S04.18: Jayne Ann Krentz: Trailblazer
Our Trailblazer episodes continue this week with Jayne Ann Krentz, who has done it all: writing for Vivian Stephens, writing historicals, writing contemporaries, writing space-set, fantasy, and paranormal romance, writing nonfiction about romance. In addition to managing life as JAK, Amanda Quick, Stephanie James and more, she’s also a legend of the genre because of her vocal resistance to the way society, literature and academia talks about romance novels.
In this episode, we talk about her journey and the way she continually reinvented herself to keep writing, about the importance of writers’ core stories, about genre and myth making, and about the role of romance in the world. We could not be more grateful to Jayne Ann Krentz for making time for Fated Mates.
Next week, our first read-along of the year will be Lisa Valdez’s Passion, an erotic historical published in 2005 that is W-I-L-D. There is a lot of biblical stuff at the world’s fair. Also some truly bananas stuff that…sticks with you. Get it at Amazon, Apple, Kobo, or B&N.
Thank you, as always, for listening! If you are up for leaving a rating or review for the podcast on your podcasting app, we would be very grateful!
Show Notes
Welcome Jayne Ann Krentz, she has had lot of pen names, including Jayne Taylor, Jayne Bentley, Stephanie James and Amanda Glass. Now she publishes under 3 names: Jayne Ann Krentz (contemporary), Jayne Castle (speculative fiction romance), and Amanda Quick (historical). She has said, “I am often asked why I use a variety of pen names. The answer is that this way readers always know which of my three worlds they will be entering when they pick up one of my books.”
We read Ravished for the podcast in 2021, or three decades ago. You know how it goes in these pandemic times.
People mentioned by Jayne: editor Vivian Stephens, author Barbara Delinksy, author Amii Loren, agent Steve Axelrod publishing executive Irwyn Applebaum, author Susan Elizabeth Phillips, author Kristin Hannah, author Debbie Macomber, author Christina Dodd, author Rachel Grant, author Darcy Burke, editor Leslie Gelbman, editor Cindy Hwang, editor Patricia Reynolds Smith.
Jayne Ann Krentz 0:00 / #
The thing about genre, the reason it even exists at all, is because it's the device and the mechanism by which we send our values down to the next generation. It's the way we affirm them to ourselves throughout our life, and it's the way a culture keeps its culture intact. It's the myth of the core value of that civilization, whatever it may be, that is going to go down through history and it survives or it doesn't survive, and that's what genre does, it carries the myth.
Sarah MacLean 0:35 / #
That was the voice of Jayne Ann Krentz. I am so excited! (laughs)
Jennifer Prokop 0:42 / #
Jayne Ann Krentz has written, probably, hundreds of romance novels at this point. Her major pen names right now are Jayne Ann Krentz, under which she writes kind of contemporaries, Jayne Castle is where she kind of puts all of her kind of speculative fiction novels, and Amanda Quick is what she writes historicals under, but she has been around for a really long time. She's going to start off by talking about her many pen names, which also include Jayne Taylor, Jayne Bentley, Stephanie James and Amanda Glass.
Sarah MacLean 1:13 / #
Amazing. This conversation, I've had the absolute joy of, you know, sharing meals with Jayne Ann Krentz, and so she is, I knew she was going to be remarkable, but this conversation really, gosh, I felt better for it at the end. I felt smarter about romance at the end, and I felt motivated in a way that I haven't felt motivated in a long time.
Jennifer Prokop 1:13 / #
Yeah, absolutely. Welcome to Fated Mates, everyone. What you're about to hear is our conversation with Jayne Ann Krentz which we recorded last fall in 2021.
Sarah MacLean 1:52 / #
Thank you so much for coming on and making time to join us for this. We're really thrilled to have you! We are avowed Jayne Ann Krentz, Amanda Quick, Jayne Castle fans. Stephanie James fans here! (laughter)
Jayne Ann Krentz 2:09 / #
Wait, let's not name all the names, that just makes me feel like I've been around forever. (laughter) I will say that was never the plan at the start. That was not part, there was no plan to be honest, but if there are any aspiring writers out there, one piece of advice for your takeaway today is for crying out loud, do not use a bunch of different pseudonyms! (laughter)
Sarah MacLean 2:34 / #
Well wait, so let's talk about that, because why not? You have, how many were there? How many are there total?
Jayne Ann Krentz 2:43 / #
Too many and the reason was because back in the old days, a lot of the contracts tied up your name, and if you signed one of those contracts, which of course I did early on, because I just wanted to be published, and it was like no big deal. Everybody writes under a pen name. And then there were two pen names. Because once you leave that house, they've got the name. It stays behind. I don't, I doubt that that appears in modern contracts, I have not heard of that for a long time. But back at the start of the romance rush in publishing, that was not an uncommon feature in a contract. So that's how it started, but it got worse because at some point, I managed to kill off a couple of names including my own. And you do that by low sales, you know, bombed out sales, which we'll get to when we talk about what a fool I was to go into science fiction romance, but it was a good way to kill off your career that time and I did because I wrote under my Jayne Ann Krentz name. So when I destroyed that, I destroyed my contemporary career, and it was at that point that I had to really retrench and figure out how to restart and reinvent myself and that was when Amanda Quick came along. So Amanda Quick is a legitimately acquired pen name, I did that to myself. Jayne Castle happens to be my birth name. I managed to sign that away for awhile, and then Jayne Ann Krentz is my married name. So I'm just under those three now.
Jennifer Prokop 4:28 / #
Now it's just the three, right?
Jayne Ann Krentz 4:30 / #
Yup. (laughs)
Jennifer Prokop 4:32 / #
So I was just thinking, was this only in romance? Did this happen to mystery writers or other genres?
Jayne Ann Krentz 4:41 / #
I don't know, but I'm willing to bet that it was pretty common in the paperback side of the market.
Jennifer Prokop 4:45 / #
Yeah. Okay.
Jayne Ann Krentz 4:46 / #
I don't, yeah, I think it was just kind of a common thing. If you look back, a lot of writers who are writing mystery and suspense today acquired a pen name at some point along the way.
Sarah MacLean 4:57 / #
So I always wondered, you know, you and I have had a lot of conversations over the years, Jayne, about patriarchy and romance, and I always thought the pen names were because of the books, but I guess mystery and sci-fi writers also did the pen name thing.
Jayne Ann Krentz 5:14 / #
The thing about a pen name, if you can get, if the publisher can get that into the contract, all a writer has is her name, and if they tie that up, you're tied to the house. It was just hard business, hard business is what it was.
Jennifer Prokop 5:29 / #
Well and I remember is an early reader of romance in the '80s, when you finally figured out, "Wait, this person is this person?"
Sarah MacLean 5:38 / #
Oh, it would blow your mind!
Jennifer Prokop 5:39 / #
Yeah, because then you were like, "Wait, there's a whole new someone I can look for in the bookstore," or the used bookstore especially, right?
Sarah MacLean 5:47 / #
Wasn't there a Romantic Times, somebody published, every year there was a publication that was like an encyclopedia of the romance novelists and it would say the names, all the names that that particular person was writing under, which when I started, maybe I started 12 years ago, and that was the time when if you wrote in different genres, which I feel like is the Jayne Ann Krentz way, you write a different genre you start a different name, but yeah, now, it's far less common, I think.
Jennifer Prokop 6:17 / #
I think it's common now. I'll tell you how it's different. I think when people self-publish, they sometimes pick a different name, and I think if especially if the heat level is really different, right? So I've had author friends say, "Well I'm going to try my hand at maybe something more erotic, and you know, is this going to interrupt my brand?" So I feel like it's so much more in control of the author, as opposed to control of the house, so that's a big change.
Jayne Ann Krentz 6:47 / #
Yeah, I think that's very true now. This was the way it was just done in the old days, and the rules were different then.
Sarah MacLean 6:54 / #
Yeah, so let's go back before you were picking pen names. So tell us about, we love the journey, so tell us about the journey. How did you become a writer? And how did you become a romance writer specifically?
Jayne Ann Krentz 7:11 / #
You know I think I just, there was never a point along the way at which I felt I could write romance better than books I was reading. I loved the genre. I found the books, I didn't really find the genre in the way we, anywhere near what we would identify it as today, until I was in, after college, until I was in my '20s. And then that's when I stumbled into Harlequin. They were the only game in town and they weren't even in town. And that was, that did me fine for few, I don't know how long it was that when I was reading them intensely that, before I wanted to try writing one. And it wasn't that I thought I could do it better than the big names at the time, I just wanted to tell the story my way. Most of the stories I was reading, well all of them, looking back on it I think, were very much the British take on the fantasy. And that's a very specific and very tweaked different take than what most American readers respond to.
Sarah MacLean 8:16 / #
Well can you explain, can you talk about that? What does that mean?
Jayne Ann Krentz 8:20 / #
Okay, the quick and easy way to understand it, is that in the British romance, your heroine is marrying up. She's marrying the duke or some version thereof. In the American romance, it's much more of a partnership kind of approach to the romance, and what matters is the man's competence. It doesn't matter what he does, he just better be damned good at it, and that's what counts. So it's a different take. There's also more sass in the American romance, and that may come from our good old 1930s movies, you know, those screwball comedies, and the fast chatter-chatter back and forth from the the 1930s romantic, and often romantic suspense films. I don't know where it came from, but it's just, it was in the American romance almost from the get go. The voice is so different, and it's more of a conversational quick repartee. It actually isn't original with us. I mean that's what Georgette Heyer was doing, but it kind of fell away in the British romance that I was reading and came back big time in the American romance.
Sarah MacLean 9:35 / #
And so when you talk about this, the American romance, these books that you were reading, we're talking about categories, the early categories? Or are you talking about historicals from the '70s too?
Jayne Ann Krentz 9:47 / #
I didn't start reading - (laughs) confession time.
Sarah MacLean 9:51 / #
(laughs) Good! Let's do it.
Jayne Ann Krentz 9:53 / #
I never read historicals. I wanted the contemporary story. I wanted romantic suspense and that was to be found in a contemporary setting in those days. So I never was drawn to the historicals until I managed to kill off my Jayne Ann Krentz career and I had to reinvent myself as Amanda Quick, and then I was starting from scratch because I had no idea how those books worked.
Jayne Ann Krentz 10:18 / #
So, but I'm a librarian, so...
Sarah MacLean 10:21 / #
Okay, so were you a librarian when you were reading and writing?
Jayne Ann Krentz 10:25 / #
Yes.
Sarah MacLean 10:26 / #
And so tell us where you were, and you were?
Jayne Ann Krentz 10:31 / #
Well, probably the lowest point of my library career was one year I spent as a school librarian. That's a calling, not a career (laughs), and I was not called. And then spent the rest of my library career at Duke University Library, and then later, a couple of corporate libraries out West here.
Sarah MacLean 10:54 / #
We interviewed Beverly Jenkins for the series, and she, too, was a corporate librarian. So I feel like there are all these little connections.
Jayne Ann Krentz 11:02 / #
Yeah. Well, that was the most boring work, actually, the corporate work. I mean it was a job and I needed a job, but for me it was much more interesting to work with readers, scholars, students, you know, people who were actually after information, not just the latest drawing for that particular gadget that they got to dismantle. But that's just me. I just happen to like the public work better.
Jennifer Prokop 11:32 / #
Jayne, we read your book, Gentle Pirate, and the heroine was a corporate librarian, I think, right? Was that around the time that you had that job? I mean, this would have been like the very early '80s.
Jayne Ann Krentz 11:45 / #
That was the first book I wrote that sold.
Jennifer Prokop 11:47 / #
Okay.
Jayne Ann Krentz 11:49 / #
There was another book that came out, actually a few months earlier, but it was actually sold after Gentle Pirate. Gentle Pirate was sold into the beginning of the Ecstasy line. That was the line that...
Jennifer Prokop 12:03 / #
Vivian Stephens.
Jayne Ann Krentz 12:04 / #
Vivian Stephens founded, Vivian Stephens was, you know, she really turned the whole American romance industry, book publishing industry on its head. She just totally changed everything. If it hadn't been for her. I don't know how it would have developed, but she was a game changer, and because of her, a lot of what we now take as familiar voices in the genre got their start. It started with Vivian Stephens.
Sarah MacLean 12:32 / #
Yeah, it was that first class with Vivian was you and Sandra Kitt, and Sandra Brown and...
Jayne Ann Krentz 12:38 / #
Some other names that have come and gone that were big at the time...Barbara Delinsky. Yeah, but I was thinking of Amy Lauren.
Jennifer Prokop 12:49 / #
We read that one, too.
Jayne Ann Krentz 12:51 / #
She was Book One, in that line, yeah.
Sarah MacLean 12:55 / #
So you were writing, so you sat down, you put pen to paper. Did you have people who were encouraging you? Was it a secret?
Jayne Ann Krentz 13:03 / #
(laughs) Of course it's a secret.
Sarah MacLean 13:04 / #
Of course it's secret! (laughs)
Jayne Ann Krentz 13:05 / #
You're not going to tell anybody you're trying to write a book until you've actually...
Sarah MacLean 13:11 / #
I don't know. I told everyone. (laughs)
Jayne Ann Krentz 13:17 / #
Back in my day it was not something you said anything, you just, the closest you would have gotten. and I tried a couple times and it was disastrous, was to attend a writers group, a local writers group, but I wasn't really welcome there, because I was really flat out trying to write genre fiction. And romance at the time, was of all the genres, the least of them in terms of respect, and everybody else was trying to write a memoir.
Sarah MacLean 13:44 / #
Still, that's still the case. Everyone in the writing group is writing a memoir. (laughs)
Jayne Ann Krentz 13:50 / #
And I didn't see that as very helpful. What changed that landscape, the business landscape, so that I stopped signing stupid contracts that tied up my name was, again, Vivian Stephens, because she was the one that got us all together for the first Romance Writers of America meeting. And that changed everything for all of us in terms of finally being able to learn about the business.
Jayne Ann Krentz 14:16 / #
Because I'll tell you, the publishers did not want you to know about how it worked. We couldn't read contracts. I mean, it's just this gobbledygook. They still are but now, at least, you've got an agent, usually to help you, or you can get a lawyer to help.
Sarah MacLean 14:29 / #
Right, well, this is important. So you didn't have an agent in these early days selling Harlequins?
Jayne Ann Krentz 14:37 / #
I did eventually but not at the very...
Sarah MacLean 14:38 / #
But most people didn't. They just sort of packed up their manuscript and shipped it off?
Jayne Ann Krentz 14:43 / #
I take it back. I had an agent for the first couple of books and she really ripped me off. So I like to forget that, it was not a good experience. And after that I went solo because I didn't trust agents for a while. So I didn't calm down about agents until RWA. The first meeting of RWA when the agent showed up and you could talk to one and, you know, that's how I met my current agent Steven Axelrod. So...
Sarah MacLean 15:09 / #
Who is an agent for many, many, many of the big names of the genre.
Jayne Ann Krentz 15:14 / #
He was at the time because he was one of the few agents who took the genre seriously and saw that it was going to go big once the US publishers got into the business.
Jayne Ann Krentz 15:27 / #
And so he, he just jumped in early. It was timing, good timing on his part.
