AMA, bantr, S06 Jennifer Prokop AMA, bantr, S06 Jennifer Prokop

06.13: Sarah & Jen are Taking Your Questions

It’s December, Jen is in NYC, and we’re taking questions from our Discord and Instagram! Listen to us talk about how we read, what makes us DNF, how we met, the books we loved this year (that weren’t published this year), and more. We love these episodes, and not only because they happen when we’re together on Sarah’s couch, but also because we get to talk directly to you!

Next week’s episode is a surprise deep dive, because y’all are wild about dragons! We’re reading Thea Harrison’s Dragon Bound, available in print and ebook at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books, Kobo and your local indie.

If you want more Fated Mates in your life, please join our Patreon, which comes with an extremely busy and fun Discord community! Join other magnificent firebirds to hang out, talk romance, and be cool together in a private group full of excellent people. Learn more at patreon.com.


Show Notes

Get our Best Romance of 2023 book box from Pocket Books Shop in Lancaster, PA. We're excited to be partnering with them on this one!

You know what we meant when we talked about Bart writing on the chalkboard.

If you’ve never been to New York City at Christmas, we would highly recommend it. This year, the windows at Saks were cosponsored by Dior and celebrated the signs of the zodiac, and it’s pretty awesome. But there’s also the angels and the Rockefeller center tree, and the Bryant Park holiday market.

Jen also went to Back to the Future the musical and ate at the place with two bulls, which was actually called Benny John’s.

Tillie Cole has bigger problems then Jen not liking any mention of cults in the books she reads.

Should you DNF? Yes.

If you’re looking for a romance writer’s conference, check out the Chicago North conference in April of 2024.

Some bookish gifts: a Book stand, a bluetooth page turner for your eReader, and get a stand while you’re at it.

Tracey Livesay made a very funny and very perfect video this week about the rise of Romantasy.

 

Books Mentioned This Episode


Sponsors

Melanie Greene’s Away with a Stranger,
available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Apple Books, or wherever you get your ebooks,

Charlotte O’Shay, author of Snowfire,
available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Apple Books, or wherever you get your ebooks,

and

Lumi Labs, creators of Microdose Gummies,
visit microdose.com and use the code FATEDMATES
for 30% off your order and free shipping.

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S05.20: Shifter Romance: Manimals!

You’ve been asking for a shifter interstitial, and we like to give you what you want. Today, we’re talking manimals! We go back to the beginning and touch on all the shifter/Lycae business that we dealt with in Season 1, and then we talk about all the ways werewolves have evolved into were-other things and then into DNA-splicing experiments. The recs get wild, the plots get weird, and there’s a lot happening!

Our next episode will drop Saturday in honor of the greatest of holidays, Derek Craven Day! To celebrate, we recommend rereading Lisa Kleypas’s Dreaming of You and then enjoying a full hour of our banter about our proudest achievement. In observance of DCD23, we will not be releasing a Wednesday episode next week, but we will be with you all the week after!

Our first read along of 2023 (in February) is Tracy MacNish’s Stealing Midnight—we’ve heard the calls from our gothic romance readers and we’re delivering with this truly bananas story, in which the hero is dug out of a grave and delivered, barely alive, to the heroine. Get ready. You can find Stealing Midnight (for $1.99!) at Amazon, B&N, Kobo, or Apple Books.


Show Notes

Today’s show is apparently brought to you by 1983. The song She’s a Maniac was on the Flashback soundtrack, and Manimal was a television show.

We talked so much about shifters in Season One, you just have to go back. I’m sorry.

Derek Craven Day is coming this Saturday. Please celebrate responsibly.

 

Books Mentioned This Episode

Sponsors

Jess K. Hardy, author of Come as You Are
Get it at Amazon, free on Kindle Unlimited,
visit Jess K. Hardy at jesskhardy.com

and

Lumi Labs, creators of Microdose Gummies
Visit microdose.com and use the code FATEDMATES
for 30% off and free shipping on your order

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S05.04: What to Read If You Liked The Love Hypothesis...

Today we start one of our new features for Season Five: If You Liked…Read This! We begin with Ali Hazelwood’s The Love Hypothesis, a book that took romance and BookTok by storm last year when it burst onto the NYT best seller list and hung out there for nearly a year, bringing so many new readers (and Reylos!) to romance.

This one is full of tropes romance loves, and we take them topic by topic, recommending read alikes for everything from grumpy/sunshine, to academic romance, to STEM heroines, to that spicy sex scene that was a delightfully unexpected surprise! That, and we’ve got a bunch of Reylo fic recommended from Ali herself (check the end of show notes)!


