really throw in the kitchen sink by making the hero a cop. Because then, as now, the relationship between law enforcement and communities with people of color has always been tenuous, has always been very, very rocky. So I wanted to see if I could write a story that the readers would believe, that they would believe that this was even possible. And I think I succeeded just in the history of the story itself, and where it is even now, in the history of romances and women's fiction.
Sarah MacLean 00:07:17 / #: You came out of the gate swinging for the fences.
Sandra Kitt 00:07:19 / #: I did.
Sarah MacLean 00:07:20 / #: Ground us. What's the year that we're talking about at this point?
Sandra Kitt 00:07:23 / #: I began writing that story and finishing it in 1980. So I'm also giving my age.
Jennifer Prokop 00:07:30 / #: That's okay.
Sarah MacLean 00:07:31 / #: Barely even born, barely even born. That's fine.
Sandra Kitt 00:07:34 / #: Thank you. Thank you, Sarah. Love you. Love you.
Sarah MacLean 00:07:37 / #: But it wasn't published until-
Sandra Kitt 00:07:39 / #: It was 15 years.
Sarah MacLean 00:07:40 / #: ... 1995, right?
Sandra Kitt 00:07:42 / #: It was 15 years before I could get it published. And that's not to say I didn't circulate it among all of the publishing houses.
Sarah MacLean 00:07:48 / #: Sure.
Sandra Kitt 00:07:48 / #: And what I consistently got back as feedback from the editors is that, "This is a really well-written book. It's really, really interesting, and I don't think we can publish it." And they would say, "We just don't know what we would do with it, because it's such a taboo subject." And that was the word they used, taboo, because it was this whole interracial thing. We take it for granted now in the 21st century.
Sarah MacLean 00:08:14 / #: In 1995, yeah.
Sandra Kitt 00:08:14 / #: Yeah. But in 1980, it was not done. And you should see if there are any other interracial stories around that era, and there really aren't. I can only think of one, but it wasn't considered a romance. It was considered commercial fiction, and it had a different kind of theme.
Jennifer Prokop 00:08:31 / #: Right, yeah. Well, what they had in the '80s were those awful romances with Native American men and historicals.
Sandra Kitt 00:08:39 / #: My feeling about them publishing them with Native American heroes or using Arab sheiks and all that, it was just an excuse to write about someone who was of color. And so it became exotic. You write about Native American falling in love with a white woman. It was always a white woman.
00:09:04 / #: It's all kinds of things. It's exploring an issue that no one ever talked about. So if you write about it in terms of historic fiction, then it's a little bit more acceptable rather than placing it in the 20th or now, the 21st century. If you say this is a story that took place in the 1800s, it's acceptable because it was the past.
00:09:25 / #: So my feeling is that I don't think it was a deliberate intent. But the way I read it, is that this was a way of exploring the whole issue of interracial romances by setting the story, first of all, in a historical period. And then, using other races that were still exotic because we really didn't know a lot about them, including our own Native Americans or the Arab countries. Or people who are Spanish, or people who are South Asian, that kind of thing.
00:09:59 / #: But I just went for the jugular. I just said, "I'm going to set this in America and let's see where the chips fall."
Sarah MacLean 00:10:05 / #: Nice.
Sandra Kitt 00:10:05 / #: Let's see where the chips fall.
Sarah MacLean 00:10:07 / #: Okay, so you have The Color of Love, which is not titled that at the time, but whatever you have this.
Sandra Kitt 00:10:13 / #: No, I think the working title originally was Through the Eyes of Love.
Sarah MacLean 00:10:19 / #: That's also nice.
Sandra Kitt 00:10:19 / #: And then at a second revision, writing through it, I named it Barriers, then it segues, the final title was The Color of Love, and that was just the perfect title for it. It really spoke very specifically about what the book is about. But once I finished it, I put it aside because as I said, I was writing for myself.
00:10:41 / #: I was writing stories that I had not seen in the industry, in the marketplace, in the bookstores, and the story came to me. I said, "This is a great story, the people who would like to read this." So I wrote a second book and I finished it, and then I wrote a third book and I finished it. And it wasn't until I finished that third book that I realized, because I had so many ideas coming to me so fast, I said, "Maybe some of this is publishable."
00:11:11 / #: Now, at the time, 1981, Harlequin had decided to start a new romance line where the stories were set completely in America, because they were a Canadian company. And they then went on the look for American writers to write the American stories, because of course, we knew our own history.
00:11:32 / #: And so, I just happened to come across this article in the New York Times. And they talked about Vivian Stephens, who they had recently hired to head up the New York office for this Harlequin imprint.
Jennifer Prokop 00:11:49 / #: This was Harlequin American Romance for everybody.
Sandra Kitt 00:11:51 / #: That became the Harlequin American Romance. Exactly. So I, being a librarian. I dug up the number for the New York office, and when I called, I got Vivian on the phone. I was totally stunned.
Sarah MacLean 00:12:04 / #: Amazing.
Sandra Kitt 00:12:06 / #: But I didn't know any better. I was so innocent and naive about publishing and people and who they were and how this worked.
00:12:13 / #: She answered the phone. I introduced myself and said, "I just read about you in the New York Times, and I see you're looking for writers." I said, "I don't really know anything about publishing, but I have written three books, and I'm thinking perhaps one of them might interest you for your new line." And she said, "Well, why don't you come on in and meet with me. We'll sit down and have a talk."
Sarah MacLean 00:12:33 / #: Perfect.
Sandra Kitt 00:12:34 / #: And I'm thinking, "All right, this is already sounding good."
Sarah MacLean 00:12:38 / #: At the time you were writing romances, obviously, were you?
Sarah MacLean 00:12:43 / #: You were not?
Jennifer Prokop 00:12:43 / #: No, you weren't.
Sandra Kitt 00:12:44 / #: No, I was not writing romances. I was writing ... I always believed that my stories were a lot bigger in scope and complexity than the romances that I had been reading.
Sarah MacLean 00:12:55 / #: Were you reading them too?
Sandra Kitt 00:12:56 / #: Oh my goodness. I've been reading them since junior high school, but they weren't called romances in those days. They were called Gothic romances because they were all written about England. They were all historicals.
00:13:08 / #: Then you get to the Mills & Boon stories from Harlequin where the stories then began to become more contemporary. But they were still all white characters, all in Europe. There was nothing about America in them at all.
Sarah MacLean 00:13:22 / #: And you were writing something different.
Sandra Kitt 00:13:24 / #: And I was writing totally different. If you've read The Color of Love, how complex that story is. And it's two or three subplots in it, and there's also a second romance going on. So I knew that what I was writing was bigger, deeper, more complex, and longer in terms of the writing. Very, very complex, word count.
Sarah MacLean 00:13:47 / #: Which is a big piece of this at the time. These categories have a very specific word count or no [inaudible 00:13:54 / #].
Sandra Kitt 00:13:53 / #: Exactly. But I didn't know that.
Sarah MacLean 00:13:56 / #: Right, exactly.
Sandra Kitt 00:13:56 / #: I didn't know that. I simply wrote the book. And I figured that I knew that it was long, but I really hadn't paid much attention to the fact that my books were significantly, sometimes twice as long as the typical category or series romance. I just in one ear and out the other.
00:14:15 / #: So Vivian had me come into her office, and it was on Second Avenue. I remember, Second Avenue between 42nd and 41st Street. And her office was so new, she had no furniture. She didn't have a secretary. There was no receptionist. There was just Vivian. And so we went into her office and sat down, and it was an amazing conversation because I said, "This is what I'm doing. I've written these three books. I don't know anything about publishing."
00:14:45 / #: So in two hours, she met with me for two hours, and gave me a quick tutorial on what she looking for, what she wanted to see in romance, yada, yada, yada. At the end of the two hours, she said, "I understand you said that you've written three books." And I said, "Yeah." She said, "Why don't you send me two? Just pick the two of the three that you thought were really different or strong or whatever. Send them to me and let me take a look at them."
00:15:12 / #: So believe me, the next day-
Sarah MacLean 00:15:14 / #: I bet.
Sandra Kitt 00:15:16 / #: ... the manuscripts were in the mail. And she called me 10 days later to say, "I'm buying both books." And the two books that she bought was a Black romance, which was Adam and Eva. And I gave her a story where the main characters were white but had secondary Black characters. And that became the Rites of Spring. And that was the very, very first book that she published. But both books came out in 1984.