Jennifer Prokop 15:32 / #
So going back to these first books you wrote, Gentle Pirate you wrote first? Or did you have things in the drawer that didn't sell? What was that sort of journey to actually getting a contract or actually selling those first books? Where did those stories come from?
Jayne Ann Krentz 15:50 / #
Well, the very first book I wanted to write was actually what we would call futuristic romance, and I wrote a futuristic romance. And tip number two, for any authors out there, it does not pay to be too far ahead of the curve.
Jennifer Prokop 16:07 / #
Yeah, not in genre.
Jayne Ann Krentz 16:09 / #
Yeah, you've got to hit the wave just right to make it work. But, um, but that didn't sell. And then what I was actually reading was contemporary romance, because that's all there was. The reason, to backtrack, the reason I actually wrote the first futuristic romance and had hopes of selling it was because I came across, I was on a student cheap ass tour of Europe, and somewhere on some sidewalk, one of those book kiosks, had some American novels and I was out of stuff to read. And the book that changed my life was on that kiosk, and it was Anne McCaffrey's Restoree.
Jayne Ann Krentz 16:11 / #
Which was, yes, futuristic romance. And I don't think it did her career any good either, because she never wrote another. She moved on to dragons.
Jennifer Prokop 17:05 / #
To great success, right? To great success.
Sarah MacLean 17:07 / #
I mean, who didn't love a dragon.
Jayne Ann Krentz 17:09 / #
But she wrote a really, what we would call today is, you know, straight up what I'm doing with Harmony, and the Jayne Castle name, very much. So that was the life changing thing about that. But after that realized that I couldn't really make a living on the futuristic books, but the thing I was actually reading was contemporary. And that's what I backed off and plunged into.
Sarah MacLean 17:32 / #
So, then walk us through...I have lots of questions. So you're there with Vivian Stephens, and you're the first book, Stephanie James has the first book in one of the lines, right? You have one of the number ones, correct? Or am I making that up?
Jayne Ann Krentz 17:48 / #
I can't remember.
Sarah MacLean 17:49 / #
I might be making that up, but I'm pretty sure you're number one somewhere. So you're writing categories, and you're how many, I mean, this is one of the things that I love about people who were writing categories. How many books? How many publishers are you working for? How many books are you writing a year? What's this look like?
Jayne Ann Krentz 18:07 / #
Well, keep in mind the books are a little shorter than what we think of as a full-length paperback novel. They were probably about 68,000 words. They weren't novellas by any means.
Jayne Ann Krentz 18:18 / #
They were not as long as a full length novel. So and the other thing factored into it, is that you couldn't make a living unless you did three or four year. I mean, if you're trying to make a living at it, you're gonna, and you couldn't build a brand.
Sarah MacLean 18:33 / #
Right. You have to feed the beast. That's what we've been talking about so much. And then at what point do you think to yourself, alright, well maybe, does single title, the bigger books come later?
Jayne Ann Krentz 18:47 / #
Well, there was no market for single title except historicals.
Jayne Ann Krentz 18:51 / #
And I had resisted writing those because I didn't read them, with the exception of Georgette Heyer, which I had read those long in my teenage years, and I didn't think they were modern romances.
Sarah MacLean 19:01 / #
Sure. Well, and they're not, right. They don't have sex in them. They're not quite the same as the modern romance.
Jayne Ann Krentz 19:07 / #
No, not at all. So then after I was a success in category, category, as the publishers were starting to do one-offs. They were starting to experiment with the single title, and they wouldn't let me do it because I was not quite ready.
Sarah MacLean 19:26 / #
Oh, those words, that you're not ready. You hear that all the time from people because there was this idea, would you explain to everybody kind of how the system worked?
Jayne Ann Krentz 19:35 / #
I think the editors didn't have a sense of what really worked in the books with the exception of people like Vivian Stephens. But most of the editors I worked with were not real fans of the genre. They didn't read the books, it was a job and they did it as much as possible by the numbers, because they didn't know, they didn't react to the books themselves. I think that limits your vision of, and then they read outside the genre, and it wasn't romance. So they had a vision of what books outside the genre was and it wasn't romance. So they were probably, in hindsight, were looking for something more along the lines of what we would call women's fiction. You know, big, big book, women's fiction.
Sarah MacLean 20:18 / #
To kind of break you out of romance? The idea was eventually you would be "good enough" and I'm using air quotes for everyone, to get out of romance.
Jayne Ann Krentz 20:27 / #
Yeah, but I didn't want to get out of it. I wanted to write romance.
Sarah MacLean 20:29 / #
Thank you for that.
Jennifer Prokop 20:32 / #
Yeah, thanks.
Jayne Ann Krentz 20:34 / #
And then what happened was, it was a publisher. It was Simon and Schuster, Irwyn Applebaum. He was a publisher at Simon and Schuster. What was the name? What was the imprint?
Sarah MacLean 20:50 / #
Are you talking about Pocket?
Jayne Ann Krentz 20:52 / #
Yeah, Pocket books. Yeah, yeah. He took the first risk of publishing romance writers in big book format and in hardcover, and they just went through the roof. And so he really, eventually, I was published by him, but back at the start I didn't have that good luck. But he's the one that I think, in hindsight, really opened up that market and basically proved to New York publishing that, yes, these women readers will pay full price for a novel.
Sarah MacLean 21:27 / #
So what is your first single title? At what point do you make that switch?
Jayne Ann Krentz 21:33 / #
Well, I guess the first single title will be the one, the science fiction that failed.
Sarah MacLean 21:36 / #
Right. So I'm going to hold it up. This, Sweet Starfire, this is what we're talking about. This is, I'm sure you know about this, The Romance Novel in English which is a catalogue from Rebecca Romney. She's put together a collection of first editions and important works from the genre. She's a rare books dealer, and we're obsessed, Jen and I are obsessed with this.
Jennifer Prokop 21:55 / #
Yes, we are.
Sarah MacLean 21:57 / #
So Sweet Starfire is, I mean, it's not the first time anybody's ever written science fiction in romance, but this is it, right? This, this feels like a moment.
Jayne Ann Krentz 22:08 / #
I think because it was it was a true romance, in the American style. It had everything that the contemporaries had, just a different backdrop.
Jayne Ann Krentz 22:20 / #
And what that brought to the plate was you could do different kinds of plots. You could open up the plots.
Sarah MacLean 22:27 / #
Well, the argument being that Sweet Starfire opens the door to paranormal, as we know it, right?
Jennifer Prokop 22:34 / #
Well done.
Sarah MacLean 22:35 / #
I mean, which is a thing, it's major! There, and, you know, maybe we would have gotten there probably to vampires and everything else, but we got there, I think more quickly, because of you. So it's my podcast, so I get to say it. (laughter)
Jayne Ann Krentz 22:51 / #
I've always divided what's, okay, what Sweet Starfire had and what all my science fiction has is a very psychic vibe.
Sarah MacLean 23:00 / #
Mm hmm.
Jayne Ann Krentz 23:01 / #
And I have always drawn a very bright line between the psychic and the supernatural. So when you say paranormal, I tend to think of the supernatural, I tend to shapeshifters and vampires and witches, which I love to read, but I can't write. They're not, they don't fit my core story. So I've always thought of it as a separate area, and then there's the psychic romance or whatever you want to call it.
Jennifer Prokop 23:27 / #
Which you're still, I mean, those are still the Fogg Lake trilogy, which the, is it the third one comes out in January?
Jayne Ann Krentz 23:36 / #
I just want to take a moment here to say to anybody in the audience, this proves I can finish a trilogy.
Jennifer Prokop 23:42 / #
Well done. But that, it is psychic. It's you know essentially, everybody, the conceit is a fog goes over this town from a mysterious governmental entity and a whole towns full of people develop sort of psychic powers. And then it's like the next generation and the fallout. So it's interesting to hear you draw that line all the way back to books you're writing in the '80s.
Jayne Ann Krentz 24:10 / #
Yeah, I've always felt that difference, but I don't know that readers see it. It's just as a writer, I'm aware of it. But I think the reason I've been attracted to the psychic vibe from the very beginning, is because for me, it enhances the relationship. It gives that extra level of knowing between two people, and connection and bond. And it gives me other plots to play with. It gives me a little outside the box plot sort of thing, I think. But I also think it has a, it works because it's just one step beyond intuition, and most people can get into intuition. Most people believe in intuition. So asking them to take the psychic thing is just that one step beyond, whereas they may not be able to do the vampire thing or the supernatural thing, that may be a step too far for a lot of readers. But I think a lot of readers are fine with the psychic vibe, because everybody thinks they've got one.
Jennifer Prokop 25:10 / #
Right. Fair.
Sarah MacLean 25:12 / #
Wait, I want to go back to it doesn't fit my core story. So you might be the first person who ever explained core story to me, at a lunch at RWA, which I'm sure you do not remember. But I want you to talk about what core story is for, I mean, for everyone, but also, let's talk about yours. Because you seem to know very clearly what your core story is.
Jayne Ann Krentz 25:39 / #
I think I'm pretty familiar with it, because I had to understand it at that earlier point, when I killed off my science fiction career and had to reinvent myself as Amanda Quick, and I had never written a historical. So what I did was, I looked at that science fiction book, the last science fiction book, which was Shield's Lady. And I stepped back and I said, you know, duh, if you take out the rocket ships, and the funny animals and the other planet stuff, what you're really looking at here is a marriage of convenience. And then I thought, well dang, I know where those fit. So, so it was understanding a marriage of convenience, built on mutual trust, is what led me down the road to historicals. And then I realized it's what I always do. And I think it's important for writers to have a sense of their core story. And if you know your core story, you can sum it up in two or three words max. That's how elemental it is, because it has nothing to do with backgrounds, it has nothing to do with plots, it has nothing to do with the eras that you're writing in, it's all about the emotions you're working with, and the conflicts that you're working with. My core story is always founded somewhere on trust. And that's, like, I can write forever about it, because that's pulled from the inside. It's just a deep, deep thing that I am always curious about, interested in, everybody gets violated at one point or another, has their trust violated, everybody's been through that experience. Everybody has taken the risk of trust. You have to do it daily, basically. So it's a risk we're all familiar with, um, and it can wreck a life or it can change a life. And to me, that's all I need. That's just plenty to work with. So I think once you find the conflicts and the emotions that you love to work with, you're going to be able to explore, that's your universe, is what it comes down to. That is your universe, and you're going to write in every corner of that universe, some corner, every corner, for the rest of your career. I think. (laughs) That's my theory and I'm sticking to it.
Sarah MacLean 28:00 / #
I think it's a great theory. And it also makes so much sense that you weren't interested in leaving romance, because trust and love go hand in hand so well, that it makes sense. So when you, I want to get to Amanda Quick, the choice to do the Amanda Quick switch. So you say you've killed off your science fiction career. You're not writing contemporary single titles at this point. Is that because they don't exist generally, or you're just not?
Jayne Ann Krentz 28:31 / #
You know I don't think so. I think they were all historical.
Sarah MacLean 28:33 / #
Still at this point.
Jayne Ann Krentz 28:35 / #
Yeah.
Sarah MacLean 28:35 / #
Okay, and so you decide, because this is the late '80s?
Jayne Ann Krentz 28:40 / #
Yeah.
Jennifer Prokop 28:40 / #
Yeah, it feels like the only person I could think of who might have been writing an occasional single title...who wrote Perfect?
Sarah MacLean 28:45 / #
Contemporary.
Jennifer Prokop 28:50 / #
Yeah, contemporary. It was Perfect and...
Sarah MacLean 28:52 / #
McNaught.
Jennifer Prokop 28:50 / #
Yeah, Mcnaught had a couple. And there were a couple...
Sarah MacLean 28:58 / #
But that's a different angle into it, right, because McNaught was writing those big epic historicals and then, so the idea of her being asked to cut 100,000 words out of her books to write category is, I mean, she just wouldn't.
Jennifer Prokop 29:12 / #
Sure. Not going to happen.
Sarah MacLean 29:13 / #
I think Judith McNaught's amazing, but I doubt she'd be very quick to be like, "Yeah, I can write it in a third of the words." So you, at what point do you know you've killed your career?
Jayne Ann Krentz 29:27 / #
The same way you always know it. I couldn't get another contract with that publisher.
Jayne Ann Krentz 29:31 / #
When they stop giving you contracts, that's a pretty big sign.
Sarah MacLean 29:34 / #
Pretty good sign.
Jayne Ann Krentz 29:37 / #
And that's when an agent really earns their keep, in a sense, because it was my agent who sold me as, I had to come up with a proposal he could work with, and it was the Amanda Quick proposal, for my first Amanda Quick book. And he just did a dang good job selling it to Bantam Books at the time, and he sold them without telling who it was.
Sarah MacLean 30:02 / #
That is a story you hear all the time.
Jennifer Prokop 30:05 / #
Yeah.
Jayne Ann Krentz 30:07 / #
And then once they committed to the book, then he could say, "Well, that's Jayne. Yeah, that's Jayne." So, but that's, that's, you know, he did a miraculous job of resurrecting my career at that point.
Sarah MacLean 30:20 / #
Not just resurrecting your career, I mean, suddenly, Amanda Quick, you know, is everywhere. Amanda Quick is one of, Jen and I both...
Jennifer Prokop 30:29 / #
Oh, yeah.
Sarah MacLean 30:30 / #
This is one of the names that we came to romance with.
Jayne Ann Krentz 30:34 / #
I think, I think what I just realized too late, probably should have realized earlier, was that the Regency, which is where I started, it is the perfect background for my voice, and it works just like the '30s is working now for that voice. It's a very similar kind of voice or of conversation and dialogue, just suits my style. Both eras suit my style.
Jennifer Prokop 30:59 / #
So as a writer, you're choosing to do something that's really out of your comfort zone, it sounds like. So how was that experience for you? Was it generative? Did you find yourself really? Or was it always like a I would love to get back to my roots? How did that, how did it go for you?
Jayne Ann Krentz 31:19 / #
Well I hadn't been there, so there was no roots to go back to, except the realization that the story I was telling fit that Regency in the way that the old Georgette Heyer had, that I kind of, that's what I clung to. What I worried most about because I was, am, are a librarian, was the research. And that was, to tell you the truth, is the reason I hadn't gone into the historicals in the first place. I had majored in history. I knew how complicated it was, but the lesson I learned very fast, was that when you write, when you write genre, you are writing not the real history, but you're writing the myth. And the myth of the Regency was already there because Georgette Heyer had created it so I just wrote on that.
Sarah MacLean 32:12 / #
So one of the things, when we read Ravished on Fated Mates, we did a deep dive episode on the book, and you know, we love it. And one of the things that we talked about was how, you didn't invent the bluestocking, obviously, Heyer was there before you but there is a difference. Amanda Quick comes on the scene, and suddenly it's like a door opens on historicals. And I'm wondering if you, does that, I mean, first of all, do you think that that's a good read on what was going on? Because it feels like prior to that, you know, you had all of the big, you know, the four J's and you had kind of other historicals that were doing a kind of different thing. And then in comes the Amanda Quick historical with the smart, you know, savvy heroine, the bluestocking, the hero who is her true partner from the start. I mean, going back to your core story now that you've said that, of course, right.
Jennifer Prokop 33:15 / #
Of course. Exactly. That's how I felt too.
