06.11: Rend by Roan Parrish & the Lift 4 Autism Auction
This week, we’re doing things a little differently! A while back, we donated an episode for bid in the Lift 4 Autism auction, arranged by friend of the pod, Kennedy Ryan. Listener Julie won (thanks, Julie!) and selected Roan Parrish’s Rend for a deep dive read along, which we were so happy to do! After a shocking amount of Bantr, here it is — we’re talking about POV, about sadness in romances, about the way romance represents loneliness, and more.
We’re also taking a bit of time to recommend a group of books that have autism spectrum rep on page and that we, members of our Discord, and other authors adore. Enjoy!
If you want more Fated Mates in your life, please join our Patreon, which comes with an extremely busy and fun Discord community! Join other magnificent firebirds to hang out, talk romance, and be cool together in a private group full of excellent people. Learn more at patreon.com.
Show Notes
If you’re looking to buy stuff, especially this weekend during holiday-sale-extravaganza, you should probably check out Wirecutter.
You should subscribe to the Bookbub daily email, choose what kinds of books you want and watch your wallet!
Order the best of the year box from Pocket Books Shop in Lancaster, PA. The Best of 2023 list comes out next week!
Books Mentioned This Episode
Sponsors
Sheila Masterson, author of The Lost God,
available at Amazon or with your monthly subscription to Kindle Unlimited
and
Carrie Clark, author of A Capacity for Falling in Love,
available at Amazon, or with your monthly subscription to Kindle Unlimited
and
Stephanie Rose, author of Raising the Bar,
available at Amazon, or with your monthly subscription to Kindle Unlimited.
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.
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
for 30% off and free shipping on your order
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.
S04.11: Vincent Virga: Trailblazer
This week, we’re continuing our Trailblazer episodes with Vincent Virga—author of the Gaywyck trilogy, the first m/m gothic romance, and one of the first m/m romances ending with a happily ever after.
He talks about writing gay romance and about the way reading about love and happiness changes readers lives. He also shares rich, wonderful stories about his vibrant life as a picture editor in publishing, about the literary set in New York City in the 70s and 80s, about writing during the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, about the times in a writer’s life when the words don’t come easily, and about the times when they can’t be stopped.
We are honored and so grateful that Vincent took the time to speak with us, and we hope you enjoy this conversation as much as we did.
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!
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 Vincent Virga, author of Gaywyck, the first gay gothic romance, and one of the earliest gay romances with a happily ever after. It was published by Avon in 1980. He has written several other novels, including Vadriel Vail and A Comfortable Corner. He was also the premier picture editor in the book industry. He has been with his partner, author James McCourt, author of Mawrdew Czgowchwz, for 56 years. Their collected papers are housed at the Beinecke Library at Yale University.
Today is the 41st anniversary of The Ramrod Massacre in New York City, where Vernon Kroening and Jorg Wenz were killed. Six other men were shot and injured inside the bar or on the streets near the Ramrod.
Author Malinda Lo and Librarian Angie Manfredi sound the warning bell about the fights that we are facing around access to books and libraries and calls for book banning happening all around the country. Here is what you can do to help support your local library. Check out Runforsomething.net for ideas about local races where you live.
Want more Vincent in your life? Here is a great interview from 2019 on a blog called The Last Bohemians, and this 2011 interview on Live Journal.
Daisy Buchanan cries that she's never seen such beautiful shirts in The Great Gatsby, and We Get Letters is a song from the Perry Como show.
People Vincent mentioned: Susan Sontag, Maria Callas, opera singer Victoria de los Ángeles, editor Elaine Markson, Jane Fonda, Armistead Maupin, poets John Ashbery and James Merrill, Hillary and Bill Clinton, editor Alice Mayhew, Gwen Edelman at Avon Books, Gwen Verdon and Bob Fosse, publisher Bob Wyatt, John Ehrlichman from Watergate, author Colm Tóibín, poet Mark Doty, Truman Capote, poet and translator Richard Howard, Shelley Winters, John Wayne, Lauren Bacall, and Kim Novak.
The museum Vincent was a part of in County Mayo, Ireland, is The Jackie Clarke Collection.
The twisty turny secret book that made him a lover of Gothics was Wilkie Collins's Woman in White. Vincent is also a lover of Samuel Richardson's Clarissa, and Henry Bellamann's King's Row.
A few short pieces abaout the AIDS epidemic: the impact of the epidemic on survivors in the queer community, and how the American government ignored the crisis.
A transcript (genrerated by a human!) can be found at the bottom of this page.
Vincent Virga 0:00 / #
Genres have no gender, really. I mean, if you look at them closely the mysteries revolve around behavior and in Jane Eyre, the wonder of Jane Eyre, is the book is about finding out that I am my own person. When Jane says, "I can take care of myself", the book was banned. The book was condemned in pulpits. The book is considered revolutionary art because "I can take care of myself."
Sarah MacLean 0:43 / #
That was the voice of Vincent Virga, the author of Gaywyck, which is the first modern male/male gothic romance published by Avon in 1980.
Jennifer Prokop 0:53 / #
This is an amazing conversation.
Sarah MacLean 0:56 / #
Oh, it's so good. It's so good.
Jennifer Prokop 0:59 / #
Every conversation we have had has been so different and so varied, but talking to Vincent, who was really writing a romance kind of outside of the romance community and also outside of the literary community, but deeply rooted in the gay community, makes for a really interesting conversation. He is going to talk about his lifelong relationship with his partner, Jimmy.
Sarah MacLean 1:28 / #
Jimmy. Hey Jimmy! We love you.
Jennifer Prokop 1:30 / #
We love Jimmy. We've never met Jimmy but we love Jimmy a lot.
Sarah MacLean 1:34 / #
Look, I have plans. (laughs)
Jennifer Prokop 1:35 / #
Yes. He's going to talk about the experience of writing Gaywyck, of living through the AIDS epidemic in the '80s, about life in New York, and learning what it meant to be part of a literary culture that most of America had turned its back on.
Sarah MacLean 1:52 / #
Also about what's underneath Hilary Clinton's bed.
Jennifer Prokop 1:55 / #
Vincent's stories are unbelievable. The people he has known, the people he has met, the stories that he's going to tell, but most of all, his commitment to really making a space for queer, young people to see themselves in a happily ever after.
Sarah MacLean 2:14 / #
This one's fabulous. You're going to love it. Welcome everyone to Fated Mates. I'm Sarah MacLean. I read romance novels, and I write them.
Jennifer Prokop 2:24 / #
And I'm Jennifer Prokop, a romance reader and editor. Without further ado, here is our conversation with Vincent Virga.
Sarah MacLean 2:33 / #
Thank you so much for joining us on Fated Mates.
Vincent Virga 2:37 / #
It's been quite an adventure for me.
Sarah MacLean 2:40 / #
Tell us why.
Vincent Virga 2:41 / #
Because I haven't revisited Gaywyck, actually revisited it, since 2000. When it was reprinted in this edition with a hideous cover by Alyson books.
Jennifer Prokop 2:57 / #
Oh, sure.
Vincent Virga 2:57 / #
And with that edition, I wrote an afterword, explaining how the book happened. And essentially, as I say in that piece, my memory works visually. All of my information is stored in my memory visually. I'm totally visually literate. So basically when I think about the beginning of Gaywyck, where was I when I started it. I see myself, literally I see myself sitting in a house. Big house. On a hill. In Shinnecock. Which is the first town and the beginning of the Hamptons.
Vincent Virga 3:47 / #
Long Island splits at Hampton Bays and the east end begins at Shinnecock. And so I'm sitting in this house on a hill, and the question is, how did I get there? And that's where my partner, Jimmy McCourt comes in. We've been together 56 years. And he basically has flawless recall. So our pal Susan Sontag wrote in On Photography, she invented this phrase called "time's relentless melt." That is the history of me.
Jennifer Prokop 4:26 / #
Me too.
Sarah MacLean 4:28 / #
Same thing. (laughter)
Vincent Virga 4:28 / #
It's interesting, isn't it?
Jennifer Prokop 4:29 / #
My best friend is my own memory. I'll call her and be like, "Okay, so how did that happen again?" And she remembers, which is very nice.
Vincent Virga 4:36 / #
Yes. Well, I also would be great for you, because I remember how it happened. But you can't ask me, "When did that happen?" So essentially I walk in and I say, "Jimmy, when did this happen?" I said, "I remember I'm sitting in this house, and you went down to get the mail." And it was high on a hill. So he went down on a bike, and then he was coming up on a bike shouting, shouting at the top of his lungs, "I have a letter from Maria Callas."
Sarah MacLean 5:11 / #
Maria Callas the opera singer?
Sarah MacLean 5:15 / #
Okay. (laughter)
Vincent Virga 5:15 / #
Maria Callas. And then out he shouted (singing in the style of Maria from West Side Story), "Maria! Maria!" (laughter) Now Jimmy had published, this is 1975, so Jimmy had published his first book, Mawrdew Czgowchwz, which got stupendous, stupendous reviews. And basically, it was the first book to be published by New York Review Books of a living author.
Vincent Virga 5:16 / #
And I was sitting on the hill in Shinnecock because I had just been fired by the New York Review of Books. (laughter)
Vincent Virga 5:44 / #
I was the only person they have ever fired. And they fired me because I had been causing trouble. It's a long story, but I had been causing trouble. So they fired me. A client making some really absurd, absurd claim. However, they paid me unemployment. And so there I was, it was summer. I hate the summer. My whole life after being fired was based on getting out of the city and the heat. In fact, my whole career is freelance. And so I went out, Lenny, a friend of mine, gave us this house. And so there I am, 1975, Jimmy's got his letter from Maria, which was actually a fan letter.
Jennifer Prokop 6:35 / #
She was his fan?
Sarah MacLean 6:36 / #
Imagine getting a fan letter from Maria Callas!
Vincent Virga 6:39 / #
She was his fan. He adored her. But also, her colleague was Victoria de los Ángeles, one of the great opera singers from that period. And she, she has a great La Bohème and great Madame Butterfly recordings, and basically, Jimmy was 10 at the Metropolitan Opera, his mother took him. They'd been going because a friend had a box, and they would go on Saturday. He was 10. And he was really not very happy with most of the operas, but suddenly, there was the Marriage of Figaro. And there was Victoria de Los Ángeles. And when it was over, Jimmy said to his mother, "I want to meet her." So they went backstage, and this little guy with these big glasses, began to talk to her. And that was the beginning of the most profound friendship. Jimmy and Victoria. And when I joined, and me, we would travel around Europe with her, going to her recitals, going to her performances, being backstage and it was a truly great adventure. And that is basically how we got to Ireland, but that's later. So here I am, on the hill. And at this point you see, I had been, had access to publishing houses because the first chapter of Jimmy's Mawrdew was published in 1971. In the New American Review 13 it was the cover story. And we actually came home from London because Jimmy got a telegram from Ted Solartaroff saying Mawrdew Czgowchwz dazzling. So we came home and I went with him and we met the team at Simon and Schuster.
