151. History, Historicals, And Suspense: An Interview with Elizabeth Lowell

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Sarah Wendell:  Hello, and welcome to episode number 151 of the DBSA podcast.  I’m Sarah Wendell from Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, and with me today are Jane from Dear Author and an author you might have heard of, Elizabeth Lowell.  I know, right?  We were so excited to do this interview!  We talk about romantic historicals, medievals, Westerns, Western historicals, and her new book, which comes out this week.

This podcast is being brought to you by InterMix, publisher of Chanel Cleeton’s Playing with Trouble, the sexy new romance in the Capitol Confessions series, on sale now.

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And now, on with the podcast.

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Sarah:  We’re so excited to talk to you today!  Thank you for taking the time to, to chat with us!

Elizabeth Lowell:  Oh, it’s always a pleasure to meet people who like books.

Sarah:  [Laughs] We, we do that, definitely.

Elizabeth:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  Could you introduce yourself to everyone who’s listening, please?

Elizabeth:  Hi, I’m Elizabeth Lowell, and I have been writing for a very long time under quite a few names, but the name that you’re most interested in today is Elizabeth, because that’s what I write romantic suspense under.

Sarah:  And also the medievals that you wrote were under Elizabeth Lowell too, right?

Elizabeth:  They were, under Elizabeth Lowell.  So were the Westerns that I wrote, and Western historicals.  But they’ve all had, at their core, romance, the relationship between a man and a woman, so I kind of lump them together.

Sarah:  I’m okay with that, because we love all of those things.

Jane:  We actually just – before you got on the phone, Sarah and I were talking about straight-up mysteries, so we don’t talk about just romance in the podcast, so feel free to share your other alter egos and what you write.

Elizabeth:  Okay, well, I’ve written as A. E. Maxwell with my husband, and we write the Fiddler and Fiora mystery series, and that’s where the relationship takes a very long arc.  From book to book to book it changes.  They’re trying to learn how to get along after, you know, you can love someone and not be able to live with them, and that’s what they were going through.  And I’ve written as Ann Maxwell, science fiction.  As I look back on it, even then I still had in the books the core of the relationship between a man and a woman.  I guess that’s what I’ve always been fascinated by – and enjoyed myself.

Jane:  Actually, one of the questions that I had written to Sarah to ask you was that particular issue.  It’s common for, I think, everybody, even George R. R. Martin, who enjoys killing off people.  He does explore the relationships between characters –

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Jane:  – the love relationships between characters.  I mean, despite the inauspicious start between Khal Drogo and Daenerys, it was certainly, it became a certainly very romantic story between the two of them, so you’d be hard pressed not to see some romance in all of these stories that are popular, so my question to you is what do you think it is about those relationships, the love stories, that even readers of non-romance are drawn to?

Elizabeth:  I think it’s the basic beauty of a good relationship between two people, a man and a woman in most cases, woman/woman, man/man, it doesn’t really matter.  The, the basic beauty of it is that they enhance each other instead of reduce each other.  They enhance possibilities.  They sweeten life.  They give you somebody to share the bad times with, as well as the good.  And I, I believe that nearly everybody is looking for that at some point or another in their life.

Jane:  I don’t know if you’ve had a chance to read the Supreme Court decision, but Kennedy in the very last paragraph of his majority decision writes that in forming a marital union, two people become something greater than once they were, which I think is a, kind of what you were saying.

Elizabeth:  Yes.  I, I think that that’s, it seems to really work at the most basic levels and at the most transent-, transcendent levels.  You’d have – how to put it?  I live with it every day; it’s part of my life; it informs everything I do.  I’m better for it.  The fact that I was fortunate enough to find it makes me want to share the possibilities with everybody, particularly people who read.  And I don’t think anyone ever gives up completely looking for it, no matter how many bad experiences they might have had or bad choices they made when they were younger.  And I have seen people find such satisfaction with themselves, with each other, and with life in a good relationship that I, all I can say is keep looking, everybody; it’s out there somewhere.

Jane:  Can you talk a little about the difference between writing by yourself and then your collaborative efforts?  Is one easier or harder?  Do you have preference?

Elizabeth:  Well, I used to put it this way:  the good news about writing with somebody is that you don’t have an empty page.  The bad news about writing with somebody is you don’t have an empty page.

[Laughter]

Elizabeth:  You know, it, it makes it, in some ways it’s easier, in some ways it’s harder, but however the two of you collaborate or whatever you do to collaborate, mutual respect is tremendously important.  If you don’t have that, you won’t be able to collaborate for long.  You have to respect the other person’s artistic vision and their intelligence and their abilities, and you have to respect your own, too.

