142. Sex and History and Romance: An Interview with Caroline Linden

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Sarah Wendell:  Hello, and welcome to episode number 142 of the DBSA podcast.  I’m Sarah Wendell from Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, and if you’re new here, DBSA stands Dear Bitches, Smart Authors, ‘cause iTunes doesn’t like the word Bitches, but I really do!  This week, I have a really fun interview with bestselling author Caroline Linden.  She has a new series that has a somewhat famous book referenced in it, and we talk about math and romance, her first romance novels that she read when she discovered the genre, and portrayals of sex in history.  You know, all the things we like to talk about here.  Math, romance, and sex, right?  Right!

This podcast is brought to you by InterMix, publisher of Ever Night, the sexy new paranormal novella from New York Times bestselling author Gena Showalter, on sale now wherever your fine eBooks are sold.

The music you’re listening to was provided by Sassy Outwater, and I will have information at the end of the podcast as to who this is and where you can buy it for your very own.

And now, without any further delay, because, I mean, really, math, sex, and romance, we need to get to this, right?  On with the podcast!

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Sarah:  If you would please introduce yourself and tell the lovely people who are listening who you are and what you write.

Caroline Linden:  I am Caroline Linden.  I write mostly historical romance set in the Regency Britain era.  I was not a native writer.  I was not born this way.  It came to me very, relatively late in life, I would say.  I was a math geek in college and met my husband in the Harvard University math department, if that tells you anything about my home life and my back ground.  I’m very happy with him, too, so I think math is extremely romantic.  So –

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Caroline:  – I worked as a computer programmer and wrote financial software code for several years, and then I had kids, and we moved, and I didn’t have a job, and I couldn’t leave my house, and I had two little kids, and all I had was a library that was about three blocks away, so I would head over there with my stroller during nap time, and I knew I had, like, twenty minutes to clean out whatever I wanted to occupy myself with for the week, and so I started reading romance, and I really got into it, and then I still had nothing else to do, and the kids would go to bed at night, and my husband got me a new computer, and I started writing my own story, you know, to improve upon the books that I read, where I would get to a certain point and say, all right, this is what she should do, and she didn’t do that in the book, and then I would think to myself, well, if I were writing this book, it would be different.  So I started writing, and that was about twelve years ago.  Now I have about fifteen books out.

Sarah:  Nice!  Congratulations!

Caroline:  I know, I still get a little dazed and confused when I say that number out loud.  Like, really?  Is that possible?  What?

Sarah:  I did that?  Really?

Caroline:  Yeah!  And that, it just, it sounds like so much, but on the other hand, my little, my small child, the one who kept me at home with nothing to do when I started writing, is going off to college in the fall, and I can’t imagine how that happened either, so.

Sarah:  It’s like you feed these children, and then, then they grow?  Like, what’s that about?

Caroline:  And then they grow and grow and grow.  I look at him and think, I used to hold you in one arm, and now you are bigger than your dad.

Sarah:  Yep.  I keep telling my children, mine are seven and nine –

Caroline:  Yeah.

Sarah:  – I keep telling them, you know, someday you’re going to be taller than me and very likely taller than your father, and they’re like, what?!  No!  There’s no way!  You’re, that’s just silly!

Caroline:  But they’re excited by the prospect, right?

Sarah:  Right, they’re totally amazed.

Caroline:  ‘Cause my son, the day he passed his dad was the greatest day of his life, I think.

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Caroline:  I don’t even think getting his driver’s license topped it.  When he could walk out of the there and say, yeah, yeah, I see you now, little man.

Sarah:  [Laughs] So what do you, what were the first romances that you read?  Do you remember them?

Caroline:  I remember reading Julie Garwood, I remember reading Judith McNaught, but the one that really was the clarion call in the wilderness to me was Julia Quinn’s The Duke and I.  I read that book, that was the first of her books that I had ever read, and I had no, I had never heard of her and had no idea what to expect, but I read that book and just sat there with my mouth hanging open at the end going, [gasp!] that is what a book should be!  I want to write like that.  And so instantly, I read all of her, and then I found Lisa Kleypas, who wrote my very favorite romance of all time, called Then Came You, which is really not the typical romance at all.

Sarah:  No, but I love that book.

Caroline:  I love that book too!  Oh, I love that book so hard!  So, yeah, those were some of the first ones that really made an impact on me where I just thought, I’m not worthy!

[Laughter]

Sarah:  So does your math background help you with plotting?  Do you use anything from your, from your mathematical training when you’re writing?  Is there an overlap there?

Caroline:  So, I think so, but when I tell people about this, their eyes kind of start to glaze over because –

Sarah:  Well, you can’t see us, so bring it on!  [Laughs]

Caroline:  Oh, okay, good.  All right.  Hold on!

Sarah:  All right!

Caroline:  So the big thing in college-level math is proof, right?

Sarah:  Right.

Caroline:  You start with one statement, and you want to prove something else at the bottom, and you have to go through step by step, and you have to use established either factual or theorems that have already been proved.  You can’t just say, well, this really makes sense, or I can draw a picture of it; therefore, it’s true.  No, it’s not at all.  You have to go very logically from one point to the next, so to me, I don’t find it that dissimilar from writing a book.

Sarah:  Nope.

Caroline:  I start with my initial situation.

Sarah:  Yep.

Caroline:  These two people, I don’t know, they hate each other, or she wants one thing and he wants the same thing, and they both can’t have it, and then at the end has to be, they are together, on a team, happy with each other.  Their conflicts are resolved, and they have come to see each other’s point of view.  They make each other laugh; they get each other off; it’s all great.  So this journey in the middle is just, you can’t just make a giant leap from, you know, your father killed my mother, to, but I love you so much anyway, you know?  There has to be something in the middle to show some prog-, some progression of whatever the couple’s journey is.  So to me, it doesn’t feel that dissimilar, but anytime I start talking about, you know, proving Green’s theorem or something, people go, okay, great!  I get it, thanks!  We’re good!  [Laughs]

Sarah:  I, actually, no, I totally see what you’re saying.  I think that makes a lot of sense.  I was talking to a whole bunch of people at RT, and you know, there’s, there’s a number of what they call recovering attorneys in romance?