Sarah MacLean 33:16 / #
But at the same, and so I, you know, I reread all of your pieces in Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women in preparation for this conversation, and we'll get there. But one of the things that you talk about is this idea of the hero as both hero and villain. He plays both roles. And I think that is really true prior to you in historicals, but he doesn't become the hero until much later in those earlier historicals, versus, you know, when you think about the hero of Ravished, he's a decent dude from the jump. And I think that is really, it feels like a Jayne Ann Krentz or an Amanda Quick Regency suddenly was doing a little bit of a different thing. Was that intentional? Or was it you were just doing the different thing?
Jayne Ann Krentz 33:19 / #
It was just intuitive.
Jayne Ann Krentz 33:26 / #
Because that's, that's the kind of character I'd always written. If you read my books from the beginning, my heroes haven't changed much over the years. You know, pretty much my heroes, they do what they do, and that they're infused with my core values in what I think works in the hero and same with the heroines. And I think if you respond to my books or any author's books, it's because, you're not responding so much to the story, the plot, the characters, you're responding to the core values infused into the primary characters. And if and if you respond to those values, you're probably going to go back to those books, that author again and again. If you don't respond to him, it's a boring book, and I think that's how it works. So if you read my books, it's probably because you got my sense of humor. And you have the same, you share a lot of the same core values. The thing about genre, the reason it even exists at all, is because it's the device and the mechanism by which we send our values down to the next generation. It's the way we affirm them to ourselves throughout our life. And it's the way a culture keeps its culture intact. It's the myth of the core value of that civilization, whatever it may be, that is going to go down through history, and it survives or it doesn't survive. And that's, that's what genre does, it carries the myth.
Jennifer Prokop 35:40 / #
I love that.
Jayne Ann Krentz 35:42 / #
That's my theory.
Jennifer Prokop 35:46 / #
That I think is really true. And when I think about myself as a romance reader for 40 years, or however long it's been. It's not that quite that long. I feel like I really do see that, like those arcs. But at the same time, I feel like there's so many ways I can talk about how romance has changed. So for you, what are the things, like they're still the big things that are the same? What are the things that have changed in romance, do you think?
Jayne Ann Krentz 36:15 / #
Those dang cell phones. (laughter) You laugh, but I'm telling you. I know, I know what you mean. And one of the tricks to success in this business is trying not to tie your story down to a particular era, unless you're really telling that era's story. I mean, if, you know, when you do the 1930s, you do the 1930s. But, but if you want the books to have a long life, it's best not to put in any gadgets or...
Sarah MacLean 36:48 / #
Celebrity names.
Jayne Ann Krentz 36:50 / #
Celebrity names, politician's names, history, local ongoing history. Keep it, the more you limit it to the myth and the mythical side of the story, the longer that story is going to survive. But that's, that's a whole other issue here. Clearly, the surface changes all the time. And that's just true of any genre. But the underlying power of the genre that you love to read, whatever that genre is, doesn't change very much. And so I'm still writing relationships that have to overcome the hurdle of trust, and it's not going to change. You know, that has nothing to do with politics or history or social problems. I think the more you deal in social problems, the more you move away from genre, in a sense, because you're dealing with the superficial again, you're back to what's current now, but 20 years from now, that won't be an issue. Some things will be issues, because they're they're universal things. I'm thinking now about women's voting, getting the right to vote. It's an interesting historical detail, and it's an important historical detail. And you can tell stories around it, because the Suffragette movement was so important, but it is, it's a different take. It's, I think what happens when you do that is like, it's like, okay, it's clear to see it set in, in a war. Any book you write set in World War Two, no matter what you do, the war is going to be the primary character. Nothing. In the end, there will be sacrifices, and everything will be sacrificed to doing the right thing in the war. Because that's the other thing that genre does, which is call upon its characters at one point or another, to do the right thing. And we have a sense of, a sense of what a real hero does when the chips are down. We have a sense of what a heroine is supposed to do when push comes to shove, and they do the right thing. That's how, that's, that's all that matters. And that works big time if you're setting the story against an overwhelming backdrop like a world war. It's Casablanca. You never see, you never see any fighting or shooting. It was one gun but you know what I mean.
Sarah MacLean 39:21 / #
War is everything.
Jayne Ann Krentz 39:23 / #
Right. Everybody sacrifices for the war effort. And it's just, I'll never write that story because it's not mine. That does not fit. It doesn't come back to the trust between two people that I want to write about. I can admire it, you know, it's not that, but it's not my story.
Sarah MacLean 39:40 / #
As you're writing, in your career, you know, you've spanned, you know, you started with categories, you've written single titles, you've written sci-fi, you've written historicals, you've written, you write contemporaries now, still. At what point in this journey are you thinking, "Oh my gosh, romance is a big deal. I mean, it's really, there are millions and millions of women out there who are reading these books, largely women."
Jayne Ann Krentz 40:09 / #
Guess when the big checks started coming. (laughter) You know, once the American publishers got into the market, it became a big business really fast, because that's just how the American market works. If it works, it explodes. You know what I mean?
Sarah MacLean 40:22 / #
Everyone's throwing books out all the time.
Jayne Ann Krentz 40:25 / #
You can clutter up the market in a hurry, you know, but that's kind of a normal process. And yeah, I just think that the process of becoming a big business happened really quickly, and simultaneously, or concomitantly, or whatever, right along with it, came the foundation of Romance Writers of America, which gave the romance writer access to information about the business. So we grew up with it, in a sense, that first generation of romance, American romance writers grew up learning fast.
Sarah MacLean 41:03 / #
Because at the time Romance Writers of America was about the business, right? It was about professional writers coming together to share, to information share.
Jayne Ann Krentz 41:12 / #
It was networking.
Jayne Ann Krentz 41:14 / #
We didn't, we didn't have that word for it, but that's what it was. And a lot of the friends I have today, I made back in those early days of networking.
Sarah MacLean 41:21 / #
So talk about that. What was this community like? Who were they? What were you getting from them? How are you interacting?
Jayne Ann Krentz 41:30 / #
Back at the beginning, only published writers were in the group. It later opened up to unpublished writers, but back at the time, we all had the same interests because we were all published, we're all dealing with publishers, we're all dealing with contracts, we're all trying to find agents, you know, that there was a lot of business to discuss, and the other organization, Novelists, Inc., also came along about that time. And gradually, I think people realized that romance writers had a lot of, all the same concerns and interests as the writers in the other genres. So there was some cross networking there too. It wasn't always comfortable, but you knew that there were other writers groups out there that had the same issues and and you could learn from them. So I just think it was the networking thing that today happens online. So it isn't maybe so necessary to have the organizations that, that we just didn't have that online option. I didn't know any other published writers until I went to that first meeting of the RWA, the very first RWA.
Sarah MacLean 42:38 / #
Yeah. Who is the group of people who keep you going?
Jayne Ann Krentz 42:43 / #
Well, Susan Elizabeth Phillips. Kristen Hannah. A lot of it is, are friends I know here, like Debbie Macomber, because we have a lot of us happen to end up in the Pacific Northwest. Christina Dodd. More newer friends who've come along right now, for example, Rachel Grant, who is doing a really interesting, modern, very modern version of the heroine who is an archaeologist, and it's kind of the new Amelia Peabody, but except very modern. And Darcy Burke.
Sarah MacLean 43:18 / #
Were there editors who you feel were essential to the growth, your growth as a writer?
Jayne Ann Krentz 43:26 / #
Yes, and to the genre, because I said back at the beginning, a lot of the editors were not people who actually loved the genre. For a lot of editors, it was a starting point in their careers, which they hoped to move on to other kinds of books, I suppose. But years ago, it's been a few decades now, I can't remember when, editors started coming into the genre, who like Vivian Stephens just loved the books, just have a gut way to buy the books, they can buy them by intuition, because they read the books, they knew how they worked. So editors like Leslie Gelbman, and my editor today, Cindy Hwang, who pretty much invented the whole paranormal publishing industry.
Sarah MacLean 44:14 / #
We should say Leslie Gelbman also edits Nora Roberts. So you've you've probably read something by Leslie Gelbman's authors before.
Jayne Ann Krentz 44:23 / #
And those editors, and they have in turn mentored a group of younger editors coming up, and they choose their people now. They choose their editorial staff knowing that they need writers, they need authors, they need these editors to bring in authors who will work long term, and that takes an editorial eye that loves the basic story.
Sarah MacLean 44:50 / #
Right. So there's this, it feels like there's this editorial mindset of building a career, of buying an author and shepherding. them through the journey.
Jayne Ann Krentz 45:01 / #
Yeah. Yeah. It won't probably last a lifetime, but their careers and the writer's careers in that kind of publishing are very intertwined. There is no getting around it. On the other side of the coin is the self-publishing, the indie published authors, who don't have that kind of connection, and it's a very different publishing world for them. It's an interesting, it's an interesting thing that's happened in the industry, because I think between the two, the writers finding editors who love the books, and the independent writers who don't need gatekeepers, which basically New York editing is a gatekeeping job. And agents are gatekeepers too. But the indie crowd doesn't have to worry about gatekeepers. So between those two groups, they kind of have revolutionized the whole romance genre, in that they have allowed an almost unlimited variety of experiments. And that has kept the genre, keeps it fresh, it keeps reinventing itself because it keeps going new places. Some of the other genres can't say that. They're much more hidebound, much more rigid, in what's acceptable. If you put a vampire cop into a traditional murder mystery, it's not gonna sell. They don't want vampires in there. They know what they want in their murder mysteries and it ain't vampires, but a romance reader will look at it. She may not like that book, but she'll give that story a chance. So the readers were inclined to be experimental too. They'll try something new. And that's, that's just been an amazing thing for the whole genre, because it keeps churning, it keeps changing. It keeps adding and experimenting, and one of the reasons we were able to do that, even in the early days, was because nobody cared enough about romance to make any rules.
Jayne Ann Krentz 47:08 / #
We skated under the radar, and it was very useful for those of us who didn't know there were rules. It's like, "Oh, okay." (laughs)
Sarah MacLean 47:16 / #
So let's talk about this, Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women, because I would like to hear the story of how this came to be in 1992.
Jayne Ann Krentz 47:30 / #
I think at that point in my career, I was very successful. I knew a lot of other successful writers. And as the saying goes, we didn't get any respect. And it wasn't that I wanted people to love my books. I understood, I don't read a lot of other people's books too, you know. I have no problem that you don't want to read the books, but the criticism was not proper criticism. It was not literary criticism. It was blowing off not just the the writers, but the readers, and the implication was, they're not well educated. They don't have a lot of money. They're, it just wrote everybody off from from the consumer through the writer.
Sarah MacLean 48:10 / #
And are you talking about specifically academics at this point? Or because there's a very famous late '80s study that came out about romance readers that presents them in this way?
Jennifer Prokop 48:22 / #
Is this Radway?
Sarah MacLean 48:24 / #
The Radway.
Jayne Ann Krentz 48:25 / #
No, I read the book and it's, okay, one of the things I learned about going into academic publishing, which I did one time and we will never do it again (laughter), is that you are expected to take a, what would be the right word, of philosophical slant, and then bring in the proof that shows that your take on it is correct. I've always felt that didn't really, wasn't very helpful, because you can make anything look right, if you bring in the evidence that you want to bring. (laughter)
Jayne Ann Krentz 49:01 / #
Yeah, so I didn't, I didn't, and that was what passed for serious academic criticism. That was nothing compared to the jokes in the newspapers on Valentine's Day.
Sarah MacLean 49:11 / #
Sure. I mean, which still persist.
Jennifer Prokop 49:13 / #
Yeah.
Jayne Ann Krentz 49:14 / #
No, it ranged across the whole scale. So at that point, I was still in my feisty mode, I guess. (laughter)
Sarah MacLean 49:22 / #
I love it.
Jennifer Prokop 49:23 / #
We're still in our feisty mode, so pass the baton right over. (laughter)
Jayne Ann Krentz 49:28 / #
Just go. Run with it. Run with it. But I had been in the business long enough to know that there was one editor out there who straddled both the academic and the genre, and that was Patricia Reynolds Smith. I had met her while she was working for Harlequin. And then eventually she moved into academic, she went back to her roots, which was academic publishing, and was with the University of Pennsylvania Press. So I called her up, and I told her what I had in mind, and I said, "Where would I take a book like this?" And she said, "Right here."
Sarah MacLean 49:29 / #
Terrific.
Jayne Ann Krentz 49:29 / #
So she really is the one I give full credit to for that book, because she knew how to organize it so that it looked academic, so that it was acceptable to an academic reader, and that it met their standards, as well as told our side of the story.
Sarah MacLean 50:25 / #
And it's interesting, because at the beginning of this book, the first line of this book is, "Few people realize how much courage it takes for a woman to open a romance novel on an airplane." And it felt, I mean, I read that again, you know, this week, and it just felt like a shot to the heart because it, I mean, we've all been there, right?
Jennifer Prokop 50:44 / #
And people still feel this way, right? And this 30 years later.
Jayne Ann Krentz 50:49 / #
Why do you think romance readers were early adopters of ebooks? (laughter)
Jennifer Prokop 50:53 / #
Exactly. None of your business, right? None of your business.
Jayne Ann Krentz 50:57 / #
Yup.
Sarah MacLean 50:57 / #
But the idea, this kind of transformational idea of turning the text around and saying you're missing the point. This is for the reader. This is about these women, these, largely, women who are experiencing these books, the mythology of these books, the power of these books themselves, privately, had to have been kind of earth shattering for academics, because that's not what they were talking about in those other books, which I also have read.
Jayne Ann Krentz 51:27 / #
Interestingly enough, we have several warmly received reviews from female academics. The harshest critics for that book that I recall, were male.
Jayne Ann Krentz 51:41 / #
And they just didn't get it. It just, even with all our careful explaining, (laughter) apparently we didn't explain it to a lot of men very well, but most of the women I talked to afterward got it.
Sarah MacLean 51:57 / #
Yeah. So you get to, you send out an email, or well, you don't send out an email. (laughter) Wait, how do you get all these people?
Jennifer Prokop 52:08 / #
Exactly!
Sarah MacLean 52:08 / #
Oh my god, what is happening? (laughing)
Jennifer Prokop 52:10 / #
You don't text your friends?
Jayne Ann Krentz 52:13 / #
This, this is that thing called the telephone.
Jayne Ann Krentz 52:16 / #
You dial it.
Jennifer Prokop 52:19 / #
I remember now.
Sarah MacLean 52:20 / #
So you start picking up the phone and calling you know, the biggest names in the genre. Elizabeth Lowell is in here, Mary Jo Putney. Susan Elizabeth Phillips.
Jennifer Prokop 52:28 / #
Sandra Brown.
Sarah MacLean 52:29 / #
Sandra Brown. Stella Cameron. And you say what?
Jayne Ann Krentz 52:34 / #
I tried to explain what I was trying to do. But I've never been the best proposal writer. In terms of explaining, I can write a proposal, but pitching it verbally has always been hard for me. But I, after talking to Pat Smith, the editor, I had a sense of how how to phrase what I was asking for, which is I'm not going to give you a topic. I just want you to tell me what you think makes the books work. What is the appeal of the romance? And 19 authors came back with 19 different essays, that all went together very nicely. It just, they just worked across the spectrum. And that book is still in the libraries today, academic libraries today. And then that was what sort of Pat Smith told me going in, she said, after I was exhausted, because this took a year out of my life.