Sarah MacLean 6:47 / #
This is like the good old days of publishing.
Jennifer Prokop 7:40 / #
I know.
Sarah MacLean 7:48 / #
Get a telegram.
Vincent Virga 7:53 / #
Absolutely.
Sarah MacLean 7:54 / #
Fly home to New York to meet Simon and Schuster.
Vincent Virga 8:16 / #
That's exactly right. And we met Ted Solartaroff.
Sarah MacLean 8:26 / #
Vincent, in my life, I have never seen a telegram from my publisher, and I object. (laughter)
Vincent Virga 8:46 / #
Actually, Jimmy received that one and Jane Fonda, when I was working with her on her books, I was a picture editor, she would send me telegrams.
Sarah MacLean 8:55 / #
It was so civilized.
Vincent Virga 8:56 / #
It was absolutely tops civilized and so thrilling! I mean there we were zooming home for New American Review. And then the book was sold by Jimmy's agent, Elaine Markson, to Simon and Schuster. And while I was there I met the team, as I said, Rhoma Mostel and Gypsy Da Silva. Now, this is important, because Simon and Schuster at that point was publishing all of these gothic romances and I said to them -
Sarah MacLean 9:30 / #
Wait, I'm gonna stop.
Sarah MacLean 9:31 / #
At this point were you reading these gothic romances? Or were they just sort of -
Vincent Virga 9:35 / #
I loved the form, but I was not reading the the new ones. My gothic romance is what Jane Eyre -
Jennifer Prokop 9:43 / #
Frankenstein.
Vincent Virga 9:44 / #
Wuthering Heights. Frankenstein. Absolutely! And also Wilkie Collins The Woman in White.
Vincent Virga 9:51 / #
The secret in Wilkie Collins, I used to say, it's worth killing for. I would kill if that were my secret. So that when I was completing Gaywyck, I kept writing new endings until I had an ending, a secret that I would kill for.
Sarah MacLean 10:10 / #
Ohhh! That's great!
Vincent Virga 10:10 / #
There are basically three endings to Gaywyck.
Sarah MacLean 10:14 / #
Okay. Because that really is the cornerstone of the good Gothic, that there is a twist at the end. There's a -
Vincent Virga 10:21 / #
A real -
Sarah MacLean 10:22 / #
And you don't see it coming.
Vincent Virga 10:24 / #
Absolutely. So I began reading them. I would send them to my mother. And once I was out there, and I picked up, I think it was Cashelmara, or it was one of them, a mega bestseller! And I'm reading this puppy, and all of a sudden I discovered that the secret wasn't a crazy wife in the attic. (laughter) The secret was actually, the secret was the husband was a closet faggot. That was the secret. So the wife would swoon, faint, and then she would fall into the arms of her best friend who would say, "I never liked that guy." And so that's how they ended. And that, that became a form.
Sarah MacLean 11:20 / #
So that became a secret that you saw many times, over and over again.
Vincent Virga 11:24 / #
Over and over again.
Vincent Virga 11:25 / #
And I couldn't believe it! I thought this is totally unacceptable! And meanwhile my mother's reading this and meanwhile I'm living with Jimmy. And I'm thinking to myself, this is absolutely hideous. And at that point, I had not come out.
Sarah MacLean 11:40 / #
Vincent, I want to come back to that, but also, can you give us a sense of time at this point? What year are we in?
Vincent Virga 11:45 / #
We're in 1972 when New American Review 1973 -
Jennifer Prokop 11:51 / #
That's when I was born, Vincent. I just want to - (laughter) You know what, because I'm usually the oldest person on these calls. So I just want to enjoy being like, I'm the young one now. I'm the young one.
Vincent Virga 12:01 / #
Yes, yes. I just joined 79 and Jimmy just joined 80.
Sarah MacLean 12:05 / #
So this is the mid '70s, and Jen has just been born, which is the most important part of that! (laughter) You were saying you had not come out yet.
Vincent Virga 12:15 / #
I had not come out! I would visit my mother and my father and they would say to me, "Who's watching the cat?"
Vincent Virga 12:21 / #
I would say, "I live with Jimmy." And I kept saying that we met in 1964 at Yale Graduate School and basically, "I'm living with Jimmy!" And they would look at me and nod, and they never computed. So basically I thought, "I have to deal with this at some point." And I'm reading these books and my hair is on fire. I'm thinking this is disgusting! So there I am, in the house on the hill, and I'm reading Lolita. I'm reading Lolita and I thought to myself, "This could be a boy." And then the next thought was, "If Shakespeare had a sister, why can't Jane Eyre have a brother, John? And that was the point when I thought genres have no gender, really.
Jennifer Prokop 13:19 / #
Yeah.
Vincent Virga 13:20 / #
I mean if you look at them closely, the mysteries revolve around behavior. And in Jane Eyre, the wonder of Jane Eyre, is the book is about finding out that I am my own person. When Jane says, "I can take care of myself" the book was banned. The book was condemned in pulpits. The book is considered revolutionary art because "I can take care of myself." So basically that became the basis of this, and also the other basis was Rochester has to go blind in order to see the truth. I began to think about my boy, my narrator, and it all sort of came together pretty fast. Too fast. Because I settled in and I began to write very quickly. Now I don't how to write a novel. I never knew how to write a novel, but I knew what novels were. I had been reading them since I was very, very young. I started reading when I was five and basically, I started reading stories. And then in grammar school I was reading novels. I was reading Dickens. And I remember in the 10th grade, Miss Marsh, was a genius of a teacher, she assigned Jane Eyre. And then she assigned Vanity Fair, which I adored. But while other kids in my class were bored, I went on to read all of Brontë. And I went on to read all of Thackeray. And so when I later discovered Wilkie Collins, I read all of Wilkie Collins. And essentially that's a lot of books. And the same with Dickens. And so when I realized that I wanted to write a book, I said to Jimmy, "I think I want to write a book." And Jimmy said to me, "What took you so long?"
Jennifer Prokop 15:44 / #
Awww. (laughs)
Sarah MacLean 15:45 / #
What a good dude! (laughter)
Vincent Virga 15:47 / #
What took you so long? And also, we had a joke. VIrginia Woolf said, "You shouldn't start writing until you're 33." I was 33.
Vincent Virga 15:56 / #
It was perfect. I mean, the gods were all ordaining this.
Jennifer Prokop 15:59 / #
Did you read pulp? Was there fiction that featured gay characters at all? Or were you really steeped in these classics?
Vincent Virga 16:07 / #
I was steeped in the classics. And when, and remember now, we're talking 1970, and so I was pretty much reading the classics. And also, I'd never been to a gay bar. I mean I met Jimmy in New Haven, and I never went to a gay bar. And so basically I was reading the classics. And in fact, I wanted to become an academic. And Jimmy wanted to become an academic. Actually, he was in a PhD program at NYU, which he thought was, "This, this is the end of my life! This is so boring!" And so he announced that he was leaving NYU, that he was going to Yale Graduate School of Drama to find a husband. (laughter) That's what he told all of his friends. That was the reason he went to Yale. And so -
Sarah MacLean 17:00 / #
And it worked! And look at this!
Vincent Virga 17:02 / #
It did work! He also brought, in the beginning of the term, all of his gay friends from Manhattan. So basically, it was a total revelation to me. These queens were swanning around and they were laughing. They were all opera mavens,, and they would sit down at the piano and make up operas and it was a whole other realm for me. And so no, I didn't read pulps, I mean, I read Dragonwyck. I also must tell you my mother's, when she was young, she worked in publishing at Macmillan. So the house in Manhattan, and then the house, the apartment in Manhattan, and the house on Long Island was floor-to-ceiling books. And they were all bestsellers. So there were things like, you know, Kings Row, which in fact, I've just re-read. I love those mega best sellers!
Sarah MacLean 18:02 / #
That's the thing, right? Those mega best sellers feel - there's a reason why they are best sellers.
Vincent Virga 18:08 / #
Absolutely.
Sarah MacLean 18:08 / #
They appeal to a really intense of storytelling that we all have.
Vincent Virga 18:14 / #
Absolutely. So there I am, you know, reading Thackeray, and when I was in college, my professor assigned Clarissa.
Vincent Virga 18:26 / #
Clarissa. And so I went to the bookstore, and there was this tiny paperback called Clarissa, and also, it had in big letters on the back, "Abridged." And I remember thinking, "I don't think so." (laughter) So I went to the library, and I said to the librarian, who knew me at that point, and I said to the librarian, "I have to read Clarissa. I want to read the whole thing. Do you have the whole thing?" And he went into the back, and he came back carrying these three tomes.
Sarah MacLean 18:58 / #
Giant books! (laughter)
Vincent Virga 18:59 / #
The three volumes of Clarissa. And he said to me, "No one has checked this book out -
Sarah MacLean 19:07 / #
(laughing) No one has ever read -
Vincent Virga 19:08 / #
"For 100 years. This book has been here for 100 years, and no one has ever read the whole thing." So that basically tells you, you know, what I was like with my reading. And I think that's why I said in the beginning, "I don't know how to write novels, but I know what they are" So that when I read them -
Sarah MacLean 19:31 / #
The instinct is hardwired.
Vincent Virga 19:32 / #
Hardwired, not only with Clarissa, but also with Kings Row.
Sarah MacLean 19:36 / #
Mmmhmm.
Vincent Virga 19:37 / #
You know, and the whole idea of telling a story, and also I grew up in the movies, essentially. I mean, I was, I think I was four when I was taken to the Wizard of Oz. And so the movies, I became obsessed with the movies and I grew up literally in the movies.
Vincent Virga 19:57 / #
The narrative, visual narrative, and of course now when I look back, I realized that it was helping me develop my visual sensibility.
Vincent Virga 20:07 / #
And as Gaywyck, the first draft, I put it aside and I'm thinking, "Oy. I have to let this sit." And so I started a novel called The Comfortable Corner. And I started writing The Comfortable Corner, and I actually, over the next, I think, two years, completed the first draft of that and then I went back to Gaywyck, and I did the second and third draft of Gaywyck, but I must tell you, from the beginning, I knew that it was a game. I knew. I knew that I was going to take lines from the great novels and the great movies.