Jane:  Do, are you what they call a pantser?

Elizabeth:  How awful!  [Laughs]

Jane:  Describe your writing process.

Elizabeth:  Well, I, I started as a pantser.  I wrote probably my first three or four science fiction books that way.  Well, actually, my first two.  I rapidly discovered that it was so much faster and so much better if I knew where I was going.  Then I didn’t have to whack my way through so much underbrush to get there.  So I am, I’m not a pantser anymore.  I make an outline.

Sarah:  Sort of like a, like a roadmap.

Elizabeth:  Yeah, it’s, you know, it’s not a detailed outline.  It’s, I don’t break down scenes and say A, B, C, D, E, F has to happen.  It’s a, by the end of this scene, this must, this element must be in place, whatever it is and however you get there, and that, that’s how I do it, so I’m kind of half and half, but I do know where I’m going, and it, it really saved me so much time.  [Laughs] It’s hard to believe.

Jane:  One of my other questions I’m dying to ask you is how do you perceive that the genre has changed, the romance genre, if at all?  Do, I mean, you’ve been around it for so long, and you’ve been writing in it for so long.

Elizabeth:  Yes, shortly after the earth cooled, I started writing.  It’s, when I first was writing, you were only permitted to use the female voice, so the guy was this great mystery, sort of this lump, actually.  [Laughs] You know, and you had to, everything that he displayed had to happen either in action or if he, if you were allowed to talk to each other, you know, some of that, and in that sense, I used the love scenes early on as a form of communication so that she could understand where he was coming from because he wasn’t allowed to say anything about his feelings.  I pretty much ignored that stricture and, and put in some of the men’s point of view because the story was just so lopsided without it, I found it difficult to stay with it myself, but then I came to writing romances after I had written other books, so it, it wasn’t my first, my first try.  The other thing that has changed wonderfully is that you’re allowed – not only allowed, but encouraged – to have a very strong female, yet who isn’t, you know, a stone bitch.  I think that the ability to show people whose strengths match each other and therefore come to love, rather than whose weaknesses and strengths match each other, that it made it a lot more exciting for me to write, to be able to actually write adults, as opposed to unformed, very young women and badly formed men.  [Laughs] I really like the way romances have developed.

Jane:  Well, I think you’ve always written a very strong heroine, or at least someone who has their own agency or their own personality that wasn’t malleable by the hero.

Elizabeth:  Yes, I –

Sarah:  Oh, yes.

Elizabeth:  I, I didn’t realize at the time that that was unusual – [laughs] – so I just, I just did it.  I like strong people.  I wouldn’t be likely to write about somebody who, who’s, the high point of every day is to play, oh, ain’t it awful over the coffee cooler.  I, I like, I like people who are doing and being.

Sarah:  I wanted to ask you to go way, way, way back in time to when you wrote for, for Silhouette.

Elizabeth:  Yeah?

Sarah:  I am a huge fan of your book Fever, which was published in 1988.

Elizabeth:  Oh –

Sarah:  I love that book so much.  For a whole bunch of reasons.

Elizabeth:  Was that the first book you read – just curious – of mine?

Sarah:  I think so.

Elizabeth:  Yeah, it’s –

Sarah:  I can’t remember if I read that one or the one – and I remember it because it had actual fuchsia, like the plant fuchsia, on the cover.

Elizabeth:  Ah.

Sarah:  I think it was, oh, goodness, it was a mi-, it was a romantic suspense, and I read, I found Fever and the one with the pictures of the plants on it at about the same time, and I can’t remember which one it was.  But that is one of the earliest of your books that I have read.

Jane:  I think my first Elizabeth Lowells were the Only series, ‘cause I only read historicals early on in my romance reading life, and except for the few, like, Candlelight Ecstasies that my library had.

Elizabeth:  [Laughs]

Jane:  Oh, and, and then I also read a lot of boss/secretary in the Harlequin romance, but I, I’m pretty sure that on-, the Only series was my Elizabeth Lowell introduction.

Sarah:  The one with the fuchsia on it, like the actual plant –

Elizabeth:  Yeah.

Sarah:  – is called Where the Heart Is.

Elizabeth:  Yes.

Sarah:  I just found it because I have this terrible, terrible problem where I remember the image of the cover more than the words on the cover, so I am that person who goes to the librarian and says, you know, she’s wearing a yellow dress, and she’s turned around, and –

Elizabeth:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  – she’s posed like this, and you can see sort of, you know, most of, like, six to twelve vertebrae in her back, and – yeah, that’s, that’s my brain.  Welcome.  I’m really sorry to have scared you that way.

