Dear Bitches, Smart Authors, February 23, 2009

 

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Jane: Welcome to the Dear Bitches, Smart Authors podcast!

Smart Bitch Sarah: I’m Smart Bitch Sarah from smartbitchestrashybooks.com, and with me is Jane from dearauthor.com.

Joining us today is author Victoria Dahl, who wrote Talk Me Down, which came out from Harlequin in January 2009. You might have seen the book on both Dear Author and Smart Bitches because, well, we basically pimped the hell out of it. We were enormous fans of this book, and we’re so excited to talk to Victoria. Thank you for joining us!

Victoria Dahl: Hi! Good morning!

Sarah: Good morning! Talk to us a little bit about switching genres, ‘cause you wrote two books as a historical author, and then you jumped forward two hundred years, and now you’re writing contemporaries.

Victoria: [Laughs] Yeah, I actually started out writing historicals, and then, I can’t read historicals when I’m writing historicals. I started reading paranormal when they were getting really popular, so I got an idea for a paranormal, and I tried my hand at that, and then vampires became sort of a little too popular? The market got a little glutted, so my agent asked me if I would just write a straight contemporary with no vampires or werewolves involved. And it was a little bit scary, but I decided to try my hand at it, and it sold, so it was pretty exciting. But I do find that contemporaries are pretty easy to write because it’s sort of like just having conversations with my friends, but I find them a lot harder to come up with ideas for the plots, because with historicals you can always, you know, throw in an arranged marriage or a, or a father who’s totally in control of the daughter and won’t let her do anything, but it’s a little harder to pull off with the contemporaries to me.

Sarah: Now one of the things that you talk about in Talk Me Down is returning to a small town, which is a familiar setting for contemporaries, and returning to a small community.

Victoria: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: Which do you think is more popular for contemporaries: small communities or, or, or big cities?

Victoria: You know, I do think it is small town. It, it just sort of comes with its own setting and its own ambience, I think. Also, it’s easier to make up a small town than it is to make up a –

[Laughter]

Sarah: You’re automatically dealing with a smaller group of people.

Victoria: [Laughs] I can create my whole world in a small town, you know.

Sarah: And there’s natural conflict, ‘cause everyone knows your business.

Victoria: Yes, and my family, my mom is from a very small town, and I’ve grown up hearing about that my whole life, about, you know, all the rumors and innuendo and, and literally, I went back to this little town for my grandfather’s funeral a few years ago, and, you know, people were coming up to me, talking about stuff that happened with my mom, like, forty years before.

Sarah: [Laughs]

Victoria: It was still, like, that important to them in their, in their world. So, yeah, it is, it’s a fascinating dynamic.

Sarah: Now to switch topics just a little bit, when we reviewed your book, Jane and I were pretty effusive with how much we liked it, ‘cause we both enjoyed it tremendously, but you also experienced some bad reviews from other sites and other publications.

Victoria: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: How, as an author, do you recommend an author deal with receiving bad reviews? Because more often than not, I think, Jane and I also write pretty harsh, very critical and, and detailed reviews as well.

Victoria: Uh-huh.

Sarah: How do you think authors should deal with bad reviews?

Victoria: I don’t know if I know the right way to deal with them. For me, and this might be sort of a, a female thing, a, a sort of female guilt thing, but when I get a good review, I talk about it on my blogs or post it on my website, and one of the reviews I got for Talk Me Down was really the first awful review, awful official review I’ve gotten for a book, and it just felt weird to sort of talk about these great reviews all the time and then pretend like, I felt like people would be going, whoa, I saw that really bad review, and she didn’t mention anything about that! [Laughs] So I thought that a good way to deal with it would be to have a, a sort of funny contest, because the review was about how my heroine was, you know, very sexual, sexually aggressive. So I had a, a contest for dirty girls, and it wasn’t – I can understand why people wouldn’t like the book, and as a matter of fact, when I wrote the book, my, as soon as I finished it, my first thought was, oh, my God, some people are going to hate this book, and so I think it’s a legitimate response, but I did feel weird sort of behaving as if I didn’t even know the bad review existed.

Sarah: I think that’s really interesting, because it is definitely part of the authorial experience. There’s a, there’s a, an expectation that you shouldn’t respond –

Victoria: Yeah.

Sarah: – to reviews like that.

Victoria: Yeah.

Sarah: All right, so tell us about what books are coming up, because you’re still writing both historicals and contemporaries. Tell us what’s coming up for you, because you have a hell of a docket.