Jayne Ann Krentz 53:27 / #
You try herding 19 authors! (laughs)
Jennifer Prokop 53:29 / #
Yeah, right. Before email.
Sarah MacLean 53:32 / #
Before email. (laughter)
Jayne Ann Krentz 53:35 / #
And then having to be the one to pass along the edits .
Sarah MacLean 53:39 / #
The notes! How dare you! (laughs)
Jayne Ann Krentz 53:45 / #
Without losing any friendships in the process? You know, it was, but everybody came through and everybody was very gracious about it. So it was an interesting experience all the way around. But she said, "The one thing about this book is that it'll still be around 20 years from now."
Sarah MacLean 54:03 / #
And it is. I mean, it was, I mean, it's been on my shelf since the very beginning of my career. So...
Jayne Ann Krentz 54:09 / #
Thank you.
Sarah MacLean 54:10 / #
I'm really grateful for it. So we talked a lot about what your core story is and what makes a Jayne Ann Krentz novel. I wonder if we could talk about your readers? Do you, I mean, one of the things that really struck me in Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women in your introduction, as I said, was centering the reader. And you're, you have this conversation in the introduction where you talk about reader service. And I wonder, we all know, of course, as readers and writers of the genre that readers are really drawn to romance and it's a very different kind of relationship that writers have with romance readers. Do you have any moments that stick out from across your career of times when you've heard from readers or really understood the power of the genre with them?
Jayne Ann Krentz 55:02 / #
I think the thing that surprises me the most, and other writers I know have the same reaction, is how often a reader will take the time to let you know that your book got them through a tough time. And I think it speaks to the underlying communication of the emotional core of those stories. When you are sitting by a bedside of somebody who isn't doing well, you want you want to read something that is speaking to your heart, and speaking to your emotional core, and affirming your own deep core values. And romance does that for women. It does it for men too, I think, but we haven't really gone there, you know, acknowledge this. I am, I'm always surprised at how many male readers romance writers pick up along the way. That they do respond to the books, and often it's the wife buying the book. And then he reads it at home kind of thing. It's an interesting play. I remember asking one male reader who came through an autograph line, he was really, really into the books that he was buying, and he was very excited. And I asked him what it was he, what spoke to him in the stories and he said, and his son was with him, and he said, "My father just came back from the war." This was, he was a Vietnam vet. And the vet said, "I just don't want any more blood." And so he got a story with a little mystery in it, a little suspense in it, a lot of action, but no really grisly, horrifying things. So there may be more of that kind of reader out there than we realize, because so much of modern romance incorporates an element of suspense, which is also that romantic suspense is a, I think, also a really core American story.
Jennifer Prokop 57:08 / #
Yeah.
Sarah MacLean 57:09 / #
That's fascinating.
Jayne Ann Krentz 57:09 / #
It's just very popular.
Sarah MacLean 57:12 / #
Jen has a whole - Jen, I know you want to talk about Vietnam, and you should ask your question.
Jennifer Prokop 57:19 / #
So my dad fought in Vietnam. And you know, I read, looking back, I am fascinated by how, so I started reading romance when I was probably 12 or 13. And this would have been like the mid '80s. And so many of these heroes were men back from Vietnam. And I am just personally really - and Sarah's whole college thesis was about Vietnam.
Sarah MacLean 57:48 / #
Women on the homefront during Vietnam
Jennifer Prokop 57:50 / #
Right?
Sarah MacLean 57:51 / #
Probably because of romance novels, I mean, of course, because of romance novels,
Jennifer Prokop 57:55 / #
Sure, of course, right? And I think for both of us, I mean for me, it was just really personal. I still don't really understand my father. And when I read books about war by men, I'm reading about combat, but when I read romance about men coming home from war, I'm reading about my family. And I think that, I've always joked, I'm getting a little weepy. It's hard to talk about, because I feel like my dad's really broken and he still is, and no one, love didn't fix him, right? And I know that that's why I get so angry sometimes when people are like, "Women reading romance." I'm like, "Look, I wanted to live out a world where it was possible for my dad to be fixed by love." And romance gives me that. And I think that I'm just really fascinated by the way that those Vietnam heroes, to me, turned into romantic suspense in a lot of ways, right? Like we, we put it back on page. So I don't know if there's a question there. I think it's your heroes meant a lot to me, because I felt like here's somebody who's talking about how hard it was to live with these men who had come back from war, and didn't know how to be parts of families anymore.
Jayne Ann Krentz 59:12 / #
Now, and that is a common story after every war. It's not just Vietnam. It's every damn war that sent them home. And what happens is, these broken men came home, and the women are left to patch them up as best they can. Sometimes you just can't.
Jennifer Prokop 59:27 / #
Yeah.
Jayne Ann Krentz 59:28 / #
You know, the damage is too great. And I think the books acknowledge that. They give a happy ending because that's what we're in the business of providing, is a bit of hope at the end. But even with the happy ending, if you say that's unrealistic, and I don't know that it is for everyone. I mean, that in your case, obviously, it was, for the real life. But what those books gave you was the fact that you were not the only person dealing with this. Women across the country were dealing with this, and not always successfully, and they acknowledge that pain, they acknowledge the problem, they acknowledge the damage. Yes, they've tried to fix it with love, but in a way, that's not why you're...
Jennifer Prokop 1:00:13 / #
That wasn't it, right. It was just that it was there.
Jayne Ann Krentz 1:00:16 / #
Other people acknowledged it.
Jennifer Prokop 1:00:18 / #
I often say that, if you want to read about miscarriage, you should read romance. Because it's another place where it's like, these things happen to people and we go on. And I feel like that's one of the things, to me as a reader, it's the, and I just don't think romance gets enough credit for really...
Jayne Ann Krentz 1:00:38 / #
It doesn't.
Jennifer Prokop 1:00:39 / #
Really saying, "Look at what we go through and yet we still persevere or trust each other or find a way." That's why I read romance. Every every single romance gives me that.
Jayne Ann Krentz 1:00:52 / #
Because it is affirming a positive core value. It is affirming hope, which ultimately is all we've really got. (laughs) But on the respect side, I will tell you one story that has stuck with me for decades now. And that was years ago, I was at a conference, one of those book fairs. Remember the big book fairs? Seattle used to have a big book fair. And I was...
Sarah MacLean 1:01:22 / #
Remember when we all went places and stood with other people? (laughter)
Jayne Ann Krentz 1:01:27 / #
Those were the days. But I was standing with a crowd of local writers of all genres, because we just have a lot of local writers here. And there was a very well-known science fiction writer, a very well-known mystery writer, a very well-known memoir writer. I mean, there was just a bunch of us standing around. And somebody started whining about how they didn't get any respect. And I being the only romance writer, and I figured I had the biggest...
Sarah MacLean 1:01:57 / #
Oh boy. Was it a man?
Jennifer Prokop 1:01:59 / #
Bite me.
Jayne Ann Krentz 1:02:02 / #
I kept my mouth shut, because every single one of those genre writers had the same experience.
Sarah MacLean 1:02:08 / #
Yeah.
Jayne Ann Krentz 1:02:09 / #
They might, in turn, have been able to look down on me, but by golly, they felt looked down upon. (laughs) That sense, and that was another insight into the fact that by and large, our country, our culture does not give a lot of respect to genre fiction in general, not just romance. We might get the sharp end of the stick or whatever, but there isn't really a lot of respect for the genres compared to the literary novel. And that, I think, is a huge misunderstanding of the purpose of genres, which, as I said earlier, isn't so much to capture a moment in history, it's to capture values and core cultural beliefs, and affirm them and transmit them. And that's really crucial to a culture. That's more important to a culture, than a piece of snippet of time of that culture, which will never be, will never happen again. So you can write New York City problems or LA problems today or tomorrow, and that's a piece of history that you're doing, but it's the underlying core values that will decide whether or not it's the genre or literary. I think it just has a really important place in our culture. Every culture has a version of genre stories, and that's how humans tell stories, and why they tell them, I think. Because it's really kind of interesting, when you think about why do we tell stories, you know?(laughs) And we, even if you don't read, you're gonna be exposed to stories, you'll be inundated with stories on TV. I mean, it's just roll through.
Sarah MacLean 1:03:48 / #
Well, we talk all the time about, you know, how romance really scratches a kind of primordial itch. It feels, it hits you emotionally first, and then the story waves over you, crashes over you. And I think that's the power of all genre, is this idea that the stories have to be compelling, they have to keep you interested, and you know, keep you turning the pages, in a way that, and I don't, I'm with you. I don't understand why that's somehow less valuable. It feels more valuable in a lot of ways.
Jayne Ann Krentz 1:04:24 / #
RIght. I think it's because there's so much of it. Humans, just in general, tend to blow off anything that's got tons of it around. And there we are inundated with stories from film, from TV, from audiobooks, from books. It's just everywhere, so we tend not to give it a lot of respect.
Jennifer Prokop 1:04:43 / #
So back to your books. Are there books of yours that you're the most proud of or that you hear the most from readers about?
Sarah MacLean 1:04:52 / #
Maybe those are two different books.
Jennifer Prokop 1:04:54 / #
Yeah, could be.
Jayne Ann Krentz 1:04:55 / #
I've always heard a lot about Ravished. And that's because it is the most fundamental version of my core story.
Jennifer Prokop 1:05:02 / #
Yeah.
Jayne Ann Krentz 1:05:03 / #
And that's it's beauty and the beast thrown in with the trust thing.
Sarah MacLean 1:05:08 / #
For me, it's because Harriet says, "Well, it's not like I'm doing anything with my virginity." (laughter)
Jennifer Prokop 1:05:15 / #
A classic line forever.
Sarah MacLean 1:05:16 / #
It's the greatest moment in romance history when Harriet says that! (laughter)
Jayne Ann Krentz 1:05:21 / #
What is this doing, yeah? So I hear a lot about that one. But to tell you the truth, I, the book I love best is always the one I just finished. And I suppose that's because it's the one that I just most recently wrote my heart into, you know. And people tend to quote lines back at me. I'll hear lines from books and forget I wrote the line. I think the only line I really remember writing, and it's only because I heard it quoted so many times after the book came out, which was, "Good news. She doesn't need therapy." (laughter) That was from Perfect Partners, and I've heard that line my whole life. (laughs)
Sarah MacLean 1:06:05 / #
Proof Jayne Ann Krentz is not from New York City. (laughter) So that's great. Do you feel like there is a book that you, is there a book of yours that you wish would outlive you? If you could choose one?
Jayne Ann Krentz 1:06:25 / #
It isn't, I don't think of my own books as being that kind of book that would speak to future generations. I don't, it'd be nice if it did, but I don't have a strong sense, it's not part of what I'm trying to write for. But what I hope outlives and lives on is the genre itself. Because I think the romance genre is probably the core genre from which everything else derives. You can't write any of the other genres without that core story of relationships. At least they won't be very interesting stories if you don't. [include romance] So I hope we never, I hope as a culture, we never lose the romance genre, simply because I think it is, it's a critical voice and a critical kind of story that we need, because it's all about the foundation of a union, a family and a community. And that core value is what holds civilization together. So there we go. We need romance to keep civilization going.
Sarah MacLean 1:07:38 / #
Amen.
Jennifer Prokop 1:07:39 / #
So much pressure.
Sarah MacLean 1:07:42 / #
I think that's a perfect place to end. Jen, do you have anything else?
Jennifer Prokop 1:07:45 / #
No, this was unbelievable. I'm going to go lay in my bed and think for a long time.
Sarah MacLean 1:07:53 / #
It really, it's transformational this conversation. It makes you think. I mean, when she said, "genre carries the myth." Stop it. I just, I immediately wrote it down on a post-it note.
Jennifer Prokop 1:08:05 / #
Yes. Well, I mean, so I said at the beginning that we recorded this months ago, right? We're actually recording the topper the week before it airs and this part. And I have been thinking about that part of the conversation for so long. Not only because I think it's so smart about what genre does and why it works the way it does. You know, specifically the thing that she said too about in genre characters are called upon to do the right thing.
Sarah MacLean 1:08:33 / #
Aww, right! It just makes sense!
Jennifer Prokop 1:08:35 / #
It's just to make sense, right? Like this myth making aspect of it. But next week we are going to be talking about a historical romance called Passion. And one of the things that we ended up talking about and I think we've talked about over and over again, is why it is that so many readers will come after historical authors and say, "That's not true." I think a lot of people look at it about like historical accuracy. But it's, when you think about it instead as being no, they're fighting. They don't like the myth changing on them.
Sarah MacLean 1:09:06 / #
They don't like characters doing the right thing in a way that, you know, they aren't used to.
Jayne Ann Krentz 1:09:11 / #
Or they don't like valorizing characters that they've never thought of as being...
Sarah MacLean 1:09:16 / #
Worthy of valor. Yeah.
Jennifer Prokop 1:09:18 / #
Yes. And so I was thinking about it so much as I was re-listening because I was like, this, to me really helps understand these are not people that are going to be swayed by, "Oh, but the word cunt has been around for, you know, hundreds of years!" Because that's not, it's not about historical accuracy. It's about, "I don't like that I'm not the primary character in this myth anymore.
Sarah MacLean 1:09:42 / #
Right. The hero of it.
Jennifer Prokop 1:09:44 / #
And I think that that then if you think about these changing mores as being these conversations are a proxy for not just how romance is changing, but how society is changing and who we make a place for, and who gets to be the star of the show? Then those conversations just take on a new kind of relevance and importance. One that I think I would approach in a different way, in the future, after thinking about what what Jayne said.
Sarah MacLean 1:10:13 / #
Yeah. I think that there is such power, I mean, clearly we talked about this in the episode with her, but there's such a sense with Jayne that she carried the banner of romance for a while. And she carried that banner because of this, because of her bedrock belief that romance and genre fiction are the successors of the core stories of us as humans.
Jennifer Prokop 1:10:43 / #
And the core stories of us as a society. right?
Sarah MacLean 1:10:46 / #
Yeah.
Jennifer Prokop 1:10:47 / #
I mean, lay me down. Even just saying it I got covered goosebumps, like, "Oh, that's what it is! Of course!
Sarah MacLean 1:10:53 / #
Yeah. I mean, and that's without even talking about core story, which she is so brilliant about. I mean, she was the first person who ever said, "core story" to me, I think. And talk about somebody who just understands her work.
Jennifer Prokop 1:10:53 / #
Yeah.
Sarah MacLean 1:11:04 / #
And never deviates from her path. And even with all, I had no idea that so many of these pen names came because she was quote, "failing," right?
Jennifer Prokop 1:11:25 / #
Yes.
Sarah MacLean 1:11:26 / #
That she had to restart her career so many times. The idea that Jayne Ann Krentz/Amanda Quick/Jayne Castle/Stephanie James had to restart, had to reboot is bananas to me, because I do think of her as being the best of us in so many ways. You know, especially coming off the re-read of Ravished that we did.
