trailblazers, S04 Jennifer Prokop trailblazers, S04 Jennifer Prokop

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.

TRANSCRIPT

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?

Sandra Kitt 00:12:43 / #: No.

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.

00:47:43 / #: Fair.

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.

00:54:39 / #: The middle.

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.

01:03:01 / #: Incredible.

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?

Sandra Kitt 01:17:58 / #: No.

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.

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S04.18: Jayne Ann Krentz: Trailblazer

Our Trailblazer episodes continue this week with Jayne Ann Krentz, who has done it all: writing for Vivian Stephens, writing historicals, writing contemporaries, writing space-set, fantasy, and paranormal romance, writing nonfiction about romance. In addition to managing life as JAK, Amanda Quick, Stephanie James and more, she’s also a legend of the genre because of her vocal resistance to the way society, literature and academia talks about romance novels.

In this episode, we talk about her journey and the way she continually reinvented herself to keep writing, about the importance of writers’ core stories, about genre and myth making, and about the role of romance in the world. We could not be more grateful to Jayne Ann Krentz for making time for Fated Mates.

Next week, our first read-along of the year will be Lisa Valdez’s Passion, an erotic historical published in 2005 that is W-I-L-D. There is a lot of biblical stuff at the world’s fair. Also some truly bananas stuff that…sticks with you. Get it at Amazon, Apple, Kobo, or B&N.

Thank you, as always, for listening! If you are up for leaving a rating or review for the podcast on your podcasting app, we would be very grateful! 

Show Notes

Welcome Jayne Ann Krentz, she has had lot of pen names, including Jayne Taylor, Jayne Bentley, Stephanie James and Amanda Glass. Now she publishes under 3 names: Jayne Ann Krentz (contemporary), Jayne Castle (speculative fiction romance), and Amanda Quick (historical). She has said, “I am often asked why I use a variety of pen names. The answer is that this way readers always know which of my three worlds they will be entering when they pick up one of my books.”

We read Ravished for the podcast in 2021, or three decades ago. You know how it goes in these pandemic times.

People mentioned by Jayne: editor Vivian Stephens, author Barbara Delinksy, author Amii Loren, agent Steve Axelrod publishing executive Irwyn Applebaum, author Susan Elizabeth Phillips, author Kristin Hannah, author Debbie Macomber, author Christina Dodd, author Rachel Grant, author Darcy Burke, editor Leslie Gelbman, editor Cindy Hwang, editor Patricia Reynolds Smith.

TRANSCRIPT

Jayne Ann Krentz 0:00 / #
The thing about genre, the reason it even exists at all, is because it's the device and the mechanism by which we send our values down to the next generation. It's the way we affirm them to ourselves throughout our life, and it's the way a culture keeps its culture intact. It's the myth of the core value of that civilization, whatever it may be, that is going to go down through history and it survives or it doesn't survive, and that's what genre does, it carries the myth.

Sarah MacLean 0:35 / #
That was the voice of Jayne Ann Krentz. I am so excited! (laughs)

Jennifer Prokop 0:42 / #
Jayne Ann Krentz has written, probably, hundreds of romance novels at this point. Her major pen names right now are Jayne Ann Krentz, under which she writes kind of contemporaries, Jayne Castle is where she kind of puts all of her kind of speculative fiction novels, and Amanda Quick is what she writes historicals under, but she has been around for a really long time. She's going to start off by talking about her many pen names, which also include Jayne Taylor, Jayne Bentley, Stephanie James and Amanda Glass.

Sarah MacLean 1:13 / #
Amazing. This conversation, I've had the absolute joy of, you know, sharing meals with Jayne Ann Krentz, and so she is, I knew she was going to be remarkable, but this conversation really, gosh, I felt better for it at the end. I felt smarter about romance at the end, and I felt motivated in a way that I haven't felt motivated in a long time.

Jennifer Prokop 1:13 / #
Yeah, absolutely. Welcome to Fated Mates, everyone. What you're about to hear is our conversation with Jayne Ann Krentz which we recorded last fall in 2021.

Sarah MacLean 1:52 / #
Thank you so much for coming on and making time to join us for this. We're really thrilled to have you! We are avowed Jayne Ann Krentz, Amanda Quick, Jayne Castle fans. Stephanie James fans here! (laughter)

Jayne Ann Krentz 2:09 / #
Wait, let's not name all the names, that just makes me feel like I've been around forever. (laughter) I will say that was never the plan at the start. That was not part, there was no plan to be honest, but if there are any aspiring writers out there, one piece of advice for your takeaway today is for crying out loud, do not use a bunch of different pseudonyms! (laughter)

Sarah MacLean 2:34 / #
Well wait, so let's talk about that, because why not? You have, how many were there? How many are there total?

Jayne Ann Krentz 2:43 / #
Too many and the reason was because back in the old days, a lot of the contracts tied up your name, and if you signed one of those contracts, which of course I did early on, because I just wanted to be published, and it was like no big deal. Everybody writes under a pen name. And then there were two pen names. Because once you leave that house, they've got the name. It stays behind. I don't, I doubt that that appears in modern contracts, I have not heard of that for a long time. But back at the start of the romance rush in publishing, that was not an uncommon feature in a contract. So that's how it started, but it got worse because at some point, I managed to kill off a couple of names including my own. And you do that by low sales, you know, bombed out sales, which we'll get to when we talk about what a fool I was to go into science fiction romance, but it was a good way to kill off your career that time and I did because I wrote under my Jayne Ann Krentz name. So when I destroyed that, I destroyed my contemporary career, and it was at that point that I had to really retrench and figure out how to restart and reinvent myself and that was when Amanda Quick came along. So Amanda Quick is a legitimately acquired pen name, I did that to myself. Jayne Castle happens to be my birth name. I managed to sign that away for awhile, and then Jayne Ann Krentz is my married name. So I'm just under those three now.

Jennifer Prokop 4:28 / #
Now it's just the three, right?

Jayne Ann Krentz 4:30 / #
Yup. (laughs)

Jennifer Prokop 4:32 / #
So I was just thinking, was this only in romance? Did this happen to mystery writers or other genres?

Jayne Ann Krentz 4:41 / #
I don't know, but I'm willing to bet that it was pretty common in the paperback side of the market.

Jennifer Prokop 4:45 / #
Yeah. Okay.

Jayne Ann Krentz 4:46 / #
I don't, yeah, I think it was just kind of a common thing. If you look back, a lot of writers who are writing mystery and suspense today acquired a pen name at some point along the way.

Sarah MacLean 4:57 / #
So I always wondered, you know, you and I have had a lot of conversations over the years, Jayne, about patriarchy and romance, and I always thought the pen names were because of the books, but I guess mystery and sci-fi writers also did the pen name thing.

Jayne Ann Krentz 5:14 / #
The thing about a pen name, if you can get, if the publisher can get that into the contract, all a writer has is her name, and if they tie that up, you're tied to the house. It was just hard business, hard business is what it was.

Sarah MacLean 5:28 / #
Yeah.

Jennifer Prokop 5:29 / #
Well and I remember is an early reader of romance in the '80s, when you finally figured out, "Wait, this person is this person?"

Sarah MacLean 5:38 / #
Oh, it would blow your mind!

Jennifer Prokop 5:39 / #
Yeah, because then you were like, "Wait, there's a whole new someone I can look for in the bookstore," or the used bookstore especially, right?

Sarah MacLean 5:47 / #
Wasn't there a Romantic Times, somebody published, every year there was a publication that was like an encyclopedia of the romance novelists and it would say the names, all the names that that particular person was writing under, which when I started, maybe I started 12 years ago, and that was the time when if you wrote in different genres, which I feel like is the Jayne Ann Krentz way, you write a different genre you start a different name, but yeah, now, it's far less common, I think.

Jennifer Prokop 6:17 / #
I think it's common now. I'll tell you how it's different. I think when people self-publish, they sometimes pick a different name, and I think if especially if the heat level is really different, right? So I've had author friends say, "Well I'm going to try my hand at maybe something more erotic, and you know, is this going to interrupt my brand?" So I feel like it's so much more in control of the author, as opposed to control of the house, so that's a big change.

Jayne Ann Krentz 6:47 / #
Yeah, I think that's very true now. This was the way it was just done in the old days, and the rules were different then.

Sarah MacLean 6:54 / #
Yeah, so let's go back before you were picking pen names. So tell us about, we love the journey, so tell us about the journey. How did you become a writer? And how did you become a romance writer specifically?

Jayne Ann Krentz 7:11 / #
You know I think I just, there was never a point along the way at which I felt I could write romance better than books I was reading. I loved the genre. I found the books, I didn't really find the genre in the way we, anywhere near what we would identify it as today, until I was in, after college, until I was in my '20s. And then that's when I stumbled into Harlequin. They were the only game in town and they weren't even in town. And that was, that did me fine for few, I don't know how long it was that when I was reading them intensely that, before I wanted to try writing one. And it wasn't that I thought I could do it better than the big names at the time, I just wanted to tell the story my way. Most of the stories I was reading, well all of them, looking back on it I think, were very much the British take on the fantasy. And that's a very specific and very tweaked different take than what most American readers respond to.

Sarah MacLean 8:16 / #
Well can you explain, can you talk about that? What does that mean?

Jayne Ann Krentz 8:20 / #
Okay, the quick and easy way to understand it, is that in the British romance, your heroine is marrying up. She's marrying the duke or some version thereof. In the American romance, it's much more of a partnership kind of approach to the romance, and what matters is the man's competence. It doesn't matter what he does, he just better be damned good at it, and that's what counts. So it's a different take. There's also more sass in the American romance, and that may come from our good old 1930s movies, you know, those screwball comedies, and the fast chatter-chatter back and forth from the the 1930s romantic, and often romantic suspense films. I don't know where it came from, but it's just, it was in the American romance almost from the get go. The voice is so different, and it's more of a conversational quick repartee. It actually isn't original with us. I mean that's what Georgette Heyer was doing, but it kind of fell away in the British romance that I was reading and came back big time in the American romance.

Sarah MacLean 9:35 / #
And so when you talk about this, the American romance, these books that you were reading, we're talking about categories, the early categories? Or are you talking about historicals from the '70s too?

Jayne Ann Krentz 9:47 / #
I didn't start reading - (laughs) confession time.

Sarah MacLean 9:51 / #
(laughs) Good! Let's do it.

Jayne Ann Krentz 9:53 / #
I never read historicals. I wanted the contemporary story. I wanted romantic suspense and that was to be found in a contemporary setting in those days. So I never was drawn to the historicals until I managed to kill off my Jayne Ann Krentz career and I had to reinvent myself as Amanda Quick, and then I was starting from scratch because I had no idea how those books worked.

Sarah MacLean 10:17 / #
Right.

Jayne Ann Krentz 10:18 / #
So, but I'm a librarian, so...

Sarah MacLean 10:21 / #
Okay, so were you a librarian when you were reading and writing?

Jayne Ann Krentz 10:25 / #
Yes.

Sarah MacLean 10:26 / #
And so tell us where you were, and you were?

Jayne Ann Krentz 10:31 / #
Well, probably the lowest point of my library career was one year I spent as a school librarian. That's a calling, not a career (laughs), and I was not called. And then spent the rest of my library career at Duke University Library, and then later, a couple of corporate libraries out West here.

Sarah MacLean 10:54 / #
We interviewed Beverly Jenkins for the series, and she, too, was a corporate librarian. So I feel like there are all these little connections.

Jayne Ann Krentz 11:02 / #
Yeah. Well, that was the most boring work, actually, the corporate work. I mean it was a job and I needed a job, but for me it was much more interesting to work with readers, scholars, students, you know, people who were actually after information, not just the latest drawing for that particular gadget that they got to dismantle. But that's just me. I just happen to like the public work better.

Jennifer Prokop 11:32 / #
Jayne, we read your book, Gentle Pirate, and the heroine was a corporate librarian, I think, right? Was that around the time that you had that job? I mean, this would have been like the very early '80s.

Jayne Ann Krentz 11:45 / #
That was the first book I wrote that sold.

Jennifer Prokop 11:47 / #
Okay.

Jayne Ann Krentz 11:49 / #
There was another book that came out, actually a few months earlier, but it was actually sold after Gentle Pirate. Gentle Pirate was sold into the beginning of the Ecstasy line. That was the line that...

Jennifer Prokop 12:03 / #
Vivian Stephens.

Jayne Ann Krentz 12:04 / #
Vivian Stephens founded, Vivian Stephens was, you know, she really turned the whole American romance industry, book publishing industry on its head. She just totally changed everything. If it hadn't been for her. I don't know how it would have developed, but she was a game changer, and because of her, a lot of what we now take as familiar voices in the genre got their start. It started with Vivian Stephens.

Sarah MacLean 12:32 / #
Yeah, it was that first class with Vivian was you and Sandra Kitt, and Sandra Brown and...

Jayne Ann Krentz 12:38 / #
Some other names that have come and gone that were big at the time...Barbara Delinsky. Yeah, but I was thinking of Amy Lauren.

Jennifer Prokop 12:49 / #
We read that one, too.

Jayne Ann Krentz 12:51 / #
She was Book One, in that line, yeah.

Sarah MacLean 12:55 / #
So you were writing, so you sat down, you put pen to paper. Did you have people who were encouraging you? Was it a secret?

Jayne Ann Krentz 13:03 / #
(laughs) Of course it's a secret.

Sarah MacLean 13:04 / #
Of course it's secret! (laughs)

Jayne Ann Krentz 13:05 / #
You're not going to tell anybody you're trying to write a book until you've actually...

Sarah MacLean 13:11 / #
I don't know. I told everyone. (laughs)

Jayne Ann Krentz 13:17 / #
Back in my day it was not something you said anything, you just, the closest you would have gotten. and I tried a couple times and it was disastrous, was to attend a writers group, a local writers group, but I wasn't really welcome there, because I was really flat out trying to write genre fiction. And romance at the time, was of all the genres, the least of them in terms of respect, and everybody else was trying to write a memoir.

Sarah MacLean 13:44 / #
Still, that's still the case. Everyone in the writing group is writing a memoir. (laughs)

Jayne Ann Krentz 13:50 / #
And I didn't see that as very helpful. What changed that landscape, the business landscape, so that I stopped signing stupid contracts that tied up my name was, again, Vivian Stephens, because she was the one that got us all together for the first Romance Writers of America meeting. And that changed everything for all of us in terms of finally being able to learn about the business.

Sarah MacLean 14:15 / #
Yeah.

Jayne Ann Krentz 14:16 / #
Because I'll tell you, the publishers did not want you to know about how it worked. We couldn't read contracts. I mean, it's just this gobbledygook. They still are but now, at least, you've got an agent, usually to help you, or you can get a lawyer to help.

Sarah MacLean 14:29 / #
Right, well, this is important. So you didn't have an agent in these early days selling Harlequins?

Jayne Ann Krentz 14:37 / #
I did eventually but not at the very...

Sarah MacLean 14:38 / #
But most people didn't. They just sort of packed up their manuscript and shipped it off?

Jayne Ann Krentz 14:43 / #
I take it back. I had an agent for the first couple of books and she really ripped me off. So I like to forget that, it was not a good experience. And after that I went solo because I didn't trust agents for a while. So I didn't calm down about agents until RWA. The first meeting of RWA when the agent showed up and you could talk to one and, you know, that's how I met my current agent Steven Axelrod. So...

Sarah MacLean 15:09 / #
Who is an agent for many, many, many of the big names of the genre.

Jayne Ann Krentz 15:14 / #
He was at the time because he was one of the few agents who took the genre seriously and saw that it was going to go big once the US publishers got into the business.

Sarah MacLean 15:25 / #
Right.

Jayne Ann Krentz 15:27 / #
And so he, he just jumped in early. It was timing, good timing on his part.

Jennifer Prokop 15:32 / #
So going back to these first books you wrote, Gentle Pirate you wrote first? Or did you have things in the drawer that didn't sell? What was that sort of journey to actually getting a contract or actually selling those first books? Where did those stories come from?

Jayne Ann Krentz 15:50 / #
Well, the very first book I wanted to write was actually what we would call futuristic romance, and I wrote a futuristic romance. And tip number two, for any authors out there, it does not pay to be too far ahead of the curve.

Jennifer Prokop 16:07 / #
Yeah, not in genre.

Jayne Ann Krentz 16:09 / #
Yeah, you've got to hit the wave just right to make it work. But, um, but that didn't sell. And then what I was actually reading was contemporary romance, because that's all there was. The reason, to backtrack, the reason I actually wrote the first futuristic romance and had hopes of selling it was because I came across, I was on a student cheap ass tour of Europe, and somewhere on some sidewalk, one of those book kiosks, had some American novels and I was out of stuff to read. And the book that changed my life was on that kiosk, and it was Anne McCaffrey's Restoree.

Sarah MacLean 16:09 / #
Okay.

Jayne Ann Krentz 16:11 / #
Which was, yes, futuristic romance. And I don't think it did her career any good either, because she never wrote another. She moved on to dragons.

Jennifer Prokop 17:05 / #
To great success, right? To great success.

Sarah MacLean 17:07 / #
I mean, who didn't love a dragon.

Jayne Ann Krentz 17:09 / #
But she wrote a really, what we would call today is, you know, straight up what I'm doing with Harmony, and the Jayne Castle name, very much. So that was the life changing thing about that. But after that realized that I couldn't really make a living on the futuristic books, but the thing I was actually reading was contemporary. And that's what I backed off and plunged into.

Sarah MacLean 17:32 / #
So, then walk us through...I have lots of questions. So you're there with Vivian Stephens, and you're the first book, Stephanie James has the first book in one of the lines, right? You have one of the number ones, correct? Or am I making that up?

Jayne Ann Krentz 17:48 / #
I can't remember.

Sarah MacLean 17:49 / #
I might be making that up, but I'm pretty sure you're number one somewhere. So you're writing categories, and you're how many, I mean, this is one of the things that I love about people who were writing categories. How many books? How many publishers are you working for? How many books are you writing a year? What's this look like?

Jayne Ann Krentz 18:07 / #
Well, keep in mind the books are a little shorter than what we think of as a full-length paperback novel. They were probably about 68,000 words. They weren't novellas by any means.

Sarah MacLean 18:18 / #
No.

Jayne Ann Krentz 18:18 / #
They were not as long as a full length novel. So and the other thing factored into it, is that you couldn't make a living unless you did three or four year. I mean, if you're trying to make a living at it, you're gonna, and you couldn't build a brand.

Sarah MacLean 18:33 / #
Right. You have to feed the beast. That's what we've been talking about so much. And then at what point do you think to yourself, alright, well maybe, does single title, the bigger books come later?

Jayne Ann Krentz 18:47 / #
Well, there was no market for single title except historicals.

Sarah MacLean 18:50 / #
Right.

Jayne Ann Krentz 18:51 / #
And I had resisted writing those because I didn't read them, with the exception of Georgette Heyer, which I had read those long in my teenage years, and I didn't think they were modern romances.

Sarah MacLean 19:01 / #
Sure. Well, and they're not, right. They don't have sex in them. They're not quite the same as the modern romance.

Jayne Ann Krentz 19:07 / #
No, not at all. So then after I was a success in category, category, as the publishers were starting to do one-offs. They were starting to experiment with the single title, and they wouldn't let me do it because I was not quite ready.

Sarah MacLean 19:26 / #
Oh, those words, that you're not ready. You hear that all the time from people because there was this idea, would you explain to everybody kind of how the system worked?

Jayne Ann Krentz 19:35 / #
I think the editors didn't have a sense of what really worked in the books with the exception of people like Vivian Stephens. But most of the editors I worked with were not real fans of the genre. They didn't read the books, it was a job and they did it as much as possible by the numbers, because they didn't know, they didn't react to the books themselves. I think that limits your vision of, and then they read outside the genre, and it wasn't romance. So they had a vision of what books outside the genre was and it wasn't romance. So they were probably, in hindsight, were looking for something more along the lines of what we would call women's fiction. You know, big, big book, women's fiction.

Sarah MacLean 20:18 / #
To kind of break you out of romance? The idea was eventually you would be "good enough" and I'm using air quotes for everyone, to get out of romance.

Jayne Ann Krentz 20:27 / #
Yeah, but I didn't want to get out of it. I wanted to write romance.

Sarah MacLean 20:29 / #
Thank you for that.

Jennifer Prokop 20:32 / #
Yeah, thanks.

Jayne Ann Krentz 20:34 / #
And then what happened was, it was a publisher. It was Simon and Schuster, Irwyn Applebaum. He was a publisher at Simon and Schuster. What was the name? What was the imprint?

Sarah MacLean 20:50 / #
Are you talking about Pocket?

Jayne Ann Krentz 20:52 / #
Yeah, Pocket books. Yeah, yeah. He took the first risk of publishing romance writers in big book format and in hardcover, and they just went through the roof. And so he really, eventually, I was published by him, but back at the start I didn't have that good luck. But he's the one that I think, in hindsight, really opened up that market and basically proved to New York publishing that, yes, these women readers will pay full price for a novel.

Sarah MacLean 21:27 / #
So what is your first single title? At what point do you make that switch?

Jayne Ann Krentz 21:33 / #
Well, I guess the first single title will be the one, the science fiction that failed.

Sarah MacLean 21:36 / #
Right. So I'm going to hold it up. This, Sweet Starfire, this is what we're talking about. This is, I'm sure you know about this, The Romance Novel in English which is a catalogue from Rebecca Romney. She's put together a collection of first editions and important works from the genre. She's a rare books dealer, and we're obsessed, Jen and I are obsessed with this.

Jennifer Prokop 21:55 / #
Yes, we are.

Sarah MacLean 21:57 / #
So Sweet Starfire is, I mean, it's not the first time anybody's ever written science fiction in romance, but this is it, right? This, this feels like a moment.

Jayne Ann Krentz 22:08 / #
I think because it was it was a true romance, in the American style. It had everything that the contemporaries had, just a different backdrop.

Sarah MacLean 22:19 / #
Yes.

Jayne Ann Krentz 22:20 / #
And what that brought to the plate was you could do different kinds of plots. You could open up the plots.

Sarah MacLean 22:27 / #
Well, the argument being that Sweet Starfire opens the door to paranormal, as we know it, right?

Jennifer Prokop 22:34 / #
Well done.

Sarah MacLean 22:35 / #
I mean, which is a thing, it's major! There, and, you know, maybe we would have gotten there probably to vampires and everything else, but we got there, I think more quickly, because of you. So it's my podcast, so I get to say it. (laughter)

Jayne Ann Krentz 22:51 / #
I've always divided what's, okay, what Sweet Starfire had and what all my science fiction has is a very psychic vibe.

Sarah MacLean 23:00 / #
Mm hmm.

Jennifer Prokop 23:01 / #
Yes.

Jayne Ann Krentz 23:01 / #
And I have always drawn a very bright line between the psychic and the supernatural. So when you say paranormal, I tend to think of the supernatural, I tend to shapeshifters and vampires and witches, which I love to read, but I can't write. They're not, they don't fit my core story. So I've always thought of it as a separate area, and then there's the psychic romance or whatever you want to call it.

Jennifer Prokop 23:27 / #
Which you're still, I mean, those are still the Fogg Lake trilogy, which the, is it the third one comes out in January?

Jayne Ann Krentz 23:36 / #
I just want to take a moment here to say to anybody in the audience, this proves I can finish a trilogy.

Jennifer Prokop 23:42 / #
Well done. But that, it is psychic. It's you know essentially, everybody, the conceit is a fog goes over this town from a mysterious governmental entity and a whole towns full of people develop sort of psychic powers. And then it's like the next generation and the fallout. So it's interesting to hear you draw that line all the way back to books you're writing in the '80s.

Jayne Ann Krentz 24:10 / #
Yeah, I've always felt that difference, but I don't know that readers see it. It's just as a writer, I'm aware of it. But I think the reason I've been attracted to the psychic vibe from the very beginning, is because for me, it enhances the relationship. It gives that extra level of knowing between two people, and connection and bond. And it gives me other plots to play with. It gives me a little outside the box plot sort of thing, I think. But I also think it has a, it works because it's just one step beyond intuition, and most people can get into intuition. Most people believe in intuition. So asking them to take the psychic thing is just that one step beyond, whereas they may not be able to do the vampire thing or the supernatural thing, that may be a step too far for a lot of readers. But I think a lot of readers are fine with the psychic vibe, because everybody thinks they've got one.

Jennifer Prokop 25:10 / #
Right. Fair.

Sarah MacLean 25:12 / #
Wait, I want to go back to it doesn't fit my core story. So you might be the first person who ever explained core story to me, at a lunch at RWA, which I'm sure you do not remember. But I want you to talk about what core story is for, I mean, for everyone, but also, let's talk about yours. Because you seem to know very clearly what your core story is.

Jayne Ann Krentz 25:39 / #
I think I'm pretty familiar with it, because I had to understand it at that earlier point, when I killed off my science fiction career and had to reinvent myself as Amanda Quick, and I had never written a historical. So what I did was, I looked at that science fiction book, the last science fiction book, which was Shield's Lady. And I stepped back and I said, you know, duh, if you take out the rocket ships, and the funny animals and the other planet stuff, what you're really looking at here is a marriage of convenience. And then I thought, well dang, I know where those fit. So, so it was understanding a marriage of convenience, built on mutual trust, is what led me down the road to historicals. And then I realized it's what I always do. And I think it's important for writers to have a sense of their core story. And if you know your core story, you can sum it up in two or three words max. That's how elemental it is, because it has nothing to do with backgrounds, it has nothing to do with plots, it has nothing to do with the eras that you're writing in, it's all about the emotions you're working with, and the conflicts that you're working with. My core story is always founded somewhere on trust. And that's, like, I can write forever about it, because that's pulled from the inside. It's just a deep, deep thing that I am always curious about, interested in, everybody gets violated at one point or another, has their trust violated, everybody's been through that experience. Everybody has taken the risk of trust. You have to do it daily, basically. So it's a risk we're all familiar with, um, and it can wreck a life or it can change a life. And to me, that's all I need. That's just plenty to work with. So I think once you find the conflicts and the emotions that you love to work with, you're going to be able to explore, that's your universe, is what it comes down to. That is your universe, and you're going to write in every corner of that universe, some corner, every corner, for the rest of your career. I think. (laughs) That's my theory and I'm sticking to it.

Sarah MacLean 28:00 / #
I think it's a great theory. And it also makes so much sense that you weren't interested in leaving romance, because trust and love go hand in hand so well, that it makes sense. So when you, I want to get to Amanda Quick, the choice to do the Amanda Quick switch. So you say you've killed off your science fiction career. You're not writing contemporary single titles at this point. Is that because they don't exist generally, or you're just not?

Jayne Ann Krentz 28:31 / #
You know I don't think so. I think they were all historical.

Sarah MacLean 28:33 / #
Still at this point.

Jayne Ann Krentz 28:35 / #
Yeah.