00:15:48 / #: So that's how I got started. And basically, once those two books came out, I was off to the races. I was off and running. Everything I wrote after that for many, many years always got published. But just to show you how much I didn't know about the industry, I didn't know that I could have written a proposal or done just three chapters, submit them to a publisher or an editor, and then they would decide that they want it and put me on the contract.
00:16:18 / #: I would write the whole book because I didn't know any better. I wrote the whole book. I was in those days, a pretty fast writer. I was doing them in about three months. And then, so I would show them to an editor at Harlequin and they'd say, "Oh, we want this." And they would buy it. And that would be that.
00:16:34 / #: I think I had written my 10th book before someone said to me, "You don't really have to write the whole book right away." And I'm going, "10, seriously? Were they keeping this a secret?"
00:16:48 / #: So anyway, I was off and running. I felt so fortunate. I felt that, "Wow, this is happening really, really quickly." But even as I began to work with Vivian, on Adam and Eva in particular, I began to get a sense of how certain people in the industry were looking at me as a writer, and looking at my stories.
00:17:13 / #: When she bought Adam and Eva, she told me that the guys, and they were all guys at the time up in Canada, didn't want her to buy the manuscript. And they wanted her to figure out how to reject it, turn it back to me, and get the advance back.
Sarah MacLean 00:17:31 / #: Because the characters were African Americans.
Sandra Kitt 00:17:33 / #: Because the characters were all Black. They were all African Americans, and they didn't want to deal with how their white readership, which was substantial, was going to respond. Because don't forget, at the time, Harlequin's book came out as a subscription series. You join the of subscription-
Jennifer Prokop 00:17:49 / #: You're going to get all of them.
Sandra Kitt 00:17:50 / #: ... Right. And you got four books every month, and you got whatever you got, that's what you got.
00:17:55 / #: So they were already anticipating that there'd be a lot of blow back if one month, one of the books had Black characters on the cover. And to Vivian's credit, and then I give her a lot of credit for this. She told them, "No, we're going to put this book through and we're going to see what happens."
00:18:11 / #: One of the things she said to me when I met with her was, "My goal is to change the way we perceive romances in this country." She said, "I can't do anything about the rest of the world, but I want the books to reflect the way America looks." And so she was actively looking for African American writers at the time, who would break that wall and begin to come in.
00:18:37 / #: And this is where Elsie Washington comes into the story. I did not know Elsie before meeting Vivian. Elsie and Vivian were actually very good friends. Let's face it, there weren't very many African Americans in the field at all. And they all knew each other. They all knew each other. They're very emotionally and psychologically supportive of what they had to go through in order to break into this career.
Sarah MacLean 00:19:02 / #: Maybe you could give listeners an overview of who Elsie is and why she's important.
Sandra Kitt 00:19:09 / #: So Elsie Washington at the time was a journalist. She was writing, working freelance, doing articles. She wrote quite a bit for Essence Magazine. I think that she was a regular columnist for a while. And so what Vivian did was to approach Elsie, because Elsie was a writer.
00:19:34 / #: And she said to her, "I want you to write a book because I'm looking to break in and open up this field to Black writers. We know that there are a lot of talented Black writers out there. We just have to find them." So she asked Elsie if she would write a book.
00:19:49 / #: And Vivian worked very, very closely with Elsie on the book, because as Elsie told me, maybe a year or two later after the book came out, which was called Entwined Destinies, and she wrote under the name of Rosalind Welles, that was her pseudonym. She said it was really, really, really difficult for her to write the book because she says, "I'm not a novelist." She says, "I write freelance. I write nonfiction. I write about beauty. I write about all kinds of things, but I don't write romances."
00:20:22 / #: So Vivian had to really hold her hand through the project. They talked about the story settings. Vivian explained what she wanted in a romance, what the romance should be about. Elsie came up with characters in a setting, and Vivian was like a guidance for her through the process until the book was done.
00:20:45 / #: And that book came out not as a Harlequin American Romance book. It came out under the Candlelight series, which was a Doubleday and print, but it was the first one by a Black writer that Candlelight had ever done. And subsequently, was legitimately the very first Black romance.
00:21:06 / #: So in that regard, Elsie came before me in terms of being the first in that category. I was the first with the American Romance line. As a matter of fact, I think Rites of Spring was number 13 in the whole line of books. And then again, as I said, later that year, 1984, came Adam and Eva. But once Elsie finished that book, she couldn't be persuaded to write another one. She said she found it very difficult because it wasn't her natural forte.
00:21:41 / #: She was a lovely, lovely lady, very gentle, very sweet, very smart, very kind. I liked her a lot. And down the road a few years when I learned that she had died of cancer, there was an obituary in the New York Times for her. I was stunned. I thought she, "Oh my goodness, she's so young. What do you mean she's dead?" But she was gone.
00:22:03 / #: But she did I feel, leave a place in history in the genre, even though a lot of people, most people apparently don't know who she is or know anything about her. There's not a lot written about her either. But I did have an opportunity to know her a little bit for about a two or three year period, and I'm very happy for that.
Sarah MacLean 00:22:25 / #: When Harlequin American Romance as a series, what's your understanding? Was this like Harlequin had this idea and they found Vivian, or did Vivian pitch it as a, "We need an American Romance line?" Do you have any sense of that relationship between that line being founded?
Sandra Kitt 00:22:44 / #: I have a sense that Vivian did not approach them. I think that they came to her. You have to remember that during the era, Harlequin was it.
Sarah MacLean 00:22:53 / #: That was it.
Sandra Kitt 00:22:54 / #: They were the premier and only romance line that was out there. They were doing extremely well worldwide. And there-
00:23:03 / #: ... extremely well worldwide, and their own demographics and focus groups show that American women readers read huge numbers of the Harlequin books and it was always known that it was a Canadian company. I don't think the readers really paid much attention to the fact that it was a Canadian company. They liked the genre.
Jennifer Prokop 00:23:22 / #: Sure.
Sandra Kitt 00:23:22 / #: And I think it was the powers that be in Canada decided, "Wow, these are huge numbers from the American readers. Maybe what we should do is start a whole another line."
Jennifer Prokop 00:23:36 / #: Cater to them.
Sandra Kitt 00:23:37 / #: Right, that not only caters to the American reader, but is set, the story. Otherwise, the stories had never been set in America. The earlier Harlequin books had never been. So they very smartly and very innovatively decided let's start a new line set in America, all the stories, and we'll find American writers to write the American stories. They contacted Vivian and they hired her away from Candlelight because she was so hugely, really successful in developing the Candlelight series. And a lot of people don't know this either, she was the first editor to find Sandra Brown. She was the first one to find Barbara Delinsky. Jayne Ann Krentz. All came through the Candlelight series, which Vivian was the editor of.
00:24:27 / #: So they looked at her record, looked at her numbers, and say, "Wow, we have to have her because she clearly knows what she was doing." And I'd once said to Vivian, after talking to her and learning a little bit more about her, I always thought that she had the purest, very clear sense of what a "romance" was and what it should be and what it should be about, and what women wanted to read.
00:24:53 / #: And I think that the genre has certainly changed since the 1980s, late 1970s, and to the point where I think we almost have to redefine romance because what we read today in romance is not what I had considered romance when I came into the industry, and what appeals to me as a women's fiction romance reader is not like any of the books that I really see coming out today, which is fine, change happens, change is natural, but I think that with change, you have to really revisit what it is you're writing and what is the mission statement, so to speak, of the stories. What is it you're trying to accomplish?
Sarah MacLean 00:25:38 / #: That's really fascinating. Could you talk a little more about that? Are you willing to talk a little more about that with us?
Sandra Kitt 00:25:47 / #: Yeah, sure.
Sarah MacLean 00:25:48 / #: No, because we certainly...
Jennifer Prokop 00:25:48 / #: Yeah, tell us. Yeah.
Sarah MacLean 00:25:48 / #: ... have had this conversation a lot that the genre is always evolving and where's it going now? So what are you thinking?
Sandra Kitt 00:25:55 / #: Okay, so I guess I have to kind of go back a little bit to when I began reading them in junior high school and they were Gothic novels. What appealed to me about the stories was the relationship between the he and the she. How did they actually come together, what drew them together? Now, the stories, the Gothic novels per se, always had an element of suspense about it and always damsel in distress being saved by this hunky hero who was also incredibly wealthy. And I was fascinated by that. 13, 14 years old, what do we know about love or romance?
00:26:32 / #: Then I sort of progressed from that to reading some of the Harlequin books and those, yeah, the Harlequin books, and those appealed to me because they were contemporary stories. Even though they were still set in Europe or set in Canada, they appealed to me because they were contemporary, which was something I could really relate to. Then we started publishing books by historical novels primarily by people like Johanna Lindsey and Kathleen Woodiwis, who was one of my favorites. I just loved her work. And see, there's another writer that I really liked a lot, Georgette Heyer.