Elizabeth:  Ah, well – no, no, it’s no problem, because I’m the person who keeps a list of the character names by my computer.

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Elizabeth:  Because I am so bad with names.

Sarah:  I love Fever for so many reasons.  One, because the heroine has been raised so far outside of society and has been traveling to these places that are so far off the grid and is so unfamiliar with, you know, human interaction in close quarters in America that when the hero encounters her, he’s like, who areyou?  What, what are you – you make no sense.  But she is so strong, and it never occurs to her to question, that maybe there’s something wrong with her for being as unique as she is.

Elizabeth:  I think –

Sarah:  I love that about her.

Elizabeth:  I think that’s the way most people ought – well, people I know are, and I, and I wish more people would be.  The ability to be yourself –

Sarah:  Yes.

Elizabeth:  Just, just be there, you know, not, not worry about what other people are thinking about you.  I probably should worry more, but – [laughs] – I don’t, and you, those are the people that fascinate me, that interest me, that I want to be friends with.  And then I write about them.

Sarah:  I also notice when I was reading some of the Silhouettes from around that, around Fever, ‘cause you know, I found one and had to glom all of them because that’s how we roll.  I noticed that you, you, you also sort of write a number of heroines that could be described as lone wolfs.  You know, usually it’s the hero who’s a lone wolf, and he’s on his own, and –

Elizabeth:  Uh-huh.

Sarah:  – you know, life is hard, but for you, often it’s the heroine who is isolated for one reason or another, and that sort of forces you to be yourself.

Elizabeth:  That’s also, makes a strong person.

Sarah:  Definitely true.

Elizabeth:  And I think that – I don’t write many city books because I’m not a city person.  That doesn’t mean you can’t be strong in the city.  It just means I don’t live there, so I don’t write it.  I am fascinated by the people who come from other cultures and by people who have – I’m trying to remember the name of my own book.

[Laughter]

Elizabeth:  Yeah, that was Fever.  Must have been Fever, yes.  Okay, the, where she had, was raised, as you say, in isolation and in different places.  It was the same with, in Pearl Cove, the heroine had been raised basically by missionaries –

Sarah:  Yes.

Elizabeth:  – in South America, and you end up not being a part of anything, so you have to depend on yourself, and that’s, that does make a strong person; it can also make a very lonely one.

Sarah:  Yes, that’s definitely true.  It also, it also creates a very thoughtful person who is very conscious of what they’re doing and how their actions affect others?

Elizabeth:  Mm-hmm.

Sarah:  Which I think is a pretty powerful concept for characters in fiction especially.

Elizabeth:  Yes, if you don’t have that empathy and that ability to interact, to put yourself in their place, to, you know, to care about what they’re actually doing and being, you end up, you don’t make good choices about people.  [Laughs]

Sarah:  No.  One thing I noticed as I was looking over the, the, the collection of your books that I’ve read is that you have a lot of heroines who have really cool jobs, especially in science.

Elizabeth:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  You’ve written anthropologists, you have a woman who’s doing cougar research, you have people who have been traveling with your, with their family through missionary work in different countries, and then you have people who do, like, creative arts and who are artists and decorators and help to make people’s homes more into their home, and – that must have been a lot of fun to research.

Elizabeth:  Well – [coughs] – excuse me.

Sarah:  Hold on!  Is that a dog?

Elizabeth:  That’s, it’s one of the three dogs that’s in the house right now.

Sarah:  Yes!  Okay –

Elizabeth:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  – we have this odd tradition on the podcast that – I used to have a, a cat, and we had to put her to sleep recently ‘cause she was very, very old, but the minute she heard me talking on the podcast, she would show up and start meowing, so she was a guest on, like, ten or twelve episodes.  Since then, every one I’ve recorded, there has been a guest pet in some way, so I am now so happy!  [Laughs]

Elizabeth:  You are the official pet guest, yes.

Sarah:  Yes!

Elizabeth:  We have, our friends are here with their German shepherd, and we have two Weimaraners.

Sarah:  Oh, that’s big and loud.

Elizabeth:  So, yes, anything that happens, we know about it, and then we know about it some more, and then we know about it –

[Laughter]

Elizabeth:  – until we get to the dogs.

Sarah:  Yes, of course.

Elizabeth:  Yeah.  So we, we are pet people.

Sarah:  Yeah, so are we.

Elizabeth:  I would have cats, except I’m allergic.  I’m allergic to long-haired cats, and my husband is allergic to short-haired cats, which pretty well covers the spectrum.

Sarah:  Yeah.

Elizabeth:  So we settle for dogs.

Sarah:  It’s a good settle.

Elizabeth:  We like it.