Sarah MacLean 28:35 / #
Okay, and so you decide, because this is the late '80s?

Jayne Ann Krentz 28:40 / #
Yeah.

Jennifer Prokop 28:40 / #
Yeah, it feels like the only person I could think of who might have been writing an occasional single title...who wrote Perfect?

Sarah MacLean 28:45 / #
Contemporary.

Jennifer Prokop 28:50 / #
Yeah, contemporary. It was Perfect and...

Sarah MacLean 28:52 / #
McNaught.

Jennifer Prokop 28:50 / #
Yeah, Mcnaught had a couple. And there were a couple...

Sarah MacLean 28:58 / #
But that's a different angle into it, right, because McNaught was writing those big epic historicals and then, so the idea of her being asked to cut 100,000 words out of her books to write category is, I mean, she just wouldn't.

Jennifer Prokop 29:12 / #
Sure. Not going to happen.

Sarah MacLean 29:13 / #
I think Judith McNaught's amazing, but I doubt she'd be very quick to be like, "Yeah, I can write it in a third of the words." So you, at what point do you know you've killed your career?

Jayne Ann Krentz 29:27 / #
The same way you always know it. I couldn't get another contract with that publisher.

Sarah MacLean 29:30 / #
Okay.

Jayne Ann Krentz 29:31 / #
When they stop giving you contracts, that's a pretty big sign.

Sarah MacLean 29:34 / #
Pretty good sign.

Jayne Ann Krentz 29:37 / #
And that's when an agent really earns their keep, in a sense, because it was my agent who sold me as, I had to come up with a proposal he could work with, and it was the Amanda Quick proposal, for my first Amanda Quick book. And he just did a dang good job selling it to Bantam Books at the time, and he sold them without telling who it was.

Sarah MacLean 30:02 / #
That is a story you hear all the time.

Jennifer Prokop 30:05 / #
Yeah.

Jayne Ann Krentz 30:07 / #
And then once they committed to the book, then he could say, "Well, that's Jayne. Yeah, that's Jayne." So, but that's, that's, you know, he did a miraculous job of resurrecting my career at that point.

Sarah MacLean 30:20 / #
Not just resurrecting your career, I mean, suddenly, Amanda Quick, you know, is everywhere. Amanda Quick is one of, Jen and I both...

Jennifer Prokop 30:29 / #
Oh, yeah.

Sarah MacLean 30:30 / #
This is one of the names that we came to romance with.

Jayne Ann Krentz 30:34 / #
I think, I think what I just realized too late, probably should have realized earlier, was that the Regency, which is where I started, it is the perfect background for my voice, and it works just like the '30s is working now for that voice. It's a very similar kind of voice or of conversation and dialogue, just suits my style. Both eras suit my style.

Jennifer Prokop 30:59 / #
So as a writer, you're choosing to do something that's really out of your comfort zone, it sounds like. So how was that experience for you? Was it generative? Did you find yourself really? Or was it always like a I would love to get back to my roots? How did that, how did it go for you?

Jayne Ann Krentz 31:19 / #
Well I hadn't been there, so there was no roots to go back to, except the realization that the story I was telling fit that Regency in the way that the old Georgette Heyer had, that I kind of, that's what I clung to. What I worried most about because I was, am, are a librarian, was the research. And that was, to tell you the truth, is the reason I hadn't gone into the historicals in the first place. I had majored in history. I knew how complicated it was, but the lesson I learned very fast, was that when you write, when you write genre, you are writing not the real history, but you're writing the myth. And the myth of the Regency was already there because Georgette Heyer had created it so I just wrote on that.

Sarah MacLean 32:12 / #
So one of the things, when we read Ravished on Fated Mates, we did a deep dive episode on the book, and you know, we love it. And one of the things that we talked about was how, you didn't invent the bluestocking, obviously, Heyer was there before you but there is a difference. Amanda Quick comes on the scene, and suddenly it's like a door opens on historicals. And I'm wondering if you, does that, I mean, first of all, do you think that that's a good read on what was going on? Because it feels like prior to that, you know, you had all of the big, you know, the four J's and you had kind of other historicals that were doing a kind of different thing. And then in comes the Amanda Quick historical with the smart, you know, savvy heroine, the bluestocking, the hero who is her true partner from the start. I mean, going back to your core story now that you've said that, of course, right.

Jennifer Prokop 33:15 / #
Of course. Exactly. That's how I felt too.

Sarah MacLean 33:16 / #
But at the same, and so I, you know, I reread all of your pieces in Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women in preparation for this conversation, and we'll get there. But one of the things that you talk about is this idea of the hero as both hero and villain. He plays both roles. And I think that is really true prior to you in historicals, but he doesn't become the hero until much later in those earlier historicals, versus, you know, when you think about the hero of Ravished, he's a decent dude from the jump. And I think that is really, it feels like a Jayne Ann Krentz or an Amanda Quick Regency suddenly was doing a little bit of a different thing. Was that intentional? Or was it you were just doing the different thing?

Jayne Ann Krentz 33:19 / #
It was just intuitive.

Sarah MacLean 33:25 / #
Yeah.

Jayne Ann Krentz 33:26 / #
Because that's, that's the kind of character I'd always written. If you read my books from the beginning, my heroes haven't changed much over the years. You know, pretty much my heroes, they do what they do, and that they're infused with my core values in what I think works in the hero and same with the heroines. And I think if you respond to my books or any author's books, it's because, you're not responding so much to the story, the plot, the characters, you're responding to the core values infused into the primary characters. And if and if you respond to those values, you're probably going to go back to those books, that author again and again. If you don't respond to him, it's a boring book, and I think that's how it works. So if you read my books, it's probably because you got my sense of humor. And you have the same, you share a lot of the same core values. The thing about genre, the reason it even exists at all, is because it's the device and the mechanism by which we send our values down to the next generation. It's the way we affirm them to ourselves throughout our life. And it's the way a culture keeps its culture intact. It's the myth of the core value of that civilization, whatever it may be, that is going to go down through history, and it survives or it doesn't survive. And that's, that's what genre does, it carries the myth.

Jennifer Prokop 35:40 / #
I love that.

Jayne Ann Krentz 35:42 / #
That's my theory.

Jennifer Prokop 35:46 / #
That I think is really true. And when I think about myself as a romance reader for 40 years, or however long it's been. It's not that quite that long. I feel like I really do see that, like those arcs. But at the same time, I feel like there's so many ways I can talk about how romance has changed. So for you, what are the things, like they're still the big things that are the same? What are the things that have changed in romance, do you think?

Jayne Ann Krentz 36:15 / #
Those dang cell phones. (laughter) You laugh, but I'm telling you. I know, I know what you mean. And one of the tricks to success in this business is trying not to tie your story down to a particular era, unless you're really telling that era's story. I mean, if, you know, when you do the 1930s, you do the 1930s. But, but if you want the books to have a long life, it's best not to put in any gadgets or...

Sarah MacLean 36:48 / #
Celebrity names.

Jayne Ann Krentz 36:50 / #
Celebrity names, politician's names, history, local ongoing history. Keep it, the more you limit it to the myth and the mythical side of the story, the longer that story is going to survive. But that's, that's a whole other issue here. Clearly, the surface changes all the time. And that's just true of any genre. But the underlying power of the genre that you love to read, whatever that genre is, doesn't change very much. And so I'm still writing relationships that have to overcome the hurdle of trust, and it's not going to change. You know, that has nothing to do with politics or history or social problems. I think the more you deal in social problems, the more you move away from genre, in a sense, because you're dealing with the superficial again, you're back to what's current now, but 20 years from now, that won't be an issue. Some things will be issues, because they're they're universal things. I'm thinking now about women's voting, getting the right to vote. It's an interesting historical detail, and it's an important historical detail. And you can tell stories around it, because the Suffragette movement was so important, but it is, it's a different take. It's, I think what happens when you do that is like, it's like, okay, it's clear to see it set in, in a war. Any book you write set in World War Two, no matter what you do, the war is going to be the primary character. Nothing. In the end, there will be sacrifices, and everything will be sacrificed to doing the right thing in the war. Because that's the other thing that genre does, which is call upon its characters at one point or another, to do the right thing. And we have a sense of, a sense of what a real hero does when the chips are down. We have a sense of what a heroine is supposed to do when push comes to shove, and they do the right thing. That's how, that's, that's all that matters. And that works big time if you're setting the story against an overwhelming backdrop like a world war. It's Casablanca. You never see, you never see any fighting or shooting. It was one gun but you know what I mean.

Sarah MacLean 39:21 / #
War is everything.

Jayne Ann Krentz 39:23 / #
Right. Everybody sacrifices for the war effort. And it's just, I'll never write that story because it's not mine. That does not fit. It doesn't come back to the trust between two people that I want to write about. I can admire it, you know, it's not that, but it's not my story.

Sarah MacLean 39:40 / #
As you're writing, in your career, you know, you've spanned, you know, you started with categories, you've written single titles, you've written sci-fi, you've written historicals, you've written, you write contemporaries now, still. At what point in this journey are you thinking, "Oh my gosh, romance is a big deal. I mean, it's really, there are millions and millions of women out there who are reading these books, largely women."

Jayne Ann Krentz 40:09 / #
Guess when the big checks started coming. (laughter) You know, once the American publishers got into the market, it became a big business really fast, because that's just how the American market works. If it works, it explodes. You know what I mean?

Sarah MacLean 40:22 / #
Everyone's throwing books out all the time.

Jayne Ann Krentz 40:25 / #
You can clutter up the market in a hurry, you know, but that's kind of a normal process. And yeah, I just think that the process of becoming a big business happened really quickly, and simultaneously, or concomitantly, or whatever, right along with it, came the foundation of Romance Writers of America, which gave the romance writer access to information about the business. So we grew up with it, in a sense, that first generation of romance, American romance writers grew up learning fast.

Sarah MacLean 41:03 / #
Because at the time Romance Writers of America was about the business, right? It was about professional writers coming together to share, to information share.

Jayne Ann Krentz 41:12 / #
It was networking.

Sarah MacLean 41:14 / #
Yeah.

Jayne Ann Krentz 41:14 / #
We didn't, we didn't have that word for it, but that's what it was. And a lot of the friends I have today, I made back in those early days of networking.

Sarah MacLean 41:21 / #
So talk about that. What was this community like? Who were they? What were you getting from them? How are you interacting?

Jayne Ann Krentz 41:30 / #
Back at the beginning, only published writers were in the group. It later opened up to unpublished writers, but back at the time, we all had the same interests because we were all published, we're all dealing with publishers, we're all dealing with contracts, we're all trying to find agents, you know, that there was a lot of business to discuss, and the other organization, Novelists, Inc., also came along about that time. And gradually, I think people realized that romance writers had a lot of, all the same concerns and interests as the writers in the other genres. So there was some cross networking there too. It wasn't always comfortable, but you knew that there were other writers groups out there that had the same issues and and you could learn from them. So I just think it was the networking thing that today happens online. So it isn't maybe so necessary to have the organizations that, that we just didn't have that online option. I didn't know any other published writers until I went to that first meeting of the RWA, the very first RWA.

Sarah MacLean 42:38 / #
Yeah. Who is the group of people who keep you going?

Jayne Ann Krentz 42:43 / #
Well, Susan Elizabeth Phillips. Kristen Hannah. A lot of it is, are friends I know here, like Debbie Macomber, because we have a lot of us happen to end up in the Pacific Northwest. Christina Dodd. More newer friends who've come along right now, for example, Rachel Grant, who is doing a really interesting, modern, very modern version of the heroine who is an archaeologist, and it's kind of the new Amelia Peabody, but except very modern. And Darcy Burke.

Sarah MacLean 43:18 / #
Were there editors who you feel were essential to the growth, your growth as a writer?

Jayne Ann Krentz 43:26 / #
Yes, and to the genre, because I said back at the beginning, a lot of the editors were not people who actually loved the genre. For a lot of editors, it was a starting point in their careers, which they hoped to move on to other kinds of books, I suppose. But years ago, it's been a few decades now, I can't remember when, editors started coming into the genre, who like Vivian Stephens just loved the books, just have a gut way to buy the books, they can buy them by intuition, because they read the books, they knew how they worked. So editors like Leslie Gelbman, and my editor today, Cindy Hwang, who pretty much invented the whole paranormal publishing industry.

Sarah MacLean 44:14 / #
We should say Leslie Gelbman also edits Nora Roberts. So you've you've probably read something by Leslie Gelbman's authors before.

Jayne Ann Krentz 44:23 / #
And those editors, and they have in turn mentored a group of younger editors coming up, and they choose their people now. They choose their editorial staff knowing that they need writers, they need authors, they need these editors to bring in authors who will work long term, and that takes an editorial eye that loves the basic story.

Sarah MacLean 44:50 / #
Right. So there's this, it feels like there's this editorial mindset of building a career, of buying an author and shepherding. them through the journey.

Jayne Ann Krentz 45:01 / #
Yeah. Yeah. It won't probably last a lifetime, but their careers and the writer's careers in that kind of publishing are very intertwined. There is no getting around it. On the other side of the coin is the self-publishing, the indie published authors, who don't have that kind of connection, and it's a very different publishing world for them. It's an interesting, it's an interesting thing that's happened in the industry, because I think between the two, the writers finding editors who love the books, and the independent writers who don't need gatekeepers, which basically New York editing is a gatekeeping job. And agents are gatekeepers too. But the indie crowd doesn't have to worry about gatekeepers. So between those two groups, they kind of have revolutionized the whole romance genre, in that they have allowed an almost unlimited variety of experiments. And that has kept the genre, keeps it fresh, it keeps reinventing itself because it keeps going new places. Some of the other genres can't say that. They're much more hidebound, much more rigid, in what's acceptable. If you put a vampire cop into a traditional murder mystery, it's not gonna sell. They don't want vampires in there. They know what they want in their murder mysteries and it ain't vampires, but a romance reader will look at it. She may not like that book, but she'll give that story a chance. So the readers were inclined to be experimental too. They'll try something new. And that's, that's just been an amazing thing for the whole genre, because it keeps churning, it keeps changing. It keeps adding and experimenting, and one of the reasons we were able to do that, even in the early days, was because nobody cared enough about romance to make any rules.

Sarah MacLean 47:07 / #
Yeah.

Jayne Ann Krentz 47:08 / #
We skated under the radar, and it was very useful for those of us who didn't know there were rules. It's like, "Oh, okay." (laughs)

Sarah MacLean 47:16 / #
So let's talk about this, Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women, because I would like to hear the story of how this came to be in 1992.

Jayne Ann Krentz 47:30 / #
I think at that point in my career, I was very successful. I knew a lot of other successful writers. And as the saying goes, we didn't get any respect. And it wasn't that I wanted people to love my books. I understood, I don't read a lot of other people's books too, you know. I have no problem that you don't want to read the books, but the criticism was not proper criticism. It was not literary criticism. It was blowing off not just the the writers, but the readers, and the implication was, they're not well educated. They don't have a lot of money. They're, it just wrote everybody off from from the consumer through the writer.

Sarah MacLean 48:10 / #
And are you talking about specifically academics at this point? Or because there's a very famous late '80s study that came out about romance readers that presents them in this way?

Jennifer Prokop 48:22 / #
Is this Radway?

Sarah MacLean 48:24 / #
The Radway.

Jayne Ann Krentz 48:25 / #
No, I read the book and it's, okay, one of the things I learned about going into academic publishing, which I did one time and we will never do it again (laughter), is that you are expected to take a, what would be the right word, of philosophical slant, and then bring in the proof that shows that your take on it is correct. I've always felt that didn't really, wasn't very helpful, because you can make anything look right, if you bring in the evidence that you want to bring. (laughter)

Sarah MacLean 49:00 / #
Sure.

Jayne Ann Krentz 49:01 / #
Yeah, so I didn't, I didn't, and that was what passed for serious academic criticism. That was nothing compared to the jokes in the newspapers on Valentine's Day.

Sarah MacLean 49:11 / #
Sure. I mean, which still persist.

Jennifer Prokop 49:13 / #
Yeah.

Jayne Ann Krentz 49:14 / #
No, it ranged across the whole scale. So at that point, I was still in my feisty mode, I guess. (laughter)

Sarah MacLean 49:22 / #
I love it.

Jennifer Prokop 49:23 / #
We're still in our feisty mode, so pass the baton right over. (laughter)

Jayne Ann Krentz 49:28 / #
Just go. Run with it. Run with it. But I had been in the business long enough to know that there was one editor out there who straddled both the academic and the genre, and that was Patricia Reynolds Smith. I had met her while she was working for Harlequin. And then eventually she moved into academic, she went back to her roots, which was academic publishing, and was with the University of Pennsylvania Press. So I called her up, and I told her what I had in mind, and I said, "Where would I take a book like this?" And she said, "Right here."

Sarah MacLean 49:29 / #
Terrific.

Jayne Ann Krentz 49:29 / #
So she really is the one I give full credit to for that book, because she knew how to organize it so that it looked academic, so that it was acceptable to an academic reader, and that it met their standards, as well as told our side of the story.

Sarah MacLean 50:25 / #
And it's interesting, because at the beginning of this book, the first line of this book is, "Few people realize how much courage it takes for a woman to open a romance novel on an airplane." And it felt, I mean, I read that again, you know, this week, and it just felt like a shot to the heart because it, I mean, we've all been there, right?

Jennifer Prokop 50:44 / #
And people still feel this way, right? And this 30 years later.

Jayne Ann Krentz 50:49 / #
Why do you think romance readers were early adopters of ebooks? (laughter)

Jennifer Prokop 50:53 / #
Exactly. None of your business, right? None of your business.

Jayne Ann Krentz 50:57 / #
Yup.

Sarah MacLean 50:57 / #
But the idea, this kind of transformational idea of turning the text around and saying you're missing the point. This is for the reader. This is about these women, these, largely, women who are experiencing these books, the mythology of these books, the power of these books themselves, privately, had to have been kind of earth shattering for academics, because that's not what they were talking about in those other books, which I also have read.

Jayne Ann Krentz 51:27 / #
Interestingly enough, we have several warmly received reviews from female academics. The harshest critics for that book that I recall, were male.

Sarah MacLean 51:41 / #
Sure.

Jayne Ann Krentz 51:41 / #
And they just didn't get it. It just, even with all our careful explaining, (laughter) apparently we didn't explain it to a lot of men very well, but most of the women I talked to afterward got it.

Sarah MacLean 51:57 / #
Yeah. So you get to, you send out an email, or well, you don't send out an email. (laughter) Wait, how do you get all these people?

Jennifer Prokop 52:08 / #
Exactly!

Sarah MacLean 52:08 / #
Oh my god, what is happening? (laughing)

Jennifer Prokop 52:10 / #
You don't text your friends?

Jayne Ann Krentz 52:13 / #
This, this is that thing called the telephone.

Jennifer Prokop 52:15 / #
Oh.

Jayne Ann Krentz 52:16 / #
You dial it.

Jennifer Prokop 52:19 / #
I remember now.

Sarah MacLean 52:20 / #
So you start picking up the phone and calling you know, the biggest names in the genre. Elizabeth Lowell is in here, Mary Jo Putney. Susan Elizabeth Phillips.

Jennifer Prokop 52:28 / #
Sandra Brown.

Sarah MacLean 52:29 / #
Sandra Brown. Stella Cameron. And you say what?

Jayne Ann Krentz 52:34 / #
I tried to explain what I was trying to do. But I've never been the best proposal writer. In terms of explaining, I can write a proposal, but pitching it verbally has always been hard for me. But I, after talking to Pat Smith, the editor, I had a sense of how how to phrase what I was asking for, which is I'm not going to give you a topic. I just want you to tell me what you think makes the books work. What is the appeal of the romance? And 19 authors came back with 19 different essays, that all went together very nicely. It just, they just worked across the spectrum. And that book is still in the libraries today, academic libraries today. And then that was what sort of Pat Smith told me going in, she said, after I was exhausted, because this took a year out of my life.

Sarah MacLean 53:25 / #
Sure.

Jayne Ann Krentz 53:27 / #
You try herding 19 authors! (laughs)

Jennifer Prokop 53:29 / #
Yeah, right. Before email.

Sarah MacLean 53:32 / #
Before email. (laughter)

Jayne Ann Krentz 53:35 / #
And then having to be the one to pass along the edits .

Sarah MacLean 53:39 / #
The notes! How dare you! (laughs)

Jayne Ann Krentz 53:45 / #
Without losing any friendships in the process? You know, it was, but everybody came through and everybody was very gracious about it. So it was an interesting experience all the way around. But she said, "The one thing about this book is that it'll still be around 20 years from now."

Sarah MacLean 54:03 / #
And it is. I mean, it was, I mean, it's been on my shelf since the very beginning of my career. So...

Jayne Ann Krentz 54:09 / #
Thank you.

Sarah MacLean 54:10 / #
I'm really grateful for it. So we talked a lot about what your core story is and what makes a Jayne Ann Krentz novel. I wonder if we could talk about your readers? Do you, I mean, one of the things that really struck me in Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women in your introduction, as I said, was centering the reader. And you're, you have this conversation in the introduction where you talk about reader service. And I wonder, we all know, of course, as readers and writers of the genre that readers are really drawn to romance and it's a very different kind of relationship that writers have with romance readers. Do you have any moments that stick out from across your career of times when you've heard from readers or really understood the power of the genre with them?

Jayne Ann Krentz 55:02 / #
I think the thing that surprises me the most, and other writers I know have the same reaction, is how often a reader will take the time to let you know that your book got them through a tough time. And I think it speaks to the underlying communication of the emotional core of those stories. When you are sitting by a bedside of somebody who isn't doing well, you want you want to read something that is speaking to your heart, and speaking to your emotional core, and affirming your own deep core values. And romance does that for women. It does it for men too, I think, but we haven't really gone there, you know, acknowledge this. I am, I'm always surprised at how many male readers romance writers pick up along the way. That they do respond to the books, and often it's the wife buying the book. And then he reads it at home kind of thing. It's an interesting play. I remember asking one male reader who came through an autograph line, he was really, really into the books that he was buying, and he was very excited. And I asked him what it was he, what spoke to him in the stories and he said, and his son was with him, and he said, "My father just came back from the war." This was, he was a Vietnam vet. And the vet said, "I just don't want any more blood." And so he got a story with a little mystery in it, a little suspense in it, a lot of action, but no really grisly, horrifying things. So there may be more of that kind of reader out there than we realize, because so much of modern romance incorporates an element of suspense, which is also that romantic suspense is a, I think, also a really core American story.

Jennifer Prokop 57:08 / #
Yeah.

Sarah MacLean 57:09 / #
That's fascinating.

Jayne Ann Krentz 57:09 / #
It's just very popular.

Sarah MacLean 57:12 / #
Jen has a whole - Jen, I know you want to talk about Vietnam, and you should ask your question.

Jennifer Prokop 57:19 / #
So my dad fought in Vietnam. And you know, I read, looking back, I am fascinated by how, so I started reading romance when I was probably 12 or 13. And this would have been like the mid '80s. And so many of these heroes were men back from Vietnam. And I am just personally really - and Sarah's whole college thesis was about Vietnam.

Sarah MacLean 57:48 / #
Women on the homefront during Vietnam

Jennifer Prokop 57:50 / #
Right?

Sarah MacLean 57:51 / #
Probably because of romance novels, I mean, of course, because of romance novels,

Jennifer Prokop 57:55 / #
Sure, of course, right? And I think for both of us, I mean for me, it was just really personal. I still don't really understand my father. And when I read books about war by men, I'm reading about combat, but when I read romance about men coming home from war, I'm reading about my family. And I think that, I've always joked, I'm getting a little weepy. It's hard to talk about, because I feel like my dad's really broken and he still is, and no one, love didn't fix him, right? And I know that that's why I get so angry sometimes when people are like, "Women reading romance." I'm like, "Look, I wanted to live out a world where it was possible for my dad to be fixed by love." And romance gives me that. And I think that I'm just really fascinated by the way that those Vietnam heroes, to me, turned into romantic suspense in a lot of ways, right? Like we, we put it back on page. So I don't know if there's a question there. I think it's your heroes meant a lot to me, because I felt like here's somebody who's talking about how hard it was to live with these men who had come back from war, and didn't know how to be parts of families anymore.

Jayne Ann Krentz 59:12 / #
Now, and that is a common story after every war. It's not just Vietnam. It's every damn war that sent them home. And what happens is, these broken men came home, and the women are left to patch them up as best they can. Sometimes you just can't.

Jennifer Prokop 59:27 / #
Yeah.

Jayne Ann Krentz 59:28 / #
You know, the damage is too great. And I think the books acknowledge that. They give a happy ending because that's what we're in the business of providing, is a bit of hope at the end. But even with the happy ending, if you say that's unrealistic, and I don't know that it is for everyone. I mean, that in your case, obviously, it was, for the real life. But what those books gave you was the fact that you were not the only person dealing with this. Women across the country were dealing with this, and not always successfully, and they acknowledge that pain, they acknowledge the problem, they acknowledge the damage. Yes, they've tried to fix it with love, but in a way, that's not why you're...

Jennifer Prokop 1:00:13 / #
That wasn't it, right. It was just that it was there.

Jayne Ann Krentz 1:00:16 / #
Other people acknowledged it.

Jennifer Prokop 1:00:18 / #
I often say that, if you want to read about miscarriage, you should read romance. Because it's another place where it's like, these things happen to people and we go on. And I feel like that's one of the things, to me as a reader, it's the, and I just don't think romance gets enough credit for really...

Jayne Ann Krentz 1:00:38 / #
It doesn't.

Jennifer Prokop 1:00:39 / #
Really saying, "Look at what we go through and yet we still persevere or trust each other or find a way." That's why I read romance. Every every single romance gives me that.

Jayne Ann Krentz 1:00:52 / #
Because it is affirming a positive core value. It is affirming hope, which ultimately is all we've really got. (laughs) But on the respect side, I will tell you one story that has stuck with me for decades now. And that was years ago, I was at a conference, one of those book fairs. Remember the big book fairs? Seattle used to have a big book fair. And I was...

Sarah MacLean 1:01:22 / #
Remember when we all went places and stood with other people? (laughter)

Jayne Ann Krentz 1:01:27 / #
Those were the days. But I was standing with a crowd of local writers of all genres, because we just have a lot of local writers here. And there was a very well-known science fiction writer, a very well-known mystery writer, a very well-known memoir writer. I mean, there was just a bunch of us standing around. And somebody started whining about how they didn't get any respect. And I being the only romance writer, and I figured I had the biggest...

Sarah MacLean 1:01:57 / #
Oh boy. Was it a man?

Jennifer Prokop 1:01:59 / #
Bite me.

Jayne Ann Krentz 1:02:02 / #
I kept my mouth shut, because every single one of those genre writers had the same experience.

Sarah MacLean 1:02:08 / #
Yeah.