Jennifer Prokop 00:27:12 / #: Sure.
Sandra Kitt 00:27:13 / #: Just amazing. And what I liked about their books were that they had a level of intelligence. They weren't just stories about he meets her, she meets him, they fall in love, they argue, they separate, they come back together, and it's the end of the book. Her stories, these stories were very well-developed characters, real sense of history, particularly Georgette Heyer, and her books had very subtle humor that just made me laugh all the time.
00:27:43 / #: And so when I started thinking about the stories that I really liked and appeal to me, they were the stories that had a very strong sense of setting. The characters were very well-drawn and consistent. You understood their motivation. And maybe I was thinking a little bit too intellectually at the time about them, but that's the kind of thing that appealed to me. And when the characters fell in love, you believed it and you believed why they were falling in love.
00:28:14 / #: For me, romance at the time, and don't forget, this was before we had introduced consummation in the stories, and there was the sex between the sheets and all of that, it was all about the emotions. It was all about...
Jennifer Prokop 00:28:32 / #: Feelings.
Sandra Kitt 00:28:33 / #: Right, the wonderful sense you got of meeting someone that you're really attracted to, but he's interesting and he's got a sense of humor or he's really smart. Whatever the case may be, I liked getting back to that primary instant when the attraction clicked and the story takes off from there. And so it's really about the emotion. It's about gaining trust, it's about overcoming doubts and taking chance and risks. So my stories have always been very emotional because that's what appealed to me.
00:29:11 / #: What I think began to happen as the envelope was pushed and writers were able to do a little bit more, then you brought in the sexuality issue, and don't forget, we went through that whole period where we were accused by critics of just writing soft mommy porn because of the sex...
Jennifer Prokop 00:29:32 / #: Still happens, right?
Sandra Kitt 00:29:32 / #: And it still happens occasionally. And of course the people who criticize it don't understand what the romance is all about anyway. Or they'd know that it's about the feelings and emotions that go into people falling in love. It's not about the act of sex, it's much more than that.
00:29:49 / #: And so I sort of began to feel this is what I'm interested in when I read a book about relationships, it's really the core of it is about the relationship. The story is something else that kind of advances the relationship between the characters and pushes it forward, but it all comes down to emotion. It all comes down to what do they feel and believe about each other in their hearts and how can they nurture it and make it something that's permanent and you have a happy ending.
00:30:21 / #: I think what's happened is once we began to allow sexuality into the stories, the envelope began to be pushed even further. And it seemed to be that became much more of a focus in the story, and there were a lot of readers who were really into that. They just wanted to get right to it and find out what they were doing in bed together. And so the emotional part of it began to take a back seat. And while I understand the fascination and appeal to the sexual part of it, because let's face it, if it's well written, you're going to get hot. And I once heard a writer say that, "If you don't get turned on writing your own love scenes, then you're not doing it right."
00:31:09 / #: So that's all good and fine and it's part of the relationship, part of human nature, part of procreation, part of all of that. But I don't think we can get away from the fundamentals, which is the relationship...
Jennifer Prokop 00:31:25 / #: Feelings.
Sandra Kitt 00:31:26 / #: What are they feeling about...
Jennifer Prokop 00:31:26 / #: Feelings.
Sandra Kitt 00:31:27 / #: ... each other. And I really kind of feel that not only have we kind of gotten away from that basis, that foundation for the stories, I don't think we spend enough time talking about what does it mean when you're asking, how do they feel about each other? When I write a love scene, a thesaurus is my favorite writing tool because I find words to describe feelings because I want to feel what she's feeling, the heroine, when a guy touches her. When he suddenly puts his hand on the back of her neck or runs his hand down her arms or turns her to face him and they're looking into each other's eyes. It doesn't always come down the sex, it comes down to that visceral...
Jennifer Prokop 00:32:14 / #: A connection.
Sarah MacLean 00:32:14 / #: Intimacy, yeah.
Sandra Kitt 00:32:15 / #: ... connection, which is hard to describe. The intimacy. Thank you. And so I do think that we need to look at romances where they are now, and heaven knows where they're going to be in five or 10 years if you keep pushing the envelope back. I wonder if at some point we begin to circle back to what they used to be and what really got the audience to begin with, what drew them in to begin with. Because the stories appealed to readers before the sex was introduced. So you don't necessarily need that, and you don't have to call it inspirational or sweet romance just because it doesn't have sex. It all comes down to emotion. So I do think we really need to revisit that and we decide what we're going to do about it.
00:33:07 / #: I only knew Vivian as an editor for about 18 months. She was only with Harlequin for about 18 months, and then she left. I'm not sure if she left or if they let her go, but she wasn't there anymore. And so I was turned over to one of the other editors in the company and continued to write for them for the next nine years. And what was interesting about them giving me such a hard time about writing stories with Black characters is that I eventually got an editor in 1993, I believe, '94, who they were doing an anthology about Thanksgiving and it was called Friends, Families, and Lovers. And they asked me to do one of the stories in which the couple was interracial. And I'm thinking, "Really?"
Sarah MacLean 00:34:02 / #: You're like, "I have a book for you. I have a book for you."
Jennifer Prokop 00:34:05 / #: "Let me tell you where I was 15 years ago," right?
Sandra Kitt 00:34:09 / #: No, I didn't even think to show them The Color of Love. I wrote another story for them called Love is Thanks Enough, and it was a Thanksgiving theme. But I was just so stunned that out of the blue 10 years later, they're now coming around to asking me to do something that's new and that's different. And the one thing I will give to Harlequin is that they were always able to come up with innovative new imprints.
Sarah MacLean 00:34:33 / #: But Sandra, in that interim period after Vivian left and until that Thanksgiving short, it sounds like you were writing books about two white people falling in love, right?
Sandra Kitt 00:34:45 / #: I was, and I got a lot of flack about that from the Black readers.
Sarah MacLean 00:34:50 / #: Was that because the publishers basically said you had to?
Sandra Kitt 00:34:55 / #: No, no, no. The publishers had nothing other than not accepting a story if I submitted it with Black characters. They really didn't tell me what I should write. I kind of figured it out.
Sarah MacLean 00:35:05 / #: But quietly told you what you should write.
Jennifer Prokop 00:35:06 / #: Like, "Really."
Sandra Kitt 00:35:08 / #: They very, very non-verbal, very, very non-verbal which was...
Jennifer Prokop 00:35:13 / #: You were like, "It's a little math. Let me put two and two together."
Sandra Kitt 00:35:15 / #: Yeah, I think I can figure this out. No, what happened was I had always considered myself somewhat of a switch-hitter as a writer, and that means I write the story as they come to me. And with The Color of Love, the story came to me as an interracial story. The next book that I wrote that came out after that was called Significant Others. This was when I was writing for Penguin Putnam, and that was a story about an African American woman who was so fair she could pass for white, but she didn't. She knew she was African American. She claimed it, this is what I am. But being the way people perceived her because of the way she looked complicated her love life. So she was always having these mixed signals and messages coming to her from men that she met, whether it was a Black man or a white man, and she wasn't looking for either. It's just she was who she was and she had to deal with it.
00:36:18 / #: So I was always mixing up the genre and trying to write things that no one else had been writing about. Then there was Between Friends in which these two girls who were childhood friends, one was Black and one was white, and they grew up together in the same community. And when the white woman had a child, the Black friend became the godmother to the white child. But then the hero was someone who had saved the heroine, who was African American, when they were teenagers when she was about to be raped, and he literally saved her life. Then he goes off and lives his life and she's living hers. When he is reintroduced to the community, then there is competition between the two girls over the guy who is white.
00:37:10 / #: My stories, I was raised in New York, which is arguably one of the most integrated cities in the universe, and this is the world I've always known. I've always been part of multi-mixed community since the time I was in elementary school, junior high school. Some of the friends that I met in junior high school are my friends today, and they are Hispanic, they're Asian, they're Jewish, one guy is Hungarian who's white.
00:37:40 / #: So this is not unusual to me. I looked at the world that I lived in New York, and that's where I began to draw on my stories because I didn't ever see anything written about the reality of the city, let alone the country which was beginning to change. The country was beginning to move towards a level of diversity that was noticeable. And all of my stories looked towards the future, and that's why I write contemporary stories rather than historical. I'm interested in the times we're living in because in writing about where we are now, I'm absolutely preparing for the future and where we're going in the future.