Caroline:  Yeah, there are.  Oh, my God, my husband’s an attorney, and every time I meet attorneys at the cocktail party, the number one thing they say to me when they hear what I do, I want to write a book too!  I wish I could write a book!

Sarah:  Yeah, well, butt in chair, hands on keyboard.

Caroline:  Mm-hmm.

Sarah:  That’s kind of what happens.

Caroline:  I, well, I’m like, well, first you probably need to leave your office.

Sarah:  Yeah.  But the –

Caroline:  Good luck.

[Laughter]

Sarah:  But the, but, but when you write a legal document –

Caroline:  Mm-hmm.

Sarah:  – you have a structure you have to follow.  If you’re filing a brief –

Caroline:  Exactly.

Sarah:  – or you’re making an argument, you have to have the beginning, and it looks like this, and the order has to go like this, and it has to fit within this framework –

Caroline:  Mm-hmm.

Sarah:  – and romance is very similar in that there is a framework that has to be worked around or worked within –

Caroline:  Mm-hmm.

Sarah:  – but whatever crazy whackadoodle argument you want to make in the middle of that brief, go at it!  Have fun!  Citations are great, you know.  There’s a number of completely awesome arguments that are made in legal briefs that are really fun to read!

Caroline:  Mm-hmm.

Sarah:  The same sort of thing is true of romance.  You have a, a beginning that is expected, that the hero and heroine are going to meet or connect or be stuck together because of a snowstorm, which is my personal favorite –

Caroline:  Mm-hmm.

Sarah:  – and then there’s going to be a happy ending where they have to –

Caroline:  I can tell you’re from the Northeast!  [Laughs]

Sarah:  Yes, I so am.  And I love a good snowstorm, because it’s not life-threatening, it’s not like a tornado or a hurricane.  If you’re in the house and you have food and water and a fireplace or heat, you’re not in great danger.  You just kind of have to wait.

Caroline:  Yeah.

Sarah:  Unless you’re in Boston –

Caroline:  I’m still recovering –

Sarah:  Unless you’re in Boston, in which case –

Caroline:  – from a hundred inches of snow in one month.

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Caroline:  It was, at times it did feel a little life-threatening.  No, but you’re, I think you’re absolutely right about legal briefs.  It’s very similar to a mathematical proof.  You can make whatever whackadoodle argument you want, but you have to have some grounds, some rationale –

Sarah:  Right.

Caroline:  – at least some reasoning to support this, you know.  [Laughs]

Sarah:  These two totally different people are going to be happy for the rest of their lives.  Okay, prove it.  Here’s 300 pages to do that with.

Caroline:  Exactly.  You know, somehow they’re going to get from I hate you, I despise you, to, you are the one I want to be with for the rest of my life, so.  I just –

Sarah:  Right.  Or they’re going to change what they think of the other person, or they’re going to learn that they’re, that they were wrong.

Caroline:  Exactly.

Sarah:  Yeah.

Caroline:  Yeah, sometimes, you know –

Sarah:  I, I love that.

Caroline:  Whatever you use to get there, whether it’s a good slap upside the head or the realization that your whole anger towards this person has been based on a lie that somebody told you, you know, whatever it is, maybe just realizing that you need to get over yourself a little bit, which –

Sarah:  Yep.

Caroline:  – you know.  [Laughs] That’s, not that that ever happens to any romance characters, but –

Sarah:  Yeah, no, not at all.

Caroline:  No.

Sarah:  So your upcoming book is Love in the Time of Scandal.

Caroline:  Mm-hmm.

Sarah:  And when does that come out?

Caroline:  That comes out May 26^th –

Sarah:  Oh, perfect.

Caroline:  – which is in just a week!  A week from tom-, um, yeah.

Sarah:  Fabulous.  Well, this will go up on Friday the 22^nd, so –

Caroline:  Mm-hmm.

Sarah:  – without spoiling too much, can you tell us about this book and then the series that it’s in?  It’s the third in the series, right?

Caroline:  It is the third in a series, so I’ll talk about the series first, and then I’ll talk about the book, because that’s –

Sarah:  Yes, please.

Caroline:  Otherwise I’ll go back and forth too much.  So, the series is, I think my agent pitched it to my publisher as 50 Shades of Regency Porn because it was when 50 Shades of Grey was just huge, enormous, so popular, everywhere.  You went on vacation and saw it on every single eReader…

Sarah:  Yep.

Caroline:  So, I didn’t read it myself, but I found it on the Kindle account I share with my daughter who’s a teenager.

Sarah:  [Gasps, laughs] Oh, no!

Caroline:  Bear in mind, this was several years ago, so she was not a very old teenager.  She was not eighteen or anything – [laughs] – and I saw it and thought, huh!  I have to know.

Sarah:  Wow.

Caroline:  I went and asked her, did you buy this?  And she gives me this, you know, that sideways, suspicious, teenage look, like, yeah, so, what’s it to you?

Sarah:  Yeah?

Caroline:  Uh-huh.  I’m like, well, first of all, it’s linked to my credit card, so I paid for it.  Second of all, why did you buy it?

Sarah:  Yeah?

Caroline:  And her answer was, after she got over being annoyed at me for noticing what she bought on my credit card, was that everybody was reading it.  Everybody was talking about it – even, I kid you not, in middle school – and she just wanted to know what the fuss was all about.

Sarah:  Yep.

Caroline:  So I kind of thought, you know, that’s definitely true.  I know people who bought, adult women who bought 50 Shades of Grey just, not because they read romance or because they were even great readers, but because everybody was talking about it –

Sarah:  Yep.