Jayne Ann Krentz 1:02:09 / #
They might, in turn, have been able to look down on me, but by golly, they felt looked down upon. (laughs) That sense, and that was another insight into the fact that by and large, our country, our culture does not give a lot of respect to genre fiction in general, not just romance. We might get the sharp end of the stick or whatever, but there isn't really a lot of respect for the genres compared to the literary novel. And that, I think, is a huge misunderstanding of the purpose of genres, which, as I said earlier, isn't so much to capture a moment in history, it's to capture values and core cultural beliefs, and affirm them and transmit them. And that's really crucial to a culture. That's more important to a culture, than a piece of snippet of time of that culture, which will never be, will never happen again. So you can write New York City problems or LA problems today or tomorrow, and that's a piece of history that you're doing, but it's the underlying core values that will decide whether or not it's the genre or literary. I think it just has a really important place in our culture. Every culture has a version of genre stories, and that's how humans tell stories, and why they tell them, I think. Because it's really kind of interesting, when you think about why do we tell stories, you know?(laughs) And we, even if you don't read, you're gonna be exposed to stories, you'll be inundated with stories on TV. I mean, it's just roll through.

Sarah MacLean 1:03:48 / #
Well, we talk all the time about, you know, how romance really scratches a kind of primordial itch. It feels, it hits you emotionally first, and then the story waves over you, crashes over you. And I think that's the power of all genre, is this idea that the stories have to be compelling, they have to keep you interested, and you know, keep you turning the pages, in a way that, and I don't, I'm with you. I don't understand why that's somehow less valuable. It feels more valuable in a lot of ways.

Jayne Ann Krentz 1:04:24 / #
RIght. I think it's because there's so much of it. Humans, just in general, tend to blow off anything that's got tons of it around. And there we are inundated with stories from film, from TV, from audiobooks, from books. It's just everywhere, so we tend not to give it a lot of respect.

Jennifer Prokop 1:04:43 / #
So back to your books. Are there books of yours that you're the most proud of or that you hear the most from readers about?

Sarah MacLean 1:04:52 / #
Maybe those are two different books.

Jennifer Prokop 1:04:54 / #
Yeah, could be.

Jayne Ann Krentz 1:04:55 / #
I've always heard a lot about Ravished. And that's because it is the most fundamental version of my core story.

Jennifer Prokop 1:05:02 / #
Yeah.

Jayne Ann Krentz 1:05:03 / #
And that's it's beauty and the beast thrown in with the trust thing.

Sarah MacLean 1:05:08 / #
For me, it's because Harriet says, "Well, it's not like I'm doing anything with my virginity." (laughter)

Jennifer Prokop 1:05:15 / #
A classic line forever.

Sarah MacLean 1:05:16 / #
It's the greatest moment in romance history when Harriet says that! (laughter)

Jayne Ann Krentz 1:05:21 / #
What is this doing, yeah? So I hear a lot about that one. But to tell you the truth, I, the book I love best is always the one I just finished. And I suppose that's because it's the one that I just most recently wrote my heart into, you know. And people tend to quote lines back at me. I'll hear lines from books and forget I wrote the line. I think the only line I really remember writing, and it's only because I heard it quoted so many times after the book came out, which was, "Good news. She doesn't need therapy." (laughter) That was from Perfect Partners, and I've heard that line my whole life. (laughs)

Sarah MacLean 1:06:05 / #
Proof Jayne Ann Krentz is not from New York City. (laughter) So that's great. Do you feel like there is a book that you, is there a book of yours that you wish would outlive you? If you could choose one?

Jayne Ann Krentz 1:06:25 / #
It isn't, I don't think of my own books as being that kind of book that would speak to future generations. I don't, it'd be nice if it did, but I don't have a strong sense, it's not part of what I'm trying to write for. But what I hope outlives and lives on is the genre itself. Because I think the romance genre is probably the core genre from which everything else derives. You can't write any of the other genres without that core story of relationships. At least they won't be very interesting stories if you don't. [include romance] So I hope we never, I hope as a culture, we never lose the romance genre, simply because I think it is, it's a critical voice and a critical kind of story that we need, because it's all about the foundation of a union, a family and a community. And that core value is what holds civilization together. So there we go. We need romance to keep civilization going.

Sarah MacLean 1:07:38 / #
Amen.

Jennifer Prokop 1:07:39 / #
So much pressure.

Sarah MacLean 1:07:42 / #
I think that's a perfect place to end. Jen, do you have anything else?

Jennifer Prokop 1:07:45 / #
No, this was unbelievable. I'm going to go lay in my bed and think for a long time.

Sarah MacLean 1:07:53 / #
It really, it's transformational this conversation. It makes you think. I mean, when she said, "genre carries the myth." Stop it. I just, I immediately wrote it down on a post-it note.

Jennifer Prokop 1:08:05 / #
Yes. Well, I mean, so I said at the beginning that we recorded this months ago, right? We're actually recording the topper the week before it airs and this part. And I have been thinking about that part of the conversation for so long. Not only because I think it's so smart about what genre does and why it works the way it does. You know, specifically the thing that she said too about in genre characters are called upon to do the right thing.

Sarah MacLean 1:08:33 / #
Aww, right! It just makes sense!

Jennifer Prokop 1:08:35 / #
It's just to make sense, right? Like this myth making aspect of it. But next week we are going to be talking about a historical romance called Passion. And one of the things that we ended up talking about and I think we've talked about over and over again, is why it is that so many readers will come after historical authors and say, "That's not true." I think a lot of people look at it about like historical accuracy. But it's, when you think about it instead as being no, they're fighting. They don't like the myth changing on them.

Sarah MacLean 1:09:06 / #
They don't like characters doing the right thing in a way that, you know, they aren't used to.

Jayne Ann Krentz 1:09:11 / #
Or they don't like valorizing characters that they've never thought of as being...

Sarah MacLean 1:09:16 / #
Worthy of valor. Yeah.

Jennifer Prokop 1:09:18 / #
Yes. And so I was thinking about it so much as I was re-listening because I was like, this, to me really helps understand these are not people that are going to be swayed by, "Oh, but the word cunt has been around for, you know, hundreds of years!" Because that's not, it's not about historical accuracy. It's about, "I don't like that I'm not the primary character in this myth anymore.

Sarah MacLean 1:09:42 / #
Right. The hero of it.

Jennifer Prokop 1:09:44 / #
And I think that that then if you think about these changing mores as being these conversations are a proxy for not just how romance is changing, but how society is changing and who we make a place for, and who gets to be the star of the show? Then those conversations just take on a new kind of relevance and importance. One that I think I would approach in a different way, in the future, after thinking about what what Jayne said.

Sarah MacLean 1:10:13 / #
Yeah. I think that there is such power, I mean, clearly we talked about this in the episode with her, but there's such a sense with Jayne that she carried the banner of romance for a while. And she carried that banner because of this, because of her bedrock belief that romance and genre fiction are the successors of the core stories of us as humans.

Jennifer Prokop 1:10:43 / #
And the core stories of us as a society. right?

Sarah MacLean 1:10:46 / #
Yeah.

Jennifer Prokop 1:10:47 / #
I mean, lay me down. Even just saying it I got covered goosebumps, like, "Oh, that's what it is! Of course!

Sarah MacLean 1:10:53 / #
Yeah. I mean, and that's without even talking about core story, which she is so brilliant about. I mean, she was the first person who ever said, "core story" to me, I think. And talk about somebody who just understands her work.

Jennifer Prokop 1:10:53 / #
Yeah.

Sarah MacLean 1:11:04 / #
And never deviates from her path. And even with all, I had no idea that so many of these pen names came because she was quote, "failing," right?

Jennifer Prokop 1:11:25 / #
Yes.

Sarah MacLean 1:11:26 / #
That she had to restart her career so many times. The idea that Jayne Ann Krentz/Amanda Quick/Jayne Castle/Stephanie James had to restart, had to reboot is bananas to me, because I do think of her as being the best of us in so many ways. You know, especially coming off the re-read of Ravished that we did.

Jennifer Prokop 1:11:50 / #
We have talked a lot about the Trailblazers in terms of, offline, what are the things that keep coming up over and over again? Vivian Stephens, the role of those, Woodiwiss, right? The things that really were markers for so many of these writers, but the thing that I keep thinking about is, but what about our listeners or the, you know, new, young, up and coming authors to hear that Jayne Ann Krentz was like, "Yeah, I was a failure." I mean I was like...

Sarah MacLean 1:12:19 / #
"My agent told me I should try historicals, and we didn't even tell them I was the author." That is, aside from just being almost unfathomable, the other side of it is so inspirational!

Jennifer Prokop 1:12:37 / #
Yes.

Sarah MacLean 1:12:38 / #
You know, not to be cheesy about it, but the idea that she, that this kind of rockstar, a true Trailblazer, struggled over and over again and had to reinvent herself over and over again, it's really amazing. Especially because, on the the New Year's Eve episode, I said my sister was looking for an old Stephanie James. Which by the way, we think we found. We'll put in show notes. But there's this idea that failure to the industry also, is, looks very different to readers.

Jennifer Prokop 1:13:19 / #
Yeah.

Sarah MacLean 1:13:20 / #
Then failure to readers, because my sister, who is in her fifties, and read that Stephanie James book in the '80s, does not believe that that book, or Stephanie James are...

Jennifer Prokop 1:13:30 / #
No.

Sarah MacLean 1:13:31 / #
In fact, I had to tell her that Stephanie James was Jayne Ann Krentz. So she was like, "Whatever happened to her?"

Jennifer Prokop 1:13:36 / #
You're like, oh, it's better for you.

Sarah MacLean 1:13:38 / #
She did okay. (laughs)

Jennifer Prokop 1:13:40 / #
She's doing all right. That's the part I think that is really, in a lot of ways, just really almost wildly inspiring. Because I think it is so easy in our modern world, or wherever we are right now to think, if I don't, that it has to be a steady, upward trajectory. And if it's not, you know, if it's not that...

Sarah MacLean 1:14:08 / #
You're not an instant bestseller.

Jennifer Prokop 1:14:10 / #
Then you're a failure, and it really speaks to no, this is a marathon, it is not a sprint, and there are going to be times you're going to fall down. There's going to be times you have to, you know, reinvent yourself come up with a new name, abandon a sub-genre you love because it is not the right time to be on that wave.

Sarah MacLean 1:14:31 / #
Fantasy, I mean, speculative fiction, speculative romance, it still doesn't have a strong foothold, and it's not out of line to suggest that Jayne Ann Krentz is the founder of that particular sub-genre, and you know, still, we're still fighting for that to claim space there.

Jennifer Prokop 1:14:52 / #
So, I mean, I think that that's sometimes the hard part about romance is, you know, I think I'm a deeply pragmatic person, and sometimes I'm like, you know, the things I personally, as an individual reader want, like and think are great, or not what the market will bear right now. And you know what? Oh, well, figure out what is going on in the market right now and enjoy it 'til your thing comes back around. I don't know.

Sarah MacLean 1:14:52 / #
Yeah. And I think that that's kind of what I took away from this conversation, what I have taken away from most of my conversations with Jayne is you can have both, right? You can both write what you love, and write to market. I mean, there is a space for both of those things. But her pragmatism, to use your word, is a lot about sustaining a career. I mean, sometimes you write to market, because that's what the market wants, and you know, you can deliver it and you know, you can succeed with it. And you know, every one of those books makes room for you to write the book, you know, in space.

Jennifer Prokop 1:16:03 / #
The book, that right, eventually you hope to make room for. There was a part where she was talking about, we were like how's romance changed? And she joked and said, "cell phones," and she was really talking about, essentially, if you are right now, if you're talking about celebrities, or politicians or technology that exists right now, that it really limits you, because your, it kind of almost takes away from that mythological aspect.

Sarah MacLean 1:16:34 / #
Sure.

Jennifer Prokop 1:16:34 / #
And one of the things I found myself, everyone has heard me ranting and raving at some point or another about how annoyed I am when people are using really old pop culture only in their books, and I'm like, well, if you think about it as mythmaking, I guess people our age are really trying to entrench Ferris Bueller's Day Off and the American myth or whatever. But it's really interesting to also think about, I personally think still, when we see that disconnect between the author, and their personal myths, or cultural myths versus their characters, and this, so I just, I found this conversation with her to be so generative in thinking new ways about things that I spend a lot of time thinking about.

Sarah MacLean 1:17:21 / #
Yeah. Well, it's also that piece of, you know, the balance of doing the important, romance doing the important work of society, right.

Jennifer Prokop 1:17:32 / #
Yeah.

Sarah MacLean 1:17:33 / #
And also romance placing a character and a love story in a specific time.

Jennifer Prokop 1:17:40 / #
Right,

Sarah MacLean 1:17:40 / #
That, you know, 40 years from now, hopefully, we don't, we don't have that conversation anymore. So I think, I of course, always think about, you know, that is a struggle, that is a particular struggle with contemporaries, but it also is so important for us who don't, for those of us who don't write contemporaries to think about that, because the conversations that our characters are having on page. You know, the the work of the genre is to figure out how to have those conversations without aging the book, dating the book. And maybe sometimes that's impossible, you know, I don't know. I think about that Nora Roberts book we read where the hero smokes all the time.

Jennifer Prokop 1:18:23 / #
Sure.

Sarah MacLean 1:18:24 / #
And it's like, how could she have known?

Jennifer Prokop 1:18:26 / #
Of course. Well, and I mean, I think that's the part where it's like working too hard to make your books out of time sometimes means...

Sarah MacLean 1:18:38 / #
But sometimes, yeah, then you get like, I've been thinking about The Hating Game a lot recently, right? Because as you know, I love The Hating Game so much. And the movie, and one of the things that I think Sally made a real choice about is you have no idea, it's in a city, but the city is very amorphus, right? There's no, there's no city, because she didn't want to place it in, she didn't want to ground it in a place. And I think that there is a reason, that's one of the reasons why The Hating Game is a global success, because everybody can place it in their particular, the city they love the most. And then the movie, put it in New York, and it was like, oh, huh. Now these are New Yorkers in a car, you know?(laughs)

Jennifer Prokop 1:19:25 / #
Right, it changes it.

Sarah MacLean 1:19:26 / #
Why are they driving? (laughs)

Jennifer Prokop 1:19:28 / #
It's and these are I think, really, I mean, I could have this conversation over and over and over again. But I just, like I said, I think the thing that was really interesting for me is, I sometimes get really stuck in this conversation. I'm just you know, annoying the shit out of people saying the same thing over and over again, and I found this conversation with her to really give me new avenues for these questions and new ways to think about the genre itself. Well, I guess I would say also, thank you to everyone for letting me have my Vietnam moment again.

Sarah MacLean 1:19:58 / #
Hey, listen, I will, I will have you and whoever you want to talk to about Vietnam talk about Vietnam anytime. Yeah, but it's interesting because it proves that we don't know what we're doing all the time. It's the Venn, it's that Venn diagram, right? What your English teacher says the author was sure what the author was doing. And we don't know, because we can't, we, you know, that Vietnam thing is a perfect example of we know what we're trying to do sometimes. But when something that massive, you know, and I think about Vietnam or you know, COVID is happening around us, and we're not overtly talking about it, but it's in there, it's in all the text. And so there it is, right, the genre carrying the myth.

Jennifer Prokop 1:20:51 / #
Last week, I ended up reading this book, I actually don't recommend, called Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon, and I found myself really having that moment. It's a nonfiction book by a Stanford professor, really disagreeing with a lot of what he said. And of course, then you can just, you know, take it to Twitter. And one of the things that he ended up talking about was the difference between, he admits that genre essentially is working, you can tell what genre's interested in only by looking at the collective.

Sarah MacLean 1:21:27 / #
I don't disagree with that.

Jennifer Prokop 1:21:28 / #
I absolutely agree with it. I was like, okay, we agree with this, but where we disagreed was him saying, essentially, he talked about Virginia Woolf and how, you know, Mrs. Dalloway, of course, is just superior, because it's the singular work of art as opposed to the genre, and I was kind of like, but that's what I'm actually interested in, is how that collective works.

Sarah MacLean 1:21:54 / #
Yeah.

Jennifer Prokop 1:21:54 / #
How does it work, that there is a hive mind where everyone is somehow chewing on the same thing? And I think Jayne answers it for us, right? We're grappling with our own mythmaking. And that is interesting to me, where this guy was sort of like meh, that's, you know, not interesting to him. It's just this totally different perspective. Mrs. Dalloway and genre can exist together. There's no reason to choose one or the other, we can have both. That's what's amazing about it.

Sarah MacLean 1:22:25 / #
One of the things that I've been really struggling with over the last couple of weeks, is, you know, this best of the year lists, right? Not the sub-genre list, not the best mystery of the year, the best romance of the year, but best overall books lists, which a lot of the publishing media are, they're kind of culling together. They, at the end of the year, they cull together what they believe are the best lists, the best of the books of the year, by virtue of what other, what the big critics have all named their ten best books, right? So it's, you know, everybody makes their list of ten, and the ones that are on multiple lists rise to the top. And so of course, if you have, say, The New York Times make a list of the 10 best books of the year, there might be one romance on it. It's rare, but there might be, you know, and other places, too. But that romance or that thriller, or that mystery, or that sci-fi novel, never makes it to that sort of, "and these are the 10 best novels of the year." And so I often think to myself, there's so much missing from these lists, and we know that by virtue of making a list, there's going to be stuff that's missing. But the idea that whole segments of mythmaking text, of myth text, is, are the myths of this time and place and society and culture are missing from these lists and just lost, right? Without Rebecca Romney, they're lost.

Jennifer Prokop 1:22:33 / #
Yeah.

Sarah MacLean 1:22:43 / #
What are we doing?

Jennifer Prokop 1:23:10 / #
So that's it. I mean, I was essentially having the same thought to myself, right. And I think, look, we obviously are genre fans for a lot of reasons, that we love romance for a lot of reasons.

Sarah MacLean 1:24:12 / #
But empirically, right. I don't read sci-fi, but I do think that surely there is a science fiction novel from the year that is remarkable and deserves to be held up as one of the best texts.

Jennifer Prokop 1:24:26 / #
I think, here's my theory. I remember when Stephen King used to be genre, and now he's like literature. And maybe it's just that there has to be, I don't know, maybe you just have to put in your time. I'm not sure.

Sarah MacLean 1:24:46 / #
I don't know. I mean, it's not like Nora hasn't put in her time, you know.

Jennifer Prokop 1:24:51 / #
I think there's a lot of you know, the patriarchy.

Sarah MacLean 1:24:54 / #
Oh, really? Do you think that? (laughs)

Jennifer Prokop 1:24:56 / #
I don't know. Maybe.

Sarah MacLean 1:24:57 / #
Anyway, Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women, it's awesome. And it's, every time we have one of these conversations, I think to myself, we're never going to get them all, right. We're never going to get every person who held the banner. But I'm really, really happy we got Jayne.

Jennifer Prokop 1:25:14 / #
Yeah, me too.

Sarah MacLean 1:25:15 / #
And I hope you all were too. I hope you were all inspired the way we were, and you know, overwhelmed the way we were.

Jennifer Prokop 1:25:23 / #
Oh, god, yeah. Even listening to it again, I was like, I'm just gonna sit here for a while. So brilliant.

Sarah MacLean 1:25:29 / #
We're so, so grateful.

Jennifer Prokop 1:25:32 / #
So before we go, it's worth saying that Jayne has a new book coming out on January 18, called Lightning in a Mirror. It is book three of the Fogg Lake trilogy, of which I have read all of them. I mentioned it actually on the episode. And again, this is part of a series that has to do with intuition and you know, like sort of some of the very things that she was talking about. So if you would like to prepare for that you could read the first two books, The Vanishing and All the Colors of Night and then prepare yourself for Lightning in the Mirror which comes out in a couple of weeks.

Sarah MacLean 1:26:07 / #
We are Fated Mates, you are listening to a Trailblazer episode, which we've been doing for all of Season Three and will likely continue to do until we die. (laughter) And you can listen to all the other Trailblazer episodes at fatedmates.net. You can find us @FatedMates on Twitter and @fatedmatespod on Instagram. Please tell us tell us how you're liking the Trailblazer episodes, shoot us emails if you would like Sarah@fatedmates.net or Jen@fatedmates.net. And tell us what you're thinking and shout about these Trailblazers because they deserve it.

Jennifer Prokop 1:26:51 / #
Next week is Passion with Lisa Valdez

Sarah MacLean 1:26:54 / #
Get ready. It's a ride. (laughs)

Jennifer Prokop 1:26:57 / #
Happy New Year, everybody!

Sarah MacLean 1:26:58 / #
Happy New Year!

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S04.10: Beverly Jenkins: Trailblazer

This week, we’re continuing our Trailblazer episodes with Beverly Jenkins—the first Black author of historical romance featuring Black main characters. We talk about her path to romance writing, about how librarians make the best writers, and about her role as the first Black historical romance novelist. We’re also talking about writing in multiple sub genres, about lifting up other authors, and about the importance of the clinch cover.

Transcript available

Thank you to Beverly Jenkins for taking the time to talk to us, and share her story.

There’s still time to buy the Fated Mates Best of 2021 Book Pack (which includes Beverly’s Wild Rain!) from our friends at Old Town Books in Alexandria, VA, and get eight of the books on the list, a Fated Mates sticker and other swag! Order the book box as soon as you can to avoid supply chain snafus.

Thank you, as always, for listening! If you are up for leaving a rating or review for the podcast on your podcasting app, we would be very grateful! 

Our next read-alongs will be the Tiffany Reisz Men at Work series, which is three holiday themed category romances. Read one or all of them: Her Halloween Treat, Her Naughty Holiday and One Hot December.

Show Notes

Welcome Beverly Jenkins, the author of more than 50 romance novels, and the recipient of the 2017 Romance Writers of America Nora Roberts Lifetime Achievement Award, as well as the 2016 Romantic Times Reviewers’ Choice Award for historical romance.

You can hear Beverly’s interview on the Black Romance History podcast, and last February, Jen interviewed her for Love’s Sweet Arrow when Wild Rain was released. Wild Rain was also one of our best of 2021 romance novels.

Beverly Jenkins's first agent was Vivian Stephens. You can listen to Julie Moody-Freeman's interview with Vivian in two parts on the Black Romance Podcast.

Some of the people Beverly mentioned: sweet romance author Laverne St. George, author Patricia Vaughn, author Anita Richmond Bunkley, publisher Walter Zacharius, editor Ellen Edwards, editor Christine Zika, cover designer Tom Egner, author Shirley Hailstock, author Donna Hill, author Brenda Jackson, editor Monica Harris, author Gay Gunn, marketing expert Adrienne di Pietro, editor Erika Tsang, agent Nancy Yost, Romantic Times owner Kathryn Falk, and Gwen Osborne from The Romance Reader.

Here’s more information about 1994, the summer of Black love, and here’s a PDF of Beverly Jenkins’s 1995 profile in People Magazine.

Transcript

Beverly Jenkins 0:00 / #
The idea that I was out in the marketplace, the African American readers were just over the moon. Some of the stories they told me of going in the bookstore and seeing Night Song, and you know, the first thing they did was flip to the back to make sure it was written by a Black woman, and one woman said she sat in the bookstore right there on the floor, and started reading.

Sarah MacLean 0:30 / #
That was the voice of Beverly Jenkins. We are thrilled to have Beverly with us. We've been working on getting her to join us on Fated Mates since Season One, and pandemics and busy-ness got in the way, but we're finally here and it feels right that the first time we talked to Beverly, we're talking to her as part of the Trailblazers series. You will hear her talk about her life, her time beginning writing her work, her research, publication, her editors and her readers, and we think you'll love it. Welcome to Fated Mates.

We are so thrilled to have Beverly Jenkins with us today. Welcome, Beverly!

Beverly Jenkins 1:18 / #
Thank you! Thank you! I'm thrilled to be here. This is - you know we've been trying to hook up for a while, so thanks so much for the invite!

Sarah MacLean 1:26 / #
We really have! And obviously, for many, many reasons, Jen and I have been wanting you to come on Fated Mates to talk about all sorts of things. I don't know if you remember this, but you and I were together outside of the National Book Festival, what feels like 1000 years ago when we could be with each other, and you started telling me stories about the beginning of your career and the early days and it was one of the most magnificent afternoons of my life, and so I am basically just here to make you tell those stories on tape.

Beverly Jenkins 2:09 / #
I've got a million of them, so you'll have to let me know which one -

Sarah MacLean 2:12 / #
I love it! No, I want to hear them all.

Beverly Jenkins 2:14 / #
Yeah.

Sarah MacLean 2:14 / #
So we are - the conceit of this whole - the work that we're doing right now with our Trailblazer guests is to really get the voices of the genre and the voices of the people who built the house on tape, and to also say the names of the people who maybe we have not heard of. The not Beverly Jenkins'. So that's why we're doing this. That's why we think it's important and that's why we are so grateful to have you with us.

Beverly Jenkins 2:48 / #
I'm proud to, proud to represent. So hit me up with your first question.

Jennifer Prokop 2:55 / #
Well, I think one of the things and this is true for all romance writers, readers, everybody, which is how did you come to romance? How did you become a reader and a writer of romance?

Beverly Jenkins 3:08 / #
I tell the story about I grew up reading everything. You know I was one of those kids that read everything in the neighborhood library, from the kiddie books to the teen books to the adult books. This would be late '50s, early '60s. I think I got my first library card when I was like eight. So that would have been like 1959, right, but there was nothing in the books that represented me in the classics, of course that my mom would make us read or insist we read Langston Hughes and Bontemps and you know those folks. But for popular literature, there was nothing, but it didn't stop me from reading. You know I love a good story. So in my journey through Mark Twain Library, that was the name of the library, eastside of Detroit, Gratiot and Burns, it's no longer there, and I'll tell you a terrible story about that eventually, but they had when I got to the teen books, I read Beany Malone. I don't know if you're familiar with the Beany Malone books. YA, family, small town. Beany was the the youngest kid, so you had her adventures. They had Seventeenth Summer which I think everybody my age read and then I moved to Mary Stewart, you know, This Rough Magic, all those great books. So then that brought in Victoria Holt and Phyllis Whitney and Jane Aiken Hodge.

Sarah MacLean 4:37 / #
Victoria Holt is one of those names that comes up every time you talk to a group of romance novelists who started, you know, young.

Beverly Jenkins 4:44 / #
Yeah, she was there. So read her. Charlotte Armstrong. I don't know if you're familiar with her. She's got a great book. What is the name of that book? The Gift Shop, I think! Awesome! It's you know, a sweet romance but it's a young woman who is on a quest with this guy. Somebody left some kind of, if I can remember correctly, some kind of a secret something inside of a gift shop. They were, it was inside of a little glass pig, [laughter] so she and this guy are traveling all over. I don't know if it's the world, I think was a country, trying to run down these pigs to get whatever it was that was inside and it's just a great story and probably holds up pretty well. I haven't read it in a 1000 years, even if it's still in print?

[Laughing] I'm gonna report in. I'm gonna find this.

