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S07.04: Trailblazer Meg Cabot

We are so thrilled to have thee Meg Cabot with us, one of the original queens of YA romance. We talk about her longstanding writing career, about the authors who inspired her, about her early historical romances, written as Patricia Cabot, about her pivot into young adult romance and the power of the subgenre, about her own love story, and, of course, about The Princess Diaries of it all. It will surprise absolutely no one that Meg is a delight as a guest--we're so grateful for her time and her insight, and she's welcome back any time.

If you also love romance, maybe you want to join our Patreon, where you get another episode from us each month, and access to the incredible readers and listeners and brilliant people on the Fated Mates discord! Support us and learn more at fatedmates.net/patreon.

Our first read along of Season 7 will be Molly O'Keefe's Everything I Left Unsaid duology, selected by Jen which despite the first book being a cliffhanger should not surprise you because she contains multitudes. The second book is The Truth About Him. Read them both and get ready for Jen to talk to you for hours. You will thank us.

Also! We're back on the phonebanking train this election season! Join us Saturdays between now and Election Day to phonebank with fellow romance lovers. Jen & Sarah are joined by special guests who will knock your socks off! Learn more and register at fatedmates.net/fatedstates. If phonebanking isn't your thing, we're also raising money for downticket house and senate races, because state legislatures may not be sexy, but they sure hold all the power. Learn more, and give what you can at fatedmates.net/givingcircle.

Looking for Sarah's Conflict Writing class? It starts this Sunday--find it right here.

Show Notes

 

Books Mentioned This Episode

The Sponsors

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S06:41: The Devil of Downtown (Yeah, He Is) by Joanna Shupe

We are talking about a full on banger this week — Joanna Shupe’s The Devil of Downtown, which is Sarah’s favorite of the Uptown Girls series (Jen is a The Prince of Broadway fan, but honestly, all three are basically perfect). We love this one so much, you’re about to get an hour or so of squeeing and sighing — Jack Mulligan is everything you could possibly want in a romance hero, Justine Greene is the do goodingest do gooder who ever was, and the way they adore each other is enough to wreck you. If you haven’t read this one yet, do yourself a favor and go read the whole series right now…Joanna Shupe proves that historical romance is everything you want.

If you wish you had six more days in a week of people talking about romance, may we suggest joining our Patreon? Aside from an additional episode every month you get access to our Discord, where 1000 other romance readers are talking about books they love (and many other things!) all the time. It’s so fun! Learn more about the Patreon and go join those cool people who love romance as much as we do at patreon.com/fatedmates.

Show Notes

The Uptown Girls Series

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Dr. Melissa Dymond, author of Paging Dr. Hart,
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Pocket Books Shop in Lancaster, PA
Check out their new $40 Swoony Subscription Box for a monthly delivery of brand new, hand-selected romance novels and access to a discussion Discord. July’s box includes
TRIPLE SEC by TJ Alexander, 
FOR REAL by Alexis Hall, and
A LIAISON WITH HER LEADING LADY by Lotte R. James

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S06.39: Summer 2024 Reads

School’s out for Jen’s summer and Sarah’s in the final stretch so we’re dreaming of romance beach reads and talking about our massive summer TBR piles! There’s something here for everyone — hot librarians, superheroes, heists, funeral homes, wedding planners and baseball players and F1 drivers and, of course, dukes.

Our next read along is Joanna Shupe’s The Devil of Downtown, from her Uptown Girls trilogy. It’s Jen’s favorite in the series. Get it at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Apple or your local indie.

If you love a fire hose of romance recommendations, may we suggest joining our Patreon? Aside from an additional episode every month you get access to our Discord, where 1000 other romance readers are talking about books they love (and many other things!) all the time. It’s so fun! Learn more about the Patreon and go join those cool people who love romance as much as we do at patreon.com/fatedmates.

Show Notes

Maybe men shouldn’t cover the WNBA, tbh. 

All about The electric slide.

You can follow DodoTheBookBitch on Instagram; follow Sarah there to see the scratch-off TBR poster. 

Jacque is one our romancelandia faves, and she has a Pride reading challenge for you all. RomanticallyInclined is on Threads reading books with fewer than 100 reviews all through June.  

For reviews in advance of publication, your best bet is Kirkus (Jen reviews for them), but you can also try Booklist or Publisher’s Weekly. We also talked about NetGalley and Edelweiss to discover upcoming books.

If you’re in NYC, don’t miss the launch event for Liana de la Rosa’s Isabel and the Rogue next week! She’ll be at The Ripped Bodice with Sarah and Adriana Herrera…and Sophie Jordan will be there, too! Tickets and info here.

Books Mentioned This Episode

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Blue Box Press, publishers of Lexi Blake’s My Royal Showmance
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Lotte R James, author of A Liaison with Her Leading Lady,
available at in print, ebook, or audiobook from
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Ava Miles, author of A Very Un-Shakespeare Romance,
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S06.35: All About Dukes (in Romance)

This one is for our historical lovers! We’re talking about everyone’s favorite title — Dukes! We get to the bottom of many duke questions, including: Why so many? Why are they always dukes? What’s wrong with princes? How do these guys make their money anyway? What’s with all the normies inheriting dukedoms? What about duchesses? And more! Please remember that everything we are about to say is romance fact. Don’t @ us with real life fact. We don’t want it.

Happy anniversary to our founding Patreon members — it’s one year of our Patreon and our Discord today! We love you a whole lot. Learn more about the Patreon and go join those cool people who love romance as much as we do at patreon.com/fatedmates.

Show Notes

The tree thing about pollen and allergens is called botanical sexism (god it’s everywhere) and this claim, like all things, is complicated. 

Defining the title of duke.  What are the corn laws or the laws about chimney sweeps? You don’t really care—it’s just fossils. 

The Reformed Rakes podcast had a recent episode about pregnancy.

The Unites States Congress is comprised of incredibly wealthy people. 

In 2009, Tatler got 10 of the 24 living non-royal dukes to sit down for lunch. There’s a photo. It’s exactly what you would expect. This 2021 article from Tatler lists the 4 living single dudes that either are or will be a duke. Shoot your shot, ladies.

Question: has Sarah really written more dukes than fewer?
A Duke: Eleven Scandals to Start to Win a Duke’s Heart, No Good Duke Goes Unpunished, The Rogue Not Taken, A Scot in the Dark, The Day of the Duchess, Daring and the Duke, Heartbreaker, The Duke of Christmas Present, and A Duke Worth Falling For (9)

Not a Duke: Nine Rules to Break When Romancing a Rake, Ten Ways to be Adored When Landing a Lord, A Rogue by Any Other Name, One Good Earl Deserves a Lover, Never Judge a Lady by Her Cover, Wicked and the Wallflower, Brazen and the Beast, Bombshell, and Knockout (9)

Books Mentioned this Episode

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Louisa Darling, author of
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S05.31: Stealing Midnight by Tracy MacNish: A+ Fresh

Finally, the read along we’ve been promising! We’re so excited to talk about Tracy MacNish’s Stealing Midnight, a gothic romance from 2008 that delivers what we here at the pod like to refer to as “the full banana.” We talk about bodysnatchers, about science, about dukes in disguise, about twins, and about why historical romance is unmatched. If you know Tracy MacNish, please tell her we love her book, and we’d really appreciate it if she’d write that second one.

Thank you, as always, for listening! Please follow us on your favorite podcasting app, and if you are up for leaving a rating or review there, we would be very grateful.

Show Notes

 

Books Mentioned This Episode

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Liza Snow, author of Obedience
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S05.22: K.J. Charles: Trailblazer

Today, we’re welcoming KJ Charles to Fated Mates for our next Trailblazer episode! Known for her work helping to bring queer historical romance to the modern genre, KJ joins us to discuss historical romance, how it remains relevant in the modern world, her work centering queer characters and communities in romance, and the start of her romance career as an editor of Mills & Boon medical romances. We also talk about the arc of her career through early small press publishing, indie publishing, and now, as a traditionally published author.

We hope you enjoy this conversation as much as we did, and we are so grateful to KJ Charles for joining us.

Transcript

Thanks to Kylie Scott, author of End of Story, and Lumi Labs, creators of Microdose Gummies, for sponsoring the episode. Visit microdose.com and use the code FATEDMATES for 30% off and free shipping on your first order.

Show Notes

K.J. Charles is a RITA nominated author of over 25 historical romance novels. You can preorder her upcoming novel, The Secret Lives of Country Gentlemen, which will be released on March 7, 2023. KJ worked as an editor at Mills and Boon, and her blog is an excellent source for romance readers and writers.

If you're looking for the "romance with a body count" infographics, click here.

Authors mentioned: Mills & Boon author Alison Roberts, Mills & Boon author Marion Lennox, author Jordan L. Hawk, author Alexis Hall, author Talia Hibbert, author May Peterson, author Jackie Lau, author EE Ottoman, author Penny Aimes, author Kris Ripper, author Jadesola James, author Therese Beharrie, author Jeannie Lin, editor Anne Scott.

Don’t miss our Band Sinister episode from last December.

 

Books Mentioned This Episode

Sponsors

Kylie Scott, author of End of Story
Get it at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books,
Kobo or at your local indie bookstore
visit Kylie Scott at kyliescott.com

and

Lumi Labs, creators of Microdose Gummies
Visit microdose.com and use the code FATEDMATES
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TRANSCRIPT

KJ Charles 00:00:00 / #:
There's historical romance that just have only the vaguest relationship to the actual history of Britain. There's historical romance that gets really down and dirty, intimate, and where the author has really delved into it. And although I prefer the second kind, but I don't think the first kind should be dismissed, because it is doing something else. I don't think every historical romance needs to go, "But there was only 28 Dukes, and most of them had syphilis and no teeth, and everyone's got lice." I don't want to read books where everyone's got lice. If I want lice, I'll have young children again.

00:00:34 / #:
I would rather read a book where they just sort of throw their hands up and just go, okay, we're Heyer-ing the hell out of this. Because actually, Georgette Heyer, although she did loads of research and everything, when she actually did the bits that are really historically grounded, which is to say An Infamous Army and the other... But they're awful. They're so boring. They're dreadful. Nobody reads them. Nobody wants to read them.

00:00:54 / #:
The sort of glittery, ball-y, wonderful, romance-y ones, we love them. And it is good that people do that. And I think there is space for both. This is actually something I'm struggling with at the moment, because, like a fool, I've been trying to write a duke book. Fundamentally, my problem is, and this really does cut quite deep into the fact that I write historical romance, is that I sort of feel like the entire aristocracy should have been executed.

Sarah MacLean 00:01:22 / #:
That was the voice of KJ Charles, an author who helped establish a place for queer historical romance in the modern genre. Writing, as she describes her work, "Heyer, but gayer." In this trailblazer episode, we talk about KJ's writing, about the way she views the historical romance genre, about building communities of queer people on page, and about her work as a romance editor back in the day for Mills & Boon.

00:01:49 / #:
You are listening to Fated Mates. I'm Sarah MacLean. I read romance novels and I write them.

Jennifer Prokop 00:01:54 / #:
And I'm Jennifer Prokop, a romance reader and editor. Although I might not want to call myself that today because KJ Charles was a real romance editor, and I'm just going to be like, okay, well, I-

Sarah MacLean 00:02:04 / #:
Listen, you just have 19 more years to go.

Jennifer Prokop 00:02:09 / #:
Hire me, Mills & Boon, so I can feel real.

Sarah MacLean 00:02:11 / #:
Oh, my God, imagine. What a good job. What a fun job.

Jennifer Prokop 00:02:16 / #:
Just editing presents all the time.

Sarah MacLean 00:02:18 / #:
The dream.

Jennifer Prokop 00:02:20 / #:
The literal dream. Yes.

Sarah MacLean 00:02:21 / #:
Anyway, but before we get there, we have something else. We have a little housekeeping for everyone. In case you didn't download our quick six-minute episode last week, Fated Mates Live is happening in person in Brooklyn, New York.

Jennifer Prokop 00:02:37 / #:
The best borough of New York City, obviously.

Sarah MacLean 00:02:41 / #:
March 24th at 7:00 PM. We suggest you call up all your romance loving friends and make a weekend of it. The 24th is a Friday. March is a great time to come to New York City because it's maybe a little gray but not super cold, and it'll be very fun. You can go to a museum, you can go to a show, you can come see us. The tickets include a gift certificate to the romance book table sponsored by WORD bookstores in Brooklyn. There will be a bar, there will be lots of other Fated Mates listeners to make friends with. And Jen, and me, and a really delightful spate of special guests, many of whom you all know already.

Jennifer Prokop 00:03:25 / #:
It's been really exciting to see people on Instagram and Twitter talking about getting their friends together and buying tickets, and arranging to come into the city for the weekend.

Sarah MacLean 00:03:35 / #:
Put on a mask, get on an airplane or a train, and come see us. Fatedmates.net/live

Jennifer Prokop 00:03:42 / #:
And now that, that's off the table. Without further ado, here is our conversation with KJ Charles.

Sarah MacLean 00:03:51 / #:
Well, thank you so much for joining us. I'm so excited. I don't think we've ever met.

KJ Charles 00:03:56 / #:
Not in person. I think we've been on panels, but this is a proper face to face, so that's nice.

Sarah MacLean 00:04:02 / #:
It's great. It's nice to meet you. It's nice to see your face.

KJ Charles 00:04:06 / #:
Yes, you too.

Jennifer Prokop 00:04:07 / #:
So everybody, as we've mentioned, I'm really excited about our conversation today because I have also hosted a few panels with KJ, and I love listening to you talk about romance. And I'm really excited because you were also an editor, which is a personal interest to me. Not that it's about me, everybody. So we are really excited to have you today on as a trailblazer. And really, one of our first questions, just because we love hearing about it, is, what was your journey to romance?

KJ Charles 00:04:38 / #:
Well, my mother had a complete set of Georgette Heyer's, which is basically, you know-

Sarah MacLean 00:04:43 / #:
That'll do it.

KJ Charles 00:04:44 / #:
Yeah, I'm an immensely fast reader and a voracious one, and I always have been. One of those kids who just sat in the library all summer, and I read extremely quickly. So I was planning to read all of my parents books. They had to remove all the inappropriate ones from the shelves, kind of thing. And so yes, I'd read through the entirety of Georgette Heyer, and obviously formative. I was thinking about it and, basically, Cotillion and These Old Shades pretty much sum up the two strands of my writing. In Cotillion, you've got Freddy, who is this wonderfully... Yeah, not too bright, wonderful, generous hearts, immensely kind, and also the superpower of really, really good manners to be deployed accurately. And then you've got Avon in These Old Shades, who's basically just a completing amoral son of a so-and-so. So yeah. And those two basically sum up most of my writing. Although, I was also reflecting that Georgette Heyer, or her era, and with the proviso of the kind of person she was and the many prejudices she had. But there's an awful lot of queerness in Georgette Heyer's historical romances.

00:05:56 / #:
In The Reluctant Widow, the actual hero, who isn't the guy who marries the heroine, is very, very heavily queer-coded. In the Corinthian, you've got the heroine who is masquerading as a boy, and the fact that the bad guy effectively hints that he's going to blackmail the hero for having taken off the boy in private, et cetera, et cetera. So there's very strong awareness of non-conventional sexuality. And then The Masquerades is just the most ridiculous cross-dressing, gender-bending. So there's a lot of that in Heyer. So yeah, it's [inaudible 00:06:31 / #], definitely. And then I kind of didn't follow up my intro. I was more of a fantasy reader, to be honest. But when I was, gosh, about 28 or so, I got a job at Mills & Boon. Which to be honest, I took because I was working at an absolute disastrous company for a lunatic, and I needed to get out of there, and Mills & Boon happened to be advertising.

Sarah MacLean 00:06:55 / #:
Take the rope that comes.

KJ Charles 00:06:57 / #:
It was very much take the rope that comes. I wanted a job that would mean not having to go into that snake pit, and they wanted an editor. And I stayed there for years. And everything I learned about editing really came from there.

Sarah MacLean 00:07:11 / #:
When you started at Mills & Boon, aside from Heyer, did you have any frame of reference for what was going on in romance?

KJ Charles 00:07:19 / #:
Not really, no. I hadn't been reading any romance at all. Well, the thing is, because of being an editor, I actually mostly concentrated on reading what I was working on. So when I worked at a travel guide company, I would be reading non-fiction, or fiction, but set in the country for the travel guide I was working on. And then I moved to a house that was doing politics and history, which I read an awful thought of that. So I wasn't actually reading romance at that time. So Mills & Boon came as a complete change of track, but it was just so much more fun. So much more fun.

Sarah MacLean 00:07:58 / #:
What did you begin with at Mills & Boon?

KJ Charles 00:08:00 / #:
They plunge you right into it. Basically, I was on the medical team, the medical romance team.

Sarah MacLean 00:08:06 / #:
And we haven't talked a ton about medical romances on the podcast.

KJ Charles 00:08:10 / #:
Oh see, I love that.

Sarah MacLean 00:08:12 / #:
It's a very English world, the medical romance.

KJ Charles 00:08:15 / #:
A lot of our top authors were Australians.

Jennifer Prokop 00:08:18 / #:
They seem Australian to me more than-

KJ Charles 00:08:19 / #:
Yeah. Well no, it pretty much divided English, Australia. I can't, offhand, think of an American, in fact.

Sarah MacLean 00:08:24 / #:
I did not grow up with medical Romances. And, I mean, I read all of them.

KJ Charles 00:08:29 / #:
They were not the big one, but it was a good team. I like working on it.

Jennifer Prokop 00:08:35 / #:
Listen, Sarah, we grew up with George Clooney on ER though.

Sarah MacLean 00:08:38 / #:
I know.

KJ Charles 00:08:38 / #:
Well, yeah.

Sarah MacLean 00:08:40 / #:
I mean, that's not to say that I don't love a doctor romance, and that's a separate episode.

KJ Charles 00:08:44 / #:
But we had some fabulous... So we had Alison Roberts, who was actually a paramedic, who wrote such exciting story, really exciting. She did one, which is set, there was a big earthquake and then there were full stories set round. It was a wonderful sort of linked series, all starting from the earthquake. Terrific. So good to work on. And she did another trilogy that basically tracked over the progress of one person's pregnancy, for which I had to do the worst Excel spreadsheet in the world. We had to make sure, these three books, every single incident all tracked this one pregnancy. Ah, well, shoot me. But it had Marion Lennox as well, who is a wonderful one. She divided between what we called, we called it tender romance then, which I think is just... What do you call it? harlequin romance?

Jennifer Prokop 00:09:26 / #:
Heartwarming?

KJ Charles 00:09:27 / #:
Yeah, it was just harlequin romance.

Jennifer Prokop 00:09:28 / #:
Just harlequin romance.

KJ Charles 00:09:29 / #:
Yeah. Opposed to harlequin presents. They've probably changed the name about 15 times since then. But Marion Lennox, she was one of my favorite authors to work with. But she wrote the... And this has become kind of quite formative for me because it was a book of hers, I actually looked it up yesterday, it's called Bushfire Bride. And it's one of those, the heroine's got a husband who is in a coma, and has been in a coma for eight years. And there's a sequence where she basically says goodbye to him. And yeah, I'm literally editing this manuscript-

Jennifer Prokop 00:09:58 / #:
I'm crying already.

KJ Charles 00:09:59 / #:
Well, this is back in the day when you edited by hand. You literally had a printout and you made the edits by hand to be input by the copy editor, because that's how old I am.

Sarah MacLean 00:10:09 / #:
Me too.

KJ Charles 00:10:10 / #:
I was literally crying so hard while I was reading this, that the copy editor was like, "You're going to have to redo this page."

Jennifer Prokop 00:10:19 / #:
Your tear stained pages.

KJ Charles 00:10:20 / #:
Literally tear stained. I mean, God, she absolutely [inaudible 00:10:23 / #]. I can't. In fact, I didn't have to look it up too much. I was thinking, what was that book called? And Bushfire Bride came into my head. And that was 20 years ago, easy 20 years ago. Amazing. So yeah, that was it. But it was formative because I delved a lot. We did a lot of books. The turnover there was absolutely crazy. Although I was mainly on medical team, everyone worked across all four. So this historical, harlequin presents, medical, and tender. That's right. So you worked across them and you got given... And if an editor or author got absolutely sick of one another, you might get them switched in.

00:11:06 / #:
Plus, I was very fast. So people tended to give me an extra manuscript when there was a panic on, which there almost always was.

Jennifer Prokop 00:11:12 / #:
Sure.

KJ Charles 00:11:12 / #:
Well, you couldn't have a book come in late, because of the nature of the publishing. And then if everything did fall apart, you had to delve into the slush pile and actually pull out a finished manuscript, and find out a way to make it publishable within the next week.

Sarah MacLean 00:11:26 / #:
Amazing.

KJ Charles 00:11:28 / #:
Well, you learn to edit. I tell you what, you learn to edit like that, it's the most fantastic grounding and structural editing. Because you have to be able to pretty much look at the slush pot manuscript and say, "Okay, it's got totally good bones, the writing's a bit junky, but if the author will agree to basically let me do a really massive edit on it, this will work." Or alternatively, "This isn't working at all, but here is a thing that I can tell the author to do. And if they do it, that will work." But you've got to be able to pretty much x-ray the book, and look at the structure, and identify what will work and what won't.

Sarah MacLean 00:12:02 / #:
Well, especially because in category there's no flab. I mean, you don't have any space to mess up.

Jennifer Prokop 00:12:10 / #:
It's all bones and muscle. Yeah.

KJ Charles 00:12:11 / #:
Yeah. It's really something. There was weeks when I did six manuscripts in a week, kind of thing, which is insane. But like I said, if you were publishing eight presents in a month, you can't publish seven presents. It doesn't work like that.

Sarah MacLean 00:12:27 / #:
Right.

KJ Charles 00:12:28 / #:
You have to deliver eight presents.

Sarah MacLean 00:12:30 / #:
People have signed up for their box. Right.

KJ Charles 00:12:32 / #:
Well, yeah, exactly. It's completely nonnegotiable. So I honestly think I couldn't have had a better training in fiction editorial. Because it was so fast and so relentless, and you had to be really super practical.

Sarah MacLean 00:12:47 / #:
So at what point during that process did you think, "I'm going to start doing this myself?" Is that how it went?

KJ Charles 00:12:57 / #:
So when I was there... Well, see, I didn't really. I've always had it vaguely in mind that it would be nice to write, or indeed to have written a book. When I was there, they very kindly let me go off for four months and work from home in Japan. And this is, as I said, 20 odd years ago. So that was a really pretty advanced thing for them to do. My husband, my then boyfriend, was doing stuff in Japan, and we lived there for four months. So I did use some of my free time to start writing then, but it wasn't a romance. I wrote a fantasy novel, which has never been published, nor should it be. And then I wrote a thriller, which was picked up by Samhian, and sold about 12 copies, properly, deservedly. But it didn't occur to me to write a romance at all. I mean, it just never... Partly, I think, actually trying to write romance while you are working at Mills & Boon might actually be a really, you really bad idea.

00:13:54 / #:
Your head might explode. Yeah, I couldn't recommend that, I don't think. So it was quite a long time, actually, after I had left. And then I got married about a year later. And then about a year after that I had a baby. And I started writing when the baby was quite small, because you're trying to stay sane. It was supposed to be a fantasy novel. But at that point, with all the years I'd worked with Mills & Boon, basically, romance had coded... My neural pathways are like valleys. My neural pathways are carved so deeply into my brain. But it just turned into a romance. And that was The Magpie Lord, which was my first published book, my first romance. And once I just leaned into it, it just felt like the most natural thing in the world to do it. So there we are.

Jennifer Prokop 00:14:51 / #:
It sounds like you mostly edited contemporary romance. So what was the draw for you to historical romance or queer romance? Did one of those come first in your brain in terms of the kind of story you wanted to write?

KJ Charles 00:15:04 / #:
I'm always more interested in historical. The thriller that I wrote was an attempt at contemporary, and I hated everything about it. Because I'd live under a rock, I don't like modern technology, and it dates so badly, so quickly. And mobile phones ruin everything, because you set up this whole drama, and all [inaudible 00:15:26 / #] just phone up and go, "Oh yeah, this is what's going on." And you've ruined everything. And then you've got to find a reason for them not to have a mobile. So yeah, historical, obviously where it's at. And also, I like the differences. I like doing the research, and I like writing about different times and different people in different places. The similarities and differences are just much more interesting to me. So although I didn't read many, I didn't edit, rather, many historicals at Mills & Boon, because we only did four a month, and they had a historicals team. So I had one or two authors. But no, it's always been what I wanted to write. And the other thing is I'm very pulp focused. A lot of what I write is sort of riffing off the pulp of the Victorian, and Edwardian, and sort of 1920s period, because I just really enjoy that. And I enjoy picking that up, and running with this, and messing about with it. And often, queering it, because as anyone who plays with Victorian to 20th century pulp will tell you, it's just absolutely ripe for that. There's a fun, it's fun. Yeah.

Jennifer Prokop 00:16:37 / #:
Gosh, it's so fun. I feel like that's the thing I really love about your books. There was one, and I'm terrible with titles, where he was a taxidermist. Is that right?

KJ Charles 00:16:50 / #:
Yes. An Unseen Attraction.

Jennifer Prokop 00:16:52 / #:
Yes. And I was seriously like, "Why am I really interested in this right now? Why is this such a great time?"

KJ Charles 00:16:58 / #:
I loved doing that though. It wasn't actually what it was meant to be. I pitched the publisher something completely different, but then I couldn't write the thing I pitched to the publisher, it turned out to be a terrible idea. And I can't even remember now why taxidermist struck me as a good idea. It's one of the most fun books I've ever read. I did this deep dive into Victorian taxidermy. I've got the most extraordinary books on my bookshelf. But I had a whole sequence where he actually taxidermy's a canary just because it was so fascinating to me. I was about inches, literally inches, from going and finding someone who would teach me to do it myself.

Sarah MacLean 00:17:33 / #:
Well, that's the best part, that you can convince yourself. I always feel like writing historical also gives you... It's really best for procrastinators, because then we can sort of go off and convince ourselves that learning how to taxiderm is actually work.

KJ Charles 00:17:47 / #:
It's totally what you should be doing.

Jennifer Prokop 00:17:49 / #:
You had to learn to pick a lock to write that book, Sarah.

Sarah MacLean 00:17:51 / #:
I learned to pick a lock to write a lock pick.

KJ Charles 00:17:53 / #:
That's so cool.

Sarah MacLean 00:17:53 / #:
I mean, it did become very useful when I had to open my mother's cheap safe.

KJ Charles 00:17:58 / #:
Okay, that's fantastic.

Sarah MacLean 00:17:59 / #:
And I'd never felt more powerful.

00:18:05 / #:
This week's episode of Fated Mates is sponsored by Kylie Scott, author of End of Story, a new book out this week.

Jennifer Prokop 00:18:12 / #:
We love Kylie Scott here at Fated Mates, and this one sounds like a banger.

Sarah MacLean 00:18:17 / #:
Ugh. She's so great.

Jennifer Prokop 00:18:19 / #:
So here's the story. Susie Bowen inherits a charming fixer up from her aunt. And so she is really excited. She's going to do the whole HGTV scene and revamp the whole thing.

Sarah MacLean 00:18:30 / #:
Perfect.

Jennifer Prokop 00:18:31 / #:
The book starts with a knock on her door. Her contractor has arrived and-

Sarah MacLean 00:18:35 / #:
Is he hot?

Jennifer Prokop 00:18:37 / #:
He's hot. His name's Lars. That's real hot. Unfortunately, Lars is her ex's best friend. And her ex is a real dirt bag. And Lars saw their whole humiliating, public breakup. And Susie just is like, oh God.

Sarah MacLean 00:18:53 / #:
No. What am I going to do?

Jennifer Prokop 00:18:55 / #:
This is awful.

Sarah MacLean 00:18:55 / #:
But she needs a contractor.

Jennifer Prokop 00:18:57 / #:
She does. And Lars is available, thank goodness. So I think she's just going to have to lean into it.

Sarah MacLean 00:19:02 / #:
Even if it's pity contracting.

Jennifer Prokop 00:19:04 / #:
It's fine, whatever. Here's the part that's great. He is tearing down some wall, and they find a divorce certificate hidden in the wall that is dated 10 years in the future and has both of their names.

Sarah MacLean 00:19:19 / #:
What?

Jennifer Prokop 00:19:20 / #:
Right. What's going to happen?

Sarah MacLean 00:19:21 / #:
Wait, why? What?

Jennifer Prokop 00:19:23 / #:
You, and Lars, and Susie are going to have to discover it all together by downloading and reading this book.

Sarah MacLean 00:19:29 / #:
I mean, as though I wasn't going to download and read this book anyway.

Jennifer Prokop 00:19:32 / #:
Of course.

Sarah MacLean 00:19:33 / #:
No matter what it was about. Because Kylie's amazing. But this is such a cool idea. I'm going to read it immediately.

Jennifer Prokop 00:19:39 / #:
Exactly. Have a great time, everybody. You can find End of Story anywhere eBooks are sold, in audio or in print.

Sarah MacLean 00:19:46 / #:
Thanks to Kylie for sponsoring the episode.

00:19:51 / #:
One of the things that Jen and I have been talking about a lot recently, there's a woman who is on TikTok and also Twitter, and her handle is baskinsuns. And she's been talking a lot about how, in her mind, historical is really more like speculative fiction than it is...

Jennifer Prokop 00:20:11 / #:
Historical fiction.

Sarah MacLean 00:20:12 / #:
Historical fiction. Historical romance is more like speculative fiction than historical romance is like historical fiction. And I think this is a really fascinating way of thinking about the genre. And I wonder how that strikes you.

KJ Charles 00:20:25 / #:
I think there's very definitely strands of it. I mean, you've got the Bridgerton, the TV series, for example.

Sarah MacLean 00:20:33 / #:
Right.

KJ Charles 00:20:35 / #:
But I mean, why not? Well, okay, actually, we could debate this one for hours, and people already have. So I'm not going to go into that. But on the face of it, you could look at that and literally just go, okay, this is a fantasy version where a large number of the aristocracy are people with color, and why should you not do that? Why is that not a good thing to do? Then there's historical romance that just does have only the vaguest relationship to the actual history of Britain. And there's historical romance that gets really down and dirty, intimate, and where the author has really delved into it.

00:21:16 / #:
And although I prefer the second kind, but I don't think the first kind should be dismissed, because it is doing something else. But maybe looking at the historical fantasy without magic would almost resolve that argument. If you see what I mean. Because it is trying to do something else. I don't think every historical romance needs to go, "But there was only 28 Dukes, and most of them had syphilis and no teeth, and everyone's got lice." I don't want to read books where everyone's got lice. If I want lice, I'll have young children again.

Jennifer Prokop 00:21:49 / #:
Yeah, I don't want to read any books where there's any lice, actually.

KJ Charles 00:21:52 / #:
Exactly. I would rather read a book where they just sort of throw their hands up and just go, okay, we're Heyer-ing the hell out of this. Because actually, Georgette Heyer, although she did loads of research and everything, when she actually did the bits that are really historically grounded, which is to say An Infamous Army and the other... They're awful. They're so boring. They're dreadful. Nobody reads them. Nobody wants to read them.

Sarah MacLean 00:22:13 / #:
No. It's much more fun to read her making things up.

KJ Charles 00:22:15 / #:
Yeah. Well, the sort of glittery, ball-y, wonderful, romanc-y ones, we love them. And it is good that people do that. I suspect that's kind of what that person might have been getting at, or at least, that's how I feel about it. And I think there is space for both, very definitely. But this is actually something I'm struggling with at the moment, because, like fool, I've been trying to write a duke book. And my problem with the duke book... I mean, fundamentally, my problem is, and this really does cut quite deep into the fact that I write historical romance, is that I sort of feel like the entire aristocracy should have been executed. Usually, I sort of hand wave this one. And then I started writing a duke, and I've got 60,000 words, and I'm just sitting there going, "You haven't got any problems that cannot be solved by your money, which you have."

Sarah MacLean 00:23:11 / #:
Exactly.

KJ Charles 00:23:11 / #:
I hate it.

Sarah MacLean 00:23:12 / #:
Money, power, title. Exactly.

KJ Charles 00:23:14 / #:
Yeah. I mean, seriously, you don't have any problems. So I have not in fact squared that circle yet. And if I've wasted 60,000 words, I'm going to be banging my head against a wall. But currently, I feel like I've wasted 60,000 words, because I cannot, for the life of me...

Sarah MacLean 00:23:29 / #:
It's poor little rich boy, right?

KJ Charles 00:23:31 / #:
It is. And that's not...

Sarah MacLean 00:23:32 / #:
[inaudible 00:23:32 / #].

KJ Charles 00:23:32 / #:
It's something I struggle with. No.

Jennifer Prokop 00:23:35 / #:
And that's not your brand.

Sarah MacLean 00:23:36 / #:
He didn't like his dad, KJ.

KJ Charles 00:23:40 / #:
Yeah. And the things that could be a problem... Oh, anyway, I won't bore you with my struggles, because I'm boring myself with my struggles. But it's a real problem for me.

Sarah MacLean 00:23:48 / #:
It's interesting that you bring this up, because I actually think this is a push-pull that's happening. This did not happen in historical romance 20 years ago. Nobody worried about this.

Jennifer Prokop 00:23:58 / #:
Even 10 years ago.

