S04.14: Elda Minger: Trailblazer
The Trailblazer series continues this week with Elda Minger—author of contemporary and historical romances, including Untamed Heart, which is the first contemporary romance to feature condom use on the page.
Elda talks about writing for Vivian Stephens, about writing about women’s bodies, about reproductive choice and about the way romance made space for women during the 70s and 80s. She shares a collection of gorgeous stories about her life as a reader and writer (and a particularly wonderful detour as a bookseller). About the boom of category and contemporary romance in the 1980s, and about the way writing made her who she is.
We are thrilled to have found Elda, and that she took time to speak with us and share her wonderful perspective on the genre with us. We can’t think of a better week to share this episode with you.
There’s still time to buy the Fated Mates Best of 2021 Book Pack from our friends at Old Town Books in Alexandria, VA, and get eight of the books on the list, a Fated Mates sticker and other swag! Order the book box as soon as you can to avoid supply chain snafus.
Thank you, as always, for listening! If you are up for leaving a rating or review for the podcast on your podcasting app, we would be very grateful!
Next week, we’re reading Nalini Singh’s Caressed by Ice, number three (and Jen’s favorite) of the Psy-Changeling series. Get it at Amazon, Apple, Kobo, B&N or at your local indie.
Show Notes
Welcome Elda Minger, author of over 30 romance novels, including Untamed Heart, Harlequin American Romance #12, the first contemporary romance with condoms used on page. In 1987, Elda wrote a column in RWR (the Romance Writer’s Report, an RWA publication) defending the use of contraception in romance novels.
Elda was selling Kathleen Woodiwiss's Shanna at the Chicago bookstore chain Kroch and Brentano’s.
Elda first Harlequin American Romances were edited by Vivian Stephens. In this interview with Vivian Stephens from the Browne Pop Culture Library archives, she describes the founding of RWA and her move to Harlequin.
Names Elda mentioned: Harlequin editor Evelyn Grippo, Harlequin editorial director Fred Kerner, writing coach Marilyn Lowery, Mills & Boon editor Frances Whitehead, Harlequin editor Randall Toye, Mills and Boon editor Jacqui Bianchi, Loveswept editor Carolyn Nichols, Harlequin editor Debra Matteucci, Harlequin editor Birgit Davis-Todd, Avon editor Nancy Coffey.
Thinking about those early days, it actually brought me such a sense of joy, and I was so grateful that I lived through it. And I was so grateful that I got to have this career. I still had this career where most of the people I know, my contemporaries, they hate their jobs, they're now retiring. They're kind of not knowing what to do. They're having bad retirements because they were like, all structured, going to job, coming home, you know, and I've been so darn lucky, because I literally would get up, make a cup of coffee, walk to my desk, start creating with all these people. And with all my animals, you know, my family, just, just home. I'm a real homebody too. And I just loved it. And then all I ever wanted and it's funny because people always say, “Do you think you're a big success?” All I ever wanted was to give to readers, what writers gave to me. That was it, and I got that.
Jennifer Prokop 0:58 / #
That was the voice of Elda Minger.
Sarah MacLean 1:01 / #
Author of Untamed Heart, which is known in romance history as the first contemporary romance to feature condom use on the page.
Jennifer Prokop 1:10 / #
Elda was edited by Vivian Stephens. She tells the story of working with Vivian and also Carolyn Nichols, another storied romance editor, and amazing, amazing perspective on Woodiwiss, on the early days of romance and what it was like to be a part of a company of women, for which she is still really proud to be part of.
Sarah MacLean 1:38 / #
This one is pretty perfect. Welcome to Fated Mates, everyone. I'm Sarah MacLean. I read romances, and I write them.
Jennifer Prokop 1:46 / #
And I'm Jennifer Prokop, a romance reader and editor. Off we go.
Elda Minger 1:55 / #
I grew up in a house of readers, all teachers, my mom, my dad, my grandmother. I knew how to read before I went to school. Books were always the most coveted, like Christmas was like ripping open, and it wasn't socks, it wasn't underwear, it wasn't toys. It was books. And I mean, I remember, I remember, my mother's family was so funny. They were like, "You let your kids read comic books?" My dad was like, "I don't care what they're reading so long as they're reading, you know?"
Elda Minger 2:23 / #
And we just read and read and talked books, and my great aunt and great uncle, they had a limited income. So they'd search all year for used books, that was our interest and tie them with twine. And I remember I had a girlfriend who said, "What a horrible gift. Those books kind of smell, and they didn't even wrap them with paper." And I remember thinking, "You just don't get it. You just don't get it, and that's cool."
Jennifer Prokop 2:46 / #
That's amazing.
Elda Minger 2:47 / #
But I always, you know, we had tons of books in the house. I remember when we lived in Illinois, a plumber came and he looked around, he goes, "You read all these books?" to my dad. And my dad said, "Nah, they're just really good insulation." You know against the snow, but I mean, you know, I just always loved the written word. I always loved books. And I never thought about being an author because my dad wrote three books, and my uncle wrote a biography of Mozart, and my mother published some poetry, but I always saw my dad when he would get like rejection letters, and he'd get so depressed, and he'd have a couple of drinks like, ah shit, this is awful, you know? And I just thought, "I never want to be that person." And so the biggest laugh in my family was when I started writing books, because it was, you know, a lot of us became teachers and I did do a lot of teaching of writing, but I never really thought about becoming a writer and then romance, the way it came to me, because I read Harlequins in high school, and I remember going to Reeves drugstore on Main Street in Antioch, town of 1200 people, right on the Wisconsin border, Illinois to Wisconsin.
Jennifer Prokop 3:53 / #
I'm in Chicago. I know where that is.
Elda Minger 3:55 / #
Okay, it's Chain O' Lakes, that big resort, you know. So there was a big metal spinner, and there was this book there, and I looked at it, it was something in Italy, and I thought that looks good, and I took it home, and I read it, I think I was like 12. And I was just like mesmerized. And of course, it was all like, "his taut thighs and his glowering" and you know, and I didn't know what half of what was going on, but it was a great story. And I went back and I said to the lady, I said, "Are there more of these?" And she said, "Well, there's four every month." And I said, "Oh boy!" And she goes, "I can save them for you." And she said, "I'll put them in a brown paper bag." And I was like, "Why?" And she goes, "Well, I'll put them in a brown paper bag."
Sarah MacLean 4:32 / #
(laughing) You'll understand when you get older!
Elda Minger 4:36 / #
Right away, and it was like, okay, somehow I'm not supposed to be reading these or something, you know, something's a little forbidden. So I kept them hidden in my closet, but I read Harlequins all through high school, and it was, I loved them! And you know, like Violet Winspear and Anne Mather. All the older names.
Jennifer Prokop 4:54 / #
Carole Mortimer was my favorite of those Presents authors.
Elda Minger 4:56 / #
Oh yeah. Oh God, she was great! And, and it was so funny because I remember I had a big box in my closet, I kept them hidden, and it was one of the reasons when I was in college I, when my dad said, he taught at Loyola University, so he said, "Hey, it'd be cheaper for you to go to Rome for a year than for me to pay for your college," because kids, you know, the professor's kids get free. And I said, "Italy, sign me up!" You know, I want to go to England. I want to go to all the places I'd read about in Harlequins. So it was part of my international travel. And so then, you know, my dad was really, there was my older sister, me and my little brother. My dad was great. As far as equality for women, like we sat around the dinner table, and it was like the rose and the thorn, best thing today, worst thing today, I always felt like I could speak up and have opinions and talk to people. And I'd go to friends houses, and this was the Midwest in the '70s, and I remember going to a dinner where the wife and the two girls did not talk at all.
Elda Minger 4:58 / #
And the father and the brothers talked and it took me a second to realize I wasn't supposed to talk. And then we all got up and cleared the table, and they sat and talked and the father lit a cigarette, and I was like, this was like being on Mars, because my dad would be like, "Okay, what'd you kids learn today? Anything funny? What's going on? You know, tell me what your friends are up to." So I always felt I could always speak up and not be a loud mouth, but just be articulate and have opinions. So I went away to school, I went to Kenyon College, got a degree in English Lit, and it had only been open to women for about five years, six years. And all this does tie into the condom scene, it really does. And I remember a professor who was a real bastard. And he said, "Women cannot write novels. Women cannot write novels." And this one woman in the front she was like, "Anne Bradstreet." And he said, "Poetry and a kind of an anomaly." And somebody else said, "Emily Brontë." And he literally said, "She was insane." This woman was insane. Wuthering Heights. And I'm sitting in the back row thinking, "What's wrong with this guy?" And I got really mad, and I screamed out, "Jane Austen!" And there's this dead silence, and you could see cognitive dissonance, like his face got real red, and he was, because how can you say, "This is a crappy writer," when the Prince Regent said, "The most perfect novel in the English language." Right? And so he's, "Ah, ah, ah." And he just couldn't, and it was great because it was just people were like, "Good for you." Just, "Jane Austen!" You know, so I took my English degree, and there was like women's studies classes back then. And there were women authors, like we were a separate category. We were not writers, we were women writers. And so it was really weird because I never read romance. You know in like '72, The Flame and the Flower came out. I was in college. So I knew nothing of historicals. I knew Harlequins, I knew category, I didn't know historicals.
Jennifer Prokop 7:53 / #
So did you read The Flame in the Flower? Was that?
Elda Minger 7:56 / #
Well, not in college. I mean I was so busy reading like all the male authors and all their point of view and everything, and not that they're bad, but it was like, let's have a little of everybody, you know. And so I read them in Italy. I found the Mills and Boons, that little British bookstore that was there. I came home, now I'd finished school and the worst part, worst part of my life, my dad died three months before I finished college.
Elda Minger 8:18 / #
So I was reeling, and I barely, I mean, my professor was great because we had to do orals, we had to, like stand up and really say we knew our stuff. And I remember standing there thinking, "I'm gonna flunk! I, my brain is like, I'm screwed." And he looked at me and said, "Miss Minger." And I said, "Yes." And he said, "Shakespeare." And I thought, "Thank you, God, because I know Shakespeare." I mean he knew that I loved and knew, so I managed to pass. So my sister and I both got a job at Kroch's and Brentano's in Libertyville, outside Chicago.
Sarah MacLean 8:47 / #
What is that?
Elda Minger 8:47 / #
It was a bookstore chain, a really nice bookstore chain, almost like, like Barnes and Noble, like gifts and things, but mostly books. And it was right outside Chicago, and Chicago, their readers, Phil Donahue, always advertised books. It was before Oprah, but I mean, talk shows would do books and you'd fix the table up front with that book, and all the women, the women were the great readers, they'd come in and buy the book. So I remember about three weeks after I got there to work there, our manager, Karen, who was just great, best boss I ever had. She said, "We are having a phenomenon. We need to talk after work. 15 minutes. You need to be prepared." So we go in back and there are all these crates marked "Shanna." (laughter) She said, "We are going to be selling this book. It's going to be very different." Than of course this was the killer. She goes, "Elda, you're the best cashier, you're going on the front register. You will be there all day. You will signal if you need a bathroom break."
Elda Minger 9:41 / #
"You will get a full lunch break, but we will not even sticker these books. You are going to memorize the SKU, it will be taped up on the register. And you will be like, your fingers will be flying, and you will be selling these books." And I was listening, but it wasn't that I was a smartass, but I was like, "Yeah, yeah. How bad can it be?" Okay.
Elda Minger 9:59 / #
We get there, we're there at 7:30 / # in the morning, by eight o'clock, it's like a rock concert.
Sarah MacLean 10:07 / #
(gasps) Wait, was she there? Or was it just the book?
Elda Minger 10:10 / #
No, no, no. This was just selling Shanna. And we had unpacked the book and Karen said, "Don't even shelve it. Stack it on your counter. Just stack it up." We're stacking it on the tables, and it's like, we literally had clerks, who their whole job was to give the book out, just give the book out. Here's Shanna. Here's Shanna. I was almost scared when they opened the door because it was like (she makes a whizzing sound) and this stampede of women came in and they were so alive and so excited in their eyes and their energy. And I was like, "What is this? What is this?" Now remember I'm here screaming, "Jane Austen. Come on women writers!" I have no idea what this is. So about 11 o'clock before my lunch break, I took a copy. I knew we were going to run out, and I hid it like under the counter. And on my lunch break I went back and put it in my locker because I thought, "I'm buying this, whatever this is. I don't know what it is, but it's something. It's something."
Sarah MacLean 10:59 / #
Had she described it to you?
Elda Minger 11:04 / #
She said it was a historical romance. And I was like, "What's that?" I've never heard of any of that because I was like in a bubble in Gambier, Ohio, tiny little college town. You know, there was barely a drugstore in Mount Vernon. And so where did you get books? You had your college bookstore and they sure didn't carry historical romance. So I go home, we make dinner. I crack open this book, and oh my god, I cannot stop reading. And I'm reading and I'm reading and I'm like, "I love this woman. She's not a nice girl. She's not a perfect woman. She's not a paragon of virtue. She's not the angel of the house. She's real. She doesn't want to get married. She's gonna pull a fast one over on her dad, which I was very, that was one of my specialties." And I was like, "Oh my God!" So I read and I probably got about half of it done and I fell asleep at four in the morning, dragged my ass to work, sold another whole huge day of Shannas. We were shipping them in from Chicago, because we'd run out. Unbelievable. I have never, I've never in my life seen a book sell like Shanna. It was unbelievable.
Sarah MacLean 12:03 / #
Well, just for our listeners, to give people a little bit of a frame of reference. Shanna is by Kathleen Woodiwiss, who wrote The Flame and the Flower. It was published in 1977, which is five years after The Flame and the Flower. So at this point, everybody who listens to the podcast knows that The Flame and the Flower sold two million copies in the first year. So Kathleen Woodiwiss is a rock star at this point.
Elda Minger 12:30 / #
She's a phenomenon.
Sarah MacLean 12:31 / #
Millions and millions of women and men who are waiting for that book to come out.
Elda Minger 12:37 / #
Yeah, it's a phenomenon. And so I finished the book, and I said to my friend, Janet, who worked at the bookstore, I said, "Are there more like this?" And she goes, "Oh, please!" She leads me down to the whole big bookshelf and she goes, "Get this, this, this." So number two I read The Wolf and the Dove. Loved it. Number three Sweet Savage Love. Loved it. I mean just, I went through everything. I went through Rosemary Rogers and Kathleen Woodiwiss, and Shirley Busbee, and Laurie McBain and I, oh my God, just on and on and on. And I'm like, "What is this?" I just fell in love. And I had a story in the back of my head. And this is really interesting because I was at the Writers Guild when Stephen Gaghan talked about Traffic, and how he wrote the movie script. And he is from St. Louis, and he said, "Three weeks after my father died, I started writing." And he said, "I don't know why. But that was it." And I was in the front row and I just stopped writing, I took little notes for friends, but I was like, "Oh my God, three weeks after my father died, I started writing the story that was in my head." And this is the weird part, it was a historical romance. And I didn't even know the genre. I did not know the genre. So I thought, "That's interesting." And he said, "I think it was my desperate attempt to control what I couldn't control." And I thought, "Yep. Bingo! You nailed me. Doesn't take Freud to figure that one out." So I'm writing this historical romance, I'm reading them like crazy. I end up driving to LA, because we ended up, after my dad died, we moved back to the west coast because all the rest of our family was there. And so Harlequin used to have an office on Sunset Boulevard. And the woman who ran it was named Evelyn Grippo. And she would have these things where she'd set up chairs and have cookies and coffee and talk about romance. And she'd say, "I'm always looking for writers." And I didn't think about writing a Harlequin then because I was writing my historical. So I finished it. And then there was a thing called the California Writers Conference. And Florence Feiler, a very ancient older lady, was there, an agent. And my, my claim to fame with her was that she had gotten the manuscripts beforehand, and she had read my first historical and when I came in to meet her, I was so nervous that I hyperventilated. Then she had to give me a bag and I was like breathing into the bag (makes frantic deep breathing noises.) And she was like, "Calm down, honey, calm down." And I'm like (makes frantic deep breathing noises again.) And she goes, "First of all, you can write. So that's the good news." She said, "Secondly, here's the bad news. The historical market is dead. Do you know what a Harlequin is?" And I said, "I do! I love them!" And she goes, "Good. Tonight at the dinner, go up to Fred Kerner and tell him I told you to tell him to send you a box of Harlequins." And I said, "Okay." So Fred Kerner was this very flamboyant guy at Harlequin who wore a white suit and they did those parties for women readers. This is like ancient history, but he was a nice guy. And I went up to him and I said, "Florence Feiler asked me to ask you to send me a box of Harlequins." He goes, he took a business card, "Write down your address, honey. Okay. It will be to you." So I told my mom and my mom was like, "Hmm." Because my mother was like a Capricorn and a very business oriented woman. So three weeks later to the day, this big box comes crashing down on my apartment step, like a huge 46 paperback count box, filled with Romance and Presents and my mother was like, "I'll be damned." The first one I picked up Janet Daily, No Quarter Asked. So I'm reading and I'm going and see I came from a theater background, so I'm like, "God, this is like a really intense one act play. This is harder than it looks."
Sarah MacLean 15:59 / #
Oh, it's so interesting that you frame it that way.
Elda Minger 16:02 / #
That was the way my mind worked, and I began breaking it down and breaking it down. And I was taking a writing class with Marilyn Lowery who was a great influence on me. You could not get in her Saturday morning class unless you had your 10 pages, no ifs, ands, or buts. So that really taught me discipline. But anyway, so I read them all and I wrote one and I sent it to London. And I remember I was so upset. I was like puking practically because I was so nervous. And I remember my brother said, "Why do you have to mail it? I'll mail it." I was like, "Good. Go do it. I can't do it. I'm too scared." So I got a little thin letter from England, from Frances Whitehead that said, "Dear Miss Minger, Though your story was entertaining, it is not suitable for our list, and we already have our American writer. But thank you so much for considering -"
Sarah MacLean 16:45 / #
Our American writer who is Janet Dailey.
Elda Minger 16:47 / #
Janet Dailey. And so I remember thinking, "Alright, our list. What does that mean?"
Sarah MacLean 16:50 / #
Wait, we heard this. Did we hear this story?
Jennifer Prokop 16:53 / #
Nora Roberts is famous for saying that.
Elda Minger 16:56 / #
Everybody got this letter. Everybody got this letter. Not right for your list. And I was like, "Not right for my list."
Sarah MacLean 17:03 / #
We have our American writer.
Elda Minger 17:04 / #
Well my brother was like, "I think it means they don't want it." And I was like, "Yeah, I think you're right." So I kept writing and then Orange County -
Sarah MacLean 17:10 / #
But if you have to be in a club, Elda, you want to be in a club with Nora Roberts and Jayne Ann Krentz.
Elda Minger 17:15 / #
Oh yeah. Oh my God. Exactly. Exactly. And so Orange County was exploding at that point, because I read a book about romance, and it was interesting because Vivian was a pivotal part of it. It was like these men did not know what they had. They did not know what they had. But they knew they wanted more of it because it was making money. And so all this exploded and editors were literally, every month major editors from New York were flying out to LAX. Now down in Orange County they're like, "We don't want to drive up into LA, but hey El, you live in LA. Can you go to LAX and pick up the editors?" And they were like, "Don't you dare pick their brains. You're like a chauffeur. We'll give you gas money, but you just drive them down."
Sarah MacLean 17:55 / #
Well you seem like the kind of person who wouldn't be chatty at all.
Elda Minger 17:59 / #
Exactly. But the funniest part was, I remember I picked up Jacqui Bianchi, who I adored, she was with Mills and Boon. And so she was like, "Okay, fire away!" With that little British accent. She's like, "Fire away. Ask me anything." And I said, "Well, I'm not supposed to ask you anything." And she was like, "Oh, bollocks. Just ask me whatever you want. You know, just, we're in the car for an hour. Let's go." And she was great. And so these editors would come and they would, they had like the tip sheets, and they had all this stuff. I mean they had, they were so well organized. It was like, "Here's what we want. Here's what we need." It was so exciting, because everybody and their mother wanted romance, and everybody was trying to write it. And like Orange County had up to three, four hundred members at a time. And they were wonderful presentations, like the morning would be a local author, but the afternoon would always be like an editor, or an agent, and they were great.
Sarah MacLean 18:46 / #
We should say that the Orange County Chapter of RWA, until you know recently, has been one of the most vibrant chapters of RWA from the very start.
Elda Minger 18:56 / #
Yeah, it is THE chapter. I think Texas, Texas is important. California. I mean not that the others aren't, but like they're the major chapters. But it was just an amazing time. And so I did get an agent. And then it was funny because I wrote one romance. And I remember my agent said, "The next book," she said, "I'll send this one out, but the next one, try to think of something really interesting, like unusual, that'll set you apart." So my sister at the time was training exotic animals, and I thought that's pretty interesting.
Sarah MacLean 18:57 / #
That's a perfect Harlequin job.
Elda Minger 19:05 / #
Nobody had done that, and so I got information from her, and I wrote Untamed Heart. And so I was working at UCLA managing Ackerman Union and it was a really difficult job because professors would make students buy their $60 textbooks that were just like good for doorstops and much not else. And we'd be shipping them back and forth to the publishers constantly, like shipping them over, then shipping them back. It was like the biggest waste of postage ever. So I was in charge of that, and I'm back there in my my camouflage pants and my gray t-shirt, my hair up in a bun with a pencil through, my army boots, you know, and I'm shipping these boxes back. And it was really funny because I remember my agent called and she said, "Okay, Silhouette turned it down." And I said, "Okay, what was wrong with it? What do I need to improve?" And she goes, "No. Elda, I don't want to read you this letter." And I said, "No, no, I'm, you know, I can learn from criticism. I want you to tell me what's wrong with the book." And she was like, "I really don't want to." And I began to get suspicious, and I said, "Read it to me." And she said, "Well, okay. "I hate this book.""
Elda Minger 20:32 / #
"I hate Hollywood people. I hate the industry."
Sarah MacLean 20:36 / #
(gasps) Please.
Elda Minger 20:36 / #
"This woman needs, this woman needs to stop. She should not consider a career as a writer." And I'm like, I'm like on the phone, before cellphones, gutted. Tears coming into my eyes, and I'm saying, "Okay, okay. Don't send it out. Don't send it out."
Sarah MacLean 20:51 / #
This is Untamed Heart that we're talking about, because Untamed Heart is about a Hollywood star.
Elda Minger 20:57 / #
Yeah. Yeah. It's about a director directing a movie in Puerto Rico. She's the animal trainer, and it was just like, "I hate these people. I hate Hollywood. It's a horrible, you know, tell her to stop." And see that was the part, I mean it's fine if you say, "We don't really care for Hollywood books. It's not our cup of tea." But tell her, "Stop the career." And I was like, "She's got to know. She's an editor."
Sarah MacLean 21:17 / #
Oh god. I hope you one day walked right up to her and said, "Look at me. I'm amazing!" (laughs)
Elda Minger 21:23 / #
Later on at this conference, this woman said to me, "Why have you never chosen to write for Silhouette?" And I thought, "Well if you only knew. If you only knew."
Sarah MacLean 21:31 / #
You know, we've heard, nobody will name this editor, and I'm not going to ask you to, but we've heard about this Silhouette editor before.
Elda Minger 21:37 / #
Yeah. Yeah. Bad letters.
Sarah MacLean 21:39 / #
I assume it's the same Silhouette editor that we've heard from other people.
Sarah MacLean 21:43 / #
So, you know.
Elda Minger 21:46 / #
Oh, yeah. And so I begged my agent. I said, "Please don't send it out. I'll give you another book. Please don't send this out." I was like crying on the phone, people at work, I mean it was like back in the bowels of the receiving and the docks and the trucks and all, but still, a couple of my students were looking at me like, "What's going on?" And she goes, "Well, I've already sent it out. Harlequin American Romance is looking for authors, and I sent it to Vivian Stephens." And I was so pathetic. I was like, "Get it back! Please get it back!" And she's like, "Oh, honey, one editor likes it, one editor doesn't." So literally two days later, she calls me at work, "You just sold your first book." And I'm like, "What?" This is like total cognitive dissonance.
Jennifer Prokop 22:25 / #
Like whiplash.
Elda Minger 22:25 / #
Cognitive dissonance. "What? The same book?" And she goes, "Yeah. Yeah. Vivian Stephens said, "Oh my God, I've just found my action adventure writer."
Sarah MacLean 22:25 / #
(gasps) Yay!
Elda Minger 22:27 / #
And I went -
Jennifer Prokop 22:43 / #
That's amazing.
Elda Minger 22:38 / #
And I hung up the phone, and at the time, it was a $6,000 advance, and that was close to what I made in a year at that time. And I thought, "I'm quitting my job, and I'm going to write the next book. I'm going to give it 100%." So I went to my boss to quit, to basically give her two weeks notice or a month's notice, and she goes, "Oh to hell with your notice." And she goes, "Shut that door. I'm ordering a pizza. How the hell did you sell a book? I want to sell a book." It's like every, every you know, we're all book people working in bookstores. We all love to read. Within the next two weeks, I was working there before I left, almost everyone in every department came up to me and said, "Tell me how you did this. How did you do this? How did you sell this book?" So it was hilarious, but Vivian was great.
Jennifer Prokop 23:20 / #
Yeah, tell us about working with Vivian.
Elda Minger 23:24 / #
She was so far ahead of her time, she and Carolyn Nichols both, and I think, they again, exuded that energy. They had that, just that magnetism. They were, they were almost like little rock stars in their own right, because like an editor would get up and talk about stuff, and you'd be kind of like, "Yeah, yeah, yeah." Carolyn and Vivian, they'd command the stage, they'd say, "This is what I want." They were absolutely 100% sure in what they were doing and what they wanted.
Jennifer Prokop 23:48 / #
At this time Carolyn was working for her Harlequin. Later, so for everyone who's listening, later, she goes on to essentially be the founding editor of Loveswept.
Jennifer Prokop 23:59 / #
At this point, she was a Harlequin editor.
Elda Minger 24:01 / #
I don't know, I don't remember Carolyn at Harlequin. But Vivian, I was working with Vivian, and she was starting this new line, American Romance. She had come to talk to us about it, and she said, "The hero can be 20 pounds overweight, you know, that they can be a little balding. She can be realistic, you know, make them real people." And I really kind of liked the concept. And so I remember she said to me, "I want the books to be you. You know, I want you to write what you want to write. I want it to be your voice, your ideas, your imagination, just go wild. I will, you know, tell me your idea and nothing is too crazy. I'll help you shape it, but just go. You know, just go." And she liked Untamed Heart a lot, and I remember the reason I put in the condom, and this is funny 'cause I hadn't thought about this in years, this will sound like the Stone Age to you guys because you're much younger. I grew up in a town, I went to high school in a town of 1200 people. It was still very much a, I would call it a boy's town, like lots of hunting, fishing, ice fishing, skiing, sledding. Women were, you know, married young, had their kids and kind of disappeared is the only way I can put it. They disappeared. And marriage, I remember Jessie Bernard once said, a sociologist, she said, "Marriage is a great deal for men and children, but not so great for women." And I remember reading that and thinking, "Yep." When women did not have access to birth control, and biologically, the sex drive is strong. I had numerous friends who got pregnant, and back in the day, there was no abortion. If you could find a doctor you could go, you could get someone to do the job, and then if you started bleeding out, you went to the emergency room. And I had two friends, older sisters, they told me later on, it was like the most terrifying experience of their lives, which is why abortion must always be safe and legal. But you had two choices. And I had two girlfriends in high school who, their beginning of their senior year or summer of their junior year, whatever, they went to visit their aunt, and they came back and they looked gutted. And I never forgot the look in their eyes, like dead eyes, because they had had their baby and given it up for adoption, because that was the option or you cornered the guy and married him, and if he thought he was trapped, it was not a good marriage, and it usually ended up in divorce. So birth control back then, I worked at a drugstore and the condoms were in a glass case behind the pharmaceutical counter. You could only buy them if you were married. This is how bad things were. You know, when I look back, it's like God, it was like the Stone Age. But the thing was, I couldn't in good faith, and all the romances, the historicals of course, they would have sex and then she'd be pregnant and there'd be a big brouhaha, but in the end he would love the baby. But with a contemporary I thought, "I can't do this. I can't do this." And I had interesting parents because my mother is from Puerto Rico, staunch Roman Catholic, could not have the sex talk with me. So my dad was like, "This is very embarrassing, but we're going to have the sex talk, and I don't think I can look at you while we do this, but you need to be protected." And I remember he told me, "Teenage boys will do anything. They would do a knothole in a plank. You have to understand this about male nature. And he said, "They will tell you, "I love you." They will promise you the moon and you are a very romantic girl, and you will have sex with him. And Monday morning he will be telling all his friends at school and you will be brokenhearted." And that did happen to one of my girlfriends, where she gave it up to a guy, and she was the town pump for the last two years of high school, and she never had a boyfriend because she didn't dare. And I remember thinking, "God, that's awful!" But you know, my dad taught college and he said, "Many a woman's college career was derailed because some guy said, "I love you. I'll be with you forever." And she ended up raising the baby with her and her mom and dropping out of school. And he said, "I don't want that for you. I don't know how more plainly to put it." And I was like, "Got it, Dad. Got it." Because he was pretty, I mean he said, "I don't expect you to be a virgin when you're married. It's different times, but pick a man who likes women." And I was at 16, so stupid, 14, "Daddy, all men like women." And he's like, "No, they don't. Pick a man who really does like and treasure women." So when I approached Untamed Heart, I thought, "Okay, I've got to somehow put birth control into it." And I said to Vivian, "Can I do that?" And she said, "If you can figure out a way to make it work, I'm all for it." She was like, what Vivian gave us more than anything was she trusted us as writers. She trusted our skill. I mean I was still a pretty raw beginner, but she gave me wings. You know she trusted me. She trusted me. She said, "You can do it." She gave you confidence.
Sarah MacLean 28:47 / #
I just want to say, I want to interrupt, because I re-read Untamed Heart this week, and I marked the page because I think it's important. I mean a lot of people, I bought a copy on eBay so that I could read it.
Elda Minger 29:04 / #
I have my copy.
Sarah MacLean 29:05 / #
There is this, I mean, first of all the hero, Ryan, is so, that first scene. Jen, I don't think you've read this book, and let me tell you, you're going to love it because they're in a sleeping bag in the first scene.
Jennifer Prokop 29:09 / #
Oh, I love that.
Sarah MacLean 29:20 / #
I mean, that's Jen’s kink.
Elda Minger 29:24 / #
(Laughing) I love it!
Sarah MacLean 29:25 / #
So they're in a sleeping bag, and it's very romantic, and he doesn't expect them to be in a sleeping bag together, and he says, “I can't, we can't have…” He brings her to orgasm, and then she's like, “What about you?” And he's like, “We can't have sex because I can't protect you.” And he says it just like that, “I can't keep you safe.” And it is great! And then when they finally do do it, it's so well done. I mean you basically begin what we have all done in contemporaries, where you know, the drawer opens and closes, and he turns away, and then he turns back and then they do it.
Jennifer Prokop 30:12 / #
Right.
Sarah MacLean 30:12 / #
And it's really, I mean you put it, you put it on page! So, Elda, I want to talk, so first of all, I mean Vivian was absolutely right to trust you. You did a magnificent job. It's so romantic and beautiful, and I want to ask, because I know that you also wrote, you ended up writing a piece about condom usage for RWA magazine, and I'm curious if you could talk a little bit about the response to it, because I know not every writer was super excited to put safe sex on page.
Elda Minger 30:50 / #
Well some women said, “It completely destroys the romantic fantasy.” And then a friend of mine quipped -
Sarah MacLean 30:56 / #
It’s so romantic.
Elda Minger 30:56 / #
Well the thing that was funny, a friend of mine quipped and said, “No, the real fantasy is that the guy would offer the protection.” And I was like, “Now, now, let's not go there, you know, let's not do that.” I just, I think I was lucky in a weird kind of way, because my mother being from the Caribbean, she had a different take on sex, she was very prudish and couldn't give me the talk, because she could not imagine me having sex in high school or even early college. But at the same time she was like, “It is a universal experience when you're with the right man. It's the most wonderful feeling in the world. It's fabulous. Don't be ashamed. Don't be, you know, don't have any shame or trepidation or fear. It's a wonderful thing. It gives you babies, you know, it's wonderful.” And so I think in some ways, I had a, a healthier attitude towards sex, because I had a lot of female friends who were like, and it really made me sad. It was like, “I can't even touch myself down there. It's so disgusting.” And I'm like, “What do you mean? What do you mean? That's you. That's you.” And then of course, Our Bodies Ourselves, and that was blowing up at the same time. And so we were all kind of learning at the same time, but I felt, I just kept saying, “I think it's intensely romantic if a man protects a woman, and if he looks out for her. It's intensely romantic and intensely beautiful, you know? And I never ever thought, it's so funny, and I'll tell you something you guys did for me. I wasn't going to put up my first four books on ebook, my first four Americans. And after I got your letter, I sat down and I thought, “No, I need to and I'm not going to.” Because people said, “Change and put in cell phones, make them different.” And I thought, “No.” I was going to call them “Blast from the Past”. And then I thought, “No, they're so badly written. I don't know if I want to put them up.”
Sarah MacLean 30:59 / #
They’re not badly written. They’re so romantic.
Elda Minger 31:03 / #
But then I thought, “Well, they're part of history.” I re-read Untamed Heart, and it was like, “God, Ryan's kind of a, God he's forceful!” But then I realized like halfway through the book he says, “I love you. It's different for me. This is different for me. Trust me and all the bullshit in the tabloids, you know.” So it was a very weird experience for me. And I thought, “No, I'm going to put these books up.” So you guys are responsible for that, the first four books.
Sarah MacLean 33:00 / #
I’m so glad to hear that!
Jennifer Prokop 33:01 / #
That’s amazing.
Sarah MacLean 33:02 / #
So they're coming soon.
Elda Minger 33:03 / #
Yeah, they're coming.
Sarah MacLean 33:05 / #
Oh, I'm so glad.
Elda Minger 33:06 / #
I will get Untamed Heart up really soon. The other thing about the back alley stuff was that a lot of girl’s first time out, couldn't have a baby, got abortions and became sterile. And that's a terrible thing for a woman to have to go through. They got infections. They got sterile. It's so unnecessary. And you know, people think like, I think a lot of people think it's like, "Well have an abortion! Have two!" And it's not like that. It's not that simple a thing because my girlfriend's older sister, she had three children, they were struggling, they could barely feed the third one. They were using birth control, she got pregnant and she said "It was most horrible decision of her life, because she's already a mother." She knows, you know, but she knew that they wouldn't survive with another child. And you know life can be very grim and very tough. And so you know, people who say women who have abortions, yeah, I'm sure they're women who use it as birth control. There are irresponsible women. Sure. But I think the vast majority, it's a really hard decision to make and it's nothing they take lightly, or think is just a walk in the park. You know it's not, it's not an easy thing. And so to me, birth control, have it there. You know, a young girl could read, I felt like a young girl could read Untamed Heart, the way I read those Harlequins when I was in high school. And she would be, when he says, "We're not protected." She would know what that, I'm sure she would figure out that's birth control, "Wow, that's what a hero does." And I've had women come up to me, like younger women and say, "I never knew men could be that way with women. When I read your books, I never knew men could care that much for women." And I'm like, "Oh, my God!" So you know a lot of authors go, "Eh, we're not curing cancer." But we are affecting people, we are affecting people who read our books.
Sarah MacLean 34:51 / #
You know that reader response, I never knew that this was a thing I could expect when we talk about expectations and romance. That's what we're talking about, is it shouldn't be a high expectation, an unrealistic expectation and should be -
Sarah MacLean 35:09 / #
An expectation.
Elda Minger 35:11 / #
Exactly. Exactly.
Jennifer Prokop 35:13 / #
It's funny, Elda, because I'm 47 and a lot of the stories you told about high school and no, this isn't about me, but I'm going to tell a story about my mom. And when I was in high school, I went to a Catholic high school, and there were a lot of girls who were pregnant, who got pregnant and like you, some of them gave the baby up for adoption. Some of them got married really young, and I will never forget this is a moment where, you have that moment where you're like, "This was when my parents did the best job parenting." So there was a girl in my neighborhood who was, I was a sophomore in high school and this girl was a senior. She was my older brother's age. And she was walking by, my mom and I were in our driveway for some reason, this girl walked by with her baby in a stroller, and my mom looked at me and she was like, "Look, I don't ever want that to be you. So if you're going to have sex, I want you to know I will take you to the doctor and you can go on birth control." And then there was this long pause and she said, "Okay, I'm not going to do it, but one of my friends will." (laughter)
Elda Minger 36:20 / #
What a great mom! What a great mom!
Jennifer Prokop 36:23 / #
I will never forget that moment, but this was, you know, this was almost 1990 when we would have had this conversation.
Elda Minger 36:31 / #
And we're still not protecting our girls. We are still not protecting our girls, because you look at rapes on college campuses. You look at girls going, oh, a great dad story. My dad was exceptional. I never knew it until I began talking to other women. When I went away to school, and again, because he was a college professor, he saw all this. He said, "When you go to a frat party, don't drink the punch." And I'm like, "What do you mean? Like Hairy Buffalo where they put all the alcohol, all the different bottles, right?" And he goes, "You don't know what's in it." And he said, "What you do is you ask for a can of Coke, and you watch them open it up. And honey, when you go to the bathroom, you take that Coke can with you." And I'm like, "Daddy, you are like, I'm going to be, I'm never going to be married. I'm going to be like a widow. I'm going to be like that maiden aunt up in the garret the way that you're doing my love life, you know." And he said, "Trust me on this." So my first frat party at Kenyon, I got, I remembered my dad, I got my Coke. Didn't take it to the bathroom. So I'm peeing in the bathroom, and I'm thinking, "I should have taken my Coke, but what the heck." So I come back and the guy hands it to me and he says, "Here you go." And I just had this weird, I always follow my gut, just had this weird feeling, and I said, "Why don't you take a sip first?" And he hesitated and I was like, "You bastard." And I went and I opened up another can of Coke, because you know, date rape drugs, maybe they weren't date rape, like the actual drug, but you know they could put stuff in to make you pass out or whatever. And I remember I cracked open another Coke, and I was just looking him like thinking, and then all of a sudden I thought, "Why am I here? Why am I here?" And I left and I never went to another frat party. But it's like, I have friends who, oh God, the stories I could tell you. And the two pregnancies that affected me the most were a girlfriend I had, two years ahead of me, senior year got pregnant. Her father made the guy marry her and they rented a house across the street from us, and during the summer, my bedroom window was open. And I was reading my Harlequins and I could hear them fighting, and they had been so in love. And they were fighting because they had no money. And her dad was paying for stuff. And her husband was like, "How do you think it makes me feel that your dad's paying for everything?" And you know, just endless fights. And I remember thinking, "This is so sad." And they did end up getting divorced. And the other one was my best friend from high school. She got pregnant, and her mom was like, "That's it. You're out." So she walked down to our house and looked at my mom. And I remember my mom said, "Elda, you need to leave the room, just for now." So I snuck over to the stairway and I sat in the stairway and I listened. And my girlfriend told my mom, "I'm pregnant." And my mother said, "Your mother loves you. She'll come around. Until then you'll stay here with us." And I still remember my dad grading papers, walking around, this, this was the era, a Lucky Strike hanging out of his mouth and rocking the baby because he wouldn't sleep. You know, but it's like, both lives derailed and not that children aren't wonderful, but the ability to time your family, and to be sure that the man is marrying you for the right reasons, you know what I mean? Like you're getting off to a good start. There are people who make it work and God bless them, but you know, a lot of times it doesn't. So it was so funny, I had never thought of this, but I just remember having a, it was like an ethical dilemma. I couldn't write a love scene where they just did it, and then nothing happened to her or she got pregnant, and it all worked out, you know, even though that's a huge romance trope, but I couldn't do it, you know?
Sarah MacLean 37:31 / #
Have you ever written a secret baby book?
Elda Minger 39:54 / #
Oh, yes. Oh, yes. In fact, I wrote, I, you know, I always challenged myself to do something, like Vivian would say like, "You always do these things that are so far out." I did Bachelor Mother and that was, I think it was the first book where a woman asked a man to get her pregnant, because she had a, I read a column in Dear Meg in the Star, and she said, "Dear Meg, I've always known I wanted to be a mother. I have problems with my ovaries. I have six months to get pregnant, and no boyfriend in sight. I'm thinking of asking my best friend to get me pregnant. What do you think?" And Dear Meg was like a staunch conservative and she said, "Do it, honey. Do it. You want that baby, you go for it." And I thought, "There's a book here." So that was one of my most popular Americans because she asked him to get her pregnant -
Sarah MacLean 40:41 / #
I can't wait to read that.
Elda Minger 40:42 / #
And then they fall in love. They fall in love. And then I actually did one for Temptation called Rescue Me. And the review I got on Amazon said, "Elda Minger has written a romance with absolutely no conflict and it works. And I don't know how she did it, but it works." And so I, you know, I like challenging myself. I did Daddy's Little Dividend. I did every other chapter in the past, like, present, past, present past, and then it all tied up at the end, and my editor called and said, "You know you didn't tell me if you were going to do this much. You didn't tell me you were going to do this much flashback." And I said, "Well, you know, what the heck." And she said, "But it does work, so we'll go ahead." And one of the ways I did my career, two things I did that were really crucial that I recommend to all authors. One thing I did was I always turned in full manuscripts, because I saw what happened to romance writers when they did a proposal and then they turned in, the book was sold, so the publisher had you. And then basically they had to rewrite it three and four times because it wasn't quite what they wanted, and it was just month after month after month. So and they were like, "Well, why would you write the whole thing? What if it's wrong?" And I said, "If it's wrong, I'll start another book, but I want the whole book to be there so they see what they see is what they get." And 90% of the time it was fine. And the other thing I've always recommended, my mom, God bless her, when I sold my first book she said, "Now darling, you need a lawyer." And I was like, "What are you talking about?" And she said, "You need a lawyer to look over your contract." And I said, "What?" You know, because I was down in Orange County. Nobody had a lawyer, you know. And she said, "You are now a small business, and you need to protect yourself. Find a lawyer. We're in Hollywood, I'm sure you can find an entertainment lawyer." I found a great lawyer. She did my first three contracts, my first 13 Americans. And she, there was all these clauses and it said, "The rights clause." She said, "Here's where the money is, and here's where you need to protect yourself." And it was very funny, because it was number F, which was appropriate, because it said, "And all other rights that may ever come into existence." And I said, "What the hell is that?"
Sarah MacLean 42:49 / #
I signed one of those, without an agent, first contract.
Elda Minger 42:54 / #
Yep, but it was funny because her name was Susan. And she said, "Honey, what if they somehow figure out a way to project your book on the moon, so that simultaneously everybody can read it? And you get no money from that?" And I was like, "Oh." And so book 14, I think was 13 or 14, Harlequin let my agent know, "We really like Elda. We really like her books, but we don't like her that much." You know, no more of this, like she can't push for anything else, but then when ebooks came into existence, everyone who had signed, "and all other rights that may come into existence," lost their ebooks. And I've gone to conventions, science fiction, fantasy, mystery people have come up to me, "How did you keep your books? How did you end up with all those titles to put up as ebooks?" And it was because of my mom. So good contract lawyer. Full manuscripts. That's, that's just the way I went.
Sarah MacLean 43:44 / #
This is incredible! I love all these stories! So Elda, just walk us through. So at this point you've written, you wrote for Harlequin American. Obviously, Vivian Stephens was only there for about a year and a half.
Sarah MacLean 44:01 / #
Then you moved to, you were moved to a different editor. Who was your sort of long standing editor? Did you have one?
Elda Minger 44:08 / #
I had Vivian, and then I had Debbie Matteucci. She was wonderful. Then I, American had a problem because the problem with American was they kept changing the focus, like one year was small town babies and apple pie. Then the next year, it was something else, and the next year it was something else, and it's really hard, you know, when they have this really distinct way you have to have the book, but they change it every year. Like Desire was like straight through, you could, you could know five years from now Desire would be basically a really sexy book, you know, and a good conflict. And so I remember I called, who did I call? I left a call, I think Randall Toye was, no, I called Debbie and I said, "I want to try and write for a different line. I feel like I'm getting stale. And it was really weird because Randall Toye called me up and said, "No, no, no, you will not go to Silhouette. Where would you like to go?" And I said, "Well, where could I go?" And he said, "How about Temptation?" And I said, "Good. I'll go there". So I loved working with Birgit Davis-Todd.
Sarah MacLean 45:08 / #
Would you explain to everybody the difference? What did Temptation mean at the time?
Elda Minger 45:12 / #
Temptation was like 65,000 words, so middling length, not short, not long, and really sexy. Temptation was like, you know, it's like Oscar Wilde, "I can resist anything but temptation." Right?
Jennifer Prokop 45:23 / #
It was kind of the precursor to Blaze, is what I would say.
Elda Minger 45:28 / #
Yeah. It was a great line. I wish they'd never destroyed it or cut it. I thought it could have gone, I would have written for them forever. But I loved Birgit, she was such a, she was probably at this point the best editor. Well, Vivian was, Vivian was the best as far as innovation and starting out. But as far as, as just editing and getting me to be the best writer, I could be, I would say Birgit Davis-Todd, because she went to McGill University and got a degree in editing. I mean, just an incredible woman, and she could always find that one piece in the manuscript that didn't work, and she'd point it out and you'd go, "Of course! Oh, my God! I didn't even think of that." But she was great. And then I did due two historicals and then I segued into bigger books for Berkeley, and then I went straight to ebooks. The last five or six years have been dicey, because I've had some death in my family and some family stuff. And so it's been a little slower than I would like, but it's like I, you know, it's not a self-indulgent thing. But it's like, when things, when the shit hits the fan, I'm not one who can just sit down and write, you know. But I've enjoyed putting the older books up online, I've gotten good response from them. And I really liked doing the longer books, and it's funny because I, I kind of had a little bit of a friction with Berkeley, as far as the bigger books, a lot of changes with editors and stuff. And I, with The Fling, I had wanted to do the other two women's stories. And now with ebooks, I'm thinking now I can, you know, and there's so many, there's so many people I know who had mystery series, and after three or four, when they didn't sell the way the publisher wanted them to, they're like, "Okay, you're done with that series." And now they're putting them all up online, and readers are buying them. So you know, I like that ebooks are giving publishers a run for their money. I like that.
Sarah MacLean 47:10 / #
Can you talk a little bit about readers? You talked a little bit about this when we talked about readers responding to your human, kind, decent men, but can you talk a little bit about the romance community of readers and how you found them and how they came to you?
Elda Minger 47:32 / #
It is so amazing! I went to my first few writers conferences, and there is no fan that loves you, and I don't even like the word fan, really, but there's no reader who loves you the way a romance reader does. And I thought about this, and I remember back in the day with Presents, I remember all my girlfriends who had babies, they were like, "I'm run ragged all day, but at the end of the day, when the kids are in bed, my husband's snoozing in the reclining chair, that's my time. I get to open my Presents, and I read a chapter or two, and that's my time." And I remember thinking, "Wow!" You know, because I'm a serial monogamist, but I never married, never had kids. But I remember thinking I always had my time. I always had reading time. I always had time. And what would that be like to be so busy during the day that you would read a little bit at night? We'd read a little bit at night, and that was your time and I thought what are these books giving women? And I have a real theory about The Flame and the Flower and the early romance books, because I think with the 50 year Woodiwiss anniversary coming up, we also have to really pay homage to Nancy Coffey, because that woman was a frickin' genius. And I love the story, slush pile, takes it home, can't stop reading, calls her up, edits it, but basically a 600 page, I mean this huge thing, and the thing that she did that was so genius was she said, "I'm going to put this out as a big spectacular." And it was a big print run, big cover, big everything so it was noticed.
