Dear Bitches, Smart Author Podcast, August 7, 2015

[music]

Sarah Wendell:  Hello, and welcome to episode number 153 of the DBSA podcast.  I’m Sarah Wendell from Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, and with me today is Petra Mayer, who is a book editor at NPR.  She was the chief wrangler of this year’s NPR Summer of Love 100 list of romances, and I was part of the committee that helped select them.  This interview, though, was recorded before we released the list, and we talk about discovering romance, particularly when someone tells you not to read it.  We talk about cartoons, fantasy, and science fiction romance and how books are selected for coverage at NPR.

This podcast is brought to you by InterMix, publisher of national bestselling author Anne Calhoun’s Evening Storm, the new e-novella in her sinfully addictive Irresistible series, available on August 18th.

And this month we have a podcast transcript sponsor.  If you like reading better than listening, we are here for you.  This week’s podcast transcript is being brought to you by Wattpad, a community where over 40 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.  Perhaps the new romantic suspense from K. A. Tucker, Burying Water.  You can connect for free from devices that you already own into Wattpad’s engaging and supportive community.  Join today and find your happily ever after.

The music that you’re listening to was provided by Sassy Outwater.  I will have information at the end of the podcast as to who this is, although I’m sure you’ve guessed, and where you can find this song and the whole awesome album for your very own music collection.

This is a book-mentioning-heavy podcast, or a podcast that’s full of a lot of books that we talk about, and if you’re thinking, I wish to read one of these right now, in the podcast entry, better known as the show notes, there will be a link to all of the books that we discuss, and if you are confused about which one was which, you can always find me on Twitter @SmartBitches or Petra Mayer @Petramatic.

And now, on with the podcast!

[music]

Sarah:  Did this work?

Petra Mayer:  I think it did!

Sarah:  I like that.

Petra:  I have no idea what went on.  It was the most astounding cascade of fuckery, and I blame my supervisor, who’s doing nothing but purring.

Sarah:  Well, that’s what my supervisor is doing.  He’s also sleeping on top of my cross-stitch so I can’t get to it.  So would you please – because this is the easy question – introduce yourself and tell the lovely people who might be listening – we hope you’re listening – who you are and what you do?

Petra:  Sure!  Hi, everyone, all you out there in Romancelandia.  I am Petra Mayer.  I am an editor at NPR Books.

Sarah:  Are you the editor of NPR Books, or are you the master of the website?

Petra:  No, this is a mistake that frequently gets made.  We used to have a position called Books Editor.

Sarah:  Right.

Petra:  That is no longer a thing.  I am an editor at NPR Books.  There’re two of us, one who does the tasteful stuff and one who does the fun stuff.  You can guess which one I am.

Sarah:  Yes!

Petra:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  This summer you are doing the NPR Summer of Looove, and I get to be on the selection committee, which is, like, so fun.

Petra:  Yeah, it is fun!

Sarah:  Yes.  It’s a very long series of conference calls, but they’re totally fun!

Petra:  I hope we can actually come up with 100 books!

Sarah:  We will.  Do not worry.  It’s, it’s not impossible.  So how did you come up with the idea of the Summer of Love?  You do something every summer, right?

Petra:  We do.  And I have to say, I didn’t come up with the name Summer of Love?  I have to give props to my colleague Beth Novey who actually thought it up.  Yeah, we’ve done YA and we’ve done sci-fi and we’ve done thriller and we’ve done beach books, and actually, last year we did a fun thing called Book Your Trip, which was all travel-related books, like car, horse, foot, balloon, bus, dragon.  It was a lot of fun.  So this year –

Sarah:  Dragon?

Petra:  Yeah, for, like, sci-fi and fantasy viewers.  [Laughs]

Sarah:  Dragon!  I am, I am, I am suddenly all ears.  It’s my favorite thing.

Petra:  Well, NPR.org/bookyourtrip.  I think it might still be live.

Sarah:  Yay!

Petra:  So, yeah, this year, I’d sort of been agitating for romance for a while, because it is a genre, and genre is my thing, and it is worth paying attention to, and I personally – I cannot speak for the network as a whole, but I personally am a romance fan.  And it’s just, you know, it was an idea whose time had come.

Sarah:  Well, I mean, there, all of the people on the, the Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me blog, where they eat things on Wednesday, have been passing around romance novels in every picture.

Petra:  Yeah, I don’t know what’s up with that.  They’re in Chicago.  If I could, I would go, I would go up there and give them some new books.  [Laughs]

Sarah:  Yeah, it’s still pretty awesome, ‘cause you’ll see them just randomly reading a romance in the background.  I’m all for it.

Petra:  Yeah, me too.

Sarah:  So, who introduced you to romance?  Have you been a reader for a long time?

Petra:  Oh, yeah.  So this is a story I may have told before, but it’s – [laughs] – you can kind of blame my mother, who was very anti-romance.  Of course, she read murder mysteries, so I, you know, I give her all the side-eye.  I love my mom, but I give her all the side-eye.  So –

Sarah:  [Laughs] You can’t side-eye your mom, who can you side-eye?