Sarah MacLean 00:23:59 / #:
Or even 10 years ago. But now, those of us... I mean, I've written a thousand dukes. And you can see it in my writing, that I've gone from poor little rich boy to now it's time to burn down the dukedom entirely. Right? Let's set it on fire.

KJ Charles 00:24:14 / #:
It's really hard not to, isn't it?

Sarah MacLean 00:24:16 / #:
Yeah, I don't do it anymore.

KJ Charles 00:24:18 / #:
Exactly. And because apart from [inaudible 00:24:21 / #], I don't know about you, but how often do you just sit there and think, "So where does this guy's money come from?"

Sarah MacLean 00:24:25 / #:
Oh, well, yeah. And what's interesting is in the eighties or nineties, you could wave it away. He has plantations, but he pays his workers.

KJ Charles 00:24:34 / #:
Or you don't even mention the plantation, he's just rich.

Sarah MacLean 00:24:37 / #:
Right.

KJ Charles 00:24:37 / #:
Okay. It's fine. He's rich, he's got land. We don't talk about the English people working for him, still less, anyone outside... Make it Victorian, and how much of his money is coming from empire, which is say colonialism, say theft.

Sarah MacLean 00:24:51 / #:
Yeah. And there are only so many times that you can sort of accept, well, this one got his title when he was 35 because he did something good.

KJ Charles 00:25:04 / #:
And if they do that, and steal money, where does that come from?

Sarah MacLean 00:25:07 / #:
It's probably in a war. There's a lot. It's hard.

KJ Charles 00:25:11 / #:
There is a lot. Yeah. No, there is a lot.

Sarah MacLean 00:25:14 / #:
Which is why there's something to this. Like you said, historical fantasy, but no magic. Because it does feel like, in a lot of ways, the work that these books are doing, the social work that these books are doing is not about... Obviously, it's very difficult to handle where did the power come from, where did the money come from. But in many cases, in your books especially, the work of your books is very important, currently. For the world that we live in now, for 2023. And I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that, about how you think about the job, the work of the books in a world where, right now, queer people and books about queer people are under attack across the United States and around...

00:26:03 / #:
... and books about queer people are under attack across the United States and around the world. So how do you reconcile the work with the world, I guess, is the question?

KJ Charles 00:26:10 / #:
Oh, Lordy.

Sarah MacLean 00:26:13 / #:
I'm asking for a friend who is me.

KJ Charles 00:26:18 / #:
Do you mean in the sense of the guiding principles, as it were?

Sarah MacLean 00:26:24 / #:
Yeah.

KJ Charles 00:26:24 / #:
I mean I feel like fundamentally the purpose of romance, I mean it's twofold, isn't it? You want to give hope and you want to give connection. So the hope is ... romance gives us a portrayal of a better world where people are loyal and people are loving and someone stands up for you and you've got family. And it's not just hope. It's fulfilled hope because you pick up a book thinking, "I hope this ends well," and it does because it's a romance novel. And then I think you've got connection in the sense of you're writing a book that depicts people connecting in a real way, but also there's a romance community and there's a fact that people see a romance novel with someone who looks like them and behaves like a queer person and black person or whoever on the cover, and that romance novel is being sold and it's on the shelves of the bookshop, that's really, really important. And it's all the more important if they're taking the books out of the schools and the libraries, which I have to say is [inaudible 00:27:34 / #] terrifying. I don't know what your policy on swearing is, but-

Jennifer Prokop 00:27:40 / #:
No, please go for it. We're-

KJ Charles 00:27:43 / #:
I mean when it comes down to it, I want my books to be ones that people ... that they're a place of safety where things work out, even if things don't look like they're going to work out. Which I think is important because there is absolutely a place of very, very low angst romance where everything is totally okay. And I don't write that. I'm really glad it exists because people sometimes need to go there. But I think people also sometimes need to have the drama or the angst or whatever but still with the guarantee of everything being okay. We use fiction to tell ourselves that the world could be a better place fundamentally. That is what fiction is for. It's to try things out and explore them and say, "Look, here's this thing, this is the way the world could be." And I write the books how the world should have been and how I would like it to be.

Sarah MacLean 00:28:47 / #:
I keep thinking about what we were talking about about the Dukes situation and I think part of the reason class is so hard to deal with in romance is we all know that many people have found happiness even in the throes of financial instability like of course, right?

00:29:08 / #:
But at the same time, we all also know that financial instability does make so many problems go away. And I think romance really hasn't quite figured out how to grapple with some of that. I know that's, I'm sorry, I'm bringing that back but I was thinking as you were talking too about how the world should be. And I think so much of what romance is trying to do when it's found family and this is the way the world should be, is we shouldn't have people that are like, "Well, I can't really have the life I want to live right now because I have to work 800 hours a week," or whatever. Or, "I can't have the life I want to live because I live in Florida and these books are being banned and what's that like for my family or my children?" And I think so much of what romance is about is saying we don't have to live like that.

KJ Charles 00:30:01 / #:
Yeah. And I think addressing problems through a fictional lens is a great way of helping people deal with them. I mean I remember one absolutely lovely bit of mail I got that was from a reader who was going through something like quite rubbish, I think it might have even been chemo, but she basically said that ... And this is going to sound, actually, it's going to ring a bell because you all could have done it, but she basically was reading this book of mine where the hero is kidnapped and he's basically trapped in this room and he's just doggedly doing sit-ups with a chain on his leg because he's not going to sit there and do nothing. So he does a thousand sit-ups and she pretty much said, "I was just going through it thinking, well, I'm like Darling, I'm like Will darling doing his sit-ups and if he can do a thousand sit-ups, then I can do this thing kind of thing. And actually that's-

Sarah MacLean 00:30:53 / #:
Nice. It is.

KJ Charles 00:30:56 / #:
So it's not just about romance providing an escape. Well, it does provide an escape. I think we can all use this, we can all think of characters and almost model ourselves.

Sarah MacLean 00:31:06 / #:
Yes.

KJ Charles 00:31:07 / #:
This is why sex positivity is important or depicting sexual relationships at work, I'm not going to necessarily say healthy because another thing romance does which is a big matter of discussion. But you can show people starting from quite an unhealthy place, but you can actually show them starting from an unhealthy place and improving. You can model all sorts of behavior and people can try them out and apply those ideas to their own situation while they're also reading a highly entertaining book that doesn't feel didactic.

Jennifer Prokop 00:31:39 / #:
Well, and I think for me it's always been love is worth it. Even when you've been hurt. We've all been hurt. I know it's very old school, but those old '90s romance heroes who were like, "I've been hurt once, I can never love again," that means something to me because we all have, right? I don't think there's anything more brave than putting your heart on the line again. And I think romance every single time is really saying you might not be called to some big act of bravery in your life, regular people of the world, but you will be called upon to make these small commitments to the people in your lives in my community or the people ... I mean I don't know. I know that's really cheesy maybe, but that really means something to me.

KJ Charles 00:32:25 / #:
But I mean it does. This is the thing. I get quite a few letters and people discover the most ... If they really see themselves in a character, if they see a dyspraxic character and they've not read one before and it means something to them to be seen, or people who read an absolute shedload of queer romance and then they go, "Actually, it turns out I might not be a success after all," which happens. Yeah, it happens. And some people who've never been aware that there was an option discover that. I think that is the power of romance. It's the power of showing how things could be and they work out, they guarantee work out. They don't do the little life on you.

Sarah MacLean 00:33:18 / #:
And I think that, to that point, we've really been very lucky as romance readers and people in the community for the last however long decade because it feels like there was so much less of that representation before. And obviously we've tried really hard for these particular episodes to bring people in who have been working on representation of all forms from the beginnings of the modern genre. But I think about it was so rare to see characters who were anything other than cis white, thin, rich-

Jennifer Prokop 00:34:05 / #:
Rich people.

Sarah MacLean 00:34:05 / #:
... et cetera, before. But now it feels like part of the reason why we asked you to join us is because it does feel like when you came onto the scene there was a shift, not that you brought the shift-

KJ Charles 00:34:21 / #:
No, it's [inaudible 00:34:23 / #] but yeah.

Sarah MacLean 00:34:22 / #:
... but you were a part of something that was happening. It was firing on all cylinders, right?

KJ Charles 00:34:28 / #:
Zeitgeist.

Sarah MacLean 00:34:31 / #:
Yeah. So I wonder if you could talk, was there an awareness of that for you as somebody who had come up through ... I mean one of the most classic romance avenues was the sort of Harlequin Mills & Boon pathway, right? So what you were working on when you were there was almost like the purest of romance.

KJ Charles 00:34:53 / #:
Very much the old school.

Sarah MacLean 00:34:54 / #:
Yeah. So did you have an awareness at the time that you started writing or you started being published that something was shifting?

KJ Charles 00:35:05 / #:
It's actually quite interesting because I sold The Magpie Lord to Samhain.

Sarah MacLean 00:35:10 / #:
And Samhain was doing so much of that too.

KJ Charles 00:35:14 / #:
They were doing a shedload, but even they basically went, "Look, this is Victorian queer fantasy and Victorian queer fantasy romance. And they pretty much said expected to sell 12 copies because it's not even regency. People don't like historical that much. It's got fantasy which can put a bunch of people off. They were doing quite a lot of queer romance, but you were really very much looking at contemporaries mostly with two [inaudible 00:35:42 / #] on the cover kind of thing.

00:35:45 / #:
And I did actually go out looking. The only other one I could find was Widdershins by Jordan L. Hawk who was also 19th century queer so same area, fantasy, and I go, "That's exactly the right ... Well, how dare you say there isn't one of them? Of course there is." There's one of them. Well, that's always the way, isn't it? There can be only one but Jordan's self published, so my expectations were extraordinarily low basically. They didn't expect it to sell a lot, but they still wanted to do it. And although it didn't end well, I really respect what they were doing. And then it did sell well. I mean it sold extremely well.

Sarah MacLean 00:36:29 / #:
Yeah. Do you know why? I mean obviously it's fantastic and that's why, but was there something that happened? Was there somebody who-

KJ Charles 00:36:36 / #:
There was a good reader who I've always ... I don't know if I'm right, but I've always attributed it to this one personal good ... You know how some people, good readers, some of them just seem to have 40 zillion connections? Well, one of them got an ARC and just left this absolutely phenomenal review and then it just went boom.

Sarah MacLean 00:36:54 / #:
Because it also feels like fantasy. You scooped up a world of readers who were not being served by romance at all.

KJ Charles 00:37:03 / #:
Yeah. People love ... I mean, yeah, look at how much historical fantasy and even queer historical fantasy there is now. It's just this wonderful, wonderful cornucopia because I think everyone's always loved this. I don't know why people ... One of the most depressing things for me about working with publishers, and I've really experienced this as an editor, is they just sit there going, "That won't sell. Oh no, that won't sell." "Well, how do you know it won't sell? We haven't published one." Well, somebody else did one and it didn't sell."

Jennifer Prokop 00:37:35 / #:
We've tried nothing, KJ.

KJ Charles 00:37:36 / #:
We've tried nothing and we're out of ideas and it's actually along the lines of I've heard people say variants on, "If it sold, we'd have already published something like it."

Jennifer Prokop 00:37:47 / #:
Sure. Nobody has new ideas.

KJ Charles 00:37:50 / #:
Yeah, no. We'd already know if this kind of thing would sell. There isn't loads of this on the market already, therefore it doesn't sell. And you go, "Well, why don't we start it?" It is genuinely infuriating.

00:38:03 / #:
And then you get through that and then you go through there can be only one phase, which we have lived through in which they will absolutely publish a Black author but one Black author. Or we can have one Indian, or we can have one queer person on our books but, goodness me, not more. Because one is plenty and then, oh my God, if it doesn't sell, [inaudible 00:38:26 / #].

Sarah MacLean 00:38:28 / #:
Beverly Jenkins, Forever.

KJ Charles 00:38:31 / #:
Well, I mean Beverly Jenkins is like this amazing ... I really hope someone's done a PhD because she sold so much. And then you look back and you think, "Why weren't they scooping up other Black historical romance authors when she was selling and selling and selling?" And why wouldn't they be going, "This is a trend, this is a trend that we can cash in on?" And they don't. They highlander it, they say, "There can be only one Beverly Jenkins."

00:39:02 / #:
And then, of course, it tips and then suddenly they go, "Oh my God, gold rush." But then they're scooping up everyone they possibly can because finally they have worked out they can make some money on it. Which obviously, as we know, is a publisher's sole reason for being, and it's maddening to observe. So my experience with especially queer fantasy historical romance was pretty much that all my [inaudible 00:39:32 / #] out there is there's a whole bunch of people writing it and a whole bunch of publishers just going, "No, that's not going to sell. That's not going to sell." Samhein told me it wasn't going to sell even while they published it so it was presumably an act of charity or something. And then, oh my God, now they'll [inaudible 00:39:46 / #] all the manuscripts that I will absolutely bet you people have been sending in for years and years.

Jennifer Prokop 00:39:51 / #:
Sure.

Sarah MacLean 00:39:51 / #:
Right. And what's fascinating about that is Samhain is one of those publishers. So let's talk about that piece of romance history because it was so fleeting, it feels like, and it was so important at the same time because there was this moment, this crest of a moment where eBooks had just hit, people had just started accepting eReaders into their lives. There were so many of these small presses that were taking on authors who larger publishers were saying, "Nobody buys that. There's no market for it." Samhain was one. Elora's Cave was doing it in erotica. There were a number of other queer presses. And I wonder if you could talk a little bit ... We've never had anybody on who published with Samhain, so I wonder if you could talk a little about that world, who it was there, what was going on in the Samhain world and then that didn't last for very long.

KJ Charles 00:40:58 / #:
It didn't last for very long. It was very, very unstable. If you look at it, they've all imploded, haven't they?

Sarah MacLean 00:41:03 / #:
All of them.

KJ Charles 00:41:05 / #:
[inaudible 00:41:06 / #], that's gone.

Sarah MacLean 00:41:06 / #:
Except for Radclyffe's. But it's different because Bold Strokes is like Radclyffe running the show, right?

KJ Charles 00:41:12 / #:
No, well, Bold Strokes, I think there's a couple of ones where it's basically people who publish themselves and possibly their friends and it's very, very specific. But also lesbian romance kind of is differently siloed. But for the sort of more general thing that was going on that I was part of, so you had [inaudible 00:41:33 / #] that was I mean they were doing some really weird things with covers that were very difficult and I think it ended poorly. And then Samhain who they did a lot of exciting stuff and they really put a lot of heart into it ended poorly. And then you've got Dreamspinner who are still going but-

Sarah MacLean 00:41:54 / #:
But don't pay their authors.

KJ Charles 00:41:56 / #:
But don't pay their authors and I have very strong views on that.

Sarah MacLean 00:41:59 / #:
My constant asterisk about Dreamspinner. They don't pay their authors, don't publish with them.

KJ Charles 00:42:04 / #:
But do not publish with them because they still owe large amounts of back royalties they should never have touched. And then you have Riptide who imploded in such a spectacular way that there was a whole page article about it in The Guardian, which is a UK newspaper, about a small American press going under because of the spectacular nature of their inflation.

Sarah MacLean 00:42:23 / #:
Well, it was so horrifying that.

KJ Charles 00:42:26 / #:
Well, it was horrifying and I was one of the people who ... I had a book coming out with them literally at that time and it was one of those ones where it was so close to publishing and I didn't want to publish with them, but it was like a couple of days before and there was an audio book. So I basically wrote to them and said, "I'm very dubious about this." And they literally reversed my rights without asking because I think they were just automatically [inaudible 00:42:51 / #].

Jennifer Prokop 00:42:51 / #:
They were just doing it. Yeah, they were just doing it.

Sarah MacLean 00:42:53 / #:
For everybody listening, we'll put a link in show notes to the Riptide story, but essentially sort of very broad strokes, there were allegations and screenshots of an editor sexually harassing authors.

KJ Charles 00:43:08 / #:
Yeah, and there was a bunch more to it. There was another scandal. Anyway, the whole ... Without delving any further into that because, to be honest-

Jennifer Prokop 00:43:17 / #:
We'll never get back out.

KJ Charles 00:43:17 / #:
No and-

Sarah MacLean 00:43:18 / #:
And it's not what today is about.

KJ Charles 00:43:20 / #:
But pulling my hair out. But that was actually quite a large part of it. It was a very [inaudible 00:43:27 / #] time. There was a great deal of hope and a great deal of people who were in some ways throwing everything at the wall to see what would stick because nobody knew, because nobody had been doing it before.

Sarah MacLean 00:43:38 / #:
Right. It literally hadn't existed.

KJ Charles 00:43:41 / #:
Yeah, suddenly, yeah, queer presses had been these very tiny outfits probably operating out of New York and doing a paperback for like $20 or something because of the cost. And suddenly you can back it out there and get it on ebook. And the numbers were pretty startling because so many people who were around the whole world who had been unable to get these books were able to get these books.

00:44:05 / #:
But of course what happened, and which happened with much of romance, is the realization that you could then self publish on Amazon and get 70% instead of 25%. And people started questioning what a lot of those presses ... [inaudible 00:44:21 / #] and they put an absolutely shocking generic cover on it and didn't give you any editorial support or you get your mates to knock up a cover and put it on Amazon and it wasn't really a debate. So I think that very heavily lies behind why so many of them didn't survive.

Jennifer Prokop 00:44:39 / #:
I just was doing a library thing and I was talking about a lot of people who self-publish will trade services with each other as a way to get books to market. As you said, I have a friend who can do a cover and I can do a copy edit. I mean it feels like people are recreating the work of the publisher in smaller groups in order to put out good products.

KJ Charles 00:45:03 / #:
That does exist. I definitely know of people who do it and there's lots of sort of horse trading with newsletters and mutual supports and so on and so forth, which I think, yeah, can be great. I'm always a bit dubious about putting the words community and authors in the same sentence because like cats in a sack and also ... but there are clearly people who do work together to help one another and recommend and lots of people who will just email me or DM me and sort of say, "Can you help with this? Can you tell me somebody who might ... Who did you use for?" And I think that is important. Well, for any marginalized community, but especially when you're trying to build it.

Sarah MacLean 00:45:53 / #:
This week's episode of Fated Mates is sponsored by Lumi Labs, creators of Microdose Gummies. So you've all heard us talking about microdosing and the concept of microdosing, which is commonly associated with psychedelics, wellness, performance enhancement and creativity. And we've been talking about Microdose Gummies for a while on the podcast and we've talked a lot about how we use them ourselves. Jen uses them for sleep. I have used them in the last few months as sort of a way to just take the edge off and calm down off of a rough time or a stressful time over the holidays. People use them for creative boosts. We've heard about people who listen using them for pain and anxiety. It's a great product that's going to fit into your lifestyle. So I really love ... I was like the whole idea of just chilling out in this really stressful time of year has been one way lately than I have found them helping me.

00:46:55 / #:
So if you search around the internet, have a Google search on microdosing, you'll learn more and you'll learn about all the ways that people are using them out there in the world. Our show today is sponsored by Microdose Gummies, which deliver the perfect entry level doses of THC that help you feel just the right amount of good. And you can find Microdose available nationwide. It'll be shipped directly to your doors at microdose.com. You can use the code Fated Mates for 30% off your first order and free shipping. Thanks as always to Lumi Labs and Microdose for sponsoring the episode. Did you have a community coming up, cats in your sack?

KJ Charles 00:47:39 / #:
I'm not a very good community person. I tend to be fairly ... There's a reason I work on my own in the shade, but I've had-

Sarah MacLean 00:47:49 / #:
Or editors or anybody who you felt was helping you to shape the road?

KJ Charles 00:47:55 / #:
Yeah, no, definitely. I mean resources like I talked a lot with Alexis Hall, obviously, queer romance British. That's been really, really interesting. Jordan Hawk, who I co-wrote a book with and E.E. Ottoman as well. And that's actually been really important I think. Probably I talk to Brits because it is actually a bit separate. Romance is so American dominated that it's actually nice so Talia Hibbert, for example, was great and Alexis and I've also got May Peterson who is an author of mostly trans, also non-binary romance including fantasy romance, but who's also a really good editor and a book doctor and she's like book doctored three books for me and saved them effectively. So having someone like that at your back is absolutely invaluable. Yeah, I think establishing relationships just with people who will actually give your book a read and tell you to calm down and take a deep breath if you're being given hassle is very important to anyone.

Jennifer Prokop 00:49:10 / #:
Do you think the perception of romance has changed over your career? I mean coming up from Mills & Boone to where we are now, how has it changed and do you have a crystal ball like where are we going?

KJ Charles 00:49:25 / #:
It's probably how do people seek romance and all that, it's such a massive genre that it's really hard. I see people say things about romance and I'm thinking but you're looking at Kindle Unlimited that's full of [inaudible 00:49:40 / #] books and toxic, I don't know what my God the hell people are doing in there. And then you're looking at the kind of books which are, lots of the kind of books which are getting on the shelves at the moment, which there's much more diversity and there's a much stronger sense of sex positivity and body positivity and all these great things. And then you've also got this huge strand of there's always a Fifty Shades or a Colleen Hoover, isn't there?

00:50:09 / #:
And how can we say what do people think of romance when you're simultaneously talking about Talia Hibbert and Colleen Hoover and whatever godforsaken thing is at the top of the Kindle Unlimited charts? I have different perceptions of those things.

00:50:27 / #:
That said, so the thing that actually is really striking me at the moment, so you're getting a lot more romance of the kind that I like and read is hitting the bookshelves, Boyfriend Material and Red, White and Blue and [inaudible 00:50:42 / #]. People like Jackie Lau who's set out to write romance with Chinese leads because she couldn't get them published and she just sort of doggedly said, "I'm going to self-publish these because no publisher will take them." And now she's being traditionally published because she just dug in and did it. So you're getting all those on the shelves, and I don't know if it's the same in the US, but I went into the Waterstones, the only big book chain we've got left and there's a table covered in romance novels and the label on it says new adults. It doesn't say romance anywhere. The word romance doesn't come up.

Jennifer Prokop 00:51:17 / #:
No, they don't like that word. No.

KJ Charles 00:51:22 / #:
Yeah, well [inaudible 00:51:24 / #], those are not new adult books. That's complete rubbish. But they don't ... and this is why the cartoon covers bothers me, not because I don't like them excessively but because it seems to me part of the big branding effort to go, "This isn't romance." It looks like chick lit or it looks like lit fic. I mean there's a book that's come out recently whose name I probably shouldn't say but it's okay because I can't remember it, but the blurb is one of those that looks like it belongs on Kindle Unlimited. It's one of those ones of he looks at me with his dark eyes and I see myself falling into the prison of his yada yada yada like black verse. There's black verse-

Sarah MacLean 00:52:00 / #:
And there's no name and it's so frustrating when you're trying-

Jennifer Prokop 00:52:03 / #:
And there's no names, and it's so frustrating when you're trying to get information.

KJ Charles 00:52:06 / #:
There's no names and it's just all this sort of vague, "she is my doom, she is my destiny" et cetera. So, the blurb is all that. But the cover really is this absolutely beautiful thing, where it looks like it belongs on a book about a Hungarian countess in the 1940s whose family is slowly decaying during the war.

Sarah MacLean 00:52:28 / #:
She's trying to keep that castle together. It's hard work.

KJ Charles 00:52:30 / #:
But it's the most lit-bit cover you've ever seen. And the blurb is the most horrible KU thing you've ever seen. And the book, I have no idea what the book is. I completely [inaudible 00:52:41 / #]

Jennifer Prokop 00:52:40 / #:
What is in there?

KJ Charles 00:52:43 / #:
Actually clashing... I don't know.

Jennifer Prokop 00:52:47 / #:
Maybe that's the strategy.

KJ Charles 00:52:49 / #:
Well, if the strategy is to confuse anyone who knows anything about romance, then they have absolutely nailed it.

Sarah MacLean 00:52:56 / #:
I saw a book the other day that is absolutely not romance, just contemporary fiction and it had a very generically vector art cover. And I just thought, this is not a romance-only problem now. This is a publishing problem.

KJ Charles 00:53:11 / #:
It is a massive publishing problem.

Sarah MacLean 00:53:12 / #:
It's just all one big bin to them, I guess. It's a book.

KJ Charles 00:53:16 / #:
The last two romantic comedies I have bought, both of which had cartoon covers or drawn covers-

Sarah MacLean 00:53:22 / #:
Were they funny?

KJ Charles 00:53:23 / #:
Both of which said rom-com on the blurb, neither of them has been romance. And actually, neither of them was a comedy. One of them was all about the heroine was being stalked by her toxic, abusive ex. It's not comedy. Why is that funny?

Sarah MacLean 00:53:36 / #:
No.

KJ Charles 00:53:36 / #:
What's going on here? And there's no romance. The other one, it's a very good book, but it's literally a book about this woman having this really difficult relationship with her family, and her faith, or whatever, and she gets engaged to this other guy. Then at the end, she thinks she might start dating the other guy who's really nice. "I think I might start dating him in a couple of months" is not a happy ending. You can't call that a romantic comedy, but they are.

Sarah MacLean 00:54:02 / #:
Right.

Jennifer Prokop 00:54:03 / #:
Yeah.

KJ Charles 00:54:03 / #:
So, where do I think romance is going? If the publishers are in charge-

Jennifer Prokop 00:54:08 / #:
Down the drain!

Sarah MacLean 00:54:09 / #:
Yeah, exactly.

00:54:11 / #:
Well, I feel that way, right? They're like, "Well, it would be great if this would just go away. Can we just make money off of you without giving you what you want? That's what we would like."

KJ Charles 00:54:21 / #:
Yeah, it is kind of baffling to me because my experience as an editor was very much simply that publishers will do basically anything for money. And I don't understand why it's the asterisk exception romance.

00:54:40 / #:
Especially the Mills have been, they were such a good publisher to work for in a lot of ways and they were completely led into what they were doing. We had an internet forum that where readers were encouraged to come on and talk to editors. We were literally so encouraged at work to sit there and chat with readers on the forums. That was a part of my job. I got paid for that and it's amazing. But they were groundbreaking and things like that.

Sarah MacLean 00:55:06 / #:
Well, it is interesting that you bring that up because it feels like those publishers, again, so you were editing for Mills & Boon in the 90's? No.

KJ Charles 00:55:17 / #:
Yeah, got to have been 20 years ago. Yeah.

Sarah MacLean 00:55:20 / #:
So at that time there were so few places for readers to find authors and publishers. Romance has always felt to me, the community of romance readers is so active and so eager to find each other because, I think, of the perception from the outside world that we're all like 'cat ladies' or sex-crazed. It's one or the other and there's both ends, the "listen, stop judging me". And so the idea being that because the outside world has this really negative perception of us as readers, when we find each other, we are so grateful to find each other. And the interaction, I think, speaking to my friends and colleagues who write, not right outside of romance, their relationship with readers is incredibly different than my relationship with readers. And I think that is something that's very special to romance. And so I'm sort of curious about how that world has shifted in your perception.

00:56:35 / #:
Because I remember before I was writing, Avon was doing similar things. Like there were boards, Tessa Dare and Courtney Milan and others came up through the Avon boards as they were writing Bridgerton fanfic essentially on the Avon boards. And then Avon had a fan-lit contest where Julia Quinn judged the finals.

Jennifer Prokop 00:57:02 / #:
Yeah.

KJ Charles 00:57:02 / #:
I mean that kind of thing was amazing. It was wonderful. I basically, I would be talking to people that I remember giving the call to somebody who was a regular on the Nelson Boone boards. And when we announced, it was wonderful because I got to do it in person, it was one of the best days of my life. I told that in person, she burst into tears. We were at a conference, she burst in into tears and she cried so hard that people were rushing up thinking she'd had news of her family's death.

Jennifer Prokop 00:57:27 / #:
I love it when they cry.

KJ Charles 00:57:30 / #:
Oh, it's great when they cry. Then we announced it on the Harlequin boards and they just exploded, the sheer joy. But it was also, and I had done it because it was a great book and she was a great writer and I loved doing it. But somebody described it as the best piece of PR Nelson Boone ever had. And it was because all of those people literally saw in real time that one of them, it could happen to you.

00:57:52 / #:
Because it did happen to her.

Sarah MacLean 00:57:55 / #:
Exactly.

KJ Charles 00:57:55 / #:
And it was joyous. It was absolutely joyous.

Sarah MacLean 00:57:59 / #:
And now I feel like the readership is binding us in so many different ways there, there's a constant sense of them being able to touch us on Twitter, on Goodreads, in all these different places. And I wonder if that's changed the way you think about writing.

00:58:20 / #:
I often wonder that about myself. Do I write differently because I'm interacting so much with readers? And this is a different question from the one that's going around on Twitter right now, which is, "What the purpose of reviews?" I don't want to talk about that.

KJ Charles 00:58:37 / #:
No, no.

Sarah MacLean 00:58:39 / #:
But I'm, I think a lot do think a lot about readers when I write.

KJ Charles 00:58:43 / #:
Well, you can't not.

Sarah MacLean 00:58:45 / #:
But I think a lot of writers don't at all. Jen and I have talked to however many and there is so many who are like "I don't think about them at all. I write for myself." I want to say for everyone out there, that's not me being, I'm not judging that, that's a way.

KJ Charles 00:58:59 / #:
No, it's an approach.

Sarah MacLean 00:59:02 / #:
Yeah.

KJ Charles 00:59:03 / #:
I totally get it. Because I know people who just, they don't want anything to do with social media, it's a time suck.

Sarah MacLean 00:59:08 / #:
Heads down.

KJ Charles 00:59:09 / #:
And I get people who say I couldn't write, I don't write, I don't write like messy, I don't have, it's one of the reasons I'm so firm on the reviews of readers. I'm not sitting here finding out what Blob 27 wants to say about, I don't care.

Sarah MacLean 00:59:24 / #:
Your mental health. I don't know how people survive that. Yeah.

KJ Charles 00:59:28 / #:
But yeah, no, I have absolutely. It's not a committee. Okay. Yeah. It's a benevolent dictatorship.

Sarah MacLean 00:59:36 / #:
Sometimes not even benevolent.

KJ Charles 00:59:37 / #:
It's [inaudible 00:59:39 / #] dictatorship, let's be real.

00:59:44 / #:
And yet, I have learned so much from readers' comments and really insightful things, which are not for me, but they are things I have seen because they scroll past on my timeline. And when you see someone who is really putting the work in to say, okay, here's this historical romance and this is why this was a misstep and this hit really badly and this hurt really badly. And you think, yeah, that is a misstep and it's potentially a misstep I could very easily have made and I'm really glad I didn't make it and I don't want to make it. And the world is full of missteps I could make. I feel like it's, on the one hand you could paralyze yourself. And on the other hand, I would rather not hurt somebody than hurt them. I don't want to hurt anyone. I don't want to say something stupid and crass if I can avoid it. I can say stupid crass things, but I'd rather not. So I think, I guess it's a fine line, isn't it?

Jennifer Prokop 01:00:43 / #:
I think strictly from a reader point of view, one of the ways I think romance has changed is that I grew up in a time of, I hid my romance novels. I think a lot of us did. Or I didn't have a community of romance readers because I grew up in a time where there was like, how was I going to find those people?

01:01:01 / #:
And so I do think one of the ways that romance has changed is that romance readers are no longer buying into the narrative of "this is something we should be ashamed of". And I often wonder if that doesn't trickle out in ways that say, as you've said, this hurt me and I don't come to romance to be hurt. There is an avenue for that to be heard. Not in a personal way like "this book isn't good", but in a right? And I do think that maybe that's what Sarah's talking about, writ large. You're more in touch with readers in a way. We didn't have that. I mean if you've been around long enough, you knew that this was a secret shame. You sulked down the library aisle or the bookstore aisle and got your books or you've got them sent to your house, there's a reason there's not send the thrillers to your house package.

01:01:57 / #:
Nobody needs that. Right. And I just think a lot about-

KJ Charles 01:01:59 / #:
Like a secret political science book.

Jennifer Prokop 01:02:02 / #:
The reader is more, we're more aware of the reader because readers are more aware of ourselves. I don't know.

Sarah MacLean 01:02:08 / #:
Yeah, I think that's true.

KJ Charles 01:02:10 / #:
But I also think people in general have just developed a much stronger idea that they can talk to creators and be talked back. I mean, you just look at that sort of powerful genre of memes. Where you've got some absolute idiots explaining to the creator of a TV show, what the TV show is about. I, so I think Twitter has almost given people this world idea possibility that you know, you can talk to your favorite author and they might interact with you and you say anything to, and yeah, quite often people are at me and I will reply and then they'll go, "I didn't think you'd reply!" It's like, but you literally talked to me!

Jennifer Prokop 01:02:50 / #:
I'm not rude.

KJ Charles 01:02:51 / #:
I'm British!

Sarah MacLean 01:02:54 / #:
Yeah. I mean one day you might talk to that person and then have a podcast with them. It's crazy.

KJ Charles 01:02:59 / #:
But I mean, this is not a binding guarantee that I will reply if someone at's me on Twitter.

Sarah MacLean 01:03:06 / #:
Oh my God.

KJ Charles 01:03:06 / #:
But I think the possibility of being sucked into the worlds of that is immensely strong. And especially if you don't have a fairly strong sense of self and a fairly, you need a tough hide for that kind of thing. I think if you are the kind of person who's always looking for feedback and who's devastated by a three star review or whatever, my only recommendation will be, stay the hell off social media altogether because it'll kill you. That's unfortunately just the way it is.

Jennifer Prokop 01:03:39 / #:
Are there books of yours that are fan favorites? Are there books that you hear about from your readers more than others?