Sarah MacLean 49:00 / #
Nancy Coffey was the editor who pulled The Flame and the Flower off the slush pile at Avon books and made essentially romance an Avon, historical romance and mass market romance would not exist -
Sarah MacLean 49:16 / #
Without Nancy Coffey at Avon at the time, which was not HarperCollins, it was a pulp publisher.
Elda Minger 49:22 / #
Well, it was funny because they go, "We wouldn't have careers without Kathleen Woodiwiss and Nancy Coffey." I'm always like, "And Nancy Coffey." Then Rosemary Rogers sends her manuscript, she addressed it to the editor who edited The Flame and the Flower, care of Avon books. And Nancy gets that and all these books start coming out and coming out so they have a bad rap. You know, the whole bodice ripper idea, the whole, the whole rape concept idea, and I think people were very uncomfortable with it and men were really uncomfortable with it. Because women were having sex and enjoying sex. And this was a, I know it sounds like I'm a dinosaur, but this was like such a new concept, like Frank Irby and Scarantino and all these guys who wrote before, they would fade to black when the door closed or the cave, you know, the firelight flickered and died or whatever happened, and then the next couple of scenes suddenly she'd be pregnant. And you'd be like, "Oh, I guess they did it." You know, I mean, you never got the sex and Woodiwiss blew open the bedroom door. And so the thing about the rapes, I gave this a lot of thought, and I thought, back in the day, and I'm in a weird generation, because the women before me, like if you got engaged, you could have sex with your, your engaged guy, because that was like you were already going to be married, "What the heck if the baby came a month early, who cared? Or two months early?" But it was like men were very much like, "Where'd you learn that? Where'd you hear about that? What's going on?" You have to remember no internet. no porn, except for guys like, projected in a garage on like a movie thing. Yeah, exactly. But I mean, it wasn't like it is now where everything's at the touch of a button. And so men were very much, "Where'd you learn that? Where'd you hear about that? Wait a minute, who've you been with? What's going on?" So women were very constrained, and they were put in this box, and I think a lot of women's depression is they don't get to be their authentic self. They don't get to be who they really are, because they're afraid that if they are who they really are mother, father, husband, even kids will abandon them. So I think that does cause depression. So then suddenly, this book comes out, and you know, Shanna especially, here's this woman who completely, even though some people found her horrible, she was her authentic self, and she did what she wanted to do. And God knows, you know, Sweet Savage Love, all of Rosemary Rogers' heroines were willful, and, and some spoiled and proud, and they just did what they wanted to do. But then we come to the sex and it's like, okay, how do you have women have sex in an era where nice girls do but may not enjoy it? Or you won't, see a friend of mine said it beautifully, because she said, "You know, we're so screwed up, El, because we're told, keep your knees together, don't have sex. Don't think about things. Even though you know, the hormones are raging, then suddenly a wedding ring's put on your finger and kaboom! You're supposed to turn right on and have multiple orgasms. It doesn't work that way." And I was like, "Yeah, it's true." So how do you get a woman to have sexual enjoyment? And I thought, "Well, you, have the hero." And I said this in Boston RWA, because people were saying these rape sagas are horrible. And I said, "Some of them are rape." I mean, there were books that had pretty awful rapes, but a lot of them I call them forced seduction, because it's like a gorgeous man will not take no for an answer. And then the other little tidbit I dug out from a sexologist was he told me, "The number one fantasy of men and women both is being forced to have sex with someone who's incredibly desirable." And I thought, "Works for me." And I mean, you know, like, okay. And so it made total sense, because it was, it was almost like, I know, it sounds crazy, but it's almost like, the only way women of slightly older than my generation, because it was starting to get liberated when I went to college, that women who were older than me who were the primary readers of the bodice rippers, I don't like the term, but it gave them permission, because it was, it wasn't their fault. They couldn't do anything about it. This guy was overwhelming. He overwhelmed them, and they're, and this is my favorite, every book had some kind of line along this line, "her body betrayed her." That to me was almost like a, not a trope, I'm trying to think of the right word. It was almost like code for we all know, we all want to have great sex. We all know the body is primed for it, your prime reproductive years. It's the whole purpose of nature, if you don't reproduce, I mean, it's like, I always think of Princess Diana, once she had those two boys, she was disposable, unfortunately, but, but it's like, that's the tooth and claw of nature. Once you reproduce, you are expendable. And so everything in nature goes toward making sure that happens. And so you have this incredible drive, and then you have a society that says, "Keep it in check. You're in charge. Don't you let things go too far."
Sarah MacLean 54:11 / #
Well, and it's your fault.
Elda Minger 54:13 / #
And yeah, exactly! And you're the temptress! That was, I think that was a big part of the witch trials, all of it. You're the temptress. You're the one that led him on. And I thought about it, I thought, "What is it like to have an erection when a beautiful woman walks by? Wouldn't you feel kind of out of control?" Because I remember guys I was close to in high school, they were like, "Oh, it's the worst. Oh my God, it's just horrible, it's like I have to wait. Everyone else is filing out into the hallway, and I have to sit there with my book in my lap." And I thought, "Oh, this poor guy!" You know, but, but that's my theory about those books, is that they, you know, we look at them with modern day sensibility, and we forget the condoms behind the counter that only married people can have. We forget the guy saying to the girl, "Where'd you learn that? What's going on here? Who've you been with?" We forget there was a girl who was raped by a guy in town and he got six of his friends to say they'd been with her, and it was all thrown out. And we forget, we forget the frat parties and the stuff still goes on, it's not, I don't think it's as bad, because I think women have more of a voice, but we need to remember. And Woodiwiss, in a sense, I think the reason she is so loved, is that this girl went from being penniless and pretty much an orphan, and scared to death, and the guy think she's a prostitute and basically does rape her, but she's like so scared, she can't even tell him what's going on. But in the end, she comes around to having his love, his respect, his admiration, and she has like her own dignity back. It's like the women were paid attention to these books, and I really think it's important. They were like a stepping stone. I don't think you could sell one now. I don't think the modern day audience would buy any of it, but I think they were a crucial stepping stone, and they need desperately to be looked at, in the context of the time. Because I remember thinking, "This is great. This book is so hot." I mean, now it's like there's stuff out there that's, you know, burn the house down, it's so hot! But back then we read them and were like, "Oh my God! Women actually having sex!" And there, well I remember arguing with a professor and saying, Every damn woman in a book written by a man, if she has sex, she dies." And he's like, "What do you mean?" I said, "Anna Karenina. Madame Bovary." I just, on and on and on. "Charlotte Gilman Perkins, you know, the Yellow Room. Every single book, you know, she has sex, she enjoys it, kaboom, she's dead. It's like the person who goes, maybe we should go into that basement and see if that killer's down there, you always know that person is going to die. It's the same with a woman." And he was like, "I never thought of it that way." But I thought women in all of literature, it's like, 90% of the time they have sex and they're punished. And now we suddenly have a genre where she has sex and no matter what else has happened to her, rape or not, she's not killed. She lives and she lives to tell the tale. So I think it's, you know, we're coming up on 50 years and Woodiwiss just wrote the story she wanted to read. That's what blows my mind. And it changed the world.
Jennifer Prokop 57:07 / #
Did you ever meet her?
Elda Minger 57:09 / #
No, and I wish I had. She had horses. She raised Morgan horses, and there was a big scandal where she had an affair with a stable master, and I love that.
Sarah MacLean 57:18 / #
Really.
Jennifer Prokop 57:19 / #
Good for her.
Sarah MacLean 57:20 / #
Left her left her husband and -
Elda Minger 57:23 / #
Yeah. Yeah. And she had this love affair with the stable master, and I thought, "Only Kathleen, I love her. Only Kathleen." And then of course, Rosemary Rogers was a wild child, so she was great, too, you know, but they were terrific women, you know,
Sarah MacLean 57:35 / #
When you wrote your historicals, so you wrote Harlequin historicals?
Elda Minger 57:43 / #
No, I wrote one for Zebra and one for Berkeley.
Elda Minger 57:46 / #
Big ones. Big fat ones. Oh, and I'll tell you a funny story about Velvet Fire. The editor there, who shall remain nameless, she said, "Just send it to me. It'll be fine." And I knew it wasn't terrific. I mean, I knew it was my first book. I wrote it, handwritten on legal pads with Bic Clics, you know, typed it up on a regular typewriter. I'm really dating myself. But I remember thinking," I've got to really go over it. I've written six Americans. I know a little bit more. I've got to go through it with a red pen." She was like, "No, no, no." And I said, "No, I insist." And so a friend of mine and I, we went through the whole thing, re-edited it, re-typed it, sent it in. So at that point, I think she was so frustrated with me at one point, she called me up and she said, "You know, you effing writers. You think it's what's between the covers that sells the books. Let me tell you something, it's the cover we make. It's the publicity campaign." It was everything, she listed everything but the actual writing. And I thought, "Oh my god, I cannot work with this woman again." So I just kept my mouth shut and the book came out and it did pretty well, but I never forgot that. And there's, there's, you have to be careful, like my dad said, "Find a man who likes women." Find an editor who likes writers, you know, find an agent who likes writers, you know, because it can be brutal out there. It can be tough. It can be tough. And the other thing with Velvet Fire was, the first sex scene she's sold in an auction. She's the Vicar's daughter.
Sarah MacLean 59:13 / #
I love it.
Elda Minger 59:13 / #
Into a bordello. Has to make her way to survive. This is like such a classic bodice ripper and so she's up on stage draped in this white silk and the candles are burning and of course, our hero goes against the villain to buy her and then the villain, that's it, it's a blood feud for the rest of the book. But the mistress of the household, the brothel owner, she looks and thinks, "Oh boy, this girl is going to put up a fight and this guy is not going to like this." So she drugs her. She gives her like an aphrodisiac and so this sex scene is wild in this bedroom, but it's like great sex, and of course she wakes up mortified, and then of course they go on to love each other, but -
Jennifer Prokop 59:51 / #
I'm ordering it now.
Sarah MacLean 59:52 / #
I'm literally going right now to buy it.
Elda Minger 59:56 / #
Well everyone in Antioch read this book, right. So a friend of mine, who shall remain nameless, well, she ran the beauty salon in town, and it was like Steel Magnolias. And she called me up and she said, "El, I know you're going to come home this summer," but she's like, "I don't think you should come home for a while." And I was like, "What are you talking about? What's wrong? What's wrong? I want to come see you guys." And she goes, "Well, um," and I won't say his name, "but you know, this guy, we both know, his wife has Velvet Fire on her bedside table." So she's taking a bubble bath, and he was like, "What's this shit?" You know, this, these horrible little books that my wife is reading, and that smartass Elda, and so the book falls open to the big sex scene, because of course, she's read it so many times and enjoyed it. So the book falls open, and he starts reading it, and I guess he went ballistic, and he called a bunch of his male friends who were married to her contemporaries and said, "Do you know this shit our wives are reading? Do you know what Elda to put in this book? Oh, my God!" You know, and so my girlfriend said, "You're kind of persona non grata around here for a while." And I was like, "Well, okay, I guess I'll come back, like next spring." And she was like, "It may have cooled down by then." But see, it's like there's such a, this is one of the things I think with romance -
Sarah MacLean 1:01:09 / #
This is the wrong way to deal with it, husbands.
Elda Minger 1:01:12 / #
Oh, I know.
Sarah MacLean 1:01:13 / #
If that book falls open to that page that has been read-
Elda Minger 1:01:16 / #
Read it!
Sarah MacLean 1:01:16 / #
Over and over again, read it, take notes, get it together and have a great weekend!
Elda Minger 1:01:23 / #
Exactly, exactly. But he was so, that was my era. Men would be very threatened by women having any sexual knowledge whatsoever, or any thoughts or desires. You know, like I had a girlfriend who told her husband a fantasy she had, and he goes "Where'd you come up with that?" He shamed her. And she said, "Never talked about fantasies again. Ever. Read them in my books, but not in my marriage." So I don't mean to be like, fuddy duddy here, but it happens. It happens. So that, that I thought was pretty funny, though. I did get a laugh out of that, because I know this guy, and I can picture him like, "Ah, what's this crap my wife's reading, and what the hell?" It was pretty funny. Made me laugh. Made me laugh.
Sarah MacLean 1:02:01 / #
Well, I just bought Velvet Fire, and I think we should do a deep dive episode on it. I'm just going to say it.
Jennifer Prokop 1:02:06 / #
We're going to have a great night. Elda, one question we really like to ask people is what's the book that you're most proud of, or a book that you hope outlives you, if there was sort of a, this is my best work?
Elda Minger 1:02:23 / #
I have three, out of my whole group of books, I have three that I really am fond of. I would say the first, Velvet Fire, because it was my first, my baby. When I finished that book, I felt I could conquer the world. And I know you probably know what I mean, Sarah, like, you're like, "Can I do it? Can I do it? Can I do it?" When you hit the end on that first book, so the second book is crucial, because there are a lot of one book wonders. But that first book, when you finish that book, you're like, "Oh my God." And that whole book came to me in a dream. I dreamed the entire damn book, and I just wrote it down. I take no credit. But I love that book. I mean, I was writing it while I was driving out to LA. I was typing it at night when I was, I mean, that I had such a passion for that book. I had to get it done, so I would say Velvet Fire for sure. The second one, strangely enough, is a very strange little book I did called Billion Dollar Baby, and it was about a bulldog that inherited millions of dollars, and I inserted kind of a mystery into an American. And I read it, again the National Enquirer, I read, I read the tabloids in line at the market, and it said, "Racehorse Inherits Millions of Dollars." And then it talked about all these animals that were left money and I thought, "Oh." And I had a bulldog as a kid, so I made it a bulldog. And I love that book, because it said a lot about what I feel about, I do animal rescue, and you know, it had a lot of my philosophy about animals and about broken people and about how anybody can heal. And then I would say the third book, I really, I felt like when it was done, it was like, "Yes! I got what I wanted to say down on the page." And that would be The Fling, because I, that was my first big contemporary, and I just loved it. That book was a joy from beginning to end. I just laughed my ass off writing it and had such a good time. And I had readers tell me, "I'll never make it to Hawaii, but I went there courtesy of The Fling. I've been to Hawaii now because of you." And you know, it's funny because you say the thing about the readers, there were two letters over the years that really touched me. One was Untamed Heart and this 17-year-old wrote me, like lined paper, cursive writing, "Dear Elda Minger," and she said, "I never knew that a girl could train wild animals. I never knew that a girl could even do this." And again, it's the time, you know, I'm dating myself. But she said, "I've always loved animals, and I'm going to find a way to work with them, like Samantha and thank you for showing me it is possible." I'm like bawling. I showed the letter to my sister and she's like, "Oh my God!" And the other letter I loved was, and I know this Midwest sensibility because I went to high school in Illinois and there's this woman in Minnesota and she said, "Dear Elda Minger, You don't know me, but I know you." And she said, "I want to thank you because I finished reading Daddy's Little Dividend." And she said, "Today was a hard day for me. Today was a very hard day for me. The five-year-anniversary of my mom's death." And then she said, "And my youngest son left for college." So she said, "It's all about being a mom and a mother and losing my mother and not being a mother anymore in the same way, and I was so depressed. So I had my TBR pile, and your book was on the top, and I started reading it, and a couple of hours later, you, you just," and this is the Midwest, I love this, I truly love this, "and you just perked me right up! You just perked me right up!" And I'm like reading this letter, bawling my eyes out, and that to me is worth thousands of dollars, any advance, to know that you've touched people. That's what it's all about. You know, that to me that's what it's all about. But I loved that, "You just perked me right up." So Minnesota.
Sarah MacLean 1:05:59 / #
Elda, I am so glad you answered my letter.
Elda Minger 1:06:04 / #
Oh, I am too! This has been so much fun.
Sarah MacLean 1:06:06 / #
Oh, I'm so happy, and I just know our listeners are going to be so riveted to these stories. So thank you so much for joining us.
Elda Minger 1:06:16 / #
Oh, thank you, you guys. I am so touched by the fact that you guys are doing this oral history because I don't want it to die. I want people to know the excitement, the fun, the privilege it was to work with these terrific women. And you know, both Carolyn and Vivian, they were powerhouses. They were women in a world, at that point, that was still pretty much dominated by men, and now publishing has a lot more women in it, and we're used to it. You know, we're used to the all the powerful women in publishing. But they were amazing. I mean, literally, when they got on the stage, it was like they were rock stars, and I'll tell you one Carolyn memory I have. I was at a convention and we were all setting up to autograph. And so you know how they have the U-shape, the U-shape and the bottom of the U is when the people come in the door, and then the two sides and the authors sit on the inside and you'd have your little placards and everything and your piles of books and then you go up to the register and it's for literacy. So a bunch of us were sitting around and there were there four seats on the bottom of the U and Carolyn came in and man, she was a powerhouse. Never mean, but my God, you did not mess with her. And she came up and she said to the women there, she goes, "You have to move. You have to move. You have to move." They were like, "What? What? Oh, okay." They move to the side of the U and she spread out, like remember how Loveswept was like that pinky-purple? She spread a pinky-purple, beautiful cloth and she put flowers up and everything, in all the different things. It was Iris Johansen, Kay Hooper, Fayrene Preston and I think it was Billie Green who might have been the fourth, but it was the four major Loveswept authors and she was, "You sit here. You sit here." There were candy bowls, bowls of candy, everything. It was like, it was like Patton orchestrating a big war. It was just like, it was amazing! And I was a couple of seats down and I just watched, this woman is amazing! They're right at the opening. People come in first thing they see, and I mean, like the big placards, you know what I mean? Like the posters and everything Loveswept! You know, right there. She was like, "Here, here, here, here. You sit here. Smile." You know, and she was like giving them confidence and all, and it was amazing. So they, but they were astounding women! Nobody really knew what they were doing, but they kind of took the ball and ran with it. They were amazing women. Amazing. So it's my honor to talk about them and to remind people of how wonderful they were and are.
Sarah MacLean 1:08:36 / #
Elda, are you still a romance reader?
Elda Minger 1:08:38 / #
Oh God, yes! I just finished - I like Lynne Graham.
Jennifer Prokop 1:08:42 / #
Lynne Graham still writes a lot of Harlequin Presents. They're terrific.
Elda Minger 1:08:45 / #
I love Presents. I will always read them for the rest of my life. But I will tell you, two of the all time greats, if your listeners haven't gotten these books, they need to get them used and read them.
Sarah MacLean 1:08:55 / #
Yeah.
Elda Minger 1:08:56 / #
Harlequin Presents by Roberta Leigh, who was a British writer who wrote for television and movies and Presents called Confirmed Bachelor, and it is one of the funniest books I have ever read. The premise is that she's an editor, and he is a misogynist who writes these horrible books about how men should be in the world. And the opening is his editor can't make it, you have to go to his Caribbean island and she's like, "Oh, no! No way!" (laughter) She is so wonderful! She's a Grace Kelly blonde, and she's a virgin, but she pretends like she's very knowledgeable, a woman of the world, and the funniest part of this book is she has two Scottie dogs. She lives with her parents in England, and they have a place in Scotland, and the dogs are called Alex and Hamish. And so at one point, she's desperate because he's like, "Oh, come on, go to bed with me, whatever." And she's like, "No, no, you're too tame for me. I'm used to two men at a time." And he goes, "Who are these men?" And she says, "Oh, my good friends, Alex and Hamish." And so he's like, "My God! And you won't sleep with me. You think I'm depraved and you're doing that." And so at one point, he's trying to track her down and he gets her mother on the phone, and her mother goes, "Yes." And she's a very nice British lady and blah, blah, blah. And he goes, "Do you approve of what your daughter is doing with Alex and Hamish?" The mother's kind of nonplussed and she says, "Well, I don't see why not. It's excellent exercise." (laughter) I mean you're peeing in pants laughing at this book. So that's a great one. And then the other one, that everyone loved back in the day, was A Candlelight Ecstasy called Video Vixen, and it was by Elaine Raco Chase, and she basically wrote Susan Lucci as a romance character. And this was back Ecstasy, like in the '70s, early '80s, maybe '82 or something. This guy's coming to interview everyone on the soap opera, and they're like, "Vicki, you have to be the one. I mean, you live in a barn in Vermont, you can fruit, you quilt. You're totally like, you have no stains in your past." And one of them was a heroin addict. One of them was an alcoholic.
Sarah MacLean 1:11:05 / #
It had to be Vivian Stephens' day.
Elda Minger 1:11:05 / #
Oh my God, I think it was.
Sarah MacLean 1:11:08 / #
I mean it had to be. You can really tell which books are hers.
Elda Minger 1:11:13 / #
Yes. She always goes further and it is one of the funniest damn books I have ever read. I re-read it like every two years, and then I love Lynne Graham. I love Betty Neels. And I know people think like, "Oh my God," you know, but I had a serious lung problem, and I found it very comforting to read romances where the hero was a doctor. I just love them, you know, so, but I will read Presents to the day I die. I love a good historical. I love Johanna Lindsey. I was brokenhearted, to hear she passed. And I'm so glad you guys are doing this, because my, the generation ahead of me, it's like the generation that's like five to ten years older than me, they are starting to go. And these days anybody can go, you know, I mean, age is not really, a you know, determinable.
Sarah MacLean 1:11:13 / #
We've lost the original Avon ladies, right? There's Bertrice Small and Joanna Lindsey and Rosemary Rogers.
Sarah MacLean 1:12:04 / #
I mean, they're not here anymore.
Jennifer Prokop 1:12:07 / #
Carolyn Nichols is not, right? There's people that we would have, I mean, Loveswept was like my line, and when I think about it, it would have been amazing to talk to her, so -
Elda Minger 1:12:19 / #
She was amazing. They were brilliant and they were tough. They had to be tough to survive in the world they were in. And oh, oh, there was something, I read an article about Vivian that was amazing. And she said she prepared the whole thing about this romance novel, and because Monday they'd have the book buying meetings, you know, and they'd say, "I'd like to buy this book. This is one I think would work." And so she did a whole big preparation, and she talked about the book and the guy interrupted her and said, "It's a romance. Just buy it." And I just thought, "Oh my God." I mean we thought we were up against stuff, you know, and I find the disparaging romance to be really, first of all people are stupid, because I always say, "Have you read one? Which one did you dislike?" And they go, "No, I've never read one. But I know they're stupid." And I'm like, "Oh, that's a brilliant informed opinion for you, you know." But when I find it coming from other women, that's when I really find it kind of disgusting, and especially sometimes other romance writers who somehow feel their books are better than say, a Harlequin Presents or a, you know, a category romance. So it's just, I think it's lessening though because you did ask me, "What do you think is happening in romance these days?" Nobody can deny that it's Amazon's number one best selling category. Nobody can deny that it's still making money and nobody can deny that it's still reaching women, and even back when I worked at Kroch's and Brentano's, they said 84% of the fiction was bought by women. And the funniest thing, I'll end with this because I can't keep you guys going forever, but I love this, I was at the Santa Barbara Writers Conference and I can't remember the guy who said this, but it was, he'd had a couple of drinks and we were all shooting the shit after dinner, and he goes, "Goddamn women getting into mystery, now we have to do fucking character." And I thought, "I've got to remember that verbatim." Because I mean, think about a lot of the hard-boiled stuff, it was good, but it wasn't real in-depth character. I never forgot that. "Goddamn women getting into mystery, now we have to do fucking character."
Sarah MacLean 1:14:25 / #
(laughter) I love that so much!
Elda Minger 1:14:28 / #
That just made me laugh. I mean I had to run to the bathroom and I always carry, oh, one thing for writers, always carry a notebook or have your phone, your memo pad ready. I would run in the bathroom, in the day it was like a little spiral bound two by three with a little Bic pen. And I would write down, "Goddamn women, now we have to do fucking character." (laughter) Yeah. That is too damn funny!
Sarah MacLean 1:14:48 / #
And perfect.
Elda Minger 1:14:49 / #
And they were pissed. He was truly pissed like, "Now it's a lot of work. Now we just can't smash it out. Now it's a lot of work." And I thought, "Oh please, you know." So. Anyway, this has just been a joy. Thank you so much.
Sarah MacLean 1:15:01 / #
Elda, thank you for coming.
Jennifer Prokop 1:15:02 / #
It's been amazing.
Sarah MacLean 1:15:06 / #
Man! Every one. Every one of them. It's like, I never know what to expect, and then, boom!
Jennifer Prokop 1:15:16 / #
I need you to say the story about how we got Elda.
Sarah MacLean 1:15:18 / #
So we heard about Elda Minger back in the day, when we did our bodily autonomy episode, we started to get really interested - we'll put links in show notes. We just re-ran it recently, but it's worth re-running it every time we're talking about abortion in the world. But when we did that episode, we were really interested in how contraception worked on page for romance novels, and Elda came up as the author of Untamed Heart and Untamed Heart came up as the first, which now in hindsight, and I mentioned this in the podcast in the conversation with Elda, but it makes sense that Vivian Stephens was a part of this book, right?
Jennifer Prokop 1:16:08 / #
Of course.
Sarah MacLean 1:16:09 / #
It really does start to feel like you can pick a Vivian Stephens book out of a lineup at this point,
Jennifer Prokop 1:16:17 / #
Someone's taking risks and someone's doing something interesting, and it was really amazing to hear Elda talk about how she felt trusted by Vivian.
Sarah MacLean 1:16:25 / #
A huge piece of that relationship of the editor/author relationship is about trust, and clearly that's what's happening here.
Jennifer Prokop 1:16:32 / #
What happened at that episode is that Steve Ammidown, who was still with Browne Popular Culture Library, ran actually, I think took some screenshots of the page with the scene, I believe they're in a Twitter feed, an old Twitter feed, and also pulled for us the RWA column that she wrote, sort of talking about why it was important to have condoms on page in romance. So that was kind of when she came on our radar. It was in that episode, but we also, then, actually could look at some of that documentation.
Sarah MacLean 1:17:06 / #
Right. And I would say at that point, I hadn't read Untamed Heart, but now that I've read Untamed Heart, it's so much more beautiful and romantic as I said in the episode, than a screenshot could possibly articulate. So but that said, so we knew, I mean, I don't know what, months ago I texted you and I was like, "We should get Elda Minger." And we have sent that text to each other many, many times, "We should get this person." And it's not always like we then immediately go get those people, because in this case, she was not easy to find. She does not have an easily accessible email address. I started, I asked around, I posted it to the Avon author group chat, "Is there? Does anybody know?" I went to Tessa Dare and I was like, "You're in Orange County. I'm told Elda Minger is in Orange County. Do you know how to find her?" And everybody kind of passed, people were super helpful but I got passed around and around and around, and no Elda. And then I (laughs) -
Jennifer Prokop 1:18:18 / #
I believe you Googled it.
Sarah MacLean 1:18:20 / #
I stalked her a little bit. I got online, and I Googled her, and I was like, well, if this is her real name and there is an Elda Minger in Orange County, California, lo and behold, and I wrote her a letter.
Jennifer Prokop 1:18:34 / #
A letter. Sarah showed it to me.
Sarah MacLean 1:18:37 / #
Jen was like, "What?" (laughter)
Jennifer Prokop 1:18:39 / #
I was like, "Oh, okay, we're doing that now." And it feels like a message in a bottle at this point.
Sarah MacLean 1:18:46 / #
I wrote her, I put a stamp on a fucking envelope, and I used the United States Postal Service.
Jennifer Prokop 1:18:50 / #
You did. Also everybody, it was a dark envelope with a silver sharpie, it was very nice looking. It was, anyone would want to open this letter.
Sarah MacLean 1:18:57 / #
Because I was like, "It can't just be a random, she's going to think it's junk mail." So I actually will tell you now, I'm going to show you, I bought a bunch of colored envelopes for this project, because I was like, if we have to do it again, I've gotta up my game on mail. So I sent her a fucking letter, you guys, in the mail, and that woman, that wonderful, magnificent woman who you all just met, texted me and was like, "Hey, Sarah. I'm Elda Minger.
Jennifer Prokop 1:19:30 / #
"I got your letter."
Sarah MacLean 1:19:31 / #
Yeah. "I'm a romance novelist. I got your letter. I would love to do the podcast." So here we are. So thank you postal service.
Jennifer Prokop 1:19:42 / #
We're the only people thanking the postal service right now but -
Sarah MacLean 1:19:45 / #
For this killer conversation. When she talked about women and reproductive rights, and why contraception is so critical on the page, I mean, it just, we are we are recording this, everyone, on the first day of the Supreme Court hearings on the Mississippi abortion law. And I mean, I just felt like this is what -
Jennifer Prokop 1:20:02 / #
It was a devastating day.
Sarah MacLean 1:20:15 / #
I needed to hear this woman talk about this work. My god, she was amazing. She had so many amazing stories.
Jennifer Prokop 1:20:24 / #
One of the things we like to do is sort of, what stuck with you from that conversation? Maybe it'll change over time, but at the beginning, kind of just as we were starting, one of the things she said is that she had gone back and was taking notes for herself, and how much joy it brought her to just remember. And I really was so moved by that because that is, romance and joy are synonymous for me. And so you know, to have someone who has loved romance for 50 years, and can, you know, tell stories about women buying Shanna in the bookstore? And I mean, I have goosebumps because I'm just so moved to hear that, and and also I think for me, her read of those books in in the context of her time.
Sarah MacLean 1:21:21 / #
Yes, which is so important, because we've talked about that, but what do we know? I mean, when you hear the voice from somebody who was there and who experienced it. I mean that Shanna story blows my mind, not because, I mean, of course if I thought about it, maybe I would have come up with it on my own, but I've never heard that perspective from a bookseller. What a cool experience to hear that! Can we also, Jen, I was so happy for you, in this moment, because when she was talking about jobs, the letter she got from the girl who had never thought that she could work with wild animals. I had a moment of a light bulb going on, because we, you have talked for so many seasons about these books and how these women have these magnificent jobs, these weird, curious, quirky, cool jobs. And we've talked about why that is and what is it about these books? And what is it about why these jobs? And of course, it made so much sense, again, like it just fit together.
Jennifer Prokop 1:22:31 / #
This was formative for me, that women had fascinating, interesting jobs in romance when I was coming up as a romance reader. And yet now, I'm also famous for being the person who's like fossils, jobs are fossils. I don't want to hear about it. I don't want to hear, you know, and it's different. And I think the thing that I have really come to, and the thing I think I'm sort of struggling with, is I feel like when we talk about jobs then, it really felt like these were books that really taught me I could do anything. I mean, you know what else I was thinking, Sarah, when she was talking about how he protected her, and how that was deeply romantic? That is the exact thing that you and I talked about when we did our, when we did that first episode, about tinctures, tonics and teas, and I was talking about a Melanie Greene book where he goes out to get her Plan B and I was like, "This is what caring looks like."
Jennifer Prokop 1:23:34 / #
This -
Jennifer Prokop 1:23:34 / #
It was deeply romantic to me and to that same feeling from a book that she read or wrote, you know, 45 years ago? Amazing.
Sarah MacLean 1:23:49 / #
Yeah. I mean, I think it's really fascinating. I I want to go back now and read all my favorite contemporaries and pay close, I can't imagine, I don't think I will ever in my life read a contemporary again and not pause for just a heartbeat on that contraception moment and think, "Who is taking care of whom here?" Because for me, her saying that was revolutionary. Like, that is exactly what I want from that moment. And she's so, I mean, Vivian Stephens was right. She can write, right? Because that moment on the page in Untamed Heart, and I'm so glad she's going to release them and ebook and we will, of course, explode all over everything when she does, so that you all know that you can run and buy it. But that moment in Untamed Heart feels like caretaking in a way that, I mean, it's perfect. And now I just want, so if you're out there writing a contemporary right now, think about that. Ask yourself that, in that moment, who is caring for whom? She was great! I would, she should just, her, Vincent Virga, let's just have a party!
Jennifer Prokop 1:25:06 / #
I right now am like, "Let's book our flights to Orange County." We'll crash at Lauren's house. She won't stop us and we'll just go kidnap Elda Minger!
Sarah MacLean 1:25:18 / #
No! Lauren and Christina will come with us.
Jennifer Prokop 1:25:20 / #
Oh my god. And I just want to talk about, I mean, I'm sure we've said this on the podcast before, but when Sarah and I first started kind of being friends on Twitter DM's, there was a point at which one of us said to the other, "All I want to do is talk about romance all day." And the other one of us was like, "Me too." And that is still like, that's what Fated Mates is for me, but also to hear, god, it feels like I climbed up a mountain and sat down at the foot of my elder and heard these amazing words and I just feel so inspired and I just love romance so much!
Sarah MacLean 1:26:04 / #
God, I'm going to go read Velvet Flame right the fuck now. We should do a read-along.
Jennifer Prokop 1:26:12 / #
I just ordered mine from Thriftbooks.
Sarah MacLean 1:26:15 / #
Oh, look at you!
Jennifer Prokop 1:26:16 / #
Because you know, I've got to get there before all the -
Sarah MacLean 1:26:19 / #
Did you find an original? Do you find a first?
Jennifer Prokop 1:26:20 / #
You never know, right, with Thriftbooks. You just never know what you're going to get.
Sarah MacLean 1:26:23 / #
Well, now I've got to go and do that.
Jennifer Prokop 1:26:25 / #
Well, and I didn't have a copy of Untamed Heart. I was buying Harlequin American Romances off of eBay, and I did get a couple of Elda Minger books. One where I think a cat goes missing and they go find it, and then another of her early, earlier Harlequin American Romances.
Sarah MacLean 1:26:42 / #
Well, Jennifer, don't count your chickens before they hatch in the month of December, is what I will say to you saying I don't have a copy of Untamed Heart.
Jennifer Prokop 1:26:54 / #
You know what else I'm about to do, Sarah, is I, okay, this is another thing everybody. I ordered 160 copies of Romantic Times from 1991 all the way to 2008. Sarah is going to get a couple years as her Christmas present. I spoiled it already. And I feel like now I'm going to go back and look through, especially in the '90s. Elda was still writing. So now I feel like when we do these episodes, I can go back and be like, "What was in RT about these authors?" It's going to be interesting.
Sarah MacLean 1:27:24 / #
Eric will love that. Take good photographs, because his whole thing now is that anytime I get a book, thanks Rebecca Romney, but anytime I get one of the books that I've been ordering, after all the Trailblazer episodes, he takes a high resolution photograph and puts it online.
Jennifer Prokop 1:27:42 / #
Yes!
Sarah MacLean 1:27:42 / #
So make sure you take good photographs of the review and stuff and we'll do that too.
Jennifer Prokop 1:27:47 / #
Amazing.
Sarah MacLean 1:27:48 / #
We're doing what we can, Steve and Rebecca. (laughter) We're out here.
Jennifer Prokop 1:27:54 / #
I, you know what, this was an amazing conversation. I could've listened to her, she kept apologizing and I was like, "No. Keep going."
Sarah MacLean 1:28:02 / #
No, she can keep going anytime. Anyway, yeah, let's all, when we go to Lauren's house we're -
Jennifer Prokop 1:28:09 / #
Oh, it's happening.
Sarah MacLean 1:28:09 / #
We're taking Elda out on the town.
Jennifer Prokop 1:28:11 / #
I'm clearing a whole day. We're going to start at brunch, just have it all 12 hours of Elda.
Sarah MacLean 1:28:16 / #
Exactly! Friend, I love you! I know that you're tired, so I'm going to let you go, but, everyone, you're listening to Fated Mates. These are the Trailblazer episodes. We are so incredibly proud to be able to bring them to you. We are so grateful to Elda for sharing her story. You can find us at Fatedmates.net, on Twitter @FatedMates, on Instagram @fatedmatespod. If you are listening to these episodes and enjoying them as much as we hope you are, as much as we're enjoying them, please let us know in all those places. Tell us who you wish we would talk to. We said we would only do a season of these but -
Jennifer Prokop 1:28:58 / #
They're going to be forever.
Sarah MacLean 1:29:00 / #
I think we're just going to do this forever. And next week we are, is it Caressed by Ice? Are we Caressed by Ice next week?
Jennifer Prokop 1:29:08 / #
Correct. We sure are.
Sarah MacLean 1:29:09 / #
Alright. So get reading. That's Nalini Singh. Do you have to read the first books in those Psy-Changeling series to get it?
Jennifer Prokop 1:29:15 / #
I mean, I don't think so. I think you'll be okay. There's a little gloss at the beginning that she gives, it's kind of, I think, what's going on. So unless you're a real completist, I feel like you should probably be able to just dive right into Caressed by Ice. I believe in you all. I believe in you. Elda believes in us, and I believe in you too.
Sarah MacLean 1:29:36 / #
Very exciting. All right. Thank you, everyone. Have a great week!
S04.13: AMA with Questions from Piper Rayne
We’re joined this week by author Piper Rayne, who is two authors! Elizabeth Grace (Piper) and Michelle Lynn (Rayne) have written dozens of wildly tropey, wonderfully romantic contemporary romances together. They join us for a few minutes at the start of the episode to talk about how they came to romance and how they write together, and then leave us with a list of questions about publishing, books, and romance recommendations.
There’s still time to buy the Fated Mates Best of 2021 Book Pack from our friends at Old Town Books in Alexandria, VA, and get eight of the books on the list, a Fated Mates sticker and other swag! Order the book box as soon as you can to avoid supply chain snafus.
Thank you, as always, for listening! If you are up for leaving a rating or review for the podcast on your podcasting app, we would be very grateful!
Our next read-along will be Nalini Singh’s Caressed by Ice, number three (and Jen’s favorite) of the Psy-Changeling series. Get them at Amazon, Apple, Kobo, B&N or at your local indie.
Show Notes
We are joined today by Piper Rayne, an author duo who are about to publish their 50th book, My Unexpected Surprise on December 14, 2021. They won the right to decide the topic of an episode after winning an item in Kennedy Ryan's Lift4Autism auction with Kulture City.
We mostly talked about and recommended books today, so check out the photo array for all the books we mentioned in today's episode.
S04.12: The Men at Work Trilogy by Tiffany Reisz: Thanksgiving is a lot
It’s autumn which means it’s time to start talking holiday seasons and holiday romances here at Fated Mates, so this week, we’re talking about one of Jen’s favorite category trilogies—Tiffany Reisz’s Men At Work series from Harlequin Blaze. These are sexy, subversive romances that turn tropes on their head while delivering delight.
There’s still time to buy the Fated Mates Best of 2021 Book Pack from our friends at Old Town Books in Alexandria, VA, and get eight of the books on the list, a Fated Mates sticker and other swag! Order the book box as soon as you can to avoid supply chain snafus.
Thank you, as always, for listening! If you are up for leaving a rating or review for the podcast on your podcasting app, we would be very grateful!
Our next read-along will be Nalini Singh’s Caressed by Ice, number three (and Jen’s favorite) of the Psy-Changeling series. Get them at Amazon, Apple, Kobo, B&N or at your local indie.
Show Notes
Tiffany Reisz is the author of the Original Sinners series and several category length romances. The Men at Work series was a Harlequin Blaze, a line that ran between 2001-2017. The ghost story one is called The Headmaster, part of a tiny stand alone Harlequin eBook series called Shivers.
We’ve talked about the history of category romance on many episodes: our favorite bonkers old categories from the 80s/90s, with Steve Ammidown on the first acquisitions of Vivian Stephens, and with rare book dealer Rebecca Romney.
Harlequin at the end of 2021 has 11 different lines: Desire, Heartwarming, Historical, Intrigue, Medical Romance, Presents, Romance, Romantic Suspense, Special Edition, Love Inspired, and Love Inspired Suspense.
The Romance Wars section of Rebecca Romney’s romance catalog starts on page 125, and it’s fascinating. Amazon began in 1994, it had 180 thousand accounts in 1996 and a million accounts by the end of 1997. The Sony Reader was on the market starting in 2004, and the first Kindle was in 2007. Kindle Unlimited started in 2014.
The Invention of Thanksgiving is a video from The Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, it features an interview with Paul Chaat Smith, a member of the Comanche tribe. Debbie Reese has a great thread with resources for children’s books with Native American characters to read or avoid.
Sarah recommends the TV show Happy Endings, and Flashdance is has a music video vibe rather than a movie with a plot.
Compare and contrast original Loveswept back cover copy to the updated version for Sunny Chandler’s Return by Sandra Brown.
Here is an explainer about how there was a traditional belief that Judaism is matrilineal, it is not a belief held by all Jewish people. This essay explains how a 1983 decision from Reform rabbis made room for children of mixed marriages to claim patrilineal descent.
Order soon if you want to make sure your Fated Mates Book Pack— 8 of our 10 Best Romance Novels of 2021— from Old Town Books in Alexandria, VA.
S04.11: Vincent Virga: Trailblazer
This week, we’re continuing our Trailblazer episodes with Vincent Virga—author of the Gaywyck trilogy, the first m/m gothic romance, and one of the first m/m romances ending with a happily ever after.
He talks about writing gay romance and about the way reading about love and happiness changes readers lives. He also shares rich, wonderful stories about his vibrant life as a picture editor in publishing, about the literary set in New York City in the 70s and 80s, about writing during the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, about the times in a writer’s life when the words don’t come easily, and about the times when they can’t be stopped.
We are honored and so grateful that Vincent took the time to speak with us, and we hope you enjoy this conversation as much as we did.
There’s still time to buy the Fated Mates Best of 2021 Book Pack from our friends at Old Town Books in Alexandria, VA, and get eight of the books on the list, a Fated Mates sticker and other swag! Order the book box as soon as you can to avoid supply chain snafus.
Thank you, as always, for listening! If you are up for leaving a rating or review for the podcast on your podcasting app, we would be very grateful!
Our next read-alongs will be the Tiffany Reisz Men at Work series, which is three holiday themed category romances. Read one or all of them: Her Halloween Treat, Her Naughty Holiday and One Hot December.
Show Notes
Welcome Vincent Virga, author of Gaywyck, the first gay gothic romance, and one of the earliest gay romances with a happily ever after. It was published by Avon in 1980. He has written several other novels, including Vadriel Vail and A Comfortable Corner. He was also the premier picture editor in the book industry. He has been with his partner, author James McCourt, author of Mawrdew Czgowchwz, for 56 years. Their collected papers are housed at the Beinecke Library at Yale University.
Today is the 41st anniversary of The Ramrod Massacre in New York City, where Vernon Kroening and Jorg Wenz were killed. Six other men were shot and injured inside the bar or on the streets near the Ramrod.
Author Malinda Lo and Librarian Angie Manfredi sound the warning bell about the fights that we are facing around access to books and libraries and calls for book banning happening all around the country. Here is what you can do to help support your local library. Check out Runforsomething.net for ideas about local races where you live.
Want more Vincent in your life? Here is a great interview from 2019 on a blog called The Last Bohemians, and this 2011 interview on Live Journal.
Daisy Buchanan cries that she's never seen such beautiful shirts in The Great Gatsby, and We Get Letters is a song from the Perry Como show.
People Vincent mentioned: Susan Sontag, Maria Callas, opera singer Victoria de los Ángeles, editor Elaine Markson, Jane Fonda, Armistead Maupin, poets John Ashbery and James Merrill, Hillary and Bill Clinton, editor Alice Mayhew, Gwen Edelman at Avon Books, Gwen Verdon and Bob Fosse, publisher Bob Wyatt, John Ehrlichman from Watergate, author Colm Tóibín, poet Mark Doty, Truman Capote, poet and translator Richard Howard, Shelley Winters, John Wayne, Lauren Bacall, and Kim Novak.
The museum Vincent was a part of in County Mayo, Ireland, is The Jackie Clarke Collection.
The twisty turny secret book that made him a lover of Gothics was Wilkie Collins's Woman in White. Vincent is also a lover of Samuel Richardson's Clarissa, and Henry Bellamann's King's Row.
A few short pieces abaout the AIDS epidemic: the impact of the epidemic on survivors in the queer community, and how the American government ignored the crisis.
A transcript (genrerated by a human!) can be found at the bottom of this page.
Vincent Virga 0:00 / #
Genres have no gender, really. I mean, if you look at them closely the mysteries revolve around behavior and in Jane Eyre, the wonder of Jane Eyre, is the book is about finding out that I am my own person. When Jane says, "I can take care of myself", the book was banned. The book was condemned in pulpits. The book is considered revolutionary art because "I can take care of myself."
Sarah MacLean 0:43 / #
That was the voice of Vincent Virga, the author of Gaywyck, which is the first modern male/male gothic romance published by Avon in 1980.
Jennifer Prokop 0:53 / #
This is an amazing conversation.
Sarah MacLean 0:56 / #
Oh, it's so good. It's so good.
Jennifer Prokop 0:59 / #
Every conversation we have had has been so different and so varied, but talking to Vincent, who was really writing a romance kind of outside of the romance community and also outside of the literary community, but deeply rooted in the gay community, makes for a really interesting conversation. He is going to talk about his lifelong relationship with his partner, Jimmy.
Sarah MacLean 1:28 / #
Jimmy. Hey Jimmy! We love you.
Jennifer Prokop 1:30 / #
We love Jimmy. We've never met Jimmy but we love Jimmy a lot.
Sarah MacLean 1:34 / #
Look, I have plans. (laughs)
Jennifer Prokop 1:35 / #
Yes. He's going to talk about the experience of writing Gaywyck, of living through the AIDS epidemic in the '80s, about life in New York, and learning what it meant to be part of a literary culture that most of America had turned its back on.
Sarah MacLean 1:52 / #
Also about what's underneath Hilary Clinton's bed.
Jennifer Prokop 1:55 / #
Vincent's stories are unbelievable. The people he has known, the people he has met, the stories that he's going to tell, but most of all, his commitment to really making a space for queer, young people to see themselves in a happily ever after.
Sarah MacLean 2:14 / #
This one's fabulous. You're going to love it. Welcome everyone to Fated Mates. I'm Sarah MacLean. I read romance novels, and I write them.
Jennifer Prokop 2:24 / #
And I'm Jennifer Prokop, a romance reader and editor. Without further ado, here is our conversation with Vincent Virga.
Sarah MacLean 2:33 / #
Thank you so much for joining us on Fated Mates.
Vincent Virga 2:37 / #
It's been quite an adventure for me.
Sarah MacLean 2:40 / #
Tell us why.
Vincent Virga 2:41 / #
Because I haven't revisited Gaywyck, actually revisited it, since 2000. When it was reprinted in this edition with a hideous cover by Alyson books.
Jennifer Prokop 2:57 / #
Oh, sure.
Vincent Virga 2:57 / #
And with that edition, I wrote an afterword, explaining how the book happened. And essentially, as I say in that piece, my memory works visually. All of my information is stored in my memory visually. I'm totally visually literate. So basically when I think about the beginning of Gaywyck, where was I when I started it. I see myself, literally I see myself sitting in a house. Big house. On a hill. In Shinnecock. Which is the first town and the beginning of the Hamptons.
Vincent Virga 3:47 / #
Long Island splits at Hampton Bays and the east end begins at Shinnecock. And so I'm sitting in this house on a hill, and the question is, how did I get there? And that's where my partner, Jimmy McCourt comes in. We've been together 56 years. And he basically has flawless recall. So our pal Susan Sontag wrote in On Photography, she invented this phrase called "time's relentless melt." That is the history of me.
Jennifer Prokop 4:26 / #
Me too.
Sarah MacLean 4:28 / #
Same thing. (laughter)
Vincent Virga 4:28 / #
It's interesting, isn't it?
Jennifer Prokop 4:29 / #
My best friend is my own memory. I'll call her and be like, "Okay, so how did that happen again?" And she remembers, which is very nice.