Petra:  Yeah, I can!  Watch me!  Hey, mom!  [Pause] That was the noise of a side-eye happening.  [Laughs] So, anyhow, how I actually read my first romance novel was – I, I’m pretty sure I told you this on, on the Pop Culture Happy Hour episode, but for people who did not hear that story – I was a teenage drama nerd.  I was a props girl, because I was never – I’m a terrible actor, basically.  I was always either a mission doll or a props girl, and one year my high school did Anything Goes, and in Anything Goes there’s a scene where somebody has to read a telegram, and we always pasted funny stuff into the telegram to try to make the actor corpse on stage, and there was a romance novel lying around in the drama club office, and somebody Xeroxed it and pasted it into the telegram to try to make the actor laugh on stage, and I can’t remember whether he did or not, but I went, ooh, a romance novel!

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Petra:  And I took it home.  [Laughs] And it was Madeline Baker –

Sarah:  Oh, boy!

Petra:  – and I cannot remember the name.  I have it upstairs.  I do have it upstairs, but it was, you know, one of these echt ‘80s fuchsia on the cover, clinch cover –

Sarah:  Well, it has to be fuchsia if it’s the ‘80s.

Petra:  Right, yeah.

Sarah:  If it’s not the fuchsia, then get the fuck out.

Petra:  About a, about a, a young woman in, like, colonial, I don’t know, what, Massachusetts or something –

Sarah:  Mm-hmm.

Petra:  – and she falls for an Indian brave, but his people raid her settlement and she gets carried away and given some incredibly romanticized fake Indian name, and –

Sarah:  Uh-huh.

Petra:  – you know, probably.  [Laughs]

Sarah:  Morning, her name was, like, Morning Dew Blossom?

Petra:  It had Dove, Dove Something.

Sarah:  Doves, of course.

Petra:  Yeah, I can’t remember.  White Dove, something like that.  White, it might have been White Fawn.  I can’t remember.

Sarah:  Oh, White Fawn.  That’s extra romantic.

Petra:  And could be completely wrong, so Madeline Baker fans out there, do not yell at me –

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Petra:  – because I’m too lazy to go upstairs and get this book and check.

Sarah:  So, wait, you read that, and you were like, wait, there’s more of this and I want to read it?

Petra:  It had sex in it!  Come on!

Sarah:  Of course, what am I, what am I thinking?

Petra:  I was, I was thirteen –

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Petra:  – and it had sex in it.  [Laughs] Like –

Sarah:  Okay.

Petra:  – like, the only other thing that, like, the only other time, place I’d been exposed to sex in, on the page was the year before, all my friends had been passing around The Valley of Horses.

Sarah:  Ooh.

Petra:  Which is a good book until you get to the sex.

Sarah:  Yes.  That, that’s okay until you get there.

Petra:  [Laughs] It’s actually a really interesting book if you just skip the sex scenes, but anyhow, so this was like – and also, you know, there was a certain element in it of tweaking my mother, because she was reading her Dorothy Sayers, and, and I was like, neener neener.  [Laughs]

Sarah:  I’ve often found that there are, that there are two kinds of sort of inheritances.  On one hand, you have people who inherit the romance novel because of someone’s support, and then you have people who inherit it in spite of somebody else, and it’s, it’s either one or the other a lot of the time.

Petra:  And I tend to think that it’s more common that people inherit it in spite of somebody.  I know a lot of people have told me stories like that.

Sarah:  Yep.  Well, I wasn’t supposed to read this, so of course I wanted to read all of it.

Petra:  Mm-hmm.

Sarah:  I mean, really, if, if there was a program to encourage youth literacy it would be like, I’m sorry, these books are inappropriate for you, and you’d see them all just go THWHOOMP!

Petra:  [Laughs] Yeah, basically.  I think the other thing that did it too was that my grand-, I had to visit my grandparents up in Mamaroneck, New York, every summer, and so of course the first thing I would do would, would be to raid their bookshelves for things that were naughty.  Like, they had a book of dirty limericks that I found one summer, and that was glorious, and it was never there again.

Sarah:  Awww!

Petra:  They had The Life and Hard Times of Heidi Abromowitz, which was a bad humor book by Joan Rivers, supposedly about a tardy friend of hers, and they had Wifey.

Sarah:  Ohhh!

Petra:  And Wifey was like a ritual that I would steal it off the bookshelf and hide it in the sofa bed every time I came, until one day, one visit I left it there, and it got crunched.

Sarah:  Oh, no!

Petra:  The next time I found it, it was down the side of the sofa bed.  But the reason I bring that up is that, like, Wifey has lots of sex –

Sarah:  But –

Petra:  – but it does not have a happy ending.

Sarah:  No, it doesn’t.

Petra:  And I was like, well, this is missing something!

Sarah:  Yeah, th-, that part was fine, but this ending thing, not so much.

Petra:  Not so much, yeah!

Sarah:  And then, did you get into sci-fi after that?  Because you’re a big sci-fi/fantasy/romance fan.

Petra:  Slash all the genres, really.