Victoria: I do! Get out your pencils; this is what’s coming up: in February I have my first historical novella coming out in the Lords of Desire anthology. It’s called “Lessons in Pleasure,” and that one’s kind of a bit of a departure for me, because this heroine is actually not sexually aggressive or experienced. She’s kind of an innocent, and I’m not used to writing those –

Sarah: Woo!

Victoria: – kind of heroines – yeah! And then in, in July, the next book in the Talk Me Down series, which is called Start Me Up, will be out, and that’s the story of Lori Love, who was the heroine’s best friend in, in, in Talk Me Down, and in August, then, my next full-length historical will be out, which is One Week As Lovers¸ and it’s also, it’s a, a character you met in a previous book, the character Lancaster from A Rake’s Guide to Pleasure.

Sarah: I liked him! I was kind of bummed that he didn’t have his own little conclusion in the story, ‘cause he was generally a good guy!

Victoria: Yeah, he has his own story, and the book is, is very much centered around him, as opposed to the heroine, which is another sort of departure for me.

Sarah: Awesome!

Victoria: Yeah! And then there’s another novella coming up in August, a historical novella.

Sarah: Damn.

Victoria: No, September! Ugh, I can’t think.

Sarah: Some point, damn. Okay, well, in 2009, I wish you a nap!

Victoria: [Laughs]

Sarah: Holy crap! [Laughs] I want to thank you for joining us today. It has been a lot of fun to talk with you, and best of luck with your enormously intimidating schedule for 2009.

Victoria: Thank you!

Sarah: Holy smoke!

Victoria: You as well!

Sarah: Oh, thank you!

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Sarah: One of the things that happens in Victoria’s novel Talk Me Down that a lot of reviewers picked up on is that the character, who’s pretty sexually autonomous, learns that in the context of her interactions with the hero, Ben, she likes to talk dirty, and she likes to speak explicitly, but whether it’s through the confines of contemporary romance, the publisher, or just the expectations of the reader, Dahl never gets specific, and she never names the specific words that the character uses, and this made Jane and me both a little curious, because I have to ask myself: do I prefer to have those words spelled out, or do I want to have them obliquely referred to, like, he cursed, or she whispered naughtily, and, you know, other words like that. I have to say that unless I’m reading erotica, I don’t necessarily expect to see some of those words, but in context, I prefer to use my imagination, because there are some words that I just think are fantastically erotic, and there’re some words that make me think of, you know, toilet bowl cleaner, and I, I much prefer to use my own imagination, but I also know there are readers who like the explicit. What do you think?

Jane: Well, I, I think that Dahl chose the right course in being oblique –

Sarah: Totally.

Jane: – and allowing the reader to fill in, in part because I thought that the eroticism was supplied through other ways in her sex scenes, but it, you know, putting words to, into the character’s mouths when they’re talking dirty to each other can be pretty effective. I read in Beth Kery’s recent book – I think it’s called Wicked Burn – the hero talks dirty to the heroine, and, and there’s no obliqueness in what he says, and that, that can be very effective. Now, having said that, I know that some readers are really turned off by certain words, I think, that are used by individuals in sex play, and so you never know if you’re hitting the wrong button or the right button, so being oblique might be the best and safe course.

Sarah: And yet there’s this vivacious market of erotic romance readers who want everything spelled out to, you know, to the ninth inch; they want to know every element and every word, and they want that explicitness in all aspects, from the dirty talk to the descriptions of the dirty, and it’s, it’s, it’s really difficult to predict whether you’re going to hit or miss the erotic talk.

Jane: Sure, and I think obliqueness can cause some problems in that if, if you don’t have a really wide vocabulary of dirty talk – I have to admit, that’s probably me – you might pause and wonder –

Sarah: [Laughs]

Jane: – what exactly are they really saying, and what constitutes dirty talk? Is it, you know, kiss me here, kiss me there, or is it something more explicit? So that can maybe cause pause for a reader as their attention is distracted and as they wonder what they could possibly be talking about.

Sarah: Maybe a future podcast will be Teach Jane to Talk Dirty.

Jane: [Laughs] And then we get the NC-17 rating and –

Sarah: Yeah, and then no one will ever listen to it, because people are like, oh, explicit! Ahhh!

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Sarah: If you’ve got any feedback or questions for Jane or Sarah or topics to suggest, we’d love to hear from you. You can email us at [email protected]. That’s S-B for Smart Bitch, J for Jane, and podcast for podcast at gmail dot com. We’d love to hear from you if you have ideas or questions you want to ask us. We might answer them in a future podcast or answer them on our websites, but either way, give us an email; we’ll definitely read it.

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