Sarah MacLean 00:38:24 / #: So did the Thanksgiving anthology lead you to get on the radar of, oh, what was his name who founded Arabesque?
Sandra Kitt 00:38:35 / #: Oh, Walter Zacharius.
Sarah MacLean 00:38:36 / #: Walter, thank you. Sorry.
Sandra Kitt 00:38:38 / #: Right.
Sarah MacLean 00:38:38 / #: I was like, "Zachary," and then I was like, "No, that's not right. It's Zacharius. Okay.
Sandra Kitt 00:38:41 / #: You were close. You were very close. He was a sweetheart. But Walter was one of the few people who put his money where his mouth was. He understood that the industry was changing. He understood that the genre was changing. And we've had talks about it. He'd say, "I don't understand why other publishers don't realize that there's a whole market out there that they've been ignoring just because the readers may all be Black." He said, "Give them what they want, and then you get what you want, which is that you sell more books and you make more money."
00:39:16 / #: So he started Arabesque. It was actually called Pinnacle, Arabesque under the Pinnacle imprint because he said, "I think it's time. I think that if we put a line out there where the target audience is going to be African American," he says, "I think it's going to be a success."
00:39:32 / #: And he came to me and my agent at the time and said, "I'm going to start this line. This is what we're going to call it, and I want Sandra to be my lead-off writer for the line." Because I was still at the time the only one out there who was doing these stories. I think in 1995, '96, that's when Beverly Jenkins may have come in on the scene, but she was doing historicals. And that's where she made her bones and made her imprint because there were no Black historical romances. So she just cornered the field and she was a good writer and she was a history buff, so she certainly did her homework. But that was the start of the market really beginning to open up and be accepting to Black voices.
00:40:23 / #: I liked the idea because I knew that there were other writers out there looking to get in. I was a little bit resistant to the idea of a separate imprint just for African American readers because to my thinking it smacked of segregation again. I had hoped that when the lines came out, first there was Arabesque Pinnacle, and then down the road a little ways came Kimani.
Sarah MacLean 00:40:52 / #: Kimani.
Sandra Kitt 00:40:53 / #: Because again, Walter had passed away at that point. They had sold Pinnacle Arabesque to BET, Black Entertainment Television. Then Harlequin had picked it up for a while. And I knew that when Harlequin picked it up, it's because they really saw what it was they were missing in the marketplace. And I had a feeling that what they were going to do was acquire Arabesque, work with the current contracts that came in, and then they were going to kill off Arabesque and start their own line, and that's what they did. They brought in Kimani.
00:41:32 / #: Someone once said to me though, "When you were there, they had you first. Why didn't they see after nine books what you were capable of and use you as the impetus for growing a line or integrating Black writers into what Harlequin already had?" I can't answer that question. I can't answer it because they've never really addressed it. And why should they? It's kind of controversial. But that's the way it kind of developed.
00:42:07 / #: But after the anthology from Harlequin, that's when I was approached by Penguin Putnam and Jennifer Enderlin. If you remember, Jennifer Enderlin...
Sarah MacLean 00:42:18 / #: Of course.
Sandra Kitt 00:42:18 / #: ... was a really hot shot editor and eventually became a vice president for the line. She was the one who gave me my first two-book contract, which included The Color of Love.
Sarah MacLean 00:42:32 / #: Until this, you've been selling one at a time?
Sandra Kitt 00:42:35 / #: Until then I was selling one book at a time for 10 years.
Jennifer Prokop 00:42:38 / #: Wow.
Sandra Kitt 00:42:39 / #: Even Harlequin never said, "We're going to put you on the contract for two or three books because clearly your stories are selling." That's a whole other story. Don't get me started on that. But Jennifer offered me the contract and she bought The Color of Love. She says, "I really like this story." And then the second book, she says, "I want another book for you." And that's when I came up with the idea for Significant Others about the young African American woman who was so fair she could pass for white and the complications that gave her life, particularly in the era of romance.
00:43:13 / #: But then after those books came out, I got another two-book contract from them, and that became Between Friends, the story of the two girls who had grown up together. And I think another book from that was She's the One which was about a firefighter. And then the last two books was Family Affair about an ex-con. Again, I was always trying... What if I had a hero who was an ex-con? Can I pull that off? I was always asking myself...
Sarah MacLean 00:43:46 / #: Swinging for the fences. Yeah.
Jennifer Prokop 00:43:48 / #: Yeah. Right.
Sandra Kitt 00:43:48 / #: Yeah, just go for it. I mean, the worst that can happen is that they'll turn you down and okay, I've had to face that. And then the last book I did, which was also very popular for that particular line was called Close Encounters. Again, an interracial story where the hero was again a cop and the heroine was an art teacher. And I can give away some of... I can do a reveal here because the book is really out of print right now. She ends up getting shot by the hero.
Sarah MacLean 00:44:25 / #: What?
Sandra Kitt 00:44:25 / #: He was on a sting, a drug sting with his team. I think he was a lieutenant in the police department and they had this elaborate sting set up. And her dog started getting fidgety and she decided at four o'clock in the morning to take the dog out for a walk. And the dog sensed, because dogs do, that there was something going on and he kept pulling her in the direction of what was going on. And before the undercover cops could realize that there was a pedestrian on the scene, action started popping, guns started firing, and they're after the bad guys, and she gets shot.
00:45:06 / #: And they didn't know right away who had shot her. Everybody was firing guns at everybody else. But in the subsequent investigation, it came out that the hero, Lee, had been the one to shoot her. And he felt enormous guilt. It was clearly an accident. She was in the wrong place at the wrong time. And he really emotionally responded to the fact that he was almost responsible for killing a civilian and a Black woman at that.
00:45:35 / #: And so that's how they met. He went to the hospital to see if she was okay and the development. And that's what I do with my stories. I don't make them predictable. I don't think there's much fun in making them predictable. I'm always, always trying to challenge myself.
00:45:53 / #: One of the points I was going to make that I got off of when I was talking about the Black stories versus the white stories is I always wrote the stories as they came to me and...
00:46:03 / #: I always wrote the stories as they came to me. And because I grew up in a culture that was so diverse and integrated, sometimes the stories came to me with white characters. The Rite of Spring, the very first book that was published had a white heroine and a white hero. But sometimes they came to me as Black characters. Now you're talking Adam and Eva, which not only have Black characters, it takes place on a Caribbean island, which is all Black. But I did have some Black readers accuse me of writing white stories because I knew that's how I would get published. And I was actually kind of hurt by that because that wasn't giving me enough credit for just being creative. But I did get accused of that, and I didn't even address it because I knew that wasn't true. I just kept writing the stories that came to me and trying to write the best stories that I could.
Sarah MacLean 00:46:55 / #: But as we're talking about readers, I want to talk about the other kind of readers, the readers who clearly you have met over your career, who have loved your books and seen themselves in your books. There is this very real sense about romance, that we are a rich community of readers who value the access that we have to authors and to storytellers. So I wonder if there are any stories that you have from these early days where you realize how committed and intense, sometimes intense, the romance community is and how... I mean, not to put too fine a point on it, but how awesome we are.
Sandra Kitt 00:47:43 / #: Well, one of the things I realized is that romance readers, women romance readers are absolutely devoted to the stories because of what it gives them, what all the stories gives them, which is a sense of what relationships can really be like, that it is possible to have a happy union and commit to it and hopefully have your happy ending. And the fact that it always, even today, outsells every other genre in publishing says volumes about relationships, the way boys and girls, men and women come together in relationships. And so when they read books about it where we make it successful, and we do, we make the story successful, they love that because it gives them hope. It gives them hope that if they don't have such a relationship now, it's absolutely possible that they could have it in the future. Or if they've had it once, it's possible to have it again if the first one doesn't work.
00:48:43 / #: So I think that what we as writers contribute to the culture of relationships and romance and love is significant. I remember back in the late '80s when I was really just getting started and people were really beginning to know my name, I once had a teacher said to me that she used to think of romances as being just trashy novels. And then she started reading them and she said, "I realized that my girls in school, these are important books for them to read because the stories were always pretty much middle class and higher, and because there was always a happy ending." She said, "This is their first introduction to what healthy men-women relationships could be like. The stories could be perceived as being a little bit of a fantasy."
00:49:42 / #: But she said, "These are pretty much on target. This is what we want. This is what we want in a relationship, a guy who's going to respect you, a guy who's going to make you laugh, who's going to talk to you, who's not going to play you. And so if they're 14, 15, 16 years old and they're reading these books, this is a pretty good start on what relationships could be like."