Sarah:  Right.

Petra:  No, I was a sci-fi and fantasy, specifically fantasy nerd before I was a romance person.  I was reading, like, the Pern books, I don’t know, was I nine?  That had to be fourth grade.  Maybe it was a little later; I don’t know.  But yeah, Anne McCaffrey was my gateway drug.  Hello, Godfrey!  Have you come back to supervise?  That’s a cat.

Sarah:  Yo, cat on the podcast!  This is excellent.

Petra:  Ohhh!

Sarah:  Hey, kitty!

Petra:  Look, this is my shithead runaway.

Sarah:  Hellooo!

Petra:  Am I allowed to say shithead runaway on your podcast?

Sarah:  Yeah, ‘cause I am not NPR.

[Laughter]

Sarah:  I am so far from NPR it is not even funny.

Petra:  We wish you were closer.

Sarah:  Well, you know, the, the podcast was originally called Dear Bitches, Smart Authors, and then I got an email from somebody who works at iTunes, like a human being who works at iTunes –

Petra:  Mm-hmm.

Sarah:  – and it was like, well, that title isn’t appropriate, so you need to change it or we’re going to delist it in three days.  And I was like, you are asking way too much of my naming ability to change the name of this podcast –

Petra: Uh-huh.

Sarah:  – so I ended up with DBSA, which stands for Dear Bitches and Smart Authors, and, you know, the, the irony isn’t lost on me that, like, you know, iTunes stores has songs with every single variation of every single curse word, but the podcasts, man, that’s, that’s a sacred area.  So.

Petra:  I wonder if it’s like Facebook, where they only do something if somebody complains.

Sarah:  I’m wondering if that’s true.  But we used to read samples of bad erotic romance, and we were paranoid that, like, they would start flagging us for content.

Petra:  You know, my friends and I read Shayla Black because of you?

Sarah:  Oh, many people have!  Isn’t that book amazing?

Petra:  [Laughs] The very first exper-, my very first experience of LOLporn.  Thanks!  I think that –

Sarah:  Oh, you’re very welcome.  I mean, even when I describe that book to people, they don’t believe me that it’s real.

Petra:  We actually own, my friends and I own a copy, which we pass around.

Sarah:  That’s just beautiful!

Petra:  It might, it might even be in my living room; I’m not sure.  [Laughs]

Sarah:  That’s just beautiful!

Petra:  You’re an influential woman, Sarah.

Sarah:  I’m so happy!

[Laughter]

Sarah:  So, among the, the books, like Pern and not Wifey and not so much Decadent, what are some of your favorite books that you’ve read that you refuse to part with?  Along with Madeline Baker?

Petra:  Are we talking romance or just anything?

Sarah:  Anything, including romance.

Petra:  Well, I would say that the book that made me a nerd was 1984, which, which is one of my favorite books of all time, which you might not expect from a romance and happy ending enthusiast, but –

Sarah:  I was going to say, I, I don’t think that has a happy ending?

Petra:  No, it doesn’t, but my – sorry, the cat’s back –

Sarah:  That’s fine.

Petra:  – my father has a really overrated view of my intellect, and –

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Petra:  – and in an, his great disappointment in me is that I’ve never read The Communist Manifesto.  That’s my dad for you in a nutshell.

Sarah:  Okay!

Petra:  He’s a politic- –

Sarah:  My dad has a favorite dead Civil War general, so I know what you mean.

Petra:  There you go!  So, in the summer of 1984, when I was nine years old, he handed me the book, and he said, here, I think you’re ready for this.

Sarah:  Sure, who doesn’t want to read apocalyptic terror –

Petra:  Yeah!

Sarah:  – at nine?

Petra:  I was fascinated by it.  I –

Sarah:  No wonder you started reading Pern.  Geeze!

Petra:  I’d never read dystopia, right?  Like, 1984 was my first introduction to worldbuilding.

Sarah:  Ahhh!

Petra:  And, like, I, you know, it’s not a happy book at all, and I didn’t understand, like, more than a half of what was going on with it ‘cause I was nine, but I did understand that this was an author who had built a convincing alternate world, and that, like –

Sarah:  Yes.

Petra:  – flipped some switch in my tiny head and made me a nerd.  [Laughs] So, that’s one of the books.  For romance, I mean, I’ve, this is no surprise to anyone – Godfrey, what the hell?  Oh, he saw a bug in the yarn – this is no surprise to anybody, that I love Loretta Chase more than somewhat.