Sarah MacLean 01:03:47 / #:
I mean, we obviously have our favorites here at Fated Mates, but.

KJ Charles 01:03:51 / #:
Yeah, there are. I mean the Magpie trilogy, which is my first ones, obviously they've been out the longest, but they also seem to have a place in library hearts that nothing will match.

Jennifer Prokop 01:04:03 / #:
It's always those first ones. And you're like, "I've written so many others!"

KJ Charles 01:04:07 / #:
I've got so many. Yeah, I've got more translations in those than anything else, it's now in 8 languages, which is nice. And tattoos, when people get tattoos, it's usually Magpie Lord. Tattoos. The first tattoo was really Terrifying. Yeah, it's amazing. It's just-

Sarah MacLean 01:04:24 / #:
See all the more reason for you to be worried about Twitter because then you're afraid, oh God, I'm going to say something someday.

Jennifer Prokop 01:04:29 / #:
And then these people have tattoos of my books.

Sarah MacLean 01:04:31 / #:
My only tattoo is of a James Joyce quote and he is not alive to really appreciate that about me.

KJ Charles 01:04:37 / #:
Yeah, but you know, he's also not going to get canceled then he'll feel dreadful. You have to strike it out and get canceled up wrong.

Sarah MacLean 01:04:44 / #:
I'd be like, god dammit.

KJ Charles 01:04:45 / #:
No, I think it's incredible. I see that and I still just sit there in white jaw, gob-smacked awe that this thing could possibly be happening.

Sarah MacLean 01:04:54 / #:
Amazing.

KJ Charles 01:04:55 / #:
Someone could react like that. Yeah. I think those are the ones that strike. Although, well, in fairness, there's three books in the tragedy and then there's two books in the extended world. So also I think people have a real opportunity to take a deep dive and roll around in the world, which is nice.

Jennifer Prokop 01:05:13 / #:
So to the same extent or a similar question, but from the other side, is there a book that you've written that you feel is the one, this is the one that 50 years from now, this is the KJ Charles book I wish everyone would read.

Sarah MacLean 01:05:29 / #:
When we talk about you, the way people talk about Georgette Heyer, like "this was the good one"-

KJ Charles 01:05:33 / #:
Oh, gosh, that's such a hard one, isn't it? Most of them have different things that I'm proud of. I mean, look, if you're asking me sort of which book am I proudest of? It's probably book three of my Will Darling series, solely because there was literally no way I was able to write that book because I published book one just at the start of the pandemic. And I had just finished writing book two when I was publishing one because it was it's self-pub and you can do that. And book three, I'm trying to write it in the pandemic, plus it's a book three of the same couple trilogy, and I put all that work in and I couldn't do the plot at all. It was really plotty. And there was another, and they couldn't decide on the, I mean you know what it was like writing in the pandemic - flipping mad.

01:06:20 / #:
But it had a murder mystery. And I wrote to the beginning with the same character. First he was the victim and then he was the murderer, and then he was the key witness and I had to write this over and I forget and I just couldn't write this bloody book.

Sarah MacLean 01:06:35 / #:
Plot is the worst.

KJ Charles 01:06:37 / #:
It took me 10 months. I cannot, I normally write a book in four months. It took me 10 months to write this. I had to stop and write a different book in the middle just to take my mind off things. So the fact that I finished it and the fact that lots of people, some people would, it's been reviewed as "her best book" kind of thing. I think, yeah, I will eternally be proud I did that.

01:06:59 / #:
I'm also actually incredibly proud of the Secret Lives as Country Gentleman, which is one that is coming out in March with Sourcebooks because that-

Sarah MacLean 01:07:08 / #:
It is tremendous. I was very lucky to be able to read it early.

KJ Charles 01:07:14 / #:
Well, I'm proud of it as a book. But I'm also immensely proud because I've published with Samhain and then I had six books with Love Swept, which were only published in E, which is an experience. [inaudible 01:07:31 / #] 2017 I basically switched to self-publishing and decided I didn't want anything to do with publishers ever again as long as I lived. And while, started looking to change that a few years later, so Secret Lives of Country Gentleman is now my first book that is coming out, coming primarily in print, this is obviously coming out in E, but Sourcebooks is print-led. Yeah, it's going to be on bookshelves, it's being promoted, it's had reviews in all the big journals, which is not something you'd get when you are self-published as a rule. And it is actually out there going, look, there is queer historical is on the shelves to buy being promoted by a publisher and being part of a tiny part, but a part of that wave of actually getting some representation out there. So I'm just hugely proud of that.

Sarah MacLean 01:08:23 / #:
Everyone, you can pre-order it now.

01:08:25 / #:
So one last question that we really like, because we feel like the history of romance is so unwritten. And we sort of mentioned this earlier, but when you think about the people that you've worked with that maybe are not, the unsung heroes of romance, are there people you worked with at Mills & Boon or people that you've worked with even as you self-published or at Samhain? We like to put the names in show notes just so that they show up in Google searches. These are people that we can sort of say, "hey, these people were an important part of making romance happen."

KJ Charles 01:09:05 / #:
Oh, it's hard isn't it, to sort of define.

Jennifer Prokop 01:09:10 / #:
It's giving an Oscar speech. Just get in the mood.

KJ Charles 01:09:15 / #:
So some of the authors I would think of, I named some of them before, but the people who have just dug in and written the books about, written the books that publishers weren't taking. So again, Jordan L Hawk and E.E. Ottoman, who were writing Trans Romance, and Jackie Lau and Talia Hibbert, who are writing diverse romance and who have driven through and become really successful.

01:09:46 / #:
And then you've got the authors of Trans Romance who are getting published now because that's happening in Karina. So you've got Penny Aimes and Kris Ripper and May Peterson and who are just leading the charge and pushing forwards. And I want them to explode, not literally I want them.

01:10:06 / #:
And actually also the people, because I mean Mills & Boon for a long time, Harlequin certainly when I came into romance, very white basically. It was pretty much very, very heavily white when I was there as an editor.

01:10:24 / #:
And then you've got people like Therese Beharrie and Jadesola James, Jeannie Lin was with them. People who were actually getting in there and changing things and being very visibly, writing books about, the price is an actual Nigerian prince, not the kind who sends emails, but your actual Nigerian price. And Teresa Harris writes, she's black, South African, and she writes books and yeah, she's also moving to traditional publishing out of category. But all those people, they fought so hard to be seen. And I want them all to be huge successes because they're also all wonderful writers. So that matters.

01:11:05 / #:
And then in terms of editors, the one who actually really leaps to mind, I wish I knew what she was doing now, is Anne Scott who was my editor at Samhain, and I say this because she gave me the single best piece of editorial advice I had ever received in my life. And one which I still think about and still becomes relevant every time I write a book. Cause I keep doing the same thing over and over again. But she basically just highlighted this passage and said, this reads like you are explaining the plot to yourself. And I've never been so seen in my life. Now I can see your face there. Yeah, exactly.

Jennifer Prokop 01:11:41 / #:
Oww.

KJ Charles 01:11:42 / #:
Yeah, but actually-

Jennifer Prokop 01:11:44 / #:
Also, yes, absolutely.

Sarah MacLean 01:11:46 / #:
Yeah. I'm going to write that down. That's a good thing to tell people.

Jennifer Prokop 01:11:49 / #:
Man, that happens in every book.

KJ Charles 01:11:52 / #:
But have an editor who will actually just sit there and say that to you and it as genuinely, every manuscript. And why is this so, period. Yeah. Why is this whole passage so slow and boring? Oh right, I'm doing it again.

Jennifer Prokop 01:12:05 / #:
I'm just recapping for myself because I took a little break.

KJ Charles 01:12:11 / #:
Yeah, exactly. It's shockingly easy to do, but when you get that kind of [inaudible 01:12:16 / #], you will never forget it. And I actually, I did a book called The Secret Casebook of Simon Feximal, which is framed as, the hero is a kind of Watson who writes stories about his lover, who he works with and is framed as letter to the editor. And I actually named the editor Henry Scott after Anne Scott because she just deserved to be immortalized.

01:12:37 / #:
But yeah, no, that kind of thing you just can't forget.

Sarah MacLean 01:12:41 / #:
That's a great piece of advice. Great advice.

Jennifer Prokop 01:12:44 / #:
We did a deep dive read along of Band Sinister so hopefully all of our readers have read a KJ Charles book, but if they haven't, I wonder if you could talk a little bit about what makes a KJ Charles book? Because you've written, so you've written all over the place in terms of, there's magic sometimes, there isn't magic, sometimes there's more, sometimes there's more romance, sometimes there's a murder, sometimes there's three books with the same couple. So I wonder, is there something that when you think about yourself and the way you write that you always get from KJ Charles?

KJ Charles 01:13:22 / #:
I have basically two taglines or taglines which have been bestowed on me. And one of them is romance with body counts, which is completely fair. Somebody did an infographic of deaths in my book and it's just horrifying.

Sarah MacLean 01:13:37 / #:
I'm going to find that.

KJ Charles 01:13:38 / #:
[inaudible 01:13:38 / #] and the different animals that people have been killed by and that kind of thing. So yeah, romance with body count, high murder levels, definitely. And the other one is HEA [inaudible 01:13:50 / #].

Jennifer Prokop 01:13:49 / #:
[inaudible 01:13:50 / #]

KJ Charles 01:13:49 / #:
It sums up everything I aspire to.

Jennifer Prokop 01:13:57 / #:
Oh my gosh. Put it on your tombstone.

KJ Charles 01:14:00 / #:
Oh totally.

Sarah MacLean 01:14:01 / #:
Tattoo worthy, I'll say it.

KJ Charles 01:14:02 / #:
Band Sinister is absolutely HEA BGA and the Will Darling Adventures is romance with body counts kind of thing. So those sort of sum up the kind of things I write, albeit over different time periods. But if I had to identify one element that was most present, it is probably the theme of a lonely person finding an alliance, friendships, loyalty, not just from their loved one, but in a larger group.

Jennifer Prokop 01:14:31 / #:
That's the right answer.

KJ Charles 01:14:32 / #:
And I toted it up because when I looked at your thing before, and as far as I can tell out of approximately 27 books, so far, 23 have [inaudible 01:14:45 / #]. So that's quite a lot. But it's so important because you've got, especially I'm A), I'm writing historicals about a time where there was no social safety net whatsoever. And if you didn't have a supportive family or a supportive community, you know, you were in so much trouble. And B), I'm writing about queer people who are, take that what I just said and multiply it by a factor of about 50. And it seems to me that a happy ending very often requires, you know, it takes a village fundamentally. So I seem to have a drive to give people their best friends and the new best friends and their group and the place where they feel at home. And it's not just with one person. Its got to be bigger than that. So I think that would be me.

Jennifer Prokop 01:15:34 / #:
We'll think about how to make that into something catchy like HEA BGA, not sure I'm up to the task, but that then you'd have three romance with a body count, HEA BGA and I'll keep working on it.

KJ Charles 01:15:46 / #:
I actually, one of, I did a series called Society of Gentlemen set in, it's a very realistic type regency world in that it's politics like cats in the sack and people like, being informed on and sent prison for their political views and revolution and so on. And one of the heroes who's a seditionist, and one of the things he repeats throughout the book is, "I don't inform". Its his catchphrase. He does not inform, it doesn't matter what he do to him, he's going to be absolutely loyal to his friends.

Jennifer Prokop 01:16:20 / #:
That's A Seditious Affair, right?

KJ Charles 01:16:22 / #:
That's A Seditious Affair. Yes.

Jennifer Prokop 01:16:23 / #:
That's my favorite of that series.

KJ Charles 01:16:25 / #:
Yeah, I enjoyed writing that so much.

Jennifer Prokop 01:16:27 / #:
Silas and Dominic, and they're perfect in all ways.

KJ Charles 01:16:32 / #:
I really enjoyed writing that one because it's got a lot of the things that I write about a lot, like class difference, which is absolutely huge there and money difference. But also what to do when you've got genuinely opposing points of view. Because I really feel that most of the time a conflict isn't one person who's right and one person who's wrong. There's people who came at it from a completely different point of view and have to reconcile those points of view. And one of them going, I'm sorry, I was totally wrong. It's easier. But it's not how it works. Yeah. So I'm very proud of that one.

Sarah MacLean 01:17:09 / #:
We are pro-conflict here at Fated Mates. So on the record.

01:17:14 / #:
KJ, this was wonderful. Thank you so much.

KJ Charles 01:17:17 / #:
Pleasure. Thank you for asking me.

Jennifer Prokop 01:17:18 / #:
And talking about your life in romance and your thoughts. We, I'm, I love every time you write along a long form piece about what's wrong with writing in romance. Well, and I will say mean, we didn't mention it, but KJ's blog is, if you want to write romance and you are not reading it, you are doing it wrong. And as an editor, if you are an editor and not giving people, I'm often read this, read this because it's so great. I mean that's the thing I feel like your editor's eye, you can see in the things that you write yourself, but also in the way that you talk about books you've read. I just, we're lucky to have you.

KJ Charles 01:18:00 / #:
Well I'm, I've really scratched my itch I missed being an editor. I loved being an editor.

01:18:03 / #:
Well, I really scratched my itch because I miss being an editor. I loved being an editor. And if they would only pay me enough, I would still be an editor. But it's the way I scratch my itch to talk authoritatively about books these days is in large part by blogging. And plus, I also find that if I blog on a subject that I'm sort of noodling about in my own writing, I often find... My granddad used to say it, say, how do I know what I think 'til I hear what I say? And I feel that may be what I'm doing.

Jennifer Prokop 01:18:29 / #:
That's perfect. No, we do that too. I feel like whenever I'm in deep in a book, I'm like, "Jen, can we do an interstitial about this thing that I'm working on?"

KJ Charles 01:18:37 / #:
Yeah, exactly.

Jennifer Prokop 01:18:38 / #:
So that I can read a bunch of books and then noodle it.

KJ Charles 01:18:41 / #:
Yeah. And you talk about it, but you're not talking about yourself. You're just talking about the problem abstractly. And lo and behold, it turns out that, you know?

Jennifer Prokop 01:18:48 / #:
Yeah, right. That's when the solution appears.

KJ Charles 01:18:50 / #:
That's what I think. Thank God, I knew it was something.

Jennifer Prokop 01:18:56 / #:
Well, thank you so much for being with us. What an amazing conversation. And we wish you the best of luck with the Secret Lives of Country Gentlemen, which is, as I said, tremendous.

KJ Charles 01:19:07 / #:
Thank you.

Jennifer Prokop 01:19:08 / #:
And you should all go read it immediately. I had a whole lot of joy reading it. March 7th.

Sarah MacLean 01:19:14 / #:
March 7th. Thanks, KJ.

KJ Charles 01:19:16 / #:
Excellent. Well, thank you very much for having me. That was lovely.

Sarah MacLean 01:19:21 / #:
What a delight.

Jennifer Prokop 01:19:23 / #:
Oh, she's the greatest.

Sarah MacLean 01:19:24 / #:
She's so fun.

Jennifer Prokop 01:19:26 / #:
Yeah, yeah. So during the pandemic, Joanna Shupe has a Facebook group. If you love historical romance, the League of Extraordinary Historical Romance Writers, and readers can be in that space too. And so it's a really fun group. And during the pandemic, I hosted a bunch of Zoom chats. Remember how desperate we were to just talk about things? And KJ was on once and I was like, "Oh, wow, this is great." And so, one of the things, can we talk about her working at Mills and Boon Stories? So awesome.

Sarah MacLean 01:20:04 / #:
I know. And so, one of the things that I just realized before we started recording the intro and the outro for this episode is we didn't say this, but I'm sure most of that Mills and Boone is Harlequin.

Jennifer Prokop 01:20:20 / #:
Right.

Sarah MacLean 01:20:20 / #:
It's just called Mills and Boon in the UK, Australia, Canada. Although I think now in Canada it's Harlequin. I don't know. Don't quote me on that. But Mills and Boon and Harlequin are crossover publishers. So presents that are published by Mills and Boon can be published by Harlequin, et cetera. I wish I'd thought to push her more on talking more about medicals because I would really like to know why medicals aren't an American thing. Don't really sell over here because I love a doctor, as you know.

Jennifer Prokop 01:20:54 / #:
I really honestly do feel like it maybe... I joked about ER, but I do think that maybe it's a different... I think maybe American TV has trained us to expect a different kind of medical thing happening.

Sarah MacLean 01:21:07 / #:
Interesting. See, what I immediately thought of was does this have something to do with insurance?

Jennifer Prokop 01:21:13 / #:
Well, sure. Nothing... Yeah.

Sarah MacLean 01:21:15 / #:
Because medical issues are so much more stressful for Americans than they are for people in all the rest of the world because we have to worry about costs.

Jennifer Prokop 01:21:23 / #:
Yeah, maybe. Maybe.

Sarah MacLean 01:21:25 / #:
But I don't know that. That just went to a bleak place. Anyway, I get universal healthcare, everybody. Vote for politicians who want to give you healthcare.

Jennifer Prokop 01:21:35 / #:
A whole new romance world will open up to us.

Sarah MacLean 01:21:37 / #:
Imagine. Imagine if that happened, if we go universal healthcare and an entire new world of contemporary romance.

Jennifer Prokop 01:21:44 / #:
What a world.

Sarah MacLean 01:21:45 / #:
Listen, that's what they should do. They should put out commercials like that in election season.

Jennifer Prokop 01:21:50 / #:
Yeah. I think the thing that also, when I think of if, look, I love KJ Charles's books. Obviously we've talked about Band Sinister's my favorite, but there are writers who have different strengths. And one of the things about KJ Charles's books is they are impeccably plotted and the pacing is perfect and all of the emotional beats. KJ Charles, as we like to say, really knows the job. And so it was really fascinating to hear her talk about learning the neural pathways literally being retrained, right?

Sarah MacLean 01:22:26 / #:
Yeah. Spending years writing, spending years editing category has to hone that skill better than really anything else, I would think.

Jennifer Prokop 01:22:37 / #:
Absolutely.

Sarah MacLean 01:22:39 / #:
I talked about this when we did the Band Sinister episode, but there's just no, there's nothing extra in those books. Every word is placed intentionally. Every plot point is intentional. I was really fascinated, I was truly incredibly fascinated by her talking about Heyer and how Heyer has really influenced her work. And that, of course, is because when we think about Heyer now, when we look back on it, Heyer's sort of a problematic antecedent, right?

Jennifer Prokop 01:23:10 / #:
Yeah.

Sarah MacLean 01:23:10 / #:
And for all of us, and I think what was really interesting to me when she talks about Heyer is how much she acknowledged queer coding in hair.

Jennifer Prokop 01:23:19 / #:
Yes.

Sarah MacLean 01:23:20 / #:
Which is not a thing I have ever thought about. Obviously when we talk about cross-dressing heroines and a lot of those things that were so essential to romance and continue to be really constant in historicals, it's never really given... I've never thought about them... I've thought about them coming from Heyer, but I've never thought about them coming from Heyer and being possibly intentionally coded in Heyer. And it made me think, gosh, I wish KJ would write the introductions to a bunch of these Heyers. So if you're a publisher out there, now You know who to talk to.

01:24:05 / #:
Planning to republish Heyers.

Jennifer Prokop 01:24:09 / #:
Yeah.

Sarah MacLean 01:24:10 / #:
Hit up KJ to write some of them, the introductions.

Jennifer Prokop 01:24:12 / #:
I think that this is something, and again, we are two straight ladies talking about this, so I don't want to-

Sarah MacLean 01:24:18 / #:
Yeah, of course.

Jennifer Prokop 01:24:19 / #:
-misstep, but I have thought a lot about what she was talking about. These books have existed for a long time, but in small press runs, and with Vincent Avera in specific bookstores, knowing, so how to get those books into your life was charged. And so I think a lot about how angry I am that people are realizing, oh, this is dangerous. And these movements to remove queer coded... Not queer coded books, queer books. Doesn't have to be coded anymore.

Sarah MacLean 01:24:56 / #:
We don't have to queer code anymore, although I think we are going to start seeing it.

Jennifer Prokop 01:25:00 / #:
I just can't get over... I don't know, I'm so upset about us going backwards and I'm so upset about the kids who had to look for queer coding because queerness explicitly didn't exist. And it's just so wrong to be taking that back from young readers, from any readers.

Sarah MacLean 01:25:21 / #:
Absolutely. I want to pause in our KJ discussion to just say to everyone, if you have not listened to our book banning episode, and I know there were lots of reasons why people maybe skipped that episode, but it is so important to hear the voices of those people who are being impacted directly by book banning. And so we have it, we'll put links and show notes to it. It sits now on the main page of fatedmates.net so that everybody can access it, but I encourage you to go listen to that episode so that you can get more informed about what is actually happening in the world right now, in the United States especially.

01:26:05 / #:
I thought that was really interesting. I really thought, I was interested in the way that, in the way she talks about historicals. We talked about this too, that there are two schools of historicals, the historicals that are maybe more historical fantasy without magic, as she said. And then what she writes, which is more historical romance purely. And I think that she threaded a really interesting needle there. And I do think there are really interesting things happening on both sides of that line.

Jennifer Prokop 01:26:42 / #:
Right. And I think I love historical, God, I love historical so much, and I feel like there's such refuge for me, and it sounds like for KJ too, in thinking about who we are now through the lens of who we were then, that's such a powerful way to think about the differences. And also what I really loved is I think one of the things you and I is romance is fun. Romance is fun.

Sarah MacLean 01:27:09 / #:
It should be fun, yeah.

Jennifer Prokop 01:27:11 / #:
It should be fun. And it doesn't always have to be fun. That's not the only mood that romance kind of can be in, but I really loved, because that's one of the things I think about KJ's books, is you are in for a good time reading those books.

Sarah MacLean 01:27:26 / #:
Yeah, they rollick.

Jennifer Prokop 01:27:27 / #:
Yes, exactly. And I think that that's part of the... It's nice to hear a author who is so committed to romance being fun, talk about what that means and what that looks like and how you get there. And then to hear that readers respond to it is so powerful. Right?

Sarah MacLean 01:27:47 / #:
I think she wasn't giving herself enough credit when she talked about how readers interact with her texts because I think reading KJ's remarkable books with her communities of supportive communities of characters, and the way love is just so beautifully represented in all of these books. She just does it so, so well. She's one of the best of us undeniably. And I think for readers, there is such power in that.

01:28:26 / #:
And I imagine back in the day when Samhain was producing some of the only eBooks that you could find that were romance KJ must have been incredibly transformational for a lot of readers.

Jennifer Prokop 01:28:46 / #:
Yeah. I think a lot about it because one of the things I feel is sometimes romance authors develop secondary characters only as bait for later books. And look, God, trust me, I love it. But that is not what KJ Charles is doing. And I think it's really important in terms of from a writing standpoint to really state that. Every single character in her books is there to be themself, not there to just be like, "I'm here to support the other characters," or, " I'm here to be background," or, "I'm here for a future book." And I really think that that's a hallmark of her style to me, is how well-developed it all is. No one's there just for a reason. And I think if you're interested as a writer yourself about how to do good secondary character work, you should be reading KJ Charles.

Sarah MacLean 01:29:53 / #:
Oh, a thousand percent. You should be reading KJ Charles for a lot of reasons. Her incredible plotting.

Jennifer Prokop 01:30:04 / #:
Yes.

Sarah MacLean 01:30:05 / #:
And this sounds like you're explaining the plot to yourself, is like, oh, yes, I felt harmed by that, but the truth is that her plotting is so clean. And I don't know if it happens on the first draft or if it happens later, but the way her plots come together is so tidy. And we talked about this, we're sort of rehashing the deep dive that we did, but hearing her talk about process in that way was really valuable.

01:30:37 / #:
And I think also one of the things that she seemed to be able to do, she seems to have been able to do with her career, is really write all around. You really get the sense from her that as difficult as it has been in terms of it sounds like her publishing journey has been not great all the time, and certainly losing your publisher, your publisher closing, having a terrible relationship with your publishers can really impact what you end up writing. It sounds like for her, it has also been really, it allowed her to really explore.

Jennifer Prokop 01:31:18 / #:
Is this the first predominantly self-published author we've had on?

Sarah MacLean 01:31:22 / #:
Well, we had E.E. on.

Jennifer Prokop 01:31:23 / #:
As a trailblazer? Oh, and E.E. Ottoman. And that's probably not a mistake, right?

Sarah MacLean 01:31:30 / #:
And Radcliffe. If you think about our queer-

Jennifer Prokop 01:31:32 / #:
Oh, yeah. Right.

Sarah MacLean 01:31:33 / #:
-guests. With the exception of Vincent, but that's just because it didn't exist probably when-

Jennifer Prokop 01:31:38 / #:
Sure.

Sarah MacLean 01:31:39 / #:
It definitely did not exist when Vincent was writing.

Jennifer Prokop 01:31:42 / #:
And I think that this is the thing where we haven't really... I think we are agnostic. When we talk about books, we're just like, "This is a good book." We're not really talking about necessarily the pipeline that brought it to your Kindle or to your door. I think that when we think about this time in romance, the ability to self-publish, the gatekeeping that exists that then people can circumvent is going to bring us books like KJ Charles, like E.E. Ottoman, like May Peterson. These are books that... And then because of the success of these authors, then we can see how traditional publishing is like, "Oh, there is a market for this." That whole discussion of the ways publishing is like, "Well, if this sold already, we'd already be selling it."

01:32:32 / #:
And I think that the only, in that way, self-publishing has been such a gift, not just to the romance community, but just to all readers. I can read books now that I didn't know I would love because publishing didn't think I would buy it. And I think that that part, talking about the journey from traditional, a kind of traditional independent publisher Samhain, down to the Riptide dream spinner, this has been a circuitous route. And it's hard to see, I don't know how to say this, the whole story until it's later, but I think that we're going to really look back on self-publishing as it gives and it takes.

Sarah MacLean 01:33:25 / #:
You and I come at romance with a very keen sense of we have to know the past in order to understand what's going on. I don't think everybody comes to romance that way, and I don't think everybody has to. But I think for you and me, there is a very real sense of the history informing the present. Right?

Jennifer Prokop 01:33:44 / #:
Right.

Sarah MacLean 01:33:46 / #:
And I think people like KJ teach us that... I just don't believe that indie publishing would be where it is if not for those small presses at the beginning. And I think that that is because those small presses, they rode that line between traditional publishing and the structure of traditional publishing and the timeline of traditional publishing and where we are now. And so I think that we are very lucky to have had authors like KJ come up through those publishers because I don't think that if we'd sort of immediately gone into what we are, where we are now with a giant pool and everybody just throws their stuff into it, we would have the kind of discoverability that we do.

Jennifer Prokop 01:34:45 / #:
Well, and I think that this is also, I'm thinking a lot about what she was talking about in terms of her readers, the letter she gets from readers, and everyone, you couldn't see her, right? But it was like this is clearly something that moved her deeply. It moved me to hear her talk about it. And I think that this is the part where what has in many seasons of Faded Mates, I hope what people really understand is reading has made me who I am. If you're a reader, the things you read are changing, are making you who you are, realizing who you are at all kinds of levels. And I just found it really beautiful to think that self-publishing, cutting out those gatekeepers has just made room in the world for people who in romance, in the readership in the world, who they are.

01:35:43 / #:
I don't know. I just get on my high horse about romance, how beautiful it is, how much it means to me to know that, I don't know, there's nothing more important about who you are in the world than how you feel about yourself and who you are allowed to love. Right?

Sarah MacLean 01:35:59 / #:
I don't know.

Jennifer Prokop 01:36:01 / #:
Yeah. And I just was very moved by the idea that people who have, we've talked about letters, people, authors get from readers who are like, "I don't like it when you swear." But you know what? Maybe that's worth it. Who cares about those letters in comparison to...

Sarah MacLean 01:36:19 / #:
Yeah. And I do think we are living in a really fascinating age of romance, and you and I talk about all the different ways that that is true, and it's not all good, but the thing that is good is how easy it is to find yourself in the books now.

01:36:43 / #:
I also think we didn't say this with her, and I wish we had, because I do believe that she herself may be responsible for a lot of how historical romance is tackling queerness.

Jennifer Prokop 01:37:00 / #:
Oh, yeah.

Sarah MacLean 01:37:02 / #:
And I mean that as the difference, the sheer difference between even the nineties and early thousands and the way historicals would use queerness as a weapon versus now you do see characters in romance in historical more. You don't see them as protagonists all the time, but you see them as secondary characters more, tertiary characters more. And I think KJ is a big, big reason why, I think so many of us have looked to her books as remarkable texts and also a brilliant model for how to try to do this right.

Jennifer Prokop 01:37:51 / #:
Yeah.

Sarah MacLean 01:37:52 / #:
And I think that's why we wanted her on. Well, we're rethinking the way we think about trailblazers. We want very much to be collected. The theory of this batch of episodes, the series, is that we wanted to make sure we had a lot of these voices. And of course, for us, we want to make sure we get the older voices as quickly as we can for lots of reasons. But that doesn't mean that... But KJ is a perfect example as of somebody who has transformed the genre.

Jennifer Prokop 01:38:29 / #:
Yes, right. As a reader. It's funny because we've been talking, this is not related necessarily to exactly to KJ Charles, but I had this moment this week where I was kind of like, "What is it I value as a romance reader, a longtime romance reader?" We see so many new readers. It's really exciting in so many ways. But I had this moment where I just realized what I really value is people who have a lot of interesting ideas. I just want to read your books if you have interesting ideas. And I joked about the book about the taxidermist, because if you had told me that I would love a book about taxidermy, I don't think I would've believed you. And yet, obviously it's just a set piece in some ways.

01:39:15 / #:
But her interests, I'm kind of glad I brought up to her talking about how interested she became in it. And I think that that's the thing about KJ. When she said, "I have 27 books," or whatever it is, they're not all the same. Not even close, none of them to them. And I think that that's one of the reasons I think of her as one of my favorite authors, is obviously she just does romance so well, but also she is always doing something interesting herself. I can see her challenging herself, and that is challenging and exciting to me.

Sarah MacLean 01:39:49 / #:
And what's fascinating is when she listed the authors who she thought were important for us to name, almost all of those authors also do different things every time.

Jennifer Prokop 01:40:02 / #:
Yes, right.

Sarah MacLean 01:40:03 / #:
Right?

Jennifer Prokop 01:40:04 / #:
Right.

Sarah MacLean 01:40:04 / #:
Alexis Hall has never written the same book twice. So there's a fascinating... She is drawn to other authors who are doing, who exploring.

Jennifer Prokop 01:40:16 / #:
Yeah.

01:40:18 / #:
And that's the thing I feel like when I think about trailblazers, to me, I think when we first started, it was kind of you were the first, obviously these are the people who are the first to do something or riding the wave of being the first to do something. But I also think as our thinking has changed, it's kind of like, who has figured out a way to write 27 books and keep it fresh? Who has figured out the way? And that is valuable to me because I think that's how we talk about, as she said, it's a huge big tent, right? Romance is huge. So who are the people that are out there pushing on the corners? I'm interested in how they just think about their work and what they do.

Sarah MacLean 01:41:04 / #:
All right, well, another trailblazer in the can, as they say. Everyone, this is Faded Mates. Don't forget Faded Mates Live is March 24th in New York City. We would love to see you, bring your friends. Tickets and more information at fadedmates.net/live. Next week, we've got an interstitial for you.

Jennifer Prokop 01:41:28 / #:
Yeah. And I would like to just say quick shout out and thank you to Lumi Labs and Kylie Scott for sponsoring this week's episode.

Sarah MacLean 01:41:37 / #:
We're thrilled to have you all. I'm Sarah MacLean I'm here with my friend Jen Prokop. You can find us every week at fadedmates.net, on Twitter @fadedmates, on Instagram @fadedmatespod. We will see you next week.

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S05.17: Catherine Coulter: Trailblazer

We’re thrilled to share our next Trailblazer episode this week—we had a great time talking with Catherine Coulter about her place in romance history as one of the earliest authors of the Signet Regency line—and the author who many believe revolutionized the Regency…by making them sexy.

She tells a million great stories here, and we talk about writing historical romance, about sex in romance, about the way she thinks about plot vs. story, about the way she’s evolved as a writer, and about revisiting her old books. All that, and Catherine has a lot to say about heroes. Thank you to Catherine Coulter for making the time for us.

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

Show Notes

People Mentioned: publisher Peter Heggie, agent Robert Gottlieb, publisher Robert Diforio, editor Hilary Ross, editor Leslie Gelbman, publisher Phyllis Grann, editor May Chen, editor David Highfill, and marketing consultant Nicole Robson at Trident Media.

Authors Mentioned: Georgette Heyer, Rebecca Brandewyne, Janet Dailey, LaVyrle Spencer, Linda Howard, Iris Johansen, Kay Hooper, Debbie Gordon and Joan Wolf

 

Catherine Coulter Novels

Sponsors

Cara Dion, author of Indiscreet.
get it at Amazon, free on Kindle Unlimited,
and
Lumi Labs, creators of Microdose Gummies
Visit microdose.com and use the code FATEDMATES
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TRANSCRIPT

Catherine Coulter 00:00:00 / #: At that point in time, Signet had sort of developed as kind of the classiest of the Regency romances, and there were some other little attempts, but with Signet, even their print runs, which were considered quite healthy, then were like, for the Regency, they were like 60,000. Then on the second book, I remember having, I got the plot idea and I told Hilary, we were down in Wall Street at a restaurant and we were having lunch. I said, well, Hilary, I said, the only thing is there was no sex in Regency.