Jennifer Prokop 5:35 / #
I know me too. I'm down, so yeah.

Beverly Jenkins 5:38 / #
Yeah, Charlotte Armstrong, The Gift Shop, great! Then you had stuff like Cash McCall, that they made the movie with Natalie Wood and James Garner, I think. So I had always loved a good love story. You know you had Doris Day and James Garner and all of that. You know, my sisters and I, I have five sisters, four sisters, three of us are stairsteps. So you know, we loved you know that kind of stuff. So reading and pop culture, but like I said, there was nothing that reflected us. Then you've got the Toni Morrison quote, you know, if it's not out there, and you want to read it, then you need to write it, but I was just writing for me. I wasn't writing for publication because the market was closed. So that's sort of how I got started, I guess, a long winded answer to your question.

Sarah MacLean 6:36 / #
So when you say you weren't writing it for the market, walk us through kind of putting pen to paper and then -

Beverly Jenkins 6:44 / #
Okay.

Sarah MacLean 6:45 / #
I mean, now you're in the market, so how did that happen?

Beverly Jenkins 6:47 / #
Now I'm in the market, now I'm in the marketplace. There were you know, other than, and I did not read those because I didn't even know they existed. Elsie Washington and Vivian, who really started this industry for us, the American side of it. Have you heard her interview with?

Jennifer Prokop 7:07 / #
The Black Romance Podcast.

Beverly Jenkins 7:08 / #
Oh my gosh!

Sarah MacLean 7:09 / #
It's fantastic! We'll put links to it in show notes, everybody.

Beverly Jenkins 7:12 / #
Just amazing. So Elsie and Sandra and I had no idea they were out there. But I was writing for me, and this was like, God, BC, Before Children. [laughter] You know me and Hubby, we were like "No, we're not having no kids. We are having too much fucking fun!" [laughter]

Sarah MacLean 7:35 / #
Were you writing historical or were you writing contemporary? What?

Beverly Jenkins 7:39 / #
I was writing Night Song.

Jennifer Prokop 7:40 / #
Okay.

Sarah MacLean 7:42 / #
Okay.

Beverly Jenkins 7:42 / #
I was writing Night Song, didn't know I was writing Night Song at the time though you know, I had no title for it, but it was just a story for me and I would come home from working at the Michigan State University Graduate Library. And I'd come home, he had played tennis in high school, so he would come home, 'cause he was a printer back then, so he'd come home, clean up from all that ink. You know, he had ink in his fro and all of that. Ink in his nose, man had ink coming out of the backs of his hands for years because there's no OSHA back then you know.

Sarah MacLean 8:10 / #
Right.

Jennifer Prokop 8:11 / #
Yeah.

Beverly Jenkins 8:13 / #
So he'd come home, clean up, grab his tennis racket and go play tennis, and I would read because you work at a Graduate Library and the little old ladies in cataloguing loved me. So I can go through the back halls of the library and grab stuff off people's carts, mainly science fiction which is what I mainly read back then, take 'em home. So if I wasn't reading, I was working on this little story just for me. Buffalo soldier and a school teacher. I had no idea it was going to be published or would get published because I already had my dream job. I was working in the library. That's all I ever wanted out of life, you know. And then I met LaVerne, I was working in Parke-Davis.

Sarah MacLean 8:56 / #
Who's LaVerne?

Beverly Jenkins 8:57 / #
LaVerne? LaVerne is the reason we're here today. Her and my mama. She writes under LaVerne St. George. She's a sweet romance writer. This is probably, oh, let's see if I was working at Parke-Davis, this is probably somewhere between '85 and '90, and LaVerne had just gotten her first book published. We were working at the Parke-Davis pharmaceutical library, which was a whole different story, that's a whole different conversation. Parke-Davis was probably one of the, maybe one of the first big pharma companies. It started in Detroit and they moved from Detroit to Ann Arbor, which is where I was working. So she had just gotten a sweet romance published by a small publisher here in Michigan. So we're celebrating her and I was talking about this little manuscript I was working on and she wanted to see it and I knew she was a member of RWA back then and I didn't know anything about any of that. I'm just writing a story, right? So I bring it in and she says, "You really need to get this published!"

Jennifer Prokop 10:03 / #
Did you hand write this manuscript? Is it typed?

Beverly Jenkins 10:06 / #
Yeah!

Jennifer Prokop 10:06 / #
What does this look like?

Beverly Jenkins 10:08 / #
Oh, okay, it was...I had [she chuckles] this little what we used to call close and play typewriter.

Jennifer Prokop 10:16 / #
Okay.

Sarah MacLean 10:17 / #
Mmmhmm.

Beverly Jenkins 10:17 / #
You know, you could carry it.

Jennifer Prokop 10:18 / #
Oh yeah.

Sarah MacLean 10:19 / #
They were very lightweight, right?

Beverly Jenkins 10:21 / #
Very lightweight, [laughter] you opened it, you open it like you open a laptop

Sarah MacLean 10:24 / #
Giant. [giggles]

Jennifer Prokop 10:25 / #
Yeah.

Beverly Jenkins 10:26 / #
Yeah. I mean, it's little and I had one of those. So it was very bad because I couldn't type back then at all, very badly typed. In fact, my husband's secretary wound up typing it once I got it ready for publication, but most of it though, at the beginning, was handwritten.

Sarah MacLean 10:45 / #
I mean nobody, this is one of those minor little things, but nobody realizes how much work it was -

Jennifer Prokop 10:51 / #
Yes!

Sarah MacLean 10:51 / #
To write a book at this point.

Beverly Jenkins 10:53 / #
OH...MY -

Sarah MacLean 10:54 / #
If I had to do this, there would be no -

Beverly Jenkins 10:56 / #
GOD!

Sarah MacLean 10:56 / #
We would not know each other. [laughter]

Beverly Jenkins 10:58 / #
Oh, girl!

Jennifer Prokop 11:00 / #
Right! That's why I was so curious. It had to be -

Beverly Jenkins 11:04 / #
It was so, you know, once we got published, right, there was no - we were using word processors 'cause this is before computers.

Sarah MacLean 11:12 / #
Yeah.

Beverly Jenkins 11:13 / #
And it was all cut and paste, for revisions, and I mean actually cut and paste. [laughter] I mean, you would have to, okay, when you did revisions, you had to cut pieces out, tape 'em in, and then tape them to the pages. So you may have some - and then you have to fold it up. So you may have something that unscrolls from me to you in Chicago. [laughter] You know, fold it up.

Sarah MacLean 11:42 / #
Yeah.

Beverly Jenkins 11:43 / #
You know when you - then you've got tons of Wite-out.

Jennifer Prokop 11:47 / #
Oh yeah.

Sarah MacLean 11:47 / #
Oh, remember Wite-out?

Beverly Jenkins 11:49 / #
Put it in a mailer. Oh God, Wite-out, yeah, I saved them.

Sarah MacLean 11:51 / #
Our young listeners are like, what's Wite-out?

Beverly Jenkins 11:54 / #
I know. I guess they're using Wite-out now for something else, but yeah, it's a little thing that you could, [laughter] paint over your bad mistakes and you can type over it once it dried. You had to wait for it to dry though.

Sarah MacLean 12:06 / #
Yes! Oh and if you didn't then it gummed up the typewriter!

Beverly Jenkins 12:10 / #
Yeah, it would get, occasionally get all gunky.

Sarah MacLean 12:13 / #
We'll put it in show notes. Learn about Wite-out in show notes.

Beverly Jenkins 12:16 / #
Oh God, yeah. Lord have mercy. You know, and then you'd have to call FedEx to come get it.

Sarah MacLean 12:22 / #
Yeah. There was no - I mean me sliding in -

Jennifer Prokop 12:25 / #
To drop off -

Sarah MacLean 12:26 / #
Two minutes before midnight on the day.

Beverly Jenkins 12:28 / #
No, no. You had to send it. Well you know, you had to have an account 'cause they'd come pick it up from your house.

Sarah MacLean 12:36 / #
Yeah.

Beverly Jenkins 12:37 / #
Umm, it was a mess!

Jennifer Prokop 12:39 / #
Sorry. I know, that's a digression, but I was curious.

Sarah MacLean 12:41 / #
No, but Jen it's so important -

Beverly Jenkins 12:42 / #
It's a great question, a great question.

Sarah MacLean 12:44 / #
It sort of, it speaks to this kind of mentality -

Jennifer Prokop 12:47 / #
The time!

Sarah MacLean 12:48 / #
The time, but also the commitment. You have to commit to being a writer at this point.

Beverly Jenkins 12:55 / #
'Cause it was a lot of work. Oh my God! You know, the folks that are using Scrivener and even Microsoft Word, you have no idea what a joy!

Sarah MacLean 13:07 / #
[laughing] Living the high life!

Beverly Jenkins 13:09 / #
We old hens, oh God! So yeah, we had all that to do.

Sarah MacLean 13:14 / #
So anyway, so LaVerne had published her first book.

Beverly Jenkins 13:16 / #
Right. She had published her first book.

Sarah MacLean 13:18 / #
And you had Night Song.

Beverly Jenkins 13:19 / #
And I had Night Song. And she, I just tell folks, you know, she harassed me everyday. She and I laugh, we're still good friends. She laughs about me telling people that she harassed me every day at work, but I think she did. At least that's my story, and I'm sticking to it.

Sarah MacLean 13:33 / #
Mmmhmm.

Beverly Jenkins 13:34 / #
And I don't know how I found Vivian? I cannot tell you how I found Vivian. I think maybe by then I was reading Romantic Times?

Sarah MacLean 13:43 / #
Mmmhmm.

Beverly Jenkins 13:44 / #
And maybe, you know, she showed up in there or something? Anyway -

Sarah MacLean 13:49 / #
So wait, this is a good point. There used to be a romance magazine and it was called Romantic Times and you could subscribe to it. If you were romance fan, you subscribed to it and there were reviews in it and interviews with your favorite authors and if you were a romance author, it was like Time Magazine for romance authors. If you ended up on the cover of Romantic Times, stop it, you were on your way.

Beverly Jenkins 14:09 / #
You were on your way. They were some of my biggest supporters at the beginning. I will always -

Sarah MacLean 14:14 / #
Mine too.

Beverly Jenkins 14:15 / #
Be grateful to Katherine Falk. But I don't know how I found Vivian. So I sent her my little raggedy manuscript, just to get LaVerne off my ass.

Sarah MacLean 14:25 / #
At Harlequin at this point?

Beverly Jenkins 14:27 / #
No, she's - no she was -

Sarah MacLean 14:28 / #
That's right, she was gone!

Beverly Jenkins 14:29 / #
She was freelance. She was gone, they'd let her go by then.

Sarah MacLean 14:31 / #
That's right! Okay.

Beverly Jenkins 14:32 / #
Yeah, she was on her own.

Sarah MacLean 14:33 / #
So we're in the late '80s.

Beverly Jenkins 14:35 / #
We're late '80s and we're almost at '90. We might be even at '90 because they bought the book in '93. Sent in my little raggedy manuscript, 'cause it was baaaaaddd. Oh my God.

Sarah MacLean 14:47 / #
I don't believe it.

Beverly Jenkins 14:48 / #
Girl, let me tell you stories. It was baaaddd. Anyway, so she called me at work because I was working at the reference desk.

Sarah MacLean 14:59 / #
On the phone.

Beverly Jenkins 15:00 / #
On the phone! And said, you know, she wanted to represent me. So me not knowing anything, you know, about this whole process, I was like, "Sure! Okay!"

Sarah MacLean 15:11 / #
Sold!

Beverly Jenkins 15:13 / #
Right. I don't think we ever -

Jennifer Prokop 15:15 / #
Seems like a nice lady calling you at work.

Sarah MacLean 15:16 / #
Was she running - she was running an agency at this point.

Beverly Jenkins 15:19 / #
Right, a small agency out of her house. And she had me and she had Pat Vaughn, Patricia Vaughn.

Sarah MacLean 15:27 / #
Yup.

Beverly Jenkins 15:29 / #
Who just sort of disappeared. I don't know whatever happened to her. Murmur of Rain, which came out right after Night Song did. I don't think Vivian and I even signed a contract. This was just a -

Sarah MacLean 15:40 / #
Sure, handshake deal.

Beverly Jenkins 15:41 / #
Just a verbal kind of thing. So, umm, took us a while to sell it. I got enough rejections to paper all of our houses because they didn't know what to do with it!

Jennifer Prokop 15:53 / #
Well and my question is how clear was it to you that, "We don't know what to do with it?" means, "We just aren't going to carry Black romance?"

Beverly Jenkins 16:02 / #
No, there was no box for it.

Jennifer Prokop 16:04 / #
Yeah.

Beverly Jenkins 16:05 / #
You know and even with romance and I didn't care, I mean, probably, if I had been set on getting published, all of those rejections would have probably broken my heart.

Sarah MacLean 16:17 / #
Of course.

Beverly Jenkins 16:18 / #
But I had a dream job! I was getting up every morning going to the library! I could care less about a rejection letter, but the interesting thing was, they all said the same thing basically: great writing but, great writing but.

Sarah MacLean 16:34 / #
What do we do with it?

Beverly Jenkins 16:36 / #
Yeah and 'cause 19th century...

Sarah MacLean 16:38 / #
America.

Beverly Jenkins 16:39 / #
American history. Even 1990, if it's a 19th century story involving Black people, it should have been about slavery.

Jennifer Prokop 16:50 / #
Right.

Beverly Jenkins 16:51 / #
So here I come with -

Jennifer Prokop 16:52 / #
We know how to sell it if its Roots.

Beverly Jenkins 16:54 / #
Right. Yep, its Roots. Barely. We know how to sell it if its Roots, and you have to remember that there were only, maybe, three Black romances out there. I mean, Vivian had the connections to send it to everybody.

Sarah MacLean 17:08 / #
So let's talk about who that is. Who were the other names who were writing Black romance? And they certainly, they weren't writing historical. You were the -

Beverly Jenkins 17:19 / #
No. Anita Richmond Bunkley had written Black Gold, which was not really a romance more like women's fiction, but it was historical, about a woman in an oil field family in Texas. And she had also written Emily...Emily The Rose. It's about a free Black woman in Texas in the 1820s and 1830s and her journey, and it wasn't a romance either. I mean, there was rape and -

Sarah MacLean 17:46 / #
Emily, The Yellow Rose.

Beverly Jenkins 17:48 / #
There you go. Okay. Yeah, yeah. We don't talk too much, we don't talk very much about Anita very much. In fact, I've neglected to talk about her for years. You know, I was going through some stuff last night, just so I could be prepared for this, and came across a bunch of stuff I was like, "Oh man, I forgot about this! I forgot about that! I forgot this!" Anyway, nobody was writing historical romance. So they're looking for a book, slavery. That's the box. So here I come with a story with a Buffalo Soldier and an overly educated school teacher in a free Black town, on the plains of Kansas, 1879, and they're like, "What the hell is this? What are we supposed to do with this? We don't know what to do." So, I do remember one editor at - I don't know what house she was at, but she sent me a very, very encouraging letter. And she said she really, really wanted and she was just, I think she's like an executive editor now and she was just a baby, baby assistant back then. And she said, she really, really, really wanted to publish this. She said that she could not convince the higher ups to take it. You know? And like I said, I didn't care! You know, I was working at a library in the morning. You know, hey! Hello! Then came, I guess, the news and I didn't know anything about this, that Walter Zacharias was going to be putting out the Arabesque line.

Jennifer Prokop 19:22 / #
Oh, sure.

Beverly Jenkins 19:23 / #
And it was my understanding that Avon didn't want to get left behind because you know they were the number one publisher of romance back then and you couldn't find anybody. So Ellen Edwards, who used to be Vivian's assistant back when Vivian was working in that closet, you know with the candle lights, called her and said, "Do you have anybody? Do you know anybody?" And she said, "Well I just happen to know this little lady in Michigan." And so she called me on June 3, 1993. I told the story about my husband and I having this hell of a fight that day. I don't, like I said I don't know what we were fighting about, something stupid probably, and the phone rang, and it was Ellen, and she said she wanted to buy my book. So of course, I stopped the fight. [laughter]

Sarah MacLean 20:17 / #
Some things are important. [laughter]

Beverly Jenkins 20:19 / #
Oh yeah! You know, he was like, "I guess I got to take your little ass to dinner." "Yes, you better take my ass to dinner!" [More laughter] So they kept sending me contracts.

Sarah MacLean 20:29 / #
This was 1993.

Beverly Jenkins 20:31 / #
This is 1993 and the book came out in '94. Summer of Black Love is what we called it, because that was also the summer that Arabesque released their first four or five, and so, on you know, on the road from there.

Jennifer Prokop 20:48 / #
So once you sold Night Song, did you immediately start working? I mean at that point how did you start to balance the idea of I have my dream job, but now I also have a writing job?

Beverly Jenkins 21:02 / #
Yeah, I didn't know what I was doing. It was all - [she laughs]

Sarah MacLean 21:06 / #
Feels very real. [laughter]

Beverly Jenkins 21:09 / #
I had no idea what the hell I was doing because I had the writing. I had the job. I had the kids. I had the hats that I was wearing in the community. The hats I was wearing at church. I had a Brownie troop. [laughter] You know and because I was a stay-at-home mom, you know, after we adopted Jonathan, my son, early on too in the career, so as a stay-at-home mom, so then I'm doing field trips and I'm doing snow cones on Friday at school and you know, all of this stuff. The kids are in the band. And luckily, all praises to my late Hubby, because that first deadline, Ellen sent me a 14 page revision letter.

Sarah MacLean 21:58 / #
On Night Song.

Jennifer Prokop 21:59 / #
Oh.

Beverly Jenkins 21:59 / #
Yeah. 'Cause it was bad. She was like "Bev, -"

Sarah MacLean 22:03 / #
No.

Beverly Jenkins 22:03 / #
"We love the love scenes. We need a story." [laughter] I was like, "Yeah, you need a story. Really?"

Sarah MacLean 22:12 / #
I just want to say something about Ellen Edwards because we have sort of danced around her in the past on Fated Mates, but you are the first of her authors who we've had on. She was editing in the heyday of the '90s authors.

Beverly Jenkins 22:28 / #
She was amazing!

Sarah MacLean 22:29 / #
At Harper. She edited, for our listeners, she edited Lisa Kleypas' Dreaming of You. She edited -

Beverly Jenkins 22:35 / #
She was amazing.

Sarah MacLean 22:37 / #
Loretta Chase's Lord of Scoundrels. She edited you.

Jennifer Prokop 22:41 / #
Wow. I mean that's amazing.

Sarah MacLean 22:42 / #
This woman was, SHE was building romance too.

Beverly Jenkins 22:46 / #
Right, yeah.

Sarah MacLean 22:47 / #
And really setting -

Beverly Jenkins 22:48 / #
Yeah, yeah.

Sarah MacLean 22:49 / #
A lot of things in play. So what, so talk about that a little bit. What was the feeling like right around then?

Beverly Jenkins 22:55 / #
You know it was interesting because she taught me how to write commercial fiction. I will always be grateful for her, because of, and we had some, we had some bumps.

Sarah MacLean 23:11 / #
I bet!

Beverly Jenkins 23:12 / #
We had some bumps and she's the reason I'm here. She taught me the differences in writing a romp as opposed to a period piece to - she was absolutely amazing! And when she left, her assistant, Christine Zika was amazing, 'cause Christine edited Vivid, and she edited Indigo.

Jennifer Prokop 23:39 / #
Okay.

Beverly Jenkins 23:40 / #
So -

Sarah MacLean 23:40 / #
Oh!

Beverly Jenkins 23:41 / #
Will always be grateful to her for those two. So I guess I was doing okay, they kept offering me contracts.

Sarah MacLean 23:48 / #
You were doing great. [laughter]

Beverly Jenkins 23:50 / #
You know, wasn't a whole lot of money and wasn't making a lot of money, but the idea that I was out in the marketplace, the African American readers were just over the moon. Some of the stories they told me of going in the bookstore and seeing Night Song, and you know, the first thing they did was run to, flip to the back to make sure it was written by a Black woman, and one woman said she sat in the bookstore right there on the floor, and started reading.

Sarah MacLean 24:22 / #
That's amazing.

Beverly Jenkins 24:23 / #
You know.

Sarah MacLean 24:24 / #
Well these also, the cover, it had that original cover? That burnt orange cover with the clinch on it.

Beverly Jenkins 24:30 / #
Mmmhmm. Right, yeah.

Jennifer Prokop 24:31 / #
Oh, it's so good.

Sarah MacLean 24:31 / #
I mean, it's such a beautiful cover.

Beverly Jenkins 24:34 / #
Tom, Tom Egner gave me just, you know, always grateful to him. He gave me some just fabulous, fabulous covers. And you know, a lot of times I would win Cover of the Year and all of that and I always sent the awards to him.

Jennifer Prokop 24:52 / #
Oh, that's nice.

Sarah MacLean 24:52 / #
What a decent person.

Beverly Jenkins 24:55 / #
And he said, "Nobody's ever done this before." I said, "Well, I didn't do the cover. You did!" [laughter] "So put it on your, on your whatever." You know.

Sarah MacLean 25:03 / #
For those of you listening, Tom Egner was the head of the art department at Avon. He basically designed all those clinch covers.

Beverly Jenkins 25:11 / #
I know. He was amazing. I miss him a lot. But then Avon's always got great art, you know, so, but I do miss him. So yeah, so then we got the People magazine spread, right after Night Song. I think it was in February of - book came out in '94. The spread, five pages!

Jennifer Prokop 25:33 / #
Wow.

Beverly Jenkins 25:33 / #
In People Magazine in February '95 and -

Sarah MacLean 25:38 / #
And what was that? About you?

Beverly Jenkins 25:40 / #
It's about the book and me, and you know, pictures of my husband, and pictures of my kitchen, and all of that. And the lady who did the article, her name was Nancy Drew. That was her real name.

Jennifer Prokop 25:51 / #
Amazing.

Beverly Jenkins 25:52 / #
And I got calls from people all over the country, "I opened my People magazine and there you were!" [laughter] And I'm like, "Yes! It is me! It is I!" You know, "I have arrived!" Umm, but very, very heady days, in the beginning.

Sarah MacLean 26:09 / #
Yeah. When did you know that romance was a huge thing and that you were making waves? I guess that's two questions. [Ms. Bev gives a throaty laugh] So -

Beverly Jenkins 26:22 / #
Yeah, it is, you know, and I have girlfriends who told me that I really don't know how influential I have been. You know, I'm just writin'. I'm just trying to tell the stories that I would have loved to have read as a teen or a young woman in my 20s or even my 30s. But I don't...I'm still amazed that people are buying my books! My mom used to tell me, she said, "Well, that's a good thing!" You know, so that you're not jaded or whatever and entitled, and all of that. I'm still amazed.

Sarah MacLean 27:00 / #
Did you feel, at the time, something was happening in the world though? Did it feel like - or was it just sort of, you know, life?

Beverly Jenkins 27:09 / #
It was just sort of life! I mean, yeah, you know, we were changing, in the sense that you had more Black women writing. Brenda and Donna Hill and Shirley Hailstock and -

Jennifer Prokop 27:22 / #
Now did that feel like it was because of Arabesque? Was it just sort of an explosion? Or -

Beverly Jenkins 27:29 / #
I think it was Arabesque.

Jennifer Prokop 27:31 / #
Okay.

Beverly Jenkins 27:32 / #
Because they were doing Contemporaries and these Black women were eating those books up.

Sarah MacLean 27:36 / #
Mmmhmm.

Jennifer Prokop 27:36 / #
Sure.

Beverly Jenkins 27:37 / #
And plus they had a great editor in Monica -

Sarah MacLean 27:41 / #
Monica Harris?

Beverly Jenkins 27:42 / #
Monica Harris. Yes, and she was just an amazing editor for those women. Rosie's Curl and Weave. She edited those anthologies, and they all absolutely loved her. Just loved her. So it was, it was sort of like an explosion.

Sarah MacLean 28:00 / #
But on the historical side, it was just you.

Jennifer Prokop 28:04 / #
Still just you.

Sarah MacLean 28:04 / #
There was no one else.

Beverly Jenkins 28:06 / #
It was just me and then the two books by Patricia Vaughn.

Sarah MacLean 28:11 / #
Right.

Beverly Jenkins 28:11 / #
Murmur Rain and I don't remember what the second title was. Gay Gunn had done Nowhere to Run, or was it nowhere to hide? Nowhere to Run. So, you know, Martha and the Vandellas. [laughter]

Sarah MacLean 28:23 / #
So at this point, who is your - whenever we talk to people who came up through the 90s in romance, there is such a discussion of community. Who you turn to as your group?

Jennifer Prokop 28:36 / #
Your people.

Sarah MacLean 28:39 / #
Who was that for you at this point?

Beverly Jenkins 28:42 / #
The readers.

Sarah MacLean 28:44 / #
Talk a little about your readers.

Beverly Jenkins 28:46 / #
It was the readers. I mean, all this fan mail I was getting and then we had two young women here who wanted to start the Beverly Jenkins Fan Club.

Sarah MacLean 28:54 / #
Amazing.

Beverly Jenkins 28:56 / #
Gloria Walker and Ava Williams and so they were, you know it was all snail mail back then. So they were sending out applications and they were sending out membership cards and newsletters and all of that. I was doing a lot of local touring, a lot of local schools and stuff, and so when I told them that I wanted to have a pajama party, they sort of looked at me like, really? [laughter]

Jennifer Prokop 29:24 / #
What was the first year that you did that? Do you remember?

Beverly Jenkins 29:28 / #
Ahhhh, shoot - maybe '99? Maybe '97?

Jennifer Prokop 29:33 / #
So, a long time.

Beverly Jenkins 29:34 / #
It's been awhile, yeah, but Brenda and I would switch off years. I would do the pajama party one year and then she'd do her cruise the next year, but we sent out letters, because like I said, there was no computers back then, at least that I was using.

Jennifer Prokop 29:51 / #
Right.

Beverly Jenkins 29:52 / #
And 75 women showed up, from all over the country.

Sarah MacLean 29:55 / #
Amazing.

Jennifer Prokop 29:56 / #
It is amazing.

Beverly Jenkins 29:57 / #
And we had a hell of a time! And we talked books and my husband came, because you know, these were, "his women" he called them. [laughter] They loved him, he loved them. These women, Saturday night, when it was time to go home, everybody cried. We had formed this sisterhood, "a sistership" as we call it, and nobody wanted to go home. So we started doing it every two years. They were my, they were my bottom women. You know in the pimp world, your bottom woman is your original hoe, right? [laughter] And she's the one that keeps everything together and all of that, when he starts bringing in new women. So they were my foundation and a lot of them, most of them, are still with me today. So in the meantime, you know, online is growing.

Jennifer Prokop 30:52 / #
Yes.

Beverly Jenkins 30:52 / #
And people are telling me, "You need to be online" and I'm like, "No, I don't." [laughter] I don't need to be online.