Sarah MacLean 20:48 / #
Am I wrong in thinking that it begins with this echo of Rebecca? Like, "Last night I dreamed I was at Manderley again."
Vincent Virga 20:54 / #
That's right, exactly. Exactly. So the game begins. I, throughout the book, at one point, when he has all of these, he gets all of these clothes from Donna, when he picks up all these shirts, and he says, "I've never seen so many beautiful shirts." That's probably the most famous one. That's also a key, it gives things away. And at one point, he says, "No one's ever called me "Darling" before." And that's Bette Davis and Now, Voyagers. So there are dozens of them.
Sarah MacLean 21:21 / #
I love that. I mean and that's why it's so appealing because when you think about the great romance novels, there is something that echoes media and pop culture and -
Vincent Virga 21:31 / #
Absolutely.
Sarah MacLean 21:32 / #
And culture writ large.
Vincent Virga 21:33 / #
Absolutely.
Sarah MacLean 21:33 / #
And that's why we love, we did a whole episode on retellings of Fated Mates and -
Sarah MacLean 21:39 / #
There's such an appeal to retellings because we know the story, and also we like the game, as you call it.
Vincent Virga 21:45 / #
Yes, it's the game, and I think when the book came out and was reviewed by Armistead Maupin, he said, he goes on and on with such delight, the tone is perfect, and the last line is, "I wonder if Robert and Donough saw Judy at Carnegie Hall?" (laughter)
Sarah MacLean 22:06 / #
Perfect! Ohhh! Did you frame it on your wall?
Vincent Virga 22:08 / #
And then he says, "Read the son of a bitch."
Jennifer Prokop 22:12 / #
Yeah.
Vincent Virga 22:13 / #
"You'll love it!"
Vincent Virga 22:14 / #
And that became the key word. And when I was re-reading it now, I though of Armistead and I thought to myself, "Yeah, I get it." I really like this book.
Sarah MacLean 22:27 / #
Yeah, it's really fun!
Vincent Virga 22:28 / #
I really like this book!
Jennifer Prokop 22:29 / #
Yeah.
Vincent Virga 22:29 / #
And I read the son of a bitch! (laughter) And I loved it!
Vincent Virga 22:34 / #
So essentially, I'm here today with this sense of celebration. And it's delightful to me that I'm now getting all of these, I'm getting all these fan emails from people of all ages again. And there's a question you ask, and I want to tell you, first of all, I had no community. None.
Sarah MacLean 23:02 / #
And that is the thing that we talk about, is the question that we ask all the time, who was your community? So -
Vincent Virga 23:07 / #
I had no community as a writer. None. Also, Jimmy's success, you know, he was published by Knopf, his books got fabulous reviews. And it brought me into a very high voltage literary community in Manhattan. And I, when Gaywyck was published, I didn't really care. I did my job, and it got wonderful reviews, and people were reading it, but that community, that community, it became their dirty secret.
Sarah MacLean 23:43 / #
Very familiar.
Vincent Virga 23:44 / #
So I would go to these events and John Ashbery would come up to me and tell me, "I love your book." And I remember Tim Duclos calling me over and saying (in a whisper), "I love your book. It really shocks me how much I love your book."
Sarah MacLean 23:59 / #
Oh, that's my favorite. "It shocks me. I couldn't believe it was good." (laughter)
Vincent Virga 24:02 / #
No, they couldn't believe it, and it was this game. And there I was, and I remember being at a party at James Merrill's house and him saying, "My nephew says Gaywyck saved his life. He was in the most profound despair and he read Gaywyck."
Sarah MacLean 24:23 / #
So before we go much further down this, people reading the book, can we talk a little bit about how the book came to be?
Sarah MacLean 24:31 / #
It's written. You've edited it. Where does it go from there?
Vincent Virga 24:34 / #
No, no.
Vincent Virga 24:35 / #
No, no. I wrote it, and Jimmy's editor, Elaine Markson, read it and loved it. And she said to me, "I will sell this book. This is unique. It's actually beautifully written. And I love this book!" So she sent it around. She sent it to Knopf. She sent it to all her friends and it was rejected. Boing, boing, boing, boing, boing. She gathered 35 rejections. At this point I had this huge career in publishing as a picture person. Eventually, I'm the only person who ever researched, edited, designed and cached picture sections. The last couple of books I did were by the Clintons. I did Hillary's book, Bill's book. I've got an eight page resume, 163 books, right. So this is also going on, and my mentor is Michael Korda, who is the head of publishing at Simon and Schuster, and Elaine sent it to everybody. Everybody.
Sarah MacLean 25:38 / #
Were the rejections because it was happily ever after? Was it because it was Gothic? Was because it was gay?
Vincent Virga 25:43 / #
I think it was gay, and no one could cope with it. They couldn't figure out what was I doing defiling this genre that was making fortunes for them. And meanwhile, I'm taking the villain and making him the hero?
Sarah MacLean 25:59 / #
I love it!
Vincent Virga 26:00 / #
So essentially -
Jennifer Prokop 26:01 / #
What are you? Milton?
Vincent Virga 26:03 / #
Exactly! And they could not cope. So Simon and Schuster, I worked with all of them, and one of the great divas was named Alice Mayhew. She did the Woodward Bernstein books. I mean, she was the great diva of the political book. I did many, many books with her. Her assistant was a woman named Gwen Edelman. okay? When Gwen left Alice, she went to Avon books.
Sarah MacLean 26:33 / #
To this point, Avon books is not a part of HarperCollins. It's a pulp publisher.
Vincent Virga 26:39 / #
Absolutely.
Sarah MacLean 26:39 / #
And they do mass market reprints and pulp fiction -
Vincent Virga 26:43 / #
Absolutely.
Sarah MacLean 26:43 / #
And just for the last few years, have been doing paperback originals like -
Sarah MacLean 26:50 / #
Rosemary Rogers and Kathleen Woodiwiss.
Sarah MacLean 26:53 / #
And those kind of big romance names.
Vincent Virga 26:56 / #
Yes, all the romances. So I sent it to Gwen, and she called me and she said, "I love this, but I can't publish this book." And I remembered Gwen was a friend, when we were in East Hampton, where we went every summer to get away from the heat. And it was also East Hampton BC: East Hampton before computers.
Sarah MacLean 27:24 / #
No helicopters flying back.
Vincent Virga 27:26 / #
No. Absolutely. And Gwen's daddy, owned what we in the romance novel realm would call, "an estate."
Sarah MacLean 27:37 / #
(laughter) I'm for it.
Vincent Virga 27:38 / #
So essentially, and we were on different sides of the highway. He was south of the highway. I was north of the highway, but my neighbor -
Sarah MacLean 27:47 / #
East egg and West Egg,
Jennifer Prokop 27:49 / #
Yeah, right! (laughter)
Vincent Virga 27:49 / #
Right. And my neighbor was Gwen Verdon, whom I worshipped! I mean the first musical I ever saw as a kid was Redhead, she and Bob Fosse. And she was my neighbor. So basically, it was, that was East Hampton, you know. So Gwen came to see me, and she sat down, and she said to me, "I have to tell you, I really love this book. And I'm so sorry, I can't publish it." And I said, "Why can't you publish it?" And Gwen said to me, "Gay people don't want romance."
Sarah MacLean 28:22 / #
Why wouldn't you know that, Vincent? (laughter)
Vincent Virga 28:25 / #
Gay people don't want romance and obviously I wouldn't know that because I wrote this book called Gaywyck. And had I known that I wouldn't have written that book. And it was also one of the reasons it had been rejected by everybody. Gay people don't want romance.
Sarah MacLean 28:37 / #
What nonsense!
Vincent Virga 28:38 / #
I said to Gwen, "Gwennie, you've known me and Jimmy for years. Years! You know, you know our lives. You've been with us at parties. You've been with us at dinner. You know, you know our lives, Gwen. In fact, you even know I came out in Paris. What is more romantic than coming out in Paris?"
Jennifer Prokop 29:03 / #
Nothing.
Vincent Virga 29:04 / #
So she said to me, "I live over a leather bar in the West Village." And she said to me, "I know gay people don't want romance."
Sarah MacLean 29:15 / #
Because of the leather bar in the West Village?
Vincent Virga 29:17 / #
The leather bar. Because she's in the West Village and all she saw -
Sarah MacLean 29:20 / #
That's the source she's citing.
Vincent Virga 29:22 / #
She only saw cruising. She only saw New York City in that period of time. Pre AIDS and she only saw that. That's all that she knew about the gay community. So basically I said, "Gwen, look at Jimmy and me as I said." And she said, "Right." So she went back and she presented the book to Bob Wyatt, who is gay. (laughter) He was the publisher. And so he loved it! And so they said, "Yes, they loved it." They loved it. The only caveat they had was I had to change the title. [AD BREAK]
Sarah MacLean 30:07 / #
So the original title was Gaywyck? Or -
Sarah MacLean 30:51 / #
Gaywyck. They said, "You have to change the title." And I said, "But it's a game, you know. Dragonwyck. It's a game. This is all part of the game." "No, no, no no. We want something more in the romantic line."
Jennifer Prokop 32:00 / #
Right.
Vincent Virga 32:01 / #
So I started. I started making these lists of romantic titles and when our papers went to Yale, to the Beinecke Library, I scooped up everything that had to do with Gaywyck, all the different drafts, everything. And that list is there.
Jennifer Prokop 32:16 / #
Oh, wow.
Sarah MacLean 32:17 / #
You've got to get it back!
Vincent Virga 32:19 / #
I wish I could remember what they were.
Sarah MacLean 32:21 / #
Attention Yale University. (laughter)
Vincent Virga 32:24 / #
When I was reading, someone, two summers ago, someone got a scholarship to go work with Jimmy's papers at Yale for his PhD. And he also went through my diaries because they're all there. Everything is there. Jimmy still shocked by everything. It was the perfect way to clean out in New York City apartment. And my sister's -
Jennifer Prokop 32:45 / #
(laughing) You're like, "Yale, would you like my things?"
Sarah MacLean 32:46 / #
(laughing) "Do you want my paper?"
Vincent Virga 32:48 / #
Everything went to Yale. Every single thing. And so I tried and I tried, meanwhile thinking, "Ugh, I can't bear changing the title of this book. I just can't bear it." And so then they created the cover.
Sarah MacLean 33:02 / #
Which is -
Vincent Virga 33:02 / #
And of course the cover -
Sarah MacLean 33:03 / #
It's stunning!
Vincent Virga 33:04 / #
It's flawless! Stunning!
Sarah MacLean 33:06 / #
It's stunning. The first time I ever saw it I gasped out loud.
Vincent Virga 33:09 / #
Yeah, me too.