00:00:49 / #: Absolutely zippo, nada. I said, I've got a plot, Hilary, but I want sex in it. It was at that point, which rarely happens, but it was an utter lack of noise in the restaurant, and everybody was on point, and we got a good laugh out of that. I told her what I wanted to do and she grinned and she said, go for it. As a result, the print run jumped up to like 130,000.

Jennifer Prokop 00:01:26 / #: That was the voice of Catherine Coulter, author of more than 80 novels, including some of the earliest Signet Regencies. We'll talk with Catherine about her time at the beginning of the Signet Line, her work, adding sex to Signet Regencies, and how she evolved into historical romances, and then of course into her longstanding career as a thriller writer. This is Fated Mates. I'm Jennifer Prokop, a romance reader and editor.

Sarah MacLean 00:01:59 / #: I'm Sarah MacLean. I read romance novels and I write them.

Jennifer Prokop 00:02:04 / #: You're about to hear a great conversation with Catherine Coulter. We're not going to spend a whole lot more time introducing it. We'll talk more on the back end. Without further ado, here is our conversation with Catherine Coulter.

Sarah MacLean 00:02:17 / #: We try really hard not to do all the fangirling, but I have to say The Sherbrooke Bride was like the Greatest Joy of my Life when I read that book, right when it came out. I'm really very delighted to be talking to you today. Thank you so much for making time for us.

Catherine Coulter 00:02:37 / #: Well, thank you for asking me, and I'm so delighted that you like The Sherbrooke Bride. It seems to be everybody's favorite, and it's an 11 book series.

Sarah MacLean 00:02:47 / #: Well, we're going to get into why and why you think it is. We are in our fourth season of this podcast, because we really love romance novels a whole lot. Over the last year, we have been interviewing the people, many of the people who we believe built the house of romance, so to speak. Part of the reason why we're doing that, and I'm sure you've noticed this, is that romance doesn't get a whole lot of attention from the world at large.

00:03:18 / #: We feel like it's really important to collect the history of the genre as much as we possibly can. These conversations, these, what we're calling Trailblazer recordings are really conversations that are very far-reaching. We want to talk about all things you. I know that you have a book out next week, so we want to talk about that too. But hopefully, you'll give us a sense of your life through writing and through romance. But we are both really thrilled to have you.

Catherine Coulter 00:03:52 / #: Well, thank you very much. Those were lovely things to say. It's true, it's true. I'll never forget when I was started writing, "Oh yes, I'm a writer." "What do you write, children's books?" That was the most regular. Then, I think romance was next. You were almost embarrassed to say, "Well, yeah, you idiot." I want to make some money. Women are 85% of the retail market, so, excuse me.

Sarah MacLean 00:04:27 / #: Yeah.

Jennifer Prokop 00:04:27 / #: Yeah.

Catherine Coulter 00:04:27 / #: Anyway.

Sarah MacLean 00:04:28 / #: Yeah.

Catherine Coulter 00:04:29 / #: I think you guys are doing a wonderful thing and getting the history down. That's very good.

Sarah MacLean 00:04:35 / #: Catherine, can you tell us about how you started reading romance?

Catherine Coulter 00:04:42 / #: Well, my mother would read aloud to me when I was like three years old, and she read everything, everything. But my very, very favorite author is Georgette Heyer, and I believe she died in 1972. She was the one who started the Regency genre. You've read her right?

Sarah MacLean 00:05:09 / #: Yes.

Jennifer Prokop 00:05:10 / #: Yes. Yes. We know Heyer.

Catherine Coulter 00:05:11 / #: Okay. Yeah, I still think she's the class act, and I've always in teaching always say, you're allowed three exclamation points a book. Okay, that's it. She uses exclamation points after nearly every sentence.

Sarah MacLean 00:05:29 / #: Exactly.

Catherine Coulter 00:05:30 / #: But it's okay. It's the weirdest thing. She does everything that you shouldn't do, and it's wonderful, which goes to show there really are no rules.

Sarah MacLean 00:05:41 / #: Right.

Catherine Coulter 00:05:41 / #: But I don't think many people are on her level of just delight. Sheer delight. What was your favorite Georgette Heyer?

Sarah MacLean 00:05:51 / #: Well, my favorite is Devil's Cub.

Catherine Coulter 00:05:55 / #: Gotcha. That was a good one.

Sarah MacLean 00:05:57 / #: Which probably tracks very well with, you'll be unsurprised that then I really fell in love with The Sherbrooke Bride and lots of other books with similar heroes to her.

Catherine Coulter 00:06:10 / #: We call them assholes or someone we deem not all that much.

Sarah MacLean 00:06:17 / #: Yeah. Well, romance in many ways has not changed all that much. Right?

Jennifer Prokop 00:06:24 / #: What about you, Catherine? What was your favorite Heyer?

Catherine Coulter 00:06:28 / #: The Grand Sophy.

Jennifer Prokop 00:06:29 / #: Oh, of course. A classic.

Catherine Coulter 00:06:31 / #: Yeah. I just love The Grand Sophy. She was such a go-getter and Sylvester or The Wicked Uncle, talk about the classic asshole. It's wonderful.

Jennifer Prokop 00:06:43 / #: Okay, so you are reading Heyer and you're reading sort of voraciously. Tell us about your life at this point. Where are you living in the world? How do you start thinking about actually putting pen to paper?

Catherine Coulter 00:06:59 / #: Well, as you know, everybody has a talent, and it just depends if you, A, find the talent, B, if you try to do something with it. My talent was writing, but I never really recognized it. I just thought everybody could write a paper the night before and get an A. It was just very natural. It was just very natural. You really didn't understand why your classmates hated your guts, but they could do that. They could do their own thing.

00:07:30 / #: Anyway, I never really thought about it. Then, I went to University of Texas and then got a master's degree at Boston College. At that point, my husband was in medical school in Columbia Presbyterian in Manhattan. One thing, I've been extraordinarily lucky, you know how when you don't know if you should go one direction or another?

Jennifer Prokop 00:08:00 / #: Mm-hmm.

Catherine Coulter 00:08:01 / #: Then you might go the one direction and you think, "Well, what would've happened if I had... Well..." Anyway, it's at the same time, I was offered an assistant professorship at a college in New Jersey, and then the other was a speech writing job on Wall Street in Manhattan. I got to weigh both of them.

00:08:22 / #: My dad had been a professor at UT, and he would tell me that academia is the most, it's a viper pit. He said, "I've never seen anything like it. They cannot compare, businesses cannot compare to the viper pit that is academia.

Sarah MacLean 00:08:40 / #: Even Wall Street?

Jennifer Prokop 00:08:42 / #: Yeah, wow.

Catherine Coulter 00:08:43 / #: I chose Wall Street and I wrote speeches and for a guy who was the president of an actuarial firm, and your eyes are already glazing over, mind did. But I'll never forget in the interview, he was this kind of desiccated little old guy. He was very nice, and he was the president and he said, "I have to speak a lot." He says, "I don't know why people ask me to speak, because I'm not very good." He said, "Can you make me funny?"

00:09:12 / #: I said, "Sure, sure." Then at that time, my husband, as I said, was at Columbia Presbyterian. I saw him maybe 30 minutes a day over spaghetti. I was reading, oh, 10 to 15 books a week in the evening. Then one night I threw the book across the room and said, "I can do better." I thought that I was so, I thought that I was a trailblazer, that nobody had ever done that.

Sarah MacLean 00:09:42 / #: Now look.

Catherine Coulter 00:09:42 / #: Well, it turns out that maybe 60% of writers started that way. "I can do better." I went in and told my husband and I have heard from so many women and I just want to take them out and shoot them. "Oh, well, my husband won't let me do blah, blah, blah." I go, "Oh, shut up." Kick the jerk to the curb. He said, "Sure." He took the next weekend off and together we plotted the first and last book, but that was the last one he helped plot.

Jennifer Prokop 00:10:16 / #: Yeah.

Sarah MacLean 00:10:16 / #: Oh, my gosh.

Catherine Coulter 00:10:18 / #: That was, what was the name of that? The Autumn Countess, which I later rewrote and made it into The Countess, which is much, much better, because it's funny. That's how it started.

Sarah MacLean 00:10:30 / #: That book was published in 1979. Were you read, is that right around, was it very quickly published?

Catherine Coulter 00:10:37 / #: Well, what happened was is since I was working full time, I would get up and write at like 4:30 and then get ready for work at 6:30. I've always been a morning person, so that worked for me. I took about a year. I'll never forget, I rode the A train, it's the express, down to Wall Street. There was this guy who worked at William Morrow.

00:11:03 / #: I said, "Oh, I'm writing a book." "Yeah right, honey." I think at the time, he wanted to get in my pants, and so he was all sorts of encouraging and nice. What he did was he gave me the name of a freelance editor in the city, and she was also a model. Of course at that time, nobody knew anything and nobody knew anything until RWA was founded-

Jennifer Prokop 00:11:33 / #: Right.

Catherine Coulter 00:11:33 / #: ... in the early 80s.

Sarah MacLean 00:11:34 / #: Right.

Catherine Coulter 00:11:35 / #: And that's when things started opening up. But at that time, it was a black hole, publishing, but I was at least in the center of it.

Jennifer Prokop 00:11:43 / #: You were reading romance novels at this point? So you-

Catherine Coulter 00:11:46 / #: Well, I read that, but I don't know if you know this, but I would say that a good 90%, maybe more, of all of my books have mysteries in them.

Jennifer Prokop 00:11:57 / #: Right.

Sarah MacLean 00:11:57 / #: Right. Yes.

Catherine Coulter 00:12:00 / #: I love mysteries. It was just a natural thing to have mysteries in it. I read tons of mysteries and I read, and there were the early bodice rippers, which were a hoot. We have the 18-year-old virgin at the beginning, she loses her virginity, he's the hero. They're separated for 500 pages and then they get together at the end. Oh, I love you. They were wonderful. They were absolutely incredible.

00:12:29 / #: This editor said, "Well, let's go for it." What she had was the top Regency publishers and the top editors. At the time it was New American Library, they had the class act with Signet Regencies, and they were the only really class act in publishing. You can now take courses on writing query letters, you know 101.

Jennifer Prokop 00:12:58 / #: Yeah.

Catherine Coulter 00:12:58 / #: I like, well, dear boss, this is my book. I hope you like it. It's so stupid. Again, you never know. There are usually three reasons why you're bought in a house, back then and now. Number one is a whole lot of writers, the majority of writers are always late. The writers under contract are always late turning in manuscripts. They're going, "Ah, what are we going to do? What are we going to do?"

Jennifer Prokop 00:13:32 / #: You just called out Sarah real hard and it's pretty amazing.

Catherine Coulter 00:13:35 / #: Sarah, come here and let me smack you.

Sarah MacLean 00:13:39 / #: I'm sorry, I'm sorry, Catherine. I'm sorry.

Jennifer Prokop 00:13:42 / #: Meet your deadline, Sarah.

Catherine Coulter 00:13:43 / #: Oh, well, you drive a house crazy, because then they're having to do this, that and the other. Or they might buy a book because they really, really love it. But those are the two main reasons. I really don't know which one I was.

Jennifer Prokop 00:13:59 / #: Oh, I know.

Catherine Coulter 00:14:01 / #: Well, Hilary Ross called me three days later, asked me out to lunch and offered me a three book contract. I was very, very lucky. She loves to tell the story how she pulled me up by my bootstrap son of a bitch. That could have been true, I guess. She still lives on the West Side of New York.

Jennifer Prokop 00:14:25 / #: Oh, that's great.

Catherine Coulter 00:14:26 / #: She was a character, and so it was very strange. But she loved my book, so what can I do, but love her back?

Jennifer Prokop 00:14:33 / #: Of course.

Catherine Coulter 00:14:34 / #: I didn't have an agent. When the three book contract was coming up, because I was such an idiot and didn't know anything, I asked my editor if she could recommend an agent. She recommended a very good friend of hers. I realized that I could have negotiated myself a better contract. That's how it all started.

Jennifer Prokop 00:15:00 / #: Hilary Ross, did she found the New American Library. For people who don't know, New American Library became Signet, correct?

Catherine Coulter 00:15:08 / #: No, no, no. New American Library was subsumed by Putnam.

Jennifer Prokop 00:15:13 / #: Okay.

Catherine Coulter 00:15:14 / #: Okay?

Jennifer Prokop 00:15:15 / #: Yep.

Catherine Coulter 00:15:16 / #: Then Putnam, of course, was subsumed by Random House. There used to be the big seven sisters in New York, and I think now we're down to four.

Jennifer Prokop 00:15:24 / #: Yeah, right.

Catherine Coulter 00:15:24 / #: We won't go into Amazon who just did wonderful things.

Sarah MacLean 00:15:28 / #: I am currently holding up an original copy of the Rebel Bride. Look down at your app right now, and you'll see the covers of the original Signet Regency. Could you talk a little bit about Signet as a line, because we talk a lot here about category romance, but we haven't talked really at all about Signet, which is one of the reasons why we were so excited to have you come on, because we want to talk obviously about your historicals and how much of a powerhouse you had become. But in those early days at Signet, what was the vibe? What were people thinking there?

Catherine Coulter 00:16:03 / #: Well, at that point in time, Signet had sort of developed as kind of the classiest of the Regency romances. There were some other little attempts by other houses, and I cannot remember any other imprints at this-

Sarah MacLean 00:16:25 / #: Sure.

Catherine Coulter 00:16:25 / #: I just can't remember. But with Signet, even their print runs, which were considered quite healthy then, for the Regencies, they were like 60,000. Then what happened was on the second book, I remember having, I got the plot idea and the second book, was that The Rebel Bride?

Jennifer Prokop 00:16:51 / #: Yes.

Catherine Coulter 00:16:52 / #: Okay. I told Hilary, we were down in Wall Street at a restaurant and we were having lunch. I said, "Well, Hilary," I said, "The only thing is," there was no sex in Regencies. Absolutely zippo, nada.

Jennifer Prokop 00:17:10 / #: Right.

Catherine Coulter 00:17:10 / #: I said, "I've got a plot, Hilary, but I want sex in it." It was at that point, which rarely happens, but it was an utter lack of noise in the restaurant and everybody was on point, and we got a good laugh out of that. I told her what I wanted to do and she grinned and she said, "Go for it."

Sarah MacLean 00:17:39 / #: Oh, great.

Jennifer Prokop 00:17:39 / #: Wow.

Catherine Coulter 00:17:39 / #: As a result, the print run jumped up to like 130,000.

Sarah MacLean 00:17:45 / #: Oh, look at that.

Catherine Coulter 00:17:46 / #: They were like, because everybody loved it. Then Joan Wolf, who's a friend now, always, always, and she was at Signet at that time, and so she stuck her toes in. But that was really the start of putting sex in Regencies. It was not discreet. In those days, they truly were bodice rippers. The sex could be extraordinarily explicit. I did extraordinarily explicit sex, I think through The Sherbrooke Bride series.

00:18:23 / #: Even toward the end of that, I just kind of lost interest in it and really spent much more time on the plot and the characters, because I'd read so many books. I go to conferences where editors would say, "Now, you want to have a sex scene every three chapters," or every 20 pages, or whatever. It was like it was gratuitous. That's when I realized you don't want anything gratuitous in a book, because it pulls the reader out of the book, which it did me, and I'm a reader, big reader.

00:18:59 / #: I said, "What are you doing? Who cares? These are just parts and it doesn't mean anything." In other words, most of the time, the sex scenes did not forward the plot. They detracted, they were just blah, they were just thrown in. I just kind of lost interest in it. That's when I just kind of went down, down, down, down, down, and stopped with explicit sex. Most people didn't.

00:19:27 / #: In fact, today, again, I wish that people writing romance would not depend so heavily on this really, really explicit sex, because it's not necessary. If you're going to do a sex scene, you want to have humor in it. It shouldn't be body part A, and body part B, and oh, this is so serious, and blah, blah, blah. No. Blah. Anyway, all right. I'm now off my bandwagon.

Jennifer Prokop 00:19:54 / #: That's okay.

Sarah MacLean 00:19:54 / #: I love a bandwagon.

Jennifer Prokop 00:19:58 / #: This week's episode of Fated Mates is sponsored by Cara Dion, author of Indiscreet.

Sarah MacLean 00:20:04 / #: All right, here we go. Are you ready?

Jennifer Prokop 00:20:06 / #: I'm ready.

Sarah MacLean 00:20:07 / #: On her 21st birthday, our Heroine Min is stood up at the opera by some jerk, but there just happens to be somebody in the seat next to her.

Jennifer Prokop 00:20:18 / #: Very handsome. I'm sure.

Sarah MacLean 00:20:19 / #: So handsome. They have an instant attraction. They bond over their love of music and opera and they have a one night stand, as one does. They leave the opera immediately. Have a one night stand, Moonstruck style.

Jennifer Prokop 00:20:33 / #: Moonstruck style. I love it.

Sarah MacLean 00:20:35 / #: Exactly. Except, Jen, what do you think happens the next day when Min goes to her university opera program?

Jennifer Prokop 00:20:46 / #: Is he her professor, Sarah?

Sarah MacLean 00:20:47 / #: Oh my God. He's totally her professor. Totally. It gets-

Jennifer Prokop 00:20:51 / #: You could not be more delighted by this, and I love it.

Sarah MacLean 00:20:53 / #: My favorite, this is my favorite, I cannot wait to read this. This one is for anybody who, like me, loves a professor-student romance. This is very forbidden. It's all about secrets. There's a little bit of an age gap in here, if you like an age gap romance. All I have to say about this is, it sounds frickin' great.

00:21:14 / #: There's a secret dark shadow from Mins past, makes their entanglement even more complicated. This is my favorite part. The music that drove them both forward and bound them together could also be the thing to tear them apart.

Jennifer Prokop 00:21:31 / #: Amazing. You can find Indiscreet in print, ebook and on KU. You can find out more about the author at CaraDion.author on Instagram. Thank you to Cara Dion for sponsoring this week's episode of Fated Meets.

Sarah MacLean 00:21:49 / #: You wrote seven Signets and seven Regencies, and then you moved to what you call historicals.

Catherine Coulter 00:21:58 / #: Well, no, I call them hystericals.

Sarah MacLean 00:22:02 / #: Oh, you're amazing.

Catherine Coulter 00:22:03 / #: Yes. I wrote long hystericals. That was interesting, because at that point, after I finished that contract, I had the brain to say, "I think I need a real agent and not the editor's best friend." I had met Peter Heggie, who was the Secretary of the Authors Guild in New York. I gave him a call. We had moved to San Francisco, because my husband was doing his residency here at the University of California San Francisco.

00:22:40 / #: Of course, a writer is totally portable. At that time, my company, I was kind of the golden lass. They even moved me out here to do a job that I had no knowledge, that I couldn't do, because it was installing a computer system on the West Coast. Okay.

Jennifer Prokop 00:23:00 / #: Right.

Catherine Coulter 00:23:00 / #: Honey, I can't even do Zoom. All right? Anyway, that's neither here nor there. But so I called Peter Heggie from San Francisco and told him I wanted a female agent. He gave me the name of two women and then he gave me one man. When I came back to New York on business and so forth, I met these people, and I swear to you, I do not even remember the women's names. I went to William Morris, they're a great big agency in New York.

00:23:36 / #: I met with the guy he recommended. His name was Robert Gottlieb, and he'd been out of the mail room, and that is still spelled male. He was in kind of this closet with no window. He'd been out of the mail room for like six months and we talked and I said, "What do you want to do when you grow up?" He said, "I want to be on the board of directors of William Morris by the time I'm 45."

00:24:10 / #: I never forgot that. Anyway, he became my agent. He absolutely enraged Hilary, absolutely enraged. The head of the house, of New American Library had to get involved to calm things down. My darling, this is over a 10,000 book advance, a $10,000 book advance. Because we're back in 1980.

Sarah MacLean 00:24:36 / #: Sure.

Catherine Coulter 00:24:37 / #: Okay. 1981. That worked out. Robert and I have been together longer than all of his marriages, but I give great gifts. I give great gifts.

Sarah MacLean 00:24:50 / #: You are the reason why.

Jennifer Prokop 00:24:51 / #: Yeah.

Catherine Coulter 00:24:53 / #: Oh, boy. I'll never forget this, just to aside. I'll never forget, he called me in 1987 and he was hyperventilating. He was so excited. He was on the board of directors of William Morris when he was 37.

Sarah MacLean 00:25:11 / #: Oh, that's great news.

Jennifer Prokop 00:25:12 / #: Oh, look at that news.

Catherine Coulter 00:25:12 / #: Yeah. It's a great story. Then he got out sharked by Michael Ovitz in 2000 and then started Trident Media. That started a new chapter of his life. He also married Olga, who was an orienteer at Olympic in Russia.

Sarah MacLean 00:25:33 / #: Wow.

Catherine Coulter 00:25:33 / #: He's a Russian fanatic. Anyway, and so they're still married. They have two grown kids, well almost grown kids now. Everything is good with him. As I say, we've been together for how long? Years and years.

Sarah MacLean 00:25:46 / #: That's a long time.

Catherine Coulter 00:25:46 / #: Well over 30 years. In the mid-80s, Bob Diforio, who was on the sales team for New American Library, he became the President. He and I met, and I really didn't know who he was, but we just had an immediate relationship. He was in part, he started pushing me immediately. I'll never forget, it was a Fire Song.

00:26:21 / #: It was the first, yeah, it was the book in the medieval series. They decided, you're going to love this. He decided that they were going to have a Fire Song perfume. They attached these little bottles of perfumes to all the books and shrink wrap them. The problem was...

Sarah MacLean 00:26:45 / #: Oh, my gosh.

Catherine Coulter 00:26:49 / #: They were shipped and were shipped in trucks and whatever. The perfume turned horrible.

Sarah MacLean 00:26:51 / #: Oh, no.

Catherine Coulter 00:27:00 / #: I must have gotten 2000 emails saying, not emails, letters saying, "Blech, ew."

Jennifer Prokop 00:27:08 / #: Oh, no.

Catherine Coulter 00:27:10 / #: Oh, that was so fun.

Jennifer Prokop 00:27:12 / #: Still you survived it, Catherine. The books must've been great.

Catherine Coulter 00:27:17 / #: Oh, things just. There's so many just cute little things that happened through the years.

Sarah MacLean 00:27:23 / #: That Song series. I think I read every one of those books a dozen times. I would get one and then just read them straight through-

Jennifer Prokop 00:27:32 / #: Read them all.

Sarah MacLean 00:27:32 / #: ... and then immediately start again. I wonder if you could talk a little bit, just in general, about what it was like writing. When we talk now about, when we look back on the 70s, the 80s, the early 90s, that period of time really felt like the heyday of romance. It's never been like that since.

Catherine Coulter 00:27:54 / #: It was the golden age, I call it. It really was the golden age.

Sarah MacLean 00:27:57 / #: Do you feel like you knew at the time what you were a part of?

Catherine Coulter 00:28:04 / #: Oh, no. You never do. No, no, no, no. I look back now and realize it was the golden age. Of course, this was pre-Amazon and everybody was just, the print runs were outrageous. They were over a million copies, and it was-

Jennifer Prokop 00:28:25 / #: That's wild.

Catherine Coulter 00:28:27 / #: Yeah. It was a wild time. But you really, you're writing and then a book comes out and it does like this. When we negotiate a contract and we're going to conferences and you just don't think, "Wow, I'm a part of the golden era." Because at the time, you are still a part of it and you're not looking back. You're not looking back. You're looking forward, always, always forward.

Sarah MacLean 00:28:56 / #: Tell us a little bit about what the readers are like at this point. What are these conferences like?

Catherine Coulter 00:29:01 / #: I think the last one was an RWA, but when I compare it to the ones throughout the years, they're not that different at all. They're really not. I will tell you, the big writers, like Janet Daly was huge then. Absolutely huge. I remember she would travel to a conference with her handlers. Okay. There'd be her personal handler, and then there'd be somebody from the publishing house, and then they would answer most of the questions.

00:29:42 / #: In the other workshops by the unsuperstars had then, as you had now, is people will stand up and say, "Okay, you want to do this, this, this, and this, and don't do that and don't do this." People are out. They want to get published. That's what they want more than anything in the universe. They're taking wild notes. I can remember thinking then, "This is nuts. What you want to do, darling, is to write a good story. Forget the rest of the shit." Okay?

Jennifer Prokop 00:30:15 / #: Yeah.

Catherine Coulter 00:30:17 / #: I just had a few do's and don'ts, but mainly even back then, I'd say, "Sit your butt in a chair and write. You cannot edit a blank page. It doesn't matter if you write crap, it really doesn't, because now you have something to work on." But people, they would preach. There was a lot of preaching, because I'm published and you're not. I don't know if it's still like that today.

00:30:51 / #: It was, the last time I was at a conference, it was more or less like that. These were kind of superstars, like what's her face? Oh, she retired and stopped writing. LaVyrle Spencer. You had, again, a huge disparity between the superstars and the people who desperately wanted to be published. This has been true forever. Forever.

Sarah MacLean 00:31:18 / #: While we're talking about authors, other authors, could you give us a sense of who was your community? You obviously, you're very busy, you have a day job, a high power day job, your husband is studying.

Catherine Coulter 00:31:31 / #: No, I quit my job in 1981, because I could no longer afford to work.

Sarah MacLean 00:31:39 / #: Right. It's the dream. Right?

Jennifer Prokop 00:31:40 / #: Right.

Sarah MacLean 00:31:41 / #: Of course.

Catherine Coulter 00:31:42 / #: Yeah. I was full-time writer from 1981, got a computer in 1981. It was $10,000. It was a Vector and it had a five-inch floppy disk. It took a week to learn how to do it. But I expected that knew it, but it got rid of all the crap, because if you made mistakes before on an electric typewriter, you had to retype a page.

Sarah MacLean 00:32:02 / #: Retype, right. Mm-hmm.

Catherine Coulter 00:32:06 / #: But you just press a little button and crap's gone.

Sarah MacLean 00:32:08 / #: Sure.

Catherine Coulter 00:32:08 / #: It was an amazing, amazing thing. Graham Greene, another writer. I'll never forget, he said in the mid-80s, "You're not a real writer if you use a computer." And I was thinking, "You idiot."

Jennifer Prokop 00:32:19 / #: Oh, Graham.

Sarah MacLean 00:32:21 / #: Oh, Graham. That's cute. That's cute. Graham.

Catherine Coulter 00:32:24 / #: Oh, lord. In 1985, I was in Houston. I had a couple of medical writer friends who sort of dropped out a little bit later, dropped out of the picture. But in 1985, I was in Houston, and this is when Rebecca Brandewyne was really big.

Sarah MacLean 00:32:45 / #: Of course.

Jennifer Prokop 00:32:45 / #: Oh, yeah.

Catherine Coulter 00:32:48 / #: Her mother, she really wanted to have lunch with me. I said, "Well, this will be fun to see what she has to say." She was an agent, Rebecca's mom. Then I'll never forget, she kissed me off for somebody else to have lunch with. I was kind of looking around and I see an empty chair at this table, and I go up and I say, "Can I sit here?" We met, and this was Linda Howard and Iris Johansen and Kay Hooper.

Sarah MacLean 00:33:21 / #: Oh, the whole crew.

Catherine Coulter 00:33:22 / #: We became best friends at that point. We have stayed that way forever.

Jennifer Prokop 00:33:26 / #: That's nice. That's great.

Catherine Coulter 00:33:29 / #: Yeah.

Sarah MacLean 00:33:29 / #: My gosh, and all four of you have just, you're still all writing. That's rare when you make a group of friends when you're young at the job and that you're all still there.

Catherine Coulter 00:33:41 / #: Yeah. Everybody became successful, everybody, all four of us, which was very good to happen, because you wouldn't want one or two people not as successful as you when we'd go on trips and stuff together. It worked out very, very well. I don't think there was no jealousy. Everybody was very supportive of everybody else, so it worked.

Sarah MacLean 00:34:06 / #: Around this time, one of the things that's interesting is you really had a productive period in the 80s where you were writing historicals. You wrote a few Silhouette Intimate Moments. You were clearly starting to transition into doing mystery thriller. Did you feel like you got guidance through this process? Or was this something that you just really were like, "These are the things I want to write?"

Catherine Coulter 00:34:30 / #: Well, that's a good question. I remember, I think it was in 1985, and we were in Europe on a train in Switzerland, and this entire plot came into my brain, which had never happened before, and it was contemporary. I said, "Go away. I don't want to watch contemporary go away." It didn't. I wrote it when I got home and I realized it was a short contemporary romance, and I had no idea what to do with it.

00:35:00 / #: I called a friend, Debbie Gordon, who's no longer writing, but she was very big at that time at Silhouette. She said, "Okay." She said, "This is what you tell Robert, this is what he wants to ask for." I did it, and he did, and I was with Leslie Wenger, and so it was a three book series, Aftershocks, the Aristocrat and Afterglow. She said, "Okay, now I've got the A's. What are the B's going to be?"

00:35:33 / #: I said, "Honey, there ain't no more water in this well." So it was just those three, but they were fun. They were like a little dessert, a little dish of sorbet. Because they're only about 65,000 words, as opposed to 100, 110,000. No, there was no guidance. In 1988, it was, the idea came to me. It wasn't a plot then. It was just an idea. Just to back up one second.

00:36:07 / #: This was False Pretenses, and it was my very first hardcover. It was a romantic suspense, not a suspense, a romantic suspense. The heroine was a concert pianist. When you change genres, the most important thing you want to do is to eliminate as many unknowns as you can. I picked the piano, because I'm a pianist. My Mother was a concert pianist, organist, and I knew everything about it. I knew all the music, so I knew-

Jennifer Prokop 00:36:44 / #: Interesting. Yeah.

Catherine Coulter 00:36:44 / #: ... what I was talking about. We're in New York City, and then it was of course a mystery, but it was a romantic suspense, because you can't be a romance unless there's a central core that's a man and a woman getting together in a relationship. Then, everything else can be around it. It doesn't matter. It can be Mars, it can be murders or can be anything you want, but to be a romance, you have to have the central core being the relationship.

00:37:16 / #: That's what it was. They wanted to push it as this. I don't even remember. I said, "No, it's a romantic suspense." They said, "Okay." That was the first hardcover. Then I wrote probably four or five more contemporary romantic suspense, which were a lot of fun to do. Anyway, I was writing probably three or four books a year. It was easy. Now, of course, I write, never mind, because now I'm an elder.

00:37:48 / #: But anyway, I was writing a whole lot of books a year, and I'll never forget. Then Putnam and Putnam had bought, as I said, New American Library. The head of Putnam was Phyllis Grann. She's Probably the best woman publisher, she was, in the world. I absolutely would kill for her. She would call me up and say, "Catherine, I need a quote." I said, "What would you like me to say?" Whatever she wanted from me, she got, because she was absolutely wonderful.

00:38:27 / #: They went back to New York and there was this big round table at the plaza in the tearoom there in the court, and I was introduced to my new editor, and they made an offer that was just outrageous, absolutely outrageous. I'll not tell you what it is, but it was outrageous. I went there, and what they wanted was the hysterical romances.

Jennifer Prokop 00:38:58 / #: The hysterical romances.

Catherine Coulter 00:39:03 / #: Well, I try to make them funny. I really do. Oh, one thing I wanted to add, talk about luck, those first six or seven Regencies, I went back and rewrote them.

Sarah MacLean 00:39:17 / #: Yeah, I want To talk about that.

Catherine Coulter 00:39:20 / #: I made them so much better. I turned them into historical romances and I made them funny. Then they hit the New York Times, because they were no longer Regencies.

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Sarah MacLean 00:40:50 / #: Did you go to Putnam and say, "I want to rewrite these?"

Catherine Coulter 00:40:53 / #: Yeah. Yeah. I said I really would like them because I think that they're kind of a bummer to me now, and I don't think I can make them 1000% percent better and make them longer and richer and funnier and all that. They said, "Sure, go for it."

Sarah MacLean 00:41:10 / #: That's incredible. What is that process like? This is the mid-80s, so it's only five or six years. It's not even a decade, since they came out. What was that process like as a writer to revise essentially yourself-

Jennifer Prokop 00:41:31 / #: Right.

Sarah MacLean 00:41:32 / #: ... at a distance?

Catherine Coulter 00:41:33 / #: It was easy. It was very, very easy, because the book was already there. I didn't have to worry about, oh dear, is that plot going to work here and there? No, no, no. I didn't have to worry about it. All I had to worry about was let's make this really, really fun.

Sarah MacLean 00:41:49 / #: Was it driven by, I'm a better writer now. I've had more practice?

Catherine Coulter 00:41:56 / #: Yes, yes.

Sarah MacLean 00:41:57 / #: Or the rules don't apply to me in the same way anymore, or both?

Catherine Coulter 00:42:00 / #: Both. Both. Of course, Regencies, ever since Joan and I were big at Signet, Regency started changing.

Sarah MacLean 00:42:10 / #: Well, they got sexier.

Catherine Coulter 00:42:11 / #: Yeah. That was because of Joan and Me, which was, and I can take credit for that and so did she.

Sarah MacLean 00:42:18 / #: Good.

Catherine Coulter 00:42:18 / #: That was fun.

Sarah MacLean 00:42:19 / #: You're at the Plaza, they want historicals?

Catherine Coulter 00:42:23 / #: They wanted historicals. In a period of three and a half years, I wrote three trilogies.

Sarah MacLean 00:42:30 / #: Wow.