00:50:04 / #: And I really appreciated her telling me that. As a matter of fact, a podcast that I did last year through DePaul University, I think Sarah probably is aware of it, with Dr. Freeman Moody. And the reason why she reached out to me, I was the first person she taped for that library series. And she says, "I have been using your books in my sociology classes for years." Because she teaches it to Black students about relationships, about Black men and women and relationships. And I was so thrilled and honored. I mean, I had no idea that anyone was doing that.
00:50:46 / #: So clearly, what we do as writers really has a significant contribution to our development as human species who fall in love, break up, fall in love again. But love is always, always what it's about, is how do we connect to people and care for people? And the romantic part of it between a man and a woman, and of course today, it's between a man and a man and a woman and a woman and all kinds. I mean, the stories have really grown quite a bit in that area, but it's always about love and people just wanting to find someone to love them. So I'm very proud that I've contributed to that.
00:51:32 / #: Editors came to realize fairly quickly, and I've had several of them say this to me, "You're not really a romance writer." Again, because my stories were so much bigger, in-depth, complicated, different, very, very different. And someone at Harlequin, an editor I had at Harlequin, halfway through my nine years with them, said to me, this was interesting, she said, "Harlequin is never going to tell you this." She said, "You are one of their top 25 selling authors."
00:52:08 / #: And I didn't know that. Again, one of those things that you learned through the industry, but I just didn't know. I didn't know any better. I didn't know how you found out that kind of information, but an editor shared that with me because she said, "I love your stories." She says, "I'll tell this to you because Harlequin will never tell you, that you are one of their 20 best-selling writers." And that was, at the time, obviously things did change about that, but things like that made me... It gave me confirmation, it gave me affirmation that I really was on the right track, that I really was writing stories that had worth and that the readers loved and that were selling. I went to a conference once, I don't know if it was RWA or Kathryn Falk's Book Lovers Convention, which was a whole different species of conferences.
Sarah MacLean 00:52:59 / #: A real ride.
Sandra Kitt 00:53:02 / #: Oh, my God, talk about partying hard. And I had just done a workshop and I stepped out of the room into the corridor in the hotel. And it was very busy, women going back and forth, changing rooms for the next session. And there was this one woman who was standing off to the side, and she just kept staring at me. And she was white, very petite, she wore glasses, I remember exactly what she looks like. And she stepped up through the crowd to me, and I smiled at her. I just said, "Hi." And she says, "Are you Sandra Kitt?" And I said, "Yes, I am." And she stared at me. She said, "I didn't know you were Black." And I said, "Okay. Is that supposed to matter?" And she said, "I love your stories." And that was a revelation for me as well.
00:53:50 / #: She didn't know what I looked like, but she liked my stories and she had been reading them. What I always wanted to do and what I hoped to do was to always from the beginning, appeal to an audience of readers. I didn't care if they were Black or white, and my stories were never deliberately, specifically geared towards a target audience of Black readers or white readers. Since I wrote both kinds of stories, if they went out there into the universe and found readership, that's what I wanted. I have men readers. I just got an email two weeks ago from this guy in... Oh, my God. Oh, he lives in someplace like Iowa or Indiana.
Sarah MacLean 00:54:39 / #: An I state.
Sandra Kitt 00:54:40 / #: Right.
Sarah MacLean 00:54:41 / #: Oh, look, I'm in Illinois, so let's not one-line the I states, everybody. My goodness.
Sandra Kitt 00:54:48 / #: My lips are sealed, no more will be said. And he contacted me on LinkedIn because I have a LinkedIn account because I was a former librarian. And he said, "I just read your latest book and I want to tell you how much I really, really..." And he was white, by the way. He says, "I really, really enjoyed it." He says, "It was so well-done, and I believe the characters." He said, "Good job, good job. Keep it up. I'm looking for your next book."
Sarah MacLean 00:55:14 / #: "Keep it up."
Sandra Kitt 00:55:15 / #: Women don't talk about male readers who read their books. And I remember going through a period when I would have cops who read the book because someone said, "You got to read this book. It's about a white cop." So every now and then, I'd get an email or a letter from a cop who would say to me, "You got it good. You got the voice down. You got the culture." I did a lot of research on the cop culture, and I actually became very friendly with a few of them when I still lived in Brooklyn because they were very good about letting me come in and interview them whenever I was working on a new story.
00:55:50 / #: That for me, as a writer, is the best kind of testimony you can get as to whether or not your books work, when it's about people who understand the culture and come to you and say, "You did it. You got it right." Or people that I don't even know who take the time to reach out to me and say, "This is a really good book. I really enjoyed it. Thank you. I'm looking for the next one." I mean, that is gold, absolute emotional gold to me as a writer. And when I used to begin to feel a little bit insecure and wondering if my stories were still relevant, if readers were still reading them, something like that would come in to let me know, "There are readers out there who absolutely love your work." I still get letters from women who say, "I love The Color of Love. I read it six times. I still have it. My book is falling apart. What am I going to do? I need to get a new copy."
00:56:50 / #: That's why you do it. You do it for the readers who get your voice, the ones who you've managed to reach. You don't reach everybody, and I understand that, and that's okay. That's not my goal in life, is to come up to that kind of standard. But the ones who write me with such wonderful feeling and sincerity, that's what makes it all worthwhile. And that's where, for me, I've succeeded.
Sarah MacLean 00:57:21 / #: Yeah. So let's talk about some of... We're always very interested in communities of writers, and especially when you have a long-standing career like yours, surely there are people who have lifted you up along the way and who you turn to. Who are those people? And they are probably different now than they were then, but we're curious.
Sandra Kitt 00:57:45 / #: They are kind of. Don't forget that when I came into the industry, either as a young adolescent reader or eventually as a writer, I was still only reading books by white writers who were writing white characters. And as I've already said, Kathleen Woodiwiss, I absolutely loved her historicals. She didn't write that many, maybe six at the most. And then there was Georgette Heyer, whom I just adored.
00:58:12 / #: After that, I discovered Patricia Veryan. No one talks about Patricia Veryan. She was a British writer who wrote stories about different kinds of English history, whether it was Regency or some other period. She also was one who was well-versed in her own history. She eventually came to America after she began publishing, and she married an American. She lived in the Seattle area. She's been gone now for probably close to 20 years. But her books, her stories are priceless. They're probably hard to come by, but I just loved her stories because of the realism of the characters and how consistent they were.
00:58:57 / #: When I talk about how I actually began to become consistently a writer and wanting to continue to be a writer after those three books that sat on my shelf for so many years, I think of Janet Daly. I began reading Janet Daly, and I was drawn to her immediately. Her stories are fairly simple, but there's always a twist in the theme or the setting. Her stories were very, very much American story, I mean, about cowboys and the Midwest and all of that. But what I also liked about her stories is that they weren't founded on fantasy or too much of things happening in the story that, to me, was a stretch.
00:59:48 / #: These were people who were just everyday people. They could be your neighbors, people you work with, went to school with. And she was so good about developing characters that I always believed her characters, no matter what her story was. And she was really creative in the kind of story she told, and I really admired that. And of course, she was very prolific. At one point, she was Harlequin's top-selling writer.
Sarah MacLean 01:00:15 / #: Oh, yeah. Remember those 50 states? Did you read those 50 states books?
Sandra Kitt 01:00:18 / #: Exactly. Read every one.
Sarah MacLean 01:00:20 / #: I was obsessed with those.
Sandra Kitt 01:00:22 / #: Yeah, yeah, so was I. And I wanted to see if she was going to do all 50 states, and she did, which is quite an accomplishment, really, because it meant that she either had to know a little bit about or do research about what made each state unique. So to me, she was a good writer of the genre for her era. And one year, Harlequin... Not Harlequin, RWA had its national conference in Hawaii. It was the first time they'd ever gone out of the country for that. But what they were trying to do was to occasionally set the conferences in a part of a country where it made it easy for other people to get there. They didn't always have to come from California or all the way to New York, or they didn't have to come from New Mexico all the way to Chicago. And they set it in Hawaii so that people on the West Coast could come to the conference.
Sarah MacLean 01:01:13 / #: Everybody had to go, sure.
Sandra Kitt 01:01:14 / #: Everyone had to go. And also, because it was Hawaii.
Sarah MacLean 01:01:14 / #: And also, Hawaii. Right, I mean...
Sandra Kitt 01:01:14 / #: Exactly.
Sarah MacLean 01:01:18 / #: "I have to go to Hawaii for work," is a pretty [inaudible 01:01:21 / #].
Sandra Kitt 01:01:20 / #: Yeah, and then you write it off your taxes.