Caroline:  – and they wanted to know what’s in this story that’s so compelling, that’s so gripping, that, you know, I just want to know.

Sarah:  Yep.

Caroline:  So my series is based on a similarly scandalous story, very taboo, but also incredibly talked about, called 50 Ways to Sin.  It’s not, that’s pretty much where the end of the 50 Shades similarity ends, because mine is a serial that’s sort of like Fanny Hill’s letters to Penthouse, if you know who Fanny Hill was.  That was a, the, that was the 50 Shades of Grey of the 1700s.  It was really, I mean, the author and the publisher both got sent to jail, that’s how bad they thought that book was.

Sarah:  Whoa!

Caroline:  But it’s this, Fanny’s this girl who leaves her home, and she goes to London, and of course, the first thing that happens to her is she gets caught up into a brothel, and Fanny has pretty much every kind of sex you can imagine.  It’s described in that very flowery eighteenth century language that makes it kind of hard reading, and so you’re plodding along, and then you realize what she’s talking about, and I just, I laughed through the whole book, because I’d be reading along going, all right, now what does this mean?  What is – okay.  Oh, my gosh, that’s what she’s watching!  [Laughs] Like, the description of gay sex is one of the funniest I have ever read –

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Caroline:  – in his book, and so – you know, it’s not really like Fanny’s shocked by it, but there’s no, that’s really the end of any opprobrium, and at the time, of course, homosexual sex was illegal, so it was a big deal that he even included this in the book!  So, anyway, so my series is a little bit different.  It’s a more mature woman, but basically it’s a widow who has money and independence, and she decides that she’s just going to go out and have a good time and, and it’s a series of one-night stands that she has with various people.  And the men in the stories that she describes are modeled on famous people in the town, so it’s kind of like celebrity fan porn fic?

Sarah:  Mm-hmm.

Caroline:  In a way?  You know, like my night with Daniel Craig?

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Caroline:  So, the first book is Love and Other Scandals, and that’s where it all gets introduced.  It’s a key point this, these naughty stories are a key point in the plot, because the heroine figures out, she can’t get them any other way, and so she finally asks the hero to get them for her, and, and that’s the joke in that one.  The second one is called It Takes a Scandal, and the third one, Love and Other Scandals – sorry, Love in the Time of Scandal – there’s too many scandals in this series – is, is pretty much – you know how Hollywood has started taking the finale series of a, of a, you know, sorry, the finale book of a series and splitting it in two?

Sarah:  Mm-hmm.

Caroline:  I feel like that’s kind of what I’ve done here, ‘cause there will be a fourth book.  Lady Constance, the writer of these wicked porno stories, is unknown.  It’s a pseudonym, so nobody knows who she is, and this is, like, part one of the finale of revealing who she is, so there will be another book next April, I think, where it will all be revealed.  But this is the first part, and it kind of sets up the, the ultimate story.  So in this book, Penelope Weston is this girl who’s really full of herself, and she hates this guy, Benedict, Lord Atherton, and she hates him because she’s hot for him, but he actually tried to marry her sister in the second book.  So he needs to get married, and she actually screws up his wedding proposal to another girl –

Sarah:  Ouch!

Caroline:  – kind of accidentally on purpose?  So he’s really pissed at her, and she hates him and thinks he’s a shallow, fake, disgustingly good-looking jerk, and they end up getting caught together in a very, yeah, not good-looking situation when Penelope gets attacked by somebody else.  So, you know, they, they end up married by about the middle of the book, and then it’s really the process of the two of them sorting out how can I deal with this marriage and this relationship?  And Penelope has to, like I said earlier, get over herself – [laughs] – and grow up and realize that she’s been wrong about him.  And he at the same time has to get over his inclination towards secrecy –

Sarah:  Mm-hmm.

Caroline:  – because he’s been keeping a lot of, like, family secrets, so anyway.  That’s, I’m not, I don’t, I’m terrible at describing my own books.  [Laughs] It goes off on this long tangent about, and then this happens, and then more stuff happens.  But I did love writing Penelope.  I think she’s one of the most smart-mouthed girls I’ve ever written, and I always wanted to be that smart-mouthed girl, but I never was, so it’s been a –

Sarah:  Are you the, are you the type of person who thinks of what to say after you’ve left the situation?

Caroline:  Yes, yes, and I will spend hours thinking about it.  [Laughs]

Sarah:  Which is probably good for fictional dialogue development?  [Laughs]

Caroline:  It is!  It’s very less-satisfying in real life, though.

Sarah:  Yeah.

Caroline:  Two hours later, you’re like, now I know exactly how I would have put that person in their place, so basically – [laughs]

Sarah:  Oh, if only I had thought of this an hour ago, damn it!

Caroline:  Well, so, anyway.

Sarah:  You had to do a lot of research, then, into books like Fanny Hill, or Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure.  What were some of the things you noticed about those earlier, more risqué pieces of, pieces of literature?

Caroline:  Those Georgians were some dirty-minded people, man.

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Caroline:  I’m telling you.  People have this idea that, oh, they were very prim and proper, and all this stuff wasn’t allowed.  Like, no, there was this very small, upper-class crust of people who, for whom marriage and children was really all about preserving money and power.  Those people cared very, very much that their daughter not go off and kiss an unauthorized, unapproved boy.

Sarah:  Right.

Caroline:  Everybody else, nope!  There was so much that went on!

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Caroline:  I, I did read, actually, a lot of early porn, and some of it was very strange and kind of scarring in a way.  [Laughs]

Sarah:  How so?

Caroline:  I read this book, I think it was called The School for Venus, School of Venus, and it’s from the 1600s, so –

Sarah:  Oh, boy.