Vincent Virga 4:36 / #
Yes. Well, I also would be great for you, because I remember how it happened. But you can't ask me, "When did that happen?" So essentially I walk in and I say, "Jimmy, when did this happen?" I said, "I remember I'm sitting in this house, and you went down to get the mail." And it was high on a hill. So he went down on a bike, and then he was coming up on a bike shouting, shouting at the top of his lungs, "I have a letter from Maria Callas."
Sarah MacLean 5:11 / #
Maria Callas the opera singer?
Sarah MacLean 5:15 / #
Okay. (laughter)
Vincent Virga 5:15 / #
Maria Callas. And then out he shouted (singing in the style of Maria from West Side Story), "Maria! Maria!" (laughter) Now Jimmy had published, this is 1975, so Jimmy had published his first book, Mawrdew Czgowchwz, which got stupendous, stupendous reviews. And basically, it was the first book to be published by New York Review Books of a living author.
Vincent Virga 5:16 / #
And I was sitting on the hill in Shinnecock because I had just been fired by the New York Review of Books. (laughter)
Vincent Virga 5:44 / #
I was the only person they have ever fired. And they fired me because I had been causing trouble. It's a long story, but I had been causing trouble. So they fired me. A client making some really absurd, absurd claim. However, they paid me unemployment. And so there I was, it was summer. I hate the summer. My whole life after being fired was based on getting out of the city and the heat. In fact, my whole career is freelance. And so I went out, Lenny, a friend of mine, gave us this house. And so there I am, 1975, Jimmy's got his letter from Maria, which was actually a fan letter.
Jennifer Prokop 6:35 / #
She was his fan?
Sarah MacLean 6:36 / #
Imagine getting a fan letter from Maria Callas!
Vincent Virga 6:39 / #
She was his fan. He adored her. But also, her colleague was Victoria de los Ángeles, one of the great opera singers from that period. And she, she has a great La Bohème and great Madame Butterfly recordings, and basically, Jimmy was 10 at the Metropolitan Opera, his mother took him. They'd been going because a friend had a box, and they would go on Saturday. He was 10. And he was really not very happy with most of the operas, but suddenly, there was the Marriage of Figaro. And there was Victoria de Los Ángeles. And when it was over, Jimmy said to his mother, "I want to meet her." So they went backstage, and this little guy with these big glasses, began to talk to her. And that was the beginning of the most profound friendship. Jimmy and Victoria. And when I joined, and me, we would travel around Europe with her, going to her recitals, going to her performances, being backstage and it was a truly great adventure. And that is basically how we got to Ireland, but that's later. So here I am, on the hill. And at this point you see, I had been, had access to publishing houses because the first chapter of Jimmy's Mawrdew was published in 1971. In the New American Review 13 it was the cover story. And we actually came home from London because Jimmy got a telegram from Ted Solartaroff saying Mawrdew Czgowchwz dazzling. So we came home and I went with him and we met the team at Simon and Schuster.
Sarah MacLean 6:47 / #
This is like the good old days of publishing.
Jennifer Prokop 7:40 / #
I know.
Sarah MacLean 7:48 / #
Get a telegram.
Vincent Virga 7:53 / #
Absolutely.
Sarah MacLean 7:54 / #
Fly home to New York to meet Simon and Schuster.
Vincent Virga 8:16 / #
That's exactly right. And we met Ted Solartaroff.
Sarah MacLean 8:26 / #
Vincent, in my life, I have never seen a telegram from my publisher, and I object. (laughter)
Vincent Virga 8:46 / #
Actually, Jimmy received that one and Jane Fonda, when I was working with her on her books, I was a picture editor, she would send me telegrams.
Sarah MacLean 8:55 / #
It was so civilized.
Vincent Virga 8:56 / #
It was absolutely tops civilized and so thrilling! I mean there we were zooming home for New American Review. And then the book was sold by Jimmy's agent, Elaine Markson, to Simon and Schuster. And while I was there I met the team, as I said, Rhoma Mostel and Gypsy Da Silva. Now, this is important, because Simon and Schuster at that point was publishing all of these gothic romances and I said to them -
Sarah MacLean 9:30 / #
Wait, I'm gonna stop.
Sarah MacLean 9:31 / #
At this point were you reading these gothic romances? Or were they just sort of -
Vincent Virga 9:35 / #
I loved the form, but I was not reading the the new ones. My gothic romance is what Jane Eyre -
Jennifer Prokop 9:43 / #
Frankenstein.
Vincent Virga 9:44 / #
Wuthering Heights. Frankenstein. Absolutely! And also Wilkie Collins The Woman in White.
Vincent Virga 9:51 / #
The secret in Wilkie Collins, I used to say, it's worth killing for. I would kill if that were my secret. So that when I was completing Gaywyck, I kept writing new endings until I had an ending, a secret that I would kill for.
Sarah MacLean 10:10 / #
Ohhh! That's great!
Vincent Virga 10:10 / #
There are basically three endings to Gaywyck.
Sarah MacLean 10:14 / #
Okay. Because that really is the cornerstone of the good Gothic, that there is a twist at the end. There's a -
Vincent Virga 10:21 / #
A real -
Sarah MacLean 10:22 / #
And you don't see it coming.
Vincent Virga 10:24 / #
Absolutely. So I began reading them. I would send them to my mother. And once I was out there, and I picked up, I think it was Cashelmara, or it was one of them, a mega bestseller! And I'm reading this puppy, and all of a sudden I discovered that the secret wasn't a crazy wife in the attic. (laughter) The secret was actually, the secret was the husband was a closet faggot. That was the secret. So the wife would swoon, faint, and then she would fall into the arms of her best friend who would say, "I never liked that guy." And so that's how they ended. And that, that became a form.
Sarah MacLean 11:20 / #
So that became a secret that you saw many times, over and over again.
Vincent Virga 11:24 / #
Over and over again.
Vincent Virga 11:25 / #
And I couldn't believe it! I thought this is totally unacceptable! And meanwhile my mother's reading this and meanwhile I'm living with Jimmy. And I'm thinking to myself, this is absolutely hideous. And at that point, I had not come out.
Sarah MacLean 11:40 / #
Vincent, I want to come back to that, but also, can you give us a sense of time at this point? What year are we in?
Vincent Virga 11:45 / #
We're in 1972 when New American Review 1973 -
Jennifer Prokop 11:51 / #
That's when I was born, Vincent. I just want to - (laughter) You know what, because I'm usually the oldest person on these calls. So I just want to enjoy being like, I'm the young one now. I'm the young one.
Vincent Virga 12:01 / #
Yes, yes. I just joined 79 and Jimmy just joined 80.
Sarah MacLean 12:05 / #
So this is the mid '70s, and Jen has just been born, which is the most important part of that! (laughter) You were saying you had not come out yet.
Vincent Virga 12:15 / #
I had not come out! I would visit my mother and my father and they would say to me, "Who's watching the cat?"
Vincent Virga 12:21 / #
I would say, "I live with Jimmy." And I kept saying that we met in 1964 at Yale Graduate School and basically, "I'm living with Jimmy!" And they would look at me and nod, and they never computed. So basically I thought, "I have to deal with this at some point." And I'm reading these books and my hair is on fire. I'm thinking this is disgusting! So there I am, in the house on the hill, and I'm reading Lolita. I'm reading Lolita and I thought to myself, "This could be a boy." And then the next thought was, "If Shakespeare had a sister, why can't Jane Eyre have a brother, John? And that was the point when I thought genres have no gender, really.
Jennifer Prokop 13:19 / #
Yeah.
Vincent Virga 13:20 / #
I mean if you look at them closely, the mysteries revolve around behavior. And in Jane Eyre, the wonder of Jane Eyre, is the book is about finding out that I am my own person. When Jane says, "I can take care of myself" the book was banned. The book was condemned in pulpits. The book is considered revolutionary art because "I can take care of myself." So basically that became the basis of this, and also the other basis was Rochester has to go blind in order to see the truth. I began to think about my boy, my narrator, and it all sort of came together pretty fast. Too fast. Because I settled in and I began to write very quickly. Now I don't how to write a novel. I never knew how to write a novel, but I knew what novels were. I had been reading them since I was very, very young. I started reading when I was five and basically, I started reading stories. And then in grammar school I was reading novels. I was reading Dickens. And I remember in the 10th grade, Miss Marsh, was a genius of a teacher, she assigned Jane Eyre. And then she assigned Vanity Fair, which I adored. But while other kids in my class were bored, I went on to read all of Brontë. And I went on to read all of Thackeray. And so when I later discovered Wilkie Collins, I read all of Wilkie Collins. And essentially that's a lot of books. And the same with Dickens. And so when I realized that I wanted to write a book, I said to Jimmy, "I think I want to write a book." And Jimmy said to me, "What took you so long?"
Jennifer Prokop 15:44 / #
Awww. (laughs)
Sarah MacLean 15:45 / #
What a good dude! (laughter)
Vincent Virga 15:47 / #
What took you so long? And also, we had a joke. VIrginia Woolf said, "You shouldn't start writing until you're 33." I was 33.
Vincent Virga 15:56 / #
It was perfect. I mean, the gods were all ordaining this.
Jennifer Prokop 15:59 / #
Did you read pulp? Was there fiction that featured gay characters at all? Or were you really steeped in these classics?
Vincent Virga 16:07 / #
I was steeped in the classics. And when, and remember now, we're talking 1970, and so I was pretty much reading the classics. And also, I'd never been to a gay bar. I mean I met Jimmy in New Haven, and I never went to a gay bar. And so basically I was reading the classics. And in fact, I wanted to become an academic. And Jimmy wanted to become an academic. Actually, he was in a PhD program at NYU, which he thought was, "This, this is the end of my life! This is so boring!" And so he announced that he was leaving NYU, that he was going to Yale Graduate School of Drama to find a husband. (laughter) That's what he told all of his friends. That was the reason he went to Yale. And so -
Sarah MacLean 17:00 / #
And it worked! And look at this!
Vincent Virga 17:02 / #
It did work! He also brought, in the beginning of the term, all of his gay friends from Manhattan. So basically, it was a total revelation to me. These queens were swanning around and they were laughing. They were all opera mavens,, and they would sit down at the piano and make up operas and it was a whole other realm for me. And so no, I didn't read pulps, I mean, I read Dragonwyck. I also must tell you my mother's, when she was young, she worked in publishing at Macmillan. So the house in Manhattan, and then the house, the apartment in Manhattan, and the house on Long Island was floor-to-ceiling books. And they were all bestsellers. So there were things like, you know, Kings Row, which in fact, I've just re-read. I love those mega best sellers!
Sarah MacLean 18:02 / #
That's the thing, right? Those mega best sellers feel - there's a reason why they are best sellers.
Vincent Virga 18:08 / #
Absolutely.
Sarah MacLean 18:08 / #
They appeal to a really intense of storytelling that we all have.
Vincent Virga 18:14 / #
Absolutely. So there I am, you know, reading Thackeray, and when I was in college, my professor assigned Clarissa.
Vincent Virga 18:26 / #
Clarissa. And so I went to the bookstore, and there was this tiny paperback called Clarissa, and also, it had in big letters on the back, "Abridged." And I remember thinking, "I don't think so." (laughter) So I went to the library, and I said to the librarian, who knew me at that point, and I said to the librarian, "I have to read Clarissa. I want to read the whole thing. Do you have the whole thing?" And he went into the back, and he came back carrying these three tomes.
Sarah MacLean 18:58 / #
Giant books! (laughter)
Vincent Virga 18:59 / #
The three volumes of Clarissa. And he said to me, "No one has checked this book out -
Sarah MacLean 19:07 / #
(laughing) No one has ever read -
Vincent Virga 19:08 / #
"For 100 years. This book has been here for 100 years, and no one has ever read the whole thing." So that basically tells you, you know, what I was like with my reading. And I think that's why I said in the beginning, "I don't know how to write novels, but I know what they are" So that when I read them -
Sarah MacLean 19:31 / #
The instinct is hardwired.
Vincent Virga 19:32 / #
Hardwired, not only with Clarissa, but also with Kings Row.
Sarah MacLean 19:36 / #
Mmmhmm.
Vincent Virga 19:37 / #
You know, and the whole idea of telling a story, and also I grew up in the movies, essentially. I mean, I was, I think I was four when I was taken to the Wizard of Oz. And so the movies, I became obsessed with the movies and I grew up literally in the movies.
Vincent Virga 19:57 / #
The narrative, visual narrative, and of course now when I look back, I realized that it was helping me develop my visual sensibility.
Vincent Virga 20:07 / #
And as Gaywyck, the first draft, I put it aside and I'm thinking, "Oy. I have to let this sit." And so I started a novel called The Comfortable Corner. And I started writing The Comfortable Corner, and I actually, over the next, I think, two years, completed the first draft of that and then I went back to Gaywyck, and I did the second and third draft of Gaywyck, but I must tell you, from the beginning, I knew that it was a game. I knew. I knew that I was going to take lines from the great novels and the great movies.
Sarah MacLean 20:48 / #
Am I wrong in thinking that it begins with this echo of Rebecca? Like, "Last night I dreamed I was at Manderley again."
Vincent Virga 20:54 / #
That's right, exactly. Exactly. So the game begins. I, throughout the book, at one point, when he has all of these, he gets all of these clothes from Donna, when he picks up all these shirts, and he says, "I've never seen so many beautiful shirts." That's probably the most famous one. That's also a key, it gives things away. And at one point, he says, "No one's ever called me "Darling" before." And that's Bette Davis and Now, Voyagers. So there are dozens of them.
Sarah MacLean 21:21 / #
I love that. I mean and that's why it's so appealing because when you think about the great romance novels, there is something that echoes media and pop culture and -
Vincent Virga 21:31 / #
Absolutely.
Sarah MacLean 21:32 / #
And culture writ large.
Vincent Virga 21:33 / #
Absolutely.
Sarah MacLean 21:33 / #
And that's why we love, we did a whole episode on retellings of Fated Mates and -
Sarah MacLean 21:39 / #
There's such an appeal to retellings because we know the story, and also we like the game, as you call it.
Vincent Virga 21:45 / #
Yes, it's the game, and I think when the book came out and was reviewed by Armistead Maupin, he said, he goes on and on with such delight, the tone is perfect, and the last line is, "I wonder if Robert and Donough saw Judy at Carnegie Hall?" (laughter)
Sarah MacLean 22:06 / #
Perfect! Ohhh! Did you frame it on your wall?
Vincent Virga 22:08 / #
And then he says, "Read the son of a bitch."
Jennifer Prokop 22:12 / #
Yeah.
Vincent Virga 22:13 / #
"You'll love it!"
Vincent Virga 22:14 / #
And that became the key word. And when I was re-reading it now, I though of Armistead and I thought to myself, "Yeah, I get it." I really like this book.
Sarah MacLean 22:27 / #
Yeah, it's really fun!
Vincent Virga 22:28 / #
I really like this book!
Jennifer Prokop 22:29 / #
Yeah.
Vincent Virga 22:29 / #
And I read the son of a bitch! (laughter) And I loved it!
Vincent Virga 22:34 / #
So essentially, I'm here today with this sense of celebration. And it's delightful to me that I'm now getting all of these, I'm getting all these fan emails from people of all ages again. And there's a question you ask, and I want to tell you, first of all, I had no community. None.
Sarah MacLean 23:02 / #
And that is the thing that we talk about, is the question that we ask all the time, who was your community? So -
Vincent Virga 23:07 / #
I had no community as a writer. None. Also, Jimmy's success, you know, he was published by Knopf, his books got fabulous reviews. And it brought me into a very high voltage literary community in Manhattan. And I, when Gaywyck was published, I didn't really care. I did my job, and it got wonderful reviews, and people were reading it, but that community, that community, it became their dirty secret.
Sarah MacLean 23:43 / #
Very familiar.
Vincent Virga 23:44 / #
So I would go to these events and John Ashbery would come up to me and tell me, "I love your book." And I remember Tim Duclos calling me over and saying (in a whisper), "I love your book. It really shocks me how much I love your book."
Sarah MacLean 23:59 / #
Oh, that's my favorite. "It shocks me. I couldn't believe it was good." (laughter)
Vincent Virga 24:02 / #
No, they couldn't believe it, and it was this game. And there I was, and I remember being at a party at James Merrill's house and him saying, "My nephew says Gaywyck saved his life. He was in the most profound despair and he read Gaywyck."
Sarah MacLean 24:23 / #
So before we go much further down this, people reading the book, can we talk a little bit about how the book came to be?
Sarah MacLean 24:31 / #
It's written. You've edited it. Where does it go from there?
Vincent Virga 24:34 / #
No, no.
Vincent Virga 24:35 / #
No, no. I wrote it, and Jimmy's editor, Elaine Markson, read it and loved it. And she said to me, "I will sell this book. This is unique. It's actually beautifully written. And I love this book!" So she sent it around. She sent it to Knopf. She sent it to all her friends and it was rejected. Boing, boing, boing, boing, boing. She gathered 35 rejections. At this point I had this huge career in publishing as a picture person. Eventually, I'm the only person who ever researched, edited, designed and cached picture sections. The last couple of books I did were by the Clintons. I did Hillary's book, Bill's book. I've got an eight page resume, 163 books, right. So this is also going on, and my mentor is Michael Korda, who is the head of publishing at Simon and Schuster, and Elaine sent it to everybody. Everybody.
Sarah MacLean 25:38 / #
Were the rejections because it was happily ever after? Was it because it was Gothic? Was because it was gay?
Vincent Virga 25:43 / #
I think it was gay, and no one could cope with it. They couldn't figure out what was I doing defiling this genre that was making fortunes for them. And meanwhile, I'm taking the villain and making him the hero?
Sarah MacLean 25:59 / #
I love it!
Vincent Virga 26:00 / #
So essentially -
Jennifer Prokop 26:01 / #
What are you? Milton?
Vincent Virga 26:03 / #
Exactly! And they could not cope. So Simon and Schuster, I worked with all of them, and one of the great divas was named Alice Mayhew. She did the Woodward Bernstein books. I mean, she was the great diva of the political book. I did many, many books with her. Her assistant was a woman named Gwen Edelman. okay? When Gwen left Alice, she went to Avon books.
Sarah MacLean 26:33 / #
To this point, Avon books is not a part of HarperCollins. It's a pulp publisher.
Vincent Virga 26:39 / #
Absolutely.
Sarah MacLean 26:39 / #
And they do mass market reprints and pulp fiction -
Vincent Virga 26:43 / #
Absolutely.
Sarah MacLean 26:43 / #
And just for the last few years, have been doing paperback originals like -
Sarah MacLean 26:50 / #
Rosemary Rogers and Kathleen Woodiwiss.
Sarah MacLean 26:53 / #
And those kind of big romance names.
Vincent Virga 26:56 / #
Yes, all the romances. So I sent it to Gwen, and she called me and she said, "I love this, but I can't publish this book." And I remembered Gwen was a friend, when we were in East Hampton, where we went every summer to get away from the heat. And it was also East Hampton BC: East Hampton before computers.
Sarah MacLean 27:24 / #
No helicopters flying back.
Vincent Virga 27:26 / #
No. Absolutely. And Gwen's daddy, owned what we in the romance novel realm would call, "an estate."
Sarah MacLean 27:37 / #
(laughter) I'm for it.
Vincent Virga 27:38 / #
So essentially, and we were on different sides of the highway. He was south of the highway. I was north of the highway, but my neighbor -
Sarah MacLean 27:47 / #
East egg and West Egg,
Jennifer Prokop 27:49 / #
Yeah, right! (laughter)
Vincent Virga 27:49 / #
Right. And my neighbor was Gwen Verdon, whom I worshipped! I mean the first musical I ever saw as a kid was Redhead, she and Bob Fosse. And she was my neighbor. So basically, it was, that was East Hampton, you know. So Gwen came to see me, and she sat down, and she said to me, "I have to tell you, I really love this book. And I'm so sorry, I can't publish it." And I said, "Why can't you publish it?" And Gwen said to me, "Gay people don't want romance."
Sarah MacLean 28:22 / #
Why wouldn't you know that, Vincent? (laughter)
Vincent Virga 28:25 / #
Gay people don't want romance and obviously I wouldn't know that because I wrote this book called Gaywyck. And had I known that I wouldn't have written that book. And it was also one of the reasons it had been rejected by everybody. Gay people don't want romance.
Sarah MacLean 28:37 / #
What nonsense!
Vincent Virga 28:38 / #
I said to Gwen, "Gwennie, you've known me and Jimmy for years. Years! You know, you know our lives. You've been with us at parties. You've been with us at dinner. You know, you know our lives, Gwen. In fact, you even know I came out in Paris. What is more romantic than coming out in Paris?"
Jennifer Prokop 29:03 / #
Nothing.
Vincent Virga 29:04 / #
So she said to me, "I live over a leather bar in the West Village." And she said to me, "I know gay people don't want romance."
Sarah MacLean 29:15 / #
Because of the leather bar in the West Village?
Vincent Virga 29:17 / #
The leather bar. Because she's in the West Village and all she saw -
Sarah MacLean 29:20 / #
That's the source she's citing.
Vincent Virga 29:22 / #
She only saw cruising. She only saw New York City in that period of time. Pre AIDS and she only saw that. That's all that she knew about the gay community. So basically I said, "Gwen, look at Jimmy and me as I said." And she said, "Right." So she went back and she presented the book to Bob Wyatt, who is gay. (laughter) He was the publisher. And so he loved it! And so they said, "Yes, they loved it." They loved it. The only caveat they had was I had to change the title. [AD BREAK]
Sarah MacLean 30:07 / #
So the original title was Gaywyck? Or -
Sarah MacLean 30:51 / #
Gaywyck. They said, "You have to change the title." And I said, "But it's a game, you know. Dragonwyck. It's a game. This is all part of the game." "No, no, no no. We want something more in the romantic line."
Jennifer Prokop 32:00 / #
Right.
Vincent Virga 32:01 / #
So I started. I started making these lists of romantic titles and when our papers went to Yale, to the Beinecke Library, I scooped up everything that had to do with Gaywyck, all the different drafts, everything. And that list is there.
Jennifer Prokop 32:16 / #
Oh, wow.
Sarah MacLean 32:17 / #
You've got to get it back!
Vincent Virga 32:19 / #
I wish I could remember what they were.
Sarah MacLean 32:21 / #
Attention Yale University. (laughter)
Vincent Virga 32:24 / #
When I was reading, someone, two summers ago, someone got a scholarship to go work with Jimmy's papers at Yale for his PhD. And he also went through my diaries because they're all there. Everything is there. Jimmy still shocked by everything. It was the perfect way to clean out in New York City apartment. And my sister's -
Jennifer Prokop 32:45 / #
(laughing) You're like, "Yale, would you like my things?"
Sarah MacLean 32:46 / #
(laughing) "Do you want my paper?"
Vincent Virga 32:48 / #
Everything went to Yale. Every single thing. And so I tried and I tried, meanwhile thinking, "Ugh, I can't bear changing the title of this book. I just can't bear it." And so then they created the cover.
Sarah MacLean 33:02 / #
Which is -
Vincent Virga 33:02 / #
And of course the cover -
Sarah MacLean 33:03 / #
It's stunning!
Vincent Virga 33:04 / #
It's flawless! Stunning!
Sarah MacLean 33:06 / #
It's stunning. The first time I ever saw it I gasped out loud.
Vincent Virga 33:09 / #
Yeah, me too.
Sarah MacLean 33:09 / #
And then I called Avon and I was like, "How do I get a copy of this?" The answer was, "You can't have one." (laughter)
Jennifer Prokop 33:19 / #
That's fine.
Vincent Virga 33:19 / #
It's intriguing, intriguing, intriguing, because people, when they got out into the bookstores, it was mistaken for a straight romantic novel.
Jennifer Prokop 33:29 / #
Ohhh.
Sarah MacLean 33:29 / #
Because it looks just like all the other gothics, which is how it should look.
Vincent Virga 33:33 / #
Absolutely.
Sarah MacLean 33:33 / #
It's how it should look. House on the hill. Brooding men.
Vincent Virga 33:36 / #
And at first glance - Absolutely. Absolutely.
Jennifer Prokop 33:39 / #
Crashing waves.
Vincent Virga 33:40 / #
Right! It was perfect. I loved it. And so out it went into the world. And then bookstores started to put warnings on it.
Vincent Virga 33:49 / #
Saying you need to know this is a gay gothic, a gay romance. And one of my clients, my picture editing clients, at that point was John Ehrlichman from the Watergate years. And I loved him. And I would come home and say things to Jimmy like, "Oh god, John Ehrlichman is a sweetie!" And Jimmy would say, "Get a grip!" And so basically -
Sarah MacLean 34:15 / #
(laughing) John Ehrlichman, about to go to jail!
Vincent Virga 34:17 / #
Actually, yes! And what happened was when I read his manuscript, he went to jail! And when I read his manuscript and said, "John, you told me everything, but you don't tell me why you went to jail." And so he wrote a chapter Why I Went to Jail. So he and I became really good friends. And he read Gaywyck, and he loved it. And when he went out on the road, he would call me and he would say, "I'm in Oklahoma. I'm in Mississippi. I'm in bookstores selling my book, and I'm asking them why they don't have Gaywyck, and many of them do have Gaywyck." And then he went to Texas, and he called me and he said, "I was just in a bookstore in Texas, and that that bookstore has a bullet hole in the window, which was put into Gaywyck!"
Sarah MacLean 34:59 / #
(gasps)
Jennifer Prokop 35:00 / #
Hmm. Wow.
Vincent Virga 35:02 / #
We mustn't forget this.
Jennifer Prokop 35:04 / #
Yeah.
Vincent Virga 35:05 / #
Mustn't forget this. The night of my party, my Gaywyck party in 1980 November, was the night of the Ramrod Massacre. And I know it happened because we were at my party at Lane's West Village apartment and we heard gunshots.
Vincent Virga 35:24 / #
And then we heard police. So we must not ever forget this. And then I went out on my tour. And I was, I was invited to meet the editor. He was Brent Harris. He loved the book. I went to see him, but before I got in the house, I got a phone call, telling me he was very sick. He was dying. And he was, in fact, I would be the last person he would be seeing before he went into this hospice. And when I got there, he loved the book and he loved Mawrdew. And so we were talking about that, he loved Callas, he loved Victoria. And we got all engaged with all of this stuff. So my short visit became hours. And while we were talking, his friends were packing up his apartment, because he was being moved out. And he was one of the first, he said, "I know of five of us. They're calling it the gay cancer. They don't know what it is yet, but there's this thing happening." We mustn't forget that either, because I - this is difficult. One of my best friends is Colm Tóibín. I've read all of his books. I met him when we were both young in Dublin. And he wrote a book called The Story of the Night, which I never read because it was about AIDS. When Gaywyck came out, and then two years later, it was followed by A Comfortable Corner, which is a book about recovery from alcoholism, written from the point of view of the other, used to be called the codependent. And basically those books were picked up all over the place. They were picked up by the 12 Step groups, they were picked up by the gay men, all over the place. And then, then I started getting invited to the hospital. And Jimmy was invited to the hospital. He could go. I could go, but I would faint. Literally, I would faint. And I was in analysis at that point. I had given myself analysis for my 40th birthday. And Jimmy always said to me, "Oh, you'll just love this. You get to talk all about yourself." And so my analyst said to me when I said I'm, "I'm fainting." He said to me, "You're having the correct response." So I realized this was a problem. And I couldn't go to wakes either, but I was invited because of the books, because the men loved the books. And so I went. I did the best that I could. And basically I couldn't write. The reason there's such a gap between Gaywyck and A Comfortable Corner and Vadriel Vale was because I actually suffered from what we now recognize as PTSD. It was, it was PTSD-ville. That's all I can say. And lost so many friends. And when years later when I met, when I met my friend, Mark Doty. When I met my friend Mark Doty for the first time, he said to me, "When my partner was dying, in Provincetown, we would read your books over and over." And so then also, when I was doing Capote with Gerald Clarke, he said to me, "Truman reads your book aloud every Christmas."
Sarah MacLean 39:46 / #
Oh my god.
Vincent Virga 39:47 / #
So there was that going on.
Sarah MacLean 39:50 / #
And you're also you're getting telephone calls in the middle of the night.
Vincent Virga 39:54 / #
I am getting, yes to telephone calls, and the most stunning, remember now the year, so I was still in the phonebook.
Jennifer Prokop 40:03 / #
Sure.
Vincent Virga 40:03 / #
And I would get, I would get telephone calls.
Sarah MacLean 40:06 / #
Phonebook! (laughter)
Vincent Virga 40:08 / #
Imagine? Phone? I actually had someone come to my apartment, this kid, and I still have a black hanging phone because I love it as a souvenir. And the kid said to me, "What's that?"
Sarah MacLean 40:16 / #
What's that?
Jennifer Prokop 40:17 / #
Oh, yeah. I teach middle schoolers and a kid was like how? And another kid was like you put your finger in and you -
Vincent Virga 40:25 / #
Yes, yes, yes. So the phone rang in the middle of the night. And it's this young boy calling me from the Midwest because he had read Gaywyck and he had been going to kill himself. He was going to shoot himself. He was in love with his gym teacher. And he said to me, "I found Gaywyck. I found it in the A&P." Because of that cover! Because it had been stacked in all of these places. So he found it. And he said to me, "Is it true that men can be together?" And I said, "I'm together. I'm together with Jimmy." We've been together since 1964 and we're very together. And we have a completely together relationship, and it's also exclusive. We never opened it. It's been exclusive for 56 years for me. And so I said, "Of course, yes, it is." And then I said to him, "If ever you need to talk about this, if ever you get frightened, call me." And he said to me, "I won't have to call you. I just have to re-read Gaywyck." I -
Sarah MacLean 41:45 / #
(laughs) I'm a mess.
Jennifer Prokop 41:46 / #
I know. I'm fine.
Vincent Virga 41:48 / #
And so AIDS hits and I am paralyzed. And I mean, paralyzed. And I was paralyzed. So what happened then was my career just became huge. Huge. I was, I became literally America's foremost picture editor.
Jennifer Prokop 42:09 / #
Right.
Vincent Virga 42:09 / #
Michael Korda christenened me the Michelangelo of picture editors. So I was all over the place. And Jimmy's editor at Farrar, Straus said, "Oh, dear. Hair by Kenneth. Pictures by Vincent." And meanwhile, I'm going to these posh events, and all of these people are coming up to me and saying, (in a whisper) "I love your book. I love your book." They'll never talk about it. And I said, you know, I would say to Jimmy, "I don't give a shit. I did what I did. I achieved what I did. I'm proud of the book. I don't care if they like it or not." And Jimmy said, "That makes it more difficult for them. Really makes it more difficult for them. So I would go to all the parties and inevitably one of them, some mega star would come up to me and say, (in a whisper) "I love your book." And that became a joke that Jimmy and I had.
Sarah MacLean 43:10 / #
You kept a list on the fridge.
Jennifer Prokop 43:11 / #
Yeah, right.
Vincent Virga 43:12 / #
Love your book! I can't tell you. And then my mother and father, we're sitting having lunch, and they are listening to the radio, and they begin fiddling on the dial and all of a sudden, they discover NPR, with bells ringing, and bats screeching and scary music. And the announcer says, "Our guest today is Vincent Virga, the author of the first gay, Gothic."
Sarah MacLean 43:47 / #
And so at this point, to be clear, you have not come out to your parents.
Sarah MacLean 43:52 / #
And your parents don't know that you've written a book.
Sarah MacLean 43:56 / #
But you did write it under your actual name.
Vincent Virga 44:00 / #
In fact, I wrote it under my actual name.
Sarah MacLean 44:01 / #
This is amazing.
Vincent Virga 44:03 / #
And my youngest brother, who is today a devoted Trumpster said to my oldest sister, "I have to change my name. I have to change my name. How can I go to school with this?" And meanwhile my sister is giving it to all of her friends and my middle brother was a deacon of the church, upstate New York. They spoke out against homosexuality. So when Gaywyck was published, my brother bought the number of copies that he needed and gave one as a Christmas present to each deacon, and resigned from the church. So that's my brother and my other brother saying "I have to change my name."
Sarah MacLean 44:42 / #
Love that story too! So your parents stumbled upon NPR -
Jennifer Prokop 44:46 / #
Outed by NPR seems like a very niche way to come out, (laughter) you know.
Vincent Virga 44:52 / #
My parents also, they never listen to NPR! They were probably looking for some talk show. Some dish show that they could have over lunch. So I went out the next weekend.
Sarah MacLean 45:06 / #
So they said nothing, or did they summon you?
Vincent Virga 45:09 / #
No. They said nothing, nothing, nothing. And I didn't even know they'd heard it. Nothing. So we go to Abraham and Straus, which is a huge supermarket, a department store in a mall, where I had worked as a kid. That's where I worked as a kid, for all of those years, between college and between Yale. In fact, the year between Yale, I was actually reviving trout, because they had built this huge trout field, you paid $5, and you went shipping, but the trout were coming up in the heat. So my job was wearing pit boots and reviving trout. (laughter) So we went to A&S and we're going up the escalator and there is a banner over the bookstore that says, "Gaywyck! Vincent Virga." And I say, "Oh, my God, look at that." And my parents ignored it.
Sarah MacLean 46:04 / #
Like it didn't exist,
Vincent Virga 46:05 / #
Didn't exist. Didn't exist. I finally at one point, soon after that, they said to me, something like, "Who's minding the cat?" And I said, "Jimmy. I live with Jimmy. I've been living with Jimmy, and basically, I wrote a book called Gaywyck." And that's when they admitted hearing it on NPR. That's when they talked about the banner. My mother read it. And she said to me, "I thought there was too much sex."
Sarah MacLean 46:33 / #
My mother said the same thing. (laughter)
Vincent Virga 46:36 / #
I said, "How could you tell? It's written in all of that prose, that Victorian prose. It's buried in the prose." I said, "How could you tell? It means, aha, that you've been reading those books I'm sending you. You've been reading those romances." And then basically, I went to sleep.
Sarah MacLean 46:58 / #
So now is this happening because Avon is just behind this book?
Vincent Virga 47:04 / #
Avon was behind it, but actually, the world was behind it.
Sarah MacLean 47:11 / #
That's great.
Vincent Virga 47:11 / #
Armistead Maupin was behind it. It was time. It was time. And so Richard Howard, who's a great poet and translator, he tells me the story that he was driving across the United States with his partner, and they were listening to NPR. And all of a sudden, this thing appeared. The bells chiming, and there I am! And the two of them started screaming at top of their voice with joy. Years later, I picked up, I'm still constantly reading right, and I picked up Madame de La Fayette The Princesse De Cleves, which is considered the first French psychological novel. It's about a woman, an aristocratic woman, who marries an aristocratic man, and then falls, she falls in love with another man. She falls in love with this man, and in Roman Catholic fashion, she has a nervous breakdown, she's hysterical, and basically, at the end of the book, she goes into a convent and dies. So I thought to myself, "You know, what? Why couldn't a man fall in love with a woman and marry her? And then fall in love with an aristocratic man?" Why can't, since I took the John reform, why can't I take the psychological novel? And so I flipped it around, of course, we meet Vadriel Vale in a monastery, which he leaves for various reasons to go out into the world to actually discover himself. And he discovers himself, he marries this wonderful woman, and he falls in love with Armand de Guise. Now the name Armand de Guise is actually a name that's in The Princesse De Cleves. And I plot that book, along the lines of The Princesse de Cleves, but I hook it into Robert and Donough Gaylord. I make Robert and Donough Armand's best friend.
Sarah MacLean 49:27 / #
Ahh! Perfect! Series, a series is born!
Vincent Virga 49:30 / #
And they also live across from each other in Gramercy Park and when I wrote Gaywyck, the first draft, I was the superintendent of the building on Gramercy Park. A little building. I was the super under a fake name, because it was a rent stabilized apartment, and Jimmy and I needed a place to live and we were walking down the street, we bumped into our pal from Yale, Bob Landorff, and he said to me, "I'm getting married and I have this tiny studio apartment at Irving Place. Do you know anybody who wants it?" And I said, "Yeah, we want it." And he said, "But you have to be Bob Landorff." And I said, "Okay. That's fine."
Vincent Virga 49:30 / #
This is the most New York thing I've ever - I mean, everybody does it.
Vincent Virga 50:08 / #
Then the landlord came because he needed a new super, and I answered the door as Bob Landorff, and Jimmy was in the bathtub. So in comes the super and he sits down, and he says to me, "Will you be the super of the building?" And I said, "I can't do anything!" "No, no, no, no. All you have to do is wash down the halls, sort the trash, and when anything goes wrong, you just call somebody." So we talked and talked and talked, and then he got up and he said, "Okay, it's a deal. Free rent." I said, "No, no, no. No free rent." I'm thinking, "Free rent. He's gonna find out I'm -"
Jennifer Prokop 50:41 / #
You're not Bob Landorff!
Vincent Virga 50:42 / #
I'm not Bob Landorff and I'm out the window! So basically, I said, "No, no, no." So he said, "I have to go to the bathroom." So we went into the bathroom, and there is Jimmy in the bathtub, and the landlord pees and then he leaves and Jimmy is freezing in the bathtub and I said, "Just think here we are with the frozen rent and I'm now the super." So basically, it's on Irving Place, and on the corner of Irving Place and Gramercy Park -
Sarah MacLean 51:12 / #
Which is one of the most beautiful places in the city! For those of you who are not New Yorkers, it's gorgeous, that block.
Vincent Virga 51:19 / #
Gorgeous. Yeah. And that's where Robert, that's where Robert and Donough, on the corner.
Sarah MacLean 51:25 / #
Perfect.
Vincent Virga 51:25 / #
And across the park, I then moved to 22nd Street and Lexington, around the corner from Gramercy Park. And Armand and Vadriel live on the other corner. So for me, they are, that's where they live, and that's where they'll always live.
Jennifer Prokop 51:46 / #
So what year was this? I mean, clearly, you were still doing picture editing and still had that whole outlet for your creativity, but writing novels was a little different, right?
Vincent Virga 51:58 / #
Yes. And I only wrote in the summers.
Jennifer Prokop 52:00 / #
Yeah. Okay.
Vincent Virga 52:00 / #
Because I discovered that I couldn't do, I couldn't do both. I could research in the winter. I could do some re-writing in the winter, but I was doing these mega best selling books. And I mean, I was working with these, you know, I was working with the President of the United States. And I was working with Jane Fonda, whom I love and all of these wonderful people on these mega books. And that took a lot of time. And also, if I'm doing your book, I read your manuscript, I then make a list of everything I want to see, and then I meet with you, and I go through your sock drawer. (laughter) And we wander through what's under your bed. Shelley Winters had these incredible pictures under her bed. And so that's what I do. I enter your life. With Hillary and Bill Clinton, I entered their lives, and I moved into the house. And it's hard to write fiction when you've got this mishegoss going on. (laughter) Impossible. And so I would write in the summer. So always the summer. For decades it was East Hampton until East Hampton became too expensive. Then it was one summer in Woodstock, which I hated. All these rich people pretending to be poor. And they were also too many mosquitoes! And so as the gods would have it, Victoria was giving a performance in Dublin and Jimmy traveled all over the British Isles with her and then they went to Dublin and a woman who was in control of this whole creative project fell in love with Jimmy and said, "You should come and spend summers in Ireland." So that's how we got to Ireland. We spent four years in Dublin, that's where I met Colm Tóibín. And then we went out to the west of Ireland, County Mayo, and I actually created a museum out there. Co-founded a museum in the west coast of Ireland, in Ballina. And then I would have, we would come back to New York, and then I got a call from the Library of Congress asking me, my very first book, my very first book was for John Wayne. And it was 12 songs. Michael gave me 12 songs and said, "You have to make a book out of this. You're a picture editor, right?" And I lied, and I said, "Sure!" Thinking, "How hard could it be?" So one of the tenants in my building was Agnes Maya, who was in charge of all the picture research at Simon and Schuster at Random House. And I said, "Agnes." She says to me, "You can't do that. I couldn't do that." So she gave me a copy of picture sources, and I kept playing the songs over and over again, and thinking to myself, "Oh my god, this is such a hoot! It's such America. It's all about America!" So I called the Army, the Navy, and the Marines, and the Air Force and I said, "Listen, I'm working on a project with John Wayne. Can I come and go through your files? And they said, "John Wayne? Sure."
Vincent Virga 53:10 / #
For him anything. (laughter)
Vincent Virga 54:55 / #
Anything! And also, and this is my first book, so I don't even know you're supposed to pay people. And then I thought to myself, all those pretty pictures of America, all of those advertisements for Oldsmobile and Ford. And so I started calling the mega companies and saying, "Listen, all those beautiful pictures of America." And they said, "We don't - no one can have them." And I said, "Well, I'm doing a book for John Wayne."
Sarah MacLean 55:24 / #
(laughter) Oh, John Wayne!
Vincent Virga 55:26 / #
And I will give you a credit. I'll give you a credit in a book by John Wayne called America, Why I Love Her. And then I thought, "I need more." So I thought to myself, you know, all those Farm Security Administration pictures, Dorothea Lange, all those people I love, they're very America. So I went to the Library of Congress, and the curator I met, became the head curator, 15 years later, of prints and photographs. And so they called me and said, "We need to do a book. We're having a major anniversary, 100 years. All of the curators have been working in their different divisions. We need a book. What do you think we should do?" And I said, "We need to do a book about a history." And I called it Eyes of the Nation, because that's what the Library of Congress is. And also the Library of Congress is America's memory. So I said, "Let's do this." And I did that. I said to Jimmy, "We're only going to go for Eyes of the Nation." He didn't want to come here. He hated it. From the beginning, he said to me, "You walk past people. You don't want to fly over there." And so we came, and then I did a book called Cartographia -
Jennifer Prokop 56:38 / #
Right.
Vincent Virga 56:38 / #
Which took seven years.
Jennifer Prokop 56:41 / #
I have a copy of it. It's beautiful!
Vincent Virga 56:43 / #
Isn't it beautiful?
Jennifer Prokop 56:44 / #
Cartographia is really your book. You are the author of record,
Vincent Virga 56:50 / #
I wrote that book. Meanwhile, remember, I had already done Eyes of the Nation, and I had done all these other books. So everybody knew me, I had full access. And when I would go in, I always had an idea of what I wanted. And I divided the book. This is what we call in the theater "a two o'clock in the morning idea." You're supposed to wake up in the morning and say, "What a stupid idea!" I didn't. I went in, and I said to Ron Grim at the Library of Congress, and he adored me because he was my guy in Eyes of the Nation. And so I said, "I have this idea." And so we began. And since I was going all over the world, the book is about maps as cultural documents. I tell the story, the history of the country, and the civilization through the map. So I say in the very beginning, it took me forever, and I was under contract to Little, Brown, and I went to this big, big event, a publishing event, and Jimmy was hosting a table. And there I was, in my tux, surrounded by all of my friends who were editors-in-chiefs and all these wonderful kids, people who had grown up with me. And the editor-in-chief of Little, Brown came over and said to me, "Vincent! We were talking about you in an editorial board meeting." And I said, "Oh?" And he said, "Yes! If you don't finish this book in six months, we're canceling the book."
Sarah MacLean 58:15 / #
(gasp) Not fun! Not cool at a gala! (laughter)
Vincent Virga 58:20 / #
No, not cool!
Sarah MacLean 58:22 / #
I object!
Vincent Virga 58:25 / #
I had been all over the Library of Congress for six years, and all these people explaining what the map meant. And I then went back to library and I thought, I have six months and I have, I have 1000's of pages. And so I wrote the introduction. What is a map? I wrote the basic introduction. And then as I went through, I thought to myself, you have one day for each map, if you can have one day for each map, will then come to the end of it. And meanwhile, I was surrounded by all these scholars who kept wanting to read my stuff, and they just adored my stuff. And they would say, "Oh, but you have to do this. You have to do that. You have to explain to me why was this huge thing going on in India?" And I would say, "No."
Jennifer Prokop 59:17 / #
(laughter) I've one day.
Vincent Virga 59:19 / #
One day. And so I did it. I did it. And essentially, it's a wonderful book.
Jennifer Prokop 59:26 / #
Yeah.
Vincent Virga 59:26 / #
I think. And also I invented this thing where I said, I create a metaphor. Map as A. Map as B. And when the book came out, now remember, I have no, no, I'm not an academic, and when the book came out, it was accepted because of Ron Grim and but I was the key name on the thing and they behaved abominably. Then it went to be reviewed by THE great journal Imago Mundi, and it was assigned to the head of the maps division in the British Museum.
Sarah MacLean 1:00:02 / #
Oh. No pressure. (laughter)
Vincent Virga 1:00:05 / #
He reviewed the book and he begins with, "You know, when I first started reading this book, I thought to myself, "It's very relaxed.""
Sarah MacLean 1:00:15 / #
Unlike the British Museum,
Vincent Virga 1:00:16 / #
All of sudden these metaphors begin. "It's beautifully written, but he creates these metaphors for each map. And my first reaction, it's awfully simplistic. And it's awfully American." He writes this.
Sarah MacLean 1:00:31 / #
Terrible scathing review! (laughter)
Vincent Virga 1:00:33 / #
Then he turns around and says, "This book is magnificent. Absolutely magnificent. It is a total triumph. It is so inventive, it is so brilliant. And it's magnificent!" Well that, of course, did not help me in the academic world. Imago Mundi, I started reviewing for Imago Mundi and the academics were freaked, because I was going to all these conventions and asking all these questions. And, um, it was a great, great experience. And then it became number one on Amazon and five different -
Jennifer Prokop 1:01:13 / #
Wow.
Vincent Virga 1:01:14 / #
Sections.
Sarah MacLean 1:01:14 / #
Great.
Vincent Virga 1:01:15 / #
So, and then I stayed on, you know, Jimmy said, "Oh, we can go home now." But then the books kept coming, kept coming. So ultimately, I think there are now 29 books from the Library of Congress with my name. And also I did movie calendars, because I had all these friends. And you know, and I would call these people in, the publisher would say to me, "The Library of Congress is 1000 pound gorilla." So I very boldly, you know, I would call people. And I, first of all, I called my pal who was the head of 20th Century Fox legal, and he gave me permission to use the images without pay. But I had to get permission from everyone in the image. That meant I had to -
Sarah MacLean 1:01:59 / #
Wow, that's rough.
Vincent Virga 1:01:59 / #
Had to bring in people. There were all those people. I couldn't do it. I mean, basically, two brilliant brilliant people did that for me. But I had to call the difficult ones. I had to call Lauren Bacall, because her agency screamed at me over the phone. Four letter words. So I called her as the, you know, the 1000 pound gorilla. And I explained that we wanted to do this for Humphrey Bogart, because he wanted to use a picture. It was for Film Preservation Society, which I know she loves. And so she said, "Oh, sure, you can do it." So she called the people back and said, "Yeah, he can have this. He can do this." They call me back and every four letter word, "You know how she treats us? Do you know what she does to us?" And then with Kim Novak, which was the joy of my life, because I worshipped Kim Novak. And basically I put her on the back of Eyes of the Nation. So her people said no. I called Kim Novak. And Faye Dunaway. I called Faye Dunaway. And Jimmy had just reviewed her book in the New York Times which she loved. And I said basically, "When are you going to play a Long Day's Journey into Night?" She said, "Yes." So essentially, that was what I was doing at the Library of Congress.
Sarah MacLean 1:02:02 / #
Amazing.