Jennifer Prokop 1:11:50 / #
We have talked a lot about the Trailblazers in terms of, offline, what are the things that keep coming up over and over again? Vivian Stephens, the role of those, Woodiwiss, right? The things that really were markers for so many of these writers, but the thing that I keep thinking about is, but what about our listeners or the, you know, new, young, up and coming authors to hear that Jayne Ann Krentz was like, "Yeah, I was a failure." I mean I was like...
Sarah MacLean 1:12:19 / #
"My agent told me I should try historicals, and we didn't even tell them I was the author." That is, aside from just being almost unfathomable, the other side of it is so inspirational!
Jennifer Prokop 1:12:37 / #
Yes.
Sarah MacLean 1:12:38 / #
You know, not to be cheesy about it, but the idea that she, that this kind of rockstar, a true Trailblazer, struggled over and over again and had to reinvent herself over and over again, it's really amazing. Especially because, on the the New Year's Eve episode, I said my sister was looking for an old Stephanie James. Which by the way, we think we found. We'll put in show notes. But there's this idea that failure to the industry also, is, looks very different to readers.
Jennifer Prokop 1:13:19 / #
Yeah.
Sarah MacLean 1:13:20 / #
Then failure to readers, because my sister, who is in her fifties, and read that Stephanie James book in the '80s, does not believe that that book, or Stephanie James are...
Jennifer Prokop 1:13:30 / #
No.
Sarah MacLean 1:13:31 / #
In fact, I had to tell her that Stephanie James was Jayne Ann Krentz. So she was like, "Whatever happened to her?"
Jennifer Prokop 1:13:36 / #
You're like, oh, it's better for you.
Sarah MacLean 1:13:38 / #
She did okay. (laughs)
Jennifer Prokop 1:13:40 / #
She's doing all right. That's the part I think that is really, in a lot of ways, just really almost wildly inspiring. Because I think it is so easy in our modern world, or wherever we are right now to think, if I don't, that it has to be a steady, upward trajectory. And if it's not, you know, if it's not that...
Sarah MacLean 1:14:08 / #
You're not an instant bestseller.
Jennifer Prokop 1:14:10 / #
Then you're a failure, and it really speaks to no, this is a marathon, it is not a sprint, and there are going to be times you're going to fall down. There's going to be times you have to, you know, reinvent yourself come up with a new name, abandon a sub-genre you love because it is not the right time to be on that wave.
Sarah MacLean 1:14:31 / #
Fantasy, I mean, speculative fiction, speculative romance, it still doesn't have a strong foothold, and it's not out of line to suggest that Jayne Ann Krentz is the founder of that particular sub-genre, and you know, still, we're still fighting for that to claim space there.
Jennifer Prokop 1:14:52 / #
So, I mean, I think that that's sometimes the hard part about romance is, you know, I think I'm a deeply pragmatic person, and sometimes I'm like, you know, the things I personally, as an individual reader want, like and think are great, or not what the market will bear right now. And you know what? Oh, well, figure out what is going on in the market right now and enjoy it 'til your thing comes back around. I don't know.
Sarah MacLean 1:14:52 / #
Yeah. And I think that that's kind of what I took away from this conversation, what I have taken away from most of my conversations with Jayne is you can have both, right? You can both write what you love, and write to market. I mean, there is a space for both of those things. But her pragmatism, to use your word, is a lot about sustaining a career. I mean, sometimes you write to market, because that's what the market wants, and you know, you can deliver it and you know, you can succeed with it. And you know, every one of those books makes room for you to write the book, you know, in space.
Jennifer Prokop 1:16:03 / #
The book, that right, eventually you hope to make room for. There was a part where she was talking about, we were like how's romance changed? And she joked and said, "cell phones," and she was really talking about, essentially, if you are right now, if you're talking about celebrities, or politicians or technology that exists right now, that it really limits you, because your, it kind of almost takes away from that mythological aspect.
Sarah MacLean 1:16:34 / #
Sure.
Jennifer Prokop 1:16:34 / #
And one of the things I found myself, everyone has heard me ranting and raving at some point or another about how annoyed I am when people are using really old pop culture only in their books, and I'm like, well, if you think about it as mythmaking, I guess people our age are really trying to entrench Ferris Bueller's Day Off and the American myth or whatever. But it's really interesting to also think about, I personally think still, when we see that disconnect between the author, and their personal myths, or cultural myths versus their characters, and this, so I just, I found this conversation with her to be so generative in thinking new ways about things that I spend a lot of time thinking about.
Sarah MacLean 1:17:21 / #
Yeah. Well, it's also that piece of, you know, the balance of doing the important, romance doing the important work of society, right.
Jennifer Prokop 1:17:32 / #
Yeah.
Sarah MacLean 1:17:33 / #
And also romance placing a character and a love story in a specific time.
Jennifer Prokop 1:17:40 / #
Right,
Sarah MacLean 1:17:40 / #
That, you know, 40 years from now, hopefully, we don't, we don't have that conversation anymore. So I think, I of course, always think about, you know, that is a struggle, that is a particular struggle with contemporaries, but it also is so important for us who don't, for those of us who don't write contemporaries to think about that, because the conversations that our characters are having on page. You know, the the work of the genre is to figure out how to have those conversations without aging the book, dating the book. And maybe sometimes that's impossible, you know, I don't know. I think about that Nora Roberts book we read where the hero smokes all the time.
Jennifer Prokop 1:18:23 / #
Sure.
Sarah MacLean 1:18:24 / #
And it's like, how could she have known?
Jennifer Prokop 1:18:26 / #
Of course. Well, and I mean, I think that's the part where it's like working too hard to make your books out of time sometimes means...
Sarah MacLean 1:18:38 / #
But sometimes, yeah, then you get like, I've been thinking about The Hating Game a lot recently, right? Because as you know, I love The Hating Game so much. And the movie, and one of the things that I think Sally made a real choice about is you have no idea, it's in a city, but the city is very amorphus, right? There's no, there's no city, because she didn't want to place it in, she didn't want to ground it in a place. And I think that there is a reason, that's one of the reasons why The Hating Game is a global success, because everybody can place it in their particular, the city they love the most. And then the movie, put it in New York, and it was like, oh, huh. Now these are New Yorkers in a car, you know?(laughs)
Jennifer Prokop 1:19:25 / #
Right, it changes it.
Sarah MacLean 1:19:26 / #
Why are they driving? (laughs)
Jennifer Prokop 1:19:28 / #
It's and these are I think, really, I mean, I could have this conversation over and over and over again. But I just, like I said, I think the thing that was really interesting for me is, I sometimes get really stuck in this conversation. I'm just you know, annoying the shit out of people saying the same thing over and over again, and I found this conversation with her to really give me new avenues for these questions and new ways to think about the genre itself. Well, I guess I would say also, thank you to everyone for letting me have my Vietnam moment again.
Sarah MacLean 1:19:58 / #
Hey, listen, I will, I will have you and whoever you want to talk to about Vietnam talk about Vietnam anytime. Yeah, but it's interesting because it proves that we don't know what we're doing all the time. It's the Venn, it's that Venn diagram, right? What your English teacher says the author was sure what the author was doing. And we don't know, because we can't, we, you know, that Vietnam thing is a perfect example of we know what we're trying to do sometimes. But when something that massive, you know, and I think about Vietnam or you know, COVID is happening around us, and we're not overtly talking about it, but it's in there, it's in all the text. And so there it is, right, the genre carrying the myth.
Jennifer Prokop 1:20:51 / #
Last week, I ended up reading this book, I actually don't recommend, called Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon, and I found myself really having that moment. It's a nonfiction book by a Stanford professor, really disagreeing with a lot of what he said. And of course, then you can just, you know, take it to Twitter. And one of the things that he ended up talking about was the difference between, he admits that genre essentially is working, you can tell what genre's interested in only by looking at the collective.
Sarah MacLean 1:21:27 / #
I don't disagree with that.
Jennifer Prokop 1:21:28 / #
I absolutely agree with it. I was like, okay, we agree with this, but where we disagreed was him saying, essentially, he talked about Virginia Woolf and how, you know, Mrs. Dalloway, of course, is just superior, because it's the singular work of art as opposed to the genre, and I was kind of like, but that's what I'm actually interested in, is how that collective works.
Sarah MacLean 1:21:54 / #
Yeah.
Jennifer Prokop 1:21:54 / #
How does it work, that there is a hive mind where everyone is somehow chewing on the same thing? And I think Jayne answers it for us, right? We're grappling with our own mythmaking. And that is interesting to me, where this guy was sort of like meh, that's, you know, not interesting to him. It's just this totally different perspective. Mrs. Dalloway and genre can exist together. There's no reason to choose one or the other, we can have both. That's what's amazing about it.
Sarah MacLean 1:22:25 / #
One of the things that I've been really struggling with over the last couple of weeks, is, you know, this best of the year lists, right? Not the sub-genre list, not the best mystery of the year, the best romance of the year, but best overall books lists, which a lot of the publishing media are, they're kind of culling together. They, at the end of the year, they cull together what they believe are the best lists, the best of the books of the year, by virtue of what other, what the big critics have all named their ten best books, right? So it's, you know, everybody makes their list of ten, and the ones that are on multiple lists rise to the top. And so of course, if you have, say, The New York Times make a list of the 10 best books of the year, there might be one romance on it. It's rare, but there might be, you know, and other places, too. But that romance or that thriller, or that mystery, or that sci-fi novel, never makes it to that sort of, "and these are the 10 best novels of the year." And so I often think to myself, there's so much missing from these lists, and we know that by virtue of making a list, there's going to be stuff that's missing. But the idea that whole segments of mythmaking text, of myth text, is, are the myths of this time and place and society and culture are missing from these lists and just lost, right? Without Rebecca Romney, they're lost.
Jennifer Prokop 1:22:33 / #
Yeah.
Sarah MacLean 1:22:43 / #
What are we doing?
Jennifer Prokop 1:23:10 / #
So that's it. I mean, I was essentially having the same thought to myself, right. And I think, look, we obviously are genre fans for a lot of reasons, that we love romance for a lot of reasons.
Sarah MacLean 1:24:12 / #
But empirically, right. I don't read sci-fi, but I do think that surely there is a science fiction novel from the year that is remarkable and deserves to be held up as one of the best texts.
Jennifer Prokop 1:24:26 / #
I think, here's my theory. I remember when Stephen King used to be genre, and now he's like literature. And maybe it's just that there has to be, I don't know, maybe you just have to put in your time. I'm not sure.
Sarah MacLean 1:24:46 / #
I don't know. I mean, it's not like Nora hasn't put in her time, you know.
Jennifer Prokop 1:24:51 / #
I think there's a lot of you know, the patriarchy.
Sarah MacLean 1:24:54 / #
Oh, really? Do you think that? (laughs)
Jennifer Prokop 1:24:56 / #
I don't know. Maybe.
Sarah MacLean 1:24:57 / #
Anyway, Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women, it's awesome. And it's, every time we have one of these conversations, I think to myself, we're never going to get them all, right. We're never going to get every person who held the banner. But I'm really, really happy we got Jayne.
Jennifer Prokop 1:25:14 / #
Yeah, me too.
Sarah MacLean 1:25:15 / #
And I hope you all were too. I hope you were all inspired the way we were, and you know, overwhelmed the way we were.
Jennifer Prokop 1:25:23 / #
Oh, god, yeah. Even listening to it again, I was like, I'm just gonna sit here for a while. So brilliant.
Sarah MacLean 1:25:29 / #
We're so, so grateful.
Jennifer Prokop 1:25:32 / #
So before we go, it's worth saying that Jayne has a new book coming out on January 18, called Lightning in a Mirror. It is book three of the Fogg Lake trilogy, of which I have read all of them. I mentioned it actually on the episode. And again, this is part of a series that has to do with intuition and you know, like sort of some of the very things that she was talking about. So if you would like to prepare for that you could read the first two books, The Vanishing and All the Colors of Night and then prepare yourself for Lightning in the Mirror which comes out in a couple of weeks.
Sarah MacLean 1:26:07 / #
We are Fated Mates, you are listening to a Trailblazer episode, which we've been doing for all of Season Three and will likely continue to do until we die. (laughter) And you can listen to all the other Trailblazer episodes at fatedmates.net. You can find us @FatedMates on Twitter and @fatedmatespod on Instagram. Please tell us tell us how you're liking the Trailblazer episodes, shoot us emails if you would like Sarah@fatedmates.net or Jen@fatedmates.net. And tell us what you're thinking and shout about these Trailblazers because they deserve it.
Jennifer Prokop 1:26:51 / #
Next week is Passion with Lisa Valdez
Sarah MacLean 1:26:54 / #
Get ready. It's a ride. (laughs)
14.5: Space Romance - There Are No Wallflowers in Space!
Well, it was destined to happen sometime—we’re taking the show intergalactic! This week we’re talking about space romance and why it’s totally. fricken. bananas. Discover the series that brought Jen and Sarah together, hear us talk about prison planets, sex planets, the Muppet Show and more. Series by Grace Goodwin, Emmy Chandler, Robin Lovett & Jessie Mihalik.
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. Also — if you have a romance loving friend, please let them know that we don’t just talk about vampires & valkyries, and maybe they’d like us, too?
We’re back to the Game Makers in two weeks with Jen’s favorite of the three books, The Master, and one of our favorites, Sophie Jordan! Get ready for chastity belts and string bikinis! Read The Master at Amazon, B&N, Apple Books, Kobo, or from your local Indie.
Show Notes
Who knew there was so much to say about The Muppets? We both loved Pigs in Space, and Sarah mentioned that General Hospital-style skit. The Muppet Show is streaming on YouTube. And they're still making new ones!
How many dudes were in Dead Poet's Society? Well, there was Robert Sean Leonard. Ethan Hawke. And Josh Fucking Charles, of course. And then these other guys.
Josh Charles and his amazing man hands on The Good Wife, kissing Alica in an elevator.
Oh, and Sarah also likes Sports Night even though Aaron Sorkin is definitely a problem.
Muppets from Space. Omg.
A few early space romances were Sweet Starfire and Warrior's Woman.
Formative 80's space and sci-fi movies: Conan the Barbarian. Back to the Future. Star Wars.
We deserved more than one kiss and real snotty offspring.
"Make is So," says Jean-Luc Picard.
Australia was the original prison island.
You should read The Most Dangerous Game. It's an amazing story.
Robin Lovett is reading Dark Skye.
Aurora Blazing doesn't come out until October, but you can read the first chapter here.
Jen recommends The Chernobyl miniseries and the podcast. Sarah thought she was joking when she said I should go to twitter and ask for nuclear romances, like I hadn't thought of that already.
Sarah recommends Booksmart.
The Master is next, and we'll be joined by Sophie Jordan.
The Moon is not a fucking part of Mars. My God.
Transcript
Movie Dialogue 0:00 / #
And now another controvertable episode of
Jennifer Prokop 0:03 / #
Fated Mates. Welcome everybody. We're going to be talking about space romances. I'm Jen Reads Romance.
Sarah MacLean 0:13 / #
I'm Sarah MacLean. I write romance novels and I read romance novels. And all I want is for a pig's in space-style intro to this, where it's like, "Romance in Space!"
Jennifer Prokop 0:29 / #
Oh God, me too Miss Piggy was formative.
Sarah MacLean 0:34 / #
Man. "Pigs in Space" was the best. Also the -- I forget what it was called, but the General Hospital-style soap opera on the Muppet Show? We're super dating ourselves. Now. I'd like everyone to appreciate.