Sarah:  [Laughs] So I was asking you about heroines and their cool jobs and, and how much fun that must have been to research.

Elizabeth:  Well, for me, it’s also a part of me, because I was at one point going to be a geologist, and it was the wrong timing in terms of society’s development.  I wanted to be a field geologist, and my teacher, my professor, after looking over his shoulder very carefully said, I could be fired for saying this, but I’m going to tell you that if you go into field geology, you will spend your life following a man with a notebook and a cup of coffee, and he will be half as smart as you are.  And I –

Sarah:  Oh, how discouraging, and yet honest.

Elizabeth:  Well, I thanked him very kindly because I wouldn’t, that’s not what I wanted, and I wouldn’t have been allowed to do what I wanted to do in the society that existed at that time.  So I went on, and I became interested in the camera, and I published some work as, as a photographer, but I had kids, and it’s, you can’t go on assignments when your husband is a journalist and you’re a photographer and you have two kids.  So I put that away and started writing.  So I basically sampled, at some level, a lot of the careers that I talk about.

Sarah:  Wow.  That’s, that’s both really inspiring and very discouraging.

Elizabeth:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  You know?  Like, it’s completely honest and true, but it’s also like, damn, you would have been a wonderful geologist!  But on the other hand, I’m kind of glad that you wrote books, ‘cause I really like them.

Elizabeth:  Well, I’m not, I’m not sad about it.  I mean, the same thing happened when I was sixteen.  I was in high school, and the honors classes were trolled, I guess, or trawled for specialty courses at various universities, and I was interested in oceanography at the time.  Are we seeing a theme here?  [Laughs] I mean –

Sarah:  Yeah, just a little.

Elizabeth:  [Laughs] And so I wrote to Scripps and, you know, did an essay on why I wanted to, and I got this letter back that was very nice – [sigh] – that said, well, it’s a shame you aren’t a boy.

Sarah:  Oh, God!  [Laughs]

Elizabeth:  But you know, in the end, I, I just shrugged it off, because I could pursue these interests through the library.

Sarah:  Right.

Elizabeth:  And it’s not that I stopped learning on these subjects; it’s just that I, I’m a realist.  If I’m going to face those kind of headwinds, and there’s something else that I like to do and I won’t face headwinds, I’ll do the other thing that I like to do as a living, and I will keep my interest in and pursue books and, you know, there’s a world of knowledge out there.  You don’t have to stop because you’re not in the job or not in school.  So I just pursued it on my own and learned, you know, as much as I wanted, and it’s been great fun.  So I have no resentment for the past.  I simply accept it.

Jane:  So do you get irritated at all when you see ladies like young starlets say that they don’t believe in feminists, feminism, or that they aren’t feminists?

Elizabeth:  No, because, you know, when I wrote, started writing science fiction I was asked to write under a man’s name because it was considered a man’s field, and I said, I have a daughter.  I want her to live in a better world than I did.  The fact that she lives in a better world than I did, I don’t resent her for not understanding what I went through.  It just is.  It is a reality, and you can beat your head against it, or you can go on and spend your energy and do something creative.  I choose to be creative.

Sarah:  And curious, because as long as you’re curious, you can keep learning about whatever it is that you’re interested in.

Elizabeth:  Oh, absolutely.  You know, they, they didn’t kill my curiosity.  I just found another channel.  I, I never gave up in the classic sense of, oh, my God, oh, ain’t it awful; I’m going to go be a secretary.  I just channeled my energies in other ways.  And I think most people do that, at least I would hope so, because it would, life would be very disappointing and limiting if every time you had, were turned down, you just curled up and went somewhere.  You know, you have to, you have to be stronger than that if you’re going to have a good life, and you can choose to be strong, and I, I try to choose that, that, to go forward in spite of adversity when it makes sense.  Like, I would go toe-to-toe with anybody over my kids, but – [laughs] – it didn’t make sense to go toe-to-toe with the scientific world over their inability to accept intelligence in women.

Jane:  I know from talking to other authors that some books take a lot longer and are a lot more painful, and some you can write within, like, three weeks, and it’s the best book ever.  Do you have that experience in your backlist?

Elizabeth:  Oh, gosh, I’m trying to – I had to write so many books under a schedule in order to make a living at it that none of them seemed easy.  [Laughs] It was, it was always, you know, hammer and tongs and working nights and weekends.  For me, the middle of every book is hard.  Every.  Single.  Book.  And I’ve never gotten, whisked right through the middle of any of my books.  I’m waiting for that to happen.

Jane:  When you look back at your books, is there a favorite book that you have, or is it like saying that your, none of your children are your favorite; they’re all equal?