Vincent Virga 1:02:02 / #
Then comes The Princesse de Cleves and then comes Vadriel Vale. And then I was thinking again, and I was alive again to my book. And I started thinking, what's next? I want the Gaywyck trilogy, so what's next? Next is to take the 19th century melodrama. I've taken the gothic romance. I've taken the psychological drama. Let's do the melodrama. So basically I created Children of Paradise, and I will never forget the moment sitting in the west coast of Ireland, and starting that book, and standing in the front room, with Robbie, in his house in Gramercy Park. And there I was, back with my crowd. And then I took the characters from Morris because at the end of it, Foster says, "They go off into the greensward." And then he says in the final, in his afterward, "They could not have lasted in the greensward." So I bring them, I bring them to Gaywyck. The whole point, when I look back on it, is about queer spaces. Now, when I'm reading all this stuff, and I realize my goal was queer spaces. Gaywyck is in 1900. All those people, he's at the opera, all of these people, Vadriel Vale, queer spaces. And so I go epic in Children of Paradise, queer spaces, and we invent the movies! Robbie becomes a movie director. If I'm going to do it with melodrama, I have to invent the movies! So basically, it cannot be published until, it exists in the Beinecke Library, and it exists in William and Mary, because William and Mary did a celebration of Gaywyck, and I asked them if they wanted the third volume of the trilogy. And basically they said, "Yes!" The reason it can't be published is because it was sent out, and the rejections were basically, "Oh, this book doesn't stand alone, and it's too long ago."
Sarah MacLean 1:02:02 / #
Vincent!
Vincent Virga 1:02:20 / #
"No one remembers Gaywyck."
Sarah MacLean 1:05:36 / #
We have to get it published!
Vincent Virga 1:05:38 / #
My goal is to have the trilogy published in uniform volume.
Jennifer Prokop 1:05:44 / #
Yeah.
Vincent Virga 1:05:45 / #
That's my goal. And my other goal is either Netflix or Amazon. I want a, I want a series.
Sarah MacLean 1:05:59 / #
Vincent, we're going to get this done. We're going to get - well, I can't, I mean, I can't get the Netflix deal for you, but we're going to get this publishing done. We can do this! We're going to do this. Fated Mates is going to come together, we're going to work together, we're going to do this. We're going to get this done.
Vincent Virga 1:06:14 / #
I would really love that.
Sarah MacLean 1:06:15 / #
We're going to get it done.
Vincent Virga 1:06:15 / #
It's my dream!
Sarah MacLean 1:06:17 / #
Everyone, listen up! We're getting it done. Stay tuned. So did you even know, it was a romance?
Vincent Virga 1:06:26 / #
I knew it was out there, but I wasn't interested. I mean, it was heterosexual, and I thought to myself, "I don't want to read these." Also, the few I picked up when I was at Avon, I thought, "I prefer The Lord Won't Mind." I'm a snob! I mean, you know, I'm a snob! And also, I long, long for romance novels, and I simply am old, and I can't find the ones that - the genre is problematic for me.
Sarah MacLean 1:07:04 / #
In the years since your books were published, have you heard from other gay romance writers who were inspired by you? Do you feel like you've left a mark in that sense? A trail?
Vincent Virga 1:07:18 / #
That was always very moving, because at one point, there was a book published, a Rainbow novel, won the award, I loved it. And in this sense, my note to this writer, and he, he sent me the most wonderful letters, and I got letters, letters, we get letters. We get stacks and stacks of letters. When the book was published, I was getting letters from Japan. In fact, there was a huge review for the book in Japan, and they sent a film crew over to interview me. Yeah, I got a lot of letters, very moving, very touching letters from people who said it helped them come out. That is who said they hid the book. And they loved the book so much, that they were passing it around. In fact, this week I got a letter from a man who 20 years ago, bought it in a bookstore in Florida. And then he lent it to someone and never got it back. So he wanted it, and he recently tracked it down in the original edition, and he loved it more than ever. And I think last week I got, older men who are moving and downsizing will write me and say their partners died and they're moving, and they're bringing very few books, but they must have mine. They must have mine. So that happens as well. I love this book. And then I just get letters randomly saying, "This is my favorite novel, and I just want you to know that." I have no idea why! I got a letter from a young boy. 24 years old, and he said, "I'm a goth, a gay goth, and I love your books. I'm sure you get letters like this all the time." And I wrote back and I said, "No. I do not get letters from 24-year-old gay goths." I'm always saying to Jimmy, "It's so touching to me." And now to be in that book, you know, The History of the -
Jennifer Prokop 1:09:35 / #
Yes! The Romance History from Rebecca Romney.
Vincent Virga 1:09:35 / #
Oh, my god!
Sarah MacLean 1:09:39 / #
Well, I think the thing about Gaywyck that resonates so much with so many people is that you really did knock down the doors of the Gothic, which is a genre that many of us love so much. Many of us cut our teeth on those early Gothics and you re-wrote the rules of it. I'm sad to hear that you you never had a writer community, but I know for a fact that many writers were inspired by you.
Vincent Virga 1:10:10 / #
Several years ago there was a convention, and there was a panel about the gay books. I wasn't invited, and just assumed, you know, I've never gone after this. I did it, as I've said, and I just sort of cruised along with it amused, and knowing what I did,, but at the same time, I remember a book that came out about gay fiction. And there was a little footnote that said, "Oh, and then there's Gaywyck, which is really a footnote, and it will never be anything but a footnote." That's what this thing said, and I thought to myself, "Okay, so maybe there were others before me." And of course, now I've read - I have a whole library of the gay novels before me.
Sarah MacLean 1:10:52 / #
Well I do think that it's worth saying that you are, as far as any of us can tell, you are the first gay Gothic romance, the first gay, possibly the first gay historical Modern romance with sex in it and everything!
Jennifer Prokop 1:11:07 / #
And a happy ending!
Vincent Virga 1:11:08 / #
The happy ending. That was the thing that I think even shook Gwen a bit. And I had been told, Michael Korda said to me, "I want you to write a book. I want you to write a story based on the best of everything." Because he had published that mega bestseller. He said, "I want you to write a best of everything with/for men. I want the gay men to die." And I said, "No." Now when I look back on it, I thought to myself, "You know, I could have killed him in Vietnam. He could have died as a great American hero." But at that point in my heart, I wanted to write this gay Gothic, and I'd already started it. I'm getting statements from Amazon, that people are buying it again. What, what caused this resurgence?
Sarah MacLean 1:12:05 / #
It's a book that people are aware of now. There are many, many more of us now who believe that those paperbacks from the '70s should not have disappeared. They should have been honored in a way that, you know, in the same way that other books from the '70s remain honored. So people are starting to think about the Modern romance, the happily ever after, with sex on the page, what does it look like? What are the roots of the genre? Who are the people who built the house? And we believe that you are a person who has built the house.
Vincent Virga 1:12:43 / #
And now you know, I've been writing, and I wrote a book called He Cooks, I Clean, which is a joke Jimmy and I had. It's a novel, He Cooks, I Clean. And my novels are now very, very erotic because D.H. Lawrence said, "You can't possibly create a fully rounded character, if you don't have their love life." That was his argument for Lady Chatterley's Lover. And basically, I always agreed. I mean, I pussyfooted through Vadriel and through the other ones. I'm a little, little bolder in Children of Paradise, but it was inappropriate for that period, and for my tone. So it's sort of a hidden, though my mother sniffed it out.
Sarah MacLean 1:13:32 / #
(laughter) Moms will do that.
Jennifer Prokop 1:13:34 / #
Mothers. They know.
Vincent Virga 1:13:33 / #
Mom. And now of course, in these new novels of mine, they're very, very passionate and graphic. But, you know, I've sent them to editors, and they say, "No, but we're supposed to be, we're supposed to be married now. You know what I mean? It's supposed to be all over, but it's not all over. For me, it will always be the Ramrod shootings on the publication that, I don't know that I can ever move beyond that.
Jennifer Prokop 1:14:09 / #
Yeah.
Vincent Virga 1:14:10 / #
So that's where I am, and I'm sad. Deeply saddened. I'm waiting to see what's waiting for me, because I'm now reading The Prophets. I've just started it. And I don't know what's going to happen in that, but I think it's going to be very unhappy. But of course, they're slaves and I've already started to cry, like, in the first chapter, by what he describes, but I'm, I'm in this, you know. I'm in this. And I live in hope.
Sarah MacLean 1:14:44 / #
Wow! That was so amazing!
Jennifer Prokop 1:14:53 / #
Sarah, before we talk about our feelings, I want you to tell our listeners about the story of how Vincent came to be on the podcast.
Sarah MacLean 1:15:04 / #
Ohhh.
Jennifer Prokop 1:15:05 / #
Because it's a good one. Everybody listen, we had a list, and we didn't hear back. A lot of people we just didn't hear back from.
Sarah MacLean 1:15:13 / #
Yeah! You will hear - we will do this: whenever there is an interesting story related to how we found a person, we will tell the story at the end. Vincent Virga. We discovered him - I think Steve Ammidown rang my bell about him when we were doing the Trailblazer thing for the RITA's in 2019, which keeps coming up because it was a really important piece of my learning about the history of the genre, which I thought I kind of knew, and then suddenly there were all these names that Steve really, Steve helped with that. And he kind of rang my bell about it, and so when we made our list of Trailblazers, he was an obvious choice.
Jennifer Prokop 1:15:59 / #
He also, Gaywyck appears in Rebecca Romney's romance catalog.
Sarah MacLean 1:16:05 / #
That happened after we started looking for him. What's interesting about the Rebecca Romney catalog and Fated Mates' Trailblazers episodes is they really have, I think we and Rebecca are often like, "Oh, that's great. That person is on our list. Or our person is on her list." So it's a really cool marriage of the two projects. But I went looking for him, and I found he has a website that hasn't been updated very recently, and I sent him an email that just introduced us, because at this point, you know, I don't expect people know who we are.
Jennifer Prokop 1:16:45 / #
Sure.
Sarah MacLean 1:16:46 / #
So I introduced us and I sort of said, "Well, I'm in New York, and I think you're in New York, and I'm happy to come. I'm vaccinated." A lot of these emails are very, "If you can't do this, we're happy to come and be with you. We're vaccinated." And my phone rang, and it was a weird number from New York. so I let it go to voicemail, because, obviously, I let it go to voicemail. Who answers the phone?
Jennifer Prokop 1:17:12 / #
Nobody.
Sarah MacLean 1:17:12 / #
And I had a voicemail from him. And I will say this, you guys, I have had a couple of really great voicemails over the course of this project, because what I've discovered is many people who are of a certain age, are very happy to make a telephone call. So Vincent and I chatted a couple of times before we recorded.
Jennifer Prokop 1:17:34 / #
The first time Sarah talked to him, she called me. You actually called me, I don't know if it was catching. And you were like, "We're a Vincent Virga stan podcast."
Sarah MacLean 1:17:44 / #
Basically, we're just going to have Vincent Virga on as our third forever. Like, you can just join us all the time. And here's the thing, I had heard some of those stories already, because we've had a couple of really great conversations, but this episode. Jen.
Jennifer Prokop 1:17:58 / #
Yeah.
Sarah MacLean 1:17:59 / #
I cried twice!
Jennifer Prokop 1:18:01 / #
So for those of you listening in real time, usually we release on a Wednesday. And here it is, it's an unusual day. We released Beverly Jenkins a couple of days ago, and here we are releasing another Trailblazer. And that's because this date is very special. This is actually the 41st anniversary of the release of Gaywyck. And the reason we know that is because, if we remember, Vincent mentioned that the night of the party, that essentially was celebrating it, there was a massacre at the Ramrod bar, and that happened on Wednesday, November 19, 1980. I will put some of these articles in show notes. This is for many people, maybe little remembered, part of gay history. A former police officer entered a gay bar called the Ramrod and opened fire. And so, you know, this was a point in the interview where all of us, I think, but Vincent especially, got really teary because here it was, this kind of height, of kind of a career and a moment for him, and it was this really brutal reminder of how unaccepting some people would always be of love stories and happily ever afters for gay and lesbian, and at that point, probably those were the only categories of Americans. So that's the reason we really wanted to release today's episode on the anniversary because -
Sarah MacLean 1:19:33 / #
We wanted to say it same. The Trailblazer episodes are about speaking the names of the people who built the house, and in this particular case, it felt important to say the name of the Ramrod massacre and to talk about this today. In shownotes we'll also put the names of the victims -
Jennifer Prokop 1:19:34 / #
Yes.
Sarah MacLean 1:19:34 / #
Of the shootings, and you know, we're our thinking Vincent today, but we are so, so happy to have had him on the podcast. I was - what a remarkable life!
Jennifer Prokop 1:20:10 / #
Oh, yeah.
Sarah MacLean 1:20:11 / #
He is living! I think it's amazing how much he had to say about the work and about writing love stories, for somebody who we have not heard from. As a genre, we don't talk about Vincent as much as I think maybe we should.
Jennifer Prokop 1:20:32 / #
Yeah. I think one of the other things that is especially poignant, is how people would whisper to him. This really stuck with me. "I loved your book, but I can't really talk about it publicly." I think Rebecca's catalog has a lot of really interesting information about the evolution of gay romance from Gaywyck. And I'm going to include a thread from a librarian I follow, Angie Manfredi, who talked about how the assault on putting LGBTQ+ literature in libraries is more intense than ever. And how vital it is for kids, for teenagers, I mean for all kinds of people, but kids especially, to be able to see themselves in literature portrayed in a positive way and having the potential for happiness and joy, and all kinds of stories. And she gives in this thread, some really specific things that you can do as a regular person, as simple as calling up your local library and saying, "I hope that you are keeping these materials on the shelves for kids and teenagers in our community." So I just want to say how urgent it is that, you know, we not take this for granted. I was very, it's sometimes really overwhelming to feel like we've made no progress, but the way we make sure we keep the progress we have made is by fighting for it, and not just assuming. Right? Not just assuming that they'll always be gay and trans and lesbian romance, or bisexuals in romance, and that especially if we want those materials to persist and be around for everyone, that we make it clear to our local libraries that, and our school libraries especially, that we support having those materials on the shelves.
Sarah MacLean 1:22:30 / #
And on top of it, purchasing those materials if you are able to, making sure that those materials pass through bookstores. And requesting those materials from your local bookstore, making sure that when you're in Barnes & Noble, you're asking for books that represent all marginalized communities, but especially those in LGBTQIA+ community. This is a second piece of the library struggle, but we all saw what happened on Election Day in Virginia, and we know that the critical race theory piece was a HUGE piece that swung Virginia red, particularly with white women. And I want to just say that there's another great thread that went around last week that basically underscored that libraries are going to be the frontline for so much of this. Anybody who was following that story in Virginia knows that it started with a mom, a white mom, who was horrified that her son was forced to read Beloved in class, and traumatized by the content in Beloved. So when we're talking about books being banned, we're talking about it happening right now, all over. So we'll throw that into show notes too.
Jennifer Prokop 1:23:58 / #
Yes. And that's it. These are, I think it's really also important to say it seems so easy to think it's happening somewhere else. It's happening everywhere.
Sarah MacLean 1:24:09 / #
Everywhere.
Jennifer Prokop 1:24:10 / #
It is happening at a school board in your town. Someone is going after books that they think are you know, and I just think as romance readers, if we care about happily everyone after, we have to care about, we have to be literally willing to stand up and say, because they're going to come at, you know, romance will be first, right? But when I think about children, when I think about the kids in my room who need to see books about themselves on the shelves, this, this is urgent work, that we as listeners and we as readers have to be a part of, because it starts with censorship, right? It starts with banning books. It starts with saying, "We shouldn't be teaching these things because they make me uncomfortable."
Sarah MacLean 1:25:08 / #
Yeah. And books are world changing in the sense that when you read a book, when any kid reads these books, it changes the way they look at the world. And that's what we need.
Jennifer Prokop 1:25:20 / #
And that's why they want to get rid of them.
Sarah MacLean 1:25:22 / #
I also just want to say and this is, you know, we're down a little bit of a Fated States rabbit hole now, but I just want to say listen, school boards too, I mean, we saw that on Tuesday, on the Election Day this year. The battle for this country is happening in school board races.
Jennifer Prokop 1:25:43 / #
Yes.
Sarah MacLean 1:25:44 / #
So if you are out there, and you are like, "What could I do? I don't want to, I can't run for Senator. How could I help?" Check out runforsomething.net where you can learn more about running in your town to be on the school board. You know, right now school boards are really front lining this.
Jennifer Prokop 1:26:05 / #
Yes. And I would just say, like I said, if you can't do that you can call your principal. I mean that's the thing, there are things, you can call the principal of your school and say, "I support having books that talk about race and racism and have gay and lesbian characters in them. There are lots of things that you can do. And I think it's just really important. We're big believers in, you know, civic action. So it doesn't have to be running for Senate, but it can be calling your kid's principal and saying, "Don't you dare take these books out of these classrooms. I want my kid to be learning the truth about who we are as a country. I want my kid to be reading stories about people that are not like them. I want my kid to see the whole world out there in their classroom."
Sarah MacLean 1:26:55 / #
In the meantime, we hope you enjoyed our interview with Vincent. We hope you head out and pick up Gaywyck on what you can get in print or in ebook, and we hope that you enjoyed this conversation as much as we did. We thought, I mean, I don't know if I've said this on the recordings yet, but it really does feel like every single conversation is so different from all the others.
Jennifer Prokop 1:27:17 / #
Oh, absolutely!
Sarah MacLean 1:27:18 / #
And this was really a delight! And I told Eric when we finished, I was like, "We have to have him for dinner because he's amazing!" (laughter)
Jennifer Prokop 1:27:28 / #
Honestly, I mean and that's the thing, let alone from Gaywyck, the story of his life doing images and the other work that he did, this is someone who had a long and distinguished career in publishing.
Sarah MacLean 1:27:40 / #
Yeah, and I want to hear all about Watergate! (laughter) Tell me everything!
Jennifer Prokop 1:27:44 / #
I want to hear about Bill and Hillary. Everything!
Sarah MacLean 1:27:47 / #
Going through pictures that were like under the bed in Hillary Clinton's house.
Jennifer Prokop 1:27:51 / #
Sure.
Sarah MacLean 1:27:51 / #
Sounds like, first of all, if I had known that job existed, I would not be sitting here with you, dummy. (laughter)
Jennifer Prokop 1:27:58 / #
Fine. My goodness.
Sarah MacLean 1:27:59 / #
Anyway, that was remarkable! I'm so glad that we did that.
Jennifer Prokop 1:28:04 / #
Me too.
Sarah MacLean 1:28:05 / #
And I hope you all loved it. Tell us how you felt about it on Twitter @FatedMates or on Instagram @FatedMatespod. You can also send Vincent an email the same way we did at his website vincentvirga.com. I think Vincent would probably be really thrilled to hear from all of you, if you felt moved by his stories. And otherwise you can find us at fatedmates.net. We will be back on Wednesday on proper schedule, but today we hope you're being kind to yourself and others.
S04.10: Beverly Jenkins: Trailblazer
This week, we’re continuing our Trailblazer episodes with Beverly Jenkins—the first Black author of historical romance featuring Black main characters. We talk about her path to romance writing, about how librarians make the best writers, and about her role as the first Black historical romance novelist. We’re also talking about writing in multiple sub genres, about lifting up other authors, and about the importance of the clinch cover.
Thank you to Beverly Jenkins for taking the time to talk to us, and share her story.
There’s still time to buy the Fated Mates Best of 2021 Book Pack (which includes Beverly’s Wild Rain!) from our friends at Old Town Books in Alexandria, VA, and get eight of the books on the list, a Fated Mates sticker and other swag! Order the book box as soon as you can to avoid supply chain snafus.
Thank you, as always, for listening! If you are up for leaving a rating or review for the podcast on your podcasting app, we would be very grateful!
Our next read-alongs will be the Tiffany Reisz Men at Work series, which is three holiday themed category romances. Read one or all of them: Her Halloween Treat, Her Naughty Holiday and One Hot December.
Show Notes
Welcome Beverly Jenkins, the author of more than 50 romance novels, and the recipient of the 2017 Romance Writers of America Nora Roberts Lifetime Achievement Award, as well as the 2016 Romantic Times Reviewers’ Choice Award for historical romance.
You can hear Beverly’s interview on the Black Romance History podcast, and last February, Jen interviewed her for Love’s Sweet Arrow when Wild Rain was released. Wild Rain was also one of our best of 2021 romance novels.
Beverly Jenkins's first agent was Vivian Stephens. You can listen to Julie Moody-Freeman's interview with Vivian in two parts on the Black Romance Podcast.
Some of the people Beverly mentioned: sweet romance author Laverne St. George, author Patricia Vaughn, author Anita Richmond Bunkley, publisher Walter Zacharius, editor Ellen Edwards, editor Christine Zika, cover designer Tom Egner, author Shirley Hailstock, author Donna Hill, author Brenda Jackson, editor Monica Harris, author Gay Gunn, marketing expert Adrienne di Pietro, editor Erika Tsang, agent Nancy Yost, Romantic Times owner Kathryn Falk, and Gwen Osborne from The Romance Reader.
Here’s more information about 1994, the summer of Black love, and here’s a PDF of Beverly Jenkins’s 1995 profile in People Magazine.
Transcript
Beverly Jenkins 0:00 / #
The idea that I was out in the marketplace, the African American readers were just over the moon. Some of the stories they told me of going in the bookstore and seeing Night Song, and you know, the first thing they did was flip to the back to make sure it was written by a Black woman, and one woman said she sat in the bookstore right there on the floor, and started reading.
Sarah MacLean 0:30 / #
That was the voice of Beverly Jenkins. We are thrilled to have Beverly with us. We've been working on getting her to join us on Fated Mates since Season One, and pandemics and busy-ness got in the way, but we're finally here and it feels right that the first time we talked to Beverly, we're talking to her as part of the Trailblazers series. You will hear her talk about her life, her time beginning writing her work, her research, publication, her editors and her readers, and we think you'll love it. Welcome to Fated Mates.
We are so thrilled to have Beverly Jenkins with us today. Welcome, Beverly!
Beverly Jenkins 1:18 / #
Thank you! Thank you! I'm thrilled to be here. This is - you know we've been trying to hook up for a while, so thanks so much for the invite!
Sarah MacLean 1:26 / #
We really have! And obviously, for many, many reasons, Jen and I have been wanting you to come on Fated Mates to talk about all sorts of things. I don't know if you remember this, but you and I were together outside of the National Book Festival, what feels like 1000 years ago when we could be with each other, and you started telling me stories about the beginning of your career and the early days and it was one of the most magnificent afternoons of my life, and so I am basically just here to make you tell those stories on tape.
Beverly Jenkins 2:09 / #
I've got a million of them, so you'll have to let me know which one -
Sarah MacLean 2:12 / #
I love it! No, I want to hear them all.
Sarah MacLean 2:14 / #
So we are - the conceit of this whole - the work that we're doing right now with our Trailblazer guests is to really get the voices of the genre and the voices of the people who built the house on tape, and to also say the names of the people who maybe we have not heard of. The not Beverly Jenkins'. So that's why we're doing this. That's why we think it's important and that's why we are so grateful to have you with us.
Beverly Jenkins 2:48 / #
I'm proud to, proud to represent. So hit me up with your first question.
Jennifer Prokop 2:55 / #
Well, I think one of the things and this is true for all romance writers, readers, everybody, which is how did you come to romance? How did you become a reader and a writer of romance?
Beverly Jenkins 3:08 / #
I tell the story about I grew up reading everything. You know I was one of those kids that read everything in the neighborhood library, from the kiddie books to the teen books to the adult books. This would be late '50s, early '60s. I think I got my first library card when I was like eight. So that would have been like 1959, right, but there was nothing in the books that represented me in the classics, of course that my mom would make us read or insist we read Langston Hughes and Bontemps and you know those folks. But for popular literature, there was nothing, but it didn't stop me from reading. You know I love a good story. So in my journey through Mark Twain Library, that was the name of the library, eastside of Detroit, Gratiot and Burns, it's no longer there, and I'll tell you a terrible story about that eventually, but they had when I got to the teen books, I read Beany Malone. I don't know if you're familiar with the Beany Malone books. YA, family, small town. Beany was the the youngest kid, so you had her adventures. They had Seventeenth Summer which I think everybody my age read and then I moved to Mary Stewart, you know, This Rough Magic, all those great books. So then that brought in Victoria Holt and Phyllis Whitney and Jane Aiken Hodge.
Sarah MacLean 4:37 / #
Victoria Holt is one of those names that comes up every time you talk to a group of romance novelists who started, you know, young.
Beverly Jenkins 4:44 / #
Yeah, she was there. So read her. Charlotte Armstrong. I don't know if you're familiar with her. She's got a great book. What is the name of that book? The Gift Shop, I think! Awesome! It's you know, a sweet romance but it's a young woman who is on a quest with this guy. Somebody left some kind of, if I can remember correctly, some kind of a secret something inside of a gift shop. They were, it was inside of a little glass pig, [laughter] so she and this guy are traveling all over. I don't know if it's the world, I think was a country, trying to run down these pigs to get whatever it was that was inside and it's just a great story and probably holds up pretty well. I haven't read it in a 1000 years, even if it's still in print?
[Laughing] I'm gonna report in. I'm gonna find this.
Jennifer Prokop 5:35 / #
I know me too. I'm down, so yeah.
Beverly Jenkins 5:38 / #
Yeah, Charlotte Armstrong, The Gift Shop, great! Then you had stuff like Cash McCall, that they made the movie with Natalie Wood and James Garner, I think. So I had always loved a good love story. You know you had Doris Day and James Garner and all of that. You know, my sisters and I, I have five sisters, four sisters, three of us are stairsteps. So you know, we loved you know that kind of stuff. So reading and pop culture, but like I said, there was nothing that reflected us. Then you've got the Toni Morrison quote, you know, if it's not out there, and you want to read it, then you need to write it, but I was just writing for me. I wasn't writing for publication because the market was closed. So that's sort of how I got started, I guess, a long winded answer to your question.
Sarah MacLean 6:36 / #
So when you say you weren't writing it for the market, walk us through kind of putting pen to paper and then -
Sarah MacLean 6:45 / #
I mean, now you're in the market, so how did that happen?
Beverly Jenkins 6:47 / #
Now I'm in the market, now I'm in the marketplace. There were you know, other than, and I did not read those because I didn't even know they existed. Elsie Washington and Vivian, who really started this industry for us, the American side of it. Have you heard her interview with?
Jennifer Prokop 7:07 / #
The Black Romance Podcast.
Beverly Jenkins 7:08 / #
Oh my gosh!
Sarah MacLean 7:09 / #
It's fantastic! We'll put links to it in show notes, everybody.
Beverly Jenkins 7:12 / #
Just amazing. So Elsie and Sandra and I had no idea they were out there. But I was writing for me, and this was like, God, BC, Before Children. [laughter] You know me and Hubby, we were like "No, we're not having no kids. We are having too much fucking fun!" [laughter]
Sarah MacLean 7:35 / #
Were you writing historical or were you writing contemporary? What?
Beverly Jenkins 7:39 / #
I was writing Night Song.
Beverly Jenkins 7:42 / #
I was writing Night Song, didn't know I was writing Night Song at the time though you know, I had no title for it, but it was just a story for me and I would come home from working at the Michigan State University Graduate Library. And I'd come home, he had played tennis in high school, so he would come home, 'cause he was a printer back then, so he'd come home, clean up from all that ink. You know, he had ink in his fro and all of that. Ink in his nose, man had ink coming out of the backs of his hands for years because there's no OSHA back then you know.
Beverly Jenkins 8:13 / #
So he'd come home, clean up, grab his tennis racket and go play tennis, and I would read because you work at a Graduate Library and the little old ladies in cataloguing loved me. So I can go through the back halls of the library and grab stuff off people's carts, mainly science fiction which is what I mainly read back then, take 'em home. So if I wasn't reading, I was working on this little story just for me. Buffalo soldier and a school teacher. I had no idea it was going to be published or would get published because I already had my dream job. I was working in the library. That's all I ever wanted out of life, you know. And then I met LaVerne, I was working in Parke-Davis.
Sarah MacLean 8:56 / #
Who's LaVerne?
Beverly Jenkins 8:57 / #
LaVerne? LaVerne is the reason we're here today. Her and my mama. She writes under LaVerne St. George. She's a sweet romance writer. This is probably, oh, let's see if I was working at Parke-Davis, this is probably somewhere between '85 and '90, and LaVerne had just gotten her first book published. We were working at the Parke-Davis pharmaceutical library, which was a whole different story, that's a whole different conversation. Parke-Davis was probably one of the, maybe one of the first big pharma companies. It started in Detroit and they moved from Detroit to Ann Arbor, which is where I was working. So she had just gotten a sweet romance published by a small publisher here in Michigan. So we're celebrating her and I was talking about this little manuscript I was working on and she wanted to see it and I knew she was a member of RWA back then and I didn't know anything about any of that. I'm just writing a story, right? So I bring it in and she says, "You really need to get this published!"
Jennifer Prokop 10:03 / #
Did you hand write this manuscript? Is it typed?
Beverly Jenkins 10:06 / #
Yeah!
Jennifer Prokop 10:06 / #
What does this look like?
Beverly Jenkins 10:08 / #
Oh, okay, it was...I had [she chuckles] this little what we used to call close and play typewriter.
Jennifer Prokop 10:16 / #
Okay.
Sarah MacLean 10:17 / #
Mmmhmm.
Beverly Jenkins 10:17 / #
You know, you could carry it.
Jennifer Prokop 10:18 / #
Oh yeah.
Sarah MacLean 10:19 / #
They were very lightweight, right?
Beverly Jenkins 10:21 / #
Very lightweight, [laughter] you opened it, you open it like you open a laptop
Sarah MacLean 10:24 / #
Giant. [giggles]
Jennifer Prokop 10:25 / #
Yeah.
Beverly Jenkins 10:26 / #
Yeah. I mean, it's little and I had one of those. So it was very bad because I couldn't type back then at all, very badly typed. In fact, my husband's secretary wound up typing it once I got it ready for publication, but most of it though, at the beginning, was handwritten.
Sarah MacLean 10:45 / #
I mean nobody, this is one of those minor little things, but nobody realizes how much work it was -
Sarah MacLean 10:51 / #
To write a book at this point.
Beverly Jenkins 10:53 / #
OH...MY -
Sarah MacLean 10:54 / #
If I had to do this, there would be no -
Sarah MacLean 10:56 / #
We would not know each other. [laughter]
Beverly Jenkins 10:58 / #
Oh, girl!
Jennifer Prokop 11:00 / #
Right! That's why I was so curious. It had to be -
Beverly Jenkins 11:04 / #
It was so, you know, once we got published, right, there was no - we were using word processors 'cause this is before computers.
Beverly Jenkins 11:13 / #
And it was all cut and paste, for revisions, and I mean actually cut and paste. [laughter] I mean, you would have to, okay, when you did revisions, you had to cut pieces out, tape 'em in, and then tape them to the pages. So you may have some - and then you have to fold it up. So you may have something that unscrolls from me to you in Chicago. [laughter] You know, fold it up.
Beverly Jenkins 11:43 / #
You know when you - then you've got tons of Wite-out.
Jennifer Prokop 11:47 / #
Oh yeah.
Sarah MacLean 11:47 / #
Oh, remember Wite-out?
Beverly Jenkins 11:49 / #
Put it in a mailer. Oh God, Wite-out, yeah, I saved them.
Sarah MacLean 11:51 / #
Our young listeners are like, what's Wite-out?
Beverly Jenkins 11:54 / #
I know. I guess they're using Wite-out now for something else, but yeah, it's a little thing that you could, [laughter] paint over your bad mistakes and you can type over it once it dried. You had to wait for it to dry though.
Sarah MacLean 12:06 / #
Yes! Oh and if you didn't then it gummed up the typewriter!
Beverly Jenkins 12:10 / #
Yeah, it would get, occasionally get all gunky.
Sarah MacLean 12:13 / #
We'll put it in show notes. Learn about Wite-out in show notes.
Beverly Jenkins 12:16 / #
Oh God, yeah. Lord have mercy. You know, and then you'd have to call FedEx to come get it.
Sarah MacLean 12:22 / #
Yeah. There was no - I mean me sliding in -
Jennifer Prokop 12:25 / #
To drop off -
Sarah MacLean 12:26 / #
Two minutes before midnight on the day.
Beverly Jenkins 12:28 / #
No, no. You had to send it. Well you know, you had to have an account 'cause they'd come pick it up from your house.
Beverly Jenkins 12:37 / #
Umm, it was a mess!
Jennifer Prokop 12:39 / #
Sorry. I know, that's a digression, but I was curious.
Sarah MacLean 12:41 / #
No, but Jen it's so important -
Beverly Jenkins 12:42 / #
It's a great question, a great question.
Sarah MacLean 12:44 / #
It sort of, it speaks to this kind of mentality -
Jennifer Prokop 12:47 / #
The time!
Sarah MacLean 12:48 / #
The time, but also the commitment. You have to commit to being a writer at this point.
Beverly Jenkins 12:55 / #
'Cause it was a lot of work. Oh my God! You know, the folks that are using Scrivener and even Microsoft Word, you have no idea what a joy!
Sarah MacLean 13:07 / #
[laughing] Living the high life!
Beverly Jenkins 13:09 / #
We old hens, oh God! So yeah, we had all that to do.
Sarah MacLean 13:14 / #
So anyway, so LaVerne had published her first book.
Beverly Jenkins 13:16 / #
Right. She had published her first book.
Sarah MacLean 13:18 / #
And you had Night Song.
Beverly Jenkins 13:19 / #
And I had Night Song. And she, I just tell folks, you know, she harassed me everyday. She and I laugh, we're still good friends. She laughs about me telling people that she harassed me every day at work, but I think she did. At least that's my story, and I'm sticking to it.
Sarah MacLean 13:33 / #
Mmmhmm.
Beverly Jenkins 13:34 / #
And I don't know how I found Vivian? I cannot tell you how I found Vivian. I think maybe by then I was reading Romantic Times?
Sarah MacLean 13:43 / #
Mmmhmm.
Beverly Jenkins 13:44 / #
And maybe, you know, she showed up in there or something? Anyway -
Sarah MacLean 13:49 / #
So wait, this is a good point. There used to be a romance magazine and it was called Romantic Times and you could subscribe to it. If you were romance fan, you subscribed to it and there were reviews in it and interviews with your favorite authors and if you were a romance author, it was like Time Magazine for romance authors. If you ended up on the cover of Romantic Times, stop it, you were on your way.
Beverly Jenkins 14:09 / #
You were on your way. They were some of my biggest supporters at the beginning. I will always -
Sarah MacLean 14:14 / #
Mine too.
Beverly Jenkins 14:15 / #
Be grateful to Katherine Falk. But I don't know how I found Vivian. So I sent her my little raggedy manuscript, just to get LaVerne off my ass.
Sarah MacLean 14:25 / #
At Harlequin at this point?
Beverly Jenkins 14:27 / #
No, she's - no she was -
Sarah MacLean 14:28 / #
That's right, she was gone!
Beverly Jenkins 14:29 / #
She was freelance. She was gone, they'd let her go by then.
Sarah MacLean 14:31 / #
That's right! Okay.
Beverly Jenkins 14:32 / #
Yeah, she was on her own.
Sarah MacLean 14:33 / #
So we're in the late '80s.
Beverly Jenkins 14:35 / #
We're late '80s and we're almost at '90. We might be even at '90 because they bought the book in '93. Sent in my little raggedy manuscript, 'cause it was baaaaaddd. Oh my God.
Sarah MacLean 14:47 / #
I don't believe it.
Beverly Jenkins 14:48 / #
Girl, let me tell you stories. It was baaaddd. Anyway, so she called me at work because I was working at the reference desk.
Sarah MacLean 14:59 / #
On the phone.
Beverly Jenkins 15:00 / #
On the phone! And said, you know, she wanted to represent me. So me not knowing anything, you know, about this whole process, I was like, "Sure! Okay!"
Beverly Jenkins 15:13 / #
Right. I don't think we ever -
Jennifer Prokop 15:15 / #
Seems like a nice lady calling you at work.
Sarah MacLean 15:16 / #
Was she running - she was running an agency at this point.
Beverly Jenkins 15:19 / #
Right, a small agency out of her house. And she had me and she had Pat Vaughn, Patricia Vaughn.
Beverly Jenkins 15:29 / #
Who just sort of disappeared. I don't know whatever happened to her. Murmur of Rain, which came out right after Night Song did. I don't think Vivian and I even signed a contract. This was just a -
Sarah MacLean 15:40 / #
Sure, handshake deal.
Beverly Jenkins 15:41 / #
Just a verbal kind of thing. So, umm, took us a while to sell it. I got enough rejections to paper all of our houses because they didn't know what to do with it!
Jennifer Prokop 15:53 / #
Well and my question is how clear was it to you that, "We don't know what to do with it?" means, "We just aren't going to carry Black romance?"
Beverly Jenkins 16:02 / #
No, there was no box for it.
Jennifer Prokop 16:04 / #
Yeah.
Beverly Jenkins 16:05 / #
You know and even with romance and I didn't care, I mean, probably, if I had been set on getting published, all of those rejections would have probably broken my heart.
Sarah MacLean 16:17 / #
Of course.
Beverly Jenkins 16:18 / #
But I had a dream job! I was getting up every morning going to the library! I could care less about a rejection letter, but the interesting thing was, they all said the same thing basically: great writing but, great writing but.
Sarah MacLean 16:34 / #
What do we do with it?
Beverly Jenkins 16:36 / #
Yeah and 'cause 19th century...
Sarah MacLean 16:38 / #
America.
Beverly Jenkins 16:39 / #
American history. Even 1990, if it's a 19th century story involving Black people, it should have been about slavery.
Jennifer Prokop 16:50 / #
Right.
Beverly Jenkins 16:51 / #
So here I come with -
Jennifer Prokop 16:52 / #
We know how to sell it if its Roots.
Beverly Jenkins 16:54 / #
Right. Yep, its Roots. Barely. We know how to sell it if its Roots, and you have to remember that there were only, maybe, three Black romances out there. I mean, Vivian had the connections to send it to everybody.
Sarah MacLean 17:08 / #
So let's talk about who that is. Who were the other names who were writing Black romance? And they certainly, they weren't writing historical. You were the -
Beverly Jenkins 17:19 / #
No. Anita Richmond Bunkley had written Black Gold, which was not really a romance more like women's fiction, but it was historical, about a woman in an oil field family in Texas. And she had also written Emily...Emily The Rose. It's about a free Black woman in Texas in the 1820s and 1830s and her journey, and it wasn't a romance either. I mean, there was rape and -
Sarah MacLean 17:46 / #
Emily, The Yellow Rose.
Beverly Jenkins 17:48 / #
There you go. Okay. Yeah, yeah. We don't talk too much, we don't talk very much about Anita very much. In fact, I've neglected to talk about her for years. You know, I was going through some stuff last night, just so I could be prepared for this, and came across a bunch of stuff I was like, "Oh man, I forgot about this! I forgot about that! I forgot this!" Anyway, nobody was writing historical romance. So they're looking for a book, slavery. That's the box. So here I come with a story with a Buffalo Soldier and an overly educated school teacher in a free Black town, on the plains of Kansas, 1879, and they're like, "What the hell is this? What are we supposed to do with this? We don't know what to do." So, I do remember one editor at - I don't know what house she was at, but she sent me a very, very encouraging letter. And she said she really, really wanted and she was just, I think she's like an executive editor now and she was just a baby, baby assistant back then. And she said, she really, really, really wanted to publish this. She said that she could not convince the higher ups to take it. You know? And like I said, I didn't care! You know, I was working at a library in the morning. You know, hey! Hello! Then came, I guess, the news and I didn't know anything about this, that Walter Zacharias was going to be putting out the Arabesque line.
Jennifer Prokop 19:22 / #
Oh, sure.
Beverly Jenkins 19:23 / #
And it was my understanding that Avon didn't want to get left behind because you know they were the number one publisher of romance back then and you couldn't find anybody. So Ellen Edwards, who used to be Vivian's assistant back when Vivian was working in that closet, you know with the candle lights, called her and said, "Do you have anybody? Do you know anybody?" And she said, "Well I just happen to know this little lady in Michigan." And so she called me on June 3, 1993. I told the story about my husband and I having this hell of a fight that day. I don't, like I said I don't know what we were fighting about, something stupid probably, and the phone rang, and it was Ellen, and she said she wanted to buy my book. So of course, I stopped the fight. [laughter]
Sarah MacLean 20:17 / #
Some things are important. [laughter]
Beverly Jenkins 20:19 / #
Oh yeah! You know, he was like, "I guess I got to take your little ass to dinner." "Yes, you better take my ass to dinner!" [More laughter] So they kept sending me contracts.
Sarah MacLean 20:29 / #
This was 1993.
Beverly Jenkins 20:31 / #
This is 1993 and the book came out in '94. Summer of Black Love is what we called it, because that was also the summer that Arabesque released their first four or five, and so, on you know, on the road from there.
Jennifer Prokop 20:48 / #
So once you sold Night Song, did you immediately start working? I mean at that point how did you start to balance the idea of I have my dream job, but now I also have a writing job?
Beverly Jenkins 21:02 / #
Yeah, I didn't know what I was doing. It was all - [she laughs]
Sarah MacLean 21:06 / #
Feels very real. [laughter]
Beverly Jenkins 21:09 / #
I had no idea what the hell I was doing because I had the writing. I had the job. I had the kids. I had the hats that I was wearing in the community. The hats I was wearing at church. I had a Brownie troop. [laughter] You know and because I was a stay-at-home mom, you know, after we adopted Jonathan, my son, early on too in the career, so as a stay-at-home mom, so then I'm doing field trips and I'm doing snow cones on Friday at school and you know, all of this stuff. The kids are in the band. And luckily, all praises to my late Hubby, because that first deadline, Ellen sent me a 14 page revision letter.
Sarah MacLean 21:58 / #
On Night Song.
Beverly Jenkins 21:59 / #
Yeah. 'Cause it was bad. She was like "Bev, -"
Beverly Jenkins 22:03 / #
"We love the love scenes. We need a story." [laughter] I was like, "Yeah, you need a story. Really?"
Sarah MacLean 22:12 / #
I just want to say something about Ellen Edwards because we have sort of danced around her in the past on Fated Mates, but you are the first of her authors who we've had on. She was editing in the heyday of the '90s authors.
Beverly Jenkins 22:28 / #
She was amazing!
Sarah MacLean 22:29 / #
At Harper. She edited, for our listeners, she edited Lisa Kleypas' Dreaming of You. She edited -
Beverly Jenkins 22:35 / #
She was amazing.
Sarah MacLean 22:37 / #
Loretta Chase's Lord of Scoundrels. She edited you.
Jennifer Prokop 22:41 / #
Wow. I mean that's amazing.
Sarah MacLean 22:42 / #
This woman was, SHE was building romance too.
Beverly Jenkins 22:46 / #
Right, yeah.
Sarah MacLean 22:47 / #
And really setting -
Beverly Jenkins 22:48 / #
Yeah, yeah.
Sarah MacLean 22:49 / #
A lot of things in play. So what, so talk about that a little bit. What was the feeling like right around then?
Beverly Jenkins 22:55 / #
You know it was interesting because she taught me how to write commercial fiction. I will always be grateful for her, because of, and we had some, we had some bumps.
Beverly Jenkins 23:12 / #
We had some bumps and she's the reason I'm here. She taught me the differences in writing a romp as opposed to a period piece to - she was absolutely amazing! And when she left, her assistant, Christine Zika was amazing, 'cause Christine edited Vivid, and she edited Indigo.
Jennifer Prokop 23:39 / #
Okay.
Beverly Jenkins 23:41 / #
Will always be grateful to her for those two. So I guess I was doing okay, they kept offering me contracts.
Sarah MacLean 23:48 / #
You were doing great. [laughter]
Beverly Jenkins 23:50 / #
You know, wasn't a whole lot of money and wasn't making a lot of money, but the idea that I was out in the marketplace, the African American readers were just over the moon. Some of the stories they told me of going in the bookstore and seeing Night Song, and you know, the first thing they did was run to, flip to the back to make sure it was written by a Black woman, and one woman said she sat in the bookstore right there on the floor, and started reading.
Sarah MacLean 24:22 / #
That's amazing.
Beverly Jenkins 24:23 / #
You know.
Sarah MacLean 24:24 / #
Well these also, the cover, it had that original cover? That burnt orange cover with the clinch on it.
Beverly Jenkins 24:30 / #
Mmmhmm. Right, yeah.
Jennifer Prokop 24:31 / #
Oh, it's so good.
Sarah MacLean 24:31 / #
I mean, it's such a beautiful cover.
Beverly Jenkins 24:34 / #
Tom, Tom Egner gave me just, you know, always grateful to him. He gave me some just fabulous, fabulous covers. And you know, a lot of times I would win Cover of the Year and all of that and I always sent the awards to him.
Jennifer Prokop 24:52 / #
Oh, that's nice.
Sarah MacLean 24:52 / #
What a decent person.
Beverly Jenkins 24:55 / #
And he said, "Nobody's ever done this before." I said, "Well, I didn't do the cover. You did!" [laughter] "So put it on your, on your whatever." You know.
Sarah MacLean 25:03 / #
For those of you listening, Tom Egner was the head of the art department at Avon. He basically designed all those clinch covers.
Beverly Jenkins 25:11 / #
I know. He was amazing. I miss him a lot. But then Avon's always got great art, you know, so, but I do miss him. So yeah, so then we got the People magazine spread, right after Night Song. I think it was in February of - book came out in '94. The spread, five pages!
Beverly Jenkins 25:33 / #
In People Magazine in February '95 and -
Sarah MacLean 25:38 / #
And what was that? About you?
Beverly Jenkins 25:40 / #
It's about the book and me, and you know, pictures of my husband, and pictures of my kitchen, and all of that. And the lady who did the article, her name was Nancy Drew. That was her real name.
Jennifer Prokop 25:51 / #
Amazing.
Beverly Jenkins 25:52 / #
And I got calls from people all over the country, "I opened my People magazine and there you were!" [laughter] And I'm like, "Yes! It is me! It is I!" You know, "I have arrived!" Umm, but very, very heady days, in the beginning.
Sarah MacLean 26:09 / #
Yeah. When did you know that romance was a huge thing and that you were making waves? I guess that's two questions. [Ms. Bev gives a throaty laugh] So -
Beverly Jenkins 26:22 / #
Yeah, it is, you know, and I have girlfriends who told me that I really don't know how influential I have been. You know, I'm just writin'. I'm just trying to tell the stories that I would have loved to have read as a teen or a young woman in my 20s or even my 30s. But I don't...I'm still amazed that people are buying my books! My mom used to tell me, she said, "Well, that's a good thing!" You know, so that you're not jaded or whatever and entitled, and all of that. I'm still amazed.
Sarah MacLean 27:00 / #
Did you feel, at the time, something was happening in the world though? Did it feel like - or was it just sort of, you know, life?
Beverly Jenkins 27:09 / #
It was just sort of life! I mean, yeah, you know, we were changing, in the sense that you had more Black women writing. Brenda and Donna Hill and Shirley Hailstock and -
Jennifer Prokop 27:22 / #
Now did that feel like it was because of Arabesque? Was it just sort of an explosion? Or -
Beverly Jenkins 27:29 / #
I think it was Arabesque.
Jennifer Prokop 27:31 / #
Okay.
Beverly Jenkins 27:32 / #
Because they were doing Contemporaries and these Black women were eating those books up.
Sarah MacLean 27:36 / #
Mmmhmm.
Jennifer Prokop 27:36 / #
Sure.
Beverly Jenkins 27:37 / #
And plus they had a great editor in Monica -
Sarah MacLean 27:41 / #
Monica Harris?
Beverly Jenkins 27:42 / #
Monica Harris. Yes, and she was just an amazing editor for those women. Rosie's Curl and Weave. She edited those anthologies, and they all absolutely loved her. Just loved her. So it was, it was sort of like an explosion.