Sarah MacLean 33:09 / #
And then I called Avon and I was like, "How do I get a copy of this?" The answer was, "You can't have one." (laughter)
Jennifer Prokop 33:19 / #
That's fine.
Vincent Virga 33:19 / #
It's intriguing, intriguing, intriguing, because people, when they got out into the bookstores, it was mistaken for a straight romantic novel.
Jennifer Prokop 33:29 / #
Ohhh.
Sarah MacLean 33:29 / #
Because it looks just like all the other gothics, which is how it should look.
Vincent Virga 33:33 / #
Absolutely.
Sarah MacLean 33:33 / #
It's how it should look. House on the hill. Brooding men.
Vincent Virga 33:36 / #
And at first glance - Absolutely. Absolutely.
Jennifer Prokop 33:39 / #
Crashing waves.
Vincent Virga 33:40 / #
Right! It was perfect. I loved it. And so out it went into the world. And then bookstores started to put warnings on it.
Vincent Virga 33:49 / #
Saying you need to know this is a gay gothic, a gay romance. And one of my clients, my picture editing clients, at that point was John Ehrlichman from the Watergate years. And I loved him. And I would come home and say things to Jimmy like, "Oh god, John Ehrlichman is a sweetie!" And Jimmy would say, "Get a grip!" And so basically -
Sarah MacLean 34:15 / #
(laughing) John Ehrlichman, about to go to jail!
Vincent Virga 34:17 / #
Actually, yes! And what happened was when I read his manuscript, he went to jail! And when I read his manuscript and said, "John, you told me everything, but you don't tell me why you went to jail." And so he wrote a chapter Why I Went to Jail. So he and I became really good friends. And he read Gaywyck, and he loved it. And when he went out on the road, he would call me and he would say, "I'm in Oklahoma. I'm in Mississippi. I'm in bookstores selling my book, and I'm asking them why they don't have Gaywyck, and many of them do have Gaywyck." And then he went to Texas, and he called me and he said, "I was just in a bookstore in Texas, and that that bookstore has a bullet hole in the window, which was put into Gaywyck!"
Sarah MacLean 34:59 / #
(gasps)
Jennifer Prokop 35:00 / #
Hmm. Wow.
Vincent Virga 35:02 / #
We mustn't forget this.
Jennifer Prokop 35:04 / #
Yeah.
Vincent Virga 35:05 / #
Mustn't forget this. The night of my party, my Gaywyck party in 1980 November, was the night of the Ramrod Massacre. And I know it happened because we were at my party at Lane's West Village apartment and we heard gunshots.
Vincent Virga 35:24 / #
And then we heard police. So we must not ever forget this. And then I went out on my tour. And I was, I was invited to meet the editor. He was Brent Harris. He loved the book. I went to see him, but before I got in the house, I got a phone call, telling me he was very sick. He was dying. And he was, in fact, I would be the last person he would be seeing before he went into this hospice. And when I got there, he loved the book and he loved Mawrdew. And so we were talking about that, he loved Callas, he loved Victoria. And we got all engaged with all of this stuff. So my short visit became hours. And while we were talking, his friends were packing up his apartment, because he was being moved out. And he was one of the first, he said, "I know of five of us. They're calling it the gay cancer. They don't know what it is yet, but there's this thing happening." We mustn't forget that either, because I - this is difficult. One of my best friends is Colm Tóibín. I've read all of his books. I met him when we were both young in Dublin. And he wrote a book called The Story of the Night, which I never read because it was about AIDS. When Gaywyck came out, and then two years later, it was followed by A Comfortable Corner, which is a book about recovery from alcoholism, written from the point of view of the other, used to be called the codependent. And basically those books were picked up all over the place. They were picked up by the 12 Step groups, they were picked up by the gay men, all over the place. And then, then I started getting invited to the hospital. And Jimmy was invited to the hospital. He could go. I could go, but I would faint. Literally, I would faint. And I was in analysis at that point. I had given myself analysis for my 40th birthday. And Jimmy always said to me, "Oh, you'll just love this. You get to talk all about yourself." And so my analyst said to me when I said I'm, "I'm fainting." He said to me, "You're having the correct response." So I realized this was a problem. And I couldn't go to wakes either, but I was invited because of the books, because the men loved the books. And so I went. I did the best that I could. And basically I couldn't write. The reason there's such a gap between Gaywyck and A Comfortable Corner and Vadriel Vale was because I actually suffered from what we now recognize as PTSD. It was, it was PTSD-ville. That's all I can say. And lost so many friends. And when years later when I met, when I met my friend, Mark Doty. When I met my friend Mark Doty for the first time, he said to me, "When my partner was dying, in Provincetown, we would read your books over and over." And so then also, when I was doing Capote with Gerald Clarke, he said to me, "Truman reads your book aloud every Christmas."
Sarah MacLean 39:46 / #
Oh my god.
Vincent Virga 39:47 / #
So there was that going on.
Sarah MacLean 39:50 / #
And you're also you're getting telephone calls in the middle of the night.
Vincent Virga 39:54 / #
I am getting, yes to telephone calls, and the most stunning, remember now the year, so I was still in the phonebook.
Jennifer Prokop 40:03 / #
Sure.
Vincent Virga 40:03 / #
And I would get, I would get telephone calls.
Sarah MacLean 40:06 / #
Phonebook! (laughter)
Vincent Virga 40:08 / #
Imagine? Phone? I actually had someone come to my apartment, this kid, and I still have a black hanging phone because I love it as a souvenir. And the kid said to me, "What's that?"
Sarah MacLean 40:16 / #
What's that?
Jennifer Prokop 40:17 / #
Oh, yeah. I teach middle schoolers and a kid was like how? And another kid was like you put your finger in and you -
Vincent Virga 40:25 / #
Yes, yes, yes. So the phone rang in the middle of the night. And it's this young boy calling me from the Midwest because he had read Gaywyck and he had been going to kill himself. He was going to shoot himself. He was in love with his gym teacher. And he said to me, "I found Gaywyck. I found it in the A&P." Because of that cover! Because it had been stacked in all of these places. So he found it. And he said to me, "Is it true that men can be together?" And I said, "I'm together. I'm together with Jimmy." We've been together since 1964 and we're very together. And we have a completely together relationship, and it's also exclusive. We never opened it. It's been exclusive for 56 years for me. And so I said, "Of course, yes, it is." And then I said to him, "If ever you need to talk about this, if ever you get frightened, call me." And he said to me, "I won't have to call you. I just have to re-read Gaywyck." I -
Sarah MacLean 41:45 / #
(laughs) I'm a mess.
Jennifer Prokop 41:46 / #
I know. I'm fine.
Vincent Virga 41:48 / #
And so AIDS hits and I am paralyzed. And I mean, paralyzed. And I was paralyzed. So what happened then was my career just became huge. Huge. I was, I became literally America's foremost picture editor.
Jennifer Prokop 42:09 / #
Right.
Vincent Virga 42:09 / #
Michael Korda christenened me the Michelangelo of picture editors. So I was all over the place. And Jimmy's editor at Farrar, Straus said, "Oh, dear. Hair by Kenneth. Pictures by Vincent." And meanwhile, I'm going to these posh events, and all of these people are coming up to me and saying, (in a whisper) "I love your book. I love your book." They'll never talk about it. And I said, you know, I would say to Jimmy, "I don't give a shit. I did what I did. I achieved what I did. I'm proud of the book. I don't care if they like it or not." And Jimmy said, "That makes it more difficult for them. Really makes it more difficult for them. So I would go to all the parties and inevitably one of them, some mega star would come up to me and say, (in a whisper) "I love your book." And that became a joke that Jimmy and I had.
Sarah MacLean 43:10 / #
You kept a list on the fridge.
Jennifer Prokop 43:11 / #
Yeah, right.
Vincent Virga 43:12 / #
Love your book! I can't tell you. And then my mother and father, we're sitting having lunch, and they are listening to the radio, and they begin fiddling on the dial and all of a sudden, they discover NPR, with bells ringing, and bats screeching and scary music. And the announcer says, "Our guest today is Vincent Virga, the author of the first gay, Gothic."
Sarah MacLean 43:47 / #
And so at this point, to be clear, you have not come out to your parents.
Sarah MacLean 43:52 / #
And your parents don't know that you've written a book.
Sarah MacLean 43:56 / #
But you did write it under your actual name.
Vincent Virga 44:00 / #
In fact, I wrote it under my actual name.
Sarah MacLean 44:01 / #
This is amazing.
Vincent Virga 44:03 / #
And my youngest brother, who is today a devoted Trumpster said to my oldest sister, "I have to change my name. I have to change my name. How can I go to school with this?" And meanwhile my sister is giving it to all of her friends and my middle brother was a deacon of the church, upstate New York. They spoke out against homosexuality. So when Gaywyck was published, my brother bought the number of copies that he needed and gave one as a Christmas present to each deacon, and resigned from the church. So that's my brother and my other brother saying "I have to change my name."
Sarah MacLean 44:42 / #
Love that story too! So your parents stumbled upon NPR -
Jennifer Prokop 44:46 / #
Outed by NPR seems like a very niche way to come out, (laughter) you know.
Vincent Virga 44:52 / #
My parents also, they never listen to NPR! They were probably looking for some talk show. Some dish show that they could have over lunch. So I went out the next weekend.
Sarah MacLean 45:06 / #
So they said nothing, or did they summon you?
Vincent Virga 45:09 / #
No. They said nothing, nothing, nothing. And I didn't even know they'd heard it. Nothing. So we go to Abraham and Straus, which is a huge supermarket, a department store in a mall, where I had worked as a kid. That's where I worked as a kid, for all of those years, between college and between Yale. In fact, the year between Yale, I was actually reviving trout, because they had built this huge trout field, you paid $5, and you went shipping, but the trout were coming up in the heat. So my job was wearing pit boots and reviving trout. (laughter) So we went to A&S and we're going up the escalator and there is a banner over the bookstore that says, "Gaywyck! Vincent Virga." And I say, "Oh, my God, look at that." And my parents ignored it.
Sarah MacLean 46:04 / #
Like it didn't exist,
Vincent Virga 46:05 / #
Didn't exist. Didn't exist. I finally at one point, soon after that, they said to me, something like, "Who's minding the cat?" And I said, "Jimmy. I live with Jimmy. I've been living with Jimmy, and basically, I wrote a book called Gaywyck." And that's when they admitted hearing it on NPR. That's when they talked about the banner. My mother read it. And she said to me, "I thought there was too much sex."