Catherine Coulter 00:42:31 / #: The Wyndham Legacy, the Legacy Trilogy, the Fire Trilogy, and another trilogy that escapes my brain at the moment. But it had never happened in my life, but I was burned in my toes.

Jennifer Prokop 00:42:44 / #: Yeah, I'm sure.

Catherine Coulter 00:42:46 / #: Absolutely burned in my toes. It was in 1995, and I was at family reunion in Texas, and my sister, who has never done this before or since, walked up to me and said, "Have you ever heard of a little town on the coast of Oregon called The Cove? They make the world's greatest ice cream and bad stuff happens." I just went on point.

Sarah MacLean 00:43:17 / #: What?

Catherine Coulter 00:43:17 / #: I said, "Oh my heavens, my heavens." I told my editor, and of course, I understood their position. If it ain't broke, why fix it?

Sarah MacLean 00:43:31 / #: Sure.

Catherine Coulter 00:43:32 / #: But I really dug in my heels.

Jennifer Prokop 00:43:33 / #: Well, they'd milked to you for nine books in three years.

Catherine Coulter 00:43:38 / #: But at that point, I had enough power. I said, "Give me a chance." Then, that's when I wrote The Cove. Then when they got it, they wanted to make it into a hardcover. I said, "No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no." I said, "Failure is well and good, but you don't want to fail in hardcover. Who knows how this book will be received?" They brought it out in paperback in 1996, I believe, and it really did extraordinarily well.

00:44:11 / #: I was very happy for that. Then the publisher called and I said, "Well, when's the next one in the series?" I said, "What series? What are you talking about?" I kid you not, this will happen. It happened. There was this voice in the back of my head, and he said, "Catherine, what about me?" It was Dillon Savage. Then, The Maze was basically Sherlock's book, and this is the book they got together.

00:44:45 / #: Then after that, you had The Target, which is one of my all-time favorite books with The Hunt, Ramsey Hunt, and Emma. I'll never forget, I wrote international thrillers with JT Ellison, six of them. I'll never forget, JT told me, he said, "Well, a series isn't really a series until book four." I was kind of laughing at her. She was perfectly right. She was totally right.

00:45:14 / #: The fourth book, The Edge, started that series, and then it just went from there. At that point, I was writing one historical a year and one FBI thriller a year. It worked very, very well, because they're such disparate genres and your brain gets unconstipated. You know what I mean?

Jennifer Prokop 00:45:39 / #: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Sarah MacLean 00:45:39 / #: Yeah, sure.

Catherine Coulter 00:45:41 / #: Then it's just been about, I guess about four or five years ago, I could just do one book a year, and that was fine. That was perfectly fine. It's been wonderful. I feel blessed, very, very blessed, and very, very lucky and have met so many fascinating writers and publishers over the years. As I say, Robert and I are still together.

Jennifer Prokop 00:46:10 / #: Amazing.

Catherine Coulter 00:46:10 / #: He'll come up and talk about, yada, yada, it's wonderful.

Jennifer Prokop 00:46:15 / #: Can we return maybe to The Sherbrooke Bride for a second?

Catherine Coulter 00:46:19 / #: Sure.

Jennifer Prokop 00:46:20 / #: Sarah talked about it being one of her favorites. You mentioned that so many readers still talk about it.

Catherine Coulter 00:46:27 / #: Yeah.

Jennifer Prokop 00:46:29 / #: When we're talking about romance, why do you think this is the book that so many romance readers connected to? Is it the primordial Catherine Coulter book? What made it the one?

Catherine Coulter 00:46:41 / #: I think that everybody, women, I think that women respond visually to a real alpha male who's an asshole, basically. But he's a real alpha male, and it's how the woman, he ends up worshiping her toenails. I think women, it's on a visceral level, they love that. They're just fascinated by the alpha male. That's my own feeling.

Jennifer Prokop 00:47:14 / #: I also think, I was speaking to a friend of mine earlier today about how we were interviewing you, Catherine, and my friend Sophie Jordan, who also writes historicals was saying that, we talked about how you really mastered the grovel in your books. You put them through the ringer at the end, because they've been such assholes.

Sarah MacLean 00:47:38 / #: That is a great joy.

Catherine Coulter 00:47:39 / #: You're not going to find an Alan Alda character as a woman's hero. Let's get real here. A beta male is of no interest to anybody, except fixing your computer.

Jennifer Prokop 00:47:55 / #: But truthfully, I think that the magic of a Catherine Coulter book is that sort of sense, as you said, worshiping her to her toenails only once he has been clubbed over the head with how terrible he's been to her. It's that punishment too.

Catherine Coulter 00:48:12 / #: It's discipline. Men love to be disciplined, even if they don't admit it. They just love it. They love it. On the other hand, the youngest brother, Tysen, who starred in The Scottish Bride, that's probably my favorite, because he evolved. He evolved so much, and he was such a good man. I take it back about the alpha male, because Tysen was absolutely amazing to me. I loved him.

Jennifer Prokop 00:48:55 / #: Was it a challenge to write someone who then was really different?

Catherine Coulter 00:48:58 / #: Oh, no. No. I loved him from the moment that book started when he was dealing with his three children, and he didn't know what to do with them. He evolved so much and turned into such a kind wonderful person who was never an asshole. He was just stupid. He wasn't stupid, that's the wrong word. He was just caught up in this view, in this world view of himself that was so limiting.

00:49:39 / #: It was so very limiting. His brothers always made fun of him. I'll never forget in the beginning of Sherbrooke Bride, when they're having their quarterly bastard meeting. That just came out of my fingertips. I said, "What are you doing?" Then Tysen goes, "Ah," and runs out. He wants none of that. But that was great sport.

Jennifer Prokop 00:50:09 / #: As you think about your career, as you sort of look back, and obviously forward as well, you show no signs of stopping. Are there moments that you can sort of pinpoint of particular challenge as a writer or from the genre? Is there some lesson that you were sort of hard-learned that you can share with us?

Catherine Coulter 00:50:36 / #: Let me just say, I do not believe in writer's block, and I never have. What I believe in is a bad plot. It happened one time, and it was an FBI thriller. I don't even remember which one, but I got to page 85 and it had been a bear. Then all of a sudden it stopped cold and I realized, "Okay, this is a shitty plot." I threw the 85 pages in the garbage can and started over. Because if you're a writer, you have to be honest with yourself and what you're producing.

00:51:14 / #: When a book stops in its tracks and the characters look at you and say, "Please go away," it's a bad plot. It's up to you not to try to keep forcing it. The trick is you have to trust that there's another plot in the parking lot in your brain that's going to come driving out, and it will. It did. That was really the only time. But no, I'll never forget, this might be interesting to writers.

00:51:51 / #: With The Cove when I first wrote it, and my editor was the head of Berkeley, Leslie Gelbman, wonderful, wonderful editor and leader. When I first wrote The Cove, it was a brand new genre for me. I wrote the entire plot out in the first 50 pages. You know how she dealt with it? She called me up, she says, and she wanted to see what I was doing. She called me back and she was saying, "Catherine, okay, now, you know what the plot is. Tell me the story."

Jennifer Prokop 00:52:35 / #: Oh, I love that.

Catherine Coulter 00:52:36 / #: That's what she said.

Jennifer Prokop 00:52:36 / #: That's a good piece of advice.

Catherine Coulter 00:52:38 / #: I had written the whole thing out in the first 50 pages so the reader would know everything. Then she was just so matter of fact, "Now, tell me the story." So, I did.

Jennifer Prokop 00:52:49 / #: Amazing.

Catherine Coulter 00:52:50 / #: A good editor, you've got to be lucky in your editors too. I know some authors who have had nine editors at the same house, and this is never good. This is always sucky. I've been very, very lucky in my editors.

Jennifer Prokop 00:53:06 / #: Who is your editor now, Catherine?

Catherine Coulter 00:53:08 / #: My editor now is a brand new person. I'm with William Morrow, and her name is May Chen. She's fairly hands-off. Actually. I'd had David Highfill. He had the absolute gall to retire and move to Tuscany.

Sarah MacLean 00:53:24 / #: How dare.

Jennifer Prokop 00:53:25 / #: That's terrible.

Catherine Coulter 00:53:27 / #: I was just cursing him, "Don't you dare go anywhere." He said, "I promise that I have spoken to May, and she will do very good by you. Please trust me, Catherine, and don't shoot her." She's very kind. To be very honest, my husband is basically my editor on the FBI thrillers. He can't write his way out of a paper bag, but he's an incredible editor.

Sarah MacLean 00:53:56 / #: That's great.

Catherine Coulter 00:53:57 / #: Since I've become an elder, I've slowed down. I had decided with Reckoning, the book that's coming out next week, I don't want to be under contact anymore. I want to just write what I want to write, and then I'll sell it. Then they said, "Oh, please, please. Dah, da, da, da, da." I said, "Okay, but I don't want, make it two years." "Okay. Anything you want. Not a problem. Not a problem." I'm on page 80, and the outline is due a year from this month.

Jennifer Prokop 00:54:27 / #: There you go.

Sarah MacLean 00:54:29 / #: Well, so there you go. You can't stop.

Catherine Coulter 00:54:31 / #: You can't stop. You can't stop. But I guess five years ago, I was asked if I was a pantser or a plotter, and I didn't know what they were talking about, but I'm definitely a pantser, are you?

Sarah MacLean 00:54:44 / #: Yes. Yeah. Yeah.

Catherine Coulter 00:54:46 / #: Which means you're always rewriting and rewriting and changing.

Sarah MacLean 00:54:51 / #: Constantly.

Catherine Coulter 00:54:51 / #: [inaudible 00:54:52 / #] build up, we call it. Constantly, constantly, constantly.

Sarah MacLean 00:54:54 / #: Which is why it terrified me that you rewrote The Rebel Bride. I was like, "Oh God, I can never go back. I'll throw it all out and start over."

Catherine Coulter 00:55:04 / #: No, no, no. You don't understand. The book was there and the plot was there.

Sarah MacLean 00:55:08 / #: Yes, right.

Catherine Coulter 00:55:09 / #: So there were no hurries. Now, you're just putting on different tree ornaments.

Sarah MacLean 00:55:13 / #: Nice.

Catherine Coulter 00:55:13 / #: Different lights. It was wonderful.

Sarah MacLean 00:55:15 / #: I bet, I bet. Catherine, tell us a little bit, I want to just talk a little about the shift from Catherine Coulter, romance trailblazer, to Catherine Coulter, real powerhouse in thrillers. Was it an easy transition in the world? Meaning did thrillers welcome you? I know that it's tough to be a woman writing thrillers in the thriller world. I'm wondering, did you have that experience or was it very generally welcoming?

Catherine Coulter 00:55:51 / #: That's a very good observation and the absolute truth is I never thought about it.

Sarah MacLean 00:55:56 / #: That's good.

Catherine Coulter 00:55:57 / #: The first time when they put, it took a while, they put the second book, The Maze in Hardcover, and it made the times, but it wasn't in the top five. But then they just kept getting stronger and stronger. By the time I went to, actually, I've never been to [inaudible 00:56:22 / #], I was just not interested. All my friends said they didn't like it. But anyway, ThrillerFest in New York City was a different matter.

00:56:32 / #: By the time I started going to ThrillerFest, the FBI series was really well grounded and was doing well. It wasn't like the third, fourth, or fifth book. It was like the eighth or ninth book in that series. There was never a problem. It was very welcoming. I really liked Lee Child. I just met a whole bunch of really, really nice people, men as well as women, like Lisa Gardner, who was such a sweetheart.

00:57:08 / #: I can't remember other names at the point, because I haven't been in three years, but it was just very, very welcoming. Well, the first year I went, it wasn't because I was interested. They had made me the interview of the year or something, I can't remember what they called it, where you're in front and you're interviewed by somebody, whatever. Anyway, so I just never experienced that. But again, a lot of people, men and women who go to ThrillerFest who are either unpublished or still in like the B rung, I do not know what their experiences are.

00:57:59 / #: Anybody I ever met was wonderful, and I'm not a jerk. I'll talk to everybody. It didn't matter. It was just never an issue. At the very beginning, "Oh, do you write children's books?" That kind of crap, but it just didn't matter. People would say, "Oh, you wrote romance?" I said, "Yes, yes, yes, yes." Because I'm not ashamed of them at all. I love them. I wish I could still write two books a year. One, a hysterical. When couldn't write two books a year, that's when I went to the novellas with Grace and Sherbrooke.

Sarah MacLean 00:58:38 / #: Right.

Catherine Coulter 00:58:39 / #: Are you familiar with those at all?

Sarah MacLean 00:58:41 / #: Yes. Yes. I've read them all.

Catherine Coulter 00:58:43 / #: Oh, well, you're so wonderful. Well, the sixth one will be out in October, because Nicole, who is God, and she heads up a digital division at Trident, which is Roberts agency. Oh, she's incredible. She is absolutely incredible. If you ever, her name is Nicole Robson. R-O-B-S-O-N.

00:59:11 / #: If you ever need anything to do, she's at the Trident Media Group in New York City, and she is smart. She's kind. She knows everything. She would help you without a problem. Anyway, she likes to put them near Halloween, because they're whoo-whoo.

Sarah MacLean 00:59:37 / #: Yeah. Well, that is the piece of the Coulter puzzle that I think is so fascinating as a writer, just looking at your career, you really have told so many different kinds of stories. For writers who are often told in a genre where we are often told, "Stay in your lane." I think part of the reason why The Sherbrooke Brides shattered everything I had thought historical was is because there was that ghosty piece.

Catherine Coulter 01:00:11 / #: The Virgin Bride, yeah.

Sarah MacLean 01:00:12 / #: Yeah, you'd never expect it. But I really feel like one of the-

Catherine Coulter 01:00:18 / #: And she lives in the past, I love it. She found her happy ever after.

Sarah MacLean 01:00:24 / #: Right. I think that there is, if you've never read Catherine Coulter's romances, I think there are so many different avenues to take, and that's really remarkable. You're a trailblazer. There's a reason why we reached out.

Catherine Coulter 01:00:44 / #: Well, you are so sweet. If you're kissing up, you're doing it very well.

Sarah MacLean 01:00:49 / #: Thank you. I'm really not. I really do think your books are great.

Jennifer Prokop 01:00:52 / #: Yeah, and we love the genre, and we love... God, we love romance so much. We just love romance.

Catherine Coulter 01:00:59 / #: Well, if you love romance so much still, I very rarely read contemporary romances because, I have found them still to be, we call it topping dicks. You tell a story and get rid of the stuff that's extraneous. It's like people are using horrible language. I stopped about 12 books ago. I never use bad language anymore, because it's gratuitous. You don't need it.

01:01:34 / #: There's always another way to say it without saying fuck. There is another way to say that. Sometimes that's appropriate, and I have to grind my teeth not to do it. But again, so many books, you have gratuitous bad language, you've read them, and you have gratuitous sex scenes. Stop it. Just stop it. Tell a good story.

Sarah MacLean 01:01:57 / #: Can I ask you a question? Do you think that there is a similar issue with gratuitous violence and thrillers?

Catherine Coulter 01:02:03 / #: Of course. Anything that's unnecessary is gratuitous. If you want to talk about ripping somebody's guts out and eating them, well, good luck. I'm not going to read your frickin' book. I'm not going to. Why do I care. You killed this person because of this, that, and the other reason, get on with the story. Yeah. Gratuitous violence, those three things are the major three.

01:02:31 / #: You hit it on the nail, it hit the nail on the hammer there, hit the nail on the head with a hammer. Okay, love that. I just hate gratuitous stuff. In the romances, it's still rife. I don't know why this is. I don't understand. It would seem to me that the genre would have weeded this out over the years, but it has not. Anyway, my soap box is now in the closet again.

Jennifer Prokop 01:03:01 / #: Catherine, I wonder, we end all of our conversations this way, so I hope you'll humor us. When we talk about trailblazers, we often come to the table with a preconceived idea of the answer to this question, but what is the hallmark of a Catherine Coulter novel? What is the thing you leave on the table every time?

Catherine Coulter 01:03:29 / #: Oh, you guys are just full of good questions. Let me just do the, address the FBI series.

Jennifer Prokop 01:03:37 / #: Yeah.

Catherine Coulter 01:03:38 / #: My promise to the reader is there is always justice at the end, and I will not kill off a major character. But there has got to be, it's always a good ending. Justice. We always have justice at the end, so there's no, what's the word, existential crap going on that leaves the reader wanting to streak. No, no, it's done. This chapter now is done, handled, although I do bring characters back a lot.

Sarah MacLean 01:04:12 / #: What about the romances?

Catherine Coulter 01:04:14 / #: The romances, I would say that after I rewrote those first six books, I realized that the trick really is to have as much humor as you can. If you are dialogue driven, which I hope most writers are, because after a page and a half, and this is another thing romance novels do wrong, page and a half of introspection, and you're already lost. You can't even remember what the character asked.

01:04:45 / #: The character asks a question, and we have a page and a half of introspection. What are you doing? Anyway, if you can say something allowed, you say it aloud, and if you can do it, have humor. If you have humor, just about anything will fly. I didn't do it in all the books, but there is humor whenever I can do it, and they're going to end well.

Jennifer Prokop 01:05:10 / #: Yeah. Wow.

Catherine Coulter 01:05:14 / #: But everybody's going to say that they're going to end well because a romance novel, because that's what the reader expects. These two people are going to go through the wringer, and then they're going to end out on the other side, and they're going to be mated for life. That is why women really like romance, because it's filled with hope. It's filled with hope. No matter what you endure in all of this, it's going to work out Well.

Sarah MacLean 01:05:39 / #: Well, thrillers too.

Jennifer Prokop 01:05:40 / #: Right, justice is served.

Sarah MacLean 01:05:41 / #: People often comment on, "Oh, so many romance novelists end up writing thrillers." The reality is, it makes perfect sense to us that that's a possible career arc. Because justice and hope being served are, they're both happily ever afters, in a certain sense, right?

Catherine Coulter 01:05:59 / #: They are. They're happily ever afters for that one plot. Okay. There are other things going on, of course, but no, you're perfectly right. You're perfectly right. There's hope and there's justice, and things are going to be okay. I promise you that. No matter what I do to those characters, it's going to be okay. Did you happen to get an ARC of Reckoning?

Sarah MacLean 01:06:25 / #: No. No, but I'm going to ask for one.

Jennifer Prokop 01:06:27 / #: We can ask Karen for them.

Catherine Coulter 01:06:29 / #: Well, I prefer that you bought it.

Jennifer Prokop 01:06:32 / #: I'll do that too.

Sarah MacLean 01:06:33 / #: Fine. We'll do that too.

Jennifer Prokop 01:06:35 / #: I'll take those orders. That's fine.

Catherine Coulter 01:06:38 / #: Well, there's a surprise at the end because readers have been bugging me about this for a long time, and I'm not going to tell you what it is.

Jennifer Prokop 01:06:45 / #: Okay.

Sarah MacLean 01:06:46 / #: Great.

Catherine Coulter 01:06:48 / #: I don't know if it's great, but we'll see.

Sarah MacLean 01:06:51 / #: I'm sure it will be. So Catherine, one last question. As you think about your more than 80 books, I think we're at now.

Catherine Coulter 01:07:01 / #: I'm on 88.

Sarah MacLean 01:07:03 / #: Number 88.

Jennifer Prokop 01:07:04 / #: Wow, yeah.

Sarah MacLean 01:07:05 / #: In 88 books, we've talked about books that your readers have really loved that have resonated. Is there a book that you think back on and think, "That was really fabulous? That's the one I wish everybody could read forever?"

Catherine Coulter 01:07:27 / #: Yes, indeed. My own personal favorite is Beyond Eden. I wrote it in the 90s, and it's my very, very own personal favorite. That book moved me profoundly.

Jennifer Prokop 01:07:39 / #: Why?

Catherine Coulter 01:07:39 / #: The heroine Lindsay. Her attitude on life and how she deals with what she goes through, which is a whole lot. Have you guys read it?

Jennifer Prokop 01:07:53 / #: I don't think I have read this one.

Sarah MacLean 01:07:55 / #: No, I don't think so.

Catherine Coulter 01:07:56 / #: Okay. Well, again, it's a contemporary and it's got a mystery in it. But again, it's a romantic suspense, and we have the hero in it is what you want every hero to be down to his toenails, which he buffs. Well, I don't know if he does. But it will move you, I hope, profoundly. It ended up right. It ended up right.

Sarah MacLean 01:08:33 / #: Wow. You know what's amazing?

Jennifer Prokop 01:08:35 / #: A lot of that was amazing.

Sarah MacLean 01:08:37 / #: Aside from that whole conversation, what's amazing is a lot of these interviews, it's as though no one has ever asked these women to talk about their life in romance. A lot of people have not been asked about that.

Jennifer Prokop 01:08:53 / #: Right.

Sarah MacLean 01:08:53 / #: And so the stories are just wild.

Jennifer Prokop 01:08:57 / #: One of the things that is really persistent in this generation of authors that we've interviewed is kind of their success feels really predicated on whether or not they were lucky enough to find good people. It was really clear from talking to Catherine Coulter that she felt really lucky and found a lot of really good people, not just friends, author friends, not just her husband, but in publishing itself.

Sarah MacLean 01:09:22 / #: Yeah, an agent who she felt supported by, editors who she felt were really doing the best work for the books. I loved that story about The Cove about when she, the first book, I love the whole story about her sister giving her the idea, et cetera. But also, I loved that she went to Leslie Gelbman, who we've talked about before, because Leslie was Nora Roberts's editor and was J.R. Ward's editor Jayne Ann Krentz's editor. Somebody who is in the ether as an important voice in romance, but when she talked about Leslie Gelbman responding and saying, "Okay, so this is the plot, but where's the story."

Jennifer Prokop 01:10:03 / #: Yeah, tell me the story.

Sarah MacLean 01:10:04 / #: It's so remarkable when, you're right, an editor just could have easily said, "This is not going to work for you," and then, right, she doesn't get to travel down that path.

Jennifer Prokop 01:10:19 / #: I think that part, I was really interested in because it feels like, and I think this is, you obviously are in publishing in a way I'm not, it is clear to me when I talk to people, to other authors now that there's still a real sense of it takes a village to be a successful author in publishing and who is that village and who's supporting you or your awareness of them as people that have helped you along the way and how long-standing. Her talking about Robert Gottlieb's many, his kids and his wife and the way that she knows people.

Sarah MacLean 01:10:57 / #: She's outlasted so many people in his life and these relationships, it feels different in a lot of ways. Obviously, I'm a writer, so I don't know what it's like to be other things, but I did for many years have a job in corporate America and the relationships don't feel quite so personal in those jobs. But this long-standing editorial relationship, long-standing agent relationships, these relationships where somebody knows your kids and knows your family, and we talk about books being orphaned, authors being orphaned by their editors, and it really does feel that way.

Jennifer Prokop 01:11:36 / #: We now are smart enough and record these kind of right after we're done.

Sarah MacLean 01:11:41 / #: Immediately after the conversation.

Jennifer Prokop 01:11:42 / #: Just got off the, and so it's interesting, because the first thing you think of is sometimes, not necessarily, but I was really interested in her talking about the golden age of romance. Of course you wouldn't realize it at the time, but looking back that she could say, "Of course."

Sarah MacLean 01:11:59 / #: Well, just the way the story goes. Where she went to a lunch at the Plaza with sales and they offered her a giant deal for more historicals at this lunch at the Plaza.

Jennifer Prokop 01:12:14 / #: Right. That doesn't happen anymore?

Sarah MacLean 01:12:16 / #: Gone are the days, maybe it happens for someone else.

Jennifer Prokop 01:12:20 / #: Colleen Hoover probably gets lunch at the Plaza. I actually don't know if you can have lunch at the Plaza anymore, but the point is...

Sarah MacLean 01:12:27 / #: It really does feel like there was this moment in time when so many writers were just powerhouses. Now what's interesting is I was thinking as she was talking, "Oh, well there is something going on right now." There are writers who are powerhouses right now.

Jennifer Prokop 01:12:48 / #: Yes.

Sarah MacLean 01:12:49 / #: But it feels like many, many fewer, she talked about getting letters from her readers, but powerhouses now sometimes are grassroots, right? Like readers-

Jennifer Prokop 01:13:00 / #: Like from TikTok.

Sarah MacLean 01:13:02 / #: Yes, right.

Jennifer Prokop 01:13:02 / #: The readers have decided that this person is a powerhouse, but she didn't talk very much about readers.

Sarah MacLean 01:13:08 / #: No, no, no. For her, it was very much, she seemed to feel as though it was a top-down kind of-

Jennifer Prokop 01:13:17 / #: She was part of the publishing ecosystem, right?

Sarah MacLean 01:13:20 / #: Mm-hmm.

Jennifer Prokop 01:13:21 / #: I thought that was also just really interesting to consider the way our relationship with authors have changed, but at the same time, she's really plugged into Facebook. She updates it every day. This is not someone who isn't disinterested in the reader's experience-

Sarah MacLean 01:13:35 / #: No, not at all.

Jennifer Prokop 01:13:37 / #: That's one big thing that seems very clearly different.

Sarah MacLean 01:13:39 / #: Yeah. I was grateful to hear you talk about burnout, because it's something that I think a lot of us are thinking about right now, nine books in three years in the early 90s.

Jennifer Prokop 01:13:52 / #: That was a lot. That is a ton of work, and it feels like that was a huge ask from her publisher. I'm glad that she talked about just like her brain kind of just fizzing out and needing to have a moment of something completely different to rejuvenate herself.

Sarah MacLean 01:14:11 / #: I loved a lot of that conversation, because I think that she is one of those people who made a career of writing as a writer and has evolved by virtue of luckily, her own passions and the way the market demanded.

Jennifer Prokop 01:14:29 / #: Then that was interesting because we see the clear evolution from romance to romantic suspense to kind of thrillers. Some of that had to do with, now I can just write one book a year or one book every two years. But I was also really interested in what would drive her to go back and then rewrite books.

Sarah MacLean 01:14:47 / #: Oh, yeah.

Jennifer Prokop 01:14:48 / #: That was fascinating because she's a writer, right? She's a craftsman. We've talked about this before that, and I don't want to put words in her mouth, because we didn't ask her this, but we've talked about this sort of, some people think of themselves as artists, and some people think of themselves as craftsmen. It feels like a true craftsman's choice to say, "That book bums me out," which is what she said.

01:15:13 / #: I think there further evidence of that is the discussion of you can't revise if there's nothing on the page, the first draft does not matter. That's just the raw material. That's the thing, the artist is like, "Okay, I've got one shot with this huge block of clay to make my sculpture," but writers are different. I thought that was also really interesting to hear her process, and it doesn't surprise me at all. It's a bit of a segue that someone who herself is so funny and so sharp and so observationally on point would think that humor is a really key ingredient of making a book.

Sarah MacLean 01:15:51 / #: Oh my god, the hystericals.

Jennifer Prokop 01:15:54 / #: Oh yeah, that's perfect.

Sarah MacLean 01:15:56 / #: Hilarious. The fact that right away when I called out The Sherbrooke Bride at the very jump, she was like, "Yeah, we call those heroes assholes." We totally do, but things are different, but they are also the same. I think that there's so much about what she said, especially when she spoke about conferences and the craft workshops, and this is the only way you can do it and throw everybody else's book out. You only use mine.

01:16:24 / #: The one thing that seems to run through all of these conversations, I think to a person is don't let other people's rules impact your book. Your story is your story. I hear so often, and you do too. We see it constantly on Twitter and in writing groups and all over the place, these kind of hard and fast. You must do it this way. You must traditionally publish this way. You must independently publish this way. None of these people followed.

01:17:00 / #: I don't think one single person we've talked to for this series has followed the bouncing ball. They've all had some moment where they've of deviated. I love, "I had lunch with Hilary Ross and I told her I wanted to put sex in a Regency, and she said, go with it." It made me think so much of Vivian Stephens and how Vivian just kept saying, "Yeah, do you, and that's what makes the books good."

Jennifer Prokop 01:17:26 / #: What a conversation. That was pretty awesome. Life goals, it's great. It's great.

Sarah MacLean 01:17:35 / #: Catherine's latest book is Reckoning. It came out in August, so it is on shelves now. We will put in show notes all the books that Jenn and I have loved by her over the years, or some subset of the books that I have loved over the years by her, because I've loved so many of them. Obviously, with the caveat that these are older historicals, so enter with caution, they're going to be bananas. I can promise that.

Jennifer Prokop 01:18:04 / #: Look, if the author was calling them hystericals as she was writing them, then the amplification of that can only be more amazing.

Sarah MacLean 01:18:11 / #: Well, I said with her that I spoke with Sophie Jordan this morning and we talked about the grovel. She really does it. She knows the job. When it comes to a grovel, these heroes have to be broken or what did she say? Disciplined.

Jennifer Prokop 01:18:25 / #: They like it though.

Sarah MacLean 01:18:26 / #: The other thing Sophie said to me was talk about taking the finger, and I think that's true. I think anybody, when you dip your toe into these old Catherine Coulter historicals, that's what you're going to get every time. A real take the finger experience.

Jennifer Prokop 01:18:40 / #: Perfect.

Sarah MacLean 01:18:41 / #: I'm Sarah MacLean. I'm here with my friend Jen Prokop. This is Fated Mates and you can find us every Wednesday. Thank you as always. To our sponsors, Lumi Labs and Cara Dion, be sure to check out Indiscrete, Cara's book, right now in KU or print.

Jennifer Prokop 01:18:58 / #: Have a great week, everyone.

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S04.19: Passion by Lisa Valdez: The Romance Equivalent of "I Have an Extra Stomach for Dessert"

 On this episode, we’re talking about a historical that we like to think of as the full banana. A descriptor which, now that we’re typing it, really covers a lot of ground. It’s Passion week — we’re talking about how Lisa Valdez shook up the traditional historical world in 2005 when she released this erotic historical featuring a widow and a dude who has an extremely large…you know. We talk about what it means for a romance to be erotic and about how this might also be inspirational. We also talk about this as a marker of a significant shift in the content of romance novels, and ask some questions about basic anatomy. Headphones on for this one, y’all!

Our next read-along will be Kresley Cole’s Munro, Book 18 of the Immortals After Dark series. You’ve probably heard of this series because Fated Mates began as an IAD fan podcast. You can take the girls out of Monster Mash, but you can’t take Monster Mash out of the girls…so we’re reading Munro, obviously. Stay tuned for information on that episode…but also, if you’re inclined to go back to the beginning, here you go. Preorder Munro 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

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S04.14: Elda Minger: Trailblazer

The Trailblazer series continues this week with Elda Minger—author of contemporary and historical romances, including Untamed Heart, which is the first contemporary romance to feature condom use on the page.  

Elda talks about writing for Vivian Stephens, about writing about women’s bodies, about reproductive choice and about the way romance made space for women during the 70s and 80s. She shares a collection of gorgeous stories about her life as a reader and writer (and a particularly wonderful detour as a bookseller). About the boom of category and contemporary romance in the 1980s, and about the way writing made her who she is. 

We are thrilled to have found Elda, and that she took time to speak with us and share her wonderful perspective on the genre with us. We can’t think of a better week to share this episode with you.

Transcript available.

There’s still time to buy the Fated Mates Best of 2021 Book Pack 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! 

Next week, we’re reading Nalini Singh’s Caressed by Ice, number three (and Jen’s favorite) of the Psy-Changeling series. Get it at Amazon, Apple, Kobo, B&N or at your local indie.

Show Notes

TRANSCRIPT

Thinking about those early days, it actually brought me such a sense of joy, and I was so grateful that I lived through it. And I was so grateful that I got to have this career. I still had this career where most of the people I know, my contemporaries, they hate their jobs, they're now retiring. They're kind of not knowing what to do. They're having bad retirements because they were like, all structured, going to job, coming home, you know, and I've been so darn lucky, because I literally would get up, make a cup of coffee, walk to my desk, start creating with all these people. And with all my animals, you know, my family, just, just home. I'm a real homebody too. And I just loved it. And then all I ever wanted and it's funny because people always say, “Do you think you're a big success?” All I ever wanted was to give to readers, what writers gave to me. That was it, and I got that.

Jennifer Prokop 0:58 / #
That was the voice of Elda Minger.

Sarah MacLean 1:01 / #
Author of Untamed Heart, which is known in romance history as the first contemporary romance to feature condom use on the page.

Jennifer Prokop 1:10 / #
Elda was edited by Vivian Stephens. She tells the story of working with Vivian and also Carolyn Nichols, another storied romance editor, and amazing, amazing perspective on Woodiwiss, on the early days of romance and what it was like to be a part of a company of women, for which she is still really proud to be part of.

Sarah MacLean 1:38 / #
This one is pretty perfect. Welcome to Fated Mates, everyone. I'm Sarah MacLean. I read romances, and I write them.

Jennifer Prokop 1:46 / #
And I'm Jennifer Prokop, a romance reader and editor. Off we go.

Elda Minger 1:55 / #
I grew up in a house of readers, all teachers, my mom, my dad, my grandmother. I knew how to read before I went to school. Books were always the most coveted, like Christmas was like ripping open, and it wasn't socks, it wasn't underwear, it wasn't toys. It was books. And I mean, I remember, I remember, my mother's family was so funny. They were like, "You let your kids read comic books?" My dad was like, "I don't care what they're reading so long as they're reading, you know?"

Jennifer Prokop 2:22 / #
Yes.

Elda Minger 2:23 / #
And we just read and read and talked books, and my great aunt and great uncle, they had a limited income. So they'd search all year for used books, that was our interest and tie them with twine. And I remember I had a girlfriend who said, "What a horrible gift. Those books kind of smell, and they didn't even wrap them with paper." And I remember thinking, "You just don't get it. You just don't get it, and that's cool."