Sarah:  Ohhh –

Petra:  [Laughs] In fact, I’ve just been rereading – I, I downloaded a bunch of her backlist, ‘cause there was all this stuff I never knew existed, but I was just rereading Captives of the Night, because I like Esmond, and I think he gets a raw deal in The Lion’s Daughter, and – [laughs] – and I love the historical detail that she puts into her books.  And I also, yeah, I mean, I also love Courtney Milan.  I can’t name specifics, but I mean, basically, any book of hers that you put in front of me will be my favorite book at that moment.  Let’s see, other books that I love and have carried with me.  Some of them, I guess these actually do qualify as romances.  There’s, there’s a historical author named Judith Merkle Riley.  I don’t know if you’ve heard of her; she passed away a few years ago.  She wrote six historical novels – I think six? – and they all have really wonderful heroines, interesting historical plots.  My favorite one is called The Serpent Garden.  It’s one of my all-time comfort reads.  It’s about a Dutch woman living in London during the reign of Henry VIII, and she’s a miniaturist, she paints miniature portraits, and she goes to France in the service of Cardinal Wolsey, and of course there’s a, you know, a lanky, smoldering, young equerry in the service of the cardinal who gives her longing looks, and she can paint portraits that see into people’s souls, and there’s an angel and a devil that tip the scales because they like to mess with humans, and – I, I’m not doing a very good job of rendering that book, but Judith Merkle Riley is amazing, and I highly recommend both that and A Vision of Light, which is a sort of fictionalized version of – now I’ve forgotten her name.  Because that’s what’s happening to me.  Anyway, it’s a book about a fourteenth century mystic.

Sarah:  Whoa!

Petra:  And it’s still romance, ‘cause she falls in love with a hot monk.

Sarah:  You know, she had a new book with Sourcebooks three years ago.

Petra:  That was, that was actually, I think she had already passed by that point, if you’re talking about The Water Devil?

Sarah:  No, The Oracle Glass.

Petra:  No, that was a reprint.

Sarah:  That was a reprint?

Petra:  That was a reprint.  Oracle – also, they’ve reprinted ‘em with ugly covers, ‘cause the Penguin covers are beautiful, like –

Sarah:  Yeah, like –

Petra:  The Oracle Glass is great.  It’s about the Affair of the Poisoners, and it’s about a young woman who is an outcast from her relatively wealthy, social-climbing family, and so she – and she’s slightly weird looking – and so she paints herself white and hunches over and dresses all in black and pretends she’s a three-hundred-year-old fortune teller to fool rich noblemen?

Sarah:  As you do.

Petra:  As you do, and she sort of gets caught up peripherally in the Affair of the Poisoners, which was this big scandal in the French court in the, I think, seventeenth century?  I should know this better; I’m a history major, after all.  [Laughs] Anyhow, they’re really great books.

Sarah:  The, I had to look it up, because I was so curious?  A Vision of Light is about Margaret of Ashbury.

Petra:  Margaret of Ashbury, right, who is fictional, but she is a fictionalized version of a – it’s not Julian of Norwich; it might be Mar- – it’s Margery Kempe, a similar sort of fifteenth, fourteenth century mystic who wrote her own book and was one of the few women who actually, whose voice has survived from that era.

Sarah:  Wow.

Petra:  So – and I’m making them sound really intellectual, but they’re just lovely, comforting, friendly – I go back to them at least once every couple years and just reread the whole set.

Sarah:  The Oracle Glass sounds really cool, too.

Petra:  It is also really cool.  There’s another one called The Master of All Desires, and A Vision of Light has a sequel called In Pursuit of the Green Lion, which is okay, and then there’s a third one which is not quite as good.  I can go into, I’ve read all of these books way too many times.

Sarah:  So when you are thinking, okay, I’m really exhausted; I need a comfort read, you’re going to turn to something like Judith Merkle Riley.

Petra:  Oh, yeah.  Yeah, and you know what my other secret pleasure is?

Sarah:  Do tell.  Please share.

Petra:  [Whispers] Mercedes Lackey.

Sarah:  Really?!

Petra:  [Still whispering] Yeah.  [Laughs, then normal voice] I had the greatest –

Sarah:  Tell me more!

Petra:  I had the greatest fangirl moment ever.  I just got back from San Diego Comic-Con, which was mostly work, I was reporting on it, and one of the thi-, in the course of my reporting I was lucky enough to get to have lunch with G. Willow Wilson.  Do you know her?  She writes Ms. Marvel?

Sarah:  Yes.

Petra:  And she had a great book out a couple years ago called Alif the Unseen.  She’s an American convert to Islam.  She’s a really interesting woman.  And I don’t know, I dropped some reference to Magic’s Pawn, and like, her eyes lit up and suddenly we were dorking, like, I was at Comic-Con sitting next to a comic creator who I was, like, nearly drooling I was so excited that I got to talk to her, and we’re, like, dorking out about Mercedes Lackey.

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Petra:  Yeah, no, Mercedes Lackey, like, has – and I do not mean this as an insult, I really, really don’t – has all the elements of truly great fanfiction.  Like –

Sarah:  That’s really interesting, and I totally get that that’s not an insult.  I, that’s actually something I’ve been thinking a lot about.  What is it that readers go for when they want fanfiction?  How is it different from published books in other mediums, like, how, what are the differences between a book and fanfiction?  So I’m really curious why you think she has all the elements of good fanfic?