Sarah MacLean 30:59 / #
I have my pajama party ladies.

Beverly Jenkins 31:01 / #
I have my pajama party ladies.

Jennifer Prokop 31:02 / #
I don't need a TikTok.

Beverly Jenkins 31:03 / #
Don't need a TikTok, don't need a 'gram. [laughter]

Jennifer Prokop 31:08 / #
This was even before social media. This would have been more like a web page or -

Beverly Jenkins 31:12 / #
Yeah, and it was a, we started with a -

Sarah MacLean 31:15 / #
A blog.

Beverly Jenkins 31:17 / #
No, we started with a Yahoo group.

Sarah MacLean 31:18 / #
Oh, sure!

Jennifer Prokop 31:19 / #
Sure. Okay, that makes sense.

Beverly Jenkins 31:21 / #
So little did I know that there were other Black women reading groups online, and one of them was, and I cannot remember what the real name was, but they called themselves The Hotties because they read hot stuff. And this was a group that was connected to Gwen Osborne and Gwen is sort of like the griot of Black romance. She was one of the early reviewers for The Romance Reader. She knows where all the bodies are buried. [laughter] We sort of combined her group and my group, and that's when we started doing the traveling, going to all these different places and all that for African American history kinds of stuff and books! So it, you know, so I'm trying to build my own little empire, because I'm not getting a whole lot of support from my publisher. I mean, I guess they were just, one of the young editors said, "Well, they just like the cachet of having you." So I'm like okay, well I can handle that. I'm still gonna go out, do my thing and all of that, but (she sighs) then after my husband passed away in '03, I met Adrienne di Pietro, and she was the marketing director for Avon and we were at one of those Avon dinners in Dallas.

Sarah MacLean 32:46 / #
Those famous dinners.

Beverly Jenkins 32:48 / #
Mmmhmm! She and I were outside smoking. I didn't know who she was, she didn't know who I was. So we hit it off really well and we got to talking, and when we got home, about a week later, I got a call from her and she said, "You know what? I have looked at your file - " she said, "and we have not done a damn thing for you." She said this is getting ready to change. And it did. 'Cause I got a lot of support in the beginning, the first couple of years.

Jennifer Prokop 33:19 / #
People Magazine.

Sarah MacLean 33:20 / #
Five pages in People.

Beverly Jenkins 33:21 / #
Yeah, right, you know, and then nothing. I think too, I tell people, I said, "You know what? When my husband passed away, you know, it's like God says "Alright, I've taken something very, very precious from you. So how about try this as a replacement?"" And my career took off. So I don't know if it was the Spirit or I don't know. Whatever. Everything in its own time and place is also how I deal with it. So Adrienne just started pushing to want a lot more for me. I mean, she sent me a box of bookmarks that had to have 20,000 bookmarks in it. What am I going to do with these? [laughter] I still have half of that box somewhere in the house.

Sarah MacLean 34:04 / #
[Laughing] Oh my god! Bookmarks! Remember bookmarks?

Beverly Jenkins 34:07 / #
Oh God, girl, oh no, Lord have mercy. But she was amazing, and I was very, very sad when she was let go.

Sarah MacLean 34:17 / #
I only knew her - she was let go almost immediately after I started at Avon.

Beverly Jenkins 34:21 / #
Yeah, she was amazing as a marketing director.

Jennifer Prokop 34:25 / #
At this point, with the big RWA implosion, there was a lot of talk about how Borders in particular, which is a Michigan -

Beverly Jenkins 34:37 / #
Right.

Jennifer Prokop 34:37 / #
Didn't buy Black romance. So how aware were you of the impediments at the bookstore level?

Beverly Jenkins 34:47 / #
I didn't have that issue.

Jennifer Prokop 34:49 / #
Okay.

Beverly Jenkins 34:50 / #
Because I knew the people. Borders did my books for my pajama parties.

Sarah MacLean 34:54 / #
Mmmm.

Jennifer Prokop 34:55 / #
Okay.

Beverly Jenkins 34:55 / #
Okay. In fact, one of the ladies, Kelly, who was supervising that, she and I are still friends. She's out on the coast doing something with books somewhere, but Barnes and Noble I had issues with.

Jennifer Prokop 35:11 / #
Okay.

Beverly Jenkins 35:12 / #
Still do. But Waldenbooks, Borders, you know and that whole thing with Borders and the Black section of the bookstore started at one of the stores near me, and the store was run by a Black woman. And this was at the height of the hip hop stuff, the urban stories. And from what I heard, she said the kids didn't know how to use a bookstore. And they would come in and they would ask for, you know, their favorite titles, and she would have to have her people, take them by the hand and show them where the spot was. And she got tired of it. So she put them all in one spot, so all she had to do was say, "Over there." Her sales went through the roof. Corporate, doing nothing but looking at the bottom line instead of the purpose behind it -

Jennifer Prokop 36:01 / #
Yeah.

Beverly Jenkins 36:01 / #
Said, "Okay, let's put all the Black books in one spot."

Sarah MacLean 36:04 / #
Everywhere.

Jennifer Prokop 36:05 / #
It worked here.

Beverly Jenkins 36:06 / #
So now we've got this, you know, Jim Crow kind of section in bookstores. I had a reader tell me one time she said, "Miss Bev, I found your books in men's health." [laughter]

Jennifer Prokop 36:22 / #
Good for them. That's where it should be. Leave those books there. [laughter]

They should really be put together. Romance and men's health. [laughter]

Beverly Jenkins 36:31 / #
Yeah, I mean, Brenda and I, and the early Arabesque women were always shelved with romance. We were never not shelved with romance. Only in the last, whatever, 20 years or so, and it's such a disadvantage for the young women of color who are coming up to not be in the romance section, because it cuts down on discoverability.

Jennifer Prokop 36:56 / #
Of course.

Beverly Jenkins 36:57 / #
I would be nuts if that was happening to me right now. But luckily for me, because you know, people didn't know any better back then, I was in romance. I was in historicals. I was in African American fiction. I was in men's health. [laughter] I was all over the store, which was great, and then my readers were fierce about making sure the books were available. I would get emails and Facebook messages from women who said, "Well, I went to, you know, five different stores in LA and your book's not there." or, "I made them go in the back and get the box out and put your books out." [laughter]

Jennifer Prokop 37:42 / #
Amazing.

Beverly Jenkins 37:43 / #
So you know, they were amazing. And then my mother! Bless her heart! She'd go into a bookstore and just move books around.

Sarah MacLean 37:51 / #
That's what mothers are for, no?

Beverly Jenkins 37:53 / #
Right! Exactly! Right. You know, she said, "I had to run out!" We lost her two years ago. She would carry around one of those little bitty spiral notebooks, purse size and it'd have all my books, every page had all my books on it. And she'd go to the mall, and she'd just hand it out to people. "This is my daughter's books! This is my daughter's books!" She was marketing when I had no marketing. She was director of marketing back then. [laughter] I remember her saying one time she was in Target, and you know, I had to tell her, "Mom, they were alphabetical." She said, "I don't care. Your books are on the bottom." And she said, "and I looked up in the camera was on me!" She said ,"and I ran out of the store!" [laughter] I don't think they're gonna put you in jail.

Sarah MacLean 38:36 / #
For re-aarranging shelves!

Beverly Jenkins 38:38 / #
For moving books around.

Sarah MacLean 38:40 / #
So there obviously has been a shift from when you started in 1993 'til now in romance. There have been tons of shifts, seismic shifts, I feel like romance moves so quickly.

Beverly Jenkins 38:53 / #
Yeah.

Sarah MacLean 38:53 / #
Can you speak to the way that you have seen the genre shift over time? You know, both as a writer and as a person who knows a lot about romance.

Beverly Jenkins 39:05 / #
Yeah. First we had the hardware shift from cut and paste and Wite-out and all that to computers and Scrivener and Google and, you know, I had to use libraries, of course, when I did my first book.

Jennifer Prokop 39:24 / #
Sure. For research.

Beverly Jenkins 39:26 / #
Yeah, 'cause none of the Master Goo, Mr. Google, Aunt Google, whatever people are calling her today, was not available back then. So that's been a seismic shift. The model is no longer blond and blue eyed and a size five. Everybody gets to have a HEA now no matter who you are, how you identify, who you love, because love is love. And that's been an amazing thing. Books are no longer rapey!

Jennifer Prokop 40:01 / #
Yeah.

Beverly Jenkins 40:03 / #
You know, which was a big issue back in the day. A lot of women didn't want to read romance. "Oh, they're rapey!" "Well, yeah." "But it's not really rape." "Yes, it is." That's changed. We're now all about consent and consent is sexy! And then, you know, but we have fewer houses, too!

Sarah MacLean 40:25 / #
Yeah.

Beverly Jenkins 40:26 / #
When I started out, God, it had to be like 25 different houses. Now we got what? Four? Three?

Sarah MacLean 40:32 / #
Yeah.

Beverly Jenkins 40:33 / #
One maybe? Coming up?

Sarah MacLean 40:34 / #
Fewer and fewer it feels like every day.

Beverly Jenkins 40:36 / #
I know, it's such an incestuous business you know. They're eating their young all over the place.

Sarah MacLean 40:42 / #
What about book selling? What about stores? And discoverability?

Beverly Jenkins 40:47 / #
There are fewer stores. You don't have, we don't have book signings like we used to. Yeah, where people would be lined up outside for books and for autographs, and all that. And what I was going to say, is the biggest seismic shift for me, has been the rise of indie writers.

Sarah MacLean 41:08 / #
Mmmhmm.

Beverly Jenkins 41:09 / #
Their refusal to be told "no." Their bravery and stepping out there on faith and saying, "My story has value." I don't think romance would have opened up the way it has in the last 10 years without them.

Sarah MacLean 41:26 / #
Right.

Jennifer Prokop 41:26 / #
Agree. Absolutely.

Beverly Jenkins 41:28 / #
I take my hat off to them because they were like, "Fuck this! You don't want my stuff? Fine!" And now publishing, realizing how much money they've been leaving on the table. They're still not on board all the way, but now they're saying, "Oh, well you were successful over there. So how about you come play with us now?" And the ladies are saying, "Sure, but I'm not giving up my independent and I'm still gonna do, you know, I'm still gonna do hybrid."

Sarah MacLean 41:57 / #
Mmmhmm.

Beverly Jenkins 41:58 / #
And they learned the format, and they learned the marketing, and they learned the distribution, how to do the data and looked at the metadata. I'm just amazed, and, you know, I bow to them for - 'cause they changed the industry.

Sarah MacLean 42:14 / #
Mmmhmm.

Beverly Jenkins 42:14 / #
They changed the industry. So those are some of the seismic changes that I have seen.

Jennifer Prokop 42:20 / #
Do you think your relationships with fans are different because of social media? I mean, you've always had such a strong fan base that you built.

Beverly Jenkins 42:29 / #
I don't think it's changed. I think it's expanded my -

Jennifer Prokop 42:33 / #
Okay.

Beverly Jenkins 42:34 / #
My base, because you know how much I love Twitter. [laughter]

Jennifer Prokop 42:40 / #
Same.

Beverly Jenkins 42:43 / #
I think it's given me access to more readers who are like, "Oh! She's not a scary Black woman! Let me read her books." You know, and then they realized, "Oh, these are some good ass books! So let me buy more!" I think my readership has probably expanded a good 35%.

Sarah MacLean 43:03 / #
Oh, wow.

Beverly Jenkins 43:03 / #
Just from from social media. And you know, and I know it's a cliche, but I always tell my fans, when I count my blessings, I count them twice. Because they have been - I wouldn't be here without them! Books are expensive!

Jennifer Prokop 43:22 / #
Yeah.

Beverly Jenkins 43:23 / #
And they're taking their hard earned money and they're buying me or going to the library and borrowing me when they can be using that money for something else. So I'm very, very grateful, and that's one of the things that I always tell new writers and aspiring writers is to, "treat your readers like they're the gold that they are" because they are gold. So, but yeah, I never met a, never met a stranger! So you know, I'm loving the love that I get from social media. People keep telling me I need to be on Instagram, and I'm like, my editor would slap me if I was on another [laughter] social platform.

Jennifer Prokop 44:05 / #
Write the book.

Beverly Jenkins 44:05 / #
Right, right.

Sarah MacLean 44:07 / #
So now I do want to talk about, I'm bouncing back a little to your career, but you moved from, you didn't move, you added contemporaries, at some point along the way.

Beverly Jenkins 44:19 / #
Yeah.

Sarah MacLean 44:20 / #
And sweeter romance. So can you talk about that choice? The choice to sort of expand? You write a lot of books!

Beverly Jenkins 44:29 / #
They asked me! Erica asked me if I had any contemporaries.

Sarah MacLean 44:34 / #
That's Erica Tsang, everybody. The editorial director of Avon books.

Beverly Jenkins 44:38 / #
Yeah, she is awesome. She's been my editor since she was 12. [laughter]

Jennifer Prokop 44:44 / #
Doogie Howser, editor M.D.

Beverly Jenkins 44:48 / #
I always say "you never say no."

Sarah MacLean 44:51 / #
Right.

Beverly Jenkins 44:51 / #
You know, you never say no. So basically, what I gave her was (The) Edge of Midnight, but it was my first manuscript that I sent to Avon, in probably the late '80s?

Sarah MacLean 45:07 / #
Oh! Wait now, see? This is a new piece of the story!

Beverly Jenkins 45:11 / #
Yeah, this was my contemporary. It was so bad. [laughter] God! You know, I tell people, I said, "That book was so bad, that the rejection letter almost beat me home from the post office." [laughter] That's how bad it was. It was awful, but I put it away.

Sarah MacLean 45:31 / #
Wait! I'm sorry I have to stop. I have to put a pause on this. So you did write a contemporary?

Beverly Jenkins 45:36 / #
Mmmhmm.

Sarah MacLean 45:37 / #
While you were, was this simultaneous to writing Night Song? Like were you writing them at the same time?

Beverly Jenkins 45:41 / #
Mmmhmm.

Sarah MacLean 45:42 / #
And so, so why did you write a contemporary? Was that because that was what romance was?

Beverly Jenkins 45:49 / #
That's - because the stories started coming.

Sarah MacLean 45:52 / #
That's what it was for you.

Jennifer Prokop 45:53 / #
Yeah, right.

Sarah MacLean 45:53 / #
Okay.

Beverly Jenkins 45:54 / #
The stories started coming. So I put it away, and then when she asked if I had a contemporary, I brought this very, very bad manuscript out again, and I looked at it, and I realized what it was. The reason it was so bad, was number one was I didn't know what the hell I was doing. I didn't know how to write. And number two, the characters were the descendants of Hester and Galen from Indigo.

Sarah MacLean 46:25 / #
Aaahhhhh.

Beverly Jenkins 46:25 / #
So that book could not have been published until after Indigo was written. So I went in, I cleaned it up, now that I know how to write, right? You're like -

Jennifer Prokop 46:37 / #
Sure. You've learned how to write commercial fiction now.

Beverly Jenkins 46:40 / #
Right. Right. You know, it's like 14 books in, I know what I'm doing now. I guess. And I realized, like I said, who the characters were. So that kicked off the, I think the five, the five romantic suspenses that I had. So it's (The) Edge of Midnight, (The) Edge of Dawn, Black Lace, and then the two Blake sisters, Deadly Sexy and Sexy/Dangerous. And then I did, I don't know how many, six or seven little novellas for Kimani in the middle of all of this. And then I realized, you need to take a step back, 'cause you are wearing yourself out writing all - 'cause I was doing like, you know, two big books and a novella, or and two novellas a year. So doing four books a year and I was no longer a spring chicken. So I had to put those away for a while. So the characters in my Avon romantic suspense, are descendants of my historical characters. And then the YA was something else that they asked me to do. I think there were five or six of us that they asked. We did two apiece. So I did Belle (and the Beau) and I did Josephine (and the Soldier). I think it was Meg Cabot and Lorraine Heath, and I'm not sure who the other ladies were.

Jennifer Prokop 48:11 / #
And then when did the Blessings series? Was that something you wanted to do? Or something they suggested?

Beverly Jenkins 48:18 / #
[She laughs] Nancy sold the series without telling me.

Sarah MacLean 48:20 / #
[Gasp] Oh, Nancy! What are you doing?

Beverly Jenkins 48:29 / #
She had been on me for years about writing a small town series. And I'm like -

Sarah MacLean 48:36 / #
Well, let's be honest. For a long time it felt like small town was where the money was in romance. If you could pull off the big small town where lots of people, there's just always a cupcake shop and a veterinarian.

Beverly Jenkins 48:49 / #
I know. I know, but I didn't want to do that.

Sarah MacLean 48:52 / #
Nancy was like "Beverly, you like money." [laughter]

Beverly Jenkins 48:55 / #
Well, I do. I do, but I was content to continue to write these award winning African American historicals, right?

Sarah MacLean 49:04 / #
Right.

Beverly Jenkins 49:06 / #
So after Mark passed away, I was up north was his mom, and got a call from Nancy on my cell phone. She never called me on my cell phone. In fact, I didn't think she had a cell phone back then. And she said, I was like I thought somebody had died! You know, I'm like Oh God, is Erica okay? You know, that kind of thing. And she said, "Well, I sold the series." I'm like, "what are you talking about?"

Sarah MacLean 49:34 / #
What series?

Beverly Jenkins 49:36 / #
Exactly. She said, "Remember that small town series I've been trying to get you to write?" And I'm like, "Yes." [laughter] She said, "Well..." I (Ms. Bev laughs) I love Nancy to death. She's just, she's so in charge of me and I really need somebody to be in charge of me and she is just THE best. She said, "Well, I sold, they only want a paragraph. Here's the money."

Sarah MacLean 50:01 / #
Since then [laughing] 25 books.

Beverly Jenkins 50:03 / #
Right. They only want a paragraph to get it started and here's the money. And I'm like okay, well, I guess I'm writing a small town series.

Jennifer Prokop 50:12 / #
Well, and it's how many books now? I mean, 12 or - ?

Beverly Jenkins 50:15 / #
Ten. I'm at ten.

Sarah MacLean 50:15 / #
And a television show in progress, I mean.

Beverly Jenkins 50:18 / #
If Al Roker would, you know, get it together and call us [laughter] maybe we could figure out what we're doing, but -

Sarah MacLean 50:25 / #
I mean, that's an interesting piece too, Bev, because you started publishing in the early '90s, which felt like a real time in romance and now you are thriving in this new - it feels like we're in another new time in a lot of ways.

Beverly Jenkins 50:40 / #
Yeah. We're in a different era now.

Sarah MacLean 50:42 / #
You have a film that is complete and out and everybody can watch now.

Beverly Jenkins 50:47 / #
Yep, yep. Iris, bless her heart, she did such a great job and she made that movie with safety pins and rubber bands.

Jennifer Prokop 50:57 / #
And a very handsome man.

Beverly Jenkins 50:58 / #
Oh yeah. Travis is pretty good, easy on the eyes!

Sarah MacLean 51:02 / #
And then you have Forbidden.

Beverly Jenkins 51:04 / #
Then I had the Sony thing. We sort of got a green light and then the damndemic hit and the people who had been so gung-ho about it scattered. Yeah, we're now back out on the block again, looking for a home. And then Al Roker's, I didn't even know he had an entertainment arm. Frankly, I had no idea. My girlfriends are like, "Well, didn't you ever see the Holly Robinson Peete stuff on - " I'm like, "No. I don't watch Hallmark." [laughter] So you know, back then Black people didn't have Christmas on Hallmark. You know, no brown people and Black people did not have Christmas on Hallmark or Lifetime. So why would I watch that? Umm. Sorry.

Sarah MacLean 51:48 / #
No, it's real.

Beverly Jenkins 51:50 / #
It is what it is, you know. So, but now things have changed, which is awesome. Supposedly they're in talks with Hallmark. I'm not, you know, we're still waiting to see what is really going on, but if that is the case, I'm pretty, pretty excited and all that. So we'll see, hopefully soon, what we can talk about is going to happen. So.

Sarah MacLean 52:14 / #
Can we talk a little bit about legacy? I know that you still think about, you're still surprised people buy your books but - [laughter]

Beverly Jenkins 52:24 / #
I am! I am!

Jennifer Prokop 52:25 / #
We're not.

Beverly Jenkins 52:26 / #
Are they gonna throw tomatoes at me this time? [laughter]

Sarah MacLean 52:30 / #
I mean I'm really curious, I'm curious about a couple of things. I'm curious about, one of the questions that Jen and I, we've sort of been dancing around this. What's the question, the really, the best question to ask? So we have a few.

Beverly Jenkins 52:42 / #
Okay.

Sarah MacLean 52:42 / #
The first, the one that sort of came to me this week, is when did you know you could do this thing? When did you feel like I'm a writer? I can do it. This is my - I feel good about it.

Beverly Jenkins 52:56 / #
After I survived the first deadline.

Jennifer Prokop 52:59 / #
Okay.

Sarah MacLean 53:00 / #
Okay.

Beverly Jenkins 53:01 / #
14 pages of revision.

Sarah MacLean 53:04 / #
Wite-out and tape.

Beverly Jenkins 53:04 / #
That they wanted in 35 days. I didn't know what the hell I was doing, but I did it. Hubby did all the cooking. He did all the, you know, grabbing the kids from school. He did all of the mom stuff. Fed me. And after that first book, and then when I saw it in the stores! One of the best things about that first book was that some of my elementary school teachers were still alive, and they were at those first signings, when I did signings in Detroit, and they just wept. They just wept. Because, you know, my mom always saw me, my momma always said, "You know, you're gonna be somebody special." And the teachers dealt with me that way. They put me on a stage in the fourth grade, and I've been on stage ever since. [laughter] Never, never met a microphone I did not like. [laughter] But the idea that they were there to see my success meant a lot. So I don't know, you know, legacy, girl... I don't know. I think your legacy should be written by somebody else, not yourself. I think the readers could probably tell you what the books mean to them more than than I can. I just like the idea of writing it and elevating our history and poking holes in the stereotypes, like you would do with a pen and a balloon. And always, always portraying the race in a positive way. So I don't know, is that a legacy? [laughs]

Jennifer Prokop 54:35 / #
Yes.

Sarah MacLean 54:35 / #
I think so.

Beverly Jenkins 54:37 / #
Standing on the shoulders of the actual historians who, are actual historians, and not kitchen table historians like me. [laughter] I owe a lot of people a lot for where I am today.

Jennifer Prokop 54:52 / #
I don't think there's ever been a time, Bev, when you and I have talked or when I've heard you speak where you haven't named the names of the people who have been a part of it.

Beverly Jenkins 55:02 / #
You know, it's so important because, you know, I didn't just show up and show out. [laughter] You know, this was - I've been a project all my life. My mother pouring stuff into me. My dad pouring stuff in me. My aunts who taught me style, wit and grace, pouring stuff into me. My teachers, people in my neighborhood, my church, my siblings. We all just don't start out as the sun, you know, issuing, gotta wait for the Earth to cool and all of that kind of stuff, so.

Jennifer Prokop 55:41 / #
When you think about your body of work, what do you think of as being the hallmarks of a Beverly Jenkins novel?

Beverly Jenkins 55:53 / #
Entertainment. Education. Heroines who know who they are, and the men who love them madly. I like the banter. I like that they all have the three gifts that I've talked about with Dorothy Sterling and the sense that they all work. They all have a commitment to community and they all in different ways push the envelope on gender and race. And they're fun!

Jennifer Prokop 56:22 / #
Yeah.

Sarah MacLean 56:23 / #
Yeah.

Beverly Jenkins 56:23 / #
You know, they're inspiring to many people. They're uplifting. My stories center dark-skinned Black women in ways that have never been centered before. I'm just a little Black girl from the east side of Detroit trying to write a story [laughs] that I can be proud of and that those who read it can be proud of.

Sarah MacLean 56:45 / #
Do you feel like there was a book that turned the tide for you in terms of readership?

Beverly Jenkins 56:51 / #
I think my books are being discovered every day, which is an amazing kind of thing. Indigo, of course. Everybody talks about Indigo. And then we had a whole group of people with the Blessings series. That's a whole different group of folks. And then the YA, because there's nothing for young women that's historical that way, and in fact, I got lots of - this is why I had to add an extra chapter when we did the re-publishing. The girls wanted to know did they get married? [laughter]

Jennifer Prokop 57:25 / #
Sure.

Beverly Jenkins 57:27 / #
So I added the weddings.

Sarah MacLean 57:29 / #
Oh my gosh. What a gift!

Jennifer Prokop 57:32 / #
Yeah.

Beverly Jenkins 57:32 / #
At the end of each book, and I got a lot of letters from the moms that were saying that she wanted her daughters or daughter, however many, to know that this is how they should be treated by a young man. Old school. I mean, so okay, so we got milestones. We've got Night Song, which is first, and then we've got the YA, and then we've got (The) Edge of Midnight, because that was my first -

Sarah MacLean 57:59 / #
Contemporary.

Beverly Jenkins 58:00 / #
And then from that very, very awful manuscript to my first romantic suspense, to the Blessings. So what is that? Four or five different milestones?

Jennifer Prokop 58:13 / #
So we talked a little bit about your covers.

Beverly Jenkins 58:16 / #
Mmmhmm.

Jennifer Prokop 58:16 / #
Okay, I have to ask about Night Hawk because it's hot. I mean, [laughter] I mean, look, I'm a simple woman.

Beverly Jenkins 58:26 / #
Hey, I'm with you.

Jennifer Prokop 58:27 / #
I don't know the order, because I my brain is full. Night Hawk is, I mean, obviously he's so handsome, but it's not a clinch cover.

Beverly Jenkins 58:36 / #
Nope.

Jennifer Prokop 58:37 / #
Right. So is that something you asked for, or is that something where they gifted you this present?

Beverly Jenkins 58:43 / #
Tom did that on his own.

Jennifer Prokop 58:46 / #
Okay. Okay.

Beverly Jenkins 58:47 / #
He sent it to me, and I tell the story, I was on deadline. I booted up the laptop and that was the first thing I saw.

Jennifer Prokop 58:58 / #
Okay.

Beverly Jenkins 58:58 / #
And it was just the picture. It didn't have any of the printing on it. There's no letters, just this very hot guy, and I went, "Oh hell, that'll wake a sister up!"

Sarah MacLean 59:08 / #
Yes, please.

Beverly Jenkins 59:10 / #
Yes, more please! Then I put him on the, because I was like okay, the ladies gotta see this. So I put it on the Facebook page and they went insane. [laughter] I told them around noon, "Okay, I'm taking him down now, so he can get a towel from y'all slobbering all over him and licking him everywhere and all of that. Right?" So then I got a request, a Facebook friend request from him. I don't remember his name now, it's been -

Jennifer Prokop 59:40 / #
Oh, the model.

Beverly Jenkins 59:41 / #
Yeah. It's like I said my head's full, just like yours is full. But yeah, no, that was you know, that was Tom's gift.