Sarah MacLean 01:01:21 / #: Exactly.
Sandra Kitt 01:01:24 / #: So I was at the conference and I was headed back to my room, and there was a woman waiting at the elevator. And as I approached the elevator, the doors opened and she walked in and I walked in. And I realized it was Janet. And while I had her in the elevator, I debated with myself for a few seconds, "Should I interrupt her? Should I introduce myself?" And I finally did. I said, "I just want to let you know how much I love your stories, and I wanted to let you know that I began writing and publishing because of your stories." And she just sort of... I don't know even know if she even said anything beyond, "Thank you." But she just stared at me as if she couldn't realize that someone was actually saying that to them. I don't want to read into it too much more than that.
Sarah MacLean 01:02:11 / #: Well, you know this very well, but the answer is, if you are ever in an elevator with an author and you want to say, "I love your work," you definitely should say that because we like that a lot.
01:02:15 / #: You should do it. Go for it.
Sandra Kitt 01:02:22 / #: Absolutely. So I was always happy that I got a chance to tell her that, particularly when I also felt that she passed away way too young. I was always happy that I was able to tell her what an inspiration her books and her writing was to me, and what allowed me to keep going in my voice and not try to write to trends or ideas or other authors, or even to readers. Just write your own story. Today, when I try to think about writers that I particularly like or who influenced me, of course, Jayne Ann Krentz comes to mind because she's just so amazing.
Sarah MacLean 01:03:01 / #: She's terrific, yeah.
Sandra Kitt 01:03:02 / #: She really is. I like Jayne Ann. She and I go back a long way because she also was a librarian, and she likes to tell people that. "Sandy and I know each other because we were both librarians." So she was an influence on me.
01:03:17 / #: There was another writer... Oh, her name was... She doesn't write anymore, and she didn't really write that many books. Her name was Anita Richmond Bunkley, African-American. And it was interesting, when she came into the industry long after I had been writing, her first three books immediately went to hard cover, and she was writing about unusual African-American history in the country. I think her first book, which she self-published, was called The Yellow Rose of Texas. And it was all about this Black family in Texas who discovered, I think it was oil on their property, which was very kind of unusual. But then it's what happens with the family and with other people trying to get the land away from them. And I remember reading this and thinking, "This is so well-done." And I was very pleased about seeing this new kind of story out there, Anita Richmond Bunkley. Then she wrote a couple of other books and kind of faded out from sight.
01:04:21 / #: And Sarah made note of the fact that a lot of writers who started out back in the day, many of them eventually stopped writing, for whatever reason. Maybe they had no more stories, maybe there were one book wonders, maybe life took a turn for them, or maybe they lost interest. Who knows? But there were many who really did very well for a short period of time, and then the candle burned out. I started out in the Arabesque line with a writer, and it's interesting, she had a pseudonym. Her pseudonym was Eboni Snoe, African-American.
Sarah MacLean 01:04:56 / #: Oh, yeah, sure. I've seen that name.
01:04:57 / #: I know that name, yeah.
Sandra Kitt 01:05:00 / #: It's terrible, but I can't remember her real name. I just remember that she had such a strong pseudonym.
Sarah MacLean 01:05:07 / #: Yes, it was perfect.
Sandra Kitt 01:05:10 / #: Right, it was perfect. And she had... Her signature piece was, whenever she appeared in public, she would dress very elaborately in long period dresses and big, big, big southern hats with plumes of feathers. She was a very, very pretty lady, and she was petite, so she could carry it off. So I'd do a signing with her, and there I am in my little mini skirt and little top and my jewelry, and there is Ebony in this huge hat and this lovely long close-fitting dress all the way to the floor. And I'm thinking, "They're not even going to look at me." But it was fun because again, she was a lovely lady, just very, very charming. I liked her very, very much and loved doing programs with her. We were actually good foils for each other because our stories were so different, and we did get a lot of attention when we did the programs. Donna Hill.
Sarah MacLean 01:06:11 / #: Oh, sure.
Sandra Kitt 01:06:13 / #: Donna Hill and I go back a long, long way, and actually, Donna began writing what they called... You know the romance magazines that used to come out?
Sarah MacLean 01:06:24 / #: With the photographs? Like the... Yeah.
Sandra Kitt 01:06:27 / #: Yeah. Well, she started writing for that in the late '70s, early '80s, but they... I don't know if I could consider them romances. It was a magazine.
Sarah MacLean 01:06:37 / #: Yeah, they were like fiction serial... They were fiction magazines. You would get them, and they were the size of an old Life magazine.
Sandra Kitt 01:06:44 / #: Exactly, exactly.
Sarah MacLean 01:06:46 / #: And they had photographs. They had clearly staged these elaborate photoshoots. I'm going to confess, Joanna Shupe, who is a wonderful writer, gave me one for Christmas last year that's like a very kind of Falcon Crest-y, this scandalous family on a vineyard, and it's magnificent. Anyway, so she wrote... Donna Hill wrote for those first.
Sandra Kitt 01:07:10 / #: She wrote for those first and then-
Sarah MacLean 01:07:12 / #: We have to get her on too.
Sandra Kitt 01:07:13 / #: Oh, she's fun. She's lovely. And as a matter of fact, I had reached out to her and she was kind enough to recognize me at a program recently, and she says, "Well, one of the people who was really there for me when I was trying to break into publishing," she said, "was Sandra Kitt. She would really take the time to talk to me." I did the same thing for Gwen Foster, who is now... I actually mentored her, and she passed away about six or seven, eight years ago. I've mentored Marcia King-Gamble, who is a multi-published writer who lives in Florida in Fort Lauderdale. So I'm proud of that also, of having mentored a lot of people.
01:07:56 / #: I remember when Brenda Jackson used to send me fan mail, and we would see each other, and she would always say how much she enjoyed my writing. And of course, she's gone on to be a stratospheric superstar. But it's nice to know that I've had that connection to so many other writers. Donna is definitely someone that you should talk to, and she's a lovely person. I think you can learn a lot and get a lot of history from her perspective. There's one who's... And I'm sorry for this, that I used to know. She was a Black writer, and she wrote for, I think it was a silhouette book that she did, but it was suspense and mystery.
01:08:39 / #: And she actually got nominated for an Edgar Award for the Best First Mystery, and she happened to have been the first Black writer who had been nominated for that. She didn't get it, but the fact that she was nominated was a huge coup for all of us, all of us writers. I really apologize for not remembering. Her last name was West...
01:09:00 / #: [inaudible 01:09:00 / #] not remembering her last name was West. Oh my God, it's on the tip of my tongue. And then in terms of just going back to Harlequin for a moment, they also had another black writer who came about in the mid- to the late-1980s. She was African-American, she was from Maryland or Virginia. She wrote under a pseudonym, and she wrote mysteries and suspense, and I think she wrote about four or five books for Harlequin. Once again, after that, she just disappeared. Don't know what happened to her, but she was African-American, and no one knows who she is because we were all under the radar to some extent. I think I was the only one for quite a long time where everybody in the industry knew who I was because I was the first. Everything that was happening at that time, I would be the first person at the table, the first person there. I was being interviewed extensively by television and radio and magazines, Glamour magazine, Essence. So I was out there. I had a most definite... I had a profile.
Sarah MacLean 01:10:13 / #: At the time, did it feel like you were leaving such a mark? Because it feels like, I mean, when Brenda Jackson and Donna Hill and others are all saying, "Oh, well, Sandra Kitt was my inspiration." I mean, clearly there is a Sandra Kitt mark.
Sandra Kitt 01:10:27 / #: And I didn't know that. I wasn't aware of that for many, many years because it wasn't something that I was consciously set out to do, leave my mark on history. I was just trying to maintain a career in writing and made sure that I was visible and that my books were being received and published and read. And so it was really a number of years later that people began to refer to me as a pioneer and the first and all of that. I've gotten several awards from Romantic Times for being a pioneer. And then it began to hit me when I thought about my history going all the way back to Vivian, that I said, "Oh yeah, you were the first to do this, and you were the first to do that."
01:11:19 / #: And then it began to click that I had a substantial footprint that had taken place in the genre. And I began to be... I was very proud of that once it really clicked in my head that I had that kind of a history. I was pleased about that for sure, and certainly pleased when someone like Donna or Gwen, they're doing a program and they said, "I just want to acknowledge Sandra Kitt because when I was first trying to get published, she mentored me and spent a lot of time with me talking about whatever." And it was unexpected, so it was wonderful. It really made me feel very, very good to know that maybe I had an impact.