Petra:  Well, I shouldn’t say all the elements, because a good fanfic, I think, either responds to or, or completes a story in ways that the original creator didn’t do?  Like, some of my favorite fics – ‘cause I’m a Doctor Who fan, and we all know this – deal with what happens to Rose and the clone Doctor after they’re stranded in the alternate universe and we say goodbye to them because the real Doctor has made this huge life-changing decision and just gone, bye!  Have a nice life.  That’s a, that’s a fantastic area where you can just fill in the narrative.  But what I sort of mean is more visceral, in that both good fanfiction and Mercedes Lackey have these kind of fulfilling, like, there’s a lot of hurt comfort.  There’re very relatable characters; there are these easy kind of fulfilling emotional catharses, easily digestible, and like – I, I feel like I’m trashing her, but I’m really not.  I, I do love her work.  [Laughs]

Sarah:  No, it’s, it’s fulfilling in a very specific way.

Petra:  Yes.

Sarah:  Almost like it taps a specific emo-, a specific emotion.

Petra:  Yeah, it’s like, it’s like – [sighs] – you know, I feel like Romy and Michele re-watching Pretty Woman when I’m reading Mercedes Lackey, you know?  It does that for me.

Sarah:  Yep, totally.  It is –

Petra:  Like, they have the scene where they won’t let Julia Roberts shop in the posh boutique, right?  And I have, like, I don’t know, I happen to like the Magic’s Pawn trilogy because it’s one of the first fantasy trilogies to feature a gay hero – also, the covers are stunningly beautiful – and, you know, there’re a million scenes where he’s, like, been busted up in some magical fight and gets comforted by a hot guy.  Like –

Sarah:  You like the hurt comfort, huh?

Petra:  – come on!  That’s, that’s catnip.

Sarah:  [Laughs] I think it’s really important for readers to figure out what their catnip is, because everyone’s catnip is different, and I think that women especially, as young women, we get told what we ought to be reading and what we should be reading, and I think that we get a lot of messages about liking things that are as widely appealing as possible, whereas, especially if you’re a genre fiction reader, you have very specific catnips that, that, that work for you, and being able to develop a language to describe them is one of the awesome things that’s come out of being on the internet.

Petra:  That’s true.  It’s interesting what you say; I’m not, I wonder if it’s a generational thing, although we are the same age.  I, or maybe just everyone thought I was weird and stayed away from me.

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Petra:  Like, the only time I can ever remember – also maybe that it was, that I was lucky in my choice of parents, except for my mother’s disapproval of romance, but the only time I can ever remember anybody, like, telling me I shouldn’t be reading something or not taking me seriously was, I was twelve years old and a friend of mine’s mother was driving us home from school, and she asked me what I was reading, and I said, The Gulag Archipelago, which was true, because I was on a dystopia kick, but you don’t believe a twelve-year-old when she says that, right?

[Laughter]

Sarah:  I was thinking more specifically of how, in every sort of generation of young readers, there are books that are popular and that they are automatically trashed because they are targeted or liked by young women, so you have, going backwards, you have, you know, Twilight, and then before that, you have things like Sweet Valley High or Sweet Dreams, which were –

Petra:  Oh, that’s true!  In my generation, or our generation, it was –

Sarah:  And, and my, my gateways were Sweet Valley High and to a lesser extent Sweet Dreams, because – I can’t believe I’m about to say this, but with Sweet Valley High there was a consistent quality.  It wasn’t great quality, but it was consistent!  With Sweet Dreams, those things were all over the place.  They could have been awesome, they could be, they, a lot of them sucked!  There were, there were some where I was like, I don’t even understand what’s happening, and I, and I personally almost made the jump from Sweet Valley High to Sweet Dreams to Harlequin because the Harlequin romances at that time were very similarly packaged to the Sweet Dreams books, but I did not have a reliable source for Harlequin, so I think I only ended up reading one or two, and they were fade to black with no sex scenes, and at my age I was like, what – [exasperated noises] – no!  No, I want it on the page.  Like, four or five pages, actually, if you don’t mind.  But it, whenever something is loved by young women that women are encouraged to read, it’s either, here, you should read this, it’s really good for you, everyone will like this, or you get, oh, yeah, well, that’s stupid things that girls like.

Petra:  How do you think that applies to something like the Nancy Drew series, which I think is fairly well-acclaimed but is also very specifically identified with young girls?

Sarah:  I don’t know, because I don’t know what things were said about it at the time that it was being published.

Petra:  Oh, that’s true.

Sarah:  But I know that when I was given books by older relatives, it was invariably a Nancy Drew book, and I thought she was so boring –

Petra:  Oh, God, yeah.

Sarah:  – and I wanted, what was her friend, Bess?  I wanted – I think it was Bess – I wanted Bess to, like, light shit on fire or something.

Petra:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  Like, set fire to Ned’s trousers, do something, ‘cause Nancy was buh-oring.

Petra:  Yeah, I tried once or twice with them, and yes, they were buh-oring.  The funny thing is, now that you’re mentioning Sweet Valley High, like, I was a, I was such a snob when I was a little kid.  Like, I think I’m making up for it now, but I, oh, I looked down on Sweet Valley High, and I, like, I was an animation snob.  Like, I was like, I don’t want to watch She-Ra.  Her mouth doesn’t move.  That’s only three sec-, that’s only six frames a second.  I’m going to watch some Looney Tunes.