Sarah MacLean 46:33 / #
My mother said the same thing. (laughter)
Vincent Virga 46:36 / #
I said, "How could you tell? It's written in all of that prose, that Victorian prose. It's buried in the prose." I said, "How could you tell? It means, aha, that you've been reading those books I'm sending you. You've been reading those romances." And then basically, I went to sleep.
Sarah MacLean 46:58 / #
So now is this happening because Avon is just behind this book?
Vincent Virga 47:04 / #
Avon was behind it, but actually, the world was behind it.
Sarah MacLean 47:11 / #
That's great.
Vincent Virga 47:11 / #
Armistead Maupin was behind it. It was time. It was time. And so Richard Howard, who's a great poet and translator, he tells me the story that he was driving across the United States with his partner, and they were listening to NPR. And all of a sudden, this thing appeared. The bells chiming, and there I am! And the two of them started screaming at top of their voice with joy. Years later, I picked up, I'm still constantly reading right, and I picked up Madame de La Fayette The Princesse De Cleves, which is considered the first French psychological novel. It's about a woman, an aristocratic woman, who marries an aristocratic man, and then falls, she falls in love with another man. She falls in love with this man, and in Roman Catholic fashion, she has a nervous breakdown, she's hysterical, and basically, at the end of the book, she goes into a convent and dies. So I thought to myself, "You know, what? Why couldn't a man fall in love with a woman and marry her? And then fall in love with an aristocratic man?" Why can't, since I took the John reform, why can't I take the psychological novel? And so I flipped it around, of course, we meet Vadriel Vale in a monastery, which he leaves for various reasons to go out into the world to actually discover himself. And he discovers himself, he marries this wonderful woman, and he falls in love with Armand de Guise. Now the name Armand de Guise is actually a name that's in The Princesse De Cleves. And I plot that book, along the lines of The Princesse de Cleves, but I hook it into Robert and Donough Gaylord. I make Robert and Donough Armand's best friend.
Sarah MacLean 49:27 / #
Ahh! Perfect! Series, a series is born!
Vincent Virga 49:30 / #
And they also live across from each other in Gramercy Park and when I wrote Gaywyck, the first draft, I was the superintendent of the building on Gramercy Park. A little building. I was the super under a fake name, because it was a rent stabilized apartment, and Jimmy and I needed a place to live and we were walking down the street, we bumped into our pal from Yale, Bob Landorff, and he said to me, "I'm getting married and I have this tiny studio apartment at Irving Place. Do you know anybody who wants it?" And I said, "Yeah, we want it." And he said, "But you have to be Bob Landorff." And I said, "Okay. That's fine."
Vincent Virga 49:30 / #
This is the most New York thing I've ever - I mean, everybody does it.
Vincent Virga 50:08 / #
Then the landlord came because he needed a new super, and I answered the door as Bob Landorff, and Jimmy was in the bathtub. So in comes the super and he sits down, and he says to me, "Will you be the super of the building?" And I said, "I can't do anything!" "No, no, no, no. All you have to do is wash down the halls, sort the trash, and when anything goes wrong, you just call somebody." So we talked and talked and talked, and then he got up and he said, "Okay, it's a deal. Free rent." I said, "No, no, no. No free rent." I'm thinking, "Free rent. He's gonna find out I'm -"
Jennifer Prokop 50:41 / #
You're not Bob Landorff!
Vincent Virga 50:42 / #
I'm not Bob Landorff and I'm out the window! So basically, I said, "No, no, no." So he said, "I have to go to the bathroom." So we went into the bathroom, and there is Jimmy in the bathtub, and the landlord pees and then he leaves and Jimmy is freezing in the bathtub and I said, "Just think here we are with the frozen rent and I'm now the super." So basically, it's on Irving Place, and on the corner of Irving Place and Gramercy Park -
Sarah MacLean 51:12 / #
Which is one of the most beautiful places in the city! For those of you who are not New Yorkers, it's gorgeous, that block.
Vincent Virga 51:19 / #
Gorgeous. Yeah. And that's where Robert, that's where Robert and Donough, on the corner.
Sarah MacLean 51:25 / #
Perfect.
Vincent Virga 51:25 / #
And across the park, I then moved to 22nd Street and Lexington, around the corner from Gramercy Park. And Armand and Vadriel live on the other corner. So for me, they are, that's where they live, and that's where they'll always live.
Jennifer Prokop 51:46 / #
So what year was this? I mean, clearly, you were still doing picture editing and still had that whole outlet for your creativity, but writing novels was a little different, right?
Vincent Virga 51:58 / #
Yes. And I only wrote in the summers.
Jennifer Prokop 52:00 / #
Yeah. Okay.
Vincent Virga 52:00 / #
Because I discovered that I couldn't do, I couldn't do both. I could research in the winter. I could do some re-writing in the winter, but I was doing these mega best selling books. And I mean, I was working with these, you know, I was working with the President of the United States. And I was working with Jane Fonda, whom I love and all of these wonderful people on these mega books. And that took a lot of time. And also, if I'm doing your book, I read your manuscript, I then make a list of everything I want to see, and then I meet with you, and I go through your sock drawer. (laughter) And we wander through what's under your bed. Shelley Winters had these incredible pictures under her bed. And so that's what I do. I enter your life. With Hillary and Bill Clinton, I entered their lives, and I moved into the house. And it's hard to write fiction when you've got this mishegoss going on. (laughter) Impossible. And so I would write in the summer. So always the summer. For decades it was East Hampton until East Hampton became too expensive. Then it was one summer in Woodstock, which I hated. All these rich people pretending to be poor. And they were also too many mosquitoes! And so as the gods would have it, Victoria was giving a performance in Dublin and Jimmy traveled all over the British Isles with her and then they went to Dublin and a woman who was in control of this whole creative project fell in love with Jimmy and said, "You should come and spend summers in Ireland." So that's how we got to Ireland. We spent four years in Dublin, that's where I met Colm Tóibín. And then we went out to the west of Ireland, County Mayo, and I actually created a museum out there. Co-founded a museum in the west coast of Ireland, in Ballina. And then I would have, we would come back to New York, and then I got a call from the Library of Congress asking me, my very first book, my very first book was for John Wayne. And it was 12 songs. Michael gave me 12 songs and said, "You have to make a book out of this. You're a picture editor, right?" And I lied, and I said, "Sure!" Thinking, "How hard could it be?" So one of the tenants in my building was Agnes Maya, who was in charge of all the picture research at Simon and Schuster at Random House. And I said, "Agnes." She says to me, "You can't do that. I couldn't do that." So she gave me a copy of picture sources, and I kept playing the songs over and over again, and thinking to myself, "Oh my god, this is such a hoot! It's such America. It's all about America!" So I called the Army, the Navy, and the Marines, and the Air Force and I said, "Listen, I'm working on a project with John Wayne. Can I come and go through your files? And they said, "John Wayne? Sure."
Vincent Virga 53:10 / #
For him anything. (laughter)
Vincent Virga 54:55 / #
Anything! And also, and this is my first book, so I don't even know you're supposed to pay people. And then I thought to myself, all those pretty pictures of America, all of those advertisements for Oldsmobile and Ford. And so I started calling the mega companies and saying, "Listen, all those beautiful pictures of America." And they said, "We don't - no one can have them." And I said, "Well, I'm doing a book for John Wayne."
Sarah MacLean 55:24 / #
(laughter) Oh, John Wayne!
Vincent Virga 55:26 / #
And I will give you a credit. I'll give you a credit in a book by John Wayne called America, Why I Love Her. And then I thought, "I need more." So I thought to myself, you know, all those Farm Security Administration pictures, Dorothea Lange, all those people I love, they're very America. So I went to the Library of Congress, and the curator I met, became the head curator, 15 years later, of prints and photographs. And so they called me and said, "We need to do a book. We're having a major anniversary, 100 years. All of the curators have been working in their different divisions. We need a book. What do you think we should do?" And I said, "We need to do a book about a history." And I called it Eyes of the Nation, because that's what the Library of Congress is. And also the Library of Congress is America's memory. So I said, "Let's do this." And I did that. I said to Jimmy, "We're only going to go for Eyes of the Nation." He didn't want to come here. He hated it. From the beginning, he said to me, "You walk past people. You don't want to fly over there." And so we came, and then I did a book called Cartographia -
Jennifer Prokop 56:38 / #
Right.
Vincent Virga 56:38 / #
Which took seven years.
Jennifer Prokop 56:41 / #
I have a copy of it. It's beautiful!
Vincent Virga 56:43 / #
Isn't it beautiful?
Jennifer Prokop 56:44 / #
Cartographia is really your book. You are the author of record,
Vincent Virga 56:50 / #
I wrote that book. Meanwhile, remember, I had already done Eyes of the Nation, and I had done all these other books. So everybody knew me, I had full access. And when I would go in, I always had an idea of what I wanted. And I divided the book. This is what we call in the theater "a two o'clock in the morning idea." You're supposed to wake up in the morning and say, "What a stupid idea!" I didn't. I went in, and I said to Ron Grim at the Library of Congress, and he adored me because he was my guy in Eyes of the Nation. And so I said, "I have this idea." And so we began. And since I was going all over the world, the book is about maps as cultural documents. I tell the story, the history of the country, and the civilization through the map. So I say in the very beginning, it took me forever, and I was under contract to Little, Brown, and I went to this big, big event, a publishing event, and Jimmy was hosting a table. And there I was, in my tux, surrounded by all of my friends who were editors-in-chiefs and all these wonderful kids, people who had grown up with me. And the editor-in-chief of Little, Brown came over and said to me, "Vincent! We were talking about you in an editorial board meeting." And I said, "Oh?" And he said, "Yes! If you don't finish this book in six months, we're canceling the book."
Sarah MacLean 58:15 / #
(gasp) Not fun! Not cool at a gala! (laughter)
Vincent Virga 58:20 / #
No, not cool!
Sarah MacLean 58:22 / #
I object!
Vincent Virga 58:25 / #
I had been all over the Library of Congress for six years, and all these people explaining what the map meant. And I then went back to library and I thought, I have six months and I have, I have 1000's of pages. And so I wrote the introduction. What is a map? I wrote the basic introduction. And then as I went through, I thought to myself, you have one day for each map, if you can have one day for each map, will then come to the end of it. And meanwhile, I was surrounded by all these scholars who kept wanting to read my stuff, and they just adored my stuff. And they would say, "Oh, but you have to do this. You have to do that. You have to explain to me why was this huge thing going on in India?" And I would say, "No."
Jennifer Prokop 59:17 / #
(laughter) I've one day.
Vincent Virga 59:19 / #
One day. And so I did it. I did it. And essentially, it's a wonderful book.
Jennifer Prokop 59:26 / #
Yeah.