Caroline:  – Pilgrims, right?  And it’s a dialogue.  It’s written as a, like, play, like a script, and these two women, one of whom is, I think the younger is sixteen, and her cousin is, like, eighteen or twenty, and the older cousin is experienced, and the whole dialogue is about her telling her younger cousin – remember, sixteen years old – how she can basically get a – can I say this on the air? – a fuck buddy of her own?  [Laughs]

Sarah:  Totally.

Caroline:  Okay.  So, that’s the whole thing.  How you have sex, how you find a guy who will have sex with you, how you can not get pregnant, how you can not get caught.  The whole thing is all about the ways a sixteen-year-old girl who’s not married can get her rocks off with any guy that she takes a fancy to, and they go through –

Sarah:  Whoa.

Caroline:  Yeah, I mean, the language is incredibly blunt.  There are no euphemisms used.  The older girl gives very explicit directions, you know.  When a man puts his prick into a woman’s cunt, it is called fucking.

Sarah:  Whoa!

Caroline:  That’s, I’m not kidding, that’s a quote.  That’s exactly how ribald it is, and she goes through, you know, these are the other names that you might here a man’s organ called, and she lists this whole long thing!  And, and it’s just, I, I think I read it with my eyebrows up going, wow, like, you know, I’ve read erotica, and this is just different!  [Laughs]

Sarah:  Wow.

Caroline:  So, yeah, I guess it, it kind of said there’s really no reason to hold back in whatever I wanted to write, because it would be historically accurate.  Yeah, and that was just, I can’t remember all of them now, of course, because I read them a couple years ago at this point, but that was the one that really stuck in my mind.  The whole thing is about how to get laid.

Sarah:  Whoa.

Caroline:  Yeah.

Sarah:  Do you remember any of the more creative names for the parts involved in such unions?

Caroline:  Oh, gosh, I will email you.  I’ll have to look it up –

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Caroline:  – because they were – you know, there was no FCC back then, so –

Sarah:  Yep!

Caroline:  – they used all the language that they wanted.  I mean, the F-word was predominantly the one that they used, but there was some still of that, that eighteenth century, or I guess at that point, seventeenth century archaic weird way of phrasing things, you know.  Like, they would call it, when he tickles me inside with his prick, and I felt such great pleasure and gave myself over with sighs of abandon, and so –

Sarah:  Whoa!

Caroline:  – it’s kind of going on in that way, but then, you know, again, it’s using the same, the same body language that people use today, which we would call, you know, really gritty and raw and intense.  Back then, it was just, nah!  Fuck is just a word!

Sarah:  Yep.

Caroline:  You know, kind of a crude word, but it’s just a word.

Sarah:  And so the point of that whole book was, okay, this feels good, and you’re not supposed to do it, so I’m going to tell you how you can do it and not get caught.

Caroline:  At one point, the older girl does say to the younger girl that all the laws about women, that they shouldn’t have sex, that they shouldn’t enjoy themselves, are written by men, and that if women were in charge of the world, fucking would not be illegal anywhere ever by anybody.

Sarah:  Go ahead, girl!  I hear that!

Caroline:  And – I know!  I thought, awesome!  Way to go!  You know, you’re right!  But the weird thing is, most of this stuff was written by men –

Sarah:  Yep.

Caroline:  – back then, and the female narrator was very popular, so one thing that I did find very interesting about it was, here’s this thing, written by men – oh, I forgot, it’s actually dedicated to a, a prostitute at the very beginning –

Sarah:  Awesome!

Caroline:  – where, where he congratulates her on the, the enthusiasm and diligence with which she attends to her fucking exercises and being so free that she doesn’t deny the pleasure of her sexual favors to anybody!

Sarah:  Whoa!

Caroline:  That’s who this is dedicated to, I know!  So it was written by, probably a man, although it’s a little bit unclear because it’s so old, and it, like a lot of older erotica, it uses a female’s voice.  Prostitutes were incredibly popular narrators, I guess because people expected them to go out and have sex with lots of different guys and figured they must be more open to variety and to doing kinky things, you know.  Whereas your, I don’t know, your wife might just lie back and let you do your thing, a prostitute’s like, yeah, all right, if you’ve got the money, bring it on!  Let’s go!  So I don’t really know, but it definitely was something that struck me that these things were celebrating female pleasure in female voices, even if they weren’t actually written by women, and they were definitely read by women.  There were definitely cases of –

Sarah:  And they were profoundly subversive, too!

Caroline:  Exactly!  And they were, there were definitely cases of women who had, like, leather-bound copies of these dirty poems and naughty stories and –

Sarah:  Woohoo!

Caroline:  Yeah, exactly!  And they would show them to their friends!  You know, you’d, you’d have this little locked cabinet in your, in your room, I guess, and of course these were wealthy women, because books were very expensive, especially leather-bound, but they would have their friends over, I guess, and look at the books!  [Laughs] Some of which were illustrated, by the way!

Sarah:  Oh, well, you can’t not have illustrations.  I mean –

Caroline:  I will send you some links.

Sarah:  Oh –

Caroline:  There were some good illustrations.  [Laughs]

Sarah:  – I mean, we need to have a whole chapter on codpieces.

Caroline:  Yeah, no, not even codpieces.  Like, totally –

Sarah:  What’s in the – fabulous!

Caroline:  Like, the guy’s reclining on the sofa, and the woman is there, still clothed, but pulling up her skirt so you can see, you know, her naked belly and all her legs and everything, and, and she’s showing him where to put it.  So –

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Caroline:  – yeah.  [Laughs] They’re instructional, you know?  You can’t get it wrong if you follow the steps in these drawings!

Sarah:  So what elements of those books did you include in your series?  ‘Cause the book that’s being, that’s being handed around among the characters in your series is 50, is it 50 Ways to Sin?

Caroline:  50 Ways to Sin.

Sarah:  Okay.  I wasn’t sure if it was 50 Ways or 50 Paths, but I knew there were fifty, and you were all sinning, which, yay.  So what parts of the books that you read, what elements did you include in 50 Ways to Sin?