Jennifer Prokop 0:49 / #
I don't even care because it's amazing. She just, everything was so sparkly and silvery when she was in space. I loved it.
Sarah MacLean 0:58 / #
I know. I know. And it's making me want, I wonder if The Muppet Show's on Netflix? "The Muppet Show should be on something I would love to show my daughter The Muppet Show.
Jennifer Prokop 1:10 / #
Yeah, I'm, I'm pretty sure it's somewhere that's I remember going through that when our son was younger, and really being like, "We got to watch the Muppet Show, man." It's good times.
Sarah MacLean 1:19 / #
Well cause also, as a grown up, you come to Sesame Street with your kids. And then you realize all the good muppets are not on Sesame Street. The good smartass muppets, Miss Piggy, uh Gonzo, Fozzie Bear. None of them are on Sesame Street.
Jennifer Prokop 1:41 / #
One of my favorite Muppet movies is the one with Gonzo being from space. God, what was that one? Hold on. I gotta. I don't. Muppet Movie.
Sarah MacLean 1:54 / #
I don't know. But I do feel like this is giving Eric some meat food.
Yeah, there was a there was a movie that was all about Gonzo and you know who else had had? Okay? The guy from The Good Wife and Dead Poets Society that oh makes me bite my fist because he's still fucking handsome.
Are you talking about Robert Sean Leonard?
Jennifer Prokop 2:16 / #
No I'm not. I'm not about fuck that guy. I'm talking about the other guy. You know the one who was on the Good Wife?
Sarah MacLean 2:21 / #
Ethan Hawke.
Jennifer Prokop 2:22 / #
No. I'm talking about that the other guy. God.
Sarah MacLean 2:25 / #
How many other guys are there in Dead Poets Society?
Shut up. The best guy. The one...
Which one?
Jennifer Prokop 2:32 / #
The one who makes out in on The Good Wife, the one who makes out with her in the elevator?
Sarah MacLean 2:37 / #
You keep saying The Good Wife. It's not gonna make me have seen it.
Jennifer Prokop 2:40 / #
Ah, hold on. I'm like, "Google's my friend."
Sarah MacLean 2:46 / #
You guys, welcome to my life.
Jennifer Prokop 2:48 / #
No, stop it. I'm an amazing person. Just because I can't remember people's names.
Sarah MacLean 2:53 / #
Dead Poets Society is a seminal text for me. It's so. I'm confused by which guy, which boy you're talking about.
Okay, wait, I'm trying to find out. So Alicia, the one with Will Gardner. Okay, so Will Gardener is the name of the guy in The Good Wife. And ahhh I'm, you know.
Will Gardener is the guy.
Jennifer Prokop 3:16 / #
Max Overstreet! He's the guy plays Max Overstreet!
Sarah MacLean 3:19 / #
Wait a second. He's not good. He's a bad guy on ah, in a lot of things.
Jennifer Prokop 3:25 / #
Okay, but in this Muppet Movie with Gonzo he also is fine. I'm just telling you.
Sarah MacLean 3:29 / #
Well, he's fine everywhere.
Yeah, well, God, yes. Oh my God. There's a scene with him kissing Alicia Florrick in the fucking elevator.
Oh. Max Overstreet. You're right. And then.
Jennifer Prokop 3:39 / #
Max Overstreet!
Sarah MacLean 3:41 / #
He's the one that goes on the date and Dead Poets Society. And then what does he do? He brings, it's Josh Charles. Josh Charles night. It's from Sports Night.
Jennifer Prokop 3:51 / #
You know, I'm starting to realize that you and I not remembering names and titles is way deeper. There's a lot of layers to it.
Sarah MacLean 3:59 / #
I know. You guys so I know my faves are problematic but I have an obsession with Aaron Sorkin and the things that he writes and Sports Night is magnificent. And you have to appreciate that me saying that Sports Night is magnificent is it must be super magnificent because I know nothing about any thing involving balls. I mean blow up balls. Although. Wait. I mean, throw ball, kick ball.
Jennifer Prokop 4:04 / #
Sportsballs, Sarah.
Sarah MacLean 4:11 / #
Sportsballs. Although I will say that I was at a signing not long ago and a woman came up to me, a reader came up to me, and if you listen reader, please tell us who you are. Please say hi on Twitter or Facebook or somewhere. Um, she came up to me and she said, "Do you know the difference between you and Tessa Dare?" And I was like, "Well, I mean, we're not the same person. So I know a lot of things that are different about me and Tessa Dare." And she said, Tessa Dare writes about balls and you don't.
And I was like, "Oh," and I realized I really don't. I generally don't involve myself with testicles. Apparently Tessa does everyone. So you know if you've never read Tessa Dare and you're into balls she's for you.
Talk about a close fuckin read. I mean damn girl.
But I did come home and I put balls into that book. Cause I was like, "Well, I refuse to be bested."
Well, Sarah, I'll just circle back around to I'm real embarrassed to tell you the name of this fucking movie that you should watch with your daughter is called Muppets from Space. I's not even complicated. How the fuck could I not think of that? Muppets from Space. Jesus Christ.
Amazing. And is it Pigs in Space, but like a whole movie?
It's like a whole movie, Miss Piggy's for sure in it.
It's like the Wayne's World of the Muppet universe?
Jennifer Prokop 6:00 / #
They're trying to figure out where Gonzo's from, if I remember correctly, but it's really fucking cute. It's one of my favorites. It's really, really cute. So I would recommend it. I feel now, it almost feels dirty to somehow segue to romance from there, but you know, whatever.
Sarah MacLean 6:18 / #
Whatever. Romance and space and here's the interesting thing. It's real dirty in space. I feel romance off planet. It's like suddenly everybody's allowed to write whatever the hell they want.
Jennifer Prokop 6:33 / #
We've talked about this with, with paranormal, right, when you remove people from human society on Earth, you get to break a bunch of different rules. That totally makes sense to me.
Sarah MacLean 6:45 / #
Yeah, it, it actually really does. It's a interesting, because so I when we talked about doing this episode, my instant thought was like, 'Oh, well, we're gonna have to we have to talk about those early ones.' But I don't think there were that many super early romances, but they, there was a Jane Ann Krentz called "Sweet Starfire". The cover's pretty great. The heroine has the most perfect, they're basically just metallic boobs underneath there. They're weaponry.
They're they're very. It's not even perky. It's -- they defy gravity.
There very firm. They are incredibly firm breasts. Um. It's basic...so okay, so the heroine has telepathy, she's telepathic and um she is, well or no, I'm sorry she's not telepathic but she's from this world of people who are telepathic and she doesn't have it. There's some reason why she doesn't have it. And she has to figure it out, and then the hero is basically Han Solo. He's a delivery man in space.
Jennifer Prokop 8:08 / #
My theory, and I will get to this later in the show, is that every good character I love in a space romance is basically Han Solo.
Sarah MacLean 8:17 / #
I mean, it makes sense though, right? Especially, because so I don't know what date. I don't know what date this is, but it had to have been early days. Um, and well, I do know what date the other one is, the other one was written in the, so the other one that sort of is instantly imprinted on my mind is Johanna Lindsay's "Warriors Woman", which is in the Ly-san-ter series, which is spelled Ly dash san dash ter because I don't know dash.
That's how you show that you're an alien culture by having some real weird spelling. Gotta use a bunch of punctuation.
Add in punctuation to make it seem real to me, but I am gonna I know last episode I was like, "We're not gonna read the back cover copy" because it sucks but here's the thing: back cover copy has changed a lot over the years because if I had back cover copy like this, I would make everyone read it all the time. So, here it is. In the year 2139 fearless Tedra De Arr sets out to rescue her beleaguered planet, Kystran from the savage rule of the evil Crad Ce Moerr. Experienced in combat but not in love, the beautiful, untouched Amazon flies with Martha, her wise-cracking, free-thinking computer, to a world where warriors reign supreme--and into the arms of the one man she can never hope to vanquish: the bronzed barbarian Challen Ly-San-Ter. A magnificent creature of raw yet, disciplined desires, the muscle-bound primitive succeeds where no puny Kystran male had before--igniting a raging fire within Tedra that must be extinguished before she can even think of saving her enslaved world.
Jennifer Prokop 10:30 / #
That's a whole lot.
Sarah MacLean 10:31 / #
We're gonna read it y'all.
Jennifer Prokop 10:34 / #
I'm kind of ready to read it right now.
Sarah MacLean 10:36 / #
So it's like this is Conan the Barbarian fanfic. And then there's the you know, and it makes sense. Where Johanna Lindsay was an earthy, you know, Schwarzeneggery kinda lady. Jayne Ann Krentz is more of an intellectual. Uh. You know.
Jennifer Prokop 10:58 / #
Han Solo type of snark guy. We should I swear to God, I always say this but now it's summer so maybe I'm, I'm constantly like, "we should be making BuzzFeed quizzes that go along with this." Like, "Which 70s or 80s space hero Do you imprint on?"
Sarah MacLean 11:20 / #
So anyway, that is where so when I say there were space romance is not new. There were definitely I mean these are huge writers. These are the big names of the 80s writing these space romances 80s and 90s. And so certainly there was there, they appeared here and there, but there are more of them now. And there are more that are sort of well-known and respected and, um, real fucking entertaining, frankly.
Oh, God. Yeah. Well, that's, I think that's, I think what it is too. So here's a little secret about me as a reader, which is. Oh, are you okay?
I was just gonna say um, "Warrior's Woman" is was published in 1990.
Jennifer Prokop 12:11 / #
I am a more of a sci-fi person than a fantasy person. Just in general, right? When I move Back to the Future and movies I loved about space travel and aliens and Star Wars, Star Trek, all of that is way more my jam. And so one of the things about space romances is I um, I feel like there's there's world building but it's less maybe? You know, fantasy. I am not a good enough reader. I'm gonna own that. I'm just like, "Oh shit, who is this guy again?" You know what I mean? I feel somehow fantasy, it requires more of me as a reader in a way that I'm like, "Uhh I'm not good at this." So I do think it's that imprinting thing. When I think about Star Wars, Back to the Future, Star Trek, that whole decade where I was growing up and just I couldn't get enough of it. So part of me is like, "Of course I love these space romances. They're amazing." If Han, I mean all we ever get from Han Solo and Princess Leia is that one fucking kiss or whatever, right? We deserve more. We deserve better. We deserve space threesomes.
Sarah MacLean 13:27 / #
Yeah. laughing We deserve sex planets, so let's just make it so.
Movie Dialogue 13:34 / #
"Make it so. Sir? Do it."
Sarah MacLean 13:40 / #
Um, okay, so we're in. We're in a golden age. I would say.
Jennifer Prokop 13:45 / #
Yes. I love it.
Sarah MacLean 13:46 / #
Of space romance. Well, wait, where should we start? Should we just, should should we start with this series that...
Jennifer Prokop 13:53 / #
Brought us together!
Sarah MacLean 13:55 / #
Oh, well, we should start...laugh everyone thinks that it was IAD but it wasn't I mean Jen and I knew each other through the IAD you know universe,
Jennifer Prokop 14:05 / #
But our real bonding happened...
Sarah MacLean 14:07 / #
Yeah, but our real bonding came over Grace Goodwin
"The Interstellar Bride" series.
I'm so embarrassed by this whole episode.
Jennifer Prokop 14:18 / #
No. I'm not. They're fucking awesome.
Sarah MacLean 14:20 / #
They are.
Jennifer Prokop 14:20 / #
But you know what? I was. I was on a family vacation where there were more people than seats in cars. And so somehow I kept always getting left behind, which I swear didn't mean to happen, but it was get the kids and the grandparents there. And I was like, "Whatever you're going to a kid's movie, it's fine." And I read a ton of these fucking books you guys one after the other. I literally could not get enough of them.
Sarah MacLean 14:44 / #
What's the series name?
"The Interstellar Bride" series.
Yeah. Oh my God. So you guys. Okay, so Jen. Picture this. Let me paint you a picture. So Jen and I are not friends yet. I mean, we're friendly. We like each other on Twitter. We're follow, we follow each other on Twitter. But um, I don't know how it fucking happened. I think it probably happened because "Ice Planet Barbarians". So Sophie Jordan, who is joining us next week for "The Master", is a dear friend of mine and she loves a bananas book just more than anybody in the whole world. And she started reading those "Ice Planet Barbarians" books by Ruby Dixon. And we found ourselves down the rabbit hole, the two of us, and it was you know, we I looked up a week later and I've read like 17 of those blue alien books. It's, the whole week is a blur. And, um, and I would recommend the first, you know, however many you want to read until you're ready, you know, at some point, you'll just overdose on them and then you'll just be like, "Okay, I'm done with these blue alien books."
It's like when you're at a bar and you're drinking. It's the first real night nice of summer and you're drinking maybe some kind of frozen cocktail. They're going down real easy. And then all of a sudden you're like, "Whoa, I just did. Wait, I just overdid it."
Exactly. I imagine it's what, I've never done cocaine, but I imagine it's like coke. You're like, "This is great!" And then you're like, "Whoa, I need a nap."
Yeah, that was it. So we had to shift from that to another similar series, right?
Then we started, so then it was just one of those things where, anytime anybody asked, "What's the craziest thing you've read recently?" We'd be like, "Well, have you read Ice Planet Barbarians?" Because it's weird. I mean, a spaceship crashes. A woman out in this ice planet. She comes she stumbles upon a giant blue alien and he immediately goes down on her. And it's crazy. So whatever. Periodically the "Ice Planet Barbarians" comes up online, and like we talk about how crazy it is. Then Jen, DMs me, I think, "Have you read these Grace Goodwin books?" And I was like, "Well no, but obviously I'm in the mood for another drug." So the structure of these books are, first of all, these are not in KU. "Ice Planet Barbarians" are in KU so you sort of feel like it's free. Grace Goodwin has put her books not. You are paying $3.99 for each one of these books. And I mean, I'm not gonna lie. I gave that money to her for a long time. These are probably not in your library either, you guys. So the first chapter you're like, "Hello. Here's the heroine having sex with two men, or whatever it is."
Jennifer Prokop 17:48 / #
But they're aliens, right?
Sarah MacLean 17:50 / #
There's 4000 books in this series. And the first one, all you know is that she's having sex. She's in the middle of sex with this person and you're like, "This feels like a very jarring entry into a book. But okay, Jen recommended it." So. And then she wakes up and you realize that she has been in a machine. In a sort of, uh,
Jennifer Prokop 17:50 / #
An MRI sex machine.
Sarah MacLean 18:14 / #
An MRI sex machine.
Jennifer Prokop 18:18 / #
Sarah, that's what it is. Hello. Instead of it being a big doughnut, it's like a big vagina.
Sarah MacLean 18:28 / #
And then she wakes up and there's a doctor and the doctor's like, "Oh, hey, you've been matched" to an interstellar, a male of a species on another planet and you are a human. You're basically a fertile human, female, and you're basically going to be shipped off to this dude, wherever you are.
Well, and it's always this alien.
With sex compatibility.
Yeah, and the deal is that at least for the ones I've read, this interstellar bride program right, the other the alien planet, they have pairs of alien men essentially agreed to mate this woman or that's how it works on their planet because it's so dangerous that that way if one of them dies, the other one will be able to you know,
Protect her.