Elizabeth:  To me, the one that made it a favorite was because I was turned loose to do what I’d been wanting to do and no publisher had wanted to buy, and that was Tell Me No Lies, and I, it was the first time I was free to write the kind of romantic suspense I wanted to write, which was basically reaching way back in history.

Sarah:  Oh, my!  Did you write that and then sell it, or did someone say, oh, nononono, whatever you write, I want to publish it?

Elizabeth:  Somebody said, whatever you write, I want to publish.  I said, I want to write this.

Sarah:  That’s a good position to be in.

Elizabeth:  Yes, it really was.  And then I, you know, after that, I didn’t really stop writing romantic suspense, so that’s my favorite for that reason, because I, you know, somebody finally said, oh, whatever you want, and I said, wow!  Let’s go.

Sarah:  Woohoo!

Elizabeth:  Yeah.  Woot!  [Laughs]

Sarah:  So your, your newest book, Perfect Touch, is romantic suspense.

Elizabeth:  Correct.  In, in Perfect Touch I got to be out in the West, which I love, and this is set in the Grand Tetons, and I got to do ranchers, another thing that I love, even though I understand from living in ranching country that it’s basically a dying way of life.  So I, I enjoy writing about when I can, because it’s going to be a piece of history that we won’t always have.  And it’s murder, because after all, people are not good, some people are not good, and in a situation where you’re under intense pressure, you get a chance to know each other very quickly.  You don’t know if you’re going to get together in the long run, but you do get to know what a person is made of very quickly, and that’s why I enjoy writing romance suspense.  It, it offers a chance to put your characters in a pressure cooker and see what happens.  And in romantic suspense and in this Perfect Touch you’re dealing with art, which I also love and have researched.  Western art, which is one of my favorite genre artists.  Family problems, which I always try to put in because I think we all have them.  You know, you’re born into a family, and you, you love it.  You may not be able to live with it, but there it is; it’s a part of you.  And then you mix all this with a woman who was raised in poverty, raised as the oldest girl in a large family, and therefore she was the second mother, the mother-in-residence, because the, the true mother was so busy having children and helping her husband on the ranch that there’s no chance of – a dairy farm in this case – there’s no chance of raising kids, and you get a woman who says, okay, that’s not for me; I’ve done it.  I don’t want kids, I don’t want marriage, I’m going to have a career.  And she made herself this wonderful career helping other people provide the perfect touch to their homes.  She doesn’t want the classic female things, and then she meets the hero, Jay, and he wants – how to put it? – he wants to continue his family tradition.  Having run away from it, gone to war, he discovered how much his own family tradition meant to him, and he came back.  He went around the world and discovered his home was in Wyoming.  She’s been around the world and loves San Francisco.  This is not a good start for a relationship, because she doesn’t want to get married, doesn’t want to have kids, and he wants to continue the tradition of the Vermilion Ranch.  And in the story you get to see how each of them relearns what they thought, what, you know, was basically a childhood truth:  I have to get out of Wyoming.  And her truth was I’m getting out of here, and I’m never going to make the choice my mother did and marry and have children.  Those were truths that formed their adulthood, and yet you still have to keep learning all the way through life, and they learned that some of the old truths have to be replaced by another truth, another reality, and that’s what the Perfect Touch is about, how each one comes to make that choice.  While being shot at.

[Laughter]

Sarah:  I, I have to say, I really like reading about heroines who don’t want to have children.

Elizabeth:  Mm-hmm.

Sarah:  Because, I mean, I have children, but I had to – here’s a little TMI – I had to go through infertility in order to conceive, and so I had all of these times where I had to ask myself, are you sure you want to do this?  This is going to hurt.  Are you really, really sure?  Okay, now it’s painful and expensive.  Are you sure you want to do this?  And so I had to keep asking myself if I really wanted to have kids, because –

Elizabeth:  Uh-huh.

Sarah:  – it was arduous to get there.  And so, I have a lot of empathy for people who are told that it is expected of them to have children, and of course they can’t want anything else because it’s “unnatural.”  That just makes my head want to explode.

Elizabeth:  Uh, yeah.

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Elizabeth:  and I, you know, I have kids.  In fact, we had them sooner than we were expecting, because it was that or say goodbye to Evan and send him over to Vietnam, which I wasn’t terribly interested in doing, so, yeah.  I, I, you know, I didn’t get married to have children.  I realize that’s a terrible thing to say.  I got married to be with Evan.  That was what I wanted, and children came along, a little sooner, but then they got out of the house sooner, and we all enjoy each other as adults, too.  But I, I totally sympathize with women who don’t have children.  It’s not, in this society, it’s not a requirement.  You, you have a chance to fulfill yourself in many ways, and I have no issues with people who fulfill themselves and have constructive, creative lives outside of a traditional role.