Caroline:  So, it’s a woman narrating them.

Sarah:  Right.

Caroline:  A woman who is unashamed of finding her own pleasure, who, you know, keeps it discreet, but at the same time is unabashed in the fact that she likes doing this.  She likes sex; she likes different kinds of sex; she’s adventurous.  If a guy proposes something novel like, I want to tie you up and blindfold you, she says, okay, I’ll try it –

Sarah:  Mm-hmm.

Caroline:  – and I really wanted that to come through to my – in the first three books, the heroines are all virgins, which was so hard to write –

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Caroline:  – but I wanted it to come through to them that sex is not this scary thing that happens in the dark on your wedding night, and you just have to lie back and take it, which is a very Victorian idea, and this is Regency, but still, upper class girls were generally kept in the dark about it.

Sarah:  Of course.

Caroline:  Exactly.  Probably because of what these two girls in the seventeenth, you know, in the 1600s thing said, you know.  If women knew – [laughs] – if all women knew how good this was, they would not listen to those rules that say you can’t do it.  So I wanted that to be a voice in my, my heroines’ ears, that sex is pleasurable, sex is good.  It’s great in marriage, but it doesn’t have to just be in marriage.  It’s something that women around the world, not just, you know, rare freaks, enjoy and savor, and then I thought a little sex ed couldn’t help, couldn’t, couldn’t hurt my heroines, as well.

Sarah:  No, I don’t think so.

Caroline:  No, that’s – when I say virgin heroines are hard to write for me, it’s because in a historical they’re often, generally, pretty clueless.  You know, what do I know?  What, what am I supposed to do?  Am I supposed to enjoy this?  And, you know, I figure, they don’t have sex ed classes telling them about masturbation or pleasure or anything at all!  So it’s kind of a cliché in historical romance, right, that the heroine is terrified on the wedding night when the hero comes in –

Sarah:  Yep.

Caroline:  – and he has to be so gentle to avoid, you know, ripping her asunder.  Like, no, I don’t really like those stories.  I, I wanted my heroines to be maybe nervous, but still looking forward to it.

Sarah:  And having knowledge and agency, which are both good and powerful things.

Caroline:  Exactly.  The – I hate, in historicals, the severe imbalance of power, which you don’t see as much anymore, but – you know what I’m talking about?  The all-powerful duke –

Sarah:  Absolutely.

Caroline:  – the penniless governess.  There needs to be some, some way to shift some of that power between them, and knowledge is an important thing, I think.  If he knows everything, if he’s, you know, been with two dozen women and he knows all the tricks and, and she’s just this quivering lump of I don’t know what to do, like, okay.  I mean, I’m not saying that’s wrong, and it definitely has worked for me big time in books by other authors, but I can’t write it that well.  I always feel like she would be going, I want to find out about this.  It’s probably the nerdy girl in me –

Sarah:  Totally!

Caroline:  –  I’m like, I’m going to Google that.  I’m going to find out.  [Laughs]

Sarah:  And what’s int- – I, I always struggle with suspending my disbelief exactly over that issue.  You have all of these young people who are all seeing each other all the time, and if the setup is to be believed, a lot of their focus is find a really good husband, make a good match, have a good marriage, get, you know –

Caroline:  The End, pretty much, right?

Sarah:  Yes, exactly!  And then all of their friends are getting married –

Caroline:  Nothing left to do after that.

Sarah:  – and I used to get so irritated with serieses – serieseseseses? – ‘scuse me – where there’d be a, a group of heroes and heroines, and they’d all get married one after the other, and the heroines that get married and have sex and learn about it don’t turn around and be like, y’all are not going to believe how awesome this is.

Caroline:  Exactly!

Sarah:  Like, I would totally be that person!  I’d be like, no, really, this is, no, your mom, and, and there’s always that horribly awkward conversation with an earlier character –

Caroline:  You know, with the mom, right?

Sarah:  Right, and the, and, okay, I need to tell you what to expect on your wedding night.  He’ll be kind to you, and, and it’s like the most vague thing, like, he’s going to give her some cookies?  He’s going to bring her a cake?  He’s going to buy her a horse, or they’re going to have sex?  Something’s going to happen!

Caroline:  Well, even worse is when the mother obviously doesn’t have a very happy marriage or whatever, and she gives the heroine this idea that it’s going to be this horrible thing.

Sarah:  Right!

Caroline:  You know, there’s going to be blood, and you’re going to be in pain, and it’s –

Sarah:  He’s not going to care!  He’s just going to go!

Caroline:  horrible, and then he’s going to go off and he’s going to sleep with all these other women too, because you’re never going to be enough for him, and no wonder these poor girls are scared out of their minds!  No wonder they don’t want to get married.

Sarah:  Exactly!

Caroline:  That doesn’t sound appealing at all!

Sarah:  And I always have to, I always have a hard time thinking, okay, there’s all these women that I’m reading about, and I love really smart heroines, like, really intelligent heroines who are fascinated by things other than society –

Caroline:  Mm-hmm.

Sarah:  – or they’re super creative in a way that isn’t entirely appreciated, but they figure out a way to make it work, because the odd thing is, maybe not so much in the Regency, because it’s not a period of history I know that much about, but I know that in the early twentieth century, a lot of the advancements in things like agriculture and botany, some of those were done by women, because if you were a woman of high society, you didn’t need to, to, to work.  You had money, so, like, you could do things.  Like, I know one of my ancestors domesticated the blueberry –

Caroline:  Cool.

Sarah:  Now, I happen to really like blueberries, so I think she’s completely rad –

Caroline:  She’s my hero!

Sarah:  I know!  I love blueberries!

Caroline:  It’s blueberry cobbler season!