Vincent Virga 59:26 / #
I think. And also I invented this thing where I said, I create a metaphor. Map as A. Map as B. And when the book came out, now remember, I have no, no, I'm not an academic, and when the book came out, it was accepted because of Ron Grim and but I was the key name on the thing and they behaved abominably. Then it went to be reviewed by THE great journal Imago Mundi, and it was assigned to the head of the maps division in the British Museum.
Sarah MacLean 1:00:02 / #
Oh. No pressure. (laughter)
Vincent Virga 1:00:05 / #
He reviewed the book and he begins with, "You know, when I first started reading this book, I thought to myself, "It's very relaxed.""
Sarah MacLean 1:00:15 / #
Unlike the British Museum,
Vincent Virga 1:00:16 / #
All of sudden these metaphors begin. "It's beautifully written, but he creates these metaphors for each map. And my first reaction, it's awfully simplistic. And it's awfully American." He writes this.
Sarah MacLean 1:00:31 / #
Terrible scathing review! (laughter)
Vincent Virga 1:00:33 / #
Then he turns around and says, "This book is magnificent. Absolutely magnificent. It is a total triumph. It is so inventive, it is so brilliant. And it's magnificent!" Well that, of course, did not help me in the academic world. Imago Mundi, I started reviewing for Imago Mundi and the academics were freaked, because I was going to all these conventions and asking all these questions. And, um, it was a great, great experience. And then it became number one on Amazon and five different -
Jennifer Prokop 1:01:13 / #
Wow.
Vincent Virga 1:01:14 / #
Sections.
Sarah MacLean 1:01:14 / #
Great.
Vincent Virga 1:01:15 / #
So, and then I stayed on, you know, Jimmy said, "Oh, we can go home now." But then the books kept coming, kept coming. So ultimately, I think there are now 29 books from the Library of Congress with my name. And also I did movie calendars, because I had all these friends. And you know, and I would call these people in, the publisher would say to me, "The Library of Congress is 1000 pound gorilla." So I very boldly, you know, I would call people. And I, first of all, I called my pal who was the head of 20th Century Fox legal, and he gave me permission to use the images without pay. But I had to get permission from everyone in the image. That meant I had to -
Sarah MacLean 1:01:59 / #
Wow, that's rough.
Vincent Virga 1:01:59 / #
Had to bring in people. There were all those people. I couldn't do it. I mean, basically, two brilliant brilliant people did that for me. But I had to call the difficult ones. I had to call Lauren Bacall, because her agency screamed at me over the phone. Four letter words. So I called her as the, you know, the 1000 pound gorilla. And I explained that we wanted to do this for Humphrey Bogart, because he wanted to use a picture. It was for Film Preservation Society, which I know she loves. And so she said, "Oh, sure, you can do it." So she called the people back and said, "Yeah, he can have this. He can do this." They call me back and every four letter word, "You know how she treats us? Do you know what she does to us?" And then with Kim Novak, which was the joy of my life, because I worshipped Kim Novak. And basically I put her on the back of Eyes of the Nation. So her people said no. I called Kim Novak. And Faye Dunaway. I called Faye Dunaway. And Jimmy had just reviewed her book in the New York Times which she loved. And I said basically, "When are you going to play a Long Day's Journey into Night?" She said, "Yes." So essentially, that was what I was doing at the Library of Congress.
Sarah MacLean 1:02:02 / #
Amazing.
Vincent Virga 1:02:02 / #
Then comes The Princesse de Cleves and then comes Vadriel Vale. And then I was thinking again, and I was alive again to my book. And I started thinking, what's next? I want the Gaywyck trilogy, so what's next? Next is to take the 19th century melodrama. I've taken the gothic romance. I've taken the psychological drama. Let's do the melodrama. So basically I created Children of Paradise, and I will never forget the moment sitting in the west coast of Ireland, and starting that book, and standing in the front room, with Robbie, in his house in Gramercy Park. And there I was, back with my crowd. And then I took the characters from Morris because at the end of it, Foster says, "They go off into the greensward." And then he says in the final, in his afterward, "They could not have lasted in the greensward." So I bring them, I bring them to Gaywyck. The whole point, when I look back on it, is about queer spaces. Now, when I'm reading all this stuff, and I realize my goal was queer spaces. Gaywyck is in 1900. All those people, he's at the opera, all of these people, Vadriel Vale, queer spaces. And so I go epic in Children of Paradise, queer spaces, and we invent the movies! Robbie becomes a movie director. If I'm going to do it with melodrama, I have to invent the movies! So basically, it cannot be published until, it exists in the Beinecke Library, and it exists in William and Mary, because William and Mary did a celebration of Gaywyck, and I asked them if they wanted the third volume of the trilogy. And basically they said, "Yes!" The reason it can't be published is because it was sent out, and the rejections were basically, "Oh, this book doesn't stand alone, and it's too long ago."
Sarah MacLean 1:02:02 / #
Vincent!
Vincent Virga 1:02:20 / #
"No one remembers Gaywyck."
Sarah MacLean 1:05:36 / #
We have to get it published!
Vincent Virga 1:05:38 / #
My goal is to have the trilogy published in uniform volume.
Jennifer Prokop 1:05:44 / #
Yeah.
Vincent Virga 1:05:45 / #
That's my goal. And my other goal is either Netflix or Amazon. I want a, I want a series.
Sarah MacLean 1:05:59 / #
Vincent, we're going to get this done. We're going to get - well, I can't, I mean, I can't get the Netflix deal for you, but we're going to get this publishing done. We can do this! We're going to do this. Fated Mates is going to come together, we're going to work together, we're going to do this. We're going to get this done.
Vincent Virga 1:06:14 / #
I would really love that.
Sarah MacLean 1:06:15 / #
We're going to get it done.
Vincent Virga 1:06:15 / #
It's my dream!
Sarah MacLean 1:06:17 / #
Everyone, listen up! We're getting it done. Stay tuned. So did you even know, it was a romance?
Vincent Virga 1:06:26 / #
I knew it was out there, but I wasn't interested. I mean, it was heterosexual, and I thought to myself, "I don't want to read these." Also, the few I picked up when I was at Avon, I thought, "I prefer The Lord Won't Mind." I'm a snob! I mean, you know, I'm a snob! And also, I long, long for romance novels, and I simply am old, and I can't find the ones that - the genre is problematic for me.
Sarah MacLean 1:07:04 / #
In the years since your books were published, have you heard from other gay romance writers who were inspired by you? Do you feel like you've left a mark in that sense? A trail?
Vincent Virga 1:07:18 / #
That was always very moving, because at one point, there was a book published, a Rainbow novel, won the award, I loved it. And in this sense, my note to this writer, and he, he sent me the most wonderful letters, and I got letters, letters, we get letters. We get stacks and stacks of letters. When the book was published, I was getting letters from Japan. In fact, there was a huge review for the book in Japan, and they sent a film crew over to interview me. Yeah, I got a lot of letters, very moving, very touching letters from people who said it helped them come out. That is who said they hid the book. And they loved the book so much, that they were passing it around. In fact, this week I got a letter from a man who 20 years ago, bought it in a bookstore in Florida. And then he lent it to someone and never got it back. So he wanted it, and he recently tracked it down in the original edition, and he loved it more than ever. And I think last week I got, older men who are moving and downsizing will write me and say their partners died and they're moving, and they're bringing very few books, but they must have mine. They must have mine. So that happens as well. I love this book. And then I just get letters randomly saying, "This is my favorite novel, and I just want you to know that." I have no idea why! I got a letter from a young boy. 24 years old, and he said, "I'm a goth, a gay goth, and I love your books. I'm sure you get letters like this all the time." And I wrote back and I said, "No. I do not get letters from 24-year-old gay goths." I'm always saying to Jimmy, "It's so touching to me." And now to be in that book, you know, The History of the -
Jennifer Prokop 1:09:35 / #
Yes! The Romance History from Rebecca Romney.
Vincent Virga 1:09:35 / #
Oh, my god!
Sarah MacLean 1:09:39 / #
Well, I think the thing about Gaywyck that resonates so much with so many people is that you really did knock down the doors of the Gothic, which is a genre that many of us love so much. Many of us cut our teeth on those early Gothics and you re-wrote the rules of it. I'm sad to hear that you you never had a writer community, but I know for a fact that many writers were inspired by you.
Vincent Virga 1:10:10 / #
Several years ago there was a convention, and there was a panel about the gay books. I wasn't invited, and just assumed, you know, I've never gone after this. I did it, as I've said, and I just sort of cruised along with it amused, and knowing what I did,, but at the same time, I remember a book that came out about gay fiction. And there was a little footnote that said, "Oh, and then there's Gaywyck, which is really a footnote, and it will never be anything but a footnote." That's what this thing said, and I thought to myself, "Okay, so maybe there were others before me." And of course, now I've read - I have a whole library of the gay novels before me.
Sarah MacLean 1:10:52 / #
Well I do think that it's worth saying that you are, as far as any of us can tell, you are the first gay Gothic romance, the first gay, possibly the first gay historical Modern romance with sex in it and everything!
Jennifer Prokop 1:11:07 / #
And a happy ending!
Vincent Virga 1:11:08 / #
The happy ending. That was the thing that I think even shook Gwen a bit. And I had been told, Michael Korda said to me, "I want you to write a book. I want you to write a story based on the best of everything." Because he had published that mega bestseller. He said, "I want you to write a best of everything with/for men. I want the gay men to die." And I said, "No." Now when I look back on it, I thought to myself, "You know, I could have killed him in Vietnam. He could have died as a great American hero." But at that point in my heart, I wanted to write this gay Gothic, and I'd already started it. I'm getting statements from Amazon, that people are buying it again. What, what caused this resurgence?
Sarah MacLean 1:12:05 / #
It's a book that people are aware of now. There are many, many more of us now who believe that those paperbacks from the '70s should not have disappeared. They should have been honored in a way that, you know, in the same way that other books from the '70s remain honored. So people are starting to think about the Modern romance, the happily ever after, with sex on the page, what does it look like? What are the roots of the genre? Who are the people who built the house? And we believe that you are a person who has built the house.
Vincent Virga 1:12:43 / #
And now you know, I've been writing, and I wrote a book called He Cooks, I Clean, which is a joke Jimmy and I had. It's a novel, He Cooks, I Clean. And my novels are now very, very erotic because D.H. Lawrence said, "You can't possibly create a fully rounded character, if you don't have their love life." That was his argument for Lady Chatterley's Lover. And basically, I always agreed. I mean, I pussyfooted through Vadriel and through the other ones. I'm a little, little bolder in Children of Paradise, but it was inappropriate for that period, and for my tone. So it's sort of a hidden, though my mother sniffed it out.