Sarah:  And it’s also, it’s so often communicated to women that that is expected of them.

Elizabeth:  Yes.

Sarah:  That if you deviate from that expectation, you are doing something very, very wrong.  Is it a spoiler for me to ask if Sam in the Perfect Touchchanges her mind, or does she still say, no, no, I really don’t want kids?

Elizabeth:  Actually, the truth is, you got an advanced copy in which they have the wrong name.

Sarah:  What?!

Elizabeth:  It’s Sara.

[Laugher]

Sarah:  Are you kidding?  Oh, that’s so funny!

Elizabeth:  Would I, would I kid you?  That’s the one time I just couldn’t believe – you know modern publishing is done in silos.  This is the most frustrating part of modern publishing.  You have –

Sarah:  [Laughs] I’m so sorry!

Elizabeth:  – that’s okay – somebody is responsible for the back cover blurb.  Somebody – and that’s their silo, and they’re in a different – they’re not in editorial.  They’re in marketing, and somebody else does X, and somebody else does Y, and somebody else does Z, and if I have a question that involves XYZ, it’s hard to get an answer, because you have to go through three separate silos and practically have a meeting about how to answer my question.

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Elizabeth:  Welcome to modern publishing, where they’ve just, you know, collapsed all the publishers into such huge houses that – [sigh] – I mean, I, I imagine the Borg, you know – [laughs] – and everybody in their own little cells, and it’s very hard to break through those cells.  And that’s not something they do to frustrate an author; it’s simply the most efficient way for the publisher to do business.  So, as a result of that, we have my back cover copy.

Sarah:  You have seen a lot of changes in the genre –

Elizabeth:  Yes, I have.

Sarah:  – and in, in publishing.  What are some of the things that you still find remarkable that are so different from when you started?

Elizabeth:  When I started – as I say, shortly after the earth cooled – I received my –

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Elizabeth:  – first royalty statement written on a yellow tablet by hand.  Yellow paper.

Sarah:  Seriously?

Elizabeth:  Seriously.

Sarah:  Oh, my goodness.

Elizabeth:  That science fiction house was behind the times even for the times.  I receive, you know, three inches of paper, computer-generated, that gives me vast amount of information that may or may not be useful ‘cause there’s no context for the information.  So all I can say is I’m being told a lot more and understanding a lot less.

[Laughter]

Elizabeth:  So, you know, it’s just, the, the changes on the business side have been, it’s like dancing on oiled marbles.  It has just been incredible.  I like the changes.  I like the, the opening up of publishing to who-, whoever has a story to tell and puts it out there, you know?  I, I think that’s great, because editors can’t always choose what people want to read, and the boom in e-publishing has certainly proven that.  It does make life very hard in some ways for the authors who are still in traditional publishing.  The businesses have come, you know, I don’t know how many people are in HarperCollins, and I don’t know how many publishing groups have been subsumed, but I think it’s five, six, or seven by now, into one unit.  It’s very hard to work with a unit that large as an individual.  It just is hard.  That’s why I started publishing my own backlist, just, just to see how it goes and what it’s like and, and how to do it.

Sarah:  I was just going to ask you about that.  I notice that the digital edition of Fever, I think you published that.  Is that right?

Elizabeth:  Yes, that’s correct.  I did it, and I’ve done all the backlist that – no, I still have a lot more backlist I haven’t published, but I’ve done a lot of my romance backlist.

Sarah:  Have you liked having that experience of, of getting the rights to self-publish digitally the books that are from earlier in your romance career?

Elizabeth:  Yes, I’ve very much enjoyed it.  Number one, I think the books are still quite readable and, and speak to a romance audience.

Sarah:  I agree!

Elizabeth:  [Laughs] Number two, it’s fun, in a way, to have that much control over your own publishing and your own art.  You get to make your own mistakes; you don’t have to live with others’, so that part’s good.  It’s a lot of work.  That part isn’t good.  [Laughs]

Sarah:  Yes, especially ‘cause you don’t have a digital file to begin with, so with a book like that you have to scan the paper book in, is that right?

Elizabeth:   That’s correct, and then you read it, or typing parts of them, and then you have to proofread them, because every time you go from one platform, scanned, to –

Sarah:  Oh, yes.

Elizabeth:  – a reading platform can get –

Sarah:  There’s a lot of mess.

Elizabeth:  Oh, what a mess.  And, they’re getting better at it.

Jane:  I think that, was it Theresa Weir who said that she was just going to download the pirated versions because they had already scanned it –

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Jane:  – and proofed it for her?