Sarah MacLean 28:00 / #
But on the historical side, it was just you.
Jennifer Prokop 28:04 / #
Still just you.
Sarah MacLean 28:04 / #
There was no one else.
Beverly Jenkins 28:06 / #
It was just me and then the two books by Patricia Vaughn.
Beverly Jenkins 28:11 / #
Murmur Rain and I don't remember what the second title was. Gay Gunn had done Nowhere to Run, or was it nowhere to hide? Nowhere to Run. So, you know, Martha and the Vandellas. [laughter]
Sarah MacLean 28:23 / #
So at this point, who is your - whenever we talk to people who came up through the 90s in romance, there is such a discussion of community. Who you turn to as your group?
Jennifer Prokop 28:36 / #
Your people.
Sarah MacLean 28:39 / #
Who was that for you at this point?
Beverly Jenkins 28:42 / #
The readers.
Sarah MacLean 28:44 / #
Talk a little about your readers.
Beverly Jenkins 28:46 / #
It was the readers. I mean, all this fan mail I was getting and then we had two young women here who wanted to start the Beverly Jenkins Fan Club.
Sarah MacLean 28:54 / #
Amazing.
Beverly Jenkins 28:56 / #
Gloria Walker and Ava Williams and so they were, you know it was all snail mail back then. So they were sending out applications and they were sending out membership cards and newsletters and all of that. I was doing a lot of local touring, a lot of local schools and stuff, and so when I told them that I wanted to have a pajama party, they sort of looked at me like, really? [laughter]
Jennifer Prokop 29:24 / #
What was the first year that you did that? Do you remember?
Beverly Jenkins 29:28 / #
Ahhhh, shoot - maybe '99? Maybe '97?
Jennifer Prokop 29:33 / #
So, a long time.
Beverly Jenkins 29:34 / #
It's been awhile, yeah, but Brenda and I would switch off years. I would do the pajama party one year and then she'd do her cruise the next year, but we sent out letters, because like I said, there was no computers back then, at least that I was using.
Jennifer Prokop 29:51 / #
Right.
Beverly Jenkins 29:52 / #
And 75 women showed up, from all over the country.
Sarah MacLean 29:55 / #
Amazing.
Jennifer Prokop 29:56 / #
It is amazing.
Beverly Jenkins 29:57 / #
And we had a hell of a time! And we talked books and my husband came, because you know, these were, "his women" he called them. [laughter] They loved him, he loved them. These women, Saturday night, when it was time to go home, everybody cried. We had formed this sisterhood, "a sistership" as we call it, and nobody wanted to go home. So we started doing it every two years. They were my, they were my bottom women. You know in the pimp world, your bottom woman is your original hoe, right? [laughter] And she's the one that keeps everything together and all of that, when he starts bringing in new women. So they were my foundation and a lot of them, most of them, are still with me today. So in the meantime, you know, online is growing.
Beverly Jenkins 30:52 / #
And people are telling me, "You need to be online" and I'm like, "No, I don't." [laughter] I don't need to be online.
Sarah MacLean 30:59 / #
I have my pajama party ladies.
Beverly Jenkins 31:01 / #
I have my pajama party ladies.
Jennifer Prokop 31:02 / #
I don't need a TikTok.
Beverly Jenkins 31:03 / #
Don't need a TikTok, don't need a 'gram. [laughter]
Jennifer Prokop 31:08 / #
This was even before social media. This would have been more like a web page or -
Beverly Jenkins 31:12 / #
Yeah, and it was a, we started with a -
Sarah MacLean 31:15 / #
A blog.
Beverly Jenkins 31:17 / #
No, we started with a Yahoo group.
Sarah MacLean 31:18 / #
Oh, sure!
Jennifer Prokop 31:19 / #
Sure. Okay, that makes sense.
Beverly Jenkins 31:21 / #
So little did I know that there were other Black women reading groups online, and one of them was, and I cannot remember what the real name was, but they called themselves The Hotties because they read hot stuff. And this was a group that was connected to Gwen Osborne and Gwen is sort of like the griot of Black romance. She was one of the early reviewers for The Romance Reader. She knows where all the bodies are buried. [laughter] We sort of combined her group and my group, and that's when we started doing the traveling, going to all these different places and all that for African American history kinds of stuff and books! So it, you know, so I'm trying to build my own little empire, because I'm not getting a whole lot of support from my publisher. I mean, I guess they were just, one of the young editors said, "Well, they just like the cachet of having you." So I'm like okay, well I can handle that. I'm still gonna go out, do my thing and all of that, but (she sighs) then after my husband passed away in '03, I met Adrienne di Pietro, and she was the marketing director for Avon and we were at one of those Avon dinners in Dallas.
Sarah MacLean 32:46 / #
Those famous dinners.
Beverly Jenkins 32:48 / #
Mmmhmm! She and I were outside smoking. I didn't know who she was, she didn't know who I was. So we hit it off really well and we got to talking, and when we got home, about a week later, I got a call from her and she said, "You know what? I have looked at your file - " she said, "and we have not done a damn thing for you." She said this is getting ready to change. And it did. 'Cause I got a lot of support in the beginning, the first couple of years.
Jennifer Prokop 33:19 / #
People Magazine.
Sarah MacLean 33:20 / #
Five pages in People.
Beverly Jenkins 33:21 / #
Yeah, right, you know, and then nothing. I think too, I tell people, I said, "You know what? When my husband passed away, you know, it's like God says "Alright, I've taken something very, very precious from you. So how about try this as a replacement?"" And my career took off. So I don't know if it was the Spirit or I don't know. Whatever. Everything in its own time and place is also how I deal with it. So Adrienne just started pushing to want a lot more for me. I mean, she sent me a box of bookmarks that had to have 20,000 bookmarks in it. What am I going to do with these? [laughter] I still have half of that box somewhere in the house.
Sarah MacLean 34:04 / #
[Laughing] Oh my god! Bookmarks! Remember bookmarks?
Beverly Jenkins 34:07 / #
Oh God, girl, oh no, Lord have mercy. But she was amazing, and I was very, very sad when she was let go.
Sarah MacLean 34:17 / #
I only knew her - she was let go almost immediately after I started at Avon.
Beverly Jenkins 34:21 / #
Yeah, she was amazing as a marketing director.
Jennifer Prokop 34:25 / #
At this point, with the big RWA implosion, there was a lot of talk about how Borders in particular, which is a Michigan -
Beverly Jenkins 34:37 / #
Right.
Jennifer Prokop 34:37 / #
Didn't buy Black romance. So how aware were you of the impediments at the bookstore level?
Beverly Jenkins 34:47 / #
I didn't have that issue.
Jennifer Prokop 34:49 / #
Okay.
Beverly Jenkins 34:50 / #
Because I knew the people. Borders did my books for my pajama parties.
Jennifer Prokop 34:55 / #
Okay.
Beverly Jenkins 34:55 / #
Okay. In fact, one of the ladies, Kelly, who was supervising that, she and I are still friends. She's out on the coast doing something with books somewhere, but Barnes and Noble I had issues with.
Jennifer Prokop 35:11 / #
Okay.
Beverly Jenkins 35:12 / #
Still do. But Waldenbooks, Borders, you know and that whole thing with Borders and the Black section of the bookstore started at one of the stores near me, and the store was run by a Black woman. And this was at the height of the hip hop stuff, the urban stories. And from what I heard, she said the kids didn't know how to use a bookstore. And they would come in and they would ask for, you know, their favorite titles, and she would have to have her people, take them by the hand and show them where the spot was. And she got tired of it. So she put them all in one spot, so all she had to do was say, "Over there." Her sales went through the roof. Corporate, doing nothing but looking at the bottom line instead of the purpose behind it -
Jennifer Prokop 36:01 / #
Yeah.
Beverly Jenkins 36:01 / #
Said, "Okay, let's put all the Black books in one spot."
Sarah MacLean 36:04 / #
Everywhere.
Jennifer Prokop 36:05 / #
It worked here.
Beverly Jenkins 36:06 / #
So now we've got this, you know, Jim Crow kind of section in bookstores. I had a reader tell me one time she said, "Miss Bev, I found your books in men's health." [laughter]
Jennifer Prokop 36:22 / #
Good for them. That's where it should be. Leave those books there. [laughter]
They should really be put together. Romance and men's health. [laughter]
Beverly Jenkins 36:31 / #
Yeah, I mean, Brenda and I, and the early Arabesque women were always shelved with romance. We were never not shelved with romance. Only in the last, whatever, 20 years or so, and it's such a disadvantage for the young women of color who are coming up to not be in the romance section, because it cuts down on discoverability.
Jennifer Prokop 36:56 / #
Of course.
Beverly Jenkins 36:57 / #
I would be nuts if that was happening to me right now. But luckily for me, because you know, people didn't know any better back then, I was in romance. I was in historicals. I was in African American fiction. I was in men's health. [laughter] I was all over the store, which was great, and then my readers were fierce about making sure the books were available. I would get emails and Facebook messages from women who said, "Well, I went to, you know, five different stores in LA and your book's not there." or, "I made them go in the back and get the box out and put your books out." [laughter]
Jennifer Prokop 37:42 / #
Amazing.
Beverly Jenkins 37:43 / #
So you know, they were amazing. And then my mother! Bless her heart! She'd go into a bookstore and just move books around.
Sarah MacLean 37:51 / #
That's what mothers are for, no?
Beverly Jenkins 37:53 / #
Right! Exactly! Right. You know, she said, "I had to run out!" We lost her two years ago. She would carry around one of those little bitty spiral notebooks, purse size and it'd have all my books, every page had all my books on it. And she'd go to the mall, and she'd just hand it out to people. "This is my daughter's books! This is my daughter's books!" She was marketing when I had no marketing. She was director of marketing back then. [laughter] I remember her saying one time she was in Target, and you know, I had to tell her, "Mom, they were alphabetical." She said, "I don't care. Your books are on the bottom." And she said, "and I looked up in the camera was on me!" She said ,"and I ran out of the store!" [laughter] I don't think they're gonna put you in jail.
Sarah MacLean 38:36 / #
For re-aarranging shelves!
Beverly Jenkins 38:38 / #
For moving books around.
Sarah MacLean 38:40 / #
So there obviously has been a shift from when you started in 1993 'til now in romance. There have been tons of shifts, seismic shifts, I feel like romance moves so quickly.
Beverly Jenkins 38:53 / #
Yeah.
Sarah MacLean 38:53 / #
Can you speak to the way that you have seen the genre shift over time? You know, both as a writer and as a person who knows a lot about romance.
Beverly Jenkins 39:05 / #
Yeah. First we had the hardware shift from cut and paste and Wite-out and all that to computers and Scrivener and Google and, you know, I had to use libraries, of course, when I did my first book.
Jennifer Prokop 39:24 / #
Sure. For research.
Beverly Jenkins 39:26 / #
Yeah, 'cause none of the Master Goo, Mr. Google, Aunt Google, whatever people are calling her today, was not available back then. So that's been a seismic shift. The model is no longer blond and blue eyed and a size five. Everybody gets to have a HEA now no matter who you are, how you identify, who you love, because love is love. And that's been an amazing thing. Books are no longer rapey!
Jennifer Prokop 40:01 / #
Yeah.
Beverly Jenkins 40:03 / #
You know, which was a big issue back in the day. A lot of women didn't want to read romance. "Oh, they're rapey!" "Well, yeah." "But it's not really rape." "Yes, it is." That's changed. We're now all about consent and consent is sexy! And then, you know, but we have fewer houses, too!
Beverly Jenkins 40:26 / #
When I started out, God, it had to be like 25 different houses. Now we got what? Four? Three?
Beverly Jenkins 40:33 / #
One maybe? Coming up?
Sarah MacLean 40:34 / #
Fewer and fewer it feels like every day.
Beverly Jenkins 40:36 / #
I know, it's such an incestuous business you know. They're eating their young all over the place.
Sarah MacLean 40:42 / #
What about book selling? What about stores? And discoverability?
Beverly Jenkins 40:47 / #
There are fewer stores. You don't have, we don't have book signings like we used to. Yeah, where people would be lined up outside for books and for autographs, and all that. And what I was going to say, is the biggest seismic shift for me, has been the rise of indie writers.
Sarah MacLean 41:08 / #
Mmmhmm.
Beverly Jenkins 41:09 / #
Their refusal to be told "no." Their bravery and stepping out there on faith and saying, "My story has value." I don't think romance would have opened up the way it has in the last 10 years without them.
Jennifer Prokop 41:26 / #
Agree. Absolutely.
Beverly Jenkins 41:28 / #
I take my hat off to them because they were like, "Fuck this! You don't want my stuff? Fine!" And now publishing, realizing how much money they've been leaving on the table. They're still not on board all the way, but now they're saying, "Oh, well you were successful over there. So how about you come play with us now?" And the ladies are saying, "Sure, but I'm not giving up my independent and I'm still gonna do, you know, I'm still gonna do hybrid."
Sarah MacLean 41:57 / #
Mmmhmm.
Beverly Jenkins 41:58 / #
And they learned the format, and they learned the marketing, and they learned the distribution, how to do the data and looked at the metadata. I'm just amazed, and, you know, I bow to them for - 'cause they changed the industry.
Sarah MacLean 42:14 / #
Mmmhmm.
Beverly Jenkins 42:14 / #
They changed the industry. So those are some of the seismic changes that I have seen.
Jennifer Prokop 42:20 / #
Do you think your relationships with fans are different because of social media? I mean, you've always had such a strong fan base that you built.
Beverly Jenkins 42:29 / #
I don't think it's changed. I think it's expanded my -
Jennifer Prokop 42:33 / #
Okay.
Beverly Jenkins 42:34 / #
My base, because you know how much I love Twitter. [laughter]
Jennifer Prokop 42:40 / #
Same.
Beverly Jenkins 42:43 / #
I think it's given me access to more readers who are like, "Oh! She's not a scary Black woman! Let me read her books." You know, and then they realized, "Oh, these are some good ass books! So let me buy more!" I think my readership has probably expanded a good 35%.
Sarah MacLean 43:03 / #
Oh, wow.
Beverly Jenkins 43:03 / #
Just from from social media. And you know, and I know it's a cliche, but I always tell my fans, when I count my blessings, I count them twice. Because they have been - I wouldn't be here without them! Books are expensive!
Jennifer Prokop 43:22 / #
Yeah.
Beverly Jenkins 43:23 / #
And they're taking their hard earned money and they're buying me or going to the library and borrowing me when they can be using that money for something else. So I'm very, very grateful, and that's one of the things that I always tell new writers and aspiring writers is to, "treat your readers like they're the gold that they are" because they are gold. So, but yeah, I never met a, never met a stranger! So you know, I'm loving the love that I get from social media. People keep telling me I need to be on Instagram, and I'm like, my editor would slap me if I was on another [laughter] social platform.
Jennifer Prokop 44:05 / #
Write the book.
Beverly Jenkins 44:05 / #
Right, right.
Sarah MacLean 44:07 / #
So now I do want to talk about, I'm bouncing back a little to your career, but you moved from, you didn't move, you added contemporaries, at some point along the way.
Beverly Jenkins 44:19 / #
Yeah.
Sarah MacLean 44:20 / #
And sweeter romance. So can you talk about that choice? The choice to sort of expand? You write a lot of books!
Beverly Jenkins 44:29 / #
They asked me! Erica asked me if I had any contemporaries.
Sarah MacLean 44:34 / #
That's Erica Tsang, everybody. The editorial director of Avon books.
Beverly Jenkins 44:38 / #
Yeah, she is awesome. She's been my editor since she was 12. [laughter]
Jennifer Prokop 44:44 / #
Doogie Howser, editor M.D.
Beverly Jenkins 44:48 / #
I always say "you never say no."
Beverly Jenkins 44:51 / #
You know, you never say no. So basically, what I gave her was (The) Edge of Midnight, but it was my first manuscript that I sent to Avon, in probably the late '80s?
Sarah MacLean 45:07 / #
Oh! Wait now, see? This is a new piece of the story!
Beverly Jenkins 45:11 / #
Yeah, this was my contemporary. It was so bad. [laughter] God! You know, I tell people, I said, "That book was so bad, that the rejection letter almost beat me home from the post office." [laughter] That's how bad it was. It was awful, but I put it away.
Sarah MacLean 45:31 / #
Wait! I'm sorry I have to stop. I have to put a pause on this. So you did write a contemporary?
Beverly Jenkins 45:36 / #
Mmmhmm.
Sarah MacLean 45:37 / #
While you were, was this simultaneous to writing Night Song? Like were you writing them at the same time?
Beverly Jenkins 45:41 / #
Mmmhmm.
Sarah MacLean 45:42 / #
And so, so why did you write a contemporary? Was that because that was what romance was?
Beverly Jenkins 45:49 / #
That's - because the stories started coming.
Sarah MacLean 45:52 / #
That's what it was for you.
Jennifer Prokop 45:53 / #
Yeah, right.
Beverly Jenkins 45:54 / #
The stories started coming. So I put it away, and then when she asked if I had a contemporary, I brought this very, very bad manuscript out again, and I looked at it, and I realized what it was. The reason it was so bad, was number one was I didn't know what the hell I was doing. I didn't know how to write. And number two, the characters were the descendants of Hester and Galen from Indigo.
Sarah MacLean 46:25 / #
Aaahhhhh.
Beverly Jenkins 46:25 / #
So that book could not have been published until after Indigo was written. So I went in, I cleaned it up, now that I know how to write, right? You're like -
Jennifer Prokop 46:37 / #
Sure. You've learned how to write commercial fiction now.
Beverly Jenkins 46:40 / #
Right. Right. You know, it's like 14 books in, I know what I'm doing now. I guess. And I realized, like I said, who the characters were. So that kicked off the, I think the five, the five romantic suspenses that I had. So it's (The) Edge of Midnight, (The) Edge of Dawn, Black Lace, and then the two Blake sisters, Deadly Sexy and Sexy/Dangerous. And then I did, I don't know how many, six or seven little novellas for Kimani in the middle of all of this. And then I realized, you need to take a step back, 'cause you are wearing yourself out writing all - 'cause I was doing like, you know, two big books and a novella, or and two novellas a year. So doing four books a year and I was no longer a spring chicken. So I had to put those away for a while. So the characters in my Avon romantic suspense, are descendants of my historical characters. And then the YA was something else that they asked me to do. I think there were five or six of us that they asked. We did two apiece. So I did Belle (and the Beau) and I did Josephine (and the Soldier). I think it was Meg Cabot and Lorraine Heath, and I'm not sure who the other ladies were.
Jennifer Prokop 48:11 / #
And then when did the Blessings series? Was that something you wanted to do? Or something they suggested?
Beverly Jenkins 48:18 / #
[She laughs] Nancy sold the series without telling me.
Sarah MacLean 48:20 / #
[Gasp] Oh, Nancy! What are you doing?
Beverly Jenkins 48:29 / #
She had been on me for years about writing a small town series. And I'm like -
Sarah MacLean 48:36 / #
Well, let's be honest. For a long time it felt like small town was where the money was in romance. If you could pull off the big small town where lots of people, there's just always a cupcake shop and a veterinarian.
Beverly Jenkins 48:49 / #
I know. I know, but I didn't want to do that.
Sarah MacLean 48:52 / #
Nancy was like "Beverly, you like money." [laughter]
Beverly Jenkins 48:55 / #
Well, I do. I do, but I was content to continue to write these award winning African American historicals, right?
Beverly Jenkins 49:06 / #
So after Mark passed away, I was up north was his mom, and got a call from Nancy on my cell phone. She never called me on my cell phone. In fact, I didn't think she had a cell phone back then. And she said, I was like I thought somebody had died! You know, I'm like Oh God, is Erica okay? You know, that kind of thing. And she said, "Well, I sold the series." I'm like, "what are you talking about?"
Sarah MacLean 49:34 / #
What series?
Beverly Jenkins 49:36 / #
Exactly. She said, "Remember that small town series I've been trying to get you to write?" And I'm like, "Yes." [laughter] She said, "Well..." I (Ms. Bev laughs) I love Nancy to death. She's just, she's so in charge of me and I really need somebody to be in charge of me and she is just THE best. She said, "Well, I sold, they only want a paragraph. Here's the money."
Sarah MacLean 50:01 / #
Since then [laughing] 25 books.
Beverly Jenkins 50:03 / #
Right. They only want a paragraph to get it started and here's the money. And I'm like okay, well, I guess I'm writing a small town series.
Jennifer Prokop 50:12 / #
Well, and it's how many books now? I mean, 12 or - ?
Beverly Jenkins 50:15 / #
Ten. I'm at ten.
Sarah MacLean 50:15 / #
And a television show in progress, I mean.
Beverly Jenkins 50:18 / #
If Al Roker would, you know, get it together and call us [laughter] maybe we could figure out what we're doing, but -
Sarah MacLean 50:25 / #
I mean, that's an interesting piece too, Bev, because you started publishing in the early '90s, which felt like a real time in romance and now you are thriving in this new - it feels like we're in another new time in a lot of ways.
Beverly Jenkins 50:40 / #
Yeah. We're in a different era now.
Sarah MacLean 50:42 / #
You have a film that is complete and out and everybody can watch now.
Beverly Jenkins 50:47 / #
Yep, yep. Iris, bless her heart, she did such a great job and she made that movie with safety pins and rubber bands.
Jennifer Prokop 50:57 / #
And a very handsome man.
Beverly Jenkins 50:58 / #
Oh yeah. Travis is pretty good, easy on the eyes!
Sarah MacLean 51:02 / #
And then you have Forbidden.
Beverly Jenkins 51:04 / #
Then I had the Sony thing. We sort of got a green light and then the damndemic hit and the people who had been so gung-ho about it scattered. Yeah, we're now back out on the block again, looking for a home. And then Al Roker's, I didn't even know he had an entertainment arm. Frankly, I had no idea. My girlfriends are like, "Well, didn't you ever see the Holly Robinson Peete stuff on - " I'm like, "No. I don't watch Hallmark." [laughter] So you know, back then Black people didn't have Christmas on Hallmark. You know, no brown people and Black people did not have Christmas on Hallmark or Lifetime. So why would I watch that? Umm. Sorry.
Sarah MacLean 51:48 / #
No, it's real.
Beverly Jenkins 51:50 / #
It is what it is, you know. So, but now things have changed, which is awesome. Supposedly they're in talks with Hallmark. I'm not, you know, we're still waiting to see what is really going on, but if that is the case, I'm pretty, pretty excited and all that. So we'll see, hopefully soon, what we can talk about is going to happen. So.
Sarah MacLean 52:14 / #
Can we talk a little bit about legacy? I know that you still think about, you're still surprised people buy your books but - [laughter]
Beverly Jenkins 52:24 / #
I am! I am!
Jennifer Prokop 52:25 / #
We're not.
Beverly Jenkins 52:26 / #
Are they gonna throw tomatoes at me this time? [laughter]
Sarah MacLean 52:30 / #
I mean I'm really curious, I'm curious about a couple of things. I'm curious about, one of the questions that Jen and I, we've sort of been dancing around this. What's the question, the really, the best question to ask? So we have a few.
Beverly Jenkins 52:42 / #
Okay.
Sarah MacLean 52:42 / #
The first, the one that sort of came to me this week, is when did you know you could do this thing? When did you feel like I'm a writer? I can do it. This is my - I feel good about it.
Beverly Jenkins 52:56 / #
After I survived the first deadline.
Jennifer Prokop 52:59 / #
Okay.
Beverly Jenkins 53:01 / #
14 pages of revision.
Sarah MacLean 53:04 / #
Wite-out and tape.
Beverly Jenkins 53:04 / #
That they wanted in 35 days. I didn't know what the hell I was doing, but I did it. Hubby did all the cooking. He did all the, you know, grabbing the kids from school. He did all of the mom stuff. Fed me. And after that first book, and then when I saw it in the stores! One of the best things about that first book was that some of my elementary school teachers were still alive, and they were at those first signings, when I did signings in Detroit, and they just wept. They just wept. Because, you know, my mom always saw me, my momma always said, "You know, you're gonna be somebody special." And the teachers dealt with me that way. They put me on a stage in the fourth grade, and I've been on stage ever since. [laughter] Never, never met a microphone I did not like. [laughter] But the idea that they were there to see my success meant a lot. So I don't know, you know, legacy, girl... I don't know. I think your legacy should be written by somebody else, not yourself. I think the readers could probably tell you what the books mean to them more than than I can. I just like the idea of writing it and elevating our history and poking holes in the stereotypes, like you would do with a pen and a balloon. And always, always portraying the race in a positive way. So I don't know, is that a legacy? [laughs]
Sarah MacLean 54:35 / #
I think so.
Beverly Jenkins 54:37 / #
Standing on the shoulders of the actual historians who, are actual historians, and not kitchen table historians like me. [laughter] I owe a lot of people a lot for where I am today.
Jennifer Prokop 54:52 / #
I don't think there's ever been a time, Bev, when you and I have talked or when I've heard you speak where you haven't named the names of the people who have been a part of it.
Beverly Jenkins 55:02 / #
You know, it's so important because, you know, I didn't just show up and show out. [laughter] You know, this was - I've been a project all my life. My mother pouring stuff into me. My dad pouring stuff in me. My aunts who taught me style, wit and grace, pouring stuff into me. My teachers, people in my neighborhood, my church, my siblings. We all just don't start out as the sun, you know, issuing, gotta wait for the Earth to cool and all of that kind of stuff, so.
Jennifer Prokop 55:41 / #
When you think about your body of work, what do you think of as being the hallmarks of a Beverly Jenkins novel?
Beverly Jenkins 55:53 / #
Entertainment. Education. Heroines who know who they are, and the men who love them madly. I like the banter. I like that they all have the three gifts that I've talked about with Dorothy Sterling and the sense that they all work. They all have a commitment to community and they all in different ways push the envelope on gender and race. And they're fun!
Jennifer Prokop 56:22 / #
Yeah.
Beverly Jenkins 56:23 / #
You know, they're inspiring to many people. They're uplifting. My stories center dark-skinned Black women in ways that have never been centered before. I'm just a little Black girl from the east side of Detroit trying to write a story [laughs] that I can be proud of and that those who read it can be proud of.
Sarah MacLean 56:45 / #
Do you feel like there was a book that turned the tide for you in terms of readership?
Beverly Jenkins 56:51 / #
I think my books are being discovered every day, which is an amazing kind of thing. Indigo, of course. Everybody talks about Indigo. And then we had a whole group of people with the Blessings series. That's a whole different group of folks. And then the YA, because there's nothing for young women that's historical that way, and in fact, I got lots of - this is why I had to add an extra chapter when we did the re-publishing. The girls wanted to know did they get married? [laughter]
Jennifer Prokop 57:25 / #
Sure.
Beverly Jenkins 57:27 / #
So I added the weddings.
Sarah MacLean 57:29 / #
Oh my gosh. What a gift!
Jennifer Prokop 57:32 / #
Yeah.
Beverly Jenkins 57:32 / #
At the end of each book, and I got a lot of letters from the moms that were saying that she wanted her daughters or daughter, however many, to know that this is how they should be treated by a young man. Old school. I mean, so okay, so we got milestones. We've got Night Song, which is first, and then we've got the YA, and then we've got (The) Edge of Midnight, because that was my first -
Sarah MacLean 57:59 / #
Contemporary.
Beverly Jenkins 58:00 / #
And then from that very, very awful manuscript to my first romantic suspense, to the Blessings. So what is that? Four or five different milestones?
Jennifer Prokop 58:13 / #
So we talked a little bit about your covers.
Beverly Jenkins 58:16 / #
Mmmhmm.
Jennifer Prokop 58:16 / #
Okay, I have to ask about Night Hawk because it's hot. I mean, [laughter] I mean, look, I'm a simple woman.
Beverly Jenkins 58:26 / #
Hey, I'm with you.
Jennifer Prokop 58:27 / #
I don't know the order, because I my brain is full. Night Hawk is, I mean, obviously he's so handsome, but it's not a clinch cover.
Beverly Jenkins 58:36 / #
Nope.
Jennifer Prokop 58:37 / #
Right. So is that something you asked for, or is that something where they gifted you this present?
Beverly Jenkins 58:43 / #
Tom did that on his own.
Jennifer Prokop 58:46 / #
Okay. Okay.
Beverly Jenkins 58:47 / #
He sent it to me, and I tell the story, I was on deadline. I booted up the laptop and that was the first thing I saw.
Jennifer Prokop 58:58 / #
Okay.
Beverly Jenkins 58:58 / #
And it was just the picture. It didn't have any of the printing on it. There's no letters, just this very hot guy, and I went, "Oh hell, that'll wake a sister up!"
Sarah MacLean 59:08 / #
Yes, please.
Beverly Jenkins 59:10 / #
Yes, more please! Then I put him on the, because I was like okay, the ladies gotta see this. So I put it on the Facebook page and they went insane. [laughter] I told them around noon, "Okay, I'm taking him down now, so he can get a towel from y'all slobbering all over him and licking him everywhere and all of that. Right?" So then I got a request, a Facebook friend request from him. I don't remember his name now, it's been -
Jennifer Prokop 59:40 / #
Oh, the model.
Beverly Jenkins 59:41 / #
Yeah. It's like I said my head's full, just like yours is full. But yeah, no, that was you know, that was Tom's gift.
Jennifer Prokop 59:51 / #
Okay.
Sarah MacLean 59:51 / #
Tom. Tom knew.
Jennifer Prokop 59:53 / #
Yeah.
Beverly Jenkins 59:54 / #
And then it's, and that whole thing with Preacher is so interesting because if you read his Introduction to his character in (The Taming of) Jessi Rose, he's very underwhelming. Very underwhelming.
Jennifer Prokop 1:00:08 / #
He just wasn't ready yet.
Beverly Jenkins 1:00:09 / #
I know and the women were like, "Preacher! Preacher! Preacher!" and some of my girlfriends were like, "Why in the hell do they want a book with him?"
Sarah MacLean 1:00:15 / #
But isn't that amazing? Romance readers, they just, they know. They know.
Jennifer Prokop 1:00:20 / #
We know.
So I had to give him a makeover [laughter] in order to make him, you know, Jenkins worthy or whatever, but I always, that always tickles me because, he was not, he was just a bounty hunter. He wasn't even -
Listen, romance. Just a bounty hunter. Come on.
Beverly Jenkins 1:00:40 / #
I know. I know. I know.
Jennifer Prokop 1:00:42 / #
Well and that's it. It's interesting and that was, let me look, I'm going to look here, 2010, oh, 2011.
Beverly Jenkins 1:00:50 / #
Okay. Okay.
Jennifer Prokop 1:00:51 / #
Okay, so I mean, and that's the thing to me, it feels like, but he really is the star of that book. You know what I mean?
Beverly Jenkins 1:00:59 / #
He is the star of that book.
Jennifer Prokop 1:00:59 / #
Right. He's such a fascinating character.
Beverly Jenkins 1:01:02 / #
Yeah, he's the star of that book, and then Maggie. I met the real Maggie. I was in Omaha, Nebraska for a book signing, and this young woman came up to me, and she was in tears. She was Native and Black. And she said, nobody's writing for me, but me. Nobody's writing for her but me and we really, really had a nice bonding kind of moment. This was before I wrote the book. So when we decided to do Preacher's book, I named the character Maggie. That was her name, Maggie Chandler Smith, and gave Maggie the real Maggie's ethnicity. So she does exist. Somebody told me this, "Oh, Ms. Bev, you know, all your characters really existed in life sometime." I'm like, okay, that's kind of scary, but Maggie does exist. She's in Nebraska.
Jennifer Prokop 1:02:09 / #
Wow, what a gift, Bev. Wow. Well, this is fabulous. [Ms. Bev laughs] Thank you so much.
Sarah, I love listening to Beverly Jenkins talk.
Sarah MacLean 1:02:23 / #
I mean, I could listen to her all day, every day. She's fascinating.
Jennifer Prokop 1:02:27 / #
I've been lucky enough to interview her when Wild Rain came out. I did a YouTube interview with her for Love's Sweet Arrow. So, you know, I have had the pleasure of talking to Ms. Bev, you know, several times, but I still think hearing someone's longitudinal story? Right? You know, the focus is different when it's like, oh, you've got a new book out.
Sarah MacLean 1:02:49 / #
I think it's worth listening to Bev's interviews on the Black Romance (History) podcast.
Jennifer Prokop 1:02:55 / #
Yes.
Sarah MacLean 1:02:56 / #
As well, we'll put links to those in show notes. Over there, you'll get a different kind of history from Bev, and I think the two together will be really interesting if you're Beverly Jenkins fans like we are. You know, one thing we should say is that she in fact does have a new book coming out.
Jennifer Prokop 1:03:14 / #
This month Bev is returning to romantic suspense.
Jennifer Prokop 1:03:18 / #
And she has a book out with Montlake called Rare Danger, which, listen to this: a librarian's quiet life becomes a page turner of adventure, romance and murder!
Sarah MacLean 1:03:29 / #
Doo doo doo! Also, now you know that all that librarian stuff will be properly sourced from her own life.
Jennifer Prokop 1:03:40 / #
I mean, Rebecca Romney is gonna love this. For Jasmine Ware, curating books for an exclusive clientele is her passion. Until an old friend, a dealer of rare books, goes missing and his partner is murdered. You know, I really love Ms. Bev's romantic suspense. So I think it's really cool to see her returning to this. To have an author still be experimenting, you know, she's written YA, she writes romance, she writes historical. She's returning to romantic suspense. I love that there's - I think it's a real model for you can keep doing whatever it is you want to do.
Sarah MacLean 1:04:14 / #
Yeah. What's amazing to me as a writer, is we all kind of have quiet stories in our head that we think oh, maybe someday I'll write that book.
Jennifer Prokop 1:04:22 / #
Yeah.
Sarah MacLean 1:04:23 / #
But it seems to me Bev has just an endless supply of them and I don't feel like that. I always sort of know what the next couple are, but -
Jennifer Prokop 1:04:33 / #
Yeah.
Sarah MacLean 1:04:33 / #
But I feel like she's, she's got romantic suspense. She's got the Blessings series. She's got all of her glorious historicals. I feel like someday there's gonna be some epic sci-fi or fantasy something from her.
Jennifer Prokop 1:04:46 / #
Yeah.
Sarah MacLean 1:04:46 / #
And I just, every time I talk to her, I just feel really blessed to know her. And the other thing I really like from an author perspective, Bev always reminds me how valuable readers are. And what I mean by that is, I mean obviously, I love, I love the people who read my books, and I feel really honored to have them all read my books, but what Beverly reminds me of, every time we talk, is how important, how the relationship between author and reader fills us both.
Jennifer Prokop 1:05:21 / #
Yeah.
Sarah MacLean 1:05:22 / #
And that is something that you can lose sight of when you're kind of deep in the manuscript, like in the weeds, you forget sometimes that the well is filled by readers in the end, and that is always a good, a good reminder. And I really value my friendship with Beverly because every time we talk, that's a piece that always comes through.
Jennifer Prokop 1:05:46 / #
And we heard her describe how different it was back in the day, right? Where you're like sending actual newsletters, were not just emails or -
Sarah MacLean 1:05:58 / #
Yeah. In print.
Jennifer Prokop 1:06:00 / #
[laughs] Right? And I mean, I think that's a part of it too. One of the things I really have loved about the Trailblazers, I mean obviously just hearing people's stories, but also hearing what it was like. I mean, okay, this is everybody, you and me, we've seen Romancing the Stone, and at the beginning of this movie, and she's a romance novelist in the '80s. She's packing up her manuscript, is, you know, is a bunch of papers in a box!
Sarah MacLean 1:06:27 / #
We can't talk about it, but there's another Trailblazer episode where we fully forgot that, or I fully forgot that the world the technology did not exist.
Jennifer Prokop 1:06:36 / #
Yes!
Sarah MacLean 1:06:37 / #
Back in the day.
Jennifer Prokop 1:06:38 / #
And that's I think, part of what's cool about that, is anytime you hear a story where people talk about how the technology has changed, it just goes to show you how fast the world moves. I really love those stories too. Thinking about what it was like to curate a group of passionate readers, who are your devoted fans and doing it without social media.
Sarah MacLean 1:07:06 / #
Yeah.
Jennifer Prokop 1:07:07 / #
And so that's the thing that I also found, that reader connection with Bev is so strong, so -
Sarah MacLean 1:07:13 / #
We're avowed stans of Beverly Jenkins here at Fated Mates. It will surprise none of you. So we are really, it's just one more week of feeling incredibly lucky -
Jennifer Prokop 1:07:25 / #
Yeah.
Sarah MacLean 1:07:25 / #
To be able to do this thing that we love so much. You've been listening to Fated Mates. You can find us at fatedmates.net, where you'll find all sorts of links to all sorts of fun things like gear, and stickers, and music and other things. You can find us on Twitter at Fated Mates or on Instagram at Fated Mates Pod. Or just you know, you can find me at sarahmaclean.net, Jen at jenreadsromance.com, where you can learn more about getting her to edit your next great masterpiece, and we are produced by Eric Mortensen. Thanks so much for listening!
S04.09: Best Romance Novels of 2021
It’s time for our favorite episode of the year — the one when we topple TBR piles! It’s our Best Books of 2021 episode — ten books that got us through this wild, not always great year—books with fabulous heroines, heroes who aren’t sure about feelings, delicious sexy bits, and stories that swing for the fences. You will not be disappointed.
Buy the Fated Mates Best of Book Pack in one fell swoop from our friends at Old Town Books in Alexandria, VA, and get eight of the books on the list, a Fated Mates sticker and other swag! Order the book box as soon as you can to avoid the snafus arising all over from supply chain issues.
Thank you, as always, for listening! If you are up for leaving a rating or review for the podcast on your podcasting app, we would be very grateful!
Our next read-alongs will be the Tiffany Reisz Men at Work series, which is three holiday themed category romances. Read one or all of them: Her Halloween Treat, Her Naughty Holiday and One Hot December.
Best Romance Novels of 2021
Show Notes
You can order the Fated Mates Best of 2021 box from Old Town Books in Alexandria.
The supply chain is a mess, especially for books.
Why does it always seem like cosmetics companies are discontinuing your favorite products?
“Big mistake, huge,” is a quote from Pretty Woman, of course.
Dario is a psychopath, but Jen wasn’t about to let that stop her.
Everyone loves Schitt’s Creek, but you don’t need to know about Alexis Rose to enjoy It Happened One Summer.
A Star is a Born has a truly terrible ending, no matter which version of the movie you watched.
Author Aviva Blakeman wrote some really thought-provoking threads about groveling and the grand gesture. Jen still loves the grovel, but Aviva's threads are a great reminder of how many ways there are to write a romance.
A Carl Sandburg poem about the fog. You know how Jen is.
Books From Our Friends
S04.08: Hana Khan Carries On by Uzma Jalaluddin
2021 has been kind of a mess, honestly, and Sarah hasn’t been reading as much as usual, because *waves hands at the world.* But Hana Khan Carries On is a total delight and exactly the book she needed this year, so we’re reading it with you! We’ll talk about romcoms, authorial voice, podcasting heroines, about how much we enjoy heroes who deserve a bit of cold storage, about writing contemporaries that reflect the time we live in, and about first person narration and why it works really well when it works really well.
Also, Sarah tries to get herself invited to hang out with Uzma Jalaluddin and tries to trademark a Ted Lasso reference all in one episode. It’s rough out here. Leave her alone.
Get ready for more trailblazers and our Best of 2021 episode this month! Our next read-alongs will be the Tiffany Reisz Men at Work series, which is three holiday themed category romances. Read one or all of them: Her Halloween Treat, Her Naughty Holiday and One Hot December.
Show Notes
This week’s book is Hana Khan Carries On by Uzma Jalaluddin. Her first novel was Ayesha At Last, which was a Pride & Prejudice retelling. Mindy Kaling is adapting Hana Khan for Amazon.
The Folio Society has a new version of Georgette Heyer’s Venetia. The introduction is by Stephen Fry, who is a real champion of poetry, including a great book about the joys of reading and writing poetry called The Ode Less Travelled.
The dating app invented for Ted Lasso is called Bantr.
If you can’t identify different voices, maybe it’s because we all have podcast voice.
In the ReadsRomance family, we call Toronto Clean Chicago….because well, I think it explains itself.
The Golden Crescent might be an invented neighborhood for this book, but it seems similar to Toronto’s Crescent Town. If you’d like more information about what it means when food or a restaurant is Halal. Perhaps you do not know about biryani, an Indian delicacy, or poutine, a Canadian one.
Jen was right about the meaning of the word pillory.
This book has aspects of the 1998 movie You’ve Got Mail with Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, which had a terrible ending.
From what we can tell, the NPR of Canada is CBC radio.
In some recent books, we get an unflinching portrayals of toxic white women on page---characters like Marissa in this book, or Misty in American Dreamer. Adriana Herrera was a guest on last year for an interstitial about the immigrant experience.
Our next read-alongs will be the Tiffany Reisz Men at Work series, which is three books. Read one or read them all: Her Halloween Treat, Her Naughty Holiday, and One Hot December.
S04.07: A Conversation with Rare Book Dealer Rebecca Romney
This week, we’re thrilled to have Rebecca Romney with us! Rebecca is a rare books dealer and the woman behind The Romance Novel in English, a 100-lot collection of rare romance novels and other romance-adjacent paraphernalia. We had a great time talking to her about the collection, her motivation to develop it, her hopes for its future at the Lilly Library at the University of Indiana, and about how romance lovers can start thinking about collecting books! We hope you love this one as much as we did!
Our next read along is Uzma Jalaluddin’s Hana Khan Carries On. Find it at: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books, Kobo, or at your local indie.
Show Notes
Welcome Rebecca Romney. She is the cofounder of Type Punch Matrix, a rare books firm based in Washington DC. She started out working at Bauman Rare Books in Las Vegas. You can also watch her in action from old appearances on Pawn Stars where she routinely broke people’s hearts about the values of their rare books.
Rebecca recently put together a collection that was purchased by the Lilly Library at Indiana University called The Romance Novel in English: A Survey in Rare Books 1769-1999. You can follow Lilly Librarian Rebecca on twitter; they sound like a great resource for romance, and for planning a visit!
On the episode, we extensively discuss some of the general themes and specific items in the catalogue. Two authors that didn’t make it into the catalogue because Rebecca couldn’t find copies: Eliza Haywood and Evelina by Frances Burney.
The Elizabeth Lowell book about a gold dealer in Las Vegas is called Running Scared and is part of the Rarities Unlimited series. Gold books aren't really a thing, but gold leaf and illumiated manuscripts are.
Here’s an explainer on The Gutenberg Bible and a clip from Pawn Stars where an individual leaf is available, and here is a page from a 2021 auction site selling a leaf. But remember that bookmaking in China was far more advanced at that time. Or maybe you’d be interested in knowing more about Newton’s Principia.
Although I couldn’t find an article about the history of Jewish booksellers, I did find an interview with Adam Kirsch, an author who wrote a book called The People and the Books, about the importance of books to Jewish people throughout history. On our Trailblazers episode with Radclyffe, she talked about the importance of queer bookstores.
What is the difference between ARCs and first editions? Time to check and see if your copy of The Flame and the Flower to see if it's a first edition.
Jen called it a garage sale and Sarah called it a Tag sale, which is exactly right considering where they grew up.
Foxing isn’t as sexy as you’d think when we’re talking about rare books.
The 2019 Rita ceremony included a video of romance firsts.
In John Markert’s Publishing Romance: The History of an Industry, 1940s to the Present, he discusses a series called Adam that failed because they were romances only from the hero’s point of view.
Time to shake all your Sweet Valley High books out of your closet, fellow Gen-Xers.
S04.05: Radclyffe: Trailblazer
This week, we’re continuing our Trailblazer episodes with Radclyffe—author of lesbian romances and founder of the LGBTQIA+ publisher, Bold Strokes Books. We talk about her path to romance as a reader and an author, and a publisher, about the early days of queer romance, about the importance of independent booksellers to the queer community, and about how readers find themselves in books.
Thank you to Radclyffe for taking the time to talk to us, and share her story.
Our next read along is Uzma Jalaluddin’s Hana Kahn Carries On. Find it at: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books, Kobo, or at your local indie.
Show Notes
Welcome Radclyffe, romance author and founder of Bold Strokes Books. The internet archive has preserved her fanfiction site.
Bookstores mentioned: Giovanni’s Room in Philadelphia, Womancrafts in Provincetown, and an article about the current state of Queer bookstores in America.
Publishing and Distributors Radclyffe mentioned: Naiad Press, founded by Barbara Greer, Sarah Aldridge, and Muriel Crawford; Regal Crest Enterprises is now Flashpoint Publications; Fawcett; Bella Booksfounded by Linda Hill; and Alyson Books.
Awards mentioned: Lambda Literary Awards, and the RWA Prism award
Further Reading: Creating a Literary Culture: A Short, Selective, and Incomplete History of LGBT Publishing, Part I, Part 2, and Part 3 by Michael Neva in the LARB,
TRANSCRIPT
Radclyffe 00:00:00 / #: What we're seeing in romance fiction has changed unbelievably from 50 years ago in terms of sexual content, gender diversity, the issues that are dealt with, the power of romance that most people do not appreciate is that you can write about anything. You can write about all the challenges of human life in a way that readers will find approachable, that they will relate to, they will think about, there's nothing else that does that. I'm a little prejudiced, but still it's an incredibly powerful genre.
Sarah MacLean 00:00:38 / #: That was Radclyffe the next in our Trailblazers series. Welcome everyone to Fated Mates. I'm Sarah MacLean. I read romance novels and I write them.
Jennifer Prokop 00:00:49 / #: And I'm Jennifer Prokop. I am a romance reader and critic.
Sarah MacLean 00:00:54 / #: And Radclyffe is the founder of Bold Strokes Books, which is an important LGBTQ publisher. She is a writer and one of the important and long-time voices for lesbian and queer romance.
Jennifer Prokop 00:01:12 / #: Today we'll be talking about her journey to romance, the founding of Bold Strokes Books, why it is important for LGBTQ publishers to exist, and how the romance landscape for queer literature, queer bookstores and queer romance has changed in the many years that she has been reading, writing, and publishing.
Sarah MacLean 00:01:33 / #: Here's our conversation. Thank you so much for joining us, Radclyffe. We're thrilled to have you.
Radclyffe 00:01:41 / #: Well, thank you for asking me. I'm really glad to be here.
Sarah MacLean 00:01:44 / #: So we're really interested in journeys and we've talked so much over the years about our journeys as romance readers and writers. So could we start there? Let's start with how you came to write and write romance.
Radclyffe 00:02:01 / #: I think that part of my story, I'm sure you've heard many times before, which is almost and probably experienced yourself, which is anyone who writes has always written things. For me as a small girl growing up, I will say this, in the '50s, there were very few things that I saw in the world around me that reflected what I wished I could do on television or the books that I read, the games that people played. Although I was fortunate to have an older brother, so I learned to play a lot of sports.
00:02:39 / #: So I started writing things when I was really young, putting girls and then women in the scenarios that I didn't get to see anywhere, including in the books that I read. But I didn't really think about writing anything, "Big," quote, unquote, until I was actually a surgery resident, and I was really, really busy and pressured. And it was a world where I also felt like a little bit of an outsider because I was a woman in surgery when there weren't a lot of women in surgery either. So I started writing just to kind of express the parts of myself that weren't being expressed.
00:03:19 / #: So I wrote my first full-length, what I would now call my first lesbian novel in 1980, with absolutely no anticipation that it would ever become anything except this thing that I had written that pleased me. No one ever read it, no one ever saw it. And I just put it in a drawer. And as the years went by, I did that again and again when I had free time, often on my vacations, I would write another one of those until I had eight of them in my drawer. Maybe my girlfriends of the time would read them or one of my best friends, but no one else ever read them and I never anticipated that I would be a, quote, unquote, "Author."