Jennifer Prokop 59:51 / #
Okay.

Sarah MacLean 59:51 / #
Tom. Tom knew.

Jennifer Prokop 59:53 / #
Yeah.

Beverly Jenkins 59:54 / #
And then it's, and that whole thing with Preacher is so interesting because if you read his Introduction to his character in (The Taming of) Jessi Rose, he's very underwhelming. Very underwhelming.

Jennifer Prokop 1:00:08 / #
He just wasn't ready yet.

Beverly Jenkins 1:00:09 / #
I know and the women were like, "Preacher! Preacher! Preacher!" and some of my girlfriends were like, "Why in the hell do they want a book with him?"

Sarah MacLean 1:00:15 / #
But isn't that amazing? Romance readers, they just, they know. They know.

Jennifer Prokop 1:00:20 / #
We know.

So I had to give him a makeover [laughter] in order to make him, you know, Jenkins worthy or whatever, but I always, that always tickles me because, he was not, he was just a bounty hunter. He wasn't even -

Listen, romance. Just a bounty hunter. Come on.

Beverly Jenkins 1:00:40 / #
I know. I know. I know.

Jennifer Prokop 1:00:42 / #
Well and that's it. It's interesting and that was, let me look, I'm going to look here, 2010, oh, 2011.

Beverly Jenkins 1:00:50 / #
Okay. Okay.

Jennifer Prokop 1:00:51 / #
Okay, so I mean, and that's the thing to me, it feels like, but he really is the star of that book. You know what I mean?

Beverly Jenkins 1:00:59 / #
He is the star of that book.

Jennifer Prokop 1:00:59 / #
Right. He's such a fascinating character.

Beverly Jenkins 1:01:02 / #
Yeah, he's the star of that book, and then Maggie. I met the real Maggie. I was in Omaha, Nebraska for a book signing, and this young woman came up to me, and she was in tears. She was Native and Black. And she said, nobody's writing for me, but me. Nobody's writing for her but me and we really, really had a nice bonding kind of moment. This was before I wrote the book. So when we decided to do Preacher's book, I named the character Maggie. That was her name, Maggie Chandler Smith, and gave Maggie the real Maggie's ethnicity. So she does exist. Somebody told me this, "Oh, Ms. Bev, you know, all your characters really existed in life sometime." I'm like, okay, that's kind of scary, but Maggie does exist. She's in Nebraska.

Jennifer Prokop 1:02:09 / #
Wow, what a gift, Bev. Wow. Well, this is fabulous. [Ms. Bev laughs] Thank you so much.

Sarah, I love listening to Beverly Jenkins talk.

Sarah MacLean 1:02:23 / #
I mean, I could listen to her all day, every day. She's fascinating.

Jennifer Prokop 1:02:27 / #
I've been lucky enough to interview her when Wild Rain came out. I did a YouTube interview with her for Love's Sweet Arrow. So, you know, I have had the pleasure of talking to Ms. Bev, you know, several times, but I still think hearing someone's longitudinal story? Right? You know, the focus is different when it's like, oh, you've got a new book out.

Sarah MacLean 1:02:49 / #
I think it's worth listening to Bev's interviews on the Black Romance (History) podcast.

Jennifer Prokop 1:02:55 / #
Yes.

Sarah MacLean 1:02:56 / #
As well, we'll put links to those in show notes. Over there, you'll get a different kind of history from Bev, and I think the two together will be really interesting if you're Beverly Jenkins fans like we are. You know, one thing we should say is that she in fact does have a new book coming out.

Jennifer Prokop 1:03:14 / #
This month Bev is returning to romantic suspense.

Sarah MacLean 1:03:18 / #
Yay!

Jennifer Prokop 1:03:18 / #
And she has a book out with Montlake called Rare Danger, which, listen to this: a librarian's quiet life becomes a page turner of adventure, romance and murder!

Sarah MacLean 1:03:29 / #
Doo doo doo! Also, now you know that all that librarian stuff will be properly sourced from her own life.

Jennifer Prokop 1:03:40 / #
I mean, Rebecca Romney is gonna love this. For Jasmine Ware, curating books for an exclusive clientele is her passion. Until an old friend, a dealer of rare books, goes missing and his partner is murdered. You know, I really love Ms. Bev's romantic suspense. So I think it's really cool to see her returning to this. To have an author still be experimenting, you know, she's written YA, she writes romance, she writes historical. She's returning to romantic suspense. I love that there's - I think it's a real model for you can keep doing whatever it is you want to do.

Sarah MacLean 1:04:14 / #
Yeah. What's amazing to me as a writer, is we all kind of have quiet stories in our head that we think oh, maybe someday I'll write that book.

Jennifer Prokop 1:04:22 / #
Yeah.

Sarah MacLean 1:04:23 / #
But it seems to me Bev has just an endless supply of them and I don't feel like that. I always sort of know what the next couple are, but -

Jennifer Prokop 1:04:33 / #
Yeah.

Sarah MacLean 1:04:33 / #
But I feel like she's, she's got romantic suspense. She's got the Blessings series. She's got all of her glorious historicals. I feel like someday there's gonna be some epic sci-fi or fantasy something from her.

Jennifer Prokop 1:04:46 / #
Yeah.

Sarah MacLean 1:04:46 / #
And I just, every time I talk to her, I just feel really blessed to know her. And the other thing I really like from an author perspective, Bev always reminds me how valuable readers are. And what I mean by that is, I mean obviously, I love, I love the people who read my books, and I feel really honored to have them all read my books, but what Beverly reminds me of, every time we talk, is how important, how the relationship between author and reader fills us both.

Jennifer Prokop 1:05:21 / #
Yeah.

Sarah MacLean 1:05:22 / #
And that is something that you can lose sight of when you're kind of deep in the manuscript, like in the weeds, you forget sometimes that the well is filled by readers in the end, and that is always a good, a good reminder. And I really value my friendship with Beverly because every time we talk, that's a piece that always comes through.

Jennifer Prokop 1:05:46 / #
And we heard her describe how different it was back in the day, right? Where you're like sending actual newsletters, were not just emails or -

Sarah MacLean 1:05:58 / #
Yeah. In print.

Jennifer Prokop 1:06:00 / #
[laughs] Right? And I mean, I think that's a part of it too. One of the things I really have loved about the Trailblazers, I mean obviously just hearing people's stories, but also hearing what it was like. I mean, okay, this is everybody, you and me, we've seen Romancing the Stone, and at the beginning of this movie, and she's a romance novelist in the '80s. She's packing up her manuscript, is, you know, is a bunch of papers in a box!

Sarah MacLean 1:06:27 / #
We can't talk about it, but there's another Trailblazer episode where we fully forgot that, or I fully forgot that the world the technology did not exist.

Jennifer Prokop 1:06:36 / #
Yes!

Sarah MacLean 1:06:37 / #
Back in the day.

Jennifer Prokop 1:06:38 / #
And that's I think, part of what's cool about that, is anytime you hear a story where people talk about how the technology has changed, it just goes to show you how fast the world moves. I really love those stories too. Thinking about what it was like to curate a group of passionate readers, who are your devoted fans and doing it without social media.

Sarah MacLean 1:07:06 / #
Yeah.

Jennifer Prokop 1:07:07 / #
And so that's the thing that I also found, that reader connection with Bev is so strong, so -

Sarah MacLean 1:07:13 / #
We're avowed stans of Beverly Jenkins here at Fated Mates. It will surprise none of you. So we are really, it's just one more week of feeling incredibly lucky -

Jennifer Prokop 1:07:25 / #
Yeah.

Sarah MacLean 1:07:25 / #
To be able to do this thing that we love so much. You've been listening to Fated Mates. You can find us at fatedmates.net, where you'll find all sorts of links to all sorts of fun things like gear, and stickers, and music and other things. You can find us on Twitter at Fated Mates or on Instagram at Fated Mates Pod. Or just you know, you can find me at sarahmaclean.net, Jen at jenreadsromance.com, where you can learn more about getting her to edit your next great masterpiece, and we are produced by Eric Mortensen. Thanks so much for listening!

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S04.02: Sandra Brown: Trailblazer

The Trailblazers conversations begin this week with the brilliant, fearless Sandra Brown—aka Erin St. Clair and Rachel Ryan. We talk about everything from her first books, acquired by Vivian Stephens for Candlelight Ecstasy, about how Slow Heat in Heaven was her personal game changer, about the beginnings of romantic suspense, and about what makes a Sandra Brown novel, the most recent of which, Blind Tiger, was released last month.

Thank you to Sandra Brown for taking the time to talk to us, and share her story.

Transcript

We’ve got an interstitial episode coming your way next week, but our first read along (in two weeks) is Amanda Quick’s Ravished—which Sarah describes as “Harriet, in a cave, with a rake.” It’s great. Get reading at: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books, Kobo, or at your local indie.

You have two weeks to read, 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 follow in your favorite podcasting platform!

Show Notes

Welcome to our first trailblazer, romance legend Sandra Brown. Her latest release is Blind Tiger, which was her 73rd book on the New York Times bestseller list. Blind Tiger is a thriller set in Texas during the 1920s.

Prohibition went into effect on January 1, 1920. In Texas, the town of Glen Rose was the Moonshine Capital of Texas.

The Ford Model T was the first mass produced American car. Here’s a video of the actual driving experience of the 1915 model. If you’d like to see a bunch of Model Ts in the same place, you can visit the winter home of Thomas Edison in Fort Myers, Florida. Henry Ford visited so often that he eventually bought the home next door. Prohibition and moonshining gave birth to NASCAR.

Sandra’s first books were bought by Vivian Stephens for Candlelight Ecstasy under the pen name Rachel Ryan. She wrote for Silhouette under the name Erin St. Clair, and for Pocket as Laura Jordan. Carolyn Nichols at Loveswept wanted authors to use their real names, and now all of Sandra's books have been rereleased under her own name.

Sandra appeared on the cover of one of her own Loveswepts, The Rana Look, with actor Mclean Stevenson.

Some of the romance authors Sandra mentioned: Paris Afton Bonds, Candace Camp, Mary Lynn Baxer, Nora Roberts, Jayne Ann Krentz, Barbara Delinksy.

Some of the thriller/mystery writers Sandra mentioned: Helen MacInnes, Evelyn Anthony, Gayle Lynds, David Morrell, and Lee Child.

TRANSCRIPT

Sandra Brown 0:00 / #
I think there were several of us who say, hey, we have romance roots, but we still love the mystery. We still love the suspense, we still love wartime books, or we still love, you know, spy novels, and so the way I felt about it was that the attraction heightens both elements of the story, because you're never more afraid than when someone you care about is in danger.

Jennifer Prokop 0:28 / #
That was the voice of Sandra Brown.

Sarah MacLean 0:32 / #
Welcome, everyone, to Fated Mates. I'm Sarah MacLean. I read romance novels, and I write them.

Jennifer Prokop 0:37 / #
I am Jennifer Prokop. I am a romance reader and editor.

Sarah MacLean 0:41 / #
And this week, for our first Trailblazer episode of Season Four, we are absolutely beyond thrilled to have had a conversation with absolute fucking legend, as Tom Hardy would say, Sandra Brown.

Jennifer Prokop 0:59 / #
We recorded with Sandra, in August, I think.

Sarah MacLean 1:04 / #
That sounds right.

Jennifer Prokop 1:05 / #
And we will be talking with her today about her life in romance, about her new novel Blind Tiger, about her many, many, many New York Times bestsellers, and just about all the amazing history and story she has, as a romance writer, and how she started in the business and where she is now.

Sarah MacLean 1:28 / #
I think that was the best part of the conversation. This sense that we were talking to somebody who knew everything. Had been there from the start, and really had a lot to say about how the genre has grown and where the genre was and where it could be.

Jennifer Prokop 1:45 / #
So without further ado, here is our interview with Sandra Brown. Enjoy it as much as we did everyone.

Sarah MacLean 1:57 / #
Well, we are thrilled to have with us Sandra Brown. Welcome Sandra.

Sandra Brown 2:02 / #
Thank you very much, Sarah and Jen, I've looked forward to this.

Sarah MacLean 2:07 / #
Well, we're super excited about Blind Tiger, which is, did I see correctly on your Instagram? It is your 73rd New York Times bestseller?

Sandra Brown 2:16 / #
As of yesterday, I found out that it will be on the Times list a week from Sunday, but we find out like 10 days before, as you know, and so yeah, like last night, we had a little celebration here because it's officially my 73rd New York Times bestseller.

Sarah MacLean 2:38 / #
Wow! I mean, living the dream!

Sandra Brown 2:41 / #
Well, thank you. I've been very fortunate and all the people that I've worked with, and my fans have followed me from, you know, one genre to another, one type of book to another, shorter books, longer books and Blind Tiger was the longest book I've ever written.

Jennifer Prokop 3:00 / #
Oh, interesting.

Sandra Brown 3:02 / #
Yeah. So it and in itself, it was so different because I kind of switch, you know, time periods. I went back 100 years. So that was kind of a, you know, leap of faith and a trust that my readers would follow me, and so I'm pleased to say so far it looks like as though they are.

Jennifer Prokop 3:24 / #
So what was it like to go back and do research for a historical again, especially in 1920? Which is, you know, you wrote historical historicals in romance, but to have 1920 be the year.

Sandra Brown 3:38 / #
It was hard, actually, but the reason I did is because when it got time last year, to begin my next book, I thought, how do you write a book where people are wearing masks and the news was so bad every night and I hated even watching the evening news because it always left me so depressed and in a bad mood, and I thought, you know, I want some escape, and I figured if I felt that way that readers would feel that way. So that what was happening 100 years ago, and lo and behold, things aren't that different. (laughter)

Sarah MacLean 4:15 / #
I was going to say, so you went back to a different pandemic.

Sandra Brown 4:17 / #
Right, a different pandemic. There was another women's movement that resulted thankfully and separate. Soldiers were coming home from a very unpopular foreign war with post traumatic stress, but they didn't even know the name -

Jennifer Prokop 4:34 / #
Have a name for that.

Sandra Brown 4:35 / #
At that point in time, and as if things aren't bad enough, nobody could buy a drink because Prohibition had gone into effect January 16th of 1920. So then I did, I just researched what was happening prohibition in Texas, which is where I live and who knew, but 50 miles down the road from where I have lived most of my life, was a town that was nicknamed the Moonshine Capital of Texas. (laughter)

Sarah MacLean 5:09 / #
Perfect!

Sandra Brown 5:09 / #
I thought, Little Glen Rose? And you know, had all these bawdy houses and speakeasies and a lots of moonshining, because geographically, it was perfect for it. So I started doing research on that, the more I got into it, the more fun I started having, but Jen, you asked me about the research. It was so fun in one way, but in another way, it's very time consuming, because I would have to stop and look everything up, you know, it was like, and at one point in time, I said, Laurel, my heroine, floorboarded her Model T. She drove a 1915 Model T, so after I'd written that scene, and I went back thought better do some deeper research how to drive a Model T.

Sarah MacLean 5:55 / #
Sure, because someone is going to email you about this car.

Sandra Brown 6:00 / #
And so, lo and behold, a Model T 1915 model had three pedals on the floor. One was the clutch on the left, in the middle was reverse, on the right is the brake. The accelerator was on the steering wheel. So you actually controlled your velocity, your speed, by levers on how much, you know, gas you gave it, was controlled by a lever on the steering wheel. So I could have made that really terrible mistake had I not gone back and checked that.

Jennifer Prokop 6:34 / #
Done that research.

Sandra Brown 6:36 / #
So I couldn't say that she floorboarded it. (laughter)

Sandra Brown 6:39 / #
My dad lives in Florida and we went to visit, I think it's Edison's Florida home, and there's a huge collection of Model T's there.

Sandra Brown 6:46 / #
Really?

Jennifer Prokop 6:47 / #
And the whole time I was reading this book was really thinking, I wonder what it would be like if these moonshiners had access to a Ford F 150 instead? (laughter) Because these things, they really are small. I mean, it's really kind of a miraculous to think about, I mean, it seems so big and fast to them, but you know, to us.

Sandra Brown 7:10 / #
Well, one thing they did, and this was also interesting, Ford would sell the chassis, the main chassis, but people would adapt. Before they started making pickup trucks, per se, people would add beds onto their Model T and kind of customize them. So customizing your automobile is not a new science that we figured out this century. They were already doing it, and so they were very innovative even before Ford started manufacturing all these things. So all of these little facts, you know, came out and then the part about moonshining was really fun to research because most of the stories, the tales that people had to tell, I would just laugh out loud because you'd be like, you can't make this up! I mean it was wild, and in terms of the speed with which they had their cars to go, that's where NASCAR started was because the moonshiners.

Sarah MacLean 7:10 / #
Wow.

Sandra Brown 7:18 / #
That's right. So our NASCAR came to be because moonshiners would soup up their engines to outrun the cars that lawmen had, and that's where NASCAR was born, in the Carolinas, actually, but yeah, so all of this was just fun. You know, it was, it was a fun departure, and I think from a creative standpoint, it's good for writers to try something different, to go at a different pace. I've always, throughout my career, just spanned 40 years now, but just to try something different to challenge myself. And I think the worst thing that a writer can do is to become complacent, and just rely on you know, their history in the marketplace, because the market is constantly changing. It's an evolution every day and it's a learning curve every day. So in order to keep up and to remain vital in the marketplace, I think it's good for writers to challenge themselves. I've never tried this, you know, wonder if I can do that, and at the same time, maintain the expectations of their readers. You know, so I think Blind Tiger, yes, it's set in another century, and yes, I had to do a lot of research on historical facts, but the bottom line is it still has, I believe, the trademarks of a Sandra Brown novel, that when one opens it and starts reading, they more or less know it's still a Sandra Brown novel.

Sarah MacLean 10:02 / #
Oh, 1,000%. We were talking about that before the interview, that we just, I felt like I just fell right into it, to the Sandra Brown world. One of the things that I think is really interesting about this, and you've written historicals before, this is not your first historical. People who listen to Fated Mates know that, and one of the things that I think about a lot as a historical writer is we tend to be judged. There's often a sense in the world that, oh well, when you're writing historicals, you're just writing, you're closing the door on current day and just writing the past, and I mean, we know that's not true. And one of the things that really echoed for me in this book was how current it felt in the sense of, as you said, a hero coming home from war, the Spanish flu. These kind of large scale things that felt so, it's almost impossible to read the pieces where, because Thatcher, our hero, has had the Spanish flu, and it's impossible to read that without thinking, oh my gosh, we're -

Sandra Brown 11:06 / #
Yeah.

Sarah MacLean 11:06 / #
We're doing that now. So I wonder if you could talk a little bit about how modern the book is, too, in that sense. How are you thinking about the world that way?

Sandra Brown 11:16 / #
Yeah, well, thank you for that, but that's how I made my pitch to the editor. (laughter) Guess what? I want to do a historical, you know, and it kind of took him aback, and because he's only edited my contemporary, thrillers or suspense novels, and he said, "Well, like where to?" (laughter) "Where are you going?"

Sarah MacLean 11:44 / #
What are you doing, Sandra?

Sandra Brown 11:46 / #
And so I started drawing for him all of the parallels that we've talked about, and I said, and when you really get down to it, I said, Shakespeare would have made the same pitch to his editors, because the human condition does not change. It hasn't for millennia, you know, and so, when you, when you start talking about human emotions, they're all still there. Greed, lust, jealousy, rage, you know, sorrow, grief, all of these things are still identifiable by every human being, and so I think if you tell a story correctly, and if you reveal to your characters, the emotions, you know, to your readers, the emotions of the characters, then they're going to relate to that. Because if you have, if you lose someone dear to you, beloved to you, you're going to feel the same thing that someone did hundreds of years ago. You know, that hasn't changed. Human heart has not changed. And so even though our devices certainly have, and I can't tell you what a relief it was to write a book without everybody's cellphones. (laughter)

Jennifer Prokop 13:11 / #
I bet. I bet.

Sandra Brown 13:13 / #
Because I think technology, in some ways, has ruined suspense, because you can't make people disappear as easily as you used to. But in answer to your question, Sarah, the emotions, human emotions, if you tell a story well, and you really explore the mind and the heart of your characters, then the story should be relatable, no matter where it's at and what time period. And so I wouldn't give too much credence to someone who says well, you're leaving contemporary life behind, because when you strip it all away, we're people and we've been people for a long time, and we've experienced the same emotions at one point in our lives or another.

Jennifer Prokop 14:02 / #
Okay, so, my dad was a soldier in Vietnam, and one of the things Sarah and I have talked about, sort of over and over again, and I joke that if I ever got a PhD in romance, it would be about the Vietnam hero returning home. Is a lot of your early romances - most of them, featured men who were, who had been in Vietnam, and Thatcher is a man coming back from World War One, so is this something that is of particular interest to you? Or do you, like me, sometimes think this is just an American story? I mean, maybe it's a story everywhere, but a particularly American story, about a man coming home from war and not knowing where he fits in. Thatcher can't even afford to get home. They've taken his uniform from him, and I was really fascinated to think about that in parallel with some of your early romances.

Sandra Brown 14:57 / #
Well, that and that's true and I have to confess, I guess that's an accidental thing, Jen, because I don't really set out to make any kind of, you know, political statement. That's not my role. I'm a fiction writer. I tell stories, but it's interesting, now that you mentioned it, because I really, really hadn't thought of that. But I suppose because the Vietnam War was so, you know, part of my development, as when I was in, well, I guess, junior high, high school, college, and then early adulthood, I knew people that were lost, you know, in that war and, and it was so much of our culture, and it was so much of a culture change in our country. So I guess, in the background in my mind, that was omnipresent, didn't even recognize it, and it's interesting that you should say, because even recent books, the hero in Thick as Thieves is an ex-soldier. There have been many who have served. The character in Lethal, what was his name? Oh dear? Coburn! (she laughs)

Jennifer Prokop 16:23 / #
73 bestsellers later, you're gonna forget some names, right?

Sarah MacLean 16:26 / #
It's really fine.

Sandra Brown 16:27 / #
I have a little glitch every now and then. (laughter) Yeah, and so that influenced, you know, his character and how he was very tough and cold toward the world until he meets this little five-year-old girl who totally disassembles him. So it's, I think in the back of my mind, possibly, it's kind of that injured male, whether the injuries are physical or emotional or mental. It's kind of that, you know, the beast, that by the end of the book is more or less tamed, but there's a reason for the way he acts. And I think that war and war experiences, you know, play into that in some regard. But it's a subconscious thing. I really never had thought about it until you mentioned it, but now that you do, I can see, oh, there's a pattern there! Thanks for pointing that out.

Jennifer Prokop 16:32 / #
You're welcome.

Sarah MacLean 16:48 / #
It's interesting, because as I was reading Blind Tiger, and knowing we were going to have this conversation, I was thinking a lot about heroes in thrillers and mysteries versus heroes in romance and how that sort of loner archetype really fits both worlds, and what you, I think, do so beautifully, in all of your books, is you deliver your loner hero a community, in a lot of ways. And Thatcher, for me, feels like your romance roots, kind of delivering these thriller heroes a different kind of happiness at the end, a different kind of satisfaction.

Sandra Brown 18:09 / #
Right.

Sarah MacLean 18:09 / #
But I also want to talk about your heroines, because for me, a Sandra Brown heroine always has a purpose outside of the hero. That has, I mean, as a reader that inspired me, as a writer. I said on Twitter the other day that you were one of the reasons why I write romance. I think your heroines have really kind of imprinted on me in a lot of ways, the DNA of the Sandra Brown heroine. You know, the heroine who is backed up against the wall, we love, Jen and I love a heroine backed up against a wall -

Jennifer Prokop 18:35 / #
100%.

Sarah MacLean 18:43 / #
Who ends up a bootlegger because that's the avenue and also she's super badass!

Jennifer Prokop 18:56 / #
The minute she learned to drive, but the whole part where she says too, I mean, there's a part, I wish I would have marked it, where she says, once she decided this was her task, she was going to be the best at it, and I was like, "There is a Sandra Brown heroine!"

Sarah MacLean 19:10 / #
That's the Sandra Brown heroine.

Sandra Brown 19:12 / #
Well, I have to admit, when I first pitched the book to my editor, and it was going to be Thatcher's story. It was going to be his story, but once I started writing it, as my characters typically do, they took over, and the book actually turned out to be Laurel's story. Because beyond not, you know, he changed careers from that of a cowboy, and we see the potential in him early on to do more than just go back to the ranch, you know, and do that and he would have been happy to do that for the rest of his life, but he didn't. When the book is ended, he's more or less the same individual that he was. He still thinks the same way, still got that laconic cowboy nature, that code of honor that he lives by. You know, I'm not gonna look for trouble, but you don't mess with me or somebody I care about, or you're going to be in trouble, and so we get that early on, and we still feel that at the end of the book. Laurel is the one who has the character arc. It became her book when she said, "You are teaching me how to drive." And her father-in-law starts sputtering and she says, "Today."

Jennifer Prokop 20:47 / #
Today. (laughter)

Sandra Brown 20:51 / #
We weren't going to and I thought, huh, she's kind of taken over this, and then I loved you know, all of the things that she does. The limbs that she goes out on.

Sarah MacLean 21:06 / #
I mean, the whole operation being her brainchild, the pies and the -

Sandra Brown 21:10 / #
It's not just to survive now, it's not just to put food on the table. It's I'm going to thrive, and if I'm going to do, if I'm going to be a lawbreaker, I'm going to be the best at it. And of course, and another element, which I believe it was one of the questions that that you were going to ask me, what makes a good romance, and we can get to that, but one of the main elements is that they need to be forbidden to each other. And so in every Sandra Brown book that I've ever written, I've tried to make it if he's a fireman, she's got to be an arsonist. For whatever reason, this cannot happen. They cannot possibly get together because they're on opposite sides of something. And in this instance, it was so obvious, you know, when I first started plotting it, and I thought, Okay, can I really do that with a heroine? Can I really do that? And yes -

Sarah MacLean 21:10 / #
Yes.

Jennifer Prokop 21:10 / #
Yes

Sandra Brown 21:21 / #
Laurel was like yes, you know, hell yes, if you're going to write me, then I'm going to take over. And she did. And, you know, I think every reader, I hope every reader, male and female, will admire her gutsiness. You know, they might not admire the enterprise, but they, I think they will admire and can identify with somebody who says, "Okay, I've been knocked down twice, really hard." And that doesn't even count her upbringing, her parents, you know, her domineering father. So, she's refusing and resolved never to depend on anyone to take care of her again, and I think that is a lesson in what contemporary women in our society are learning, is that you know, as much as you love somebody, as kind of someone is to you, but you need to be able, because you don't know what fate is going to throw on your path, you need to be able to take care of yourself. Not depend on other people, anyone.

Sarah MacLean 23:41 / #
It was a joy to read Blind Tiger, and to return to your books, to your historicals. I mean, as an adult, as an avowed, we did a podcast where I said it out loud, as an Another Dawn fan, here we go, yeah! A dusty Texas. I'm ready.