Jennifer Prokop 19:29 / #
Protect her and still be there for her. Now none of them ever die. So it's just these, polyamorous, super sexy threesomes.
Sarah MacLean 19:37 / #
But I will say, male female male.
Jennifer Prokop 19:40 / #
Oh always.
Sarah MacLean 19:40 / #
There's no crossing of the swords. Which is a big bummer for me.
Yeah, I think that's why you and I both are like, "Meh." Here's my other thing, is the the woman on earth who's part of the intake process. Her name is Warden A Gara. And as time went on, in these books, it became clear that she had some sort of backstory herself. And I was like, "It's like a year later, has she ever gotten her own book?" And I do not think so. But I bet we cannot be the only people who are like, "Warden A Gara, where is your book?"
Why doesn't she get herself in the machine?
Jennifer Prokop 20:16 / #
Well, I think she had a mate and something went wrong. And so now she's back in the pool and you know, not ready.
Sarah MacLean 20:23 / #
Sure, sure. So, take your time A Gara. Um, but here's what's really interesting because this is it. These really echo. So I'm really fascinated by the space books because I think they're doing some sort of interesting work, as part of the genre. I mean, this is welcome to Fated Mates everyone. We're gonna talk about, we're gonna try and figure out, why these
Jennifer Prokop 20:49 / #
What it's doing, right?
Sarah MacLean 20:50 / #
What, at first glance, feel like real one-handed reads, if you know what I mean, but I think doing some interesting work and what these books are doing is very similar to what medievals were doing in that they're telling a story about each one of these meetings in these Grace Goodwin books is intergalactic because intermarriage between the two cultures solidifies the relationship between the two planets. It's like your Norman female is sold to a Saxon warrior. Or vice vice versa. I don't remember my history. So I think whatever goes. So that's interesting, there's something going on there. But also then there's this very real sense of woman alone, in a world in a threatening world.
Jennifer Prokop 21:44 / #
Yeah, sure.
Sarah MacLean 21:45 / #
And there's something really compelling about that. In 2019 for me, I've been talking a lot about, you and I haven't talked in a ton about how it feels like now, in 2019, you have to options and romance you have the super soft, really gentle calm love story. Or you have like, space prison planet book. And we're gonna get to. The two. I feel like they're scratching the same itch, socially. Because I'm right now not really that interested in a soft book because I want to see threat. I want to see anger. I want to see women and people in marginalized communities triumphing over, you know, the worst. But I think a lot of people are like, "The world is horrible. And I just want to escape into my like, soft cinnamon roll of a book."
And I think that they're two sides of the same coin, which is how when, we think about like, "What does romance?" How does romance approach the patriarchy?" And I think one of the things we've talked a lot about is, we're excited about the way that it you know, I was reading really interesting thread this morning that was when we talk about romance being by women for women, that it that's that used to be true, but now it's also really trying, I think, at least the books I'm interested in trying to be a place for anyone who's on the downside of the gender spectrum, right? Anyone who's not a cis het male. And so therefore, opening up for non binary for queer people, right? And so I think that these books are really pushing against sometimes too gender dynamics, because one of the big differences I think of in these books is that women aren't always just receptacles or receivers. Sometimes they're fighting back. Sometimes they're the heroine. Sometimes they're saving their mate. Sometimes. I feel like there's a lot of ways in which it's, you put, you put people in space and then sometimes their roles. Whether they be gender roles or work related roles or marriage roles. Kind of, "get a chance to change because now you're in a different society." So I do think that that's, that's what it is too. So it's exploring like, "Who are we in relationship to this institution?" Maybe? Whether it be the prison planet, the meeting, the inter bride program, whatever.
Yeah, I agree. I think there's something really interesting to be said for, for just how these books are. It's weird because almost all of them sort of really solidify in some ways underscore that kind of physical difference between the sort of women as the weaker sex
Hmm, yeah right? Well, cause the aliens are always seven feet tall. It's like a monster dash, right?
Even in, so let's talk about let's talk about Emmy Chandler next. So, if you follow me on Twitter you know that I, about three weeks ago went through this massive Emmy Chandler phase. I was on retreat with a bunch of other authors, somebody recommended, we were talking about, I was with Sophie Jordan, Sophie loves a prison book, we're talking about these prison planet books. And now I can't remember the name of that series either. Anyway, and I had never read them. So I picked up the first of the Emmy Chandler prison planet books. The first one is called Guardian. Oh, it's just called Prison Planet, the series. And so the concept is people get shipped off from planet from, again, it's kind of a star trekky kind of futuristic society where there are many different planet many different planetary planets that are in part of some sort of planetary consortium. And if you commit a crime, you are sent to this prison planet where
Jennifer Prokop 26:22 / #
It's Australia.
Sarah MacLean 26:24 / #
Yeah, where there are sectors and each sector has a different kind of criminal in it. And women and men are sent to all the sectors and it's a very intense. Content warning on this. There's a lot of threat of sexual violence in this book. Because obviously, when you are in a position where women and men are imprisoned in a enclosed space, no matter how big the enclosed space like that sexual dynamic is that that dynamic of sex is going to be there between them. And it's overarching. There is a constant threat of sexual violence in these books. But what Emmy Chandler is doing here in that...so the first one is called Guardian and basically a woman is sent to this to this prison planet and then she discovers, she gets to choose her mate, like meat, she gets to choose the man who she is with for 30 days. And then his job is to protect and feed and clothe her and her job is, you know, to pleasure him and he of course, is very noble and heroic. And it all works out sort of fine at the end, although I want to talk about what fine means in the context of some of these books. The second one Hunter is my favorite of them.
Me too. And it's the most dangerous game basically, right?
Yeah. Yeah. So very rich people get to pay money to come down onto the prison planet and hunt killers basically in an enclosed space. So it's like Hunger Games, there's an enclosed space with lots of cameras and things that are monitoring you. In that one, the heroine gets herself put into this enclosed space too. So the hero and heroine are both being hunted by the same man. And the heroine is a technological genius. He is just physical, pure brute physical strength. She is mental. She's just a genius. And so to get so she saves the day in that book with her intellect,
Jennifer Prokop 28:50 / #
Right, and he keeps them safe when they're out in the woods essentially, right? I mean, so it's together they're this unbeatable team. Even against all of the ways in which they're ... the other hunter has weapons has technology as cameras can find them. There's these really terrifying metal dogs that essentially are just if they run into you, they're just gonna rip you to shreds. I mean, it's a classic, like "The Most Dangerous Game" is a classic, short story about a general who essentially creates his own island, right? And he's gonna hunt, the people who get shipwrecked on the island, and he sets up essentially a trap to shipwreck them. And have you read this?
Sarah MacLean 29:38 / #
No. But I mean I know the premise.
Jennifer Prokop 29:40 / #
You know, the trope, right? And it has to be an island the same way this has to be a prison planet, right? You have to be isolated. And even if you can defeat the hunter, how are you going to escape is always the meta question that's kinda underneath, right? There's no real escape from any of it even if you can beat this one, this one guy.
Sarah MacLean 30:04 / #
No. And so the third one, "Champion," is lady gladiator. She gets to choose her, she's sentenced to death, and she gets to choose the way she dies and she chooses fighting as a gladiator on the prison planet for TV. And the only woman who's ever done it. That's real Hunger Games-y. She gets a makeover and she has sponsors. If you loved the Hunger Games, and you wish there had been sex in it, and you are not scared and you are not triggered by sexual violence in any way. Nobody in these books actually, gets raped. But it's ... It's a threat constantly.
Jennifer Prokop 30:51 / #
Or it's happened in the past, right? I mean, in the second one, she's essentially been or no is it?
Sarah MacLean 30:57 / #
I think she kills him before. I mean, you should not, if that is triggering for you at all, you should not read these books. But that third one, "Champion," and you can read these standalone. You do not need to read them in order. But "Champion" is, if somebody said to me like, "I want Hunger Games, but a romance." It's "Champion." Um, anyway, and then they go on from there. But there's something really interesting about these books, especially now in that happily ever after in these books, can't really be happy.
Jennifer Prokop 31:35 / #
Cause the world is not righted.
Sarah MacLean 31:37 / #
They're still on a prison planet. Right? So it's a really odd. There's something very satisfying. They were incredibly satisfying for me as I was reading them. But I really I keep going back to why is because we talk all the time -- one of the big questions that -- I'm sorry, I know I'm talking a lot...One of the big questions we have a lot is it In historical, specifically, is, "Why don't people write poor characters in historical romances?" I mean, in contemporary is too. And the answer has always been well, because it's not, if you're poor, is it happily ever after? If you're more literally worried about where your next meal is coming from. Is it happily ever after? And these people are alone on a prison planet.
Here's what I think it's really about. I think this is the work right? We talk a lot about partnership, right? That's what a romance sort of delivers at the end is, these two individuals have become like a team, right? And now they're going to face whatever struggles to happen together. And I think that's why it ultimately works because even though they're still danger in their future, and we know that. We also know that they have come through something where we trust that whatever their future, right, whatever this future conflict is going to be for them, that they are going to tackle it together. And there's something really appealing about that. Right? And I don't necessarily, by the way, think that that's just a romance thing. I think that's a friendship thing. I think a lot of these books have, build communities of people together, right? I think going back to Ice Planet Barbarians, they all start to work together. And it's literally watching a new society form. Only it's one often where gender differences are irrelevant, or there's more equality. You know, people are essentially literally making a new world for themselves. So I think that's why that's really appealing.
Mm hmm. I agree. And it feels like if they could triumph over these really dark moments. If you can be a lady gladiator and survive, then what can't you do?
Jennifer Prokop 34:12 / #
You got this right? Well, and often I will also point out that almost always those external conflicts are human in nature. Right? So it's you got kidnapped and sent to the ice planet barbarians. These men who set up the the gladiator dome and you're in it or whatever. So they're beating humanity, and then forming something new on this new planet. I mean, I think really profoundly. It's this idea that we're starting over. We're going to do this better. We're not going to end up in 2019. We started there, but we don't have to end up there.
Sarah MacLean 34:53 / #
Yeah, well, what's interesting is that they're not all this kind of gendered? Funkiness and, and that's where I want to go next because I want to go to Robin Lovett's books. Um, Robin Lovett is writing a series called Planet of Desire. The first one is called "Toxic Desire." Fun fact. Johanna Lindsey. No, Johanna Lindsey, wrong. Fun fact, Sophie Jordan and Joanna Shupe both texted me about "Toxic Desire" within 18 hours of each other. I don't think you all have heard Joanna talk about bananas books. You will hear Sophie next week to talk about "The Master." But when they both recommend a book, I know it's gonna be special. So Planet of Desire is Robin Lovett series, where, again, it's futuristic, there's kind of an intergalactic Space Consortium, there's a big bad planet or bad guys.
Jennifer Prokop 36:05 / #
It's the 10 planets Consortium, I think or something right?
Sarah MacLean 36:09 / #
Yeah. Yeah, it's like the EU of space.
Jennifer Prokop 36:11 / #
And the thing that's really interesting, before you launch into this is, all of the, if you're working on one of the 10 planets ships, they demand that you be essentially gender neutral, but what that really means is that you are essentially disguising yourself if you're a woman to present more as a man. And so what happens is they land on this, this sex planet, and the reason it's a sex planet is because there's something literally in the atmosphere, the Desedre or whatever, I don't how to say it.
Sarah MacLean 36:43 / #
Aphrodisiac. The atmosphere itself is an aphrodisiac.
Jennifer Prokop 36:47 / #
And you can't get away from it right?
Sarah MacLean 36:50 / #
You're gonna die. If you don't have sex, you will die.
Jennifer Prokop 36:53 / #
Yeah, masturbating is not enough. It has to be a mutual thing, right?
Sarah MacLean 36:57 / #
Well, masturbating will help for a little bit. Yeah ultimately, you gotta have sex. And it doesn't matter it's can be there it can be. It can be any form of sex with, it's polyamory, queer, queer sex, whatever kind of sex you want.
Jennifer Prokop 37:15 / #
It does not have to be P in V.
Sarah MacLean 37:17 / #
It's about the emotional connection between the two, three, four, however many people.
Then what happens is, people there are as I mean, in the first one, there's an enemy. So the the alien kind of male of the species who's there hates the 10 planets people.
Enemies to lovers. Yeah. Cuz he was on. He was a prisoner on the ship or something? Anyway, he has gold skin. And, and when they when he when anybody has sex with this, this type of creature I mean, not creature but this type of being in the world. Yeah, they then turn gold.
Jennifer Prokop 38:06 / #
I know, it's amazing!
Sarah MacLean 38:06 / #
It's so crazy.
That sex is gonna make you golden.
But that's a really good one because he was this is again, it's a classic old school romance trope. "I was imprisoned by your people. I hate you by virtue of you being those people."
Jennifer Prokop 38:24 / #
And yet here we are together.
Sarah MacLean 38:26 / #
Here we are. We're forced. We are forced together and it's on. It's not only forced proximity, it's for sexual proximity, because if we don't do it, we're gonna die.
Jennifer Prokop 38:37 / #
And this is a whole series then plays around with a bunch of other things. And the second one, there's essentially a sex Olympics, of course.
Sarah MacLean 38:44 / #
Yeah. Well, that also again, we're back to if you like the Hunger Games. Hunger Games read alikes, with Jen and Sarah! Hey scholastic!
Jennifer Prokop 38:59 / #
We're like defiling your intellectual property.
Sarah MacLean 39:03 / #
Um, cuz that second one is sex in an arena. Not gladiators. Fucking.
It's performative. It's in public. It's a voyeuristic. I mean, because then there's...
I really like the whole community though.
Well, the, essentially the people, that alien race that lives on this planet then has developed a certain kind of culture based around this.
The need.
Jennifer Prokop 39:38 / #
I will say this, if you liked the idea of Feveris in Dark Skye. This is this is the series for you. This is your next book after that.
Sarah MacLean 39:50 / #
But I really love it because it's so sex positive. All the people are, "I don't understand. Why are you being so weird about sex?"
Jennifer Prokop 40:00 / #
You know, when we as people on earth travel, I think, at least I would hope most of us have this basic understanding that it's not our place to put our cultural mores on to that new place we're visiting, but to experience, what's going on here? To eat the food of the place, you're going. To try and speak the language, right? We understand that is sort of our responsibility when we choose to travel. But what if when we travel some other world, it really is fundamentally seems wrong with what you've either learned about who you are as a person or your culture. And it's kind of rules and morality. And then it really becomes, again, that conflict level really ramps up because now it's person versus society. And you're like, "Hey, this isn't how I'm supposed to act, but I have to do it in order to survive here." And those kinds of really strong internal conflicts are which are pressure from an external conflict -- that's always a real interesting. I like that. It's real meaty.
Sarah MacLean 41:10 / #
I agree. I mean and I think that's done very well in third book in this series which is just now out is it just out?
Or it, we both just got it from NetGalley let me look.
In the third book in the series, the hero is a person from the homeworld. This is his world. Yes. And because of by virtue of the sex requirement, all the time sex to stay alive on this planet, right? The the characters the people who live on this planet, they don't really believe in love. They don't believe in monogamy. I'm sorry, not love. They don't believe in monogamy. And so the concept of monogamy is incredibly foreign to them, and problematic for them because they're like, "Well, wait a second. Because what if something happens?" Right? Like what if?