Jennifer Prokop 00:04:00 / #: The difference between growing up in the '50s and the '80s, did you still feel that there was this dearth of stories that you wanted to read? Even then, there was no little change between growing up and then being a doctor?
Radclyffe 00:04:14 / #: That's a great question. And the answer is there was a change, but it wasn't enough of a change or a big enough of a change. And that's another part of my story, a cool part of my story, actually, when I was 12, I used to read everything I could find. And mostly they were paperbacks that came out of the drug stores and supermarkets and whatever my mom was reading.
Sarah MacLean 00:04:34 / #: Same.
Radclyffe 00:04:34 / #: And I somehow-
Jennifer Prokop 00:04:37 / #: One of us.
Radclyffe 00:04:37 / #: Yeah, I somehow, I don't know how, found this book written by Ann Bannon called Beebo Brinker, and I was 12, and it's the first time I ever read anything that had two women involved in it. And I was 12, and I was starting to realize that I wasn't like everyone else. And this book really made a huge impression on me, but I also knew it was probably something that I wasn't supposed to show anybody else. And I kept it behind the other books in my bookcase.
00:05:10 / #: And I didn't hear the word lesbian until I was 18 years old. So it wasn't that, it was a sense in the world around me that what I was feeling was probably not what I ought to be feeling. But that book made a huge impression on me. And I went to school in Philadelphia where one of the country's oldest gay and lesbian bookstores was established, Giovanni's Room.
00:05:35 / #: And in 1973, I discovered in this bookstore that had two shelves and about 10 books, the first lesbian romance that Naiad Press ever published called The Latecomer by Sarah Aldridge. And it was the first lesbian romance I had ever read, although interestingly from a historical point of view, they did not call them romances. They called them lesbian novels at the time for about another eight years. And I read that book like a million times.
Sarah MacLean 00:06:08 / #: Can you ground us with a date for this?
Jennifer Prokop 00:06:12 / #: Now that's when you found it. Was that also when it was published?
Radclyffe 00:06:15 / #: That's when it was published, 1973. Naiad Press was established in 1972 by Barbara Grier and two other women.
Sarah MacLean 00:06:24 / #: Was Naiad exclusively publishing lesbian novels?
Radclyffe 00:06:27 / #: Yes, Barbara Grier and Sarah Aldridge and Muriel Crawford were the three women who established it. And that went on to be the premier lesbian press until the late '90s when Barbara sold it and it changed names. So I would go there every week looking for another book, and there was never another book. They published one nine months later, and then maybe another nine months, and then eventually they would do three or four a year and then two a month, which was like, but that took years to get there. So I started writing my own and I didn't really think about publishing them.
Sarah MacLean 00:07:05 / #: Can you tell us what kind of stories were these?
Radclyffe 00:07:08 / #: My very first one was a western, of course, because when I grew up, I wanted to be a cowboy. I had a little star and I had six shooters, and I played soldiers a lot too, which actually when I tell you about what I write, you'll probably understand exactly why I write what I write. But I was the girl on the block with all boys, and I had an older brother, so I had six shooters and rifles and badges, and I wanted to be a cowboy. So I wrote a western, and it's called Innocent Hearts. And it's the first one I wrote, it's not the first one that was published. I think it was published probably fourth, and it took place in the west around the 1860s or so.
Sarah MacLean 00:07:57 / #: So like historical western?
Jennifer Prokop 00:07:58 / #: Yeah.
Radclyffe 00:07:59 / #: Yeah. It features an 18-year-old rancher. No, she's about 20. And the young woman she gets involved with came from Boston with her family, and her father was going to start a newspaper there. They're both very innocent. When you write in that era with two young women in particular, you really can't use the language we use today. So anyways, that's the first one I wrote because I wanted to be the one with the horse, the guns and the girl.
Sarah MacLean 00:08:30 / #: Nice.
Jennifer Prokop 00:08:33 / #: And so at the time, you said you started with Ann Bannon, and was there a sense of romance as a genre? Did you know you were writing something called a romance?
Radclyffe 00:08:45 / #: I knew I was writing a love story. I didn't really think of it as a genre because I wasn't really thinking about writing and publishing at all. I was just thinking about writing the stories that really moved me and with the kind of characters and the kind of situations that really touched me and I was writing the characters that I wanted to be. One of the next book I wrote was a police officer, which is Safe Harbor, which was the first book that was published. And so that's the next one I wrote. Then I did a police procedural stories, the Justice series with cops.
00:09:28 / #: So throughout the '80s I was writing these books. And I'll tell you a story, which I have told a couple times. In 1988, I decided I would try publishing one of them. So I sent it to Naiad Press, and the submission procedures was a lot different then. You had to send them a little query and tell them about your book and your writing experience and all that sort of thing. And my only writing experience was medical papers. But the publisher at the time would then call you and say, "I would like to read your manuscript." So she called me on a Sunday morning at 7:30 in the morning.
00:10:03 / #: And I should preface the story by saying that I have a tremendous amount of respect for this person. And without her, many of us would not be here. So she called me 7:30, and I told her I had read every book that they'd ever published. And she said, "Well, send your manuscript and let's see if you've been washed in the blood of Naiad." So, "Okay." And I sent it, right?
Jennifer Prokop 00:10:30 / #: Wow. I'm going to start using that phrase with people, "Have you been washed in the blood of Fated Mates?" "Fine."
Radclyffe 00:10:36 / #: Yeah. So I waited and waited and waited, and I'm doing my office hours one afternoon at the hospital, and my secretary gives me this message and it says, "Barbara Grier called." And I'm like, "Oh." So I run to my office and I call her back and she says, "Well, we're interested in publishing this book." She said, "But it's really not very good." And she said, "You're kind of a mediocre author and you'll probably never be anything more than a mediocre author." And I thought-
Jennifer Prokop 00:11:07 / #: My face right now. I know. I'm like, "Ah."
Radclyffe 00:11:11 / #: Please remember what I said about Barbara Grier.
Jennifer Prokop 00:11:13 / #: No.
Sarah MacLean 00:11:13 / #: Yeah.
Jennifer Prokop 00:11:13 / #: Sure, of course, of course.
Radclyffe 00:11:13 / #: She's one of my heroes, okay? And they didn't like the fact that I opened the book with a scene where the major character is at a party and she is drinking a little too much and has a history of using drugs. Now, this was 1980, right?
Jennifer Prokop 00:11:31 / #: Right.
Radclyffe 00:11:32 / #: Because me, I write dark heroes who are wounded and because eventually the process of falling in love allows them to heal those wounds, they have to start there. She wanted me to change that. And I thought about it, and I didn't want to do that. And I said, "I am really honored that you called me, but I don't think I want to do this." And there was complete and total silence on the line for like 30 seconds. I don't think anybody had ever said, "No."
Sarah MacLean 00:12:06 / #: "Barbara, hello?"
Radclyffe 00:12:07 / #: And so that was that. And I was so mad.
Jennifer Prokop 00:12:08 / #: Yeah.
Sarah MacLean 00:12:08 / #: Of course you were.
Radclyffe 00:12:10 / #: I was so mad that I went home and I wrote another book, so that was really inspiring.
Sarah MacLean 00:12:19 / #: Yeah. Well, but I think this is really interesting. I think for a lot of romance writers, often this story is told, this kind of, "I gave it to a gatekeeper, and the gatekeeper said, 'No, no, you can't come in here with this.'" And I mean, it happens with, "You can't have a character who has a history with drugs." It happens with, "You can't have characters who look, love, et cetera, the way that these characters do." And these gatekeepers often say, "Well that, it just doesn't sell or that's just not what romance is."
Jennifer Prokop 00:12:55 / #: There's no market for it.
Sarah MacLean 00:12:56 / #: It doesn't follow the rules. And those of us who have succeeded, many of us have succeeded because we've said, "No, that's not a good rule. I don't want to be gate kept in that way."
Radclyffe 00:13:08 / #: I think the other thing is if you really believe in what you've written and you've written it because you have something to say in a particular way, then that's not the right place for your book. I think in 1988, maybe it wouldn't have sold. Maybe it wouldn't have appealed. She certainly felt that way, and Barbara was very successful. And in later years we were good friends and she was kind enough to tell me once that I was a mistake on her part. So that was really nice of her.
Sarah MacLean 00:13:39 / #: That's nice.
Jennifer Prokop 00:13:40 / #: Yeah, that is nice. You're the one that got away.
Sarah MacLean 00:13:43 / #: Vindication.
Jennifer Prokop 00:13:44 / #: Yeah.
Radclyffe 00:13:47 / #: So I began sharing the things that I had written through fan fiction which is a roundabout way to answer your question. And that was the first time I had really started sharing the things that I had written with people I didn't know with people that I had no idea how they were going to respond to the things that I wrote. But it was a really energizing kind of exhilarating experience to put the things I had written out there and have people comment on them and like them and I became enthusiastic and developed a big fan fiction following. I was writing X-Files fan fiction.
Jennifer Prokop 00:14:23 / #: Oh, right on. Yeah, sure.
Sarah MacLean 00:14:25 / #: Perfect. A good fandom too to be a part of.
Jennifer Prokop 00:14:30 / #: Sure, right.
Radclyffe 00:14:30 / #: Yeah, it was great. It suited me really well. And I had created fan fiction with an original character called Marshall Black who became Scully's lover. And people afterwards have said, "I started reading watching the X-Files, but I couldn't find Marsh in the stories," because they were looking for her. So I started a website and I put the original fiction that I had written all those years ago on my website.
Sarah MacLean 00:14:56 / #: Does this still exist?
Radclyffe 00:14:58 / #: Yes, it does, on my RedFic.com website. It's still there. Three publishers contacted me and wanted to publish my original fiction just out of the blue. And I really, well, naively number one, I said yes to everybody, which was a bad mistake. And number two, I had to think really hard about whether I wanted to do that. Whether I wanted to hand it over. Whether I wanted to sort of give away ownership of this work because I understood that being published, that's what happens and that is what happens.
00:15:32 / #: And I think that as authors, we have to understand that, that we enter into a partnership that isn't always a partnership because we have similar goals, but not always the same goals. But I said yes, and I loved the process. As soon as I started publishing, I wanted to understand everything about it, and that's what led to me eventually starting my own company.
Sarah MacLean 00:15:55 / #: Yeah. So talk a little bit about Bold Strokes Books and how that came to be?
Radclyffe 00:16:02 / #: It pretty much grew out of my experience with publishing with these small publishers. And I call them small publishers, mostly because of the model, and it's not in a negative way at all, but they were POD publishers, relatively small.
Jennifer Prokop 00:16:16 / #: So that, everybody, means print-on-demand.
Radclyffe 00:16:18 / #: Which is not what it is today. Today print-on-demand pretty much rolls right over into all of the pretty much normal distribution, but at that time it didn't.
Jennifer Prokop 00:16:27 / #: What year do you think this was?
Radclyffe 00:16:31 / #: About 2000. Yeah, and Safe Harbor was published in 2001.
Sarah MacLean 00:16:34 / #: Do the publishers still exist?
Radclyffe 00:16:36 / #: One of them does. That was Regal Crest Enterprises, and it's just this past year changed hands and I believe changed names, but some of the same authors. But the other two, one went out of business very quickly and the other one went out of business after she failed to pay anyone royalties.
Jennifer Prokop 00:16:54 / #: Well, some things-
Radclyffe 00:16:56 / #: That happens.
Jennifer Prokop 00:16:56 / #: That will happen [inaudible 00:16:57 / #], yeah.
Radclyffe 00:16:58 / #: That does happen. So I very quickly realized that the model wasn't going to work because it limited distribution and it limited exposure of the titles. And I learned that from going to some bookstores, particularly in Provincetown. And one of my first books was set in Provincetown, it's Safe Harbors, the first in the Provincetown Tales, and they wouldn't order it or couldn't order it because of the way it was being produced. And I thought, this is not right.
Jennifer Prokop 00:17:27 / #: And it's worth saying Provincetown is like a premier vacation destination in the summer for many gay and lesbian Americans.
Radclyffe 00:17:37 / #: That is true.
Jennifer Prokop 00:17:37 / #: This is like my brother and his partner were there this summer. It's ground zero.
Radclyffe 00:17:41 / #: So was I, everybody went back as soon as we could get out.
Jennifer Prokop 00:17:44 / #: And that's it. So what I'm saying, this is what I want people to understand, if Provincetown couldn't get their hands on this book. So I just think it's really important to place that in-
Radclyffe 00:17:53 / #: Yeah, the context. And that said to me that this model is not going to work. And it wasn't just about my books, it was about all of our books because if queer authors didn't have access to the same kind of distribution and exposure and marketing that everyone else got, we would not reach our readership. And that to me has always been critical.
Sarah MacLean 00:18:17 / #: To that end, can we talk about what we would call traditional publishing today? The kind of big five, at the time there were many more than five, but the big houses.
Radclyffe 00:18:27 / #: Now there's like four and a half or something.
Jennifer Prokop 00:18:27 / #: Yeah.
Sarah MacLean 00:18:30 / #: Right, it's just the numbers are dwindling. What did romance look like there?
Jennifer Prokop 00:18:36 / #: Or queer fiction even?
Sarah MacLean 00:18:37 / #: Or, yeah-
Jennifer Prokop 00:18:38 / #: I mean maybe-
Sarah MacLean 00:18:38 / #: ... I mean-
Jennifer Prokop 00:18:38 / #: ... queer romances and even-
Radclyffe 00:18:40 / #: In the mainstream?
Jennifer Prokop 00:18:40 / #: Yeah.
Sarah MacLean 00:18:41 / #: Yeah.
Jennifer Prokop 00:18:41 / #: Or did it exist at all?
Radclyffe 00:18:43 / #: Not much. I mean, if I think back to that time, I will say this, in the late '60s and early '70s, mainstream publishers were publishing mostly in paperback. And there were a lot of works featuring both lesbians and gay men for a brief period of time. Fawcett and the paperbacks, that's where Anne Bannon's books were published. One of the very first lesbian romances, a Place of our Own was actually published, and I don't remember which mainstream publishers, but then it disappeared and I'm not sure why.
Jennifer Prokop 00:19:22 / #: When was Sarah Waters writing? When was Tipping the Velvet?
Radclyffe 00:19:26 / #: I would say in the '90s. Remember, it's also British and-
Jennifer Prokop 00:19:31 / #: Not short.
Radclyffe 00:19:32 / #: ... not traditionally romance. Her books are historical works, and that's how they were marketed well.
Jennifer Prokop 00:19:38 / #: That's how they kind of... okay.
Sarah MacLean 00:19:38 / #: And then Anne Allen Shockley was writing for Avon before Avon was HarperCollins, but when Avon was a pulp fiction house?
Radclyffe 00:19:47 / #: Yes. And that was 1971, I think.
Sarah MacLean 00:19:51 / #: The early '70s. Yeah.
Radclyffe 00:19:52 / #: Right, so it was a very small window. And I don't know what actually happened culturally, socially, at around that time to basically say to publishers, "We're not going to sell enough of them." Maybe they just didn't sell enough of those books. I do know that over the years when there were several very, very, very popular lesbian authors, for example, particularly writing mysteries, and they got picked up by mainstream publishers, they didn't make it. They didn't sell enough to continue to publish with them. And I think part of it is audience size, and I just think it's a smaller audience.
Sarah MacLean 00:20:35 / #: Okay. So we have these small publishers in the early thousands, early 2000s that are trying to make a go of it, but they can't get the print on demand books into stores. And then you think to yourself, what?
Radclyffe 00:20:50 / #: I think we need the same model that everybody else has. So I very naively, since I don't know anything about publishing except what I've been doing, decide I'm going to start a publishing company, but the very first thing I did was figure out how to get distribution. And I was very fortunate that at just about the same time, another lesbian publisher of size had decided that she wanted to start a distribution company. So she said-
Sarah MacLean 00:21:17 / #: And who is that?
Radclyffe 00:21:18 / #: Bella Books, Linda Hill. And I'm just a small fry. So Linda said, "If you're interested, I'm going to start this distribution company and we can, essentially, umbrella your books into our distribution system." And I said, "Yes," which from the get-go gave me mainstream distribution.
00:21:37 / #: So all of our print books have always been distributed like everybody else's. And then the challenge became getting the people at the other end to actually buy them. That's a different story.
00:21:50 / #: So we've had mainstream distribution from the beginning and that gave the authors that I signed I think, the best chance for international exposure and to get into bookstores and libraries and places that they couldn't at the time.
Sarah MacLean 00:22:04 / #: So how were you finding authors at this point? Because obviously there's no shortage of authors to find, but what's the vision at this point for you?
Radclyffe 00:22:14 / #: I'll tell you the mission statement. There were two things that I wanted to do. I wanted to publish quality queer fiction, and I did not want to only publish lesbian fiction. So my goal was always to publish queer fiction. That was good stuff, and I wanted to create a platform to support authors and help them with their careers. So those were my two goals, and that's what we've worked on since the company has started.
00:22:47 / #: Early on, most of the authors that I signed were people that I had met at conventions and FanFic places, so a lot of them came out of fan fiction that first year. I think every single one of the authors I signed had been writing fan fiction.
00:23:03 / #: And then as we began to create a profile and our books were out there and we were going to events and people were getting to know us, we began to expand. And it's been years since and some of the authors still write fan fiction, because they really like it, but they're not coming out of the fan fiction community anymore. Not in any large numbers at all for at least a decade, probably more.
Jennifer Prokop 00:23:27 / #: I think one of the things that's really changed is if you had asked me in 2000 if a lesbian romance was for me, I probably would've said like, "No." But now I do feel like that romance readers who love romance read all kinds of romance as those times have changed. Or maybe you feel like they haven't. Do you still think there's the perception that the queer fiction and romances that you are publishing are only for queer readers? Do you see that that's changed on your end or is that just me being like pie in the sky?
Radclyffe 00:24:00 / #: It's hard because as you know, from a demographic point of view, you can't pinpoint who is buying a book. But I think overall, there's not very much crossover. I know that there is some, there's certainly, when I was writing fan fiction, I know that there were people who would write and say, "I'm straight," so that I would know that and say, "But I love it."
00:24:21 / #: People tell me that they give their books, my authors tell me they give their books to people in the office, and some of them really like it. But I don't know that those are people who are seeking out these works. But it's very much like if you look at how do people find books, it's very often word of mouth or personal recommendation. And I think that you're probably far more aware of what's out there. I think the average reader would still think, "This is not for me. I won't to understand it, or I won't relate to it, or it's not my life."
Jennifer Prokop 00:24:56 / #: And I just want to say, I don't want to suggest that you should be writing for the straight gaze, but I just was curious if in the 20 years you have seen a difference. So I just wanted to not sound like a [inaudible 00:25:09 / #].
Radclyffe 00:25:09 / #: I mean, I can tell from our reading community because we have a really vibrant web store and we sell a lot online, and we've really pushed for direct to customer sales, that it's mostly still queer. But again, I don't know, but I think it's probably a tiny percentage. I would love it if it wasn't, I mean, people have often said, "Oh, well, probably it's men buying your books." Hallelujah. I would love for men to buy my books. Please buy my books. But it isn't, it's lesbians and other queers.
Sarah MacLean 00:25:44 / #: We're sponsored this week by Radish, Romance that Feels You. Radish is a comprehensive romance fiction library penned by talented, popular writers, bottomless content, one cute app. So what I think is interesting about Radish is that aside from being a kind of huge catalog based on many, many, many tropes, it's really, really well-structured.
Jennifer Prokop 00:26:06 / #: Oh, it is a romance reader's dream. I mean, honestly, if you haven't played around with it, it has everything so clearly organized and really easy to understand. And I feel like at Radish, they really have the finger on the pulse of what a romance reader wants to read and the most popular tropes.
Sarah MacLean 00:26:27 / #: Yeah, I mean, I think there's a lot of conversation right now in romance, in the romance ether about tropes and why we love them so much and why we're also compulsively brought to them. And I think Radish gets that, but also I think it's a pretty cool system. So the way that Radish works is you pay per episode, which is a little bit like a chapter, but you don't actually pay for the whole book. You just pay for usually about the first 10 or 15 chapters or 10 or 15 episodes are free. And then there are coins to pay for the rest of the book if you want them to go quickly or you can just wait.
Jennifer Prokop 00:27:06 / #: Right, or you can just wait because the new episode will release every hour. And that's really great. I think I found that I really love Radish when I'm running errands, I'm waiting for the car wash, things where I can just, I only have a minute or two to read something and I can get to the end of the chapter. But oh, then I'm home and the next chapter is available for me.
Sarah MacLean 00:27:26 / #: Yeah, and if you are a chaotic reader like me and you read lots of books at the same time, this is actually pretty great because Radish will remind you when a new chapter is available of any of the 25 stories that you're reading. So anyway, if you're a romance reader and we know you all are and you've never tried Radish or you've been thinking about Radish, give it a try.
00:27:49 / #: Our friends there are offering 24 free coins when you sign up through the special link radish.social/fatedmates, you can use those coins to read a book that we've recommended here on another episode, or you can try one of their exclusive episodic series that just go on and on like soap operas. Either way, we think it's something any enthusiastic romance fan will want to check out.
Jennifer Prokop 00:28:15 / #: Thanks again to Radish for sponsoring our show.
Sarah MacLean 00:28:21 / #: At this point, you're really starting to leave a mark, right? I mean, this is your one of Bold Strokes becomes a premier queer publisher, one of the ones that people in the industry have heard of and know and trust. And so I'm curious at this point, who's your community here? Who are the authors who you are feeling are your family here? Who are the other people in publishing who are supporting you?
Radclyffe 00:28:53 / #: There are. When I started, there was a lot of support. I think there was when I started Bold Strokes Books, it was 2004. So queer publishing was still very fragmented and small. There was one big gay male publisher, Alyson, and then there was Naiad out here, and then Bella was Naiad's. Naiad became Bella when Linda bought it, and little here and little there.
00:29:18 / #: So everybody kind of felt like more of a community than we do today in a different way. It was fragmented then because we were geographically separated and probably financially separated, and we didn't have the avenues of marketing that we have today. So there was a fair amount of support from other publishers. Most of the authors came out of the reading community, they were reading these books, they wanted to write these books, and that's where they came from.
00:29:47 / #: Now they're coming, I think, primarily, again, they're all readers, but they're coming internationally, not people that I have individually met early on. Many of the authors I met at events and conferences and could talk to them and they would pitch to me. So there was a much more one-on-one very early. But now we're bigger and we get lots more submissions. So I don't personally know everyone. Our authors are super tight.
00:30:14 / #: When we have a newbie, all of our authors contact them, we put them in contact right away. It's really important, as I'm sure you know, when you write, it's a very solitary experience and we really try to create a community. I want them to know that this is a real company. It doesn't exist out there in the ether somewhere. This is a real entity. There are people behind it that work to help them publish their works, help them better their craft. We introduce them to everyone.
00:30:48 / #: For me personally, my wife, who basically when I said, "Well, I think I'm going to retire from medicine and start this company, and I have no idea if it's going to do anything." And she was just finishing her postdoc. And so we had to move. So we sold our car and we sold our house, and I didn't make any money from the company for almost three years. Just put money in because you got to put money in to publish those books and nobody pays you for a long time.
00:31:18 / #: And I was really fortunate, the people that are with me now have been with me from the beginning. Many of them, my editors, my graphic artists, the authors, we have a very low attrition rate. People do not leave. Thank you. I mean, people stop writing, their life moves on, or they find that maybe the model doesn't suit them, but not many. I mean, I looked at our attrition rate and it's really low.
Jennifer Prokop 00:31:46 / #: So you've talked about the authors, but what do Bold Strokes' readers tell you about what it feels like to have this space for them?
Radclyffe 00:31:55 / #: I know that they're very devoted. All of the authors and myself have really active social media platforms, so we hear from them all the time. But more importantly, we try to do as many in-person events as we can so that we can meet the readers. And it's really important to do that. And for example, every Women's Week, which is a week in Provincetown, starting with Columbus Day, we do a book event for five days.
00:32:23 / #: And we have many readers who come back year after year after year. It's all free. We do readings, we do panels, we do signings, we do chats, whatever we can do that they enjoy, it's for them. So we get a lot of positive feedback. And for me personally as an author, I've received countless emails from people of all ages who've said how important it is for them to see in fiction the life they wish they had or the life they do have that others don't know about.
00:33:03 / #: It's tremendously important for marginalized communities to be able to see themselves in a positive way. Probably one of the earliest and neatest experiences I ever had was I was in Saints and Sinners, which is an event in New Orleans, and it was one of the first erotica readings I did in public, and it was okay. It was a mixed group too. So, "Okay, I'm reading to the guys and I'm reading to women."
00:33:25 / #: And afterwards this young woman who was probably 15, came up to me with her mother to tell me how much she loved my books. And she said, "Oh, Above All, Honor, is one of my favorites." And I'm thinking, "Oh man, it starts with this graphic sex scene in chapter one." And it was awesome. I mean, it was so incredibly gratifying to know that this young person was there with her mom and had found this book and it meant something to her. And all of us, all the authors that I publish have experiences like that.
Sarah MacLean 00:34:03 / #: So let's talk about challenges though. So it's not easy to start a business. It's not easy to start a publishing business, that is for sure. And then you have on top of it, starting a romance business in a romance world that can be very gatekeep-y and conservative, I think we would say, in a lot of ways. So can you talk a little bit about how it is to be Radclyffe in the world of romance?
Radclyffe 00:34:34 / #: Well, first of all, I was nobody to start. I think that almost everyone has to adjust their expectations. And I didn't have any. I didn't set out to be a bestselling author. What I wanted to be was a good author. I wanted to get the books to people who wanted to read them. That was my goal. My goal was not to sell 50,000 books or 500,000 books or to make a lot of money, because I honestly did not think that I would.
00:35:05 / #: So I didn't have the expectations that I think sometimes other authors do, particularly today. I think that a lot of authors think they're going to sell a whole lot of books and make a whole lot of money, and generally that doesn't happen. I wanted my company and my authors, and I'm being a little possessive here, to have everything that everybody else had. So I thought, well, I should be part of the RWA. So that's one of the first things that I did.
00:35:33 / #: One of the very first things that I did to get exposure was join the RWA and go to the RWA, which was terrifying because I didn't know anybody. I didn't look like everybody else for the most part. I didn't write what everybody else was writing. Nobody was talking about what I was writing. And this was just another one of those experiences where you don't fit.
00:35:58 / #: But it was also exhilarating because I went to the classes and the seminars and this is the stuff that I needed to know. So it was amazing. And so then I went through all the hoops so that the RWA would recognize Bold Strokes as a legitimate publisher because we ticked all their boxes. And I made sure that we ticked all their boxes so that we could begin to build a profile as a legitimate, significant publisher of queer fiction.
00:36:31 / #: And every chance I got, every venue that I could go to, I fronted the company. I went there and I said, "This is who we are. This is what we do. We're really good at it." And I think that's my job. My job is to create a profile for this company so that the authors who sign here will have that benefit.
Jennifer Prokop 00:36:54 / #: So looking forward then, do you feel like we're on the precipice of anything? What are your hopes for what romance will look like in five or 10 years? I mean, have you seen positive change that you think will continue?
Radclyffe 00:37:09 / #: Oh, I think romance has changed tremendously. I mean, and as historians, if we're looking at the history of romance fiction, we can go back to Jane Austen, but really it's very compressed in terms of what we as contemporary readers are looking at 50 years maybe. I mean certainly for queer romances, we're looking at 50 years. That's just a little tiny piece of time. And yet so much has been crammed in there.
00:37:36 / #: And for us, for queer romance writers and queer authors in particular, our entire industry really parallels social change. I mean, the more visibility, the more exposure, the more authors, the more work, the more things we're writing about that are relevant to the community. So I think that what we're seeing in romance fiction has changed unbelievably from 50 years ago in terms of sexual content, gender diversity, the issues that are dealt with.
00:38:08 / #: The power of romance that most people do not appreciate is that you can write about anything. You can write about all the challenges of human life in a way that readers will find approachable, that they will relate to, they will think about, there's nothing else that does that. I'm a little prejudiced, but still it's an incredibly powerful genre.
00:38:35 / #: And that's been very true in terms of queer romances where initially we were dealing with the challenges of coming out. What it meant professionally for someone to be queer, to have a queer relationship that wasn't hidden. How do you deal with families? How do you deal with religious prejudices? And then that began to change, and you don't see as many coming out stories. We still do. We still write them because people are still coming out and people are still coming out in places where it's not safe.
00:39:07 / #: But romance has expanded and now we deal with gender diversity and challenges for YA, queer youth. And I think that's only going to continue. I mean, nothing is ever going to stop the romance genre because it deals with human relationships. It deals with what's most critical in our experience are the relationships in our lives. So it's never going to stop, but I think it will continue to transform as the issues that we face as a community, as a civilization change too.
Jennifer Prokop 00:39:44 / #: We say all the time, that romance really iterates on the time that it's in. When it was the AIDS crisis, was queer romance responsive to... I mean, again, did queer romance even exist in the same way? Especially as a doctor, did you see the way that there was fear about HIV? Did that play out in queer romance?
Radclyffe 00:40:12 / #: It played out in queer fiction, but I think that if you look at queer romance, it's just like romance in the mainstream. It's predominantly female oriented. Predominantly written by women with the expectation that the readers will be women. So that the men were writing about it, but that you were seeing it more in the context of the mysteries that they were writing or the general fiction that they were writing.
00:40:38 / #: And I'm not going to say that I didn't see a lot of it in lesbian fiction. Certainly I think in the non-fiction, in the essays and the other works. But in the fiction per se, I would say, it was secondary. And there is that divide, but there's that divide always in romance, what women are writing about and what men are writing about or what women are writing for men to read.
Sarah MacLean 00:41:05 / #: So you said earlier that, "I didn't have expectations," but I'm curious because at some point you did become a name that people know in the world of romance. And I wonder if there's a moment or at what point did you realize like, "Oh, I'm Radclyffe, I'm doing a thing and people know who I am?" And I asked this, and I've asked this of several of the people who we're interviewing for this series, when did you know you were amazing? Because we are, right? You are.
Radclyffe 00:41:42 / #: Okay. I don't know that I'm amazing. People tell me that I am one of the most determined and self-directed people that they know. And I think that that is true. I also have a sense of my own worth, which I think is probably why I said no to Barbara Grier back in the 1980s. But I didn't know what I would become as an author or a publisher. I only knew that I would do my best to do it right and that if anyone could do it, then I could do it.
00:42:14 / #: I mean, that's like we have a saying in surgery, "There's always room at the top," and I believe that. It's hard for someone who didn't train to be a writer, who doesn't either have no background in writing or literature or any of those things to believe. You kind of have that imposter syndrome a little bit at the beginning because I came out of a totally different world. So external recognition of my work for me personally was important and it bothered me. Now, do you know what the Lammy's are?
Sarah MacLean 00:42:55 / #: The Lambda Literary Awards?
Radclyffe 00:42:58 / #: The Lambda Literary Awards are like The RITAs. And it really bothered me the first few years that I was publishing that I didn't get nominated, really bothered me.
Sarah MacLean 00:43:06 / #: So can you explain how does the Lambda work? Because we of course in romance know how The RITA works and it has a lot of problems along the way. But how do you get nominated?
Radclyffe 00:43:18 / #: Well, you can submit your book just like you do to The RITAs, which are now the Vivians. And then basically, if you nominate it, they'll review it pretty much the same way.
Jennifer Prokop 00:43:31 / #: Was there always a romance category? Because that was my question, if this is a category they had to add?
Radclyffe 00:43:37 / #: There wasn't at the very beginning, there were only a few categories, but there has been for many years. And there's always been a little bit more of a literary event, a literary bent as opposed to genre fiction bent in those awards. But they do have genre categories. So if you send your books in, they will review it and then you become a finalist and then you win.
00:44:06 / #: And so I never got to be a finalist, and I couldn't figure out why that was. And it wasn't until really the company got bigger and the company had some recognition and more of my titles were out there and they knew who we were that I won a Lammy. I can't remember the first year, 2005, 2006. That meant a lot to me. Now, some people say those things, you know what they say about awards.
Jennifer Prokop 00:44:36 / #: They are great. That's what they say about them.
Sarah MacLean 00:44:38 / #: It's fun to put them on your shelf.
Radclyffe 00:44:40 / #: It meant something to me because it said to me, at least the people who are looking at similar works see this, they see me. I became visible. So that was important.
Sarah MacLean 00:44:51 / #: And I also have to say that I think that there is a massive difference between the Lambda Literary Award and The RITA or the Vivian in that the discoverability of queer, if I'm looking for great queer romance, I'm going to go to the Lambda Award and look at the winners there. I don't really feel like romance readers feel like, "I'm looking for great historical romance, I'm going to go check out the Vivians." Not because those books aren't maybe great, but-
Jennifer Prokop 00:45:21 / #: Right. They're going to go to the bookstore and look at the table. Right.
Radclyffe 00:45:25 / #: Well, I will tell you that one of the things that made the biggest impression on me was winning The PRISM because that's not my audience. That made a difference to me. They didn't know me at all, I'm a name on a book that they would not recognize. So I knew that when I won that, that said that my work was a good work. And that meant a lot to me as an author.
00:45:54 / #: In terms of, I guess, the thing that makes me feel like I've made an impression in the publishing and the world of queer fiction is all the authors that I've published and how well they've all done. They have surpassed me on every level hundreds of times. And when people say, "What's your legacy?" That's my legacy. They are. And so it doesn't matter if I'm forgotten, they won't be, because there's too many of them.
Jennifer Prokop 00:46:28 / #: When we do think about your books though, do you think there's a hallmark of what makes a Radclyffe romance?
Radclyffe 00:46:35 / #: I've thought about that because we talk about branding a lot, and I think so. I remember that I read at the York Lesbian Arts Festival in the UK or in the mid-2000s I guess, and I read, and the person who was moderating said, "Oh, it's all about the characters for you, isn't it?" And I looked at her and I said, "Of course," because I think that is, to me, what it's all about is the characters. And I think that that's what pulls the reader in and holds the reader.
00:47:11 / #: So I think that they remember. I know that readers remember my characters because they write to me and they talk about them by name, like they're real people. I think that when I think of my work, then I don't know that readers will actually recognize it, but I write archetypes. I specifically write hero archetypes, and I always have. And that gets back to the little kid who wanted to be the sheriff and who wanted to be the one.
00:47:39 / #: I wanted to put women in positions of authority and power. So I write about positions of responsibility more than power. I like to write about people who are responsible for others at cost to themselves. To me, that makes a hero. So many of my works, and they're not all military or law enforcement, but they're people who have assumed responsibility and they're generally wounded. So I write wounded heroes who are saved by love.
Sarah MacLean 00:48:10 / #: I love it.
Radclyffe 00:48:11 / #: Because that to me is a romance. That's what I wrote, read as a kid, and that's what I write. I mean, is there anything better than that?
Jennifer Prokop 00:48:18 / #: No.
Jennifer Prokop 00:48:20 / #: I'm a simple woman.
Radclyffe 00:48:21 / #: Yeah, totally.
Jennifer Prokop 00:48:22 / #: No, is the answer.
Sarah MacLean 00:48:24 / #: So do you have a book that is the most popular with your readers? You have one that is a fan favorite?
Radclyffe 00:48:33 / #: I totally do. I totally do. I mean, they always-
Jennifer Prokop 00:48:36 / #: And we all do. We all make that face.
Radclyffe 00:48:39 / #: And is it like one of the first ones you ever wrote?
Jennifer Prokop 00:48:40 / #: It's the first one.
Radclyffe 00:48:43 / #: Because mine is, yeah. And it's like, "What happened after that? You just fell apart?"
Jennifer Prokop 00:48:48 / #: This makes me feel better.
Radclyffe 00:48:50 / #: Mine is Fated Love. I wrote it. It was one of the first ones that was really widely disseminated, so that may be part of it, but it was published in 2004 and absolutely almost everybody picks that book.
Jennifer Prokop 00:49:07 / #: I'm going to tell you two why you all are crazy. It's because when a person who has been reading for a long time decides to finally write a romance what they are doing, and every single person who has gone on to write many books after that first one has said, "I wrote in this book the things I wanted to see."
Radclyffe 00:49:30 / #: It's true.
Jennifer Prokop 00:49:32 / #: And I am going to tell you right now, that is why they resonate with readers, not because it's the best book you've ever written, because it is the book of your heart. And our hearts are all looking for a lot of similar things. So it's not that we don't think you've grown and changed and written great books. It's that first book is often so steeped in the kind of longing for the story that you desperately wanted to read. That is why we love them.
Sarah MacLean 00:50:02 / #: It is, it's a love letter.
Radclyffe 00:50:03 / #: So why can't we do it again?
Jennifer Prokop 00:50:04 / #: I know, "What have you done for me lately, Jen?"
Radclyffe 00:50:06 / #: Why aren't we doing that every time?
Jennifer Prokop 00:50:07 / #: Well, because, look, then you all are like, "Okay, but now there's a market and now there's the possibility of disappointing readers. And now I have to find new readers." It's, right-
Radclyffe 00:50:16 / #: And I have to write better sentences.
Jennifer Prokop 00:50:18 / #: Yes.
Sarah MacLean 00:50:20 / #: That's nonsensical.
Radclyffe 00:50:20 / #: And I have to pay attention to my point of view.
Sarah MacLean 00:50:22 / #: Exactly.
Jennifer Prokop 00:50:23 / #: Sorry.
Sarah MacLean 00:50:23 / #: Head hopping, what's that?
Jennifer Prokop 00:50:24 / #: Sorry for explaining the world to you two. I don't know what is even going on.
Radclyffe 00:50:30 / #: It's the first book I wrote with a kid, and I think that it was one of my earliest books, but I didn't want to write children because I was absolutely certain that I couldn't write children, but I decided that I would. Not a young child, but I think when I started, she was nine. I've written five in this universe since then because these characters are so popular.
00:50:51 / #: And it was a book about family, and I think that that's what people really loved. I mean, it was a romance, a really emotional romance, but it was also about family and community. So it hit a lot of buttons. That's the one that people like the most. I think one of your questions was, if I could pick one book to be remembered by, I think it would be one of the ones I wrote most recently, because I think it's better written. So I'd rather be remembered by that. And it also kind of comes full circle for me. It's my take on du Maurier's Rebecca, which is one of the most formative books of my life. I read a lot of gothic romance when I was young.
Sarah MacLean 00:51:38 / #: That's why you love a wounded hero, Radclyffe.
Radclyffe 00:51:40 / #: Totally.
Jennifer Prokop 00:51:41 / #: Serious, hello?
Sarah MacLean 00:51:41 / #: Right there. That's imprinted on you.
Jennifer Prokop 00:51:46 / #: Okay, is the cover a woman running away from a house? Because-
Radclyffe 00:51:47 / #: It should be.
Jennifer Prokop 00:51:47 / #: ... that is my paragram.
Radclyffe 00:51:47 / #: No, it isn't. As a matter of fact, it's this one right here. It's this one.
Jennifer Prokop 00:51:56 / #: Unrivaled, yeah.
Radclyffe 00:51:56 / #: It's a medical romance, but it has many of the themes of Rebecca. Actually, the other one is Jane Eyre. And one of the first books I wrote is called Love's Melody Lost. So one of the very first ones I wrote is based on Jane Eyre, and this one is du Maurier, 66 books just there in between. But yeah, I really like gothic romances.
Sarah MacLean 00:52:22 / #: Well, the book is Unrivaled. Because you feel like Bold Strokes is such a part of your legacy, I wonder if you could talk... I have the same question about Bold Strokes that I did about your own books. Is there one moment of Bold Strokes that you can point to as, "This is the time when we knew we would succeed at this, we knew that we could make this work. This is the book that we knew or the author?" Is there some sort of turning point for you that you can point to? The answer may be no, but-
Radclyffe 00:52:57 / #: I think the answer is no. Really. It's an organic sort of body of people and work that simply has grown and never stopped. But from the very beginning when there were just five of us and then there were 10 of us, and then 25 of us, we were connected. And I think that that's what made me realize and our books were really good and people really liked them. And I think the success of our early titles sort of confirmed for me that we were on the right road.
00:53:36 / #: And we've continued to really push and have a lot of the most popular authors that are publishing, writing queer stuff today. And we're expanding all the time, and we have many more diverse authors and diverse stories. So we're growing. We never have stagnated.
Jennifer Prokop 00:53:54 / #: So you talked about the discoverability problem and print on demand. And so when the Kindle came online, when eBooks really became a thing, and for those of you who are five years old or whatever, I'm sorry, I don't mean that I'm old. I remember for years they were like, "There's going to be digital books one day," and we were all like, "Whatever." And then boom there were. Did that help with discoverability? Did that change your business model when books became available directly to people?
Radclyffe 00:54:25 / #: Yeah, totally. Actually, I'm a big numbers person. I believe in the numbers. And so I've looked at a lot of these things and presented some of these things. And when the Kindle came out, and then the iPad shortly after, it became very apparent to me that we needed this platform. And I asked our eBook tech, who at the time was just making PDFs that we were selling from a web store. So I got a contract with both Amazon and iTunes right away, and I said, "Tony," I said, "We need to convert our catalog." Well, we had 800 titles then, and she did it in six weeks.
Sarah MacLean 00:55:06 / #: What?
Jennifer Prokop 00:55:07 / #: Oh, wow.
Sarah MacLean 00:55:08 / #: That's unbelievable.
Jennifer Prokop 00:55:09 / #: And there you go, right? There you go.
Radclyffe 00:55:13 / #: And see, when you're an independent publisher, you can move.
Sarah MacLean 00:55:15 / #: So nimble. Yeah.
Radclyffe 00:55:15 / #: The next year, we saw a 30% increase in our backlist sales, in our backlist title sales.
Sarah MacLean 00:55:21 / #: Now what year do you feel like this was?
Radclyffe 00:55:25 / #: 2010, 2011.
Sarah MacLean 00:55:26 / #: Yeah, it was right. I mean, that felt like that it was electric that time.
Jennifer Prokop 00:55:30 / #: It was electric.
Sarah MacLean 00:55:30 / #: And it was the Wild West in a lot of ways in that if you had a Kindle or if you had a Sony eReader, which is what I had to start, you were just reading whatever there was. I mean, I think people who now come to romance and come to independent publishing have no frame of reference for how little there was at the beginning, which is why so many of these authors and publishers who were on the early crest of this wave-
Jennifer Prokop 00:56:02 / #: Early adopters.
Sarah MacLean 00:56:03 / #: ... were making so much money. I mean, because we would read everything.
Radclyffe 00:56:09 / #: The thing that was so important for us is that we could reach the community that didn't have access to us before. It's been both a blessing and a curse for queer publishing because I think that digital publishing has destroyed the network of queer bookstores. In the '70s and '80s and '90s, there were probably 1,200 feminist and queer bookstores in the United States, and now there's probably less than 10. I mean, they just cannot survive because there's not enough concentration of readers.
00:56:48 / #: Womencrafts in Provincetown is one of the oldest still existing, and I mean, they're still going strong, but Giovanni's is gone. I mean, in all the major cities, they're gone. Because there's not enough in that one place to buy print. So we're reaching more readers, but it's flipped the paradigm. So eBooks are selling much more than print, which is true for genre fiction and romance in particular, which everybody knows. And that's a loss. That's a tremendous loss for us not to have those bookstores anymore.
Sarah MacLean 00:57:23 / #: Where is the community finding books?
Radclyffe 00:57:26 / #: Well, they find them online like most readers, but very fortunately for us, they find them with us because we have our own web store. We send out all our new release newsletters, we discount our titles so that they can find them. We do daily bargains. We do every possible thing we can to get our books to our readers. But interestingly enough, the vast majority of readers are still getting them outside of our direct connections. They're still getting them. They're looking on the internet. They're hopefully going to bookstores and finding them there, because we still do release all of our titles in print and libraries. We have a pretty good library distribution, both eBook and paperback. So they find them the way everybody else finds them.
Sarah MacLean 00:58:19 / #: Yeah, but it is sad to lose the community of booksellers.
Radclyffe 00:58:23 / #: It's very tough.
Sarah MacLean 00:58:25 / #: And also, we didn't talk about this, but you have one of the largest collections of lesbian romance in the world, in your house, behind you.
Jennifer Prokop 00:58:35 / #: [inaudible 00:58:35 / #] behind you.
Radclyffe 00:58:35 / #: There's 2,000 books right there behind me.
Sarah MacLean 00:58:38 / #: I feel like we should take a picture of this. I'm going to take a picture of you. Let's take this, yeah.
Radclyffe 00:58:42 / #: This is a little tiny piece of the set, eight bookcases, that I started collecting every single one that I could find throughout the country after that first book in 1972. And then I went back and found some of the older ones. And then very honestly, probably eight or nine years ago, one, I ran out of space. Number two, very happily, there were so many coming out that I couldn't read them all at once.
Jennifer Prokop 00:59:08 / #: You couldn't do it anymore, yeah.
Radclyffe 00:59:08 / #: And so a lot of them now, I just read on Kindle or I read on the iPad, but I have them, they're 40 years old now, some of them. But this is the lifeblood behind me. This is what, for our community-
Sarah MacLean 00:59:28 / #: This is what you've bathed in the blood of?
Radclyffe 00:59:29 / #: ... this is life giving. That's I am bathed in the blood.
Sarah MacLean 00:59:31 / #: I love that.
Jennifer Prokop 00:59:35 / #: Well done. What a way to end.
Sarah MacLean 00:59:38 / #: Radclyffe, this was amazing. Thank you so much for joining us.
Jennifer Prokop 00:59:38 / #: It was amazing.
Sarah MacLean 00:59:41 / #: Thanks for telling us your stories.
Radclyffe 00:59:43 / #: I hope it was enjoyable for everybody who's listening too.
Jennifer Prokop 00:59:48 / #: If people aren't interested in this, then they just aren't us because I can't get enough of it.
Radclyffe 00:59:53 / #: I know, I could talk about it forever.
Jennifer Prokop 00:59:53 / #: Forever. Forever.
Sarah MacLean 00:59:56 / #: Yeah, yeah. I have a feeling that every one of these interviews is just going to be-
Jennifer Prokop 01:00:03 / #: They're amazing.
Sarah MacLean 01:00:04 / #: ... better than the next. It's crazy how great they all are.
Jennifer Prokop 01:00:07 / #: It really is amazing. I think one of the things that really struck me, there are so many about this conversation is once again, the real importance of representation.
Sarah MacLean 01:00:18 / #: Yeah, and also the idea of how she thinks about her own books and the archetypes that she writes, reflecting herself and other people. And talk about somebody who understands why she's sitting down every day. And I think that is a struggle for some of us, but it's not for her. And interestingly, I mean not to spoil who else we have coming and what else we have planned, but I think one of the things that I'm already seeing just so early in the conversations that we're having is these people all know why they sit down every day, and that is a huge piece of the puzzle, I think.
01:00:56 / #: I do just want to shout out, also, we talked about this during the Sandra Brown episode or after the Sandra Brown episode, but again, this sense of community. This idea that the work for so many of these trailblazers is to lift up other voices and to help other people come to the table. And that's really cool.
Jennifer Prokop 01:01:15 / #: This question of the losing of queer bookstores, we talk a lot about, okay, the Kindle revolution has meant that your reading can be private, but that in this particular case, it has also taken away a space that has been so powerful in the queer community.
01:01:37 / #: And when she talked about not being able to put books on the shelves in P-Town, right? And so that whole question of books on the shelves is one, I think, that you and I offline talk about all the time, "Where are people finding romance on the shelves?" And that is something that is even more urgent. And I think really is so interesting to hear that perspective from Radclyffe.