Jennifer Prokop 24:03 / #
Yes.

Sandra Brown 24:04 / #
So funny, a little backstory on that. I wrote Sunset Embrace, and I sent it into my editor at the time. They were published by Bantam, and my editor at the time, after a month or so had gone by and the book was in production, and she called me one day and said, "The ladies here in the office have a request." And I thought, you know, signing books for their aunts, their grandmothers, their moms, and she said, "They want you to write another book and make Bubba the hero." And I went, "Ah! Well, let me see what I can do."

Jennifer Prokop 24:54 / #
The ladies in the office always know.

Sarah MacLean 24:58 / #
They know.

Sandra Brown 24:59 / #
So I set out to plot Another Dawn, and it was difficult because I had to age him 10 years because, in Sunset Embrace, it was really kind of a coming of age book for him. So I had to age him 10 years, and I thought, "Do I really want a hero named Bubba? I think I'm going to have to give him a new name." (laughter) And so I did that, and then thinking of the plot, and the plot broke my heart, actually, and I think it broke the heart of a lot of readers.

Sarah MacLean 25:39 / #
Of a lot of readers.

Sandra Brown 25:40 / #
It was essential to his and Banner's book, you know, the plot development there. So anyway, thank you for the compliment. I love cowboys. I'm from Texas. I'm a sucker at cowboys, as Thatcher, as Thatcher is, you know. I loved his bow-legged walk and his cowboy hat and his spurs and all of that.

Jennifer Prokop 26:08 / #
Everything.

Sarah MacLean 26:11 / #
Same. Well, I would love to hear about your journey into romance, because we've talked on the podcast about how you were really there at the start of Harlequin American with Vivian Stephens. We talked about Tomorrow's Promise on the podcast.

Jennifer Prokop 26:25 / #
Loveswept.

Sarah MacLean 26:26 / #
Yeah, the early Loveswept books. So I wonder if you could give us a sense of, paint us a picture of those early years and how you became a romance writer.

Sandra Brown 26:36 / #
My first five books were for Vivian Stephens in another house in another line. It was called Ecstasy, and it was published by Bantam Doubleday Dell. And how all of that happened, first of all, I got fired from my job. And I was working in television, for the ABC affiliate here in Dallas, and they came through one day and fired all of us who were on-air contributors for this magazine show. They said they needed fresh faces. So God bless my husband, who's still my husband. He's put up with me all these years, but he said, "You know, you've always said you want to write fiction, and now you've got time and opportunity to do it." And I had two babies at home. I mean, they were toddlers, my children. And I said, "Gosh, but you know, I don't know how to, I don't know how to do that." He said, "You won't know if you don't try. And you can either keep talking about it or you can do it." So I sat down and proceeded to start writing, and he had a talk show. This is a long story. But anyway, he had a talk show in the morning. He interviewed all the authors who came in on tour. So one was a local woman who wrote romances. Her name was Paris Afton Bonds. She volunteered as a favor for him having her on his show, to read one of my manuscripts, and she said, "You ought to be writing romances." And I was like, "What's a romance?" I didn't know, but you know, and she said, "Well, like a Harlequin romance." And that Harlequin was the only show in town, and they were, of course, a British company, so most of their writers are British, but I went bought 12 or 15 of them, started reading them, I thought, "Yeah, I think I can do this." So I proceeded to and Paris invited me to go with her to Houston to a writer's conference.

Sarah MacLean 28:44 / #
Oh my gosh.

Sandra Brown 28:45 / #
And there I met a woman named Candace Camp.

Sarah MacLean 28:48 / #
Oh my god!

Jennifer Prokop 28:49 / #
Of course!

Sandra Brown 28:51 / #
Who had first published The Rainbow Season, and that was one of the best books I had ever read, and I loved it! I couldn't speak when I met Candace, Candy, I called her. I was just like, "Uhhh!" She wrote that book under a pseudonym, Lisa Gregory. So I met her at that cocktail party, and also at the cocktail party, I met a woman from a small East Texas town, that had a bookstore, Mary Lynn Baxter, who later wrote for Silhouette. And she said, "Well, I've read everything ever written, and I have the ear of every editor in New York. So when you get a manuscript you like, send it to me, and I'll read it and I'll tell you whether or not it's any good." So about three months later, she had given me your phone number, three months later, I called her and said, "Do you remember meeting me and dada - " and, "Yes! What have you written?" And I said, "Well, I'm going to send you something." And she called me a few days later and said, "This is exactly what a woman named Vivian Stephens is looking for, for a new line of romances called Ecstasy."

Sarah MacLean 29:56 / #
Oh my gosh!

Sarah MacLean 29:58 / #
I have shivers.

Sarah MacLean 30:00 / #
I know, this is the greatest story! Do you have five or six hours to stay with us? (laughter)

Sandra Brown 30:06 / #
Vivian bought my first book about two weeks later, and then 13 days, she said, "Do you have another one?" And I said, "Yeah, I'm finishing it up." And she said, "Well send it. Is it same orientation?" And I said, "Yeah." "Same level of heat?" And I said, "Yeah." So she, I sent it to her, and she bought my second book 13 days after the first one. So I sold my first two and then she bought the next three, and then she moved to Harlequin, and that's when she she bought Tomorrow's Promise. And so, by then, at that point in time, every publisher was developing their own line. Jove had a line called Second Chance, and I later wrote for them. Silhouette had a line - Pocket had a line called Silhouette, and then Silhouette Desire, and then, what was the other - anyway, ultimately, I was writing for four different houses under four different names, including my own.

Sarah MacLean 31:12 / #
The pseudonyms. I'd love to talk a little bit about that because, was it four different houses under four different names, because each House wanted a different name?

Sandra Brown 31:20 / #
Right, right. My first pseudonym was for Vivian for the Ecstasy line, and I used Rachel Ryan, because those are my children's names.

Jennifer Prokop 31:32 / #
Oh, okay.

Sandra Brown 31:33 / #
And it was a bribe. If you let mommy work, (laughter) and leave me alone -

Jennifer Prokop 31:41 / #
That's awesome.

Sandra Brown 31:42 / #
We'll go get ice cream, and I'll put your name on every page of the book. (laughter)

Sarah MacLean 31:49 / #
Oh my god.

Jennifer Prokop 31:51 / #
Perfect.

Sandra Brown 31:51 / #
I also felt Rachael Ryan sounded a whole lot more like a romance writer than Sandra Brown, but when I started writing for Carolyn Nichols, for the Loveswept line, Carolyn wanted to, instead of featuring the series, or making the series the selling point, she wanted the authors to be more spotlighted. She wanted the authors to be the prominent name and develop the trademark, of course, but also to really emphasize the individuality of the authors. And so she said, "I want to use your real name." And I said, "It's about time, too." You know, that idea. So that's the history.

Sarah MacLean 32:39 / #
So as we're talking about that question, I feel you you must know what's coming, but the Loveswept line, and them wanting readers to know authors, can we talk about this? Which is that Rana Look!

Sandra Brown 32:53 / #
You mentioned that to me. I had forgotten that. (laughter)

Sarah MacLean 32:57 / #
First of all, I love that you have forgotten this.

Jennifer Prokop 32:59 / #
Imagine being so cool that you forgot that you are your own cover model. That's all I have to say about that.

Sarah MacLean 33:07 / #
And we have lots of serious questions too.

Sandra Brown 33:10 / #
How did that come about? Honest and truthfully, I cannot remember. I just remember being asked.

Sarah MacLean 33:17 / #
I don't think you were alone, because I think Nora Roberts was also on one around the same time. I feel like they they did this with a few people.

Jennifer Prokop 33:25 / #
There were a of couple people, I think. There was another one, I can't remember the name though.

Sarah MacLean 33:28 / #
Beautiful writers got to play model.

Sandra Brown 33:31 / #
My hair has never been that long. (laughter)

Sarah MacLean 33:35 / #
I was going to say is this your actual hair?

Sandra Brown 33:39 / #
And I never had a dress that gorgeous either! So what I think they did, I think what they did is take our picture in that pose, and then they had, you know, the painting done, and it was a really pretty good rendition -

Sarah MacLean 33:57 / #
It's beautiful!

Sandra Brown 33:57 / #
Of my face, but I didn't have the hair -

Jennifer Prokop 34:00 / #
Flowing, locks.

Sarah MacLean 34:03 / #
We've talked about this on the podcast before, but this is McLean Stevenson from MAS*H, right?

Sandra Brown 34:09 / #
Yeah.

Sarah MacLean 34:09 / #
Did you get to pick? Was he a favorite? Or were they just like, "Sorry, Sandra, you're going to have to be here with this guy."

Jennifer Prokop 34:14 / #
He's our local hottie.

Sandra Brown 34:17 / #
I don't know. I don't know how he got selected either.

Sarah MacLean 34:24 / #
He needed the press. He needed to hang out with you. He needed the glow up of Sandra Brown. So going back to those kind of early days, because we always think about that as it must have felt a little like there was an explosion of popularity, because prior to that it was so historic. We know that in the '70s it was big historical times, but this is really the burst of contemporary romance.

Sandra Brown 34:48 / #
Yes.

Sarah MacLean 34:48 / #
Did did it feel like it to you? Did you feel like you were on the precipice of something?

Sandra Brown 34:53 / #
Yes. In a way, because as I said, all of it up to that point in time, Harlequin published in London and in Toronto, and they had, I think the first American author that they bought was Janet Dailey. And I could be wrong on that, but I think that's right. And so it was like, well, duh, you've got a whole continent over here of women writers yet untapped. The competition among the houses, this is a great time to be starting, I've often said that I hit it at exactly the right moment in time, because the competition among the houses to sew up, you know, the Nora Roberts, the Jayne Ann Krentz, the Barbara Delinski, the -

Sarah MacLean 35:57 / #
Sandra Brown.

Sandra Brown 36:00 / #
I could go on and on and on, all the writers that, you know, came up out of this. And so it was very competitive among the houses to publish quickly. Well, I wrote like a frenzy all the time. I mean -

Sarah MacLean 36:18 / #
I was going to say -

Jennifer Prokop 36:19 / #
It must have been.

Sandra Brown 36:20 / #
When my kids got old enough to go to kindergarten and they were in school, because it was like I need to write without - so I think the year 1983, I think, which, oh gosh, that sounds so long ago. It was so long ago, but I think I had 11 books published.

Jennifer Prokop 36:44 / #
Wow.

Sandra Brown 36:46 / #
I had one a month except for one month, and so it was a juggling act. Each line, whether it was Silhouette, Loveswept, Second Chance, the American Harlequins, whether each line had nuances that were uniquely theirs, there was just something you know, a little bit different. And so I would tailor a story, if I thought of a plot, I would kind of tailor the story, oh, that would make a good Desire. Or, oh, that would make a good Loveswept. And then there were some differences in the lengths, so if a story was going to be a little bit longer, you know, I would tailor it. But it was a, kind of a juggling act. And I have to say, one lesson I learned early on, is I didn't talk about my business with anybody. I wouldn't share anything that I had spoken about with one editor with another. I kept very close counsel, and I wound up on speaking terms with everybody with whom I've ever worked. (laughter) I think one reason was because I didn't discuss my business, nor anyone else's with, you know, with anyone. So that might be a word of advice for a starting author. You know, hold your cards close to your vest and concentrate on your business and nobody else.

Jennifer Prokop 38:30 / #
One of the things that's really interesting, is you were just talking about how fertile a time it was for authors, but this is when, Sarah and I both kind of came up reading at this time. I mean, we were young. It's fine. It doesn't matter.

Sarah MacLean 38:45 / #
Barely even born.

Jennifer Prokop 38:46 / #
Doesn't matter. We were reading romances when we were 10, and I don't, I'm not sad about it. But I also think this was an incredibly, then fertile, time to come up as a romance reader. So can you - are there - do you have stories? Do you get letters from fans? These books mean something to people!

Sandra Brown 39:05 / #
Yeah, and it's so humbling. It really is. But before we had email and social media, you know, fan letters, I would collect them from the mailbox. And I would dedicate, you know, like one day a month to answer, you know, by hand, all of these letters. It took a lot of time, but right now social media takes a lot of time. So, you know, but I was always so touched by the stories that people would tell me about how my story affected them. And to this day, it's really humbling and gratifying and validating because I can bang my head against the wall, think nobody is going to read this crap. (laughs) This is just a, just another, unhhh! You know, trying to get it right. And I struggle with that. I struggle with the insecurity of I'll never write another, you know, sentence again. Every day I do that. But when you get a letter that says, "This touched me. It's such a needful time in my life." Whatever it is: an illness, the loss of a partner or child, or something really tragic. And they say, "Your books just saved me through this." And that's when it's like, you know, if that one person is the only person who took something from that labor that I put in, it was worth it. You know, it makes those long hours and days at the keyboard really, truly worthwhile.

Sarah MacLean 40:54 / #
We'll get to the shift, the way that you moved from romance, to thrillers, but I'm curious, particularly about readers and the separate genres, because it often feels when I'm at events, or you know, when Jen is at events, it often feels like people always say, "Oh, romance is totally different than everyone else." The thriller audience isn't like this. It doesn't become as personal. Do you, have you had that experience? Or because you're sort of still Sandra Brown? Your books still feel Sandra Brown-y. Do you still get the feedback?

Sandra Brown 41:28 / #
Sometimes, from really dumb people. (laughter) And I, you know, if someone says, "Well, I don't read those kinds of books." And I say, "Well, have you ever read one?" "No." "Well, then how do you know what kind it is?" (laughter)

Jennifer Prokop 41:46 / #
Right.

Sandra Brown 41:48 / #
You know, I'm less sensitive to it than I once was, because then in the same breath, they'll say, "Gosh, it but it must be really, you know, how do you write a book?" And I'll go, "Yeah, that's, that's kind of tricky." You know if it were easy everybody would be doing it, because the writer's life is a great life. So I kind of dismiss that anymore, you know, and, but because I know how hard it is, and my husband knows how hard it is, and my children and grandchildren know. And my colleagues that I care about deeply know how hard it is, and we commiserate. Sarah, you know how hard it is. And so it's, it's really, I just, I don't bother with that anymore. And also, I fall back on a book that really inspired me, and I thought, "You know what? You can combine thrillers and sex." And the book that did that for me was Eye of the Needle by Ken Follett. That was one of the sexiest books, because you talk about forbidden, and you talk about the isolation, which I always tried to build. You said you bring your character into a community and form a community around that character, is very insightful of you, because I do try to create a world where the rest of the world is kind of just disappeared. It's that world and the characters, it's a microcosm. They have good people, bad people, but their lives are really uninfluenced by much that's going on. It's within that tight community that they're orbiting. And so when I read Eye of the Needle, I thought, here they are. It's got all the elements I loved. They're alone on this island, nobody knows where. The communication is gone. The weather is prohibitive. They're forbidden to each other, and yet that allure, you know, just that allure, and of course, he's an assassin. He's a horrible person, but the love scene -

Sarah MacLean 44:30 / #
We're for it.

Sandra Brown 44:32 / #
You know, it's just great. And so I thought now if somebody like Ken Follett can do this - (laughs)

Sarah MacLean 44:41 / #
What if you did it!

Jennifer Prokop 44:42 / #
What if you did, right?

Sandra Brown 44:45 / #
So that book really influenced me a lot, in terms of you can mix the two, and it has to be, integrated into the story and when people are running for their lives, it's a little bit impractical and implausible to think, "Oh, timeout. We've got to have sex." You know, so - (laughter)

Sandra Brown 45:06 / #
We have a name for that, Sandra, "the danger bang!"

Sandra Brown 45:10 / #
(laughter) I've never heard that term before.

Jennifer Prokop 45:16 / #
You're welcome.

Sarah MacLean 45:18 / #
It's yours now.

Sandra Brown 45:21 / #
Here's the thing, and I've done questionnaires and things on this before and asked, did you realize you were creating a genre or helping create a genre? No. No. It was a subconscious thing and I'm given far more credit than I deserve, because I read Helen MacInnes. I read Evelyn Anthony. I read all of these writers, again, mostly British, who were writing basically books during the Cold War. It was after World War Two, but still that influence, you know, the Nazis, the spies, the all that, and they had wonderful sexy books! Especially Evelyn Anthony was a big influence on me, her books are amazing! And the tension, because here again, the forbidden, and so I really get more credit than I deserve, because I felt like I borrowed, you know, so much from them, from other writers, and from my contemporaries. I think there were several of us who saw, hey, we have romance roots, but we still love the mystery. We still love the suspense, we still love wartime books, or we still love, you know, spy novels, and so the way I felt about it was that the attraction heightens both elements of the story, because you're never more afraid than when someone you care about is in danger. Even more than yourself. So it heightens that suspense. It heightens please don't let anything happen, and it heightens the urgency. If this is going to be the only time we have, then we're going to make the most of it. So it heightens both elements. It heightens the relationship and it heightens the danger, because they work against each other, with each other.

Sarah MacLean 47:35 / #
As you're talking about this community of these other writers who were doing it at the same time as you, because there were, it felt like something broke, meaning the tide broke, and suddenly there was romantic suspense everywhere in the genre. Did you have a community of other writers who were doing the same thing? Who were the members of that community?

Sandra Brown 47:56 / #
Well, I have to say, I have to give credit to International Thriller Writers. I was asked very early on, Gale Lynds asked me, and David Morel, who I didn't know at the time, Lee Child, some of these that were saying, "Would you like to become part of this - we're going to form a league of writers called International Thriller Writers and we're breaking barriers." They did. I mean, it was like, we wanted to incorporate mystery. We wanted to incorporate suspense, it can incorporate fantasy, it can incorporate romance, but every book should be a thriller, no matter what book you're writing, it should thrill your readers. So they were very democratic, you know, in this organization, and I think they possibly as much, if not more, went out of their way to include writers from another genre that wasn't so steeped in espionage, or so, you know, which we called a mind thriller. They had horror writers. It was everybody, and so I really have to credit that organization a lot with bringing everybody in, and recognizing the contribution that women writers had made to the marketplace. They were really a fundamental group that brought to the publisher's attention, "Hey, we got all these great writers over here and guess what, you know, they're women!" (laughs) What a concept!

Jennifer Prokop 50:00 / #
When you look back on your career, is there a book that you can point to where you thought, "Oh, I, I'm feeling my direction change, and I'm moving away from straight romance." Or was it just really a smooth continuum for you? There's not a Slow Heat in Heaven was the one or whatever.

Sandra Brown 50:21 / #
Yeah, well it was Slow Heat in Heaven. (laughter)

Sarah MacLean 50:24 / #
There it is. That's the one we hear about all the time.

Jennifer Prokop 50:28 / #
All the time.

Sandra Brown 50:28 / #
Yeah. Yeah.

Sarah MacLean 50:29 / #
I mean, it's the book you hear about when somebody says, "Sandra Brown," if you're not us going, "Another Dawn! Tomorrow's Promise!" (laughter)

Sandra Brown 50:37 / #
It was kind of a breakthrough for me, but apparently for a lot of romance readers, it was like, "What happened to that nice girl we used to know?" (laughter)

Sarah MacLean 50:53 / #
Yeah! It was so gritty.

Sarah MacLean 50:54 / #
I can still remember where I was when I read Slow Heat in Heaven. I was in my sister's apartment in Waltham, Massachusetts, sleeping on an air mattress, and there I was.

Sandra Brown 51:06 / #
I've been to Waltham, Massachusetts! Anyway, I remember, I had finished the Texas! Trilogy. Lucky, Chase and Sage, who were the most, they were the most fun books I'd ever written, and they are in their 45th printing domestically. And so they have resonated with a lot of readers, and I love those characters, and they were so much fun. And I think I only wrote one other Loveswept after that. And then I had signed a contract with, it was the Warner books at the time, and they, I had kind of gotten to where I was, like, you know, I've got to stretch. I've got to do - I had written like 45 romances, and I thought I really want to kind of get past these boundaries that you know now, anything goes, but back then it was like, you know, you can't do this, you can't do gun play, you can't, you know, language had to be controlled, and there were certain plots, I was, as I said, always giving my editors heart attacks, because they were going, "(gasp) Sandra!" and you know, one of the characters in Texas! Trilogy, the plot, she was married, and when I told my editor I was going to do that, well, when I told my editor, who was Carolyn Nichols, and when I told her, I said, "I want to do these books from a male point of view." And she said, "Well, you can't do that." And I said, "Well, you kind of can." (laughs) I can!

Sarah MacLean 52:52 / #
Let me show you.

Sandra Brown 52:55 / #
They're thinking such wonderful things. I think this would be and I want to make them longer, and I will throw in a third book. I'll give you a woman point of view, I'll give them a bratty younger sister, and so that's where that came about and -

Sarah MacLean 53:14 / #
That's so fascinating. I mean, that changed the game!

Sandra Brown 53:18 / #
I had to fight for that, and when I told her that the heroine, you know, in Lucky was going to be married, she said, "Your readers will never forgive you, if you use, if you have an adulterous, you know." and I'll go, "Carolyn, how many books have I written for you? You're just going to have to go out on a leap of faith on this." And so, you know, made it that way. But when I, after I finished all those romances, I thought, I want to do something where I don't have any kind of parameter. I'm having to stay with that. No borders. No fences. So I signed this book with, this deal, with Warner, to write a standalone novel, and it was Slow Heat in Heaven, what became Slow Heat in Heaven. And from the get go, I loved Cash Boudreaux. And I said -

Sarah MacLean 54:15 / #
Same. Obviously.

Sandra Brown 54:17 / #
I said, "This is gonna be the Sandra Brown hero. It's the one that needs redeeming.

Sarah MacLean 54:24 / #
And did you know in the moment? Were you like, "Oh, I knew I was writing "the book.""

Sandra Brown 54:30 / #
The minute he showed up with that hoe across his shoulders and then he kills the snake. And I thought, "This is the Sandra Brown hero." And it's the one that, you know, needs love, that needs to be loved. It's hardened by life and the -

Sarah MacLean 54:54 / #
Poor baby. Poor baby. Also, someone else kills a snake.

Jennifer Prokop 54:58 / #
Thatcher kills a snake too. So you're going back to your roots. You might not know, but we do. (laughter)

Sarah MacLean 55:05 / #
We're paying close attention here.

Sandra Brown 55:07 / #
I thought it the minute he walked on the page, and a lot of people, you know, it took them so aback. The sexuality was a whole lot more graphic and everything, but I remember you had Susan Elizabeth Phillips on.

Jennifer Prokop 55:23 / #
Yes.

Sandra Brown 55:24 / #
And I definitely remember a, I guess it was Romance Writers of America, some writer's conference, where she and I were both attending, and I think that's first time I met her. I think it was. Maybe not, but anyway, we were both there, and we were very friendly. Love her. Still love her. Sterling lady. And she was making a speech at lunch. She was the keynote speaker. And she was going on about she said, "We as writers have to be fearless. We have to be fearless. We can't be inhibited by our own timidity." And that was her point, you know, be fearless. She said, "I have a post it note on my computer screen, "be fearless."" You know, take the chance. And she said, "Sandra Brown." (laughter)

Sarah MacLean 56:26 / #
She called you out.

Sandra Brown 56:27 / #
Strawberry shortcake is - (laughter) and she said, "She shocked us all with Slow Heat in Heaven." And she said romance readers all over the country were saying, "(Gasp!) How dare she?" And she said they couldn't get enough of it.

Jennifer Prokop 56:53 / #
How dare she. Can I have some more? Yeah.

Sandra Brown 56:56 / #
And so she said and it was kind of, it was definitely a turning point in my career, but it was also a book, that as you both have mentioned, kind of put readers back on their heels with what, I didn't know you could do this, you know.

Sarah MacLean 57:13 / #
It felt different.

Jennifer Prokop 57:14 / #
It did.

Sarah MacLean 57:14 / #
It was different. It's interesting because you brought up the Texas! Trilogy, and I feel like in Texas! Chase, which we did a deep dive episode on, so we read it and thought about it. You were moving into romantic suspense. There are too, there's a whole stalker -

Sandra Brown 57:32 / #
Yeah.

Sarah MacLean 57:34 / #
Threadline through that book, and it's clear that that was the path you were on, even before.

Sandra Brown 57:42 / #
Yeah. I never felt like I've deserted the romance genre. I felt like I learned so much from writing the romances. First of all, when they were, when your page count was dictated you know, you had to be, I had to learn to get into the action immediately, join the scene in progress, and that didn't come with the first several books. I spent a lot of time you know, tiptoeing through the tulips and describing everything and showing off to the reader how much research I'd done about a place. Really what they wanted to know was when are they going to meet, what, you know, what's going on?

Jennifer Prokop 58:25 / #
When are they gonna kiss?

Sandra Brown 58:27 / #
I was learning.

Sarah MacLean 58:28 / #
It feels very real.

Sandra Brown 58:29 / #
And I got better at it, but little tools like that, that I had to learn when writing romance, I brought with me. I don't feel like I deserted anything, and as you say, the books always had shadings. I remember even my fourth book, A Treasure Worth Seeking, was about an FBI agent having to move into the heroine's apartment because her brother is escaped jail or something like that, and they're kind of hiding out hoping he's gonna show up. So there was always that, that thread in there.

Sarah MacLean 59:06 / #
So you move to Warner to publish Slow Heat in Heaven, and so I guess my question is, did you move to Warner because you knew Warner would let you do something that maybe romance wouldn't let you do?

Sandra Brown 59:20 / #
My agent kind of threw the idea out there, and they were the first to, you know, to really bite. I think I did a three book contract, my first one. The first two books, Slow Heat (in Heaven) and Best Kept Secret had basically had a terrible cover on it, and we had a meeting and I said okay, and what they had suggested is that if I was going to establish myself as as a, you know, more suspense or mystery, then perhaps I would rethink writing category romances. And that was a tough, that was a, it was a, that was tough to leave that safety net, than it was, you know, on the high trapeze without one, and I couldn't, you know, I had to make up my mind, and I thought, yeah, this is where I want to go. So that was a career decision. So we had this meeting, and it was so, it looked like a historical recycle cover that had been recycled from historical because you've got the heroine lying back with the bosoms falling out, and the shirtless hero with the biceps and everything, and so, and I said, "This is set on a horse training ranch. I haven't seen any body in West Texas who dresses like this." (laughter) And so I said, "No more bosoms and biceps." I said if you're going to ask me to kind of start edging away from the romance elements into more mystery and suspense, then you've got to give me covers. that also indicate that.

Sarah MacLean 1:01:24 / #
You have to help me succeed.

Sandra Brown 1:01:26 / #
That's exactly right. And so on Mirror Image, they did a completely different type of cover, and guess what? It was my first book on The New York Times bestseller list. So I made my point. And from then on, I didn't have to, you know -

Sarah MacLean 1:01:43 / #
Fight for it.

Sandra Brown 1:01:44 / #
I had a little bit more cool.