Sarah:  Blueberry muffins for everyone!  But she did that because she was of a social class where she could go and do research, and it wasn’t, (a) it wasn’t going to make her unattractive to everybody, because it was acceptable for her to be doing this, you know, activity, but so much of the scientific advancements are in part done by people who didn’t have to work otherwise.  So I, I have a hard time believing that heroines of, in any era of historicals wouldn’t be, like, curious about anything, much less sex.  I mean, surely they had to be like, okay, you go watch the stable go, stable boy.  We’ll all hide.  We’re going to watch and see what happens.

Caroline:  Right.  [Laughs]

Sarah:  Somebody was peepin’.

Caroline:  So, it’s, it’s interesting.  I was, I, I think it was the, the two nerdy history girls, Loretta Chase and Isabella Bradford –

Sarah:  Mm-hmm.

Caroline:  – who were talking about women’s rights, and they said, it’s a popular misconception that women’s rights have been generally increasing over time, and that’s not really the case.  They’ve been sort of up and down over history.  In the Georgian era, women were – you know, yeah, there was the very top upper crust, you know, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, that kind of woman who was not permitted to work or do anything for the most part –

Sarah:  Mm-hmm.

Caroline:  – but otherwise, women did, actually, a lot of stuff.  The, the very term cottage industry comes from women who would stay at home and run, basically, a little business out of their house.  They would spin thread and card wool and weave and do all kinds of stuff at home, and yeah, it was tied to the house, but they were creating a very vital source of income –

Sarah:  Of course.

Caroline:  – for their family.  Widows, especially, went on to run their husbands’ business.  Eleanor Coade is a huge example of that.  I don’t even know that her husband did anything, but she was this rock star in, of all things, the building trades.  She came up with this way of firing ceramic that made it look like stone, except you could do it in any shape you wanted.  So instead of having to hire a sculptor to carve that elaborate stone mantelpiece for your fine new house, she could cast it for you in ceramic, and it would survive a fire.  And she was just, marks of her stuff are still around London.  If you walk around London, you can still see little examples here and there of Coade work that has survived.

Sarah:  Wow!

Caroline:  Yeah!  She’s just, Google her, she’s incredible.  And there were plenty of other women in scientific fields.  You know, Ada Lovelace is a good, a good one to mention.

Sarah:  Yep.

Caroline:  I think Caroline Herschel, the astronomer’s sister, who probably did about half his work.  There were women out there.  It just wasn’t as accepted for them to publish their stuff.  I’m sure there were tons of scientists and philosophers and, and various people whose, whose work was strongly supported by their wife or their sister.  She just wasn’t really allowed to put her name on it in public.  And that’s a common thing, or not a common thing, but that’s a plot you see in historical romances a fair amount, you know, that the, the father is a scientist or a scholar of some sort and, and really what’s going on is his daughter’s doing a lot of the work, and he’s publishing it under his name because nobody will accept a manuscript from a woman.

Sarah:  Yep.

Caroline:  But she’s the real genius behind his fame.

Sarah:  So true.  And there’re stories after story after story of women inventing something and a dude taking it and getting the credit.

Caroline:  Of course.  Mm-hmm.

Sarah:  That’s a, that’s a very familiar story.

Caroline:  It is.

Sarah:  Bastards.

Caroline:  I know.  [Laughs] Makes you so angry!

Sarah:  So what is next for you in this series.  Are you working on the last book, or is it already done?

Caroline:  I wish it was already done.  I’m working on it.

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Caroline:  Love in the Time of Scandal kind of ends with, it’s not really a cliffhanger, but it ends with loose, unconcluded plot threads sticking out there –

Sarah:  Yep.

Caroline:  – and I actually read an early review of the book that said, if there’s another book, I’m okay with this.  If there’s not, I am so enraged at the author, and I was like, no, there’s another book.  I, that’s just too open for me.  So I am writing the last book, where Lady Constance will be revealed, and all the questions at the end of Love in the Time of Scandal will get answered and picked up midstream, but –

Sarah:  I don’t know if you can answer this question, but is she going to have her own romance?  Or does she have one during the course of the story?

Caroline:  Lady Constance?

Sarah:  Mm-hmm?

Caroline:  That is my plan.  I – I probably shouldn’t say this –

Sarah:  You can’t see me; I’m rubbing my hands together.

Caroline:  – on a, on a recorded phone call, but I’ve been writing the, the Regency pornos, and I do see a plot arc to them, and if I can finish them off the way I want to, I am thinking about publishing them.  Just as a, you know, it’s not going to be that long.  It’ll be like, maybe, ten of the fifty issues, but it’s actually really fun to write old-style porn.  [Laughs]

Sarah:  I’m sure!  It’s a completely different language construction.

Caroline:  It, you know, it’s like channeling Jane Austen to write your favorite erotica story.

Sarah:  Dirty stuff.

Caroline:  Yeah!  Yeah, so – [laughs] – it’s really fun!  I feel very weird saying that out loud.  Yes, I really like writing Jane Austen porn.

Sarah:  That’s awesome!  So is that going to be part of the series?  Or is that –

Caroline:  No, that would be a separate thing, because it’s – you know, I wanted it to be really, definitely out there, especially for the time, so it’s, it’s way sexier than the stuff I usually write, especially the one with two guys and the woman, but I’ve had a lot of fun writing them, and a number of people have emailed me to say, well, you know, what are they really like?  Are they really that raunchy, sexy, different, dirty?  And so – I think I would do it separately, though, so that people who were like, I’m better, I’m just, I’m good not knowing, just imagining what they’re like, so that they wouldn’t have to, you know, deal with it if they didn’t want to.

Sarah:  Awesome!

Caroline:  I hope so!

Sarah:  So I have one last question for you.

Caroline:  Yep!

Sarah:  What have you read recently that you would like to tell people about?  Any books that you were like, oh, my gosh, this was amazing?

Caroline:  Any books I read.  Oh, my gosh, what’s amazing?  I am fangirling on Laura Kaye’s Hard Ink series, which is about to conclude pretty soon.  I think this summer the final book comes out –

Sarah:  Mm-hmm.