Sarah MacLean 01:02:04 / #: Well, and this idea of losing queer bookstores being scary in a lot of ways. Like this idea that these bookstores, and we all know this intuitively as readers, that bookstores, libraries, these are usually safe spaces for us to do our exploration around identity. But for queer kids, for LGBTQIA+ kids, these are spaces that when they're lost, they are a loss, a more powerful loss.
Jennifer Prokop 01:02:36 / #: This is also one of our first Trailblazer episodes where someone had a really different full-time job and was writing on the side. So you don't know who else we've interviewed or those people didn't talk about their other job. But being a doctor and then becoming a romance writer is sort of just for-
Sarah MacLean 01:02:58 / #: And publisher.
Jennifer Prokop 01:02:59 / #: And publisher, right? And so that journey, I think also just goes to show that romance is so powerful for so many people that it's a way of really expressing something that's deep in our hearts. And I was just really interested in hearing that, I really liked that.
Sarah MacLean 01:03:21 / #: Can I also say Radclyffe was the first writer we've had who we've talked across all four seasons where we talked about writing, and she spoke about it as something that she did to relax that she never expected anybody to look at?
Jennifer Prokop 01:03:40 / #: Right, right.
Sarah MacLean 01:03:41 / #: And I'm really charmed by that. And I know that she's not the only one out there, but often we fall into this mythology of like, well, people write in order for other people to read. But Radclyffe was really writing for herself first. And I think that also gets back to this question of representation and identity and experience. But I think that's really fabulous. And I think if you're out there and you're just writing for yourself, that's fine too.
Jennifer Prokop 01:04:08 / #: Yeah, and I think one of the things, and we have had Christina and Lauren on to talk about FanFic. We have talked with Adriana and Alexis who are also big FanFic people. And Adriana especially has talked really explicitly about how fan fiction, these are spaces where marginalized characters can get the full treatment of their humanity.
01:04:33 / #: And so it was also really interesting to think about the ways in which those are avenues where we are going to have so many amazing writers coming up through as, "I wrote this for me, because I wanted to see these characters have a happily ever after, or I wanted to see them experience love the way I feel love." So just really, I think, that was not a surprise to me at all to hear that she'd had a little dabbling in FanFic also in her story.
Sarah MacLean 01:04:59 / #: Yeah, those cowboy books. I love it, I want them. Anyway, everyone, this is Fated Mates. You have been listening to a Trailblazer episode. We're doing those in addition to our regular read-alongs and interstitial episodes over the course of season four and maybe beyond.
01:05:16 / #: We're trying very hard to add to the romance history here, along with other podcasts that are doing the same thing. You should head over, speaking of other podcasts that are doing the same thing, to Julie Moody-Freeman's Black Romance podcast where she has been doing this for several seasons with Black romance writers.
01:05:34 / #: And you can otherwise hang out with us, FatedMates.net. You can find us on Twitter and Instagram at FatedMates and at FatedMatesPod respectively. You can find gear and stickers and links to other cool stuff at the website. And otherwise, head over to your pod catching app, your favorite one, and like and follow us there. And you will never miss an episode of us in your ear holes.
S04.04: Ravished by Amanda Quick: The difference between fossils and Fossils
At some point, we were going to have to talk about fossils, right? Ravished is the bluestocking book that started it all for Sarah, and an absolute classic for Jen. On the reread, we absolutely loved it, which just goes to show that Amanda Quick (aka Jayne Ann Krentz) is a total legend. We’ll talk about the appeal of big heroes who know what they want and just go for it, about how difficult it is to write two people who genuinely enjoy each other’s company from the jump, about how awesome it is when a heroine is totally down with doing it in a cave, and about the broad appeal of greatcoats.
Our next read along is Uzma Jalaluddin’s Hana Kahn Carries On. Find it at: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books, Kobo, or at your local indie.
Sponsored by Radish: Bottomless content; one cute app. Visit radish.social/fatedmates for 24 free coins and to read your first Radish story.
Show Notes
Ravished was originally published in 1992 by Jayne Ann Krenz, who has a lot of pen names, including Jayne Taylor, Jayne Bentley, Stephanie James and Amanda Glass. Now she publishes under 3 names: Jayne Ann Krenz (contemporary), Jayne Castle (PNR), 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.”
The Bluestocking archetype is about a woman who is interested in science and learning in her own right, and is a reference to the Bluestocking Society, which was founded in the 1750s by Elizabeth Montagu and Elizabeth Vesey.
Some hallmarks of a gothic novel are “the discovery of mysterious elements of antiquity” and also handsome men in great coats.
All about the waltz and why it was so scandalous.
Jen’s thread about fossils, which are just a McGuffin.
Maybe you are more interested than Jen and would like to learn about how to fake a fossil.
Author Vanessa Riley is committed to reviving bananas regency names for men. In A Duke, The Lady, and a Baby, the hero’s name is Busick.
S04.03: Secret Baby Interstitial
We’re doing a big one this week — secret babies! We’re talking the babies and the pregnancies—and why they are such a juggernaut in romance. We’re talking about why people are all in on secret babies or absolutely all out on them, we’re pinpointing the itch they scratch and why have they installed such buttons in so many of us, and we’re getting to the bottom to why these secret babies are often sired by billionaires. It’s a ride.
Next week, our first read along is Amanda Quick’s Ravished—which Sarah describes as “Harriet, in a cave, with a rake.” It’s great. Get reading at: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books, Kobo, or at your local indie.
Sponsored by Radish: Bottomless content; one cute app. Visit radish.social/fatedmates for 24 free coins and to read your first Radish story.
Show Notes
The secret baby trope can be broken down into secret baby or secret child. Secret pregnancy is just earlier on the timeline, while surprise pregnancy. Often, a secret baby plot happens because there is a fear that the baby is in danger.
More about the word Interstitial.
We recently re-released our bodily autonomy interstitial from 2019.
If you are on Facebook, join Sarah’s OSCRB group (Old School Romance Book Club) if you want more romance talk.
On some old school covers, you see lots of people with gravity defying hair.
Sarah mentioned the “Four Js” and she meant these old school historical romance powerhouses: Johanna Lindsay, Jude Deveraux, Julie Garwood, and Judith McNaught.
The most dangerous third rail in romance is cheating.
More about “the heir and the spare.”
The Right Stuff is a movie about astronauts, but Terms of Endearment is the movie where Jack Nicholson plays an astronaut. The movie was released in late 1983, and Long Time Coming was released in 1988.
The Cut went ahead and published two pieces about Sally Rooney’s latest book, and they loved the sex in Rooney's book and think folks want more, but somehow they’ve never heard of genre romance.
Given that description of the book Sarah was looking for, Jen thinks if it exists, it could have been a Harlequin Blaze, rather than a Loveswept or a Desire. But who knows!
Next week, we’re reading Ravished, a 1992 historical about fossils by Amanda Quick. Yes, actual fossils.
S04.02: Sandra Brown: Trailblazer
The Trailblazers conversations begin this week with the brilliant, fearless Sandra Brown—aka Erin St. Clair and Rachel Ryan. We talk about everything from her first books, acquired by Vivian Stephens for Candlelight Ecstasy, about how Slow Heat in Heaven was her personal game changer, about the beginnings of romantic suspense, and about what makes a Sandra Brown novel, the most recent of which, Blind Tiger, was released last month.
Thank you to Sandra Brown for taking the time to talk to us, and share her story.
We’ve got an interstitial episode coming your way next week, but our first read along (in two weeks) is Amanda Quick’s Ravished—which Sarah describes as “Harriet, in a cave, with a rake.” It’s great. Get reading at: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books, Kobo, or at your local indie.
You have two weeks to read, but in the meantime, sit back, relax, and let us give you a preview of what's to come! Don't forget to like and follow in your favorite podcasting platform!
Show Notes
Welcome to our first trailblazer, romance legend Sandra Brown. Her latest release is Blind Tiger, which was her 73rd book on the New York Times bestseller list. Blind Tiger is a thriller set in Texas during the 1920s.
Prohibition went into effect on January 1, 1920. In Texas, the town of Glen Rose was the Moonshine Capital of Texas.
The Ford Model T was the first mass produced American car. Here’s a video of the actual driving experience of the 1915 model. If you’d like to see a bunch of Model Ts in the same place, you can visit the winter home of Thomas Edison in Fort Myers, Florida. Henry Ford visited so often that he eventually bought the home next door. Prohibition and moonshining gave birth to NASCAR.
Sandra’s first books were bought by Vivian Stephens for Candlelight Ecstasy under the pen name Rachel Ryan. She wrote for Silhouette under the name Erin St. Clair, and for Pocket as Laura Jordan. Carolyn Nichols at Loveswept wanted authors to use their real names, and now all of Sandra's books have been rereleased under her own name.
Sandra appeared on the cover of one of her own Loveswepts, The Rana Look, with actor Mclean Stevenson.
Some of the romance authors Sandra mentioned: Paris Afton Bonds, Candace Camp, Mary Lynn Baxer, Nora Roberts, Jayne Ann Krentz, Barbara Delinksy.
Some of the thriller/mystery writers Sandra mentioned: Helen MacInnes, Evelyn Anthony, Gayle Lynds, David Morrell, and Lee Child.
Sandra Brown 0:00 / #
I think there were several of us who say, hey, we have romance roots, but we still love the mystery. We still love the suspense, we still love wartime books, or we still love, you know, spy novels, and so the way I felt about it was that the attraction heightens both elements of the story, because you're never more afraid than when someone you care about is in danger.
Jennifer Prokop 0:28 / #
That was the voice of Sandra Brown.
Sarah MacLean 0:32 / #
Welcome, everyone, to Fated Mates. I'm Sarah MacLean. I read romance novels, and I write them.
Jennifer Prokop 0:37 / #
I am Jennifer Prokop. I am a romance reader and editor.
Sarah MacLean 0:41 / #
And this week, for our first Trailblazer episode of Season Four, we are absolutely beyond thrilled to have had a conversation with absolute fucking legend, as Tom Hardy would say, Sandra Brown.
Jennifer Prokop 0:59 / #
We recorded with Sandra, in August, I think.
Sarah MacLean 1:04 / #
That sounds right.
Jennifer Prokop 1:05 / #
And we will be talking with her today about her life in romance, about her new novel Blind Tiger, about her many, many, many New York Times bestsellers, and just about all the amazing history and story she has, as a romance writer, and how she started in the business and where she is now.
Sarah MacLean 1:28 / #
I think that was the best part of the conversation. This sense that we were talking to somebody who knew everything. Had been there from the start, and really had a lot to say about how the genre has grown and where the genre was and where it could be.
Jennifer Prokop 1:45 / #
So without further ado, here is our interview with Sandra Brown. Enjoy it as much as we did everyone.
Sarah MacLean 1:57 / #
Well, we are thrilled to have with us Sandra Brown. Welcome Sandra.
Sandra Brown 2:02 / #
Thank you very much, Sarah and Jen, I've looked forward to this.
Sarah MacLean 2:07 / #
Well, we're super excited about Blind Tiger, which is, did I see correctly on your Instagram? It is your 73rd New York Times bestseller?
Sandra Brown 2:16 / #
As of yesterday, I found out that it will be on the Times list a week from Sunday, but we find out like 10 days before, as you know, and so yeah, like last night, we had a little celebration here because it's officially my 73rd New York Times bestseller.
Sarah MacLean 2:38 / #
Wow! I mean, living the dream!
Sandra Brown 2:41 / #
Well, thank you. I've been very fortunate and all the people that I've worked with, and my fans have followed me from, you know, one genre to another, one type of book to another, shorter books, longer books and Blind Tiger was the longest book I've ever written.
Jennifer Prokop 3:00 / #
Oh, interesting.
Sandra Brown 3:02 / #
Yeah. So it and in itself, it was so different because I kind of switch, you know, time periods. I went back 100 years. So that was kind of a, you know, leap of faith and a trust that my readers would follow me, and so I'm pleased to say so far it looks like as though they are.
Jennifer Prokop 3:24 / #
So what was it like to go back and do research for a historical again, especially in 1920? Which is, you know, you wrote historical historicals in romance, but to have 1920 be the year.
Sandra Brown 3:38 / #
It was hard, actually, but the reason I did is because when it got time last year, to begin my next book, I thought, how do you write a book where people are wearing masks and the news was so bad every night and I hated even watching the evening news because it always left me so depressed and in a bad mood, and I thought, you know, I want some escape, and I figured if I felt that way that readers would feel that way. So that what was happening 100 years ago, and lo and behold, things aren't that different. (laughter)
Sarah MacLean 4:15 / #
I was going to say, so you went back to a different pandemic.
Sandra Brown 4:17 / #
Right, a different pandemic. There was another women's movement that resulted thankfully and separate. Soldiers were coming home from a very unpopular foreign war with post traumatic stress, but they didn't even know the name -
Jennifer Prokop 4:34 / #
Have a name for that.
Sandra Brown 4:35 / #
At that point in time, and as if things aren't bad enough, nobody could buy a drink because Prohibition had gone into effect January 16th of 1920. So then I did, I just researched what was happening prohibition in Texas, which is where I live and who knew, but 50 miles down the road from where I have lived most of my life, was a town that was nicknamed the Moonshine Capital of Texas. (laughter)
Sarah MacLean 5:09 / #
Perfect!
Sandra Brown 5:09 / #
I thought, Little Glen Rose? And you know, had all these bawdy houses and speakeasies and a lots of moonshining, because geographically, it was perfect for it. So I started doing research on that, the more I got into it, the more fun I started having, but Jen, you asked me about the research. It was so fun in one way, but in another way, it's very time consuming, because I would have to stop and look everything up, you know, it was like, and at one point in time, I said, Laurel, my heroine, floorboarded her Model T. She drove a 1915 Model T, so after I'd written that scene, and I went back thought better do some deeper research how to drive a Model T.
Sarah MacLean 5:55 / #
Sure, because someone is going to email you about this car.
Sandra Brown 6:00 / #
And so, lo and behold, a Model T 1915 model had three pedals on the floor. One was the clutch on the left, in the middle was reverse, on the right is the brake. The accelerator was on the steering wheel. So you actually controlled your velocity, your speed, by levers on how much, you know, gas you gave it, was controlled by a lever on the steering wheel. So I could have made that really terrible mistake had I not gone back and checked that.
Jennifer Prokop 6:34 / #
Done that research.
Sandra Brown 6:36 / #
So I couldn't say that she floorboarded it. (laughter)
Sandra Brown 6:39 / #
My dad lives in Florida and we went to visit, I think it's Edison's Florida home, and there's a huge collection of Model T's there.
Jennifer Prokop 6:47 / #
And the whole time I was reading this book was really thinking, I wonder what it would be like if these moonshiners had access to a Ford F 150 instead? (laughter) Because these things, they really are small. I mean, it's really kind of a miraculous to think about, I mean, it seems so big and fast to them, but you know, to us.
Sandra Brown 7:10 / #
Well, one thing they did, and this was also interesting, Ford would sell the chassis, the main chassis, but people would adapt. Before they started making pickup trucks, per se, people would add beds onto their Model T and kind of customize them. So customizing your automobile is not a new science that we figured out this century. They were already doing it, and so they were very innovative even before Ford started manufacturing all these things. So all of these little facts, you know, came out and then the part about moonshining was really fun to research because most of the stories, the tales that people had to tell, I would just laugh out loud because you'd be like, you can't make this up! I mean it was wild, and in terms of the speed with which they had their cars to go, that's where NASCAR started was because the moonshiners.
Sandra Brown 7:18 / #
That's right. So our NASCAR came to be because moonshiners would soup up their engines to outrun the cars that lawmen had, and that's where NASCAR was born, in the Carolinas, actually, but yeah, so all of this was just fun. You know, it was, it was a fun departure, and I think from a creative standpoint, it's good for writers to try something different, to go at a different pace. I've always, throughout my career, just spanned 40 years now, but just to try something different to challenge myself. And I think the worst thing that a writer can do is to become complacent, and just rely on you know, their history in the marketplace, because the market is constantly changing. It's an evolution every day and it's a learning curve every day. So in order to keep up and to remain vital in the marketplace, I think it's good for writers to challenge themselves. I've never tried this, you know, wonder if I can do that, and at the same time, maintain the expectations of their readers. You know, so I think Blind Tiger, yes, it's set in another century, and yes, I had to do a lot of research on historical facts, but the bottom line is it still has, I believe, the trademarks of a Sandra Brown novel, that when one opens it and starts reading, they more or less know it's still a Sandra Brown novel.
Sarah MacLean 10:02 / #
Oh, 1,000%. We were talking about that before the interview, that we just, I felt like I just fell right into it, to the Sandra Brown world. One of the things that I think is really interesting about this, and you've written historicals before, this is not your first historical. People who listen to Fated Mates know that, and one of the things that I think about a lot as a historical writer is we tend to be judged. There's often a sense in the world that, oh well, when you're writing historicals, you're just writing, you're closing the door on current day and just writing the past, and I mean, we know that's not true. And one of the things that really echoed for me in this book was how current it felt in the sense of, as you said, a hero coming home from war, the Spanish flu. These kind of large scale things that felt so, it's almost impossible to read the pieces where, because Thatcher, our hero, has had the Spanish flu, and it's impossible to read that without thinking, oh my gosh, we're -
Sarah MacLean 11:06 / #
We're doing that now. So I wonder if you could talk a little bit about how modern the book is, too, in that sense. How are you thinking about the world that way?
Sandra Brown 11:16 / #
Yeah, well, thank you for that, but that's how I made my pitch to the editor. (laughter) Guess what? I want to do a historical, you know, and it kind of took him aback, and because he's only edited my contemporary, thrillers or suspense novels, and he said, "Well, like where to?" (laughter) "Where are you going?"
Sarah MacLean 11:44 / #
What are you doing, Sandra?
Sandra Brown 11:46 / #
And so I started drawing for him all of the parallels that we've talked about, and I said, and when you really get down to it, I said, Shakespeare would have made the same pitch to his editors, because the human condition does not change. It hasn't for millennia, you know, and so, when you, when you start talking about human emotions, they're all still there. Greed, lust, jealousy, rage, you know, sorrow, grief, all of these things are still identifiable by every human being, and so I think if you tell a story correctly, and if you reveal to your characters, the emotions, you know, to your readers, the emotions of the characters, then they're going to relate to that. Because if you have, if you lose someone dear to you, beloved to you, you're going to feel the same thing that someone did hundreds of years ago. You know, that hasn't changed. Human heart has not changed. And so even though our devices certainly have, and I can't tell you what a relief it was to write a book without everybody's cellphones. (laughter)
Jennifer Prokop 13:11 / #
I bet. I bet.
Sandra Brown 13:13 / #
Because I think technology, in some ways, has ruined suspense, because you can't make people disappear as easily as you used to. But in answer to your question, Sarah, the emotions, human emotions, if you tell a story well, and you really explore the mind and the heart of your characters, then the story should be relatable, no matter where it's at and what time period. And so I wouldn't give too much credence to someone who says well, you're leaving contemporary life behind, because when you strip it all away, we're people and we've been people for a long time, and we've experienced the same emotions at one point in our lives or another.
Jennifer Prokop 14:02 / #
Okay, so, my dad was a soldier in Vietnam, and one of the things Sarah and I have talked about, sort of over and over again, and I joke that if I ever got a PhD in romance, it would be about the Vietnam hero returning home. Is a lot of your early romances - most of them, featured men who were, who had been in Vietnam, and Thatcher is a man coming back from World War One, so is this something that is of particular interest to you? Or do you, like me, sometimes think this is just an American story? I mean, maybe it's a story everywhere, but a particularly American story, about a man coming home from war and not knowing where he fits in. Thatcher can't even afford to get home. They've taken his uniform from him, and I was really fascinated to think about that in parallel with some of your early romances.
Sandra Brown 14:57 / #
Well, that and that's true and I have to confess, I guess that's an accidental thing, Jen, because I don't really set out to make any kind of, you know, political statement. That's not my role. I'm a fiction writer. I tell stories, but it's interesting, now that you mentioned it, because I really, really hadn't thought of that. But I suppose because the Vietnam War was so, you know, part of my development, as when I was in, well, I guess, junior high, high school, college, and then early adulthood, I knew people that were lost, you know, in that war and, and it was so much of our culture, and it was so much of a culture change in our country. So I guess, in the background in my mind, that was omnipresent, didn't even recognize it, and it's interesting that you should say, because even recent books, the hero in Thick as Thieves is an ex-soldier. There have been many who have served. The character in Lethal, what was his name? Oh dear? Coburn! (she laughs)
Jennifer Prokop 16:23 / #
73 bestsellers later, you're gonna forget some names, right?
Sarah MacLean 16:26 / #
It's really fine.
Sandra Brown 16:27 / #
I have a little glitch every now and then. (laughter) Yeah, and so that influenced, you know, his character and how he was very tough and cold toward the world until he meets this little five-year-old girl who totally disassembles him. So it's, I think in the back of my mind, possibly, it's kind of that injured male, whether the injuries are physical or emotional or mental. It's kind of that, you know, the beast, that by the end of the book is more or less tamed, but there's a reason for the way he acts. And I think that war and war experiences, you know, play into that in some regard. But it's a subconscious thing. I really never had thought about it until you mentioned it, but now that you do, I can see, oh, there's a pattern there! Thanks for pointing that out.
Jennifer Prokop 16:32 / #
You're welcome.
Sarah MacLean 16:48 / #
It's interesting, because as I was reading Blind Tiger, and knowing we were going to have this conversation, I was thinking a lot about heroes in thrillers and mysteries versus heroes in romance and how that sort of loner archetype really fits both worlds, and what you, I think, do so beautifully, in all of your books, is you deliver your loner hero a community, in a lot of ways. And Thatcher, for me, feels like your romance roots, kind of delivering these thriller heroes a different kind of happiness at the end, a different kind of satisfaction.
Sarah MacLean 18:09 / #
But I also want to talk about your heroines, because for me, a Sandra Brown heroine always has a purpose outside of the hero. That has, I mean, as a reader that inspired me, as a writer. I said on Twitter the other day that you were one of the reasons why I write romance. I think your heroines have really kind of imprinted on me in a lot of ways, the DNA of the Sandra Brown heroine. You know, the heroine who is backed up against the wall, we love, Jen and I love a heroine backed up against a wall -
Jennifer Prokop 18:35 / #
100%.
Sarah MacLean 18:43 / #
Who ends up a bootlegger because that's the avenue and also she's super badass!
Jennifer Prokop 18:56 / #
The minute she learned to drive, but the whole part where she says too, I mean, there's a part, I wish I would have marked it, where she says, once she decided this was her task, she was going to be the best at it, and I was like, "There is a Sandra Brown heroine!"
Sarah MacLean 19:10 / #
That's the Sandra Brown heroine.
Sandra Brown 19:12 / #
Well, I have to admit, when I first pitched the book to my editor, and it was going to be Thatcher's story. It was going to be his story, but once I started writing it, as my characters typically do, they took over, and the book actually turned out to be Laurel's story. Because beyond not, you know, he changed careers from that of a cowboy, and we see the potential in him early on to do more than just go back to the ranch, you know, and do that and he would have been happy to do that for the rest of his life, but he didn't. When the book is ended, he's more or less the same individual that he was. He still thinks the same way, still got that laconic cowboy nature, that code of honor that he lives by. You know, I'm not gonna look for trouble, but you don't mess with me or somebody I care about, or you're going to be in trouble, and so we get that early on, and we still feel that at the end of the book. Laurel is the one who has the character arc. It became her book when she said, "You are teaching me how to drive." And her father-in-law starts sputtering and she says, "Today."
Jennifer Prokop 20:47 / #
Today. (laughter)
Sandra Brown 20:51 / #
We weren't going to and I thought, huh, she's kind of taken over this, and then I loved you know, all of the things that she does. The limbs that she goes out on.
Sarah MacLean 21:06 / #
I mean, the whole operation being her brainchild, the pies and the -
Sandra Brown 21:10 / #
It's not just to survive now, it's not just to put food on the table. It's I'm going to thrive, and if I'm going to do, if I'm going to be a lawbreaker, I'm going to be the best at it. And of course, and another element, which I believe it was one of the questions that that you were going to ask me, what makes a good romance, and we can get to that, but one of the main elements is that they need to be forbidden to each other. And so in every Sandra Brown book that I've ever written, I've tried to make it if he's a fireman, she's got to be an arsonist. For whatever reason, this cannot happen. They cannot possibly get together because they're on opposite sides of something. And in this instance, it was so obvious, you know, when I first started plotting it, and I thought, Okay, can I really do that with a heroine? Can I really do that? And yes -
Sandra Brown 21:21 / #
Laurel was like yes, you know, hell yes, if you're going to write me, then I'm going to take over. And she did. And, you know, I think every reader, I hope every reader, male and female, will admire her gutsiness. You know, they might not admire the enterprise, but they, I think they will admire and can identify with somebody who says, "Okay, I've been knocked down twice, really hard." And that doesn't even count her upbringing, her parents, you know, her domineering father. So, she's refusing and resolved never to depend on anyone to take care of her again, and I think that is a lesson in what contemporary women in our society are learning, is that you know, as much as you love somebody, as kind of someone is to you, but you need to be able, because you don't know what fate is going to throw on your path, you need to be able to take care of yourself. Not depend on other people, anyone.
Sarah MacLean 23:41 / #
It was a joy to read Blind Tiger, and to return to your books, to your historicals. I mean, as an adult, as an avowed, we did a podcast where I said it out loud, as an Another Dawn fan, here we go, yeah! A dusty Texas. I'm ready.
Sandra Brown 24:04 / #
So funny, a little backstory on that. I wrote Sunset Embrace, and I sent it into my editor at the time. They were published by Bantam, and my editor at the time, after a month or so had gone by and the book was in production, and she called me one day and said, "The ladies here in the office have a request." And I thought, you know, signing books for their aunts, their grandmothers, their moms, and she said, "They want you to write another book and make Bubba the hero." And I went, "Ah! Well, let me see what I can do."
Jennifer Prokop 24:54 / #
The ladies in the office always know.
Sarah MacLean 24:58 / #
They know.
Sandra Brown 24:59 / #
So I set out to plot Another Dawn, and it was difficult because I had to age him 10 years because, in Sunset Embrace, it was really kind of a coming of age book for him. So I had to age him 10 years, and I thought, "Do I really want a hero named Bubba? I think I'm going to have to give him a new name." (laughter) And so I did that, and then thinking of the plot, and the plot broke my heart, actually, and I think it broke the heart of a lot of readers.
Sarah MacLean 25:39 / #
Of a lot of readers.
Sandra Brown 25:40 / #
It was essential to his and Banner's book, you know, the plot development there. So anyway, thank you for the compliment. I love cowboys. I'm from Texas. I'm a sucker at cowboys, as Thatcher, as Thatcher is, you know. I loved his bow-legged walk and his cowboy hat and his spurs and all of that.
Jennifer Prokop 26:08 / #
Everything.
Sarah MacLean 26:11 / #
Same. Well, I would love to hear about your journey into romance, because we've talked on the podcast about how you were really there at the start of Harlequin American with Vivian Stephens. We talked about Tomorrow's Promise on the podcast.
Jennifer Prokop 26:25 / #
Loveswept.
Sarah MacLean 26:26 / #
Yeah, the early Loveswept books. So I wonder if you could give us a sense of, paint us a picture of those early years and how you became a romance writer.
Sandra Brown 26:36 / #
My first five books were for Vivian Stephens in another house in another line. It was called Ecstasy, and it was published by Bantam Doubleday Dell. And how all of that happened, first of all, I got fired from my job. And I was working in television, for the ABC affiliate here in Dallas, and they came through one day and fired all of us who were on-air contributors for this magazine show. They said they needed fresh faces. So God bless my husband, who's still my husband. He's put up with me all these years, but he said, "You know, you've always said you want to write fiction, and now you've got time and opportunity to do it." And I had two babies at home. I mean, they were toddlers, my children. And I said, "Gosh, but you know, I don't know how to, I don't know how to do that." He said, "You won't know if you don't try. And you can either keep talking about it or you can do it." So I sat down and proceeded to start writing, and he had a talk show. This is a long story. But anyway, he had a talk show in the morning. He interviewed all the authors who came in on tour. So one was a local woman who wrote romances. Her name was Paris Afton Bonds. She volunteered as a favor for him having her on his show, to read one of my manuscripts, and she said, "You ought to be writing romances." And I was like, "What's a romance?" I didn't know, but you know, and she said, "Well, like a Harlequin romance." And that Harlequin was the only show in town, and they were, of course, a British company, so most of their writers are British, but I went bought 12 or 15 of them, started reading them, I thought, "Yeah, I think I can do this." So I proceeded to and Paris invited me to go with her to Houston to a writer's conference.
Sarah MacLean 28:44 / #
Oh my gosh.
Sandra Brown 28:45 / #
And there I met a woman named Candace Camp.
Sarah MacLean 28:48 / #
Oh my god!
Jennifer Prokop 28:49 / #
Of course!
Sandra Brown 28:51 / #
Who had first published The Rainbow Season, and that was one of the best books I had ever read, and I loved it! I couldn't speak when I met Candace, Candy, I called her. I was just like, "Uhhh!" She wrote that book under a pseudonym, Lisa Gregory. So I met her at that cocktail party, and also at the cocktail party, I met a woman from a small East Texas town, that had a bookstore, Mary Lynn Baxter, who later wrote for Silhouette. And she said, "Well, I've read everything ever written, and I have the ear of every editor in New York. So when you get a manuscript you like, send it to me, and I'll read it and I'll tell you whether or not it's any good." So about three months later, she had given me your phone number, three months later, I called her and said, "Do you remember meeting me and dada - " and, "Yes! What have you written?" And I said, "Well, I'm going to send you something." And she called me a few days later and said, "This is exactly what a woman named Vivian Stephens is looking for, for a new line of romances called Ecstasy."
Sarah MacLean 29:56 / #
Oh my gosh!
Sarah MacLean 29:58 / #
I have shivers.
Sarah MacLean 30:00 / #
I know, this is the greatest story! Do you have five or six hours to stay with us? (laughter)
Sandra Brown 30:06 / #
Vivian bought my first book about two weeks later, and then 13 days, she said, "Do you have another one?" And I said, "Yeah, I'm finishing it up." And she said, "Well send it. Is it same orientation?" And I said, "Yeah." "Same level of heat?" And I said, "Yeah." So she, I sent it to her, and she bought my second book 13 days after the first one. So I sold my first two and then she bought the next three, and then she moved to Harlequin, and that's when she she bought Tomorrow's Promise. And so, by then, at that point in time, every publisher was developing their own line. Jove had a line called Second Chance, and I later wrote for them. Silhouette had a line - Pocket had a line called Silhouette, and then Silhouette Desire, and then, what was the other - anyway, ultimately, I was writing for four different houses under four different names, including my own.
Sarah MacLean 31:12 / #
The pseudonyms. I'd love to talk a little bit about that because, was it four different houses under four different names, because each House wanted a different name?
Sandra Brown 31:20 / #
Right, right. My first pseudonym was for Vivian for the Ecstasy line, and I used Rachel Ryan, because those are my children's names.
Jennifer Prokop 31:32 / #
Oh, okay.
Sandra Brown 31:33 / #
And it was a bribe. If you let mommy work, (laughter) and leave me alone -
Jennifer Prokop 31:41 / #
That's awesome.
Sandra Brown 31:42 / #
We'll go get ice cream, and I'll put your name on every page of the book. (laughter)
Sarah MacLean 31:49 / #
Oh my god.
Jennifer Prokop 31:51 / #
Perfect.
Sandra Brown 31:51 / #
I also felt Rachael Ryan sounded a whole lot more like a romance writer than Sandra Brown, but when I started writing for Carolyn Nichols, for the Loveswept line, Carolyn wanted to, instead of featuring the series, or making the series the selling point, she wanted the authors to be more spotlighted. She wanted the authors to be the prominent name and develop the trademark, of course, but also to really emphasize the individuality of the authors. And so she said, "I want to use your real name." And I said, "It's about time, too." You know, that idea. So that's the history.
Sarah MacLean 32:39 / #
So as we're talking about that question, I feel you you must know what's coming, but the Loveswept line, and them wanting readers to know authors, can we talk about this? Which is that Rana Look!
Sandra Brown 32:53 / #
You mentioned that to me. I had forgotten that. (laughter)
Sarah MacLean 32:57 / #
First of all, I love that you have forgotten this.
Jennifer Prokop 32:59 / #
Imagine being so cool that you forgot that you are your own cover model. That's all I have to say about that.
Sarah MacLean 33:07 / #
And we have lots of serious questions too.
Sandra Brown 33:10 / #
How did that come about? Honest and truthfully, I cannot remember. I just remember being asked.
Sarah MacLean 33:17 / #
I don't think you were alone, because I think Nora Roberts was also on one around the same time. I feel like they they did this with a few people.
Jennifer Prokop 33:25 / #
There were a of couple people, I think. There was another one, I can't remember the name though.
Sarah MacLean 33:28 / #
Beautiful writers got to play model.
Sandra Brown 33:31 / #
My hair has never been that long. (laughter)
Sarah MacLean 33:35 / #
I was going to say is this your actual hair?
Sandra Brown 33:39 / #
And I never had a dress that gorgeous either! So what I think they did, I think what they did is take our picture in that pose, and then they had, you know, the painting done, and it was a really pretty good rendition -
Sarah MacLean 33:57 / #
It's beautiful!
Sandra Brown 33:57 / #
Of my face, but I didn't have the hair -
Jennifer Prokop 34:00 / #
Flowing, locks.
Sarah MacLean 34:03 / #
We've talked about this on the podcast before, but this is McLean Stevenson from MAS*H, right?
Sarah MacLean 34:09 / #
Did you get to pick? Was he a favorite? Or were they just like, "Sorry, Sandra, you're going to have to be here with this guy."
Jennifer Prokop 34:14 / #
He's our local hottie.
Sandra Brown 34:17 / #
I don't know. I don't know how he got selected either.
Sarah MacLean 34:24 / #
He needed the press. He needed to hang out with you. He needed the glow up of Sandra Brown. So going back to those kind of early days, because we always think about that as it must have felt a little like there was an explosion of popularity, because prior to that it was so historic. We know that in the '70s it was big historical times, but this is really the burst of contemporary romance.
Sarah MacLean 34:48 / #
Did did it feel like it to you? Did you feel like you were on the precipice of something?
Sandra Brown 34:53 / #
Yes. In a way, because as I said, all of it up to that point in time, Harlequin published in London and in Toronto, and they had, I think the first American author that they bought was Janet Dailey. And I could be wrong on that, but I think that's right. And so it was like, well, duh, you've got a whole continent over here of women writers yet untapped. The competition among the houses, this is a great time to be starting, I've often said that I hit it at exactly the right moment in time, because the competition among the houses to sew up, you know, the Nora Roberts, the Jayne Ann Krentz, the Barbara Delinski, the -
Sarah MacLean 35:57 / #
Sandra Brown.
Sandra Brown 36:00 / #
I could go on and on and on, all the writers that, you know, came up out of this. And so it was very competitive among the houses to publish quickly. Well, I wrote like a frenzy all the time. I mean -
Sarah MacLean 36:18 / #
I was going to say -
Jennifer Prokop 36:19 / #
It must have been.
Sandra Brown 36:20 / #
When my kids got old enough to go to kindergarten and they were in school, because it was like I need to write without - so I think the year 1983, I think, which, oh gosh, that sounds so long ago. It was so long ago, but I think I had 11 books published.
Sandra Brown 36:46 / #
I had one a month except for one month, and so it was a juggling act. Each line, whether it was Silhouette, Loveswept, Second Chance, the American Harlequins, whether each line had nuances that were uniquely theirs, there was just something you know, a little bit different. And so I would tailor a story, if I thought of a plot, I would kind of tailor the story, oh, that would make a good Desire. Or, oh, that would make a good Loveswept. And then there were some differences in the lengths, so if a story was going to be a little bit longer, you know, I would tailor it. But it was a, kind of a juggling act. And I have to say, one lesson I learned early on, is I didn't talk about my business with anybody. I wouldn't share anything that I had spoken about with one editor with another. I kept very close counsel, and I wound up on speaking terms with everybody with whom I've ever worked. (laughter) I think one reason was because I didn't discuss my business, nor anyone else's with, you know, with anyone. So that might be a word of advice for a starting author. You know, hold your cards close to your vest and concentrate on your business and nobody else.
Jennifer Prokop 38:30 / #
One of the things that's really interesting, is you were just talking about how fertile a time it was for authors, but this is when, Sarah and I both kind of came up reading at this time. I mean, we were young. It's fine. It doesn't matter.
Sarah MacLean 38:45 / #
Barely even born.
Jennifer Prokop 38:46 / #
Doesn't matter. We were reading romances when we were 10, and I don't, I'm not sad about it. But I also think this was an incredibly, then fertile, time to come up as a romance reader. So can you - are there - do you have stories? Do you get letters from fans? These books mean something to people!
Sandra Brown 39:05 / #
Yeah, and it's so humbling. It really is. But before we had email and social media, you know, fan letters, I would collect them from the mailbox. And I would dedicate, you know, like one day a month to answer, you know, by hand, all of these letters. It took a lot of time, but right now social media takes a lot of time. So, you know, but I was always so touched by the stories that people would tell me about how my story affected them. And to this day, it's really humbling and gratifying and validating because I can bang my head against the wall, think nobody is going to read this crap. (laughs) This is just a, just another, unhhh! You know, trying to get it right. And I struggle with that. I struggle with the insecurity of I'll never write another, you know, sentence again. Every day I do that. But when you get a letter that says, "This touched me. It's such a needful time in my life." Whatever it is: an illness, the loss of a partner or child, or something really tragic. And they say, "Your books just saved me through this." And that's when it's like, you know, if that one person is the only person who took something from that labor that I put in, it was worth it. You know, it makes those long hours and days at the keyboard really, truly worthwhile.
Sarah MacLean 40:54 / #
We'll get to the shift, the way that you moved from romance, to thrillers, but I'm curious, particularly about readers and the separate genres, because it often feels when I'm at events, or you know, when Jen is at events, it often feels like people always say, "Oh, romance is totally different than everyone else." The thriller audience isn't like this. It doesn't become as personal. Do you, have you had that experience? Or because you're sort of still Sandra Brown? Your books still feel Sandra Brown-y. Do you still get the feedback?
Sandra Brown 41:28 / #
Sometimes, from really dumb people. (laughter) And I, you know, if someone says, "Well, I don't read those kinds of books." And I say, "Well, have you ever read one?" "No." "Well, then how do you know what kind it is?" (laughter)
Jennifer Prokop 41:46 / #
Right.
Sandra Brown 41:48 / #
You know, I'm less sensitive to it than I once was, because then in the same breath, they'll say, "Gosh, it but it must be really, you know, how do you write a book?" And I'll go, "Yeah, that's, that's kind of tricky." You know if it were easy everybody would be doing it, because the writer's life is a great life. So I kind of dismiss that anymore, you know, and, but because I know how hard it is, and my husband knows how hard it is, and my children and grandchildren know. And my colleagues that I care about deeply know how hard it is, and we commiserate. Sarah, you know how hard it is. And so it's, it's really, I just, I don't bother with that anymore. And also, I fall back on a book that really inspired me, and I thought, "You know what? You can combine thrillers and sex." And the book that did that for me was Eye of the Needle by Ken Follett. That was one of the sexiest books, because you talk about forbidden, and you talk about the isolation, which I always tried to build. You said you bring your character into a community and form a community around that character, is very insightful of you, because I do try to create a world where the rest of the world is kind of just disappeared. It's that world and the characters, it's a microcosm. They have good people, bad people, but their lives are really uninfluenced by much that's going on. It's within that tight community that they're orbiting. And so when I read Eye of the Needle, I thought, here they are. It's got all the elements I loved. They're alone on this island, nobody knows where. The communication is gone. The weather is prohibitive. They're forbidden to each other, and yet that allure, you know, just that allure, and of course, he's an assassin. He's a horrible person, but the love scene -
Sarah MacLean 44:30 / #
We're for it.
Sandra Brown 44:32 / #
You know, it's just great. And so I thought now if somebody like Ken Follett can do this - (laughs)
Sarah MacLean 44:41 / #
What if you did it!
Jennifer Prokop 44:42 / #
What if you did, right?
Sandra Brown 44:45 / #
So that book really influenced me a lot, in terms of you can mix the two, and it has to be, integrated into the story and when people are running for their lives, it's a little bit impractical and implausible to think, "Oh, timeout. We've got to have sex." You know, so - (laughter)
Sandra Brown 45:06 / #
We have a name for that, Sandra, "the danger bang!"
Sandra Brown 45:10 / #
(laughter) I've never heard that term before.
Jennifer Prokop 45:16 / #
You're welcome.
Sarah MacLean 45:18 / #
It's yours now.
Sandra Brown 45:21 / #
Here's the thing, and I've done questionnaires and things on this before and asked, did you realize you were creating a genre or helping create a genre? No. No. It was a subconscious thing and I'm given far more credit than I deserve, because I read Helen MacInnes. I read Evelyn Anthony. I read all of these writers, again, mostly British, who were writing basically books during the Cold War. It was after World War Two, but still that influence, you know, the Nazis, the spies, the all that, and they had wonderful sexy books! Especially Evelyn Anthony was a big influence on me, her books are amazing! And the tension, because here again, the forbidden, and so I really get more credit than I deserve, because I felt like I borrowed, you know, so much from them, from other writers, and from my contemporaries. I think there were several of us who saw, hey, we have romance roots, but we still love the mystery. We still love the suspense, we still love wartime books, or we still love, you know, spy novels, and so the way I felt about it was that the attraction heightens both elements of the story, because you're never more afraid than when someone you care about is in danger. Even more than yourself. So it heightens that suspense. It heightens please don't let anything happen, and it heightens the urgency. If this is going to be the only time we have, then we're going to make the most of it. So it heightens both elements. It heightens the relationship and it heightens the danger, because they work against each other, with each other.
Sarah MacLean 47:35 / #
As you're talking about this community of these other writers who were doing it at the same time as you, because there were, it felt like something broke, meaning the tide broke, and suddenly there was romantic suspense everywhere in the genre. Did you have a community of other writers who were doing the same thing? Who were the members of that community?
Sandra Brown 47:56 / #
Well, I have to say, I have to give credit to International Thriller Writers. I was asked very early on, Gale Lynds asked me, and David Morel, who I didn't know at the time, Lee Child, some of these that were saying, "Would you like to become part of this - we're going to form a league of writers called International Thriller Writers and we're breaking barriers." They did. I mean, it was like, we wanted to incorporate mystery. We wanted to incorporate suspense, it can incorporate fantasy, it can incorporate romance, but every book should be a thriller, no matter what book you're writing, it should thrill your readers. So they were very democratic, you know, in this organization, and I think they possibly as much, if not more, went out of their way to include writers from another genre that wasn't so steeped in espionage, or so, you know, which we called a mind thriller. They had horror writers. It was everybody, and so I really have to credit that organization a lot with bringing everybody in, and recognizing the contribution that women writers had made to the marketplace. They were really a fundamental group that brought to the publisher's attention, "Hey, we got all these great writers over here and guess what, you know, they're women!" (laughs) What a concept!
Jennifer Prokop 50:00 / #
When you look back on your career, is there a book that you can point to where you thought, "Oh, I, I'm feeling my direction change, and I'm moving away from straight romance." Or was it just really a smooth continuum for you? There's not a Slow Heat in Heaven was the one or whatever.
Sandra Brown 50:21 / #
Yeah, well it was Slow Heat in Heaven. (laughter)
Sarah MacLean 50:24 / #
There it is. That's the one we hear about all the time.
Jennifer Prokop 50:28 / #
All the time.
Sandra Brown 50:28 / #
Yeah. Yeah.
Sarah MacLean 50:29 / #
I mean, it's the book you hear about when somebody says, "Sandra Brown," if you're not us going, "Another Dawn! Tomorrow's Promise!" (laughter)
Sandra Brown 50:37 / #
It was kind of a breakthrough for me, but apparently for a lot of romance readers, it was like, "What happened to that nice girl we used to know?" (laughter)
Sarah MacLean 50:53 / #
Yeah! It was so gritty.
Sarah MacLean 50:54 / #
I can still remember where I was when I read Slow Heat in Heaven. I was in my sister's apartment in Waltham, Massachusetts, sleeping on an air mattress, and there I was.
Sandra Brown 51:06 / #
I've been to Waltham, Massachusetts! Anyway, I remember, I had finished the Texas! Trilogy. Lucky, Chase and Sage, who were the most, they were the most fun books I'd ever written, and they are in their 45th printing domestically. And so they have resonated with a lot of readers, and I love those characters, and they were so much fun. And I think I only wrote one other Loveswept after that. And then I had signed a contract with, it was the Warner books at the time, and they, I had kind of gotten to where I was, like, you know, I've got to stretch. I've got to do - I had written like 45 romances, and I thought I really want to kind of get past these boundaries that you know now, anything goes, but back then it was like, you know, you can't do this, you can't do gun play, you can't, you know, language had to be controlled, and there were certain plots, I was, as I said, always giving my editors heart attacks, because they were going, "(gasp) Sandra!" and you know, one of the characters in Texas! Trilogy, the plot, she was married, and when I told my editor I was going to do that, well, when I told my editor, who was Carolyn Nichols, and when I told her, I said, "I want to do these books from a male point of view." And she said, "Well, you can't do that." And I said, "Well, you kind of can." (laughs) I can!
Sarah MacLean 52:52 / #
Let me show you.
Sandra Brown 52:55 / #
They're thinking such wonderful things. I think this would be and I want to make them longer, and I will throw in a third book. I'll give you a woman point of view, I'll give them a bratty younger sister, and so that's where that came about and -
Sarah MacLean 53:14 / #
That's so fascinating. I mean, that changed the game!
Sandra Brown 53:18 / #
I had to fight for that, and when I told her that the heroine, you know, in Lucky was going to be married, she said, "Your readers will never forgive you, if you use, if you have an adulterous, you know." and I'll go, "Carolyn, how many books have I written for you? You're just going to have to go out on a leap of faith on this." And so, you know, made it that way. But when I, after I finished all those romances, I thought, I want to do something where I don't have any kind of parameter. I'm having to stay with that. No borders. No fences. So I signed this book with, this deal, with Warner, to write a standalone novel, and it was Slow Heat in Heaven, what became Slow Heat in Heaven. And from the get go, I loved Cash Boudreaux. And I said -
Sarah MacLean 54:15 / #
Same. Obviously.
Sandra Brown 54:17 / #
I said, "This is gonna be the Sandra Brown hero. It's the one that needs redeeming.
Sarah MacLean 54:24 / #
And did you know in the moment? Were you like, "Oh, I knew I was writing "the book.""
Sandra Brown 54:30 / #
The minute he showed up with that hoe across his shoulders and then he kills the snake. And I thought, "This is the Sandra Brown hero." And it's the one that, you know, needs love, that needs to be loved. It's hardened by life and the -
Sarah MacLean 54:54 / #
Poor baby. Poor baby. Also, someone else kills a snake.
Jennifer Prokop 54:58 / #
Thatcher kills a snake too. So you're going back to your roots. You might not know, but we do. (laughter)
Sarah MacLean 55:05 / #
We're paying close attention here.
Sandra Brown 55:07 / #
I thought it the minute he walked on the page, and a lot of people, you know, it took them so aback. The sexuality was a whole lot more graphic and everything, but I remember you had Susan Elizabeth Phillips on.