Sarah:  That’s a thing you knew?

Petra:  Yeah.

Sarah:  Wow.  That’s amazing!

Petra:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  I was never into She-Ra, but my younger sister is six years younger than me.  Loved her from She-Ra.  Oh, She-Ra everything.  You know what I loved?  I loved Jem and the damn Holograms.

Petra:  Oh, God, yeah.  I was, well, I have the toys.  I never watched the shows.  I, also, I wasn’t allowed to watch a lot of TV as a kid.  Like, so there were, I had to make the calculation of what was worth sneaking around my mother to watch?

Sarah:  It had to be very high quality animation to make it worth the risk.

Petra:  Right, and for, for a budding nerd, it was Looney Tunes and Monty Python.  [Laughs]

Sarah:  I can understand that.  You know what else I wish I’d seen more of?  Josie and the Pussycats cartoons.

Petra:  Yeah, me too!

Sarah:  I love Josie and the Pussycats!

Petra:  [Laughs] I only, I remember seeing the movie, the live action movie?

Sarah:  Oh, God.

Petra:  No, it’s really good!  Have you seen it?

Sarah:  No!

Petra:  It is actually very fun.  It’s kind of a sly corporate satire, and seeing Seth Green, like, as a kind of quasi, like, Justin Timberlake boy band twerp is hilarious.

Sarah:  You said Justin Green, or you said Seth Green, and I am in.  I’m in!  We’ll watch this.

Petra:  [Laughs] Yeah.  It’s, I mean it’s not, like, Shakespeare, but it’s surprisingly good.

Sarah:  Oh, I am, I am totally here for this.

Petra:  [Laughs] So I feel like we’re getting off track.  I, I should be talking about romance, and I’m, like, wandering off into all the other random crap I read.

Sarah:  No, this is totally fine, because one of the ser-, one of the things about the series that I’m doing is that I’m interviewing readers who read romance, but no romance reader only reads one thing.  We read kind of a little of everything.

Petra:  I’m like, I will read medicine bottles if there’s nothing else around.  [Laughs]

Sarah:  Oh, yes.  Oh, yes.

Petra:  Actually, when I was a kid I was kind of into that, because I thought the medical warnings were, like, weird and gruesome and interesting.  [Laughs]

Sarah:  You know what books you might like, now that I think about it?

Petra:  Mm-hmm?

Sarah:  Have you ever read Carla Kelly?

Petra:  Mm-mm.

Sarah:  Carla Kelly now writes inspirationals, and I believe that they are mostly Mormon, but she used to write Regencies, like the old-style Regencies.  Like the little slender ones –

Petra:  Oh!

Sarah:  – where there was, like, hot, sexy hand-holding and maybe one kiss?

Petra:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  But her Regencies are almost always – I think they’re ideal for, for nerdy readers like you and me –

Petra:  Mm-hmm.

Sarah:  – because they take place during different wars, they are almost always between people of different classes, and they’re not necessarily all noblemen or titled lords.

Petra:  That sounds great.  You know, actually, I wanted to ask you for a recommendation because –

Sarah:  Yes?

Petra:  – I’m suddenly feeling that I need to read contemporary –

Sarah:  Oh, okay!

Petra:  – and I, I want it to be – P, get your damn tail off the keyboard.  I don’t want cat butt –

Sarah:  Oh, my supervisor has returned.

Petra:  [Laughs] I, so I’m currently rereading Bet Me, which I quite enjoy, but I feel like there have to be more things in the world than Bet Me.

Sarah:  Oh, yes.

Petra:  I read Courtney Milan’s, the first Cyclone series book.  I really liked it.  I, I need my contemporaries to be believable.  Like, no Navy SEALs, no cowboys.  Like, beta heroes.

Sarah:  Oh, yes.  Okay, you will like Shannon Stacey’s Kowalskis series, starting with Exclusively Yours.

Petra:  Okay.

Sarah:  I think there are nine Kowalskis.  Skip the second one.

Petra:  Okay.

Sarah:  I never believed the conflict, and I thought the heroine was an idiot.

Petra:  Okay.  [Laughs]

Sarah:  But the Kowalskis series, starting with Exclusively Yours and then the third one, Yours to Keep, are, are two of my favorites.  Exclusively Yours is, all of them take place in a small town, either in New Hampshire or in rural Maine –

Petra:  Oh, one of the –

Sarah:  – and these people –

Petra:  Why is it always a small town?

Sarah:  It’s very hot right now, but the thing I like about Stacey’s books is that these people are not wealthy.  They work, they have jobs –

Petra:  Oh, cool.

Sarah:  – and they have, you know, normal human crap to deal with, like families and whatnot.

Petra:  You can’t see this, but I’m, like, going on Amazon right now on my phone.

Sarah:  Yay!  So, Exclusively Yours is about a young woman who, on the day of high school graduation, everyone thought she was going to marry her high school boyfriend, and she was like –

Petra:  Mm-hmm.