Jennifer Prokop 2:46 / #
That's amazing.

Elda Minger 2:47 / #
But I always, you know, we had tons of books in the house. I remember when we lived in Illinois, a plumber came and he looked around, he goes, "You read all these books?" to my dad. And my dad said, "Nah, they're just really good insulation." You know against the snow, but I mean, you know, I just always loved the written word. I always loved books. And I never thought about being an author because my dad wrote three books, and my uncle wrote a biography of Mozart, and my mother published some poetry, but I always saw my dad when he would get like rejection letters, and he'd get so depressed, and he'd have a couple of drinks like, ah shit, this is awful, you know? And I just thought, "I never want to be that person." And so the biggest laugh in my family was when I started writing books, because it was, you know, a lot of us became teachers and I did do a lot of teaching of writing, but I never really thought about becoming a writer and then romance, the way it came to me, because I read Harlequins in high school, and I remember going to Reeves drugstore on Main Street in Antioch, town of 1200 people, right on the Wisconsin border, Illinois to Wisconsin.

Jennifer Prokop 3:53 / #
I'm in Chicago. I know where that is.

Elda Minger 3:55 / #
Okay, it's Chain O' Lakes, that big resort, you know. So there was a big metal spinner, and there was this book there, and I looked at it, it was something in Italy, and I thought that looks good, and I took it home, and I read it, I think I was like 12. And I was just like mesmerized. And of course, it was all like, "his taut thighs and his glowering" and you know, and I didn't know what half of what was going on, but it was a great story. And I went back and I said to the lady, I said, "Are there more of these?" And she said, "Well, there's four every month." And I said, "Oh boy!" And she goes, "I can save them for you." And she said, "I'll put them in a brown paper bag." And I was like, "Why?" And she goes, "Well, I'll put them in a brown paper bag."

Sarah MacLean 4:32 / #
(laughing) You'll understand when you get older!

Elda Minger 4:36 / #
Right away, and it was like, okay, somehow I'm not supposed to be reading these or something, you know, something's a little forbidden. So I kept them hidden in my closet, but I read Harlequins all through high school, and it was, I loved them! And you know, like Violet Winspear and Anne Mather. All the older names.

Jennifer Prokop 4:54 / #
Carole Mortimer was my favorite of those Presents authors.

Elda Minger 4:56 / #
Oh yeah. Oh God, she was great! And, and it was so funny because I remember I had a big box in my closet, I kept them hidden, and it was one of the reasons when I was in college I, when my dad said, he taught at Loyola University, so he said, "Hey, it'd be cheaper for you to go to Rome for a year than for me to pay for your college," because kids, you know, the professor's kids get free. And I said, "Italy, sign me up!" You know, I want to go to England. I want to go to all the places I'd read about in Harlequins. So it was part of my international travel. And so then, you know, my dad was really, there was my older sister, me and my little brother. My dad was great. As far as equality for women, like we sat around the dinner table, and it was like the rose and the thorn, best thing today, worst thing today, I always felt like I could speak up and have opinions and talk to people. And I'd go to friends houses, and this was the Midwest in the '70s, and I remember going to a dinner where the wife and the two girls did not talk at all.

Jennifer Prokop 5:53 / #
Wow.

Elda Minger 4:58 / #
And the father and the brothers talked and it took me a second to realize I wasn't supposed to talk. And then we all got up and cleared the table, and they sat and talked and the father lit a cigarette, and I was like, this was like being on Mars, because my dad would be like, "Okay, what'd you kids learn today? Anything funny? What's going on? You know, tell me what your friends are up to." So I always felt I could always speak up and not be a loud mouth, but just be articulate and have opinions. So I went away to school, I went to Kenyon College, got a degree in English Lit, and it had only been open to women for about five years, six years. And all this does tie into the condom scene, it really does. And I remember a professor who was a real bastard. And he said, "Women cannot write novels. Women cannot write novels." And this one woman in the front she was like, "Anne Bradstreet." And he said, "Poetry and a kind of an anomaly." And somebody else said, "Emily Brontë." And he literally said, "She was insane." This woman was insane. Wuthering Heights. And I'm sitting in the back row thinking, "What's wrong with this guy?" And I got really mad, and I screamed out, "Jane Austen!" And there's this dead silence, and you could see cognitive dissonance, like his face got real red, and he was, because how can you say, "This is a crappy writer," when the Prince Regent said, "The most perfect novel in the English language." Right? And so he's, "Ah, ah, ah." And he just couldn't, and it was great because it was just people were like, "Good for you." Just, "Jane Austen!" You know, so I took my English degree, and there was like women's studies classes back then. And there were women authors, like we were a separate category. We were not writers, we were women writers. And so it was really weird because I never read romance. You know in like '72, The Flame and the Flower came out. I was in college. So I knew nothing of historicals. I knew Harlequins, I knew category, I didn't know historicals.

Jennifer Prokop 7:53 / #
So did you read The Flame in the Flower? Was that?

Elda Minger 7:56 / #
Well, not in college. I mean I was so busy reading like all the male authors and all their point of view and everything, and not that they're bad, but it was like, let's have a little of everybody, you know. And so I read them in Italy. I found the Mills and Boons, that little British bookstore that was there. I came home, now I'd finished school and the worst part, worst part of my life, my dad died three months before I finished college.

Sarah MacLean 8:18 / #
Ohhh.

Elda Minger 8:18 / #
So I was reeling, and I barely, I mean, my professor was great because we had to do orals, we had to, like stand up and really say we knew our stuff. And I remember standing there thinking, "I'm gonna flunk! I, my brain is like, I'm screwed." And he looked at me and said, "Miss Minger." And I said, "Yes." And he said, "Shakespeare." And I thought, "Thank you, God, because I know Shakespeare." I mean he knew that I loved and knew, so I managed to pass. So my sister and I both got a job at Kroch's and Brentano's in Libertyville, outside Chicago.

Sarah MacLean 8:47 / #
What is that?

Elda Minger 8:47 / #
It was a bookstore chain, a really nice bookstore chain, almost like, like Barnes and Noble, like gifts and things, but mostly books. And it was right outside Chicago, and Chicago, their readers, Phil Donahue, always advertised books. It was before Oprah, but I mean, talk shows would do books and you'd fix the table up front with that book, and all the women, the women were the great readers, they'd come in and buy the book. So I remember about three weeks after I got there to work there, our manager, Karen, who was just great, best boss I ever had. She said, "We are having a phenomenon. We need to talk after work. 15 minutes. You need to be prepared." So we go in back and there are all these crates marked "Shanna." (laughter) She said, "We are going to be selling this book. It's going to be very different." Than of course this was the killer. She goes, "Elda, you're the best cashier, you're going on the front register. You will be there all day. You will signal if you need a bathroom break."

Sarah MacLean 8:48 / #
Wowwww!

Elda Minger 9:41 / #
"You will get a full lunch break, but we will not even sticker these books. You are going to memorize the SKU, it will be taped up on the register. And you will be like, your fingers will be flying, and you will be selling these books." And I was listening, but it wasn't that I was a smartass, but I was like, "Yeah, yeah. How bad can it be?" Okay.

Jennifer Prokop 9:58 / #
Wow.

Elda Minger 9:59 / #
We get there, we're there at 7:30 / # in the morning, by eight o'clock, it's like a rock concert.

Sarah MacLean 10:07 / #
(gasps) Wait, was she there? Or was it just the book?

Elda Minger 10:10 / #
No, no, no. This was just selling Shanna. And we had unpacked the book and Karen said, "Don't even shelve it. Stack it on your counter. Just stack it up." We're stacking it on the tables, and it's like, we literally had clerks, who their whole job was to give the book out, just give the book out. Here's Shanna. Here's Shanna. I was almost scared when they opened the door because it was like (she makes a whizzing sound) and this stampede of women came in and they were so alive and so excited in their eyes and their energy. And I was like, "What is this? What is this?" Now remember I'm here screaming, "Jane Austen. Come on women writers!" I have no idea what this is. So about 11 o'clock before my lunch break, I took a copy. I knew we were going to run out, and I hid it like under the counter. And on my lunch break I went back and put it in my locker because I thought, "I'm buying this, whatever this is. I don't know what it is, but it's something. It's something."

Sarah MacLean 10:59 / #
Had she described it to you?

Elda Minger 11:04 / #
She said it was a historical romance. And I was like, "What's that?" I've never heard of any of that because I was like in a bubble in Gambier, Ohio, tiny little college town. You know, there was barely a drugstore in Mount Vernon. And so where did you get books? You had your college bookstore and they sure didn't carry historical romance. So I go home, we make dinner. I crack open this book, and oh my god, I cannot stop reading. And I'm reading and I'm reading and I'm like, "I love this woman. She's not a nice girl. She's not a perfect woman. She's not a paragon of virtue. She's not the angel of the house. She's real. She doesn't want to get married. She's gonna pull a fast one over on her dad, which I was very, that was one of my specialties." And I was like, "Oh my God!" So I read and I probably got about half of it done and I fell asleep at four in the morning, dragged my ass to work, sold another whole huge day of Shannas. We were shipping them in from Chicago, because we'd run out. Unbelievable. I have never, I've never in my life seen a book sell like Shanna. It was unbelievable.

Sarah MacLean 12:03 / #
Well, just for our listeners, to give people a little bit of a frame of reference. Shanna is by Kathleen Woodiwiss, who wrote The Flame and the Flower. It was published in 1977, which is five years after The Flame and the Flower. So at this point, everybody who listens to the podcast knows that The Flame and the Flower sold two million copies in the first year. So Kathleen Woodiwiss is a rock star at this point.

Elda Minger 12:30 / #
She's a phenomenon.

Sarah MacLean 12:31 / #
Millions and millions of women and men who are waiting for that book to come out.

Elda Minger 12:37 / #
Yeah, it's a phenomenon. And so I finished the book, and I said to my friend, Janet, who worked at the bookstore, I said, "Are there more like this?" And she goes, "Oh, please!" She leads me down to the whole big bookshelf and she goes, "Get this, this, this." So number two I read The Wolf and the Dove. Loved it. Number three Sweet Savage Love. Loved it. I mean just, I went through everything. I went through Rosemary Rogers and Kathleen Woodiwiss, and Shirley Busbee, and Laurie McBain and I, oh my God, just on and on and on. And I'm like, "What is this?" I just fell in love. And I had a story in the back of my head. And this is really interesting because I was at the Writers Guild when Stephen Gaghan talked about Traffic, and how he wrote the movie script. And he is from St. Louis, and he said, "Three weeks after my father died, I started writing." And he said, "I don't know why. But that was it." And I was in the front row and I just stopped writing, I took little notes for friends, but I was like, "Oh my God, three weeks after my father died, I started writing the story that was in my head." And this is the weird part, it was a historical romance. And I didn't even know the genre. I did not know the genre. So I thought, "That's interesting." And he said, "I think it was my desperate attempt to control what I couldn't control." And I thought, "Yep. Bingo! You nailed me. Doesn't take Freud to figure that one out." So I'm writing this historical romance, I'm reading them like crazy. I end up driving to LA, because we ended up, after my dad died, we moved back to the west coast because all the rest of our family was there. And so Harlequin used to have an office on Sunset Boulevard. And the woman who ran it was named Evelyn Grippo. And she would have these things where she'd set up chairs and have cookies and coffee and talk about romance. And she'd say, "I'm always looking for writers." And I didn't think about writing a Harlequin then because I was writing my historical. So I finished it. And then there was a thing called the California Writers Conference. And Florence Feiler, a very ancient older lady, was there, an agent. And my, my claim to fame with her was that she had gotten the manuscripts beforehand, and she had read my first historical and when I came in to meet her, I was so nervous that I hyperventilated. Then she had to give me a bag and I was like breathing into the bag (makes frantic deep breathing noises.) And she was like, "Calm down, honey, calm down." And I'm like (makes frantic deep breathing noises again.) And she goes, "First of all, you can write. So that's the good news." She said, "Secondly, here's the bad news. The historical market is dead. Do you know what a Harlequin is?" And I said, "I do! I love them!" And she goes, "Good. Tonight at the dinner, go up to Fred Kerner and tell him I told you to tell him to send you a box of Harlequins." And I said, "Okay." So Fred Kerner was this very flamboyant guy at Harlequin who wore a white suit and they did those parties for women readers. This is like ancient history, but he was a nice guy. And I went up to him and I said, "Florence Feiler asked me to ask you to send me a box of Harlequins." He goes, he took a business card, "Write down your address, honey. Okay. It will be to you." So I told my mom and my mom was like, "Hmm." Because my mother was like a Capricorn and a very business oriented woman. So three weeks later to the day, this big box comes crashing down on my apartment step, like a huge 46 paperback count box, filled with Romance and Presents and my mother was like, "I'll be damned." The first one I picked up Janet Daily, No Quarter Asked. So I'm reading and I'm going and see I came from a theater background, so I'm like, "God, this is like a really intense one act play. This is harder than it looks."

Sarah MacLean 15:59 / #
Oh, it's so interesting that you frame it that way.

Elda Minger 16:02 / #
That was the way my mind worked, and I began breaking it down and breaking it down. And I was taking a writing class with Marilyn Lowery who was a great influence on me. You could not get in her Saturday morning class unless you had your 10 pages, no ifs, ands, or buts. So that really taught me discipline. But anyway, so I read them all and I wrote one and I sent it to London. And I remember I was so upset. I was like puking practically because I was so nervous. And I remember my brother said, "Why do you have to mail it? I'll mail it." I was like, "Good. Go do it. I can't do it. I'm too scared." So I got a little thin letter from England, from Frances Whitehead that said, "Dear Miss Minger, Though your story was entertaining, it is not suitable for our list, and we already have our American writer. But thank you so much for considering -"

Sarah MacLean 16:45 / #
Our American writer who is Janet Dailey.

Elda Minger 16:47 / #
Janet Dailey. And so I remember thinking, "Alright, our list. What does that mean?"

Sarah MacLean 16:50 / #
Wait, we heard this. Did we hear this story?

Jennifer Prokop 16:53 / #
Nora Roberts is famous for saying that.

Elda Minger 16:56 / #
Everybody got this letter. Everybody got this letter. Not right for your list. And I was like, "Not right for my list."

Sarah MacLean 17:03 / #
We have our American writer.

Elda Minger 17:04 / #
Well my brother was like, "I think it means they don't want it." And I was like, "Yeah, I think you're right." So I kept writing and then Orange County -

Sarah MacLean 17:10 / #
But if you have to be in a club, Elda, you want to be in a club with Nora Roberts and Jayne Ann Krentz.

Elda Minger 17:15 / #
Oh yeah. Oh my God. Exactly. Exactly. And so Orange County was exploding at that point, because I read a book about romance, and it was interesting because Vivian was a pivotal part of it. It was like these men did not know what they had. They did not know what they had. But they knew they wanted more of it because it was making money. And so all this exploded and editors were literally, every month major editors from New York were flying out to LAX. Now down in Orange County they're like, "We don't want to drive up into LA, but hey El, you live in LA. Can you go to LAX and pick up the editors?" And they were like, "Don't you dare pick their brains. You're like a chauffeur. We'll give you gas money, but you just drive them down."

Sarah MacLean 17:55 / #
Well you seem like the kind of person who wouldn't be chatty at all.

Elda Minger 17:59 / #
Exactly. But the funniest part was, I remember I picked up Jacqui Bianchi, who I adored, she was with Mills and Boon. And so she was like, "Okay, fire away!" With that little British accent. She's like, "Fire away. Ask me anything." And I said, "Well, I'm not supposed to ask you anything." And she was like, "Oh, bollocks. Just ask me whatever you want. You know, just, we're in the car for an hour. Let's go." And she was great. And so these editors would come and they would, they had like the tip sheets, and they had all this stuff. I mean they had, they were so well organized. It was like, "Here's what we want. Here's what we need." It was so exciting, because everybody and their mother wanted romance, and everybody was trying to write it. And like Orange County had up to three, four hundred members at a time. And they were wonderful presentations, like the morning would be a local author, but the afternoon would always be like an editor, or an agent, and they were great.

Sarah MacLean 18:46 / #
We should say that the Orange County Chapter of RWA, until you know recently, has been one of the most vibrant chapters of RWA from the very start.

Elda Minger 18:56 / #
Yeah, it is THE chapter. I think Texas, Texas is important. California. I mean not that the others aren't, but like they're the major chapters. But it was just an amazing time. And so I did get an agent. And then it was funny because I wrote one romance. And I remember my agent said, "The next book," she said, "I'll send this one out, but the next one, try to think of something really interesting, like unusual, that'll set you apart." So my sister at the time was training exotic animals, and I thought that's pretty interesting.

Sarah MacLean 18:57 / #
That's a perfect Harlequin job.

Elda Minger 19:05 / #
Nobody had done that, and so I got information from her, and I wrote Untamed Heart. And so I was working at UCLA managing Ackerman Union and it was a really difficult job because professors would make students buy their $60 textbooks that were just like good for doorstops and much not else. And we'd be shipping them back and forth to the publishers constantly, like shipping them over, then shipping them back. It was like the biggest waste of postage ever. So I was in charge of that, and I'm back there in my my camouflage pants and my gray t-shirt, my hair up in a bun with a pencil through, my army boots, you know, and I'm shipping these boxes back. And it was really funny because I remember my agent called and she said, "Okay, Silhouette turned it down." And I said, "Okay, what was wrong with it? What do I need to improve?" And she goes, "No. Elda, I don't want to read you this letter." And I said, "No, no, I'm, you know, I can learn from criticism. I want you to tell me what's wrong with the book." And she was like, "I really don't want to." And I began to get suspicious, and I said, "Read it to me." And she said, "Well, okay. "I hate this book.""

Sarah MacLean 20:31 / #
What?

Elda Minger 20:32 / #
"I hate Hollywood people. I hate the industry."

Sarah MacLean 20:36 / #
(gasps) Please.

Elda Minger 20:36 / #
"This woman needs, this woman needs to stop. She should not consider a career as a writer." And I'm like, I'm like on the phone, before cellphones, gutted. Tears coming into my eyes, and I'm saying, "Okay, okay. Don't send it out. Don't send it out."

Sarah MacLean 20:51 / #
This is Untamed Heart that we're talking about, because Untamed Heart is about a Hollywood star.

Elda Minger 20:57 / #
Yeah. Yeah. It's about a director directing a movie in Puerto Rico. She's the animal trainer, and it was just like, "I hate these people. I hate Hollywood. It's a horrible, you know, tell her to stop." And see that was the part, I mean it's fine if you say, "We don't really care for Hollywood books. It's not our cup of tea." But tell her, "Stop the career." And I was like, "She's got to know. She's an editor."

Sarah MacLean 21:17 / #
Oh god. I hope you one day walked right up to her and said, "Look at me. I'm amazing!" (laughs)

Elda Minger 21:23 / #
Later on at this conference, this woman said to me, "Why have you never chosen to write for Silhouette?" And I thought, "Well if you only knew. If you only knew."

Sarah MacLean 21:31 / #
You know, we've heard, nobody will name this editor, and I'm not going to ask you to, but we've heard about this Silhouette editor before.

Elda Minger 21:37 / #
Yeah. Yeah. Bad letters.

Sarah MacLean 21:39 / #
I assume it's the same Silhouette editor that we've heard from other people.

Elda Minger 21:39 / #
Oh yeah.

Sarah MacLean 21:43 / #
So, you know.

Elda Minger 21:46 / #
Oh, yeah. And so I begged my agent. I said, "Please don't send it out. I'll give you another book. Please don't send this out." I was like crying on the phone, people at work, I mean it was like back in the bowels of the receiving and the docks and the trucks and all, but still, a couple of my students were looking at me like, "What's going on?" And she goes, "Well, I've already sent it out. Harlequin American Romance is looking for authors, and I sent it to Vivian Stephens." And I was so pathetic. I was like, "Get it back! Please get it back!" And she's like, "Oh, honey, one editor likes it, one editor doesn't." So literally two days later, she calls me at work, "You just sold your first book." And I'm like, "What?" This is like total cognitive dissonance.

Jennifer Prokop 22:25 / #
Like whiplash.

Elda Minger 22:25 / #
Cognitive dissonance. "What? The same book?" And she goes, "Yeah. Yeah. Vivian Stephens said, "Oh my God, I've just found my action adventure writer."

Sarah MacLean 22:25 / #
(gasps) Yay!

Elda Minger 22:27 / #
And I went -

Jennifer Prokop 22:43 / #
That's amazing.

Elda Minger 22:38 / #
And I hung up the phone, and at the time, it was a $6,000 advance, and that was close to what I made in a year at that time. And I thought, "I'm quitting my job, and I'm going to write the next book. I'm going to give it 100%." So I went to my boss to quit, to basically give her two weeks notice or a month's notice, and she goes, "Oh to hell with your notice." And she goes, "Shut that door. I'm ordering a pizza. How the hell did you sell a book? I want to sell a book." It's like every, every you know, we're all book people working in bookstores. We all love to read. Within the next two weeks, I was working there before I left, almost everyone in every department came up to me and said, "Tell me how you did this. How did you do this? How did you sell this book?" So it was hilarious, but Vivian was great.

Jennifer Prokop 23:20 / #
Yeah, tell us about working with Vivian.

Elda Minger 23:24 / #
She was so far ahead of her time, she and Carolyn Nichols both, and I think, they again, exuded that energy. They had that, just that magnetism. They were, they were almost like little rock stars in their own right, because like an editor would get up and talk about stuff, and you'd be kind of like, "Yeah, yeah, yeah." Carolyn and Vivian, they'd command the stage, they'd say, "This is what I want." They were absolutely 100% sure in what they were doing and what they wanted.

Jennifer Prokop 23:48 / #
At this time Carolyn was working for her Harlequin. Later, so for everyone who's listening, later, she goes on to essentially be the founding editor of Loveswept.

Elda Minger 23:59 / #
Right.

Jennifer Prokop 23:59 / #
At this point, she was a Harlequin editor.

Elda Minger 24:01 / #
I don't know, I don't remember Carolyn at Harlequin. But Vivian, I was working with Vivian, and she was starting this new line, American Romance. She had come to talk to us about it, and she said, "The hero can be 20 pounds overweight, you know, that they can be a little balding. She can be realistic, you know, make them real people." And I really kind of liked the concept. And so I remember she said to me, "I want the books to be you. You know, I want you to write what you want to write. I want it to be your voice, your ideas, your imagination, just go wild. I will, you know, tell me your idea and nothing is too crazy. I'll help you shape it, but just go. You know, just go." And she liked Untamed Heart a lot, and I remember the reason I put in the condom, and this is funny 'cause I hadn't thought about this in years, this will sound like the Stone Age to you guys because you're much younger. I grew up in a town, I went to high school in a town of 1200 people. It was still very much a, I would call it a boy's town, like lots of hunting, fishing, ice fishing, skiing, sledding. Women were, you know, married young, had their kids and kind of disappeared is the only way I can put it. They disappeared. And marriage, I remember Jessie Bernard once said, a sociologist, she said, "Marriage is a great deal for men and children, but not so great for women." And I remember reading that and thinking, "Yep." When women did not have access to birth control, and biologically, the sex drive is strong. I had numerous friends who got pregnant, and back in the day, there was no abortion. If you could find a doctor you could go, you could get someone to do the job, and then if you started bleeding out, you went to the emergency room. And I had two friends, older sisters, they told me later on, it was like the most terrifying experience of their lives, which is why abortion must always be safe and legal. But you had two choices. And I had two girlfriends in high school who, their beginning of their senior year or summer of their junior year, whatever, they went to visit their aunt, and they came back and they looked gutted. And I never forgot the look in their eyes, like dead eyes, because they had had their baby and given it up for adoption, because that was the option or you cornered the guy and married him, and if he thought he was trapped, it was not a good marriage, and it usually ended up in divorce. So birth control back then, I worked at a drugstore and the condoms were in a glass case behind the pharmaceutical counter. You could only buy them if you were married. This is how bad things were. You know, when I look back, it's like God, it was like the Stone Age. But the thing was, I couldn't in good faith, and all the romances, the historicals of course, they would have sex and then she'd be pregnant and there'd be a big brouhaha, but in the end he would love the baby. But with a contemporary I thought, "I can't do this. I can't do this." And I had interesting parents because my mother is from Puerto Rico, staunch Roman Catholic, could not have the sex talk with me. So my dad was like, "This is very embarrassing, but we're going to have the sex talk, and I don't think I can look at you while we do this, but you need to be protected." And I remember he told me, "Teenage boys will do anything. They would do a knothole in a plank. You have to understand this about male nature. And he said, "They will tell you, "I love you." They will promise you the moon and you are a very romantic girl, and you will have sex with him. And Monday morning he will be telling all his friends at school and you will be brokenhearted." And that did happen to one of my girlfriends, where she gave it up to a guy, and she was the town pump for the last two years of high school, and she never had a boyfriend because she didn't dare. And I remember thinking, "God, that's awful!" But you know, my dad taught college and he said, "Many a woman's college career was derailed because some guy said, "I love you. I'll be with you forever." And she ended up raising the baby with her and her mom and dropping out of school. And he said, "I don't want that for you. I don't know how more plainly to put it." And I was like, "Got it, Dad. Got it." Because he was pretty, I mean he said, "I don't expect you to be a virgin when you're married. It's different times, but pick a man who likes women." And I was at 16, so stupid, 14, "Daddy, all men like women." And he's like, "No, they don't. Pick a man who really does like and treasure women." So when I approached Untamed Heart, I thought, "Okay, I've got to somehow put birth control into it." And I said to Vivian, "Can I do that?" And she said, "If you can figure out a way to make it work, I'm all for it." She was like, what Vivian gave us more than anything was she trusted us as writers. She trusted our skill. I mean I was still a pretty raw beginner, but she gave me wings. You know she trusted me. She trusted me. She said, "You can do it." She gave you confidence.

Sarah MacLean 28:47 / #
I just want to say, I want to interrupt, because I re-read Untamed Heart this week, and I marked the page because I think it's important. I mean a lot of people, I bought a copy on eBay so that I could read it.

Elda Minger 29:04 / #
I have my copy.

Sarah MacLean 29:05 / #
There is this, I mean, first of all the hero, Ryan, is so, that first scene. Jen, I don't think you've read this book, and let me tell you, you're going to love it because they're in a sleeping bag in the first scene.

Jennifer Prokop 29:09 / #
Oh, I love that.

Sarah MacLean 29:20 / #
I mean, that's Jen’s kink.

Elda Minger 29:24 / #
(Laughing) I love it!

Sarah MacLean 29:25 / #
So they're in a sleeping bag, and it's very romantic, and he doesn't expect them to be in a sleeping bag together, and he says, “I can't, we can't have…” He brings her to orgasm, and then she's like, “What about you?” And he's like, “We can't have sex because I can't protect you.” And he says it just like that, “I can't keep you safe.” And it is great! And then when they finally do do it, it's so well done. I mean you basically begin what we have all done in contemporaries, where you know, the drawer opens and closes, and he turns away, and then he turns back and then they do it.

Jennifer Prokop 30:12 / #
Right.

Sarah MacLean 30:12 / #
And it's really, I mean you put it, you put it on page! So, Elda, I want to talk, so first of all, I mean Vivian was absolutely right to trust you. You did a magnificent job. It's so romantic and beautiful, and I want to ask, because I know that you also wrote, you ended up writing a piece about condom usage for RWA magazine, and I'm curious if you could talk a little bit about the response to it, because I know not every writer was super excited to put safe sex on page.

Elda Minger 30:50 / #
Well some women said, “It completely destroys the romantic fantasy.” And then a friend of mine quipped -

Sarah MacLean 30:56 / #
It’s so romantic.

Elda Minger 30:56 / #
Well the thing that was funny, a friend of mine quipped and said, “No, the real fantasy is that the guy would offer the protection.” And I was like, “Now, now, let's not go there, you know, let's not do that.” I just, I think I was lucky in a weird kind of way, because my mother being from the Caribbean, she had a different take on sex, she was very prudish and couldn't give me the talk, because she could not imagine me having sex in high school or even early college. But at the same time she was like, “It is a universal experience when you're with the right man. It's the most wonderful feeling in the world. It's fabulous. Don't be ashamed. Don't be, you know, don't have any shame or trepidation or fear. It's a wonderful thing. It gives you babies, you know, it's wonderful.” And so I think in some ways, I had a, a healthier attitude towards sex, because I had a lot of female friends who were like, and it really made me sad. It was like, “I can't even touch myself down there. It's so disgusting.” And I'm like, “What do you mean? What do you mean? That's you. That's you.” And then of course, Our Bodies Ourselves, and that was blowing up at the same time. And so we were all kind of learning at the same time, but I felt, I just kept saying, “I think it's intensely romantic if a man protects a woman, and if he looks out for her. It's intensely romantic and intensely beautiful, you know? And I never ever thought, it's so funny, and I'll tell you something you guys did for me. I wasn't going to put up my first four books on ebook, my first four Americans. And after I got your letter, I sat down and I thought, “No, I need to and I'm not going to.” Because people said, “Change and put in cell phones, make them different.” And I thought, “No.” I was going to call them “Blast from the Past”. And then I thought, “No, they're so badly written. I don't know if I want to put them up.”

Sarah MacLean 30:59 / #
They’re not badly written. They’re so romantic.

Elda Minger 31:03 / #
But then I thought, “Well, they're part of history.” I re-read Untamed Heart, and it was like, “God, Ryan's kind of a, God he's forceful!” But then I realized like halfway through the book he says, “I love you. It's different for me. This is different for me. Trust me and all the bullshit in the tabloids, you know.” So it was a very weird experience for me. And I thought, “No, I'm going to put these books up.” So you guys are responsible for that, the first four books.

Sarah MacLean 33:00 / #
I’m so glad to hear that!

Jennifer Prokop 33:01 / #
That’s amazing.

Sarah MacLean 33:02 / #
So they're coming soon.

Elda Minger 33:03 / #
Yeah, they're coming.

Sarah MacLean 33:05 / #
Oh, I'm so glad.

Elda Minger 33:06 / #
I will get Untamed Heart up really soon. The other thing about the back alley stuff was that a lot of girl’s first time out, couldn't have a baby, got abortions and became sterile. And that's a terrible thing for a woman to have to go through. They got infections. They got sterile. It's so unnecessary. And you know, people think like, I think a lot of people think it's like, "Well have an abortion! Have two!" And it's not like that. It's not that simple a thing because my girlfriend's older sister, she had three children, they were struggling, they could barely feed the third one. They were using birth control, she got pregnant and she said "It was most horrible decision of her life, because she's already a mother." She knows, you know, but she knew that they wouldn't survive with another child. And you know life can be very grim and very tough. And so you know, people who say women who have abortions, yeah, I'm sure they're women who use it as birth control. There are irresponsible women. Sure. But I think the vast majority, it's a really hard decision to make and it's nothing they take lightly, or think is just a walk in the park. You know it's not, it's not an easy thing. And so to me, birth control, have it there. You know, a young girl could read, I felt like a young girl could read Untamed Heart, the way I read those Harlequins when I was in high school. And she would be, when he says, "We're not protected." She would know what that, I'm sure she would figure out that's birth control, "Wow, that's what a hero does." And I've had women come up to me, like younger women and say, "I never knew men could be that way with women. When I read your books, I never knew men could care that much for women." And I'm like, "Oh, my God!" So you know a lot of authors go, "Eh, we're not curing cancer." But we are affecting people, we are affecting people who read our books.

Sarah MacLean 34:51 / #
You know that reader response, I never knew that this was a thing I could expect when we talk about expectations and romance. That's what we're talking about, is it shouldn't be a high expectation, an unrealistic expectation and should be -

Elda Minger 35:08 / #
Exactly.

Sarah MacLean 35:09 / #
An expectation.

Elda Minger 35:11 / #
Exactly. Exactly.

Jennifer Prokop 35:13 / #
It's funny, Elda, because I'm 47 and a lot of the stories you told about high school and no, this isn't about me, but I'm going to tell a story about my mom. And when I was in high school, I went to a Catholic high school, and there were a lot of girls who were pregnant, who got pregnant and like you, some of them gave the baby up for adoption. Some of them got married really young, and I will never forget this is a moment where, you have that moment where you're like, "This was when my parents did the best job parenting." So there was a girl in my neighborhood who was, I was a sophomore in high school and this girl was a senior. She was my older brother's age. And she was walking by, my mom and I were in our driveway for some reason, this girl walked by with her baby in a stroller, and my mom looked at me and she was like, "Look, I don't ever want that to be you. So if you're going to have sex, I want you to know I will take you to the doctor and you can go on birth control." And then there was this long pause and she said, "Okay, I'm not going to do it, but one of my friends will." (laughter)

Elda Minger 36:20 / #
What a great mom! What a great mom!

Jennifer Prokop 36:23 / #
I will never forget that moment, but this was, you know, this was almost 1990 when we would have had this conversation.