Sandra Brown 55:24 / #
And I definitely remember a, I guess it was Romance Writers of America, some writer's conference, where she and I were both attending, and I think that's first time I met her. I think it was. Maybe not, but anyway, we were both there, and we were very friendly. Love her. Still love her. Sterling lady. And she was making a speech at lunch. She was the keynote speaker. And she was going on about she said, "We as writers have to be fearless. We have to be fearless. We can't be inhibited by our own timidity." And that was her point, you know, be fearless. She said, "I have a post it note on my computer screen, "be fearless."" You know, take the chance. And she said, "Sandra Brown." (laughter)
Sarah MacLean 56:26 / #
She called you out.
Sandra Brown 56:27 / #
Strawberry shortcake is - (laughter) and she said, "She shocked us all with Slow Heat in Heaven." And she said romance readers all over the country were saying, "(Gasp!) How dare she?" And she said they couldn't get enough of it.
Jennifer Prokop 56:53 / #
How dare she. Can I have some more? Yeah.
Sandra Brown 56:56 / #
And so she said and it was kind of, it was definitely a turning point in my career, but it was also a book, that as you both have mentioned, kind of put readers back on their heels with what, I didn't know you could do this, you know.
Sarah MacLean 57:13 / #
It felt different.
Jennifer Prokop 57:14 / #
It did.
Sarah MacLean 57:14 / #
It was different. It's interesting because you brought up the Texas! Trilogy, and I feel like in Texas! Chase, which we did a deep dive episode on, so we read it and thought about it. You were moving into romantic suspense. There are too, there's a whole stalker -
Sarah MacLean 57:34 / #
Threadline through that book, and it's clear that that was the path you were on, even before.
Sandra Brown 57:42 / #
Yeah. I never felt like I've deserted the romance genre. I felt like I learned so much from writing the romances. First of all, when they were, when your page count was dictated you know, you had to be, I had to learn to get into the action immediately, join the scene in progress, and that didn't come with the first several books. I spent a lot of time you know, tiptoeing through the tulips and describing everything and showing off to the reader how much research I'd done about a place. Really what they wanted to know was when are they going to meet, what, you know, what's going on?
Jennifer Prokop 58:25 / #
When are they gonna kiss?
Sandra Brown 58:27 / #
I was learning.
Sarah MacLean 58:28 / #
It feels very real.
Sandra Brown 58:29 / #
And I got better at it, but little tools like that, that I had to learn when writing romance, I brought with me. I don't feel like I deserted anything, and as you say, the books always had shadings. I remember even my fourth book, A Treasure Worth Seeking, was about an FBI agent having to move into the heroine's apartment because her brother is escaped jail or something like that, and they're kind of hiding out hoping he's gonna show up. So there was always that, that thread in there.
Sarah MacLean 59:06 / #
So you move to Warner to publish Slow Heat in Heaven, and so I guess my question is, did you move to Warner because you knew Warner would let you do something that maybe romance wouldn't let you do?
Sandra Brown 59:20 / #
My agent kind of threw the idea out there, and they were the first to, you know, to really bite. I think I did a three book contract, my first one. The first two books, Slow Heat (in Heaven) and Best Kept Secret had basically had a terrible cover on it, and we had a meeting and I said okay, and what they had suggested is that if I was going to establish myself as as a, you know, more suspense or mystery, then perhaps I would rethink writing category romances. And that was a tough, that was a, it was a, that was tough to leave that safety net, than it was, you know, on the high trapeze without one, and I couldn't, you know, I had to make up my mind, and I thought, yeah, this is where I want to go. So that was a career decision. So we had this meeting, and it was so, it looked like a historical recycle cover that had been recycled from historical because you've got the heroine lying back with the bosoms falling out, and the shirtless hero with the biceps and everything, and so, and I said, "This is set on a horse training ranch. I haven't seen any body in West Texas who dresses like this." (laughter) And so I said, "No more bosoms and biceps." I said if you're going to ask me to kind of start edging away from the romance elements into more mystery and suspense, then you've got to give me covers. that also indicate that.
Sarah MacLean 1:01:24 / #
You have to help me succeed.
Sandra Brown 1:01:26 / #
That's exactly right. And so on Mirror Image, they did a completely different type of cover, and guess what? It was my first book on The New York Times bestseller list. So I made my point. And from then on, I didn't have to, you know -
Sarah MacLean 1:01:43 / #
Fight for it.
Sandra Brown 1:01:44 / #
I had a little bit more cool.
Sarah MacLean 1:01:47 / #
Was there any discussion of changing your name?
Sandra Brown 1:01:50 / #
No. No. I wanted to publish under Sandra Brown.
Sarah MacLean 1:01:54 / #
That's great. You hear other people having to, you know, make that switch. It still is a thing that people say in romance. You know, well, if you want to write something else, you need to change your name. I'm just going to tell everybody, "No. Sandra Brown didn't."
Jennifer Prokop 1:02:07 / #
Sandra Brown didn't, you shouldn't have to either.
Sandra Brown 1:02:10 / #
And that also is my real name.
Sarah MacLean 1:02:14 / #
That helps too. So let's talk about Sandra Brown, because we've already talked about you know, what makes the Sandra Brown romance a little bit, but what do you think, kind of is the hallmark of the Sandra Brown romance? What do you think saying to readers?
Sandra Brown 1:02:27 / #
Well I don't know about the same two readers, but I had a, I've worked this out over time. I have four elements to me that are critical, and in every book, and I've carried it over into the suspense novels, but the romance aspect of that. The first one is that the hero and the heroine must be codependent to solve their problem. In other words, they share a problem that each has to try and overcome. They're coming at it from different angles, and willingly, they have to work together in order to solve it. That's the first thing. So build in, if I can, a problem they're going to share, and they're dependent on each other. Not liking it at first, but that's the way it is. The second thing is they've got to share space, and this is the hardest thing to do. Because you got to keep them together. And that, you know, all of the peripheral characters in Blind Tiger, were a lot of people, but I tried as much as possible, even though Thatcher and Laurel were not living with each other. He kept showing up. He was always showing up.
Sarah MacLean 1:03:59 / #
I love it.
Sandra Brown 1:04:01 / #
And so I kept them together as much as possible, but in a romance novel, I think it's almost essential that they're on every page together. The desire is a given. It's going to be chemistry from the get-go. First time they see each other sparks are gonna fly, even though they don't demonstrate it. Sparks can fly in anger. but there's going to be that static electricity, you know, automatically. So that's a given. And then the one that we've touched on in this, I think is as important as any if not the, it can't be easy. They've got to be forbidden, for one reason or another. So you've got them a problem they've got to solve together. You've got them to share space. They're gonna have the desire but they can't give into it.
Jennifer Prokop 1:04:54 / #
This explains everything about the kind of romance reader, I mean, it's just hard wired right into my system. Because I say that a lot, a thing I struggle with, I think, in modern romances, they aren't trying to solve the same problem. They have separate problems, and I'm always like, okay, but I don't care. What are they doing together? And I know that makes me old-fashioned maybe, but I don't care. Solve a problem together. That's what I want to see you do.
Sandra Brown 1:05:18 / #
I think old-fashioned works, if it, you know, if it's written correctly. A contemporary book by contemporary writer and I read them and I love them, eat 'em up. And as I said, the human emotions have not changed. So, you know, we can go back and we can read, you know, books written hundreds of years ago, Dickens, Shakespeare, you know, Wilkie Collins, anybody, and those, those emotions are still there, identified.
Sarah MacLean 1:05:56 / #
I would love to hear - one of the questions we sent you, and I think it's so important for these interviews and for women in general, in publishing, is, when did you know you were Sandra Brown? Right? When did you know you were a big deal? Was there a moment when you were like, oh, no, I'm a thing. I'm leaving a mark.
Sandra Brown 1:06:17 / #
I can't wait for that day. Because I still feel, I mean, very much, a yeoman. I mean, I am, I work hard. And every day when I come to this computer, it's like, I've never done it before. I start from scratch every day. And so I know, I don't think of Sandra Brown as Sandra. In fact, my friends have heard me say before, my family has heard me say, frequently, I've got to go be Sandra Brown today.
Sarah MacLean 1:07:03 / #
A separate entity. Sure.
Sandra Brown 1:07:06 / #
It's like, you know, I don't fluff up every day. And so it's, it's like, I still consider myself, you know, just a, someone who works very, very hard, and has been blessed with the opportunities that I have been given and, and to be able to do what I love doing and, and make a living at it. And I know that a lot of people, you know, just take their jobs, but they're necessary. And I get to do what I love doing and get to have a job out of it. So I'm grateful every day and I never, I think the you know, it's really bad for a writer to start reading the press releases, because when you start getting complacent about what you are, you can get really lazy and so I face, I am very paranoid and very fearful that whatever talent, I don't even like to use that word, but I guess that's the word that has to suffice, but whatever storytelling ability that I may have had or forming a sentence or creating a character yesterday will have left me last night, and I live in the fear of being exposed as the biggest fraud that ever pulled off, you know, a hoax.
Sarah MacLean 1:08:39 / #
That just sounds like you're a writer. This is all very comforting for me, but I think we, Jen and I, will say you are obviously a legend to us and to many.
Sandra Brown 1:08:52 / #
Well, thank you. Thank you. That means a great deal, and I love to, to hear other, I mean, you know, I'm buddies with a lot of other writers and some are, you know, very fearful the same way I am. Some are very, you know, laid back something, you know, gosh, you know, isn't this fun, and I remember being, it was actually at George and Barbara Bush's home in Houston for a luncheon, for one her foundation's literacy programs. And Harlan Cohen and I were there and we had our spouses with us, this lovely lunch. And so we were outside in their garden, having our picture made with him and everything and he, you know, he's very, very tall, and he leaned down and he said, "Do you believe we get to do this?" And I said, "You know, I pinch myself all the time." I mean, telling my stories, writing my stories has enabled me to do amazing things, meet sports stars and movie stars and rock stars and go on two USO tours, an opportunity that would not have been afforded me, had I not been, you know, a writer. And so I'm forever grateful. But yeah, I don't look at you know, Sandra Brown the mom is just mom, believe me, Sandra Brown, the grandmother is just that, you know. And Sandra Brown, the one that goes to work every day is the different one that shows up to make a speech.
Jennifer Prokop 1:10:43 / #
So as we wrap up, though, one question that I think, it's just a reflective question, and you've seen this in advance is, when you think about your body of work, especially romance, since this is a romance podcast, although you're welcome to talk about any one of your books. Do you have a favorite? Do you have a book that you are especially proud of, or that you hope will outlive you?
Sandra Brown 1:11:08 / #
Well, I make, when I'm asked this in a public speech, public arena, I always say my favorite is the one that you're about to buy.
Jennifer Prokop 1:11:23 / #
Great answer.
Sarah MacLean 1:11:24 / #
But let's say you're asked for posterity.
Sandra Brown 1:11:29 / #
I think if, if I hadn't, well, of course, and this is not, I'm not being facetious on this, I was very proud of Blind Tiger. Because it was a, it was a different kind of book, and I hope it has long legs. I hope it, you know, lasts for a long time, I hope that word of mouth will spread, because it is a different kind of story, and it's kind of a yarn, you know, in a way and I want people to read it. I thought there was some very interesting character development in it and social implications in it, and so I'm proud of it. A book that comes around a lot is Envy. People - there's a lot of fan base that say Envy, you know, was one that I really loved. And so I think it might, it might live a longer time. And I think the trilogy will, just because they're so much fun. And they're still wanting an e-book. I can't get them an e-book, and because -
Jennifer Prokop 1:12:41 / #
Oh, yeah! 'Cause we had to order, I had to order paperbacks.
Sarah MacLean 1:12:44 / #
We had to read them in print. Why can't they be an e-book?
Sandra Brown 1:12:47 / #
Well, it's all contractual stuff. I hate that side of it, because, you know, well, I could comment more, but I'm not.
Jennifer Prokop 1:13:02 / #
I'm sure.
Sarah MacLean 1:13:03 / #
That's fine. You can come again, when you're ready.
Sandra Brown 1:13:06 / #
Let's put it this way. As soon as it becomes feasible, I would love to have them available to readers in e-book. Yeah. And I love people that read them. You know, in the whole volume, the one volume, because then they can read it like one thousand page book. Yeah.
Sarah MacLean 1:13:26 / #
I love, I mean, this is such a tiny, tiny thing, but that exclamation point really does a whole lot of work!
Sandra Brown 1:13:33 / #
You know what, I heard you comment on that.
Sarah MacLean 1:13:39 / #
Did you hear me call them sex-clamation points!
Jennifer Prokop 1:13:44 / #
We're teaching you all the good stuff.
Sandra Brown 1:13:47 / #
I may be wrong, but I think you attributed that to the publisher, and that was me! Because I thought when I can't just say "Texas Trilogy" because that doesn't say anything, and so I thought what if I put an exclamation point? And I did and so when I sent the manuscript in -
Sarah MacLean 1:14:08 / #
It's perfect.
Jennifer Prokop 1:14:09 / #
It is.
Sandra Brown 1:14:10 / #
I said now, the exclamation point is part of the title, and it's gonna be on all of the books. So yeah, that was my idea.
Sarah MacLean 1:14:18 / #
We're going to put, I'm going to put a special beginning on the text of that episode to make sure that we get this correct.
Jennifer Prokop 1:14:18 / #
Get it right.
Sarah MacLean 1:14:18 / #
I want to correct the record. Those exclamation points are glorious, and I love them very much.
Sandra Brown 1:14:30 / #
Thank you.
Sarah MacLean 1:14:31 / #
So this is sort of a separate question that I would love for you to answer. But is there anybody lesser known in romance, who, from, you know, who you think, as we're, Jen and I are planning to interview, you know, as many people as we can over the next few years for this kind of a conversation? Is there anybody who you absolutely think we have to talk to? And not just authors.
Sandra Brown 1:14:53 / #
I don't know who you have lined up? I think the contemporaries of mine that I mentioned before, I think Jayne Ann Krentz, because she writes multi-genre, and she does them all extremely well. Nora Roberts, of course.
Jennifer Prokop 1:15:13 / #
We'd love to get Nora Roberts, of course.
Sandra Brown 1:15:16 / #
And Candice Camp, because she has written contemporaries and historicals, and she's been around more than 40 years, and still turning out great books. And so she would be one I would suggest, because they do have that history, you know, they do have that longevity. And recently, not too recently, but someone asked me, "What are you most proud of?" You know, and it can't be your children, and it can't be your long marriage, and it can be anything easy like that, but from a writing standpoint, from your, what, what's the thing you're most proud of? And I said, "My longevity. It's not easy to maintain." And I respect authors, like, you know, like the Dean Koontz's and the Stephen King's, and they were all, they had all just started, you know, when just years, a few years ahead of me. And I read their works as inspiration when I first started out, and, and Dean Koontz is a great plotter. I mean, he just, and he wrote a book on how to write fiction and it became a bible early on. So all of these writers who year after year and decade after decade are still on the bestseller lists. That speaks well of not just their talent, but their work ethic.
Jennifer Prokop 1:16:54 / #
Well, I also think it's nice as a genre reader, to see people I deeply respect becoming more widely respected. I mean, when I was younger, Stephen King was just a horror writer. But now Stephen King is Stephen King.
Jennifer Prokop 1:17:10 / #
And I think that there's a way in which, I appreciate deeply, this, the idea that great storytelling and great writing is isn't just found in literary fiction, right? It's found in thrillers and horror and romance, and I think that that's one of the things that's so nice about seeing those people on those lists and seeing that longevity, is there's readers now who read Sandra Brown that wouldn't read, you know, Demon Rumm, and that's too bad, right?
Sandra Brown 1:17:40 / #
Yeah. You're right. You're exactly right. And so I think there is a, sometimes there is a prejudice there, you know, but it speaks well of a storyteller who can come up with that many stories and over a period of decades, I mean, just decades, and remain a marketable commodity to publishing houses. And so I'm proud of that longevity, and it's work. I mean, it's just work, and it speaks not just to, you know, sit and wait to get inspired, you really have to put your butt in the chair, you know, and get your head out of the clouds and put words on paper. That's the only way I know how to do it. There's no other way that I know to write a book except one word at a time. And I had another brilliant thought, now it's left me, but back to the longevity and just working at it, just working at it. I never aspired to do anything except entertain. I don't care if I win prizes, but my books are collecting dust on somebody's bookshelf. I want to be the book they take to the beach, into the bathtub, you know, to bed with them at night, that have the coffee stain, the Coca-Cola stain, the suntan oil, you know, they're frayed from taking on the subway, because, you know, that's the one you don't want to put down. That's the one you're carrying around with you, and that's the one that keeping you engrossed, and so if I entertain my reader than I can go to sleep at night, that I've done my job for the day. That's, that's the one thing that I always set out to do, is entertain my reader. Tell the reader a story.
Sarah MacLean 1:19:43 / #
Well, you have done it very well. Thank you so much for so many years of fabulous books and writing.
Sandra Brown 1:19:52 / #
Thank you. Y'all are so sweet! I'm very honored.
Sarah MacLean 1:19:56 / #
On a personal level, thank you for inspiring, I mean, you are the reason I write romance, so it is a huge honor to talk to you.
Jennifer Prokop 1:20:06 / #
It is an honor.
Sarah MacLean 1:20:07 / #
We just learned that we have, you have imprinted on our on our reading.
Jennifer Prokop 1:20:13 / #
I was trying to be real cool, but when you described you meeting Candace Camp that was me meeting you. It's fine.
Sarah MacLean 1:20:23 / #
Sandra, this was an absolute delight. Thank you so much.
Sandra Brown 1:20:27 / #
Thank you. It was my pleasure.
Sarah MacLean 1:20:31 / #
Man, when that was over, I was like, that's why that's Sandra Brown. That's why she's Sandra Brown. She was the best.
Jennifer Prokop 1:20:42 / #
I'm like not even really making words. I'm surprised I did when we talked to her because I don't think people realize, this was such a formative author.
Sarah MacLean 1:20:53 / #
We were really, I mean, I think longtime listeners will not be surprised to hear that we were very stressed out about doing this right.
Jennifer Prokop 1:21:03 / #
Y'all, we prepared. We prepared so hard for it.
Sarah MacLean 1:21:06 / #
Almost too much. I was a little worried by how much we prepared.
Jennifer Prokop 1:21:08 / #
Yeah.
Sarah MacLean 1:21:09 / #
I was like, uh-oh, what if we lose our mojo? But it was so great. I loved her. I love just how she - I loved her wisdom. I loved that when she, when we asked her about the hallmarks of a Sandra Brown novel -
Jennifer Prokop 1:21:22 / #
She had a list.
Sarah MacLean 1:21:23 / #
She knew exactly what she wanted, what she was. And she knew exactly how Sandra Brown novels feel. And I mean, the second she said, "And they're pretty fearless." I was like, that's it. That's the whole ballgame. And we've talked so much about that over the last three years, not just about her, but about all the books that we've loved.
Jennifer Prokop 1:21:43 / #
Yes.
Sarah MacLean 1:21:43 / #
Just that there's this sense of fearlessness in them, and so it just reminded me that as writers, our work is to swing for the fences, and maybe we clear them and maybe we don't but you swing.
Jennifer Prokop 1:21:57 / #
We're going to talk a lot this year about the history of romance, and you know, The Flame and the Flower was this really important kind of marker. Romance existed before in a lot of different iterations and a lot of different ways, but you know, sort of genre romance. And the thing that I have been thinking a lot about is, the romance reader you are is really formed by your primordial romance texts. And when Sandra Brown talked about what makes us Sandra Brown romance, it was so, this is what is romance is to me.
Sarah MacLean 1:22:37 / #
Yes! Like she unpeeled you, straight to your core.
Jennifer Prokop 1:22:40 / #
Right there, she made me who I was. But I think the other thing that's really interesting is that can be true at the same time that I can see how romance has really changed.
Sarah MacLean 1:22:40 / #
Yeah.
Jennifer Prokop 1:22:52 / #
And so that's the part that I think continues to astound me, is outsiders to romance are kind of like, aren't the books all the same? And I was like, no. Yes and no, right? Yes, there's something that delivers to me every time and hearing Sandra Brown verbalize what she wants to do in her books really made that clear to me, but also, so much has changed.
Sarah MacLean 1:23:18 / #
Yeah. Well, it was interesting because reading Blind Tiger, which is probably 60% mystery/thriller, 40% romance really gave me a feel for it. There were so many moments where I thought, oh, that's Sandra Brown. That's it. This feels, it's a lesson in authorial voice reading that book, you know, 30 years after I read my first Sandra Brown novel, because I can still hear her in it. And then after meeting her, you sort of have this moment where you're like, oh, it all connects in this really cool way. But also, it feels like the romance there is a Sandra Brown romance, not a romance of an author who just started this year, and that is also very cool. I think, the work of what we have talked about, us wanting this season to be, feels like we're really, in that first interview, it just felt like okay, we're starting to see already the long road, and I'm really excited about that.
Jennifer Prokop 1:24:23 / #
I think one other thing I've been thinking a lot about is, I think I've mentioned a couple times here and there, there's a podcast I really enjoyed listening to with my husband called Hit Parade, which is about pop music. And it talks about, sort of opens with, we're going to talk about disco and Donna Summer, but then it traces back all of the people that sort of influenced that music, and then there's sort of a part where it's like, who has Donna Summer influenced, right? That's a really good episode, everybody, by the way. One of the things I was thinking about as we talked to Sandra Brown was Tia Williams. So we interviewed Tia Williams about her book, Seven Days in June -
Sarah MacLean 1:25:03 / #
Last season.
Jennifer Prokop 1:25:03 / #
Last season, but Tia Williams talked about her love of Slow Heat in Heaven and Sandra Brown. And when I thought about it, it made perfect sense, because I could see sort of the influence. And I think that's the part about knowing I mean, you know, my brain's got to be good for something, I guess, is it is really fascinating. We talk about like the romance family tree and sort of how, who influences who. I think that's another thing we are hoping that these Trailblazer episodes can do is really show you the people who, you know, these things are all connected. Every romance has that common DNA, but some people tune in more to some authors than others, and it's really, that was another fascinating thing for me.
Sarah MacLean 1:25:51 / #
What's remarkable to me is how all of these people that we've talked to have been able to name other authors who inspire them, push them, kept them moving, you know, helped them in the early days of their career. And I think that is, when, as I think about this piece of it, I keep coming back to this heroine's journey question that we've talked about so much when we're talking about the actual books, but the heroine's journey is really the journey of a lot of these writers too. Just finding community, in general, writing is such a lonely road, but I don't think any of us in romance or out of it, get anywhere without a community. So it's really wonderful to hear those names spoken.
Jennifer Prokop 1:26:36 / #
Yes. Yeah. So I hope everyone enjoyed this conversation as much as we did.
Sarah MacLean 1:26:42 / #
It was the best.
Jennifer Prokop 1:26:43 / #
There are some - we have a lot of awesome things teed up for you. We have written some - talk about swinging for the fences. If you even knew the emails we've been sending to people.
Sarah MacLean 1:26:54 / #
We're not clearing all the fences, but we sure are trying.
Jennifer Prokop 1:26:56 / #
We're trying. And you know what? I think the other thing that I will try and do in Show Notes is maybe put some of our favorites of these authors. So they're talking, we've asked about their favorites books that they love, but so, Show Notes I hope will be something else.
Sarah MacLean 1:27:15 / #
That's right. I did just have a moment where I was like, should we read Slow Heat in Heaven when we read the Texas! book, but -
Jennifer Prokop 1:27:21 / #
You know what, I did when we read that book.
Sarah MacLean 1:27:24 / #
Did you reread it?
Jennifer Prokop 1:27:25 / #
That's one re-read when we did Sandra Brown, so I will make sure we link to that episode as well.
Sarah MacLean 1:27:31 / #
That's right. Oh, also, how cool was it that she clearly listened to our Sandra Brown episode?
Jennifer Prokop 1:27:36 / #
I don't even want to talk about it.
Sarah MacLean 1:27:37 / #
It was amazing! It was amazing! She had prepped information about our favorite books and honest to god, what a class act.
Jennifer Prokop 1:27:47 / #
Yeah.
Sarah MacLean 1:27:49 / #
Sandra Brown. You're the best. Thank you so much. Come back anytime. And that's that. You've been listening to Fated Mates. I'm Sarah MacLean.
Jennifer Prokop 1:28:02 / #
I'm Jennifer Prokop. You can find us on Instagram @FatedMatespod, on Twitter @FatedMates and in your earholes every week.
Sarah MacLean 1:28:09 / #
Every week at FatedMates.net or on your favorite podcatcher. You can like and follow us on your favorite podcatcher and you won't miss a single episode. We've got a lot cooking for Season Four. Also at FatedMates.net you can buy merch and stickers from Best Friend Kelly and Jordandené. There's also, ooh, you guys, for Season Four there's a Fated Mates tote bag now and a Fated Mates mug, so don't say we never do anything for you. Have a great week. We hope you're reading something great. Next week is an interstitial week. We haven't talked about the trope yet. We're going to do that now.
Jennifer Prokop 1:28:42 / #
We'll figure it out everybody.
Sarah MacLean 1:28:50 / #
We prepped for Sandra Brown and not for next week. So.
S03.54: Bombshell has Landed!
Sarah has a new book out, so Jen is playing host this week, and Sarah is playing guest, and Jen is really extremely good at it…so pour yourself a glass of whatever you’re drinking and get ready! And don’t miss the first two chapters of the Bombshell audiobook at the end of the episode!
If you haven’t purchased Bombshell yet, you can find it wherever books are sold, and at Amazon, Apple Books, B&N, Kobo, or Bookshop.org.
This episode wraps up Season 3! Jen’s taking Lil’Romance to college, Sarah’s taking a break from social media, and we’ll be back in September with Season 4. Don’t worry, though, there will be a few little audio treats dropping on Wednesdays so you don’t miss us too much. (we will miss you, though. obviously.)
Thank you, as always, for listening! Please follow us on your favorite podcasting app, and if you are up for leaving a rating or review there, we would be very grateful.
Show Notes
Bombshell is here! The audiobook is narrated by Mary Jane Wells, and she’s one of Jen’s favorite narrators.
Speaking of audio, here's the official Bombshell playlist.
Maybe you want to watch the Amazons fighting in the Wonder Woman movie, just for vibes.
The Soiled S’s are the five Talbot sisters: Seraphina, Sesily, Seleste, Seline, and Sophie. Seraphina and Sophie each had their own books, and Seleste and Seline were married in the background of the series.
A series bible is used by writers as a reference document for the world they’ve made.
Some of our favorite movies with a crew and/or a heist movies: The A-Team, Ocean’s Eight, and the Avengers.
The first of Louisa Edward’s chef romances is called Can’t Stand the Heat.
Queen Victoria was on the throne from 1837-1901, and here is an overview of the hallmarks of her reign and what it was like for women during that era.
Here’s a brief history of Scotland Yard.
The word bombshell dates back to 1708.
S03.53: Sports Romance with Farrah Rochon
Today we’re joined by Farrah Rochon, author of The Dating Playbook, to talk sports romances! We talked sports way back in season 1 (links below), but this is one of those tropes we’re always happy to dig into! We get to the bottom of Farrah’s love of football, we talk about competence porn and the human body as a superior tool, and we recommend a LOT of B O O K S!
Don’t miss Fated Mates LIVE! to celebrate the release of Sarah’s next book, BOMBSHELL! Join us and some of our very favorite people on August 24th! Tickets are a copy of the book, and available at five participating romance friendly bookstores. Get them here!
NEXT WEEK IS BOMBSHELL WEEK! Get it at Amazon, Apple Books, B&N, Kobo, or Bookshop.org, or at one of the participating romance-friendly bookstores hosting the Fated Mates Live/Virtual Bombshell Launch! Orders will come with a Fated Mates Sticker!
Thank you, as always, for listening! Please follow us on your favorite podcasting app, and if you are up for leaving a rating or review there, we would be very grateful.
Show Notes
Welcome Farrah Rochon! Her newest book, The Dating Playbook just came out yesterday. She has another football series, the New York Sabres.
The 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing begin on February 4th, 2022.
Here’s an explainer for dressage, an Olympic equestrian event. The horse at the club dressage video on twitter, Snoop Dogg and Kevin Hart watching the same video.
The 1984 category romance about a woman competing in Equestrian events at the Olympics was originally called Summer Games and later changed to Remember Summer (which is available as an eBook), and it was by Elizabeth Lowell not Iris Johansen.
How the horses travel to Tokyo, how the ice is made, and other articles about new sports at this year’s Olympics.
All about Rune, the Danish Destroyer.
In season one, we did a fake engagement interstitial, but it’s a very popular trope in 2021.
Texas football culture is legendary, just look at some Texas high school football stadiums, including the one in Katy. If you’re ever in Katy, we highly recommend a trip to Katy Budget Books.
You might be interested in this article with statistics breaking down the average age of professional athletes by sport, and this list of oldest professional athletes by sport. The question of which Olympics sports have the oldest and youngest athletes is always a fascinating one. This year, the youngest athletes were 12: Syrian tennis table player Hend Zaza and Japanese skateboarder Kokona Hiraki. The oldest athlete is Australian equestrian Mary Hanna, who is 66.
We interviewed Susan Elizabeth Phillips and also did a deep dive on the third book in the Chicago Stars series, Nobody’s Baby But Mine.
Pitch was a Fox show that was cancelled before its time.
It turns out there are two real life ex-NFL players, Brian Orakpo and Michale Griffin who opened Gigi’s Cupcake shop in Texas. So just read this article over and over again until we get all the deets on Jamie Wesley’s forthcoming series.
S03.52: Assassins and Hitmen in Romance Interstitial
Surprising absolutely no one, we love an assassin here at Fated Mates! We basically love any character who has been through the wringer and also can kill a man fourteen different ways before dinner. Even better if it’s a heroine, and she’s been hired to kill the hero (or vice versa). Anyway, we’re talking about why these books (and so! many! movies!) scratch that particular itch for us. Spoiler: It’s beautiful people blowing things up, obvi.
Don’t miss Fated Mates LIVE! to celebrate the release of Sarah’s next book, BOMBSHELL! Join us and some of our very favorite people on August 24th! Tickets are a copy of the book, and available at five participating romance friendly bookstores. Get them here!
Speaking of BOMBSHELL, it is our next read along! Get it at Amazon, Apple Books, B&N, Kobo, or Bookshop.org, or at one of the participating romance-friendly bookstores hosting the Fated Mates Live/Virtual Bombshell Launch! Orders will come with a Fated Mates Sticker!
Thank you, as always, for listening! Please follow us on your favorite podcasting app, and if you are up for leaving a rating or review there, we would be very grateful.
Show Notes
The game Assassin’s Creed first came out in 2007, and now there are so many different versions, and in many of them, you can garrote someone if you are so moved. Sarah's favorite is Assassin's Creed Syndicate, which is set in Victorian London.
We mentioned so many movies and TV shows with assassins: John Wick, The Bourne Identity, Gunpowder Milkshake (and its many weapons), Suicide Blonde, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, Kill Bill, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, James Bond, Black Widow, Le Femme Nikita, The Saint, Grosse Pointe Blank, Desperado, and The Witcher.
More about some of the super camera angles we are seeing at the Tokyo Olympics.
Jack Reacher isn’t as assassin as much as he’s a vigilante. Also, he doesn’t know how to use a washing machine.
Rege-Jean Page signed up to make a remake of The Saint, and Donald Glover and Phoebe Waller-Bridge are remaking Mr. and Mrs. Smith, and we’re not sad about any of it.
Iocane powder is from The Princess Bride, of course.
Listen when you read Sweet Ruin you'll definitely want to go back to season 1 and listen to our deep dive epsiode. Because it is great.
We also talked a bunch about romances with paid killers in the Spy Romance and Mafia Romance interstitials.
As Jen was working on show notes, she discovered the book Killing Sarai was adapted into a Spanish language action movie called “En Brazos de un Asesino,” which translates to “In the Arms of an Assassin.” You can stream it on any number of services, including Amazon Prime Video.
Check out all the programming for Bookstore Romance Day, August 21-22, 2021.
We are having a live episode of Fated Mates to celebrate the launch of Bombshell on August 24th at 7 eastern, to get a ticket, you'll need to buy a copy from one of these indie bookstores. (If you already pre-ordered from WORD in Brooklyn, you'll get log in details in an email.)
S03.51: Mistresses, Courtesans, and Cheating in Romance with Adriana Herrera
Adriana Herrera, a FIVE-TIMER, joins us this week to talk about the third-rail of romance…infidelity! We’re talking about cheating, and about all the other bits related to it: mistresses, courtesans, illegitimate children, sex work…and get your pencils ready because (of course) we’re toppling TBRs with this one.
Don’t miss Fated Mates LIVE! to celebrate the release of Sarah’s next book, BOMBSHELL! Join us and some of our very favorite people on August 24th! Tickets are a copy of the book, and available at five participating romance friendly bookstores. Get them here!
Speaking of BOMBSHELL, it is our next read along! Get it at Amazon, Apple Books, B&N, Kobo, or Bookshop.org, or at one of the participating romance-friendly bookstores hosting the Fated Mates Live/Virtual Bombshell Launch! Orders will come with a Fated Mates Sticker!
Thank you, as always, for listening! Please follow us on your favorite podcasting app, and if you are up for leaving a rating or review there, we would be very grateful.
Show Notes
Welcome to five-timer Adriana Herrera, our very own Rizzo, and her Pink Lady jacket is on the way. PS. It was only in working on these show notes that Jen realized that Rizzo’s first name is Betty.
The phrase “safe romance” is used in online spaces to describe books without a single molecule of infidelity energy.
Infidelity in evangelical christianity (and everywhere, honestly) often places the blame on the wife if her husband strays and also on “the evil other woman” -- in this model, you know who’s not to blame? Men. And that’s pure patriarchy.
Lavender wasn’t invented because it’s a plant and its known history dates back 2500 years.
Courtesan culture was inextricably tied to colonialism in India, in China, and in the USA.
Summer Brennan’s patreon about The Book of Courtesans. Hallie Rubenhold's Covent Garden Ladies, which is the book that inspired the Hulu TV show Harlots, is about Harris's List of London "working girls."
The Spanish word for wife is esposa, which means handcuffs or manacles, while the word for mistress is amante, which means beloved.
We have had some deep dive episodes where there is infidelity: Waking Up with the Duke by Lorraine Heath and Ravishing the Heiress by Sherry Thomas
There are so many bastards in historical romance, partly because it’s an easy on-ramp for creating a character who is an outsider.
Ethical non-monogamy is the practice of talking to your partner(s) about the boundaries of your relationship. Polyamorous and Open relationships would fall into this category.
On Maryse’s Book Blog, there was a 2015 post about cheating in romance, and most of the titles are self-published and indie.
Sarah talked about Lorenzo Lamas and Dynasty and Jen and her brother Mike talked about Santa Barbara on Adriana’s Instagram Live conversations about telenovelas and soap operas.
We are having a live episode of Fated Mates to celebrate the launch of Bombshell on August 24th at 7 eastern, to get a ticket, you'll need to buy a copy from one of these indie bookstores. (If you already pre-ordered from WORD in Brooklyn, you'll get log in details in an email.)
S03.50: Unmasked by the Marquess by Cat Sebastian: a Perfect Modern Historical
We’re nearing the end of Season Three and we are so happy to be reading one of the most delightful books in modern historical romance, Cat Sebastian’s Unmasked by the Marquess. We talk about Cat’s masterful plotting within a three-act structure, about friendship, trust and sacrifice in relationships, and about writing a modern historical while still delivering the bananas plots that made the early books in the genre the best.
We also announce our next Fated Mates LIVE! to celebrate the release of Sarah’s next book, BOMBSHELL! Join us and some of our very favorite people on August 24th! Tickets are a copy of the book, and available at five participating romance friendly bookstores. Get them here!
Our next read along is Sarah’s BOMBSHELL! Get it at Amazon, Apple Books, B&N, Kobo, or Bookshop.org, or signed via Sarah’s local indie, WORD, or one of the participating romance-friendly bookstores hosting the Fated Mates Live/Virtual Bombshell Launch! Orders from WORD or the launch sponsors will come with a Fated Mates Sticker!
Thank you, as always, for listening! Please follow us on your favorite podcasting app, and if you are up for leaving a rating or review there, we would be very grateful.
Show Notes
The virtual launch event for Bombshell will be on Tuesday Aug 24 at 7eastern/4 pacific. If you pre-ordered a signed book from Word!, keep an eye out for details for how to join the event.
Unmasked by the Marquess received excellent reviews from Kirkus, Publisher’s Weekly, and the New York Times.
A guide to nonbinary pronouns.
The audiobook of Unmasked by the Marquess is great, and narrated by Joel Leslie.
Cat Sebastian is a fanfiction expert and routinely talks about some of her favorite fics. If you don’t know, the Stucky ship of Cap & Bucky is the most written about ship on Ao3.
“Natural child” was the nice way of saying that a child was born out of wedlock. The mean way, of course, is bastard.
More about the three act structure.
This is a great interview with Cat Sebastian in Jezebel about writing queer characters in historical romance.
S03.45: Dark Romance: Monsters Need Love, Too.
We promised you an episode on Dark Romance and truthfully we’re pretty proud of how well we’ve delivered. We’ve got Kenya Goree-Bell, Nisha Sharma, Joanna Shupe and Jo Brenner with us today to dig deep on this subgenre that we don’t read regularly. We are endlessly grateful for their guidance through this end of the romance pool!
We talk about what makes a romance “dark,” about how dark romance differs from morality chain and taboo romance, and about why dark romance resonates with so many readers. Oh, and yes, if you’re curious, we fill your TBR pile (obvi). Stay tuned at the end of the episode for additional reflections from Sarah & Jen.
CONTENT NOTE: Because Dark Romance can include all sorts of problematic content, we don’t shy away from many of those topics in this episode. Proceed with caution, both in listening and in reading.
AUDIO NOTE: Due to countless irregularities, planned and unplanned, the audio in this episode isn’t up to our normal standards. But it sounds fine.
Our next read along, sometime in July, is Cat Sebastian’s wonderful Unmasked by the Marquess. Get it at Amazon, Apple Books, B&N, Kobo, or Bookshop.org.
Thank you, as always, for listening! Please follow us on your favorite podcasting app, and if you are up for leaving a rating or review there, we would be very grateful!
Show Notes
Welcome our panel of dark romance experts: Kenya Goree-Bell, Nisha Sharma, Joanna Shupe, and Jo Brenner.
The hallmarks and tenets of Dark Romance
- All dubious consent and non-consent romance is dark romance (although not all dark romance has dubcon or nonconsensual elements).
- It’s about what the HEA is made up of: If the non-aggressor or non-villian moves into the dark (rather than pulling the other into the light), then it would qualify as dark romance.
- Often the aggressor/villain is static, while the non-aggressor finds their light or strength in the new world they exist in. This person does all the work and learns how to navigate a life around the aggressor and their world. These are not stories of love redeeming, but rather of learning to find love and happiness with the person (people) in front of you.
- The characters are suffering from current or past psychological or physical trauma. The non-aggressor represents the last bits of humanity that the aggressor has to hold on to. Dark romance explores a relationship where only one person has strains of humanity and the impact it has on a person without it.
- The evil and violence of the aggressor must take place on the page.
Some Terms we'll use on this episode
Consensual non-consent (non-con): is when romantic partners engage “in behaviors that may include role-playing nonconsensual behaviors, or may involve negotiating sexual behaviors where one partner agrees to give up consent during certain behaviors or relationships.” This can include fantasizing about rape and kidnapping, and lots of women have complicated feelings about these fantasies.
Dubious consent (dub-con): is the gray area between full, enthusiastic consent and rape. A person hasn't give outright consent to having sex and might not consider it rape; however, some other factor prevents them from saying no.
The Aggressor: rather than use hero/heroine, Jo started using aggressor and non-aggressor as a way of talking about chracters who exhibit very non-heroic behavior.
The skin suit: What Jen calls the experience of reading a book where she wants more distance between herself and the main characters.
The Murder Meal: Sarah noticed that a common trope of dark romance is a meal where blood is shed and people still continue to eat.
Notes and Other Links
You may have listened to our Morality Chain episode, where we made a graphic explaining how it differs from dark romance. Next month, Nikki Sloane will join us to discuss taboo romance.
It’s not Mordor unless you’re a hobbit. Sarah is not opposed to elevensies, so it's fine.
Earlier this year, there was a Saturday Night Live skit about women watching The Murder Show. Why do women like reading about serial killers? Did you see this essay in Slate about a woman who thinks she slept with a man who went on to be a serial killer?
Game of Thrones and it’s penchant for sexual violence is still influencing pop culture.
The only thing that’s forbidden in dark romance is cheating, which shows how firmly these books are rooted in the romance genre, as compared to the rampant cheating by male characters The Godfather and other mafia movies, but this is often rooted in obsession rather than a belief in monogamy.
While there's very little (possibly no) research on readers of dark romance, but there's lots of research on the horror genre. Sarah’s friend Micol Ostow, who writes YA horror recommended this essay about the "spectacle of the ruined body." Meanwhile, Jen follows Becky Spratford, a librarian and horror expert, who says that one thing romance and horror have in common is they are both “genres of emotion.”
There’s some research on horror and spoilers from Jonathan Leavitt & Nicholas Christenfeld which indicates that spoilers might allow people to enjoy a story more fully. Perhaps dark romance readers, regardless of what terrible things happen, can safely continue reading because they know there will be an HEA.
Why do we like to watch and read media where characters are undergoing trauma? In The Paradox of Horror: Fear as a Positive Emotion, Katerina Bantinaki explains how readers experience reading about fear and trauma. Related: (Why) Do You Like Scary Movies? by G. Neil Martin.
A highly gendered kind of world exists in many m/f Dark Romances, and the article Her Body, Himself: Gender in Slasher Films by Carol Clover explores how similar themes play out in horror movies. As Nisha said, there are queer and polyamarous dark romance and a few the panel recommends are Soul Survivor by Daniel de Lorne, the Wicked Villains Series by Katee Robert, Trouble or the Darkness trilogy by Nora Ash, and Manipulate by Pam Godwin.
Stockholm Syndrome isn’t real, quelle surprise, but it still a popular idea in pop culture of all kinds. Many dark romance novels show characters using extreme or maladaptive coping strategies in an attempt to heal themselves or others without the help of therapists or medicine, a particularly American problem since so few people have adequate (if any) coverage for mental health.
Dark romance runs long, they’re all “Zack Snyder cut” books. We speculated that there are two reasons for the length of many of these books:
- The books are long because the trauma on page must have an equal or greater redemption arc. Readers must believe that the non-agressor has fully accepted the bad deeds of the aggressor in order to believe the HEA.
- Many of these books are on KU, which means authors are getting paid by the page. Like Charles Dickens, the incentive is to write longer to increase their pay.
S03.44: The Stage Dive Series by Kylie Scott: #HeroesWhoEat
We’re back to read alongs this week! We’re big Kylie Scott fans here at Fated Mates, and we talked about her Stage Dive series all the way back in Season One on our very first interstitial, and now we’re doing a deep dive. We’d intended to do book three, Lead, but we ended up talking about all four, and honestly, rereading this was pretty great for us. We hope it was great for you, too.
Our next read along, sometime in July, is Cat Sebastian’s wonderful Unmasked by the Marquess. Get it at Amazon, Apple Books, B&N, Kobo, or Bookshop.org.
Thank you, as always, for listening! Please follow us on your favorite podcasting app, and if you are up for leaving a rating or review there, we would be very grateful!
Show Notes
Sarah has a book coming on August 24th! Preorder Bombshell now. You won't regret it.
Everyone is struggling with getting dressed again.
It’s a 1001 in the 1001 Dark Nights series as an homage and allusion to Scheherazade, the story-teller of the Arabian Nights.
We also love the VIP series by Kristen Callihan, and the 4th book in that series, Exposed, comes out next month, July 2021.
On our upcoming episode with Susan Elizabeth Phillips, where she told us that back in the day, “rock stars, actors, and athletes” were not allowed in the early days of romance. We aren’t sure why, but we speculate that it was fear of putting “sex, drugs, and rock and roll” and other high roller lifestyles on page.
If you want to join the OSRBC group (Old School Romance Book Club) on Facebook, make sure to answer the three questions if you want to be admitted.
Andi Arndt is the narrator of all Kylie’s books, including the entire Stage Dive series, and Jen thinks she is terrific.
The Captains’ Vegas Vows has a similar set up to Lick: waking up married in Vegas, and only one of them remembered what happened.
“Retcon” is a word that started out as shorthand for retroactive continuity, and here’s a piece from Merriam-Webster explaining its remarkable elasticity.
Hyperemesis gravidarum is the medical term for severe morning sickness, which affects about one percent of pregnant people.
DC comics claims that Batman doesn’t go down, but the internet and everyone else on twitter and even Zach Snyder disagred. But in all seriousness, maybe it's just another interesting data point about America turning back towards the Hays Code and continuing to remove sex from all kinds of media.
Thelma and Louise does have a great ending, you can’t argue with that. And since 2021 is the 30th anniversary of the film’s release, there are lots of interesting retrospectives on the movie.
Desmond Morris is an English zoologist who outlined the 12 stages of intimacy -- hey, humans are animals, too!
Our July interviews will be with Susan Elizabeth Phillips, Nicola Yoon, and Nikki Sloane. Our July read-along is Unmasked by the Marquess by Cat Sebastian.
S03.43: Writers in Romance with Tia Williams
We’re welcoming Tia Williams, author of the wonderful Seven Days in June, to talk about her delicious book, about writing writers, about romances set in New York City, about her youth as a romance reader, and about Drew Barrymore as inspiration, and about The Joan Wilder?!.
Our next read along is Kylie Scott’s Lead, one of our longtime favorites. Get it at Amazon, Apple Books, B&N, Kobo, or Bookshop.org! Get the others in the series, too, while you’re at it, because you’ll probably want to read the whole thing.
Thank you, as always, for listening! Please follow us on your favorite podcasting app, and if you are up for leaving a rating or review there, we would be very grateful!
Show Notes
If you want a signed copy of Bombshell along with a Fated Mates sticker, preorder from Word Bookstore in Brooklyn.
Welcome Tia Williams! Her new release, Seven Days in June, is Reese’s Book Club pick for June and also is the June pic for the Tanya Time book club with Tanya Sam. In this article in Ebony, Tia talks about her commitment to putting Black love on page and creating rich, interesting lives for Shane and Eva.
Eva’s website is EvaMercyMe, and her vampire hero is Sebastian. And according to Twitter, all romance Sebastians are good Sebatians.
Slow Heat in Heaven by Sandra Brown is quite the read, and we talked about it on the Texas!Chase episode.
The question of “what if Romeo and Juliet met as grown-ups” was also the idea behind Kate Clayborn’s Love at First, and we talked about it with Kate on an episode about retellings in romance.
Drew Barrymore’s memoir Little Girl Lost is the story of her childhood in Hollywood, and definitely was hugely influential and shocking, and it still is worth a read if you can find a copy. It hasn't been digitized!
Jen talked to Adriana Herrera about how people might self-harm, cut, and use other extreme coping mechanisms if they have experienced trauma.
The Brooklyn Book Festival is not for the faint of heart.
More about the quote “Easy reading is damn hard writing.”
The Argeneau series by Lynsay Sands started with started with A Quick Bite in 2005, and book 33, Mile High with a Vampire comes out in Sept of 2021.
Want to watch that TikTok about The Unhoneymooners?
Romancing the Stone is a great movie from the 80s, and “The Joan Wilder!?” is a line from the movie. And, friend of the pod Linda has a t-shirt you might like. What’s looking like a great movie with a similar set up is The Lost City of D with Channing Tatum and Sandra Bullock.
Next week, we’ll be discussing Lead (and the other books in the Stage Dive series) by Kylie Scott.