Elizabeth:  I was tempted to do that, believe me.  I almost did it, but the scanned version that I, that was pirated was so bad, had so many, you know, head-scratching errors in it that I said, oh, I’ll pay to have it scanned, you know.  [Laughs] But I understand completely how she feels.  You get to one of the long books that’s been pirated, one of my early sagas as A. E. Maxwell, and I’m looking at this and it’s 600 pages, and I’m thinking, wow!  [Laughs]

Sarah:  Oy.

Elizabeth:  But in the end, most pirated versions are so, so unclean, so dirty, so messed up that they’re hard to read, unless they’ve gotten better since I tried it.

Jane:  I, I think it depends on – I remember watching, like, in real time – I felt like it was in real time – when the last Harry Potter book came out, and the piraters were, I don’t know how – they must, like, talk in a chat room or something – but they were, like, scanning and proofing and uploading it, like, page by page –

Sarah or Elizabeth:  Yep.

Jane:  – and it was done with, like, in the first hour or something of that book being released.

Elizabeth:  Oh, yeah, you just rip the pages out and shove them through a scanner.  It’s not hard to do, unfortunately.

Jane:  You want the pirated version to be bad, and you want your professional version to be a better copy, because that drives people to buy the legitimate version, because there’s value there.

Elizabeth:  Yeah.  Well, hopefully.  I, the early scans of some of my books by my publisher have a lot of errors in them, and I’ve – [sighs] – tried to get ‘em corrected, and in the end, they want me to go through and line-by-line do the corrections and then, you know, line-by-line type them out and mail them in, and I somehow haven’t had time to do that when I’m writing books, so some of the older books have a lot of errors.  One of the Onlys had so many errors in it that I thought I’d throw it across the room.

Jane:  My favorite err-, I think my favorite scanning error it that, because of the way that the letter is shaped, that the arms turns into anus.  [Laughs] It’s always –

Sarah:  Yes, I –

Elizabeth:  Oh, oh, yes.  [Laughs]

Sarah:  That is my absolute favorite scanning error.

Jane:  ‘Cause the, the, the, then the misconstrued sentences are just hilarious.

Sarah:  She threw her anus around his neck!

Jane:  [Laughs]

Elizabeth:  Yes, and you look at, and you think, really, how do you do that?

[Laughter]

Elizabeth:  The visual would make me stumble and fall out of the book, I’ll tell you, it would.  That’d be like the three-armed heroine on the cover –

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Elizabeth:  – of one of Christina Dodd’s books.

Jane:  Oh, which –

Sarah:  That’s my favorite book cover.

Jane:  Oh, yeah, Christina Dodd, that’s right.

Sarah:  Castles in the Air.  She’s my avatar.  I use the image of the princess from that book as my avatar in different places online, because you know, if I had three arms, I would get so much done?

Elizabeth:  Oh, yeah –

Sarah:  I would be so productive.

Elizabeth:  – I think I’d like three heads.

Jane:  That reminds me of that really boring erotica book that I read that was 8 Arms to Hold You.

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Elizabeth:  Really.

Jane:  Well, you would think it was going to be really out there, right?  With that title and the fact that it was a shapeshifting octopus?

Elizabeth:  Oh dear.

Jane:  It was really boring.  There was no octo-, there was no tentacle lovin’.

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Elizabeth:  Well, all I can say is, how many slot As and Bs can you have?  [Laughs]

Sarah:  There’s not a lot.

Jane:  Well, I mean, I guess if it was two octopi going at it that they would want – but, but there was none.  I think, I don’t know, you’re probably not familiar with it – [laughs] – but apparently in Japanese hentai, tentacle loving is very popular, and I think that this story was based off of it.  I, the closest I’ve ever come to tentacle loving is through Laurell K. Hamilton.  She has – Sarah, was it in her Merry Gentry series?

Sarah:  I don’t remember.  Yes, it was, yes, it was.

Jane:  Yeah, so she had a character named Sholto, who was the knight, he was – I can’t remember.  He was the god of some dark night, night walkers, night flyers or something, and apparently his stomach had tentacles coming out of it, but then he was, like, transformed in a book where the tentacles became only a tattoo.  Is that right, Sarah?  Am I remembering this correctly?

Elizabeth:  You’d have to be.  [Laughs] No one could think of that alone.

Jane:  I didn’t, I don’t – [laughs] – I don’t remember exactly.  I stopped reading the series.  Not, not because of the tentacle sex.

Elizabeth:  Some auto corrects are pretty hilarious, too.

Jane:  Oh, yeah.  I can get lost on that one site –

Sarah:  Yes.