Sarah MacLean 1:13:32 / #
(laughter) Moms will do that.
Jennifer Prokop 1:13:34 / #
Mothers. They know.
Vincent Virga 1:13:33 / #
Mom. And now of course, in these new novels of mine, they're very, very passionate and graphic. But, you know, I've sent them to editors, and they say, "No, but we're supposed to be, we're supposed to be married now. You know what I mean? It's supposed to be all over, but it's not all over. For me, it will always be the Ramrod shootings on the publication that, I don't know that I can ever move beyond that.
Jennifer Prokop 1:14:09 / #
Yeah.
Vincent Virga 1:14:10 / #
So that's where I am, and I'm sad. Deeply saddened. I'm waiting to see what's waiting for me, because I'm now reading The Prophets. I've just started it. And I don't know what's going to happen in that, but I think it's going to be very unhappy. But of course, they're slaves and I've already started to cry, like, in the first chapter, by what he describes, but I'm, I'm in this, you know. I'm in this. And I live in hope.
Sarah MacLean 1:14:44 / #
Wow! That was so amazing!
Jennifer Prokop 1:14:53 / #
Sarah, before we talk about our feelings, I want you to tell our listeners about the story of how Vincent came to be on the podcast.
Sarah MacLean 1:15:04 / #
Ohhh.
Jennifer Prokop 1:15:05 / #
Because it's a good one. Everybody listen, we had a list, and we didn't hear back. A lot of people we just didn't hear back from.
Sarah MacLean 1:15:13 / #
Yeah! You will hear - we will do this: whenever there is an interesting story related to how we found a person, we will tell the story at the end. Vincent Virga. We discovered him - I think Steve Ammidown rang my bell about him when we were doing the Trailblazer thing for the RITA's in 2019, which keeps coming up because it was a really important piece of my learning about the history of the genre, which I thought I kind of knew, and then suddenly there were all these names that Steve really, Steve helped with that. And he kind of rang my bell about it, and so when we made our list of Trailblazers, he was an obvious choice.
Jennifer Prokop 1:15:59 / #
He also, Gaywyck appears in Rebecca Romney's romance catalog.
Sarah MacLean 1:16:05 / #
That happened after we started looking for him. What's interesting about the Rebecca Romney catalog and Fated Mates' Trailblazers episodes is they really have, I think we and Rebecca are often like, "Oh, that's great. That person is on our list. Or our person is on her list." So it's a really cool marriage of the two projects. But I went looking for him, and I found he has a website that hasn't been updated very recently, and I sent him an email that just introduced us, because at this point, you know, I don't expect people know who we are.
Jennifer Prokop 1:16:45 / #
Sure.
Sarah MacLean 1:16:46 / #
So I introduced us and I sort of said, "Well, I'm in New York, and I think you're in New York, and I'm happy to come. I'm vaccinated." A lot of these emails are very, "If you can't do this, we're happy to come and be with you. We're vaccinated." And my phone rang, and it was a weird number from New York. so I let it go to voicemail, because, obviously, I let it go to voicemail. Who answers the phone?
Jennifer Prokop 1:17:12 / #
Nobody.
Sarah MacLean 1:17:12 / #
And I had a voicemail from him. And I will say this, you guys, I have had a couple of really great voicemails over the course of this project, because what I've discovered is many people who are of a certain age, are very happy to make a telephone call. So Vincent and I chatted a couple of times before we recorded.
Jennifer Prokop 1:17:34 / #
The first time Sarah talked to him, she called me. You actually called me, I don't know if it was catching. And you were like, "We're a Vincent Virga stan podcast."
Sarah MacLean 1:17:44 / #
Basically, we're just going to have Vincent Virga on as our third forever. Like, you can just join us all the time. And here's the thing, I had heard some of those stories already, because we've had a couple of really great conversations, but this episode. Jen.
Jennifer Prokop 1:17:58 / #
Yeah.
Sarah MacLean 1:17:59 / #
I cried twice!
Jennifer Prokop 1:18:01 / #
So for those of you listening in real time, usually we release on a Wednesday. And here it is, it's an unusual day. We released Beverly Jenkins a couple of days ago, and here we are releasing another Trailblazer. And that's because this date is very special. This is actually the 41st anniversary of the release of Gaywyck. And the reason we know that is because, if we remember, Vincent mentioned that the night of the party, that essentially was celebrating it, there was a massacre at the Ramrod bar, and that happened on Wednesday, November 19, 1980. I will put some of these articles in show notes. This is for many people, maybe little remembered, part of gay history. A former police officer entered a gay bar called the Ramrod and opened fire. And so, you know, this was a point in the interview where all of us, I think, but Vincent especially, got really teary because here it was, this kind of height, of kind of a career and a moment for him, and it was this really brutal reminder of how unaccepting some people would always be of love stories and happily ever afters for gay and lesbian, and at that point, probably those were the only categories of Americans. So that's the reason we really wanted to release today's episode on the anniversary because -
Sarah MacLean 1:19:33 / #
We wanted to say it same. The Trailblazer episodes are about speaking the names of the people who built the house, and in this particular case, it felt important to say the name of the Ramrod massacre and to talk about this today. In shownotes we'll also put the names of the victims -
Jennifer Prokop 1:19:34 / #
Yes.
Sarah MacLean 1:19:34 / #
Of the shootings, and you know, we're our thinking Vincent today, but we are so, so happy to have had him on the podcast. I was - what a remarkable life!
Jennifer Prokop 1:20:10 / #
Oh, yeah.
Sarah MacLean 1:20:11 / #
He is living! I think it's amazing how much he had to say about the work and about writing love stories, for somebody who we have not heard from. As a genre, we don't talk about Vincent as much as I think maybe we should.
Jennifer Prokop 1:20:32 / #
Yeah. I think one of the other things that is especially poignant, is how people would whisper to him. This really stuck with me. "I loved your book, but I can't really talk about it publicly." I think Rebecca's catalog has a lot of really interesting information about the evolution of gay romance from Gaywyck. And I'm going to include a thread from a librarian I follow, Angie Manfredi, who talked about how the assault on putting LGBTQ+ literature in libraries is more intense than ever. And how vital it is for kids, for teenagers, I mean for all kinds of people, but kids especially, to be able to see themselves in literature portrayed in a positive way and having the potential for happiness and joy, and all kinds of stories. And she gives in this thread, some really specific things that you can do as a regular person, as simple as calling up your local library and saying, "I hope that you are keeping these materials on the shelves for kids and teenagers in our community." So I just want to say how urgent it is that, you know, we not take this for granted. I was very, it's sometimes really overwhelming to feel like we've made no progress, but the way we make sure we keep the progress we have made is by fighting for it, and not just assuming. Right? Not just assuming that they'll always be gay and trans and lesbian romance, or bisexuals in romance, and that especially if we want those materials to persist and be around for everyone, that we make it clear to our local libraries that, and our school libraries especially, that we support having those materials on the shelves.
Sarah MacLean 1:22:30 / #
And on top of it, purchasing those materials if you are able to, making sure that those materials pass through bookstores. And requesting those materials from your local bookstore, making sure that when you're in Barnes & Noble, you're asking for books that represent all marginalized communities, but especially those in LGBTQIA+ community. This is a second piece of the library struggle, but we all saw what happened on Election Day in Virginia, and we know that the critical race theory piece was a HUGE piece that swung Virginia red, particularly with white women. And I want to just say that there's another great thread that went around last week that basically underscored that libraries are going to be the frontline for so much of this. Anybody who was following that story in Virginia knows that it started with a mom, a white mom, who was horrified that her son was forced to read Beloved in class, and traumatized by the content in Beloved. So when we're talking about books being banned, we're talking about it happening right now, all over. So we'll throw that into show notes too.
Jennifer Prokop 1:23:58 / #
Yes. And that's it. These are, I think it's really also important to say it seems so easy to think it's happening somewhere else. It's happening everywhere.
Sarah MacLean 1:24:09 / #
Everywhere.
Jennifer Prokop 1:24:10 / #
It is happening at a school board in your town. Someone is going after books that they think are you know, and I just think as romance readers, if we care about happily everyone after, we have to care about, we have to be literally willing to stand up and say, because they're going to come at, you know, romance will be first, right? But when I think about children, when I think about the kids in my room who need to see books about themselves on the shelves, this, this is urgent work, that we as listeners and we as readers have to be a part of, because it starts with censorship, right? It starts with banning books. It starts with saying, "We shouldn't be teaching these things because they make me uncomfortable."
Sarah MacLean 1:25:08 / #
Yeah. And books are world changing in the sense that when you read a book, when any kid reads these books, it changes the way they look at the world. And that's what we need.
Jennifer Prokop 1:25:20 / #
And that's why they want to get rid of them.
Sarah MacLean 1:25:22 / #
I also just want to say and this is, you know, we're down a little bit of a Fated States rabbit hole now, but I just want to say listen, school boards too, I mean, we saw that on Tuesday, on the Election Day this year. The battle for this country is happening in school board races.
Jennifer Prokop 1:25:43 / #
Yes.
Sarah MacLean 1:25:44 / #
So if you are out there, and you are like, "What could I do? I don't want to, I can't run for Senator. How could I help?" Check out runforsomething.net where you can learn more about running in your town to be on the school board. You know, right now school boards are really front lining this.
Jennifer Prokop 1:26:05 / #
Yes. And I would just say, like I said, if you can't do that you can call your principal. I mean that's the thing, there are things, you can call the principal of your school and say, "I support having books that talk about race and racism and have gay and lesbian characters in them. There are lots of things that you can do. And I think it's just really important. We're big believers in, you know, civic action. So it doesn't have to be running for Senate, but it can be calling your kid's principal and saying, "Don't you dare take these books out of these classrooms. I want my kid to be learning the truth about who we are as a country. I want my kid to be reading stories about people that are not like them. I want my kid to see the whole world out there in their classroom."
Sarah MacLean 1:26:55 / #
In the meantime, we hope you enjoyed our interview with Vincent. We hope you head out and pick up Gaywyck on what you can get in print or in ebook, and we hope that you enjoyed this conversation as much as we did. We thought, I mean, I don't know if I've said this on the recordings yet, but it really does feel like every single conversation is so different from all the others.
Jennifer Prokop 1:27:17 / #
Oh, absolutely!
Sarah MacLean 1:27:18 / #
And this was really a delight! And I told Eric when we finished, I was like, "We have to have him for dinner because he's amazing!" (laughter)
Jennifer Prokop 1:27:28 / #
Honestly, I mean and that's the thing, let alone from Gaywyck, the story of his life doing images and the other work that he did, this is someone who had a long and distinguished career in publishing.