Jennifer Prokop 01:12:03 / #: When you think about all the books you've written, what's the one that's your favorite or that you hope will outlive you?
Sandra Kitt 01:12:15 / #: Well, for sure Color of Love, because it was the first book I've ever written, and I wrote it from such a pure place. I didn't know anything about writing. I didn't know anything about publishing. I simply had a story, and I was very pleased and proud that when I finished that book at over 100,000 words, it was the story I intended to write. It had the trajectory for the characters, the ups and the downs, and the ending that I wanted, and I was just enormously pleased that I had been able to do that. Certainly the rest of my career I was very proud of just because of what I accomplished and just from being able to stay in the game for as long as I've been able to. But that one is definitely going to be the one that I'm going to take to my grave as the one that I remember.
01:13:09 / #: The other one that I'm very proud of was Adam and Eva because it was the first black romance that came out. And despite Harlequin's hesitancy about bringing the book out, and it did come out, it did very well for them. And then it went on to be published in Italy, they did a translation in Italy. So all of that's important. And at one point I was told, well, they now consider that one of Harlequin's early classics, Adam and Eva, because it was the first black romance that they had published by a black writer. So they did recognize that, and I was very pleased about that.
01:13:51 / #: Many, many, many years later, I went on to do a spinoff of the story. There was a little girl in Adam and Eva, and I had her grow up. And so I wrote a book, I think it was 2008, 2009, called Promises in Paradise, which was about little girl who became a doctor. She's an adult now, but it revisits Adam and Eva, who did have their happy ending. So I'm very proud of that story.
01:14:22 / #: More recently, I'm very proud of the book that came out this past April. I started writing for Sourcebooks, and I have a three book contract with them. First book came out in April, second book will come out next year. I'm starting to write the third one now. But the reason why I'm so proud of it is because I did such a good job with the hero and heroine. Whenever I have a chance to sit down and read the story again, I'm equally as surprised. I'm thinking, "Oh, this works. They really are consistent, and they're so cute together, and the hero has this great sense of humor."
01:15:06 / #: And so I was very happy about that because I had a very long hiatus from writing from about 2010 until 2018 when I got this new contract. And of course the first book didn't come out until 2021, just this past April. And so the fact that I was able to sort of get back in the saddle again, almost cold, and write this book and be very happy with it, and the story and the characters, was really very gratifying personally to me. So at this point, that's one of my favorites because it was like I reinvented myself or something.
Sarah MacLean 01:15:44 / #: Sandra, this is fabulous.
Jennifer Prokop 01:15:46 / #: Thank you so much.
Sarah MacLean 01:15:48 / #: I mean, what a joy of a conversation. Thank you so much. I'm so happy we get to bring it to all of our listeners.
Sandra Kitt 01:15:56 / #: Thank you so much. I really enjoyed it. I'm sure I didn't answer all your questions, and believe me, there's a lot of stuff in the... It was a long history, so there are a lot of things, but this was great.
Sarah MacLean 01:16:06 / #: Well, you're always welcome to come back. If you think, "I need to tell them that story," come on again.
Sandra Kitt 01:16:12 / #: Yeah-
Jennifer Prokop 01:16:13 / #: Exactly.
Sandra Kitt 01:16:14 / #: ... I would love to. I would love to.
Sarah MacLean 01:16:15 / #: Let us know, and-
Sandra Kitt 01:16:15 / #: I'll start reviewing it because I know there's a lot of interesting things that happened during my career. I never told you about Fabio.
Sarah MacLean 01:16:22 / #: Oh wait, no, we're still recording. Tell us about Fabio.
Jennifer Prokop 01:16:25 / #: Tell us about Fabio.
Sandra Kitt 01:16:30 / #: Well, he was delightful. He was handsome as anything. Very, very popular as a male cover model for historical novels. However, when I was writing for Harlequin, I did a book called The Way Home, and it came to me that his face, his persona, would be perfect as the cover model for the book. And this was another one of my novels where all the main characters were white. And I said, "But he has long hair" and-
Sarah MacLean 01:17:01 / #: Her face.
Sandra Kitt 01:17:01 / #: Right, and very solemn kind of, and I said, "I'm going to do this."
Sarah MacLean 01:17:07 / #: Oh my gosh, I'm looking at the cover right now.
Sandra Kitt 01:17:11 / #: But it's him. It's him. I don't know if you can tell.
Sarah MacLean 01:17:14 / #: I can, and it's amazing.
Sandra Kitt 01:17:19 / #: I loved it. I turned it into... When I turned in the book, I had his picture and I turned it in to Harlequin to the production company, and I said, "This is my hero. This is the model you're going to follow, but you're going to make him contemporary." So I said, "You're going to need to give him a contemporary haircut. Don't make the hair too short. I want it to kind of brush the collar of his shirt," and I said, "It's still his beautiful face," And I said, "He's going to have on dark glasses because he has a sensitivity to light because of an accident that happened to him."
Jennifer Prokop 01:17:54 / #: Was it a bird on a rollercoaster?
Jennifer Prokop 01:17:59 / #: Sorry, couldn't help it.
Sarah MacLean 01:18:01 / #: So rude. She's so rude.
Jennifer Prokop 01:18:04 / #: I'm sorry. I'm sorry.
Sandra Kitt 01:18:05 / #: I'm with it. I'm with it.
Jennifer Prokop 01:18:05 / #: I'm a lot of fun at a party.
Sandra Kitt 01:18:08 / #: And it came out, I was very happy, because I said, "Oh my God, it really is him, except he's got short hair." And so I was at another conference. This time it was a Romantic Times conference, and I don't know why I keep running into people in the elevator.
Sarah MacLean 01:18:24 / #: The elevator's where to be in all of these.
Jennifer Prokop 01:18:26 / #: Yeah.
Sandra Kitt 01:18:26 / #: Well, people are coming and going. Of course you stand outside one long enough, you're going to run into six people that you want to say hello to. And I was with Katherine, Katherine Falk, who has been amazing in my career. From the very beginning, she was on my side, incredibly supportive, included me in everything that Romantic Times was doing, so I give her really big thumbs up.
01:18:51 / #: But I was with her because we were going up to one of the suites where there was a party going to take place. And she says, and this guy was walking ahead of us surrounded by women, and she grabbed his arm and pulled him back. She says, "Fabio, you have to come with us. We're going to this really cool party." And I looked at him and I said, "You're on the cover of my next book." I said, "It's not historical, but I want you to know it's your face, because I made sure that they did it in the production." And he looked at me and he said, "Well, thank you." He didn't speak a lot of English at the time, but I had my little encounter with Fabio. He was perfectly charming, very nice guy. And he did come up to the party.
Sarah MacLean 01:19:35 / #: Listen, living the dream, a romance novelist who got Fabio on her cover, so...
Sandra Kitt 01:19:39 / #: I got Fabio on a cover, yes.
Jennifer Prokop 01:19:41 / #: Amazing. What a perfect way to end this conversation, honestly.
Sarah MacLean 01:19:46 / #: The best. Well, thank you so much, Sandra. We are-
Sandra Kitt 01:19:53 / #: Thank you.
Sarah MacLean 01:19:53 / #: I mean, this was the best.
01:19:59 / #: Listen. She's so cool.
Jennifer Prokop 01:20:01 / #: She's super cool. I know.
Sarah MacLean 01:20:03 / #: And also super stylish. You guys couldn't see the video, but at one point I was like, "I want to grow up and be Sandra Kitt," basically.
Jennifer Prokop 01:20:14 / #: Yeah, I felt a little bad because I really did come to the table dressed for Deadlands, so...
Sarah MacLean 01:20:20 / #: But it's fine. It's fine.
Jennifer Prokop 01:20:22 / #: It's not about us.
Sarah MacLean 01:20:24 / #: Listen.
Jennifer Prokop 01:20:25 / #: So before we start, actually-
Sarah MacLean 01:20:27 / #: Oh, okay.
Jennifer Prokop 01:20:27 / #: ... here's what I want you to tell us, because you invited Sandra Kitt to speak at the 2019 RWAs.
Sarah MacLean 01:20:35 / #: Yeah.
Jennifer Prokop 01:20:35 / #: So was that something like... You really, I feel like, put her on my radar, and maybe that's true for a lot of people. So-
Sarah MacLean 01:20:42 / #: I think-
Jennifer Prokop 01:20:43 / #: How did that come to be?