Elizabeth:  [Laughs]

Jane:  – Damn You Auto Correct!

Elizabeth:  Oh, yeah.

Sarah:  So, what is next for you, ma’am?  What are you working on now?

Elizabeth:  I’m working on a semi-follow to Perfect Touch.  It is Piper, the business partner from the first book, and she’s into Turkish carpets, Persian carpets and rugs, and that leads her into some very dark places, so I’m having fun with it.

Jane:  I always like to know what people are reading.  Is there a book that you’ve read recently that you’ve really enjoyed?  It does not have to be romance, could be anything, even non-fiction, ‘cause we talk about those too.

Elizabeth:  When I’m writing, I generally am researching, so right now I have lots of books about Iranian carpets, Persian carpets.  I don’t read romantic suspense when I’m writing it, but I read paranormal romance.  I never know how to pronounce her name.  Nalini Singh?  NALini Singh?

Sarah:  Nalini, you got it right.

Elizabeth:  Nalini.  Whenever she has a book out, I, I jump on it.  I just love her.  That’s basically what I’m reading when I’m writing, is research and paranormal and friends’ books, and that’s it.  I don’t, don’t go many, any much beyond that.  It’s like a busman’s holiday to be writing romantic suspense and then reading it at night.  Ugh.  Can’t do it.  I have to be not writing.

Jane:  Well, I, she has a new book coming out, Nalini, called Archangel’s Enigma.  Do you read that series?

Elizabeth:  Oh, yes, I love it.  She’s the only one who was able to create two series that I loved.

Jane:  So, it’s about Naasir –

Elizabeth:  Oh –

Jane:  – and it’s really good.

Elizabeth:  Oh, well, I’m dying to see it.

Jane:  Naasir kind of reminds me of a Changeling.  It was a very different book in her series, and I, I just loved it, and, and where she’s taking the world, it’s very creative, so –

Elizabeth:  Yes, since I, I really, really – and she’s a beautiful writer.  I just really enjoy her.

Jane:  And a person.  Have you, have you met her?  ‘Cause she’s a really amazing person.

Elizabeth:  No, I haven’t.  I just about don’t go to conferences any more, and that’d be the –

Jane:  Oh.

Elizabeth:  – one place I’d meet her, since she’s half a world away.

Jane:  Yeah.  Well, thank you so much for participating in this hour-long conversation.  [Laughs]

Sarah:  I really appreciate your time.  This is going to be a really fun interview.

Jane:  And –

Elizabeth:  Oh, I enjoyed it!  It’s fun talking to you guys.

Jane:  And it’s great that you’re still writing and – since the dawn of time, so – [laughs]

Sarah:  The earth cooled.  We are very grateful that the earth has remained cool enough for you to write.

Jane:  I feel like I’ve been reading since the earth cooled, so I hope you keep writing.

Elizabeth:  Well, thank you very much, and as long as I enjoy it, I will keep writing.

[music]

Sarah:  And that is all for this podcast.  I want to thank Elizabeth Lowell for taking the time to talk to us.

This podcast was brought to you by InterMix, publisher of Chanel Cleeton’s Playing with Trouble, the sexy new romance in the Capital Confessions series, available for download on July 21^st.

And if you didn’t know, now you will.  We also do a transcript of every episode for people who are hearing impaired or prefer to read instead of listening, because, hey, however you want to consume your romance content is totally your call.  Our podcast transcripts are compiled by garlicknitter, and this week they’re being sponsored by Wattpad.  Wattpad is a community where forty million people from around the world are reading, writing, and connecting over stories.  Whatever you’re into, there’s a story you will love on Wattpad.  Joint today to find your happily ever after.

Our music is provided by Sassy Outwater.  This is the Peatbog Faeries, this is their new album Blackhouse, this song is called “Spiders,” and I love this whole album, so if you haven’t tried it, it’s amazing!

I will have links in the podcast entry – also known as the show notes if you’re better at podcasting than I am – to the album and where you can buy it online, as well as links to all of the books that we mention during the course of the show.

Future podcasts will include me, possibly Jane, certainly other people, talking about romance.  I’m continuing our series where I find and interview romance readers, because y’all are really interesting people.  Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

If you’ve got ideas or suggestions or questions or you want us to help you, find you a book to read, please feel free to email us at sbjpodcast – that’s S for Sarah, B for Bitches, J for Jane, podcast at gmail dot com [[email protected]].  Like I said, y’all are interesting, and we love hearing from you.

In the meantime, on behalf of Elizabeth Lowell and Jane and myself, we wish you the very best of reading.  Have a great weekend.

[racy music]