Elda Minger 36:31 / #
And we're still not protecting our girls. We are still not protecting our girls, because you look at rapes on college campuses. You look at girls going, oh, a great dad story. My dad was exceptional. I never knew it until I began talking to other women. When I went away to school, and again, because he was a college professor, he saw all this. He said, "When you go to a frat party, don't drink the punch." And I'm like, "What do you mean? Like Hairy Buffalo where they put all the alcohol, all the different bottles, right?" And he goes, "You don't know what's in it." And he said, "What you do is you ask for a can of Coke, and you watch them open it up. And honey, when you go to the bathroom, you take that Coke can with you." And I'm like, "Daddy, you are like, I'm going to be, I'm never going to be married. I'm going to be like a widow. I'm going to be like that maiden aunt up in the garret the way that you're doing my love life, you know." And he said, "Trust me on this." So my first frat party at Kenyon, I got, I remembered my dad, I got my Coke. Didn't take it to the bathroom. So I'm peeing in the bathroom, and I'm thinking, "I should have taken my Coke, but what the heck." So I come back and the guy hands it to me and he says, "Here you go." And I just had this weird, I always follow my gut, just had this weird feeling, and I said, "Why don't you take a sip first?" And he hesitated and I was like, "You bastard." And I went and I opened up another can of Coke, because you know, date rape drugs, maybe they weren't date rape, like the actual drug, but you know they could put stuff in to make you pass out or whatever. And I remember I cracked open another Coke, and I was just looking him like thinking, and then all of a sudden I thought, "Why am I here? Why am I here?" And I left and I never went to another frat party. But it's like, I have friends who, oh God, the stories I could tell you. And the two pregnancies that affected me the most were a girlfriend I had, two years ahead of me, senior year got pregnant. Her father made the guy marry her and they rented a house across the street from us, and during the summer, my bedroom window was open. And I was reading my Harlequins and I could hear them fighting, and they had been so in love. And they were fighting because they had no money. And her dad was paying for stuff. And her husband was like, "How do you think it makes me feel that your dad's paying for everything?" And you know, just endless fights. And I remember thinking, "This is so sad." And they did end up getting divorced. And the other one was my best friend from high school. She got pregnant, and her mom was like, "That's it. You're out." So she walked down to our house and looked at my mom. And I remember my mom said, "Elda, you need to leave the room, just for now." So I snuck over to the stairway and I sat in the stairway and I listened. And my girlfriend told my mom, "I'm pregnant." And my mother said, "Your mother loves you. She'll come around. Until then you'll stay here with us." And I still remember my dad grading papers, walking around, this, this was the era, a Lucky Strike hanging out of his mouth and rocking the baby because he wouldn't sleep. You know, but it's like, both lives derailed and not that children aren't wonderful, but the ability to time your family, and to be sure that the man is marrying you for the right reasons, you know what I mean? Like you're getting off to a good start. There are people who make it work and God bless them, but you know, a lot of times it doesn't. So it was so funny, I had never thought of this, but I just remember having a, it was like an ethical dilemma. I couldn't write a love scene where they just did it, and then nothing happened to her or she got pregnant, and it all worked out, you know, even though that's a huge romance trope, but I couldn't do it, you know?

Sarah MacLean 37:31 / #
Have you ever written a secret baby book?

Elda Minger 39:54 / #
Oh, yes. Oh, yes. In fact, I wrote, I, you know, I always challenged myself to do something, like Vivian would say like, "You always do these things that are so far out." I did Bachelor Mother and that was, I think it was the first book where a woman asked a man to get her pregnant, because she had a, I read a column in Dear Meg in the Star, and she said, "Dear Meg, I've always known I wanted to be a mother. I have problems with my ovaries. I have six months to get pregnant, and no boyfriend in sight. I'm thinking of asking my best friend to get me pregnant. What do you think?" And Dear Meg was like a staunch conservative and she said, "Do it, honey. Do it. You want that baby, you go for it." And I thought, "There's a book here." So that was one of my most popular Americans because she asked him to get her pregnant -

Sarah MacLean 40:41 / #
I can't wait to read that.

Elda Minger 40:42 / #
And then they fall in love. They fall in love. And then I actually did one for Temptation called Rescue Me. And the review I got on Amazon said, "Elda Minger has written a romance with absolutely no conflict and it works. And I don't know how she did it, but it works." And so I, you know, I like challenging myself. I did Daddy's Little Dividend. I did every other chapter in the past, like, present, past, present past, and then it all tied up at the end, and my editor called and said, "You know you didn't tell me if you were going to do this much. You didn't tell me you were going to do this much flashback." And I said, "Well, you know, what the heck." And she said, "But it does work, so we'll go ahead." And one of the ways I did my career, two things I did that were really crucial that I recommend to all authors. One thing I did was I always turned in full manuscripts, because I saw what happened to romance writers when they did a proposal and then they turned in, the book was sold, so the publisher had you. And then basically they had to rewrite it three and four times because it wasn't quite what they wanted, and it was just month after month after month. So and they were like, "Well, why would you write the whole thing? What if it's wrong?" And I said, "If it's wrong, I'll start another book, but I want the whole book to be there so they see what they see is what they get." And 90% of the time it was fine. And the other thing I've always recommended, my mom, God bless her, when I sold my first book she said, "Now darling, you need a lawyer." And I was like, "What are you talking about?" And she said, "You need a lawyer to look over your contract." And I said, "What?" You know, because I was down in Orange County. Nobody had a lawyer, you know. And she said, "You are now a small business, and you need to protect yourself. Find a lawyer. We're in Hollywood, I'm sure you can find an entertainment lawyer." I found a great lawyer. She did my first three contracts, my first 13 Americans. And she, there was all these clauses and it said, "The rights clause." She said, "Here's where the money is, and here's where you need to protect yourself." And it was very funny, because it was number F, which was appropriate, because it said, "And all other rights that may ever come into existence." And I said, "What the hell is that?"

Sarah MacLean 42:49 / #
I signed one of those, without an agent, first contract.

Elda Minger 42:54 / #
Yep, but it was funny because her name was Susan. And she said, "Honey, what if they somehow figure out a way to project your book on the moon, so that simultaneously everybody can read it? And you get no money from that?" And I was like, "Oh." And so book 14, I think was 13 or 14, Harlequin let my agent know, "We really like Elda. We really like her books, but we don't like her that much." You know, no more of this, like she can't push for anything else, but then when ebooks came into existence, everyone who had signed, "and all other rights that may come into existence," lost their ebooks. And I've gone to conventions, science fiction, fantasy, mystery people have come up to me, "How did you keep your books? How did you end up with all those titles to put up as ebooks?" And it was because of my mom. So good contract lawyer. Full manuscripts. That's, that's just the way I went.

Sarah MacLean 43:44 / #
This is incredible! I love all these stories! So Elda, just walk us through. So at this point you've written, you wrote for Harlequin American. Obviously, Vivian Stephens was only there for about a year and a half.

Elda Minger 44:00 / #
Right.

Sarah MacLean 44:01 / #
Then you moved to, you were moved to a different editor. Who was your sort of long standing editor? Did you have one?

Elda Minger 44:08 / #
I had Vivian, and then I had Debbie Matteucci. She was wonderful. Then I, American had a problem because the problem with American was they kept changing the focus, like one year was small town babies and apple pie. Then the next year, it was something else, and the next year it was something else, and it's really hard, you know, when they have this really distinct way you have to have the book, but they change it every year. Like Desire was like straight through, you could, you could know five years from now Desire would be basically a really sexy book, you know, and a good conflict. And so I remember I called, who did I call? I left a call, I think Randall Toye was, no, I called Debbie and I said, "I want to try and write for a different line. I feel like I'm getting stale. And it was really weird because Randall Toye called me up and said, "No, no, no, you will not go to Silhouette. Where would you like to go?" And I said, "Well, where could I go?" And he said, "How about Temptation?" And I said, "Good. I'll go there". So I loved working with Birgit Davis-Todd.

Sarah MacLean 45:08 / #
Would you explain to everybody the difference? What did Temptation mean at the time?

Elda Minger 45:12 / #
Temptation was like 65,000 words, so middling length, not short, not long, and really sexy. Temptation was like, you know, it's like Oscar Wilde, "I can resist anything but temptation." Right?

Jennifer Prokop 45:23 / #
It was kind of the precursor to Blaze, is what I would say.

Elda Minger 45:28 / #
Yeah. It was a great line. I wish they'd never destroyed it or cut it. I thought it could have gone, I would have written for them forever. But I loved Birgit, she was such a, she was probably at this point the best editor. Well, Vivian was, Vivian was the best as far as innovation and starting out. But as far as, as just editing and getting me to be the best writer, I could be, I would say Birgit Davis-Todd, because she went to McGill University and got a degree in editing. I mean, just an incredible woman, and she could always find that one piece in the manuscript that didn't work, and she'd point it out and you'd go, "Of course! Oh, my God! I didn't even think of that." But she was great. And then I did due two historicals and then I segued into bigger books for Berkeley, and then I went straight to ebooks. The last five or six years have been dicey, because I've had some death in my family and some family stuff. And so it's been a little slower than I would like, but it's like I, you know, it's not a self-indulgent thing. But it's like, when things, when the shit hits the fan, I'm not one who can just sit down and write, you know. But I've enjoyed putting the older books up online, I've gotten good response from them. And I really liked doing the longer books, and it's funny because I, I kind of had a little bit of a friction with Berkeley, as far as the bigger books, a lot of changes with editors and stuff. And I, with The Fling, I had wanted to do the other two women's stories. And now with ebooks, I'm thinking now I can, you know, and there's so many, there's so many people I know who had mystery series, and after three or four, when they didn't sell the way the publisher wanted them to, they're like, "Okay, you're done with that series." And now they're putting them all up online, and readers are buying them. So you know, I like that ebooks are giving publishers a run for their money. I like that.

Sarah MacLean 47:10 / #
Can you talk a little bit about readers? You talked a little bit about this when we talked about readers responding to your human, kind, decent men, but can you talk a little bit about the romance community of readers and how you found them and how they came to you?

Elda Minger 47:32 / #
It is so amazing! I went to my first few writers conferences, and there is no fan that loves you, and I don't even like the word fan, really, but there's no reader who loves you the way a romance reader does. And I thought about this, and I remember back in the day with Presents, I remember all my girlfriends who had babies, they were like, "I'm run ragged all day, but at the end of the day, when the kids are in bed, my husband's snoozing in the reclining chair, that's my time. I get to open my Presents, and I read a chapter or two, and that's my time." And I remember thinking, "Wow!" You know, because I'm a serial monogamist, but I never married, never had kids. But I remember thinking I always had my time. I always had reading time. I always had time. And what would that be like to be so busy during the day that you would read a little bit at night? We'd read a little bit at night, and that was your time and I thought what are these books giving women? And I have a real theory about The Flame and the Flower and the early romance books, because I think with the 50 year Woodiwiss anniversary coming up, we also have to really pay homage to Nancy Coffey, because that woman was a frickin' genius. And I love the story, slush pile, takes it home, can't stop reading, calls her up, edits it, but basically a 600 page, I mean this huge thing, and the thing that she did that was so genius was she said, "I'm going to put this out as a big spectacular." And it was a big print run, big cover, big everything so it was noticed.

Sarah MacLean 49:00 / #
Nancy Coffey was the editor who pulled The Flame and the Flower off the slush pile at Avon books and made essentially romance an Avon, historical romance and mass market romance would not exist -

Elda Minger 49:15 / #
Exactly.

Sarah MacLean 49:16 / #
Without Nancy Coffey at Avon at the time, which was not HarperCollins, it was a pulp publisher.

Elda Minger 49:22 / #
Well, it was funny because they go, "We wouldn't have careers without Kathleen Woodiwiss and Nancy Coffey." I'm always like, "And Nancy Coffey." Then Rosemary Rogers sends her manuscript, she addressed it to the editor who edited The Flame and the Flower, care of Avon books. And Nancy gets that and all these books start coming out and coming out so they have a bad rap. You know, the whole bodice ripper idea, the whole, the whole rape concept idea, and I think people were very uncomfortable with it and men were really uncomfortable with it. Because women were having sex and enjoying sex. And this was a, I know it sounds like I'm a dinosaur, but this was like such a new concept, like Frank Irby and Scarantino and all these guys who wrote before, they would fade to black when the door closed or the cave, you know, the firelight flickered and died or whatever happened, and then the next couple of scenes suddenly she'd be pregnant. And you'd be like, "Oh, I guess they did it." You know, I mean, you never got the sex and Woodiwiss blew open the bedroom door. And so the thing about the rapes, I gave this a lot of thought, and I thought, back in the day, and I'm in a weird generation, because the women before me, like if you got engaged, you could have sex with your, your engaged guy, because that was like you were already going to be married, "What the heck if the baby came a month early, who cared? Or two months early?" But it was like men were very much like, "Where'd you learn that? Where'd you hear about that? What's going on?" You have to remember no internet. no porn, except for guys like, projected in a garage on like a movie thing. Yeah, exactly. But I mean, it wasn't like it is now where everything's at the touch of a button. And so men were very much, "Where'd you learn that? Where'd you hear about that? Wait a minute, who've you been with? What's going on?" So women were very constrained, and they were put in this box, and I think a lot of women's depression is they don't get to be their authentic self. They don't get to be who they really are, because they're afraid that if they are who they really are mother, father, husband, even kids will abandon them. So I think that does cause depression. So then suddenly, this book comes out, and you know, Shanna especially, here's this woman who completely, even though some people found her horrible, she was her authentic self, and she did what she wanted to do. And God knows, you know, Sweet Savage Love, all of Rosemary Rogers' heroines were willful, and, and some spoiled and proud, and they just did what they wanted to do. But then we come to the sex and it's like, okay, how do you have women have sex in an era where nice girls do but may not enjoy it? Or you won't, see a friend of mine said it beautifully, because she said, "You know, we're so screwed up, El, because we're told, keep your knees together, don't have sex. Don't think about things. Even though you know, the hormones are raging, then suddenly a wedding ring's put on your finger and kaboom! You're supposed to turn right on and have multiple orgasms. It doesn't work that way." And I was like, "Yeah, it's true." So how do you get a woman to have sexual enjoyment? And I thought, "Well, you, have the hero." And I said this in Boston RWA, because people were saying these rape sagas are horrible. And I said, "Some of them are rape." I mean, there were books that had pretty awful rapes, but a lot of them I call them forced seduction, because it's like a gorgeous man will not take no for an answer. And then the other little tidbit I dug out from a sexologist was he told me, "The number one fantasy of men and women both is being forced to have sex with someone who's incredibly desirable." And I thought, "Works for me." And I mean, you know, like, okay. And so it made total sense, because it was, it was almost like, I know, it sounds crazy, but it's almost like, the only way women of slightly older than my generation, because it was starting to get liberated when I went to college, that women who were older than me who were the primary readers of the bodice rippers, I don't like the term, but it gave them permission, because it was, it wasn't their fault. They couldn't do anything about it. This guy was overwhelming. He overwhelmed them, and they're, and this is my favorite, every book had some kind of line along this line, "her body betrayed her." That to me was almost like a, not a trope, I'm trying to think of the right word. It was almost like code for we all know, we all want to have great sex. We all know the body is primed for it, your prime reproductive years. It's the whole purpose of nature, if you don't reproduce, I mean, it's like, I always think of Princess Diana, once she had those two boys, she was disposable, unfortunately, but, but it's like, that's the tooth and claw of nature. Once you reproduce, you are expendable. And so everything in nature goes toward making sure that happens. And so you have this incredible drive, and then you have a society that says, "Keep it in check. You're in charge. Don't you let things go too far."

Sarah MacLean 54:11 / #
Well, and it's your fault.

Elda Minger 54:13 / #
And yeah, exactly! And you're the temptress! That was, I think that was a big part of the witch trials, all of it. You're the temptress. You're the one that led him on. And I thought about it, I thought, "What is it like to have an erection when a beautiful woman walks by? Wouldn't you feel kind of out of control?" Because I remember guys I was close to in high school, they were like, "Oh, it's the worst. Oh my God, it's just horrible, it's like I have to wait. Everyone else is filing out into the hallway, and I have to sit there with my book in my lap." And I thought, "Oh, this poor guy!" You know, but, but that's my theory about those books, is that they, you know, we look at them with modern day sensibility, and we forget the condoms behind the counter that only married people can have. We forget the guy saying to the girl, "Where'd you learn that? What's going on here? Who've you been with?" We forget there was a girl who was raped by a guy in town and he got six of his friends to say they'd been with her, and it was all thrown out. And we forget, we forget the frat parties and the stuff still goes on, it's not, I don't think it's as bad, because I think women have more of a voice, but we need to remember. And Woodiwiss, in a sense, I think the reason she is so loved, is that this girl went from being penniless and pretty much an orphan, and scared to death, and the guy think she's a prostitute and basically does rape her, but she's like so scared, she can't even tell him what's going on. But in the end, she comes around to having his love, his respect, his admiration, and she has like her own dignity back. It's like the women were paid attention to these books, and I really think it's important. They were like a stepping stone. I don't think you could sell one now. I don't think the modern day audience would buy any of it, but I think they were a crucial stepping stone, and they need desperately to be looked at, in the context of the time. Because I remember thinking, "This is great. This book is so hot." I mean, now it's like there's stuff out there that's, you know, burn the house down, it's so hot! But back then we read them and were like, "Oh my God! Women actually having sex!" And there, well I remember arguing with a professor and saying, Every damn woman in a book written by a man, if she has sex, she dies." And he's like, "What do you mean?" I said, "Anna Karenina. Madame Bovary." I just, on and on and on. "Charlotte Gilman Perkins, you know, the Yellow Room. Every single book, you know, she has sex, she enjoys it, kaboom, she's dead. It's like the person who goes, maybe we should go into that basement and see if that killer's down there, you always know that person is going to die. It's the same with a woman." And he was like, "I never thought of it that way." But I thought women in all of literature, it's like, 90% of the time they have sex and they're punished. And now we suddenly have a genre where she has sex and no matter what else has happened to her, rape or not, she's not killed. She lives and she lives to tell the tale. So I think it's, you know, we're coming up on 50 years and Woodiwiss just wrote the story she wanted to read. That's what blows my mind. And it changed the world.

Jennifer Prokop 57:07 / #
Did you ever meet her?

Elda Minger 57:09 / #
No, and I wish I had. She had horses. She raised Morgan horses, and there was a big scandal where she had an affair with a stable master, and I love that.

Sarah MacLean 57:18 / #
Really.

Jennifer Prokop 57:19 / #
Good for her.

Sarah MacLean 57:20 / #
Left her left her husband and -

Elda Minger 57:23 / #
Yeah. Yeah. And she had this love affair with the stable master, and I thought, "Only Kathleen, I love her. Only Kathleen." And then of course, Rosemary Rogers was a wild child, so she was great, too, you know, but they were terrific women, you know,

Sarah MacLean 57:35 / #
When you wrote your historicals, so you wrote Harlequin historicals?

Elda Minger 57:43 / #
No, I wrote one for Zebra and one for Berkeley.

Sarah MacLean 57:45 / #
Oh.

Elda Minger 57:46 / #
Big ones. Big fat ones. Oh, and I'll tell you a funny story about Velvet Fire. The editor there, who shall remain nameless, she said, "Just send it to me. It'll be fine." And I knew it wasn't terrific. I mean, I knew it was my first book. I wrote it, handwritten on legal pads with Bic Clics, you know, typed it up on a regular typewriter. I'm really dating myself. But I remember thinking," I've got to really go over it. I've written six Americans. I know a little bit more. I've got to go through it with a red pen." She was like, "No, no, no." And I said, "No, I insist." And so a friend of mine and I, we went through the whole thing, re-edited it, re-typed it, sent it in. So at that point, I think she was so frustrated with me at one point, she called me up and she said, "You know, you effing writers. You think it's what's between the covers that sells the books. Let me tell you something, it's the cover we make. It's the publicity campaign." It was everything, she listed everything but the actual writing. And I thought, "Oh my god, I cannot work with this woman again." So I just kept my mouth shut and the book came out and it did pretty well, but I never forgot that. And there's, there's, you have to be careful, like my dad said, "Find a man who likes women." Find an editor who likes writers, you know, find an agent who likes writers, you know, because it can be brutal out there. It can be tough. It can be tough. And the other thing with Velvet Fire was, the first sex scene she's sold in an auction. She's the Vicar's daughter.

Sarah MacLean 59:13 / #
I love it.

Elda Minger 59:13 / #
Into a bordello. Has to make her way to survive. This is like such a classic bodice ripper and so she's up on stage draped in this white silk and the candles are burning and of course, our hero goes against the villain to buy her and then the villain, that's it, it's a blood feud for the rest of the book. But the mistress of the household, the brothel owner, she looks and thinks, "Oh boy, this girl is going to put up a fight and this guy is not going to like this." So she drugs her. She gives her like an aphrodisiac and so this sex scene is wild in this bedroom, but it's like great sex, and of course she wakes up mortified, and then of course they go on to love each other, but -

Jennifer Prokop 59:51 / #
I'm ordering it now.

Sarah MacLean 59:52 / #
I'm literally going right now to buy it.

Elda Minger 59:56 / #
Well everyone in Antioch read this book, right. So a friend of mine, who shall remain nameless, well, she ran the beauty salon in town, and it was like Steel Magnolias. And she called me up and she said, "El, I know you're going to come home this summer," but she's like, "I don't think you should come home for a while." And I was like, "What are you talking about? What's wrong? What's wrong? I want to come see you guys." And she goes, "Well, um," and I won't say his name, "but you know, this guy, we both know, his wife has Velvet Fire on her bedside table." So she's taking a bubble bath, and he was like, "What's this shit?" You know, this, these horrible little books that my wife is reading, and that smartass Elda, and so the book falls open to the big sex scene, because of course, she's read it so many times and enjoyed it. So the book falls open, and he starts reading it, and I guess he went ballistic, and he called a bunch of his male friends who were married to her contemporaries and said, "Do you know this shit our wives are reading? Do you know what Elda to put in this book? Oh, my God!" You know, and so my girlfriend said, "You're kind of persona non grata around here for a while." And I was like, "Well, okay, I guess I'll come back, like next spring." And she was like, "It may have cooled down by then." But see, it's like there's such a, this is one of the things I think with romance -

Sarah MacLean 1:01:09 / #
This is the wrong way to deal with it, husbands.

Elda Minger 1:01:12 / #
Oh, I know.

Sarah MacLean 1:01:13 / #
If that book falls open to that page that has been read-

Elda Minger 1:01:16 / #
Read it!

Sarah MacLean 1:01:16 / #
Over and over again, read it, take notes, get it together and have a great weekend!

Elda Minger 1:01:23 / #
Exactly, exactly. But he was so, that was my era. Men would be very threatened by women having any sexual knowledge whatsoever, or any thoughts or desires. You know, like I had a girlfriend who told her husband a fantasy she had, and he goes "Where'd you come up with that?" He shamed her. And she said, "Never talked about fantasies again. Ever. Read them in my books, but not in my marriage." So I don't mean to be like, fuddy duddy here, but it happens. It happens. So that, that I thought was pretty funny, though. I did get a laugh out of that, because I know this guy, and I can picture him like, "Ah, what's this crap my wife's reading, and what the hell?" It was pretty funny. Made me laugh. Made me laugh.

Sarah MacLean 1:02:01 / #
Well, I just bought Velvet Fire, and I think we should do a deep dive episode on it. I'm just going to say it.

Jennifer Prokop 1:02:06 / #
We're going to have a great night. Elda, one question we really like to ask people is what's the book that you're most proud of, or a book that you hope outlives you, if there was sort of a, this is my best work?

Elda Minger 1:02:23 / #
I have three, out of my whole group of books, I have three that I really am fond of. I would say the first, Velvet Fire, because it was my first, my baby. When I finished that book, I felt I could conquer the world. And I know you probably know what I mean, Sarah, like, you're like, "Can I do it? Can I do it? Can I do it?" When you hit the end on that first book, so the second book is crucial, because there are a lot of one book wonders. But that first book, when you finish that book, you're like, "Oh my God." And that whole book came to me in a dream. I dreamed the entire damn book, and I just wrote it down. I take no credit. But I love that book. I mean, I was writing it while I was driving out to LA. I was typing it at night when I was, I mean, that I had such a passion for that book. I had to get it done, so I would say Velvet Fire for sure. The second one, strangely enough, is a very strange little book I did called Billion Dollar Baby, and it was about a bulldog that inherited millions of dollars, and I inserted kind of a mystery into an American. And I read it, again the National Enquirer, I read, I read the tabloids in line at the market, and it said, "Racehorse Inherits Millions of Dollars." And then it talked about all these animals that were left money and I thought, "Oh." And I had a bulldog as a kid, so I made it a bulldog. And I love that book, because it said a lot about what I feel about, I do animal rescue, and you know, it had a lot of my philosophy about animals and about broken people and about how anybody can heal. And then I would say the third book, I really, I felt like when it was done, it was like, "Yes! I got what I wanted to say down on the page." And that would be The Fling, because I, that was my first big contemporary, and I just loved it. That book was a joy from beginning to end. I just laughed my ass off writing it and had such a good time. And I had readers tell me, "I'll never make it to Hawaii, but I went there courtesy of The Fling. I've been to Hawaii now because of you." And you know, it's funny because you say the thing about the readers, there were two letters over the years that really touched me. One was Untamed Heart and this 17-year-old wrote me, like lined paper, cursive writing, "Dear Elda Minger," and she said, "I never knew that a girl could train wild animals. I never knew that a girl could even do this." And again, it's the time, you know, I'm dating myself. But she said, "I've always loved animals, and I'm going to find a way to work with them, like Samantha and thank you for showing me it is possible." I'm like bawling. I showed the letter to my sister and she's like, "Oh my God!" And the other letter I loved was, and I know this Midwest sensibility because I went to high school in Illinois and there's this woman in Minnesota and she said, "Dear Elda Minger, You don't know me, but I know you." And she said, "I want to thank you because I finished reading Daddy's Little Dividend." And she said, "Today was a hard day for me. Today was a very hard day for me. The five-year-anniversary of my mom's death." And then she said, "And my youngest son left for college." So she said, "It's all about being a mom and a mother and losing my mother and not being a mother anymore in the same way, and I was so depressed. So I had my TBR pile, and your book was on the top, and I started reading it, and a couple of hours later, you, you just," and this is the Midwest, I love this, I truly love this, "and you just perked me right up! You just perked me right up!" And I'm like reading this letter, bawling my eyes out, and that to me is worth thousands of dollars, any advance, to know that you've touched people. That's what it's all about. You know, that to me that's what it's all about. But I loved that, "You just perked me right up." So Minnesota.

Sarah MacLean 1:05:59 / #
Elda, I am so glad you answered my letter.

Elda Minger 1:06:04 / #
Oh, I am too! This has been so much fun.

Sarah MacLean 1:06:06 / #
Oh, I'm so happy, and I just know our listeners are going to be so riveted to these stories. So thank you so much for joining us.

Elda Minger 1:06:16 / #
Oh, thank you, you guys. I am so touched by the fact that you guys are doing this oral history because I don't want it to die. I want people to know the excitement, the fun, the privilege it was to work with these terrific women. And you know, both Carolyn and Vivian, they were powerhouses. They were women in a world, at that point, that was still pretty much dominated by men, and now publishing has a lot more women in it, and we're used to it. You know, we're used to the all the powerful women in publishing. But they were amazing. I mean, literally, when they got on the stage, it was like they were rock stars, and I'll tell you one Carolyn memory I have. I was at a convention and we were all setting up to autograph. And so you know how they have the U-shape, the U-shape and the bottom of the U is when the people come in the door, and then the two sides and the authors sit on the inside and you'd have your little placards and everything and your piles of books and then you go up to the register and it's for literacy. So a bunch of us were sitting around and there were there four seats on the bottom of the U and Carolyn came in and man, she was a powerhouse. Never mean, but my God, you did not mess with her. And she came up and she said to the women there, she goes, "You have to move. You have to move. You have to move." They were like, "What? What? Oh, okay." They move to the side of the U and she spread out, like remember how Loveswept was like that pinky-purple? She spread a pinky-purple, beautiful cloth and she put flowers up and everything, in all the different things. It was Iris Johansen, Kay Hooper, Fayrene Preston and I think it was Billie Green who might have been the fourth, but it was the four major Loveswept authors and she was, "You sit here. You sit here." There were candy bowls, bowls of candy, everything. It was like, it was like Patton orchestrating a big war. It was just like, it was amazing! And I was a couple of seats down and I just watched, this woman is amazing! They're right at the opening. People come in first thing they see, and I mean, like the big placards, you know what I mean? Like the posters and everything Loveswept! You know, right there. She was like, "Here, here, here, here. You sit here. Smile." You know, and she was like giving them confidence and all, and it was amazing. So they, but they were astounding women! Nobody really knew what they were doing, but they kind of took the ball and ran with it. They were amazing women. Amazing. So it's my honor to talk about them and to remind people of how wonderful they were and are.

Sarah MacLean 1:08:36 / #
Elda, are you still a romance reader?

Elda Minger 1:08:38 / #
Oh God, yes! I just finished - I like Lynne Graham.

Jennifer Prokop 1:08:42 / #
Lynne Graham still writes a lot of Harlequin Presents. They're terrific.

Elda Minger 1:08:45 / #
I love Presents. I will always read them for the rest of my life. But I will tell you, two of the all time greats, if your listeners haven't gotten these books, they need to get them used and read them.

Sarah MacLean 1:08:55 / #
Yeah.

Elda Minger 1:08:56 / #
Harlequin Presents by Roberta Leigh, who was a British writer who wrote for television and movies and Presents called Confirmed Bachelor, and it is one of the funniest books I have ever read. The premise is that she's an editor, and he is a misogynist who writes these horrible books about how men should be in the world. And the opening is his editor can't make it, you have to go to his Caribbean island and she's like, "Oh, no! No way!" (laughter) She is so wonderful! She's a Grace Kelly blonde, and she's a virgin, but she pretends like she's very knowledgeable, a woman of the world, and the funniest part of this book is she has two Scottie dogs. She lives with her parents in England, and they have a place in Scotland, and the dogs are called Alex and Hamish. And so at one point, she's desperate because he's like, "Oh, come on, go to bed with me, whatever." And she's like, "No, no, you're too tame for me. I'm used to two men at a time." And he goes, "Who are these men?" And she says, "Oh, my good friends, Alex and Hamish." And so he's like, "My God! And you won't sleep with me. You think I'm depraved and you're doing that." And so at one point, he's trying to track her down and he gets her mother on the phone, and her mother goes, "Yes." And she's a very nice British lady and blah, blah, blah. And he goes, "Do you approve of what your daughter is doing with Alex and Hamish?" The mother's kind of nonplussed and she says, "Well, I don't see why not. It's excellent exercise." (laughter) I mean you're peeing in pants laughing at this book. So that's a great one. And then the other one, that everyone loved back in the day, was A Candlelight Ecstasy called Video Vixen, and it was by Elaine Raco Chase, and she basically wrote Susan Lucci as a romance character. And this was back Ecstasy, like in the '70s, early '80s, maybe '82 or something. This guy's coming to interview everyone on the soap opera, and they're like, "Vicki, you have to be the one. I mean, you live in a barn in Vermont, you can fruit, you quilt. You're totally like, you have no stains in your past." And one of them was a heroin addict. One of them was an alcoholic.

Sarah MacLean 1:11:05 / #
It had to be Vivian Stephens' day.

Elda Minger 1:11:05 / #
Oh my God, I think it was.

Sarah MacLean 1:11:08 / #
I mean it had to be. You can really tell which books are hers.

Elda Minger 1:11:13 / #
Yes. She always goes further and it is one of the funniest damn books I have ever read. I re-read it like every two years, and then I love Lynne Graham. I love Betty Neels. And I know people think like, "Oh my God," you know, but I had a serious lung problem, and I found it very comforting to read romances where the hero was a doctor. I just love them, you know, so, but I will read Presents to the day I die. I love a good historical. I love Johanna Lindsey. I was brokenhearted, to hear she passed. And I'm so glad you guys are doing this, because my, the generation ahead of me, it's like the generation that's like five to ten years older than me, they are starting to go. And these days anybody can go, you know, I mean, age is not really, a you know, determinable.

Sarah MacLean 1:11:13 / #
We've lost the original Avon ladies, right? There's Bertrice Small and Joanna Lindsey and Rosemary Rogers.

Elda Minger 1:12:04 / #
Yeah.

Sarah MacLean 1:12:04 / #
I mean, they're not here anymore.

Jennifer Prokop 1:12:07 / #
Carolyn Nichols is not, right? There's people that we would have, I mean, Loveswept was like my line, and when I think about it, it would have been amazing to talk to her, so -

Elda Minger 1:12:19 / #
She was amazing. They were brilliant and they were tough. They had to be tough to survive in the world they were in. And oh, oh, there was something, I read an article about Vivian that was amazing. And she said she prepared the whole thing about this romance novel, and because Monday they'd have the book buying meetings, you know, and they'd say, "I'd like to buy this book. This is one I think would work." And so she did a whole big preparation, and she talked about the book and the guy interrupted her and said, "It's a romance. Just buy it." And I just thought, "Oh my God." I mean we thought we were up against stuff, you know, and I find the disparaging romance to be really, first of all people are stupid, because I always say, "Have you read one? Which one did you dislike?" And they go, "No, I've never read one. But I know they're stupid." And I'm like, "Oh, that's a brilliant informed opinion for you, you know." But when I find it coming from other women, that's when I really find it kind of disgusting, and especially sometimes other romance writers who somehow feel their books are better than say, a Harlequin Presents or a, you know, a category romance. So it's just, I think it's lessening though because you did ask me, "What do you think is happening in romance these days?" Nobody can deny that it's Amazon's number one best selling category. Nobody can deny that it's still making money and nobody can deny that it's still reaching women, and even back when I worked at Kroch's and Brentano's, they said 84% of the fiction was bought by women. And the funniest thing, I'll end with this because I can't keep you guys going forever, but I love this, I was at the Santa Barbara Writers Conference and I can't remember the guy who said this, but it was, he'd had a couple of drinks and we were all shooting the shit after dinner, and he goes, "Goddamn women getting into mystery, now we have to do fucking character." And I thought, "I've got to remember that verbatim." Because I mean, think about a lot of the hard-boiled stuff, it was good, but it wasn't real in-depth character. I never forgot that. "Goddamn women getting into mystery, now we have to do fucking character."

Sarah MacLean 1:14:25 / #
(laughter) I love that so much!

Elda Minger 1:14:28 / #
That just made me laugh. I mean I had to run to the bathroom and I always carry, oh, one thing for writers, always carry a notebook or have your phone, your memo pad ready. I would run in the bathroom, in the day it was like a little spiral bound two by three with a little Bic pen. And I would write down, "Goddamn women, now we have to do fucking character." (laughter) Yeah. That is too damn funny!

Sarah MacLean 1:14:48 / #
And perfect.

Elda Minger 1:14:49 / #
And they were pissed. He was truly pissed like, "Now it's a lot of work. Now we just can't smash it out. Now it's a lot of work." And I thought, "Oh please, you know." So. Anyway, this has just been a joy. Thank you so much.

Sarah MacLean 1:15:01 / #
Elda, thank you for coming.

Jennifer Prokop 1:15:02 / #
It's been amazing.

Sarah MacLean 1:15:06 / #
Man! Every one. Every one of them. It's like, I never know what to expect, and then, boom!

Jennifer Prokop 1:15:16 / #
I need you to say the story about how we got Elda.

Sarah MacLean 1:15:18 / #
So we heard about Elda Minger back in the day, when we did our bodily autonomy episode, we started to get really interested - we'll put links in show notes. We just re-ran it recently, but it's worth re-running it every time we're talking about abortion in the world. But when we did that episode, we were really interested in how contraception worked on page for romance novels, and Elda came up as the author of Untamed Heart and Untamed Heart came up as the first, which now in hindsight, and I mentioned this in the podcast in the conversation with Elda, but it makes sense that Vivian Stephens was a part of this book, right?

Jennifer Prokop 1:16:08 / #
Of course.

Sarah MacLean 1:16:09 / #
It really does start to feel like you can pick a Vivian Stephens book out of a lineup at this point,

Jennifer Prokop 1:16:17 / #
Someone's taking risks and someone's doing something interesting, and it was really amazing to hear Elda talk about how she felt trusted by Vivian.

Sarah MacLean 1:16:25 / #
A huge piece of that relationship of the editor/author relationship is about trust, and clearly that's what's happening here.

Jennifer Prokop 1:16:32 / #
What happened at that episode is that Steve Ammidown, who was still with Browne Popular Culture Library, ran actually, I think took some screenshots of the page with the scene, I believe they're in a Twitter feed, an old Twitter feed, and also pulled for us the RWA column that she wrote, sort of talking about why it was important to have condoms on page in romance. So that was kind of when she came on our radar. It was in that episode, but we also, then, actually could look at some of that documentation.

Sarah MacLean 1:17:06 / #
Right. And I would say at that point, I hadn't read Untamed Heart, but now that I've read Untamed Heart, it's so much more beautiful and romantic as I said in the episode, than a screenshot could possibly articulate. So but that said, so we knew, I mean, I don't know what, months ago I texted you and I was like, "We should get Elda Minger." And we have sent that text to each other many, many times, "We should get this person." And it's not always like we then immediately go get those people, because in this case, she was not easy to find. She does not have an easily accessible email address. I started, I asked around, I posted it to the Avon author group chat, "Is there? Does anybody know?" I went to Tessa Dare and I was like, "You're in Orange County. I'm told Elda Minger is in Orange County. Do you know how to find her?" And everybody kind of passed, people were super helpful but I got passed around and around and around, and no Elda. And then I (laughs) -

Jennifer Prokop 1:18:18 / #
I believe you Googled it.

Sarah MacLean 1:18:20 / #
I stalked her a little bit. I got online, and I Googled her, and I was like, well, if this is her real name and there is an Elda Minger in Orange County, California, lo and behold, and I wrote her a letter.

Jennifer Prokop 1:18:34 / #
A letter. Sarah showed it to me.

Sarah MacLean 1:18:37 / #
Jen was like, "What?" (laughter)

Jennifer Prokop 1:18:39 / #
I was like, "Oh, okay, we're doing that now." And it feels like a message in a bottle at this point.

Sarah MacLean 1:18:46 / #
I wrote her, I put a stamp on a fucking envelope, and I used the United States Postal Service.

Jennifer Prokop 1:18:50 / #
You did. Also everybody, it was a dark envelope with a silver sharpie, it was very nice looking. It was, anyone would want to open this letter.

Sarah MacLean 1:18:57 / #
Because I was like, "It can't just be a random, she's going to think it's junk mail." So I actually will tell you now, I'm going to show you, I bought a bunch of colored envelopes for this project, because I was like, if we have to do it again, I've gotta up my game on mail. So I sent her a fucking letter, you guys, in the mail, and that woman, that wonderful, magnificent woman who you all just met, texted me and was like, "Hey, Sarah. I'm Elda Minger.

Jennifer Prokop 1:19:30 / #
"I got your letter."

Sarah MacLean 1:19:31 / #
Yeah. "I'm a romance novelist. I got your letter. I would love to do the podcast." So here we are. So thank you postal service.

Jennifer Prokop 1:19:42 / #
We're the only people thanking the postal service right now but -

Sarah MacLean 1:19:45 / #
For this killer conversation. When she talked about women and reproductive rights, and why contraception is so critical on the page, I mean, it just, we are we are recording this, everyone, on the first day of the Supreme Court hearings on the Mississippi abortion law. And I mean, I just felt like this is what -

Jennifer Prokop 1:20:02 / #
It was a devastating day.

Sarah MacLean 1:20:15 / #
I needed to hear this woman talk about this work. My god, she was amazing. She had so many amazing stories.

Jennifer Prokop 1:20:24 / #
One of the things we like to do is sort of, what stuck with you from that conversation? Maybe it'll change over time, but at the beginning, kind of just as we were starting, one of the things she said is that she had gone back and was taking notes for herself, and how much joy it brought her to just remember. And I really was so moved by that because that is, romance and joy are synonymous for me. And so you know, to have someone who has loved romance for 50 years, and can, you know, tell stories about women buying Shanna in the bookstore? And I mean, I have goosebumps because I'm just so moved to hear that, and and also I think for me, her read of those books in in the context of her time.

Sarah MacLean 1:21:21 / #
Yes, which is so important, because we've talked about that, but what do we know? I mean, when you hear the voice from somebody who was there and who experienced it. I mean that Shanna story blows my mind, not because, I mean, of course if I thought about it, maybe I would have come up with it on my own, but I've never heard that perspective from a bookseller. What a cool experience to hear that! Can we also, Jen, I was so happy for you, in this moment, because when she was talking about jobs, the letter she got from the girl who had never thought that she could work with wild animals. I had a moment of a light bulb going on, because we, you have talked for so many seasons about these books and how these women have these magnificent jobs, these weird, curious, quirky, cool jobs. And we've talked about why that is and what is it about these books? And what is it about why these jobs? And of course, it made so much sense, again, like it just fit together.

Jennifer Prokop 1:22:31 / #
This was formative for me, that women had fascinating, interesting jobs in romance when I was coming up as a romance reader. And yet now, I'm also famous for being the person who's like fossils, jobs are fossils. I don't want to hear about it. I don't want to hear, you know, and it's different. And I think the thing that I have really come to, and the thing I think I'm sort of struggling with, is I feel like when we talk about jobs then, it really felt like these were books that really taught me I could do anything. I mean, you know what else I was thinking, Sarah, when she was talking about how he protected her, and how that was deeply romantic? That is the exact thing that you and I talked about when we did our, when we did that first episode, about tinctures, tonics and teas, and I was talking about a Melanie Greene book where he goes out to get her Plan B and I was like, "This is what caring looks like."

Sarah MacLean 1:23:33 / #
Yep.

Jennifer Prokop 1:23:34 / #
This -

Sarah MacLean 1:23:34 / #
Yes.

Jennifer Prokop 1:23:34 / #
It was deeply romantic to me and to that same feeling from a book that she read or wrote, you know, 45 years ago? Amazing.

Sarah MacLean 1:23:49 / #
Yeah. I mean, I think it's really fascinating. I I want to go back now and read all my favorite contemporaries and pay close, I can't imagine, I don't think I will ever in my life read a contemporary again and not pause for just a heartbeat on that contraception moment and think, "Who is taking care of whom here?" Because for me, her saying that was revolutionary. Like, that is exactly what I want from that moment. And she's so, I mean, Vivian Stephens was right. She can write, right? Because that moment on the page in Untamed Heart, and I'm so glad she's going to release them and ebook and we will, of course, explode all over everything when she does, so that you all know that you can run and buy it. But that moment in Untamed Heart feels like caretaking in a way that, I mean, it's perfect. And now I just want, so if you're out there writing a contemporary right now, think about that. Ask yourself that, in that moment, who is caring for whom? She was great! I would, she should just, her, Vincent Virga, let's just have a party!

Jennifer Prokop 1:25:06 / #
I right now am like, "Let's book our flights to Orange County." We'll crash at Lauren's house. She won't stop us and we'll just go kidnap Elda Minger!

Sarah MacLean 1:25:18 / #
No! Lauren and Christina will come with us.

Jennifer Prokop 1:25:20 / #
Oh my god. And I just want to talk about, I mean, I'm sure we've said this on the podcast before, but when Sarah and I first started kind of being friends on Twitter DM's, there was a point at which one of us said to the other, "All I want to do is talk about romance all day." And the other one of us was like, "Me too." And that is still like, that's what Fated Mates is for me, but also to hear, god, it feels like I climbed up a mountain and sat down at the foot of my elder and heard these amazing words and I just feel so inspired and I just love romance so much!

Sarah MacLean 1:26:04 / #
God, I'm going to go read Velvet Flame right the fuck now. We should do a read-along.

Jennifer Prokop 1:26:12 / #
I just ordered mine from Thriftbooks.

Sarah MacLean 1:26:15 / #
Oh, look at you!

Jennifer Prokop 1:26:16 / #
Because you know, I've got to get there before all the -

Sarah MacLean 1:26:19 / #
Did you find an original? Do you find a first?

Jennifer Prokop 1:26:20 / #
You never know, right, with Thriftbooks. You just never know what you're going to get.

Sarah MacLean 1:26:23 / #
Well, now I've got to go and do that.

Jennifer Prokop 1:26:25 / #
Well, and I didn't have a copy of Untamed Heart. I was buying Harlequin American Romances off of eBay, and I did get a couple of Elda Minger books. One where I think a cat goes missing and they go find it, and then another of her early, earlier Harlequin American Romances.

Sarah MacLean 1:26:42 / #
Well, Jennifer, don't count your chickens before they hatch in the month of December, is what I will say to you saying I don't have a copy of Untamed Heart.

Jennifer Prokop 1:26:54 / #
You know what else I'm about to do, Sarah, is I, okay, this is another thing everybody. I ordered 160 copies of Romantic Times from 1991 all the way to 2008. Sarah is going to get a couple years as her Christmas present. I spoiled it already. And I feel like now I'm going to go back and look through, especially in the '90s. Elda was still writing. So now I feel like when we do these episodes, I can go back and be like, "What was in RT about these authors?" It's going to be interesting.

Sarah MacLean 1:27:24 / #
Eric will love that. Take good photographs, because his whole thing now is that anytime I get a book, thanks Rebecca Romney, but anytime I get one of the books that I've been ordering, after all the Trailblazer episodes, he takes a high resolution photograph and puts it online.

Jennifer Prokop 1:27:42 / #
Yes!

Sarah MacLean 1:27:42 / #
So make sure you take good photographs of the review and stuff and we'll do that too.

Jennifer Prokop 1:27:47 / #
Amazing.

Sarah MacLean 1:27:48 / #
We're doing what we can, Steve and Rebecca. (laughter) We're out here.

Jennifer Prokop 1:27:54 / #
I, you know what, this was an amazing conversation. I could've listened to her, she kept apologizing and I was like, "No. Keep going."

Sarah MacLean 1:28:02 / #
No, she can keep going anytime. Anyway, yeah, let's all, when we go to Lauren's house we're -

Jennifer Prokop 1:28:09 / #
Oh, it's happening.

Sarah MacLean 1:28:09 / #
We're taking Elda out on the town.

Jennifer Prokop 1:28:11 / #
I'm clearing a whole day. We're going to start at brunch, just have it all 12 hours of Elda.

Sarah MacLean 1:28:16 / #
Exactly! Friend, I love you! I know that you're tired, so I'm going to let you go, but, everyone, you're listening to Fated Mates. These are the Trailblazer episodes. We are so incredibly proud to be able to bring them to you. We are so grateful to Elda for sharing her story. You can find us at Fatedmates.net, on Twitter @FatedMates, on Instagram @fatedmatespod. If you are listening to these episodes and enjoying them as much as we hope you are, as much as we're enjoying them, please let us know in all those places. Tell us who you wish we would talk to. We said we would only do a season of these but -

Jennifer Prokop 1:28:58 / #
They're going to be forever.

Sarah MacLean 1:29:00 / #
I think we're just going to do this forever. And next week we are, is it Caressed by Ice? Are we Caressed by Ice next week?

Jennifer Prokop 1:29:08 / #
Correct. We sure are.

Sarah MacLean 1:29:09 / #
Alright. So get reading. That's Nalini Singh. Do you have to read the first books in those Psy-Changeling series to get it?

Jennifer Prokop 1:29:15 / #
I mean, I don't think so. I think you'll be okay. There's a little gloss at the beginning that she gives, it's kind of, I think, what's going on. So unless you're a real completist, I feel like you should probably be able to just dive right into Caressed by Ice. I believe in you all. I believe in you. Elda believes in us, and I believe in you too.

Sarah MacLean 1:29:36 / #
Very exciting. All right. Thank you, everyone. Have a great week!

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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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S03 - BOOB, read along, full-length episode Jennifer Prokop S03 - BOOB, read along, full-length episode Jennifer Prokop

S03.50: Unmasked by the Marquess by Cat Sebastian: a Perfect Modern Historical

We’re nearing the end of Season Three and we are so happy to be reading one of the most delightful books in modern historical romance, Cat Sebastian’s Unmasked by the Marquess. We talk about Cat’s masterful plotting within a three-act structure, about friendship, trust and sacrifice in relationships, and about writing a modern historical while still delivering the bananas plots that made the early books in the genre the best.

We also announce our next Fated Mates LIVE! to celebrate the release of Sarah’s next book, BOMBSHELL! Join us and some of our very favorite people on August 24th! Tickets are a copy of the book, and available at five participating romance friendly bookstores. Get them here!

Our next read along is Sarah’s BOMBSHELL! Get it at Amazon, Apple Books, B&N, Kobo, or Bookshop.org, or signed via Sarah’s local indie, WORD, or one of the participating romance-friendly bookstores hosting the Fated Mates Live/Virtual Bombshell Launch! Orders from WORD or the launch sponsors will come with a Fated Mates Sticker!

Thank you, as always, for listening! Please follow us on your favorite podcasting app, and if you are up for leaving a rating or review there, we would be very grateful.

Show Notes

The virtual launch event for Bombshell will be on Tuesday Aug 24 at 7eastern/4 pacific. If you pre-ordered a signed book from Word!, keep an eye out for details for how to join the event.

Unmasked by the Marquess received excellent reviews from Kirkus, Publisher’s Weekly, and the New York Times.

A guide to nonbinary pronouns.

The audiobook of Unmasked by the Marquess is great, and narrated by Joel Leslie.

Cat Sebastian is a fanfiction expert and routinely talks about some of her favorite fics. If you don’t know, the Stucky ship of Cap & Bucky is the most written about ship on Ao3.

“Natural child” was the nice way of saying that a child was born out of wedlock. The mean way, of course, is bastard.

More about the three act structure.

This is a great interview with Cat Sebastian in Jezebel about writing queer characters in historical romance.

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full-length episode, interstitial, S02 - Interstitials, so you wanna, romance recommendations Sarah MacLean full-length episode, interstitial, S02 - Interstitials, so you wanna, romance recommendations Sarah MacLean

S02.19: So You Want to Read a Historical

We’re launching a Special Romance Report here at Fated Mates — a series of interstitials introducing readers to the subgenres of Romance (there are seven!) — we’re talking about why they exist, what they’re trying to do, what to expect from them, what might have readers hesitating, and where to start! This week, we’re starting with Sarah’s favorite subgenre — Historicals! We’re talking about why they’re sexy, progressive, feminist, and very not boring.

Don’t miss a single moment of our 2020 episodes — subscribe on your favorite podcasting platform and like/review the podcast if you’re so inclined!

Next week, we’re talking Kristen Callihan’s Managed, which you may recognize as “SCOTTIE,” which is how Jen refers to it because she loves him so much. We think you’ll love it, too, and if you have time, read the next in the series, Fall, which is one of Sarah’s top 10 romances ever. Read Managed at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books, or Kobo.

Show Notes

  • RWA imploded and it's such a long, complicated story, but this article from Vox and this timeline by Claire Ryan are what will catch you up.

  • Let's start at the very beginning, a very good place to start: there are seven romance subgenres: historical, contemporary, romantic suspense, paranormal, inspirational, erotic romance, and YA.

  • When it comes to the grandmother of historicals, don't forget that Jane Austen was writing contemporaries.

  • Johanna Lindsey died in October, and her family announced it publicly in December. The New York Times obituary was trash, so read the Washington Post or Entertainment Weekly one instead. Check out the Twitter hastag #MyFirstJohanna for people's stories about their first book by Lindsey (including Sarah's), and maybe listen to our episode on Gentle Rogue.

  • Support Farrah Rochon for an organ in her sister's memory. And come this summer, buy her upcoming book The Boyfriend Project.

  • In Born a Crime, Trevor Noah wrote about what his mother said about her second husband wanting to put her in a cage: For a long time I wondered why he ever married a woman like my mom in the first place, as she was the opposite of that in every way. If he wanted a woman to bow to him, there were plenty of girls back in Tzaneen being raised solely for that purpose. The way my mother always explained it, the traditional man wants a woman to be subservient, but he never falls in love with subservient women. He’s attracted to independent women. “He’s like an exotic bird collector,” she said. “He only wants a woman who is free because his dream is to put her in a cage.”

  • Mary Wollstonecraft is all the evidence you need that feminists have been around for a long time.

  • Jen recommends In the Dream House by Carmen Marie Machado, which is about domestic abuse in a queer relationship. The quote from Jose Estaban Munoz is, "When the historian of queer experience attempts to document a queer past, there is often a gatekeeper representing a straight present."

  • When talking about The Doctor's Discretion by EE Ottoman, Sarah is very excited about a book called The Butchering Art by medical historian Dr. Lindsey Fitzharris, whose sometimes very gross Instagram is amazing. Doctor James Berry was trans man who lived and worked in London in the mid 1800s.

  • If you haven't listened to our episode about Beverly Jenkins's Indigo what are you waiting for?

  • Avon Red was a short-lived series, but then again, so was The Red Shoe Diaries. Sarah recommends On These Silken Sheets by Sabrina Darby from that series.

  • Whores of Yore is a great blog, and definitely proves Jen's assertion that as soon as someone invented cameras, someone else wanted to get naked in front of it. Dr. Kate Lister, who founded the site, has a book called A Curious History of Sex coming out Feb 2020.

  • Next time you are in New York, visit The Museum of Sex. Sarah recommends Hallie Rubenhold's The Covent Garden Ladies: Pimp General Jack and the Extraordinary Story of Harris' List (which out of print, but available in audio, and is the book Harlots is based on). Hallie Rubenhold's The Five is not out of print, and also excellent--it is very not a romance, and about the victims of the Ripper killings.

  • KJ Charles is so ridiculously good. Sarah's favorites are Wanted a Gentleman and Think of England and Jen loves Band Sinister. Nicola Davidson's Surrey Sexual Freedom Society series is fantastic. Alyssa Cole's An Extraordinary Union is amazing. Monica McCarty wrote a historical series that imagines Highlanders as being kind of like Navy SEALs. Sarah talked about one of the books in the series, The Arrow on the Scotland interstitial. Honestly, we talked about so many authors, so just click on any one of the images in the photo gallery below for some of our favorites by those authors.

  • But stickers and buttons from Kelly, tees and bags from Jordandene, take our reading challenge, and answer our survey.

romances we mentioned

nonfiction we mentioned

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S02.15: Romance Recommendations: Stump Jen & Sarah Part 2

It’s the second half of our recommendation podcast! We asked you to ask us for recommendations, and thought it would be fun to recommend on the fly—absolutely no preparation! Instead, we met up at Sarah’s apartment and read your questions sight-unseen (thanks to @bestfriendkelly for collecting them!). What ensued is a killer list of romances that you should all read! And if you missed the first half — head back and listen!

Do not miss the show notes this week, y’all. Really.

Don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast in your favorite podcasting platform — and while you’re there, please leave us a like or a review!

Next week, we’re releasing a little stocking stuffer for our Christmas Day episode, but we’re back in business on January 1, with the seasonally appropriate (at least in title) Born in Ice, by none other than the queen herself, Nora Roberts. Read Born in Ice at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books, Kobo or your local indie.

Question 1: Beth from Milwaukee asked, "I'm going to Iceland in December for my 10th wedding anniversary! I obviously need a book that has snow/cold and using body heat and -ahem- other activities for warmth. Bonus points if a volcano or other geological feature is a part of the story! Sub genre is not important, and yes I'm aware of the Ice Planet Barbarians."

Our recommendations: From the deep recesses of Jen's brain, the only romance she can think of with a volcano, Eden Burning by Elizabeth Lowell. And that's from the 80s, so fair warning that it's likely to have problematic elements. When it comes to snuggly, warm, only one bed romances, you just need to use the internet! But Jen did write a piece about Only One Bed for Kirkus, which you should read. In the meantime, go watch Joe versus the Volcano, and then talking about Hawaii reminded Sarah of some bananas sounding book by Anne Stuart called Tangled Lies. But a few snowy romances: Beary Christmas Baby by Sasha Devlin or How the Dukes Stole Christmas.

Question 2: Emily from Washington D.C. want our opinion aobut "the BEST star crossed lovers trope (it always gets me so good)."

Our Recommendations: The reason Sarah thinks that star-crossed lovers have to end up unhappy is Romeo and Juliet, of course. But Jen thinks you should try Luck of the Draw by Kate Clayborn and Sarah recommends Long Shot by Kennedy Ryan, but comes with a whole suitcase of content warnings for domestic violence. In the interim, Jen read and recommends Forbidden Promises by Synithia Williams, the heroine falls in love with her sister's ex-husband! And of course, coming in the summer of 2020 comes Daring and the Duke by Sarah, which will also work. But you have to wait!

Question 3: Megumi from San Antonio, TX is looking for "a contemporary of someone not Scottish going to Scotland and finding love. (Maybe England but mostly Scotland)"

Our Recommendations: Jen lost her mind and said Unfixable by Tessa Bailey, but Willa is a heroine who goes to Ireland. She thinks it still counts. Sarah recommends a novella by Sophie Jordan called "In a Stranger's Bed" which was a Goldilocks retelling published in the Glamour anthology but which is currently unavailable so come on Sophie, get it together and put your stories up because they are ON FIRE. A few others you can try: A Duke by Default by Alyssa Cole, the Under the Kilt series by Melissa Blue, Getting Hot with the Scot by Melonie Johnson, and Ten Days With the Highlander by Hayson Manning. Also, we didn't know what Adriana Herrera had up her sleeve when we recorded, but Mangos & Misteltoe is ADORABLE, and features to delicious Dominican heroines falling in love on a Scottish Baking Show. It's also a perfect holiday romance!

Question 4: Becca wants "a funny contemporary, a true romcom, minimal trauma."

Our recommendations: Jen thinks it doesn't exist. Sarah recommends going old school to Jennifer Crusie or Susan Elizabeth Phillips. If it helps, you should know that later this season, we'll be talking about Bet Me and Nobody's Baby But Mine. After we recorded, Sarah realized she should have recommended Christina Lauren, who she adores, and who she believes is one of the few authors writing real RomCom. If you haven't read Josh & Hazel's Guide to Not Dating, it's a very funny, very romantic friends-to-lovers romance! "What happened to romantic comedy" is an existential question for our time.

Question 5: Laurel from NC wants a book that "Has marriage of convenience, preferably historical."

Our recommendations: Sarah says Sherry Thomas better than everyone and recommends Ravishing the Heiress. Jen thinks The Duke Buys a Bride by Sophie Jordan might work. Sarah points out that in order to qualify, the marriage has to happen pretty early in the story. The marriage has to be part of the plot the whole time. Once again, there are so many of these we had trouble thinking of them on the spot, but in hindsight, Sarah would like you not to miss Amalie Howard's The Beast of Beswick or Scarlet Peckham's The Duke I Tempted. Bonus story from Jen about a Sherry Thomas YA book about Mulan called The Magnolia Sword.

Question 6: Cara from Finland wants a book that "Has chosen families strongly included in the plot. Extra points if it's enemies-to-lovers with the heroine's family ready to kick the pining-but-unfortunately-dumbass hero's butt."

Our recommendations: Whoa! That's a lot of asks all at once. Just reread IAD, Cara! This is the plot of Sarah's book A Scot in the Dark, so that's a good place to start. Lots of rock star romances have chosen family, try Kristen Callihan's series, and Managed will be a book that blooded Jen later this season. It's not linked via heroines, but Elle Kennedy's Hotter than Ever is bonkers sexy, a MMF menage, and has lots of found Navy SEAL family. In historicals, there are lots of sisterhood/brotherhood books. Try the Wallflowers series by Lisa Kleypas, or Lorraine Heath's Scoundrels of St. James!

Question 7: Krystal from New Jersey is looking for "Childhood friends to lovers - historical! Where the Male is titled and the woman is not!"

Our recommendations: There are so many that will work here. Sarah recommends Tessa Dare's first series, the Wanton Dairymaids (!!!) should work, try Godess of the Hunt. After recording, of course, a bunch of books came to mind! Try Kelly Bowen's You're the Earl That I Want, Vanessa Riley's The Butterfly Bride, and Loretta Chase's Last Night's Scandal.

Question 8: Rosalie from the Chicago suburbs wants books she "can recommend to my 15 year old son. Have thought about Sarina Bowen’s Ivy Years. Although LJ Shen “Sinner of Saints” series is high school, seems too dark/gritty and I think he would not be able to suspend reality for some of the story lines given he is the same age."

Our Recommendations: Sarah thinks the Sarina Bowen series you mentioned should work just fine. Adult romances that are adventure stories might work are the Hidden Legacy series by Ilona Andrews and Polaris Rising by Jessie Mihalik. Some actual YA Romance that Jen likes are The Way You Make me Feel and I Believe in a Thing Called Love, which are both by Maurene Goo. One of Jen's favorite YA books of all time is called The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks. She also recommneds Not if I Save You First by Ally Carter. Some sports romances we recommend are the WAGS series by Naima Simone, especially Scoring Off the Field. Finally, The Deal by Elle Kennedy might be a good choice.

Question 9: Jemma from Texas is looking for "Found family. Also with lots of good food descriptions. Not necessarily a chef romance though (they stress me out because chefs stay up so late at night; ugh, who does that?)"

Our recommendations: This is such a perfect question for Sarah. She recommends the Recipe for Love series by Louisa Edwards. Another series by the same author is called the Rising Star Chefs. The Opposite of You by Rachel Higginson will work. Finally, American Dreamer by Adriana Herrera, and a series by Sabrina Sol. In hindsight, Sarah basically only recommended books with chefs in them. She's sorry. She has a problem.

Question 10: Sara from Albuquerque wants a "Bodyguard trope where the person being guarded does NOT spend the whole book trying to escape the bodyguard because he/she doesn't think there is any danger even though it's incredibly obvious to everyone else. Bonus if the bodyguard character is female."

Our recommendations: Jen recommends Sexy/Dangerous (female bodyguard) by Beverly Jenkins, which is fabulous. Nana Malone has a few, one in her royals seris, and another is Bodyguard to the Billionaire (female bodyguard) -- also, listen to Nana talk about Royal Romance on an interstitial last season!. And! Try HelenKay Dimon's Leave Me Breathless (female bodyguard), Katee Robert's Thalanian Dynasty series (male bodyguard/MMF menage) and Anna Zabo's Reverb (trans male bodyguard).

Question 11: Molly from Washington has an AMA question about how to organize her Kindle books. She is also looking for a book that "Features a Grumpy/terse older brother’s friend (or older brother of friend) with smart mouth heroine, bonus points for SUPER HOT, some sort of road trip, or problem they have to solve much to their reluctance (trapped on a desert island?) basically Bowen and Mari 😂"

Our answer: : Jen wrote a long thread about how she organizes her Kindle, which you should just read on Twitter. But it takes a lot of time, so clear a day to do it! For the grumpy road trip question, Sarah recommends Right by Jana Aston. This is the second book in a series, the first one is called Wrong and you don't have to read them in order. Also, don't miss Tessa Bailey's Staking His Claim or Fix Her Up! Maybe try Mister McHottie by Pippa Grant. And...have you listened to our Road Trip interstitial?

Question 12: Hero from Paris, France (not Texas!) wants to know what trope would be, and then some books that take you on a "yellow brick road of emotions."

Our Recommendations: We ended up talking about the last books that made us cry. The last book Sarah read that made her cry was Sinner by Sierra Simone. For Jen, it was The Bride Test by Helen Hoang. Jen also thinks Sarah's books are pretty emotional, so start off with her first, Nine Rules to Break When Romancing the Rake. Finally, The Madness of Lord Ian MacKenzie by Jennifer Ashley or Escorted by Claire Kent. Also, we're going to read Alexis Hall's For Real as a book that blooded Sarah, so stay tuned for that!

Question 13: Chris from Seattle wants to know how we keep track of all these books! Also, a book that "starts with the main character in jail."

Our recommendations: Jen recommends the book Hard Time by Cara McKenna. The entire Devil's Rock series by Sophie Jordan is fantastic, and the first one is actually called All Chained Up, but you're going to want to read them all. Sarah recommends My One and Only Duke by Grace Burrowes, which starts with the hero in Newgate. Another historical with the hero in jail is The Highwayman by Kerrigan Byrne. Hold by Claire Kent starts with both characters on a prison planet, and there is also an entire series of prison planet books by Emmy Chandler.

Question 14: Emily wants to know "How do you find time to read as much as you do? I’m a fast reader but can never seem to carve out enough time to read as much as I want." And also is looking for recommendations for books that are "deeply, utterly romantic and swoony and leaves you with a PROFOUND book hangover. Great, sexy banter is a plus!"

Our recommendations: Jen doesn't watch TV and Sarah starts a book every day. Don't be afraid to DNF! Book wise, Jen knows a book is a real winner if she rereads it, and some of her favorites are Everything I Left Unsaid and The Truth About Him by Molly O'Keefe (famously, this is the only duology/book with a cliffhanger that Jen has ever finished!), Thirsty by Mia Hopkins, Never Sweeter by Charlotte Stein, and she also rereads a lot of Kresley Cole. Sarah recommends Three Little Mistakes by Nikki Sloane.

Question 15: Rosa, Daughter of Mexican immigrants living in Oakland, CA wants to know "Is a historical romance where both main characters are people of color. Does this exist?"

Our recommendations: Some #OwnVoices historical authors you should check out are Beverly Jenkins, Alyssa Cole, Rebel Carter, Vanessa Riley, and Piper Huguley. Lydia San Andres has several historicals with Latinx characters, start with A Summer for Scandal. Also, check out the Decades series, which are African-American historicals that focus on each decade of American history. Each book has a different author, so you can check out lots of new writers. Jeannie Lin writes luscious historicals set in China. Forthcoming in 2020, Diana Quincy is coming out with books that feature Middle Eastern characters.

Question 16: Rachel from Kansas asks for a book that "Features a heroine who had breast cancer. Your podcast has helped me through my recovery."

Our recommendations: Jen recommends Hooked on You by Kate Meader which has a heroine had a double mastectomy. She is in recovery and does have a cancer scare after finding a lump in her armpit, but it is not cancer. Sarah recommends a contemporary by Brenna Aubrey called At Any Moment, and then When the Duke was Wicked, which is a historical by Lorraine Heath which is based on extensive medical research that is accurate to the time period. Although it's not breast cancer, Sarah references a Nikki Sloane book where the hero is recovering from cancer in another question on today's episode, and that one was Three Little Mistakes.

Question 17: Katrin from London would "like a book where the hero has a smaller 🍆 (penis)."

Our recommendation: Jen has one that she could think of, which is A Matter of Disagreement by E.E. Ottoman. But that is a difficult request! We are going to keep thinking about it.

Our last AMA was from Rosa, who also asked about historical romance with people of color, and she wants to know about the process of cover design.

Our answer: Sarah talked about the process and Jen described what she learned in her conversation with Reese Ryan. Sarah talked about how she does give some advice on colors and why the people in the art department needs visual information for making the best cover. For The Day of the Duchess, Sarah sent a photo of Cate Blanchette as guidance. Inspired by this quesiton, Jen did contact Harlequin and is interviewing someone at Harlequin about their cover design process, and that will be published at Kirkus in January 2020.

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