Sarah MacLean 01:20:44 / #: Yeah, gosh, that's a bummer. It's a real bummer that helped to put her on the radar for people, because I feel like I knew about Sandra Kitt for a long time, and I don't if it's because... I don't know why. I know if it's because I was reading Harlequin Americans back in the day and she was writing them, and it wasn't... Those were old, those books, those first books, but I sort of always knew she existed, and I always knew she was an African-American writer who was writing for Harlequins. I didn't know she was first.
Jennifer Prokop 01:21:22 / #: Okay.
Sarah MacLean 01:21:22 / #: That helped... We should probably name the people who were part of that group when Adriana Herrera and Alexis Daria and Tracy Livesey and LaQuette and Joanna Shupe and Sierra Simone and-
Jennifer Prokop 01:21:37 / #: Nisha.
Sarah MacLean 01:21:39 / #: ... Andie Christopher... Sorry?
Jennifer Prokop 01:21:41 / #: Nisha.
Sarah MacLean 01:21:42 / #: Oh, sorry. No, Eric can maybe stitch this in. And Andie Christopher and Nisha Sharma and I all got together to work on that RITA ceremony, which at the time was so important because we really wanted to talk about who built the house, which is what I've been saying this whole season. I went to Steve Amidon and I... Because I didn't know a ton about categories at the time, and so we put together this list and Sandra was so obviously the first. I mean, there was Elsie Washington, who unfortunately we lost, and Sandra, I didn't know-
Jennifer Prokop 01:22:28 / #: That was the first time I'd heard that story, right.
Sarah MacLean 01:22:28 / #: ... that she just wrote that first book and then just didn't want to do it anymore, although God knows I don't blame her. This is really very different than journalism. But I felt like... And then somebody said she's in New York, and it was just... I took her to lunch. I called her up and I said, "Can I take you to lunch?" And she came. And we went to lunch on the Upper West Side at this place... I can't even remember what it was called, but it was like we were in a corner. It was very New York. It was like a corner padded booth, and it had a white tablecloth and it felt very... We were having a business meeting. And she told me a few stories like the ones that she told today, and it just... What a glorious person she is, full of memories of people. She was the one who pointed me in the direction of Eva Rutland, who actually she didn't talk about today, but Eva Rutland was a black writer of Harlequin Historicals.
Jennifer Prokop 01:23:43 / #: Oh, interesting.
Sarah MacLean 01:23:44 / #: Or no, she wrote Regencies for Harlequin Historical. And I mean, they were Regencies with white characters. No one knew that Eva Rutland was a black woman who was also in her almost 80s and legally blind.
Jennifer Prokop 01:24:00 / #: Wow.
Sarah MacLean 01:24:02 / #: Yeah, and was writing these Regencies that people really loved. And so this made me think about... There are so many people. There are so many names.
Jennifer Prokop 01:24:16 / #: Yes, so many names.
Sarah MacLean 01:24:18 / #: And so whenever we talk to somebody like Sandra and others who are on our list... I'm so excited about some of these people. And when they say, " Oh, you should know about this person who very few people have talked about..." And she's so great, and I was so glad that she got to talk about Elsie Washington.
Jennifer Prokop 01:24:44 / #: Yeah, me too. And also about Vivian Stevens, because even though we've heard bits and pieces from people, I feel like it just adds that little bit of information every single time-
Sarah MacLean 01:24:58 / #: Yeah, and-
Jennifer Prokop 01:24:59 / #: ... about who she was and what she was trying to do.
Sarah MacLean 01:25:02 / #: Yeah, I mean, maybe at some point in the future, we really should put together-
Jennifer Prokop 01:25:06 / #: Like a supercut.
Sarah MacLean 01:25:06 / #: ... an episode that's just about Vivian Stephens, because I feel like we... I mean, you should all go. If you haven't gone and listened to the Vivian Stephens interview at the Black Romance Podcast, you absolutely should. We'll put links in show notes. But you start to see a very real picture of this wonderful editor come into play.
01:25:31 / #: You know, one of the things that has come up over a few interviews, and I think we've never kind of hit it hard on the outros, is the power of Romantic Times.
Jennifer Prokop 01:25:45 / #: Yes, and Katherine Falk.
Sarah MacLean 01:25:46 / #: And people probably don't even really know... I will say this. I think maybe when we recorded our Vivian Stevens episode with Steve Amidon, we mentioned Katherine Falk, but this woman was a powerhouse, but she was independent of publishing. She had this magazine, right?
01:26:09 / #: As far as I know, she was a fan. She just loves romance just like us. And she started a magazine called Romantic Times that then became RT Book Reviews. And when I first started, I mean, if you didn't get a good review in RT, you were toast.
Jennifer Prokop 01:26:28 / #: Yeah.
Sarah MacLean 01:26:30 / #: Because book buyers all across the country would use RT. And so they were the tastemakers. And I remember I started, and my dream was to be on the cover of RT because it was a real glossy magazine, and it would be like you'd get it and it would have Cathy Maxwell on the cover, or... And so it was like superstar time. And Katherine was... I've met her a couple of times. By the time I met her, she was an older woman. She, to my knowledge, is still alive, and she just loved this.
01:27:11 / #: And she had this annual conference, RT, that was the antithesis of RWA. RWA was a bunch of authors, very professional, going to be professional with each other, and RT was like, wear crazy hats, meet your fun fans, spend time with readers, go to parties, learn to make fascinators with Miranda Neville. It was a really different kind of thing. Fabio was always there in the early days. Apparently they had cover model contests. It was a scene. But Katherine Falk, she keeps coming up as a really supportive voice who lifted up authors who might not have gotten a publisher lift.
Jennifer Prokop 01:27:57 / #: Yeah. So interesting.
Sarah MacLean 01:28:02 / #: And I think... I don't know. I'm going to try and find her email address, I guess.
Jennifer Prokop 01:28:07 / #: Yeah, I think she's on our list.
Sarah MacLean 01:28:11 / #: Yeah, now she is. Yeah. Well, I think she's always been on our list, right?
Jennifer Prokop 01:28:14 / #: She's always been on our list. Yeah. Yeah.
Sarah MacLean 01:28:19 / #: But gosh, and Sandra Kitt just dropping Isaac Asimov's name. Oh, he's staying up with Asimov and his wife.
Jennifer Prokop 01:28:27 / #: Neil Grasse de Tyson.
Sarah MacLean 01:28:29 / #: Listen-
Jennifer Prokop 01:28:30 / #: Neil-
Sarah MacLean 01:28:31 / #: These women, they all have great stories.
Jennifer Prokop 01:28:34 / #: Neil Tyson deGrasse. I can say words, everybody. I'm a little tired today.
Sarah MacLean 01:28:37 / #: Neil deGrasse Tyson. That's right.
Jennifer Prokop 01:28:39 / #: I said it wrong the first time.
Sarah MacLean 01:28:41 / #: You did it.
Jennifer Prokop 01:28:43 / #: Yeah, well, and you know what else I really loved is I... It's funny because today we talked a lot about the librarian connection... Or no, sorry, the lawyer connection.
Sarah MacLean 01:28:55 / #: Yes.
Jennifer Prokop 01:28:55 / #: But back then it was like all these really cool authors were librarians.
Sarah MacLean 01:28:59 / #: Everyone was a librarian.
Jennifer Prokop 01:29:00 / #: So cool. Yeah.
Sarah MacLean 01:29:02 / #: Listen, I'm for it.
Jennifer Prokop 01:29:04 / #: I am too. I am too. It's amazing.
Sarah MacLean 01:29:07 / #: So all of this is to say Sandra Kitt was as cool visually as she is orally, and Jen is going to come to New York, and we're all going to go out together.
Jennifer Prokop 01:29:17 / #: Yeah, it's going to happen. We'll take pictures and you'll all be jealous because it was amazing. And I just think-
Sarah MacLean 01:29:24 / #: She's really fun.
Jennifer Prokop 01:29:25 / #: Again, Sarah and I get off these calls and just look at each other like, "Oh my God, that was amazing," and we hope that you had the same experience.
Sarah MacLean 01:29:35 / #: This is Fated Mates. You can find at FatedMates.net. You can find us on Twitter at Fated Mates. You can find us on Instagram at FatedMatesPod, or you can find Jen and I just sort of wherever books are being talked about, generally. We hope you're reading something fabulous this week. We hope you enjoyed this episode, and if you just came to us for this particular Trailblazer episode, please don't miss all the others, which are equally as awesome. Every one of these interviews, every one of these conversations is magnificent. And otherwise, we will see you next week with something.
Jennifer Prokop 01:30:14 / #: Who knows?
Sarah MacLean 01:30:15 / #: We've got something up our sleeve; check show notes. And otherwise, have a great week.