Caroline:  – and I am, like, sooo interested, I want to see that book.

Sarah:  [Laughs] But she’s an Avon author.  Don’t you have an in?

Caroline:  She is an Avon author!  You know, I just, I, I’m trying to work up the courage to, to write and ask her if he could read it early.

[Laughter]

Caroline:  And then, then I battle myself.  Like, maybe that’s unethical, maybe that’s taking advantage of the authorial relationship, and then I’m like, well, but I write for that publisher too, and if somebody, if she asked for one of my books early, I would give it to her, so –

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Caroline:  – what’s the worst she can do?  Say no and think I’m, like – [laughs]

Sarah:  I always wonder if when authors are considering offers, if they have, if they’re fortunate to have offers from more than one, one publishing company, like, you know, after the initial things that you must evaluate, like contract terms and advance and percentages and all the mathematical things, if, like, seventh or eighth or ninth down is who else writes for that publisher that I would get their books early?  Hmmm.

Caroline:  You know, we do.

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Caroline:  Of course.  Not, not in the sense of will I get their books early, although there is a little bit of well, now I’m going to meet them at the, you know –

Sarah:  RWA!

Caroline:  – publisher’s party at RWA –

Sarah:  Right.

Caroline:  – and so, maybe – [laughs] – we’ll hit it off and be friends!  And I certainly, I do have plenty of friends that I read their books really early, so it does happen.  I certainly won’t deny that, and it’s a major perk of being an author.  It’s great.

Sarah:  It’s a good perk!

Caroline:  But, no, I think when you look at publishers as an author, you, you want to know who they publish because you want to see what they’re capable of doing.  [Laughs]

Sarah:  Of course!

Caroline:  Let’s see, are all their authors on the New York Times bestseller list?  Yep.  That’s great!

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Caroline:  Are none of their authors on the bestseller list?  Hmm.  Why not?

Sarah:  That’s not so good.

Caroline:  So, there, you know, there’s some of that.  I, I think the most important thing in a publisher is the editorial match, but it’s also really significant, you know, what are they going, how are they going to market this book?  Because no author wants to write a book and see it sell 5,000 copies and just disappear without a trace.  I remember reading about books that involved airline pilots and stuff being just really, really heart, hard after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.  Not that those books had anything to do with the terrorist attacks, but it just wasn’t the right moment, you know?

Sarah:  And people didn’t want to read about –

Caroline:  Exactly.

Sarah:  – flying.

Caroline:  Exactly.  And right now, if you gave me a book about two people trapped in a house for a month while –

Sarah:  Snow storm?

Caroline:  – snow pile up outside the house, I would probably run screaming the other direction –

Sarah:  Nope!  Nope.

Caroline:  – and not stop until I hit a beach.

[Laughter]

Caroline:  So there’s, there’s definitely different moments in time that – on the other hand, you’ve also seen books that have terrible covers.  [Laughs] Or, or books that you never saw at all, and you’re like, oh, that sounds like a good book.  When did that come out?  Three years ago.  I never heard of it.

Sarah:  That’s one of the things that I, when I was at the – I, I run a one-day bloggers’ conference at, right before RT, and one of the things that a lot of book bloggers were talking about was do you, you know, do you review books before they come out, when they come out, you know, is it, is it, is it okay to review things that are older, and my feeling is it’s always knew to somebody who hasn’t read it?

Caroline:  Exactly.

Sarah:  So if it’s still in print, you should absolutely talk about it, because somebody’s going to be like, give it to me now.

Caroline:  Yeah, that’s definitely true.  I would say that, I’m sure bloggers have as limited time as authors do, so it’s probably better –

Sarah:  Yes.

Caroline:  – to focus on books that are, are new, just because the people who read your blog are more likely to see those books in a bookstore and get the email from Amazon or Barnes and Noble saying, new for you! and you might like –

Sarah:  Absolutely.

Caroline:  So it’s more helpful to have the information, I think, closer to a book’s release, when a book is still, you know, new, or at least relatively new.

Sarah:  Yep.

Caroline:  But, you know, then that review will live on, and somebody who finds a book can Google it and see, oh, there are all these reviews.  This book came out four years ago, but people loved it.

Sarah:  It’s true.

Caroline:  And you know, I really appreciate all the bloggers who take time out of their day to review books.  Can I just say that?  Because my day is so full, and I sit here sometimes and think, man – [laughs] – I just want to read a book and get away from the world.  I don’t want to have to write a book report on it.  I would not want to do that, so I, I really appreciate what you guys do.

Sarah:  Oh, you’re very welcome.  And of course my dog appreciates it too, because the mailman just showed up?  It’s not a podcast unless there is a pet appearing in some way, so my smaller of two dogs has decided it’s his day to be on the podcast.  Thank you for telling me the mailman was here.  I also saw him, so good.  Good job.

Caroline:  Yes.

Sarah:  Thank you.

Caroline:  In my house, we call that the dog bell –

Sarah:  Yes!

Caroline:  – because my dog, the mailman comes six days a week, right.  My dog still goes absolutely crazy when hears the door to drop the mail.

Sarah:  [Laughs] Like, every day this happens.  You know this happens every day, right?

Caroline:  And it’s exciting every day!  Isn’t it?

Sarah:  [Laughs] I know!  But thank you for the, for the kudos.  I happen to love reading and reviewing books and describing them and talking about them, and for me, writing fiction is a lot harder, so I love doing what I do, and I’m glad it’s helpful.

Caroline:  You know, I, we really appreciate it, because I love reading, but if I had to write about the books that I read, I think that would, I don’t want to say ruin it, but it would definitely become more like work than just pleasure, so I really appreciate all the, the bloggers and reviewers and, you know, even just ordinary readers who take the time to leave a review on their Goodreads account and say what they thought of it, because, you know, that, that takes time.  That’s – reviews are important to authors.  Any author who tells you they don’t care about their reviews is either insanely rich or lying.  So that’s my statement on reviews.