You know, your mate has to leave you for a week. You're gonna die. It's just, it's impossible. It's impossible to be monogamous and live on this planet. Right?
Well, and this dude has a special gift.
He's a shaman or something.
Jennifer Prokop 42:20 / #
He's a sex god. He has to share it with the people.
Sarah MacLean 42:24 / #
So yeah. So basically his whole thing is, if you're sick on this planet, he has special energy that he can infuse in you but he has to do it via sex. It's all real bananas. Robin. I mean, what is happening in your head? PS: I love you, Robin. I met you a BA and you're amazing.
Jennifer Prokop 42:46 / #
No, but you know, this is one though, where instead of her just acclimating to his rules. She has. She he acclimates to sort of her culture, right? And she has this real concern about, "It's complicated," of course. But every single one of the conflicts that happens is really about again, "Who am I? Who do I want to be? Should having a sexual relationship with someone make it so that they're my mate for life?" I mean, essentially, it's her drama because of her. You know, she is not even entirely human. She's some other thing too.
Sarah MacLean 43:23 / #
But I think for him, his conflict is really interesting too, because if you're born into a destiny, do you have no other choice? His whole conflict is society versus self. In a very concrete way. "If I take if I do the thing that I want to do for myself, I have to turn my back on this responsibility that I have towards my society." I mean, it's very it is actually very Dark Skye, this kind of in you know if...
Well, Robin is reading Dark Skye right now.
But if Thronos didn't have such a stick up his ass about everything it would be very Dark Skye. So yeah I mean so I've really liked this. I like it for another reason to that I just want to shout out and this is not to say look, most people in romance, are not public about their entire persona. I use a pseudonym. I am Sarah in real life but you know names are all changed and it's funky but a lot of these sex planet books or space books are written under very private pseudonyms. I'm sure partially because they're there is something kind of salacious and scandalous about them at first glance. Robin is very public, she's a public figure. She uses her actual photo and I'm not dissing anybody who doesn't do that, but I just want to give an extra shout out to her for being brave.
She's great. And I think that's what it is, too. I think, fundamentally, you know, I think, sometimes erotic romance gets this really hard rap. "Meh. It's it's just porn." Obviously, no one listening to us thinks that. We don't think that. But I do think books that really examine our sense of self in conjunction with our sexuality and what that means when they aren't necessarily in alignment the way we want them to. That's, that's worth us digging into as a genre. And I think that when you a lot of the books that we've talked about so far already are really doing that and a variety of really interesting ways. And so, yeah, they deserve some credit for pushing against a, I don't know, a boundary that I think a lot of people don't really, it's harder to explore.
Yeah, I really want us to have, as a genre, I want romance, and I think this is something that places like RWA really need to sort, RWA has a lot to sort out, but someday when we get down the list from the really critical things that impact people's actual real lives in the world, I want us to have a real conversation about erotic romance. And, what it means. Why it's valuable. What the difference is between a sexy book and an erotic book. Why we need those books. Why we need to honor those books as as themselves. And I think a lot of these books are doing that work.
Jennifer Prokop 46:27 / #
Yeah, I think so. True. So I want to talk though, because sci fi / space romances aren't always just sex planet books. That's all true and interesting. But there are a couple other ones that I thought that we could talk about. Because I like science fiction so much, maybe I've read more of them. And there's a couple that have come out, in the past year, that I think are worth just mentioning. And then I want to talk about a couple that I just read that I really liked. So I want to talk about "Polaris Rising" by Jessie, is it, Mihalik? I'm not sure how I'm saying her last name correctly.
Sarah MacLean 47:12 / #
That's how I would say it but we apologize.
Jennifer Prokop 47:14 / #
This is a, now I'm gonna be really honest with you, I think this is the kind of romance light. There is a romantic arc. But I think the big arc is for our heroine, Ada von Hasenberg. And she is essentially and this is my catnip, right? So she is the princess essentially in the in the universe. There's three really powerful houses and house von Hasenberg is one of them. And she's the fifth of six children. And she has all these skills but her real job is going to be to marry somebody for her house. So this is the all the aristocracy stuff, but put in space. And a couple of years earlier she got told she was gonna have to marry somebody. And she was all like, "Fuck all y'all," and she takes off. And so she's on this space adventure and she, at the beginning of the book, has been caught kind of accidentally. She was just in the wrong place at the wrong time and someone picked her up who didn't really even know what they had and all of a sudden figures it out. And she gets put in a cell with a guy named Marcus Lock who is essentially the most wanted criminal in the galaxy.
Sarah MacLean 48:27 / #
And hey, Marcus. I wanna say this. He's known as the Devil of Fornax Zero. Which I mean everyone knows if they're called the devil then you definitely are gonna bone 'em. I mean, that's just gonna happen happen right?
And they pretty quickly figure out that they can use each other to essentially escape the ship and she promises like, "Look, I'll pay you a ton of money. If you get me out of here. If you help me get out of here," because she's crazy rich from this crazy rich family and they go on this massive space adventure. And the reason I say it's romance light is, there's a clear romantic arc but I don't think it's the A plot, right? It's like Princess Leia if she didn't have to be fucking dead weighted with Luke and everybody else, right? She is just on her own adventure and it's fucking great. And I loved it because I love, you know she's got blasters, and implants, and she has to go do all this crazy...
The cover. I know that we always joke about covers not being important and whatever read the book, but this covers badass.
And I'm going to tell you I also just read it does not come out till October 1 so maybe this is bad form, but I just read the sequel which is about Ada's sister Bianca. She has been previously married. She went through the house marriage thing. And part of the reason Ada was so sure she didn't want to do it, she saw what happened to her older sister's. Now Bianca's husband is dead. She's back in the house. And there's a big romance between her and the head of house security.
A bodyguard romance!
Jennifer Prokop 50:16 / #
Hello, exactly. And again, I feel like if you go into these books, thinking there's gonna be a romance but it's going to be kind of secondary to this Space Princess plot. Then you like me will be very happy. And I love them cuz they're about competent women.
Sarah MacLean 50:36 / #
I love it. So over the so just to confirm the series is how many books?
Jennifer Prokop 50:42 / #
It's going to be three. The first one is "Polaris Rising." It's out now. And "Aurora Blazing" comes up second.
Sarah MacLean 50:48 / #
And this plot. The meat of the plot is over three by books. It's like Game of Thrones in space.
Jennifer Prokop 50:58 / #
Yep. It sure is. House politics, right? So their house wants something from them. There's all this intrigue between them and the other houses. There's always competition, essentially.
Sarah MacLean 51:12 / #
And each of the books is a standalone romance. It's just the overarching series is the plot.
You know what, I think that people will like that. Because also I do feel like it's more common in science fiction to have the same characters over books, but I like that instead it's like the house. House Van Hasenberg.
Well it flips the script and it makes them more, it actually does make them more romancey. Because, yeah, a romance reader. Well, I mean, Jen, please, if you're recommending these, they have to be complete romances at the end. You're not gonna recommend them if at the end, you're like, "Well, are these two ending up together?"
Jennifer Prokop 51:49 / #
You're gonna get that HEA but what I really liked about it is, I think number two worked for me because they work together more. In "Polaris Rising," there's actually quite a few scenes where they split up and we follow Ada who does her own shit. Saves him a bunch of times. That worked for me too. But, I think if you need them to be on page together all the time, it's not quite the same. But I really like them a lot.
Sarah MacLean 52:20 / #
It sounds like Romancelandia really loves this book. It's on my desk because it's one of my next reads. I mean, it's on my desk with eight other books, but, and I got a puppy this week. I don't know what I'm doing.
Jennifer Prokop 52:30 / #
You're not reading space romances.
Sarah MacLean 52:31 / #
I'm also reading this book. I'm reading this puppy training book that's written by monks. I don't even know who I am.
That's real awkward. Sarah. Real awkward. Are we done?
I think so. No wait. You had a queer space romance.
Jennifer Prokop 52:48 / #
Oh, I do have one I want to shout out it's called "Treason of Truths" by Ada Harper. And it is essentially also a bodyguard romance except, so the queen or the empress, her name Sabine, so of course I was already really into liking her. And then her lover although it's real complicated at the beginning. You can't quite figure it out. Her name is Lyre. L Y R E, is that how you say it? And her job essentially is, she's the spymaster for the empress. But the book opens with her doing some negotiating and you definitely at first like, "Wait is this unrequited love?" Lyre's just super into Sabine but then they get back together and you could tell everybody thinks they're already lovers. It's kind of hidden but there's this great line at the beginning and I was all in where Sabine says something to someone in Lyre thinks, "When she says, 'Thank you,' she can make it sound like, 'Fuck you.'" And I was like, that's my kind of character right there. So that one is one that I I actually have not finished yet. But I've started once I knew we were doing this and I've been really enjoying it but I will admit I'm not there yet. I'm not done yet.
Sarah MacLean 54:08 / #
Oh great. Well I'm glad that we shouted it out. Tell us your favorite space romance because we want to read more of them. I downloaded "Warrior's Woman" like a lunatic earlier so I'm ready. I mean who am I kidding? I'm not reading this monk book. But we are very excited. I'm always jazzed when we can talk about a sub genre of romance that is feels new. Feels fresh. There are just there are only so many wallflower rakes that you know, I mean, I love a wallflower rake. God knows. But
There are no wallflowers in space, Sarah none. And maybe that's why I like it.
I don't think no. This is really fun. It's summer. It's time for space romances. If there were ever a time for space romance. It's summer.
Now, before we go, you wanted to try something new at the end of every episode.
Oh my gosh, I wasn't ready to do it today. But
Do you want me to start?
You start. Yeah. And I've got a thing that I'm yeah, I've got a thing to talk about.
So it's just sharing something fun that we had happened to us or that we did. Is that what it is?
I don't know. No, I'm thinking that it should be a like, "Is there a book that you just recently read that you think is great?" Okay, the recc. Either a book or a movie or show or thing?
Jennifer Prokop 55:38 / #
Oh, okay. So I have been watching Chernobyl on HBO to no one's surprise because everyone knows I know love a nuclear story. But you know, it's been really cool. I know.
Sarah MacLean 55:49 / #
That's so obscure and weird. Oh my god. Have you read Alyssa Cole's mixed signals?
Yeah, but wait, you didn't know that about me. You didn't know
I knew that you, vaguely but I didn't know that it was, you know, a thing you put in your bio. Send me your nuclear romances.
Okay. Actually, there are a few nuclear romances and I have not read them.
Well, that Mixed Signals one, isn't it?
All right. That's Listen, I read nonfiction nuclear books. I've read many, many books about Chernobyl. I know that's real fucking crazy, but I love it. Yeah, so I've read Actually, I'll take a picture. I put it on Twitter. You just don't follow me closely. Enough. I have a whole nuclear shelf anyway,
I have puppy now. I can't I just I can't. I can't Twitter.
Okay, here's what's really cool about if you've watched the show. They also have a podcast that goes along with it. And what's really cool about the podcast is, it's the guy from Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me, which I was on one than once. I was on that once and won. But
You were on what?
Jennifer Prokop 56:55 / #
Wait, I'll tell you that in a minute. Wait, and he's interviewing the writer. And what they do is they kind of go through the episode and talk about what parts are true and where they came from and which parts he essentially wrote in. So it's a really cool way of experiencing the show. Kind of like, if you ever have that question when, you're watching something that's based on real events, you're like, "Which parts real which parts aren't?" The podcast is so fun to listen to, as you watch because that, or after you watch, because then you're like, "Oh, that's a composite character. Oh, that dialogue actually came straight from voices from Chernobyl," so I really recommend the podcast in the show.
You can recommend puppy books, I guess.
Nope. No, I you guys, I so I really love the movies, but I don't go to them enough. And that is the thing that is real. But I went to see Book Smart.
Jennifer Prokop 58:00 / #
Oh, I want to see that!
Sarah MacLean 58:02 / #
My lovely friend Megan Frampton, and Megan and I live five or six blocks from each other and in between our houses - this is what's so great about living in a city - is a movie theater. So we met in the middle and we went to see Book Smart, which is, I said to my husband, "It is the greatest last night of high school movie I've ever seen." Basically if you loved all those high school coming of age movies, this movie is about the very last night of high school. Tomorrow morning is graduation. And the heroine is the valedictorian and her best friend, who is the salutatorian - is that how you say that? Salutatorian. And they are adorable workaholic. Well, the valedictorian is an adorable workaholic nerd. And the salutatorian is mega feminist nerd. And they've done nothing but be each other's friends and study to get into the best possible colleges and to do their amazing things after after high school. And then on the last day of school, she discovers that all the kids who she thinks like, "Well, they've just slacked off and not done anything. And they're all going to, you know, nowhere colleges and she's gonna end up being their boss," turns out, they're all going to Yale and Princeton, Stanford and big colleges, and she realizes in the very beginning of this movie, she's basically missed out on high school because she was so panicked for the rest of her life. So she had that one night to rectify it. It's like a buddy movie. And it has all the beats. There's a little there's a little bit of a romance in it. It has all the beats that you love in these movies. If you love these movies, which I do, and I just highly, highly recommend it. It's written by a woman. Produced, it's got a giant female, lots and lots of women working on it. The crew, and it's written by Olivia Wilde who's, you know, awesome talented. Jason Sudeikis, is in it.
Jennifer Prokop 1:00:30 / #
Hmm, that sounds so good.
Sarah MacLean 1:00:31 / #
So is Lisa Kudrow.
Well, it's summertime it's time for me to get my movie on so I'm here for it.
If you like a high school movie. But you teach high school you well you teach junior high.
I don't. I teach middle school but you know, my son is in high school and I am always telling him, "Just enjoy high school. Stop fucking falling for this crazy idea that your life will only matters."
I want you to watch it with him and then tell me what he thinks.
Jennifer Prokop 1:00:58 / #
I will report back to you.
Sarah MacLean 1:00:59 / #
Yeah, I want to know what real kids - kids on the street - feel. But I really loved it.
Kids on the street are still in bed at 11:30 / # in the morning, fine.
That's a great life.
Jennifer Prokop 1:01:10 / #
It seriously is.
Sarah MacLean 1:01:11 / #
It really is. I would be in bed if I didn't have you know, kids and a dog. And a husband.
Jennifer Prokop 1:01:18 / #
Self-inflicted!
Sarah MacLean 1:01:22 / #
All right, my love's. This was Fated Mates. Don't forget to subscribe, like and subscribe in your favorite podcasting app. Find us on Twitter at Fated Mates. Find us on Instagram at Fated Mates pod. Check out the show notes because Jen is amazing and does beautiful show notes. There will be cover images this year.
Jennifer Prokop 1:01:42 / #
Yeah. Oh yeah. Just a quick reminder everybody that the Moon and Mars are two different places. Have fun in space.
Sarah MacLean 1:02:31 / #
Well masturbating will help for a little bit, but ultimately, you gotta have sex.
Jennifer Prokop 1:02:37 / #
It does not have to be P in V.
Movie Dialogue 1:03:29 / #
Waiter all have with she's having only less pepper