Sarah:  – I have a job as a, and, and I’m leaving, and, and bye.  And he was like, what the fuck?  We were going to get married and, and, and so she ends up becoming an entertainment reporter –

Petra:  Hmm!

Sarah:  – and he becomes a novelist who is very, very reclusive and secretive and doesn’t give interviews, so when her boss finds out that she was the high school girlfriend of this novelist that no one can get an interview with –

Petra:  Uh-huh.

Sarah:  – she says, you have to go get an interview with him or you’re going to lose your job.

Petra:  All right.

Sarah:  So she goes back to her home town and is like, okay, can I please have an interview?  And he’s like, on one condition, and he hands her the list of conditions.  She has to pack her bag, no phone, no computer, no internet, and bring bug spray and meet him at a specific place, and he takes her to his family’s camp, where they all have a campsite out in the woods with his whole family, which is, like, her worst nightmare –

Petra:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  – and they have to share a cabin, and his, his sister hates her.  Like, she’s super pissed that this girl broke her brother’s heart, and they sort of work out their problems in this campsite –

Petra:  Hmm.

Sarah:  – so it’s both sort of super forced proximity, but it’s also really funny, and one of the reasons that she left was she was like, I wanted to do something other than be Mrs. Whatever His Name Was.

Petra:  Mm-hmm.

Sarah:  I wanted to do something other than be so-and-so’s wife.  And, and, and –

Petra:  I just bought it.  It was four bucks for Kindle.

Sarah:  Yeah – and nobody understands.

Petra:  Sold.

Sarah:  The third one, Yours to Keep, I also loved, and the, the families are all sort of related, there’re cousins and stuff, but Yours to Keep, the heroine runs a landscaping business, runs her own business, and has told her mother, who doesn’t live nearby, that she has a boyfriend, and it’s this guy.  I think his name is, is, is Sean, and he’s currently deployed, and so she’s made up this whole relationship with this person –

Petra:  Huh.

Sarah:  – who exists!

Petra:  Ha!

Sarah:  – but is not in a relationship with her, so when he comes back, she’s like, listen, I just, my mom’s coming to visit, so I need you to pretend to be my boyfriend for, like, couple weeks.

Petra:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  And he’s like –

Petra:  Oh, the old pretend boyfriend gambit.

Sarah:  – okay.  But what, what works about it is that the mother is onto them almost immediately, and she’s just like –

Petra:  Oh!

Sarah:  – I’m just going to watch this, ‘cause this is hilarious!  Like, these people don’t even know each other.  This is great!

Petra:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  And they’re so funny but also super touching, and they have good family relationships.  Like, there’s a strong mother figure, there are good parents.  These are just genuinely decent human beings.

Petra:  I like that, because the one flaw – I mean, I, I’m enjoying Bet Me, I read it a bunch, but, like –

Sarah:  Toxic families!

Petra:  Jesus!  I’m tired of, like, the toxic mother who’s just, you’re fat, get a man!  You’re fat, get a man!  You’re fat, get a man!

Sarah:  Yep.

Petra:  Ugh.

Sarah:  Having supportive parents makes for a really, really lovely –

Petra:  Yeah.

Sarah:  – lovely story.  Another recommendation for you:  let me pull up my contemporary romance recs – okay.

Petra:  [Laughs] I love that you have a file.

Sarah:  Have you –

Petra:  What?

Sarah:  Have you read Marjorie Liu?  [Laughs] That’s a great face; I wish I could take a picture of that.

Petra:  No, I’ve read Marie Lu, and I did not care for her.

Sarah:  Nope, different.  Marjorie Liu wrote – a long, long time ago in a publishing era far away, there was a house called Dorchester who did all the rad shit.  Marjorie was a Dorchester author.  They, they took all these risks, but she wrote a series, or might still be writing it, called Dirk & Steele, which was a paranormal detective agency series.

Petra:  Well, that sounds fun!

Sarah:  But they are –

Petra:  I do love Meljean Brook.

Sarah:  Oh, you would probably like Marjorie Liu.  She’s very heavily influenced by Asian mythology and also by general ass-kicking.

Petra:  That sounds so familiar.

Sarah:  She also writes for Marvel.

Petra:  Ahhh!  That –

Sarah:  She has, she has a new comic out called Huntress, I think, or Monstress, but it’s not Marvel, and it’s not DC, it’s Image?

Petra:  Image?

Sarah:  Image!

Petra:  If it’s not Marvel and it’s not DC and it’s really good, it’s Image probably.  Right, right now –

Sarah:  Yes, Image.  It’s coming out right now, and she also wrote several of the X-Men series, and then she wrote Black Widow for Marvel.  She wrote some of the Black Widow comics.

Petra:  Cool!  That sounds interesting.

Sarah:  But she is a really good blend of worldbuilding and ass-kicking.

Petra:  Okay!  Marjorie Liu.  How do you spell the last name?

Sarah:  L-I-U.

Petra:  L-I-U.  [Laughs]

Sarah:  Oh, one more contemporary recommendation, before I forget.