Sarah:  Well, I’m, I’m really glad to hear you say that.  I know there’s a lot of authors who, who struggle with what to do with reviews?  Do, do you answer them, do you look at them, do you not look at them, and I think everyone’s relationship with reviewing is different, so I really appreciate that.

Caroline:  I, I think it definitely matters what the author’s personality is.  Some people admit they just can’t handle it.

Sarah:  Yep!

Caroline:  And they say, I’m not going to look, and that’s the right choice for them.

Sarah:  Yep.

Caroline:  If it would really screw with your mind and make it so you couldn’t write your next book –

Sarah:  Mm-hmm.

Caroline:  – then you should not look.  I – [laughs] – again, being a nerdy girl who can’t resist Goggling –

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Caroline:  – I read my reviews.  I look at them, and sometimes I see things in the review, and somebody will say something that I think about and go, you know what, I see their point.

Sarah:  Mm-hmm.

Caroline:  It’s, you know, debatable on whether I would have done things differently if I had thought of that while I was writing the book, but I see the point.  Some reviews, you know, I, I really believe reviews are for readers and not for authors, so I don’t take it that way, but I’m always interested in what people say about my books.

Sarah:  Absolutely.

Caroline:  And sometimes there are very, incredibly thoughtful reviews, and sometimes they have two stars attached to them.  [Laughs]

Sarah:  Nope.

Caroline:  You know, it’s, it’s much easier to read the five-star reviews and be happy, but –

Sarah:  Of course it is!

Caroline:  – but I appreciate a well-written two-star review just as much, because everybody brings something different to reading that book –

Sarah:  It’s true.

Caroline:  – and I write the kind of books that I would like to read, so I’m bringing my own reader biases and opinions and preferences into writing them as well, but not everybody is like me, you know?

Sarah:  It’s true!

Caroline:  So, yeah, it’s all good.

Sarah:  That’s awesome.  Well, thank you very much for taking the time to talk to me.

Caroline:  It’s been really fun talking to you.  I’m glad –

Sarah:  Yay!

Caroline:  – I’m glad your mail arrived safely.  [Laughs]

Sarah:  I, my mail is on the porch, and the dog is, is now going back to sleep because his job for the morning has been done!

Caroline:  Yay!  Oh, that’s good.  My dog will hang out by the door and wait until somebody gives her a treat.

Sarah:  [Laughs] I scared him away!

Caroline:  I alerted you!

Sarah:  I scared him away!  Give me a treat!

Caroline:  [Laughs] No, actually, my dog is a lab, so she’s the friendliest creature in the world.  She loves the mailman because six years ago we had a mailman for about a month who carried dog bones in his bag, and he would put one on top of the mail when he dropped it off.

Sarah:  Aww!

Caroline:  That was six years ago.  No mailman since has done that, and my dog still goes apeshit when the mail comes.  She’s so convinced –

Sarah:  There might be a cookie this time!

Caroline:  There might.  There might.  If ever I had any doubts about the reliability of partial conditioning, my dog has totally put them to rest.  It is real!  It works!  It is a law!

Sarah:  Well, I will, I, I’ll have to tell my mailman.  You know, dude, dog biscuits all the way.  [Laughs]

Caroline:  You know, I had a friend whose dog went crazy and was, like, really angry, like, attacking the mailman.  You know, the mailman is violating the sanctity of our home or something, and she put a little bucket right outside her door with dog treats in it, and she told the mailman, when you put the mail in, put a treat through the door with it – [laughs] – so the dog would come to associate the mail arriving with something good.

Sarah:  Very smart.

Caroline:  And nobody knows what he was associating it with before, but now he at least likes the treats, so –

Sarah:  Hey, who doesn’t like a good cookie, right?

Caroline:  I know!  Oh, my God, I wish somebody would come once a day and give me a cookie.

Sarah:  That would be awesome!  There’s got to be a way to set that up.

Caroline:  Oh, I love cookies.

Sarah:  [Laughs] Me too.

Caroline:  That was the, that was the best part of writing a contemporary last year.  I, I wrote a baker, and I spent the whole, I spent probably half my writing time online looking up recipes.  Hmm!  I would like to make this!

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Caroline:  So guess what!  It’s going in the book!

[music]

Sarah:  And that is all for this episode.  I hope you enjoyed our conversation.  It’s not a podcast unless there’re pets, right?  I mean, a pet must make an appearance on a podcast every episode.

This podcast was brought to you by pets and also by InterMix, publisher of Ever Night, the sexy new paranormal novella from New York Times bestselling author Gena Showalter, on sale wherever fine eBooks are sold.

Our music in every episode is provided by Sassy Outwater, and you can find her on Twitter @SassyOutwater.  This podcast features a song by the Peatbog Faeries from their CD Dust, and you can find them at their website or on iTunes.  This song, if I am correct in my pronunciation, is called “Abhainn A’Nathair,” and I hope I got that right.  Plus, I have new information.  Sassy tells me that there is a new Peatbog Faeries album coming out on May 24^th.  I’m very excited.  We will have to try all of the songs, yes?  Yes.  Of course.

Future podcasts will include me talking to people about romance novels, because that’s what we do here, and it’s fun!  Because yay!  If you have questions or suggestions or you want to talk to me or you would like to ask for a book recommendation or you think I’m wrong about something, you are most welcome to email us, but you’re even more welcome if you think Jane is wrong about something.  Our email address is [email protected], and we love all of the listener email.  We have lots of it, and I’m about to use it for many, many podcasts.

In the meantime, I hope you and yours enjoy a terrific holiday weekend if you’re in the States, and on behalf of Caroline Linden and Jane and myself, we wish you the very best of reading.  Have a great weekend.

[rollicking music]