Notes

Ali Hazelwood’s Books

 

Pining Main Characters

 

The Professors

 

STEM Heroines

 

Great Banter

 

Microtropes


Reylo Fic recommended by Ali Hazelwood & Adriana Herrera


Sponsors

This week’s episode of Fated Mates is sponsored by:

Blair Babylon, author of Twisted and Tangled,
available in print and ebook, wherever you get your romance,

and

Emjoy, your audio journey to female pleasure.
Visit letsemjoy.com/mates for your 14 day free trial.

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S04.41: Unputdownable Romance Novels

We don’t even know, y’all, so this week, we’re doing a little bit of flailing and a lot of talking about books we found unputdownable when we read them the first time. We did our very best to avoid repeats — which is difficult this many episodes in! We talk about what makes a book unputdownable (we’ve got buckets!) and about other things too…like our annual reader survey and how skilled a musician Sarah is.

Fated Mates Live, in person is happening — if you have tickets to the live show in Alexandria, VA on July 30th — let us know on our Twitter thread (and find friends!). If you didn’t get a ticket, but want to join the wait list, you can do that at Old Town Books! The event is mask required, so plan accordingly!

Thanks to Avon Books, publishers of Julie Anne Long’s You Were Made to Be Mine, and to Leighann Hart, author of Darling Descent, for sponsoring the episode.

Next week, we’ve got a Trailblazer coming your way, but our next read along is Talia Hibbert’s Get a Life, Chloe Brown. Get it at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books, or Kobo.


Show Notes

Abortion is lifesaving healthcare. We are devastated and urge you to support the National Network of Abortion Funds, which removes financial and logistical barriers to abortion access by centering people who have abortions and organizing at the intersections of racial, economic, and reproductive justice. They partner with organizations already in place on the ground in places where abortions are banned to do the work of helping people who need abortions.

We’ve talked about bodily autonomy in romance novels before, and in our trailblazer conversation with Elda Minger, she spoke extensively about what birth control and abortion were like for people back in the 70s.

We remain Big Mad. Also, we are here for you, always. Find Jen (mostly) at Twitter and Sarah (mostly) on Instagram.

Sarah broke her ukulele, which is a pretty cool instrument.

It's Lizzo leading the charge to donate proceeds from her tour to Planned Parenthood, joined by (of course) Rage Against the Machine. Although Harry Styles did make a statement about the Dobbs decision.

Don’t forget to take our Season 4 listener survey!

London Has Fallen is a deeply silly and very entertaining movie that absolutely does not even try to pass The Bechdel Test.

Back when Jen read the first Scorpius Syndrome book, she did notice a funny thing about the main character’s sense of smell.

Books Mentioned This Episode


Sponsors

This week’s episode of Fated Mates is sponsored by:

Avon Books, publishers of Julie Anne Long’s You Were Made to Be Mine, available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books, Kobo or your local independent bookseller.

Visit julieannelong.com

and

Leighann Hart, author of Darling Descent
available at Kindle Unlimited

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S02.10: Amnesia Romance Novels

We’re talking about the most scientific of topics today — it’s Amnesia Week! Whether you love or hate it, or believe it simply doesn’t exist, you can’t deny the fact that amnesia has kept a battalion of romance readers in books for nigh on forty years. And of course, we’re talking about Overboard.

Next week, we’re switching things up and running a full recommendation podcast! You asked us questions, and we’re recommending a metric romance ton of books! Don’t miss it!

In two weeks, we’re going to a classic of classics! The read was on both Jen & Sarah’s list—Loretta Chase’s Lord of Scoundrels, which is on the lions’ share of Best Romance Novels Ever lists. We’ll get into why. Read Lord of Scoundrels at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books, Kobo or your local indie.


SHOW NOTES

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S02.01 Welcome to Season Two

We're Back!

We promised you we'd be back with Season Two in September, and here we are in September, back with Season Two!

We've said farewell to Season One, but we'll never fully be able to quit IAD, so Season Two will be The Books That Blooded Us -- that is, the books that made us the romance readers we are...books that taught us what the genre could be, books that scratched our itch, books that made us lifelong romance readers, books that set us on the path directly to your earholes!

Over the season, we'll tackle 10 (or so) books that blooded each of us -- we'll deep dive, discuss, and delight in each other's picks -- and we've got some fun ideas for how you all can share the books that blooded you!

So...where do we begin? We begin in two weeks with the primordial text for both of us...the one...the only...Dreaming of You. We'll talk Derek Craven's cockney accent, Sara Fielding's legendary novel, Lisa Kleypas's immense skill with talismans, and we'll get to the very bottom of some of the most controversial bits of this glorious book that the two of us love a whole lot.

Get reading, y'all, we've got a lot to say. You can find Dreaming of You at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books, Kobo, or at your local indie. It's currently $2.99 in digital everywhere, so snatch it up!

We'll be announcing the schedule for the first few reads later this week -- so you'll have time to read ahead, but in the meantime, sit back, relax, and let us give you a preview of what's to come!

Don't forget to like and subscribe in your favorite podcasting platform!

Show Notes

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