Petra:  Oh, yes!

Sarah:  You would probably really like Julie James.

Petra:  Okay!

Sarah:  Just as funny as Jennifer Crusie, but one of the things I love about her heroes and heroines is that they are extremely competent.

Petra:  Ooh, I like that!

Sarah:  Like, this is all kinds of competence porn, because the, the first one, I think, that you would really like is Something About You, and then they go on from there.

Petra:  Something About You.  I’m looking it up now.

Sarah:  Something About You.  There’s Something About You, A Lot Like Love – it’s the FBI/U.S. Attorney series.  And –

Petra:  Oh, right!  Okay.  I’m not that much into, like, sort of cop/law enforcement things, but I’ll give it a try.

Sarah:  It’s, it’s not so much law enforcement, it, as it is the investigation part, but like –

Petra:  Oh, that’s kind of cool!

Sarah:  – like for, in, I think it’s Something About You, the, the meet cute, so to speak –

Petra:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  – is that the heroine is trying to sleep in a hotel room, and the people next door are banging.

Petra:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  And she realizes that she can’t sleep, she’s like, fine, whatever, and then she hears something and realizes that something has gone horribly wrong and ends up reali-, ends up finding out that next door a very high-priced prostitute was murdered, and she heard the whole thing, but the person with whom she has to work is, she’s an assistant U.S. attorney –

Petra:  Mm-hmm.

Sarah:  – he’s with the FBI, and they were part of a case, and he thinks that she sold him out on a case years ago and had, and, and he was so disgraced he had to transfer and is slowly working his way back into Chicago.  So –

Petra:  All right, I just bought it.

Sarah:  – they’re – awesome! – they are so great, and then there’s A Lot Like Love and About That Night and Love Irresistibly and It Happened One Wedding.

Petra:  I love that you have these all memorized.  Unless you’re looking –

Sarah:  No, I’m looking at them in the screen!  I do, I – no, no, no!

Petra:  Oh.

Sarah:  No, no, no.  In Sarah’s brain – that’s when I can read a resource.  In Sarah’s brain, there’s Something About You, which is the low-cut pink dress where his hand is, like, six inches above her butt –

Petra:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  – A Lot Like Love is a purple dress; About That Night, they’re wearing suits; it’s not really that exciting; and then Love Irresistibly is the one that has the bandage dress, which was like super hot and very red.

Petra:  Ooh!

Sarah:  I was actually doing a podcast interview with Julie James, and I was, and my brain is so bad at titles that I was like, no, no, no, no!  The one of yours with the red dress, not the pink, and she was like, oh!  That one!

Petra:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  Which is, like, you know, as a pseudo-journalist, that’s just embarrassing.

Petra:  Well, it’s, you know –

Sarah:  The one of your books with the red dress, you know?

Petra:  As long as you remember it.

Sarah:  Yeah.  But the thing about her characters is that – especially the, the heroines, I really appreciate this about them – they have worked really hard to get where they are professionally, and they like their jobs.

Petra:  Ooh, I love –

Sarah:  And they’re good at their jobs.  Like, they are competent and smart, and they like what they do.  One of them owns a wine store, and her brother is the Twitter Terrorist, who was a computer programmer, and he was like one of those start-up child geniuses –

Petra:  Mm-hmm.

Sarah:  – and was, like, a technology darling, and his girlfriend broke up with him and posted pictures of herself with a new guy on Twitter, and he was drunk in Mexico, and he –

Petra:  Oh, dear.

Sarah:  – he set up an attack and took down Twitter.  And then passed out for, like, two days – hi, kitty –

Petra:  This is the third one.

Sarah:  – because he was drunk and miserable, and this is how, you know, this is how he handles his, his misery.  So he comes to, and there’s, like, a warrant out for his arrest, the Mexican authorities are preparing to extradite him because he took down Twitter, and he –

Petra:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  – and he went to jail, he went to prison for it, and his sister cuts a deal with the FBI to help them catch a particularly egregious dude in exchange for lowering her brother’s sentence.  And there’s this, there’s this great scene – her book is first – there’s this great scene where they start talking about the case, and she’s screaming at the radio, it was Twitter!  You idiots!  It was just Twitter!  What’s wrong with you?!  And so, those two have a great pair of books, because once he’s out, he has a, a bracelet to track him –

Petra:  Mm-hmm.

Sarah:  – and he has to stay within a certain perimeter, and he can only go out so much, so he saves all of his going out so that he can run down the Chicago lakefront as far as he is allowed to go, stop, and run back, and meanwhile has everything else in his life delivered ‘cause he doesn’t want to live, leave his house.

Petra:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  And I’m like, dude, I know that feel.  [Laughs]

Petra:  Sounds like a romance hero to me.

Sarah:  Totally.  So you would really like those, just because –

Petra:  Okay!

Sarah:  – all of the characters are really smart and competent and funny.

Petra:  That sounds great.  I’m down with competency porn.

Sarah:  I love competence porn.  Hi, kitty!

Petra:  I’m having a lot of editorial interference.  