Sarah MacLean 1:01:47 / #
Was there any discussion of changing your name?

Sandra Brown 1:01:50 / #
No. No. I wanted to publish under Sandra Brown.

Sarah MacLean 1:01:54 / #
That's great. You hear other people having to, you know, make that switch. It still is a thing that people say in romance. You know, well, if you want to write something else, you need to change your name. I'm just going to tell everybody, "No. Sandra Brown didn't."

Jennifer Prokop 1:02:07 / #
Sandra Brown didn't, you shouldn't have to either.

Sandra Brown 1:02:10 / #
And that also is my real name.

Sarah MacLean 1:02:14 / #
That helps too. So let's talk about Sandra Brown, because we've already talked about you know, what makes the Sandra Brown romance a little bit, but what do you think, kind of is the hallmark of the Sandra Brown romance? What do you think saying to readers?

Sandra Brown 1:02:27 / #
Well I don't know about the same two readers, but I had a, I've worked this out over time. I have four elements to me that are critical, and in every book, and I've carried it over into the suspense novels, but the romance aspect of that. The first one is that the hero and the heroine must be codependent to solve their problem. In other words, they share a problem that each has to try and overcome. They're coming at it from different angles, and willingly, they have to work together in order to solve it. That's the first thing. So build in, if I can, a problem they're going to share, and they're dependent on each other. Not liking it at first, but that's the way it is. The second thing is they've got to share space, and this is the hardest thing to do. Because you got to keep them together. And that, you know, all of the peripheral characters in Blind Tiger, were a lot of people, but I tried as much as possible, even though Thatcher and Laurel were not living with each other. He kept showing up. He was always showing up.

Sarah MacLean 1:03:59 / #
I love it.

Sandra Brown 1:04:01 / #
And so I kept them together as much as possible, but in a romance novel, I think it's almost essential that they're on every page together. The desire is a given. It's going to be chemistry from the get-go. First time they see each other sparks are gonna fly, even though they don't demonstrate it. Sparks can fly in anger. but there's going to be that static electricity, you know, automatically. So that's a given. And then the one that we've touched on in this, I think is as important as any if not the, it can't be easy. They've got to be forbidden, for one reason or another. So you've got them a problem they've got to solve together. You've got them to share space. They're gonna have the desire but they can't give into it.

Jennifer Prokop 1:04:54 / #
This explains everything about the kind of romance reader, I mean, it's just hard wired right into my system. Because I say that a lot, a thing I struggle with, I think, in modern romances, they aren't trying to solve the same problem. They have separate problems, and I'm always like, okay, but I don't care. What are they doing together? And I know that makes me old-fashioned maybe, but I don't care. Solve a problem together. That's what I want to see you do.

Sandra Brown 1:05:18 / #
I think old-fashioned works, if it, you know, if it's written correctly. A contemporary book by contemporary writer and I read them and I love them, eat 'em up. And as I said, the human emotions have not changed. So, you know, we can go back and we can read, you know, books written hundreds of years ago, Dickens, Shakespeare, you know, Wilkie Collins, anybody, and those, those emotions are still there, identified.

Sarah MacLean 1:05:56 / #
I would love to hear - one of the questions we sent you, and I think it's so important for these interviews and for women in general, in publishing, is, when did you know you were Sandra Brown? Right? When did you know you were a big deal? Was there a moment when you were like, oh, no, I'm a thing. I'm leaving a mark.

Sandra Brown 1:06:17 / #
I can't wait for that day. Because I still feel, I mean, very much, a yeoman. I mean, I am, I work hard. And every day when I come to this computer, it's like, I've never done it before. I start from scratch every day. And so I know, I don't think of Sandra Brown as Sandra. In fact, my friends have heard me say before, my family has heard me say, frequently, I've got to go be Sandra Brown today.

Sarah MacLean 1:07:03 / #
A separate entity. Sure.

Sandra Brown 1:07:06 / #
It's like, you know, I don't fluff up every day. And so it's, it's like, I still consider myself, you know, just a, someone who works very, very hard, and has been blessed with the opportunities that I have been given and, and to be able to do what I love doing and, and make a living at it. And I know that a lot of people, you know, just take their jobs, but they're necessary. And I get to do what I love doing and get to have a job out of it. So I'm grateful every day and I never, I think the you know, it's really bad for a writer to start reading the press releases, because when you start getting complacent about what you are, you can get really lazy and so I face, I am very paranoid and very fearful that whatever talent, I don't even like to use that word, but I guess that's the word that has to suffice, but whatever storytelling ability that I may have had or forming a sentence or creating a character yesterday will have left me last night, and I live in the fear of being exposed as the biggest fraud that ever pulled off, you know, a hoax.

Sarah MacLean 1:08:39 / #
That just sounds like you're a writer. This is all very comforting for me, but I think we, Jen and I, will say you are obviously a legend to us and to many.

Sandra Brown 1:08:52 / #
Well, thank you. Thank you. That means a great deal, and I love to, to hear other, I mean, you know, I'm buddies with a lot of other writers and some are, you know, very fearful the same way I am. Some are very, you know, laid back something, you know, gosh, you know, isn't this fun, and I remember being, it was actually at George and Barbara Bush's home in Houston for a luncheon, for one her foundation's literacy programs. And Harlan Cohen and I were there and we had our spouses with us, this lovely lunch. And so we were outside in their garden, having our picture made with him and everything and he, you know, he's very, very tall, and he leaned down and he said, "Do you believe we get to do this?" And I said, "You know, I pinch myself all the time." I mean, telling my stories, writing my stories has enabled me to do amazing things, meet sports stars and movie stars and rock stars and go on two USO tours, an opportunity that would not have been afforded me, had I not been, you know, a writer. And so I'm forever grateful. But yeah, I don't look at you know, Sandra Brown the mom is just mom, believe me, Sandra Brown, the grandmother is just that, you know. And Sandra Brown, the one that goes to work every day is the different one that shows up to make a speech.

Jennifer Prokop 1:10:43 / #
So as we wrap up, though, one question that I think, it's just a reflective question, and you've seen this in advance is, when you think about your body of work, especially romance, since this is a romance podcast, although you're welcome to talk about any one of your books. Do you have a favorite? Do you have a book that you are especially proud of, or that you hope will outlive you?

Sandra Brown 1:11:08 / #
Well, I make, when I'm asked this in a public speech, public arena, I always say my favorite is the one that you're about to buy.

Jennifer Prokop 1:11:23 / #
Great answer.

Sarah MacLean 1:11:24 / #
But let's say you're asked for posterity.

Sandra Brown 1:11:29 / #
I think if, if I hadn't, well, of course, and this is not, I'm not being facetious on this, I was very proud of Blind Tiger. Because it was a, it was a different kind of book, and I hope it has long legs. I hope it, you know, lasts for a long time, I hope that word of mouth will spread, because it is a different kind of story, and it's kind of a yarn, you know, in a way and I want people to read it. I thought there was some very interesting character development in it and social implications in it, and so I'm proud of it. A book that comes around a lot is Envy. People - there's a lot of fan base that say Envy, you know, was one that I really loved. And so I think it might, it might live a longer time. And I think the trilogy will, just because they're so much fun. And they're still wanting an e-book. I can't get them an e-book, and because -

Jennifer Prokop 1:12:41 / #
Oh, yeah! 'Cause we had to order, I had to order paperbacks.

Sarah MacLean 1:12:44 / #
We had to read them in print. Why can't they be an e-book?

Sandra Brown 1:12:47 / #
Well, it's all contractual stuff. I hate that side of it, because, you know, well, I could comment more, but I'm not.

Jennifer Prokop 1:13:02 / #
I'm sure.

Sarah MacLean 1:13:03 / #
That's fine. You can come again, when you're ready.

Sandra Brown 1:13:06 / #
Let's put it this way. As soon as it becomes feasible, I would love to have them available to readers in e-book. Yeah. And I love people that read them. You know, in the whole volume, the one volume, because then they can read it like one thousand page book. Yeah.

Sarah MacLean 1:13:26 / #
I love, I mean, this is such a tiny, tiny thing, but that exclamation point really does a whole lot of work!

Sandra Brown 1:13:33 / #
You know what, I heard you comment on that.

Sarah MacLean 1:13:39 / #
Did you hear me call them sex-clamation points!

Jennifer Prokop 1:13:44 / #
We're teaching you all the good stuff.

Sandra Brown 1:13:47 / #
I may be wrong, but I think you attributed that to the publisher, and that was me! Because I thought when I can't just say "Texas Trilogy" because that doesn't say anything, and so I thought what if I put an exclamation point? And I did and so when I sent the manuscript in -

Sarah MacLean 1:14:08 / #
It's perfect.

Jennifer Prokop 1:14:09 / #
It is.

Sandra Brown 1:14:10 / #
I said now, the exclamation point is part of the title, and it's gonna be on all of the books. So yeah, that was my idea.

Sarah MacLean 1:14:18 / #
We're going to put, I'm going to put a special beginning on the text of that episode to make sure that we get this correct.

Jennifer Prokop 1:14:18 / #
Get it right.

Sarah MacLean 1:14:18 / #
I want to correct the record. Those exclamation points are glorious, and I love them very much.

Sandra Brown 1:14:30 / #
Thank you.

Sarah MacLean 1:14:31 / #
So this is sort of a separate question that I would love for you to answer. But is there anybody lesser known in romance, who, from, you know, who you think, as we're, Jen and I are planning to interview, you know, as many people as we can over the next few years for this kind of a conversation? Is there anybody who you absolutely think we have to talk to? And not just authors.

Sandra Brown 1:14:53 / #
I don't know who you have lined up? I think the contemporaries of mine that I mentioned before, I think Jayne Ann Krentz, because she writes multi-genre, and she does them all extremely well. Nora Roberts, of course.

Jennifer Prokop 1:15:13 / #
We'd love to get Nora Roberts, of course.

Sandra Brown 1:15:16 / #
And Candice Camp, because she has written contemporaries and historicals, and she's been around more than 40 years, and still turning out great books. And so she would be one I would suggest, because they do have that history, you know, they do have that longevity. And recently, not too recently, but someone asked me, "What are you most proud of?" You know, and it can't be your children, and it can't be your long marriage, and it can be anything easy like that, but from a writing standpoint, from your, what, what's the thing you're most proud of? And I said, "My longevity. It's not easy to maintain." And I respect authors, like, you know, like the Dean Koontz's and the Stephen King's, and they were all, they had all just started, you know, when just years, a few years ahead of me. And I read their works as inspiration when I first started out, and, and Dean Koontz is a great plotter. I mean, he just, and he wrote a book on how to write fiction and it became a bible early on. So all of these writers who year after year and decade after decade are still on the bestseller lists. That speaks well of not just their talent, but their work ethic.

Jennifer Prokop 1:16:54 / #
Well, I also think it's nice as a genre reader, to see people I deeply respect becoming more widely respected. I mean, when I was younger, Stephen King was just a horror writer. But now Stephen King is Stephen King.

Sandra Brown 1:17:10 / #
Yeah.

Jennifer Prokop 1:17:10 / #
And I think that there's a way in which, I appreciate deeply, this, the idea that great storytelling and great writing is isn't just found in literary fiction, right? It's found in thrillers and horror and romance, and I think that that's one of the things that's so nice about seeing those people on those lists and seeing that longevity, is there's readers now who read Sandra Brown that wouldn't read, you know, Demon Rumm, and that's too bad, right?

Sandra Brown 1:17:40 / #
Yeah. You're right. You're exactly right. And so I think there is a, sometimes there is a prejudice there, you know, but it speaks well of a storyteller who can come up with that many stories and over a period of decades, I mean, just decades, and remain a marketable commodity to publishing houses. And so I'm proud of that longevity, and it's work. I mean, it's just work, and it speaks not just to, you know, sit and wait to get inspired, you really have to put your butt in the chair, you know, and get your head out of the clouds and put words on paper. That's the only way I know how to do it. There's no other way that I know to write a book except one word at a time. And I had another brilliant thought, now it's left me, but back to the longevity and just working at it, just working at it. I never aspired to do anything except entertain. I don't care if I win prizes, but my books are collecting dust on somebody's bookshelf. I want to be the book they take to the beach, into the bathtub, you know, to bed with them at night, that have the coffee stain, the Coca-Cola stain, the suntan oil, you know, they're frayed from taking on the subway, because, you know, that's the one you don't want to put down. That's the one you're carrying around with you, and that's the one that keeping you engrossed, and so if I entertain my reader than I can go to sleep at night, that I've done my job for the day. That's, that's the one thing that I always set out to do, is entertain my reader. Tell the reader a story.

Sarah MacLean 1:19:43 / #
Well, you have done it very well. Thank you so much for so many years of fabulous books and writing.

Sandra Brown 1:19:52 / #
Thank you. Y'all are so sweet! I'm very honored.

Sarah MacLean 1:19:56 / #
On a personal level, thank you for inspiring, I mean, you are the reason I write romance, so it is a huge honor to talk to you.

Jennifer Prokop 1:20:06 / #
It is an honor.

Sarah MacLean 1:20:07 / #
We just learned that we have, you have imprinted on our on our reading.

Jennifer Prokop 1:20:13 / #
I was trying to be real cool, but when you described you meeting Candace Camp that was me meeting you. It's fine.

Sarah MacLean 1:20:23 / #
Sandra, this was an absolute delight. Thank you so much.

Sandra Brown 1:20:27 / #
Thank you. It was my pleasure.

Sarah MacLean 1:20:31 / #
Man, when that was over, I was like, that's why that's Sandra Brown. That's why she's Sandra Brown. She was the best.

Jennifer Prokop 1:20:42 / #
I'm like not even really making words. I'm surprised I did when we talked to her because I don't think people realize, this was such a formative author.

Sarah MacLean 1:20:53 / #
We were really, I mean, I think longtime listeners will not be surprised to hear that we were very stressed out about doing this right.

Jennifer Prokop 1:21:03 / #
Y'all, we prepared. We prepared so hard for it.

Sarah MacLean 1:21:06 / #
Almost too much. I was a little worried by how much we prepared.

Jennifer Prokop 1:21:08 / #
Yeah.

Sarah MacLean 1:21:09 / #
I was like, uh-oh, what if we lose our mojo? But it was so great. I loved her. I love just how she - I loved her wisdom. I loved that when she, when we asked her about the hallmarks of a Sandra Brown novel -

Jennifer Prokop 1:21:22 / #
She had a list.

Sarah MacLean 1:21:23 / #
She knew exactly what she wanted, what she was. And she knew exactly how Sandra Brown novels feel. And I mean, the second she said, "And they're pretty fearless." I was like, that's it. That's the whole ballgame. And we've talked so much about that over the last three years, not just about her, but about all the books that we've loved.

Jennifer Prokop 1:21:43 / #
Yes.

Sarah MacLean 1:21:43 / #
Just that there's this sense of fearlessness in them, and so it just reminded me that as writers, our work is to swing for the fences, and maybe we clear them and maybe we don't but you swing.

Jennifer Prokop 1:21:57 / #
We're going to talk a lot this year about the history of romance, and you know, The Flame and the Flower was this really important kind of marker. Romance existed before in a lot of different iterations and a lot of different ways, but you know, sort of genre romance. And the thing that I have been thinking a lot about is, the romance reader you are is really formed by your primordial romance texts. And when Sandra Brown talked about what makes us Sandra Brown romance, it was so, this is what is romance is to me.

Sarah MacLean 1:22:37 / #
Yes! Like she unpeeled you, straight to your core.

Jennifer Prokop 1:22:40 / #
Right there, she made me who I was. But I think the other thing that's really interesting is that can be true at the same time that I can see how romance has really changed.

Sarah MacLean 1:22:40 / #
Yeah.

Jennifer Prokop 1:22:52 / #
And so that's the part that I think continues to astound me, is outsiders to romance are kind of like, aren't the books all the same? And I was like, no. Yes and no, right? Yes, there's something that delivers to me every time and hearing Sandra Brown verbalize what she wants to do in her books really made that clear to me, but also, so much has changed.

Sarah MacLean 1:23:18 / #
Yeah. Well, it was interesting because reading Blind Tiger, which is probably 60% mystery/thriller, 40% romance really gave me a feel for it. There were so many moments where I thought, oh, that's Sandra Brown. That's it. This feels, it's a lesson in authorial voice reading that book, you know, 30 years after I read my first Sandra Brown novel, because I can still hear her in it. And then after meeting her, you sort of have this moment where you're like, oh, it all connects in this really cool way. But also, it feels like the romance there is a Sandra Brown romance, not a romance of an author who just started this year, and that is also very cool. I think, the work of what we have talked about, us wanting this season to be, feels like we're really, in that first interview, it just felt like okay, we're starting to see already the long road, and I'm really excited about that.

Jennifer Prokop 1:24:23 / #
I think one other thing I've been thinking a lot about is, I think I've mentioned a couple times here and there, there's a podcast I really enjoyed listening to with my husband called Hit Parade, which is about pop music. And it talks about, sort of opens with, we're going to talk about disco and Donna Summer, but then it traces back all of the people that sort of influenced that music, and then there's sort of a part where it's like, who has Donna Summer influenced, right? That's a really good episode, everybody, by the way. One of the things I was thinking about as we talked to Sandra Brown was Tia Williams. So we interviewed Tia Williams about her book, Seven Days in June -

Sarah MacLean 1:25:03 / #
Last season.

Jennifer Prokop 1:25:03 / #
Last season, but Tia Williams talked about her love of Slow Heat in Heaven and Sandra Brown. And when I thought about it, it made perfect sense, because I could see sort of the influence. And I think that's the part about knowing I mean, you know, my brain's got to be good for something, I guess, is it is really fascinating. We talk about like the romance family tree and sort of how, who influences who. I think that's another thing we are hoping that these Trailblazer episodes can do is really show you the people who, you know, these things are all connected. Every romance has that common DNA, but some people tune in more to some authors than others, and it's really, that was another fascinating thing for me.

Sarah MacLean 1:25:51 / #
What's remarkable to me is how all of these people that we've talked to have been able to name other authors who inspire them, push them, kept them moving, you know, helped them in the early days of their career. And I think that is, when, as I think about this piece of it, I keep coming back to this heroine's journey question that we've talked about so much when we're talking about the actual books, but the heroine's journey is really the journey of a lot of these writers too. Just finding community, in general, writing is such a lonely road, but I don't think any of us in romance or out of it, get anywhere without a community. So it's really wonderful to hear those names spoken.

Jennifer Prokop 1:26:36 / #
Yes. Yeah. So I hope everyone enjoyed this conversation as much as we did.

Sarah MacLean 1:26:42 / #
It was the best.

Jennifer Prokop 1:26:43 / #
There are some - we have a lot of awesome things teed up for you. We have written some - talk about swinging for the fences. If you even knew the emails we've been sending to people.

Sarah MacLean 1:26:54 / #
We're not clearing all the fences, but we sure are trying.

Jennifer Prokop 1:26:56 / #
We're trying. And you know what? I think the other thing that I will try and do in Show Notes is maybe put some of our favorites of these authors. So they're talking, we've asked about their favorites books that they love, but so, Show Notes I hope will be something else.

Sarah MacLean 1:27:15 / #
That's right. I did just have a moment where I was like, should we read Slow Heat in Heaven when we read the Texas! book, but -

Jennifer Prokop 1:27:21 / #
You know what, I did when we read that book.

Sarah MacLean 1:27:24 / #
Did you reread it?

Jennifer Prokop 1:27:25 / #
That's one re-read when we did Sandra Brown, so I will make sure we link to that episode as well.

Sarah MacLean 1:27:31 / #
That's right. Oh, also, how cool was it that she clearly listened to our Sandra Brown episode?

Jennifer Prokop 1:27:36 / #
I don't even want to talk about it.

Sarah MacLean 1:27:37 / #
It was amazing! It was amazing! She had prepped information about our favorite books and honest to god, what a class act.

Jennifer Prokop 1:27:47 / #
Yeah.

Sarah MacLean 1:27:49 / #
Sandra Brown. You're the best. Thank you so much. Come back anytime. And that's that. You've been listening to Fated Mates. I'm Sarah MacLean.

Jennifer Prokop 1:28:02 / #
I'm Jennifer Prokop. You can find us on Instagram @FatedMatespod, on Twitter @FatedMates and in your earholes every week.

Sarah MacLean 1:28:09 / #
Every week at FatedMates.net or on your favorite podcatcher. You can like and follow us on your favorite podcatcher and you won't miss a single episode. We've got a lot cooking for Season Four. Also at FatedMates.net you can buy merch and stickers from Best Friend Kelly and Jordandené. There's also, ooh, you guys, for Season Four there's a Fated Mates tote bag now and a Fated Mates mug, so don't say we never do anything for you. Have a great week. We hope you're reading something great. Next week is an interstitial week. We haven't talked about the trope yet. We're going to do that now.

Jennifer Prokop 1:28:42 / #
We'll figure it out everybody.

Sarah MacLean 1:28:50 / #
We prepped for Sandra Brown and not for next week. So.

Jennifer Prokop 1:28:53 / #
On brand as always.

Sarah MacLean 1:28:42 / #
We'll be there

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S03.07: An Interview with Julie Moody-Freeman from the Black Romance Podcast

Two episodes in one week! We are doing what we can to take care of you, Fated Maters!

This week, we’ve got Julie Moody-Freeman, professor, self-proclaimed romance nerd, and host of the new “Black Romance Podcast” with us! We’re freewheeling about the importance of oral history, Black romance, romance and academia, her life as a romance reader, her favorite books and authors, and her dream interviews. Subscribe to the Black Romance Podcast at Apple, Overcast, Spotify, or your favorite podcasting service.

(The audio on this one isn’t up to our usual standards. Sorry about that. We’ll do better next time. -Eric)

We’re back on our regular Wednesday schedule next week, and with a deep dive on Alisha Rai’s Serving Pleasure, a fantastic erotic romance. Find it at Amazon, B&N, Kobo, Apple Books or Bookshop.org.

Also, we had our first Fated States phonebanking session with Indivisible.org this week — it was great and we loved seeing so many of your amazing faces! Please join us, fellow Fated Maters and special guests for Fated States Phonebanking Part 2 on Saturday, October 3rd at 3pm Eastern to call North Carolina!

Show Notes

This week, we interview Julie Moody-Freeman, a professor of African and Diaspora Studies at DePaul University. She's the host of the Black Romance Podcast. Julie wrote a chatper in the newly released Routledge Companion to Popular Romance Fiction.

The Black Romance Podcast is an oral history podcast which has interviewed some of the greatest voices in Black romance both past and present.

If you're interested readings some books of non-romance oral history, Jen recommends Voices from Chernobyl, Tower Stories, and anything by Studs Terkel. You might also enjoy the podcast Bughouse Square, which pairs interviews from the Studs Terkel Radio Archives and Eve Ewing interviewing poeple today. It's terrific.

The era of the mall bookstore--Waldenbooks and B. Dalton-- is over. But then again, malls might be over.

Vivian Stephens was the woman who revolutionized the American cateogry romance. You should listen to her two-part interview on the Black Romance Podcast, read this terrific profile of her in Texas Monthly, and listen to us read and discuss some of her early aquistions with Steve Ammidown.

Julie teaches a class called Romance, Women, and Race at Depaul. On the reading list: Make it Last Forever by Gwyneth Bolton, Gabriel's Discovery by Felicia Mason, A Duke by Default by Alyssa Cole, Forbidden by Beverly Jenkins, and The Brightest Day Anthology.

Although Season One of the Black Romance Podcast will be coming to a close soon, she listed some of the women she'd love to interview: Shirley Hailstock, Donna Hill, and Rochelle Alers.

Rosalind Wells and Francis Ray are two Black romance trailblazers who are no longer with us.

Next week, we'll be reading Serving Pleasure by Alisha Rai.

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S02.45: Vivian Stephens' Acquisitions with librarian Steve Ammidown

It felt fitting that our final episode of Season 2—during which we celebrated so many of the vintage romances that blooded us—would be with someone we could fully geek out with! We are thrilled to have Steve Ammidown, romance nerd and archivist at the Browne Popular Culture Library at Bowling Green State University, with us today to talk about Vivian Stephens and early category romances. To prepare, all three of us read some of the earliest American category romances, and wow were they a ride! We’re talking women who work, marriage in romance, older heroines, the impact of Vietnam on 1980s romances, and more. Strap in!

We’re on hiatus for the next three weeks, but you’ll hear some great alternative content on Wednesdays — including crossover episodes and interviews we’ve done in other places. Thank you, as always, for listening — we hope you’re having a great (and safe!) summer. While we’re apart, if you are up for leaving a rating or review for the podcast on your podcasting app, we would be very grateful!

Oh, and did you know Sarah has a new book out? Daring & the Duke is officially here! Get it at Amazon, Kobo, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books, Books-a-Million or from your local indie, or order it signed from the wonderful independent bookstore, Savoy Bookshop in RI, where she is through the end of July!

Show Notes

Welcome Steve Ammidown, the Manuscripts & Outreach Archivist at the Browne Popular Culture Library at the Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, Ohio.

Vivian Stephens was one of the original founders of RWA and one of the most important editors in romance. At the Browne Pop Culture library, there is a special Vivian Stephens collection. Vivian was instrumental in bringing category romance to America and created the Candlelight Ecstacy Romance line, which put sex on page in a new way. She also created the Harlequin American line.

Category romances are a particular type of romance novel -- usually shorter and published in specific imprints that indicate the content of the book. Think Harlequin Presents or Loveswept. Now most are published by Harlequin, but there were many lines from many different publishers over the years. Rob Imes has a fabulous list of category romance imprints at his blog.

Vivian recruited a series of authors who changed the face of romance: Jayne Castle/Jayne Ann Krentz, Sandra Brown, and later Beverly Jenkins. Here is an early interview with Vivian about her work and the world of romance.

At the last RITAs ceremony--in the future, it will be the Vivians!-- there was a great video of romance firsts. You should watch it.

Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women was a 90s era collection of romance essays by romance writers to combat a lot of not great academic research on romance.

The late 70s and early 80s were a tumultuous time in American history: the return of Vietnam soldiers, a finacial crisis, and a huge divorce boom.

The mall bookstores, B. Dalton and Waldenbooks, were alive and well in the 80s. The buyers at these bookstores, including Sue Grimshaw, were powerful gatekeepers who had a great amount of power over the romance genre.

Kathryn Falk and Romantic Times and Flavia Kngightsbridge was a famous RT columnist, and at RT conventions there was something called the Mr. Romance Competition, and everyone who has ever seen it is like...whoa.

Marisa de Zavala, whose real name is Celina Mullan, also wrote as Ana Lisa de Leon and Rachel Scott. See more about Marisa on this great thread about her from Alexis Daria!

Entwined Destinies was one of the first category romances with Black characters by a Black author, Elsie Washington writing as Rosalind Welles. Although it's very difficult to find a copy of Entwined Destinies, but BGSU has a great photograph of Vivian and Elsie together.

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