Sarah MacLean 1:27:40 / #
Yeah, and I want to hear all about Watergate! (laughter) Tell me everything!
Jennifer Prokop 1:27:44 / #
I want to hear about Bill and Hillary. Everything!
Sarah MacLean 1:27:47 / #
Going through pictures that were like under the bed in Hillary Clinton's house.
Jennifer Prokop 1:27:51 / #
Sure.
Sarah MacLean 1:27:51 / #
Sounds like, first of all, if I had known that job existed, I would not be sitting here with you, dummy. (laughter)
Jennifer Prokop 1:27:58 / #
Fine. My goodness.
Sarah MacLean 1:27:59 / #
Anyway, that was remarkable! I'm so glad that we did that.
Jennifer Prokop 1:28:04 / #
Me too.
Sarah MacLean 1:28:05 / #
And I hope you all loved it. Tell us how you felt about it on Twitter @FatedMates or on Instagram @FatedMatespod. You can also send Vincent an email the same way we did at his website vincentvirga.com. I think Vincent would probably be really thrilled to hear from all of you, if you felt moved by his stories. And otherwise you can find us at fatedmates.net. We will be back on Wednesday on proper schedule, but today we hope you're being kind to yourself and others.
S03.22: For Real by Alexis Hall: Jen had to Google Some Things
It’s 2021, and we’re back on the reading train with one of Sarah’s favorite erotic romances ever, Alexis Hall’s For Real. We dig into sex on the page, how sex and identity work together to make an erotic romance an erotic romance, power dynamics, and the difference between fear & risk. Enjoy!
You still have time to buy the Fated Mates Best of 2020 Book Pack from our friends at Old Town Books in Alexandria Virginia, and get the seven traditionally published books on the list, a Fated Mates sticker and a candle from the bookstore! Order here!
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 returning to Curvy Girls for an interstitial, and then we’re headed on to Naima Simone’s Blackout Billionaires series! In order, the books are: The Billionaire's Bargain, Black Tie Billionaire, and Blame It on the Billionaire. Find them at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, or Apple Books.
Show Notes
We won Georgia, but then white supremacist terrorists attacked the Capitol. If you want to talk to your kids, here are some suggestions from Facing History and Ourselves, this is a resource for teachers but I think any parent with tweens and teens will find it helpful. If you have little kids, Jen’s friend Elisa is a children’s librarian and recommend the books When a Bully is President and What We Believe: A Black Lives Matter Principles Activity Book.
Answering machines don’t exist anymore. (Well, they probably do, but no one we know uses them.)
For Real won the 2016 RITA for Best Erotic romance, and Alexis Hall wrote a blog entry about it.
Fear vs. Risk, the short version. Or maybe you want to read whole book about fear, called Nerve by Eva Holland. Jen knows Eva from another online space, but they've never met in person.
Bluebeard’s attic had some things Jen had to google.
Eric Selinger is a romance guy, but also a poetry guy at DePaul. Jen took a workshop with Eric a million years ago (before she started doing romance stuff), and the guy who said “poetry is a laboratory for sentences” was poet Baron Wormser, author of the best book Jen’s ever read about teaching and learning poetry, A Surge of Language.
Jen was thinking about what happens when romance authors are forced to read the sex scenes instead of the feelings scenes, like when Stacey Abrams on Stephen Colbert.
Sarah talked about chastity belts at the end, and we here at Fated Mates strongly advise against giving the internet the power over your chastity belts and cock cages. SAFETY FIRST!
Derek Craven Day is coming, do you have you merch ready? T-shirts and buttons and listen to our discussion of Dreaming of You, of course.
18: We Got to the Bag of Severed Heads! Shadow's Claim and Shadow's Seduction
We’re taking a turn into the world of the Dacians, and Jen and Sarah are having STRIFE because, as usual, Jen is wrong. We’re combining Shadow’s Claim and Shadow’s Seduction — talking about what it means to be a Kresley heroine, why writers tackle spin off series, the challenges of straight writers writing queer stories, and why we would appreciate receiving the heads of our enemies as tributes.
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.
We’re getting down to the wire with Season One of Fated Mates — in two weeks, join us for Wicked Abyss, featuring the literal King of Hell, and the Queen who takes fully no shit from him. Get Wicked Abyss at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books, Kobo, or at your local indie!
Show Notes
You know Kresley is self-publishing when you see it's Valkerie Press.
In IAD, a sorceri queen has the most power in that area.
- Eloisa James' first novel was Potent Pleasures, the the line Sarah quoted is: "Charlotte was one week short of 17 when her life was changed, falling into two halves like a shiny child's ball: before and after."
Uh. While researching for this podcast, Jen realized that Deadmou5 is real.
Sarah's hero/heroine/heroine's best friend on the line book is A Rogue By Any Other Name, which you can get in ebook for $1.99 right now!
There apparently was a crossover between IAD and Gena Showalter's Lords of the Underworld series. Tell us what you know.
Gay romance author and all around good guy Nathan Burgoine explains why "Gay for You" is a problem.
No one like a milksop.
All about the Kinsey Scale, and Jen thinks of this very funny tweet from her friend Zach every time she hears the phrase "Kinsey scale."
Happy Days didn't spin off from something, it was the spinner. Frasier was a Cheers spin-off. The Dacians is not an IAD spin-off. It is IAD. This is canon now.
The Arcana Chronicles is Kresley's YA series.
Jen recommends The Animators by Kayla Rae Whitaker if you're interested in a novel about women artists at work.
In two weeks, we're finishing Season One (sniff!) with Wicked Abyss!
Lost Limb Count
Arms and Hands (8)
- Conrad cuts off his own hand with a rusty axe so he escape the "witched" chains his brothers locked him in. (Dark Needs at Night's Edge)
- Cadeon has both of his hands burned off in the same scene where he loses an eye. There's description of what Cade's baby fingers look like as they are re-growing. It's...kinda gross. (Dark Desires After Dusk)
- Sebastian pulverizes most of his right arm during the Hie. He regenerates. (No Rest For the Wicked)
- Lucia peels all the skin off from her hand in order to free herself from some handcuffs. (Pleasure of a Dark Prince)
- In order to retrieve the ring from La Dorada , Lothaire cuts off her finger. (Pleasure of a Dark Prince)
- Lanthe and Carrow cut off Fegley's hand so they can use his thumb to unlock their torques. He's later killed. (Demon from the Dark)
- After receiving Lothaire's heart in a box, Ellie cuts off her middle finger and sends it to him. (Lothaire)
- Chloe's shoulder is dislocated in the escape from her auction (MacRieve).
Chest and Torso (7)
- Omort severs Rydstrom's spine and punches through his torso in a fight. Sabine saves him and enlists Hag to help heal him. (Kiss of a Demon King)
- Lucia's neck is broken. She regenerates. (Pleasure of a Dark Prince)
- On Torture Island, Regin,
- MacRieve,
- and Brandr are vivisected. It's pretty terrible. (Dreams of a Dark Warrior)
- Declan's skin is peeled off by the Neoptera as a child. (Dreams of a Dark Warrior)
- Lothaire rips out his own heart and sends it to Ellie in a box. (Lothaire)
Head, Face, and Eyes (6)
Bowen loses an eye and most of his forehead during the Hie. Mariketa has cursed him and he can't heal until he returns to her. (Wicked Deeds on a Winter's Night)
Cadeon loses an eye and part of his forehead and hair when fighting. It all regenerates. (Dark Desires After Dusk)
During a rugby match, Garreth has his teeth knocked out and swallows them. (Pleasure of a Dark Prince)
Lothaire kicks out La Dorada's remaining eye and throws her over a cliff. (Dreams of a Dark Warrior)
In the Bloodroot Forest, the tree grows over Lothaire's lips and tongue. (Lothaire)
After she gains her immortality, Chloe's hair grows, but she cuts it off every morning. (MacRieve)
Lanthe agrees to have her tongue cut out to save herself and Thronos, knowing she can still use the power of persuasion telepathically. (Dark Skye) ** Horns (2)**
Cadeon cuts off his own horns to prove to Holly that he is worthy of being her mate. She tells him to let them grow back (Dark Desires After Dusk)
Malkolm is captured by his enemies in Oblivion and taken to the city of Ash. The publicly cut off his horns and then intend to kill him, but Carrow saves him. (Demon from the Dark)
Legs and Feet (3)
- Lachlain tears off his own leg to reach Emma. He regenerates. (A Hunger Like No Other)
- Mariketa's skull is fractured and her leg is torn from her body. She heals herself after Bowen lays on the ground. Ivy grows over her and heals her. (Wicked Deeds on a Winter's Night)
- Thronos is chasing Melananthe and loses a foot when a portal closes on it. (Kiss of a Demon King)
- While in Pandamonia, Thronos is trapped in a Groundhog Day like trap, doomed to repeat his worst nightmare over and over again. When he believes that Lanthe is about to die, he repeatedly tears of his legs in order to reach her. He never actually loses a limb, but he was willing, so we're counting it. (Dark Skye)
Beheading as a Romantic Gesture (4)
- The first time Garreth spies Lucia, it's when she shoots an arrow and beheads a kobold. He notices that it's "a fantastical shot" and he's super into it. Later, he helps her pick up the head because he's a real gentleman like that. (Pleasure of a Dark Prince)
- Later in the book, they are under attack from vampires and Lucia asks him to help. Garreth promises to "give her their throats" and beheads two vampires. But she's upset about it because of a previous bad experience with cannibalism. (Pleasure of a Dark Prince)
- Malkolm beheads men that attacked Carrow in Oblvion, and he throws them to prove he's a worthy mate. (Demon from the Dark)
- Declan fights and beheads several creatures as they escape Torture Island, including squeezing one dude so hard his eyes pop out and then he twists his head off. (Dreams of a Dark Warrior)
- Thronos beheads several foes during fights, which impresses Lanthe; but he also beheads Felix, a sorcerer who once tricked Lanthe and stole her sorcery. (Dark Skye)
- The bag of heads, yo. This is the pinnicle of this category, obviously. (Shadow's Claim)
** Beheading as a Non-Romantic Gesture**
- Ellie cuts off Lothaire's head, leaving a slender 1/8 of an inch left. It was kind of an accident, but he deserved it. (Lothaire)
Maybe?
- Does Garreth's losing his connection with his mortal soul count? (Pleasure of a Dark Prince)
- When Soroya inhabited Ellie's body, she subjected her to a full Brazilian wax. Ellie doesn't realize it's happened until she takes control of her body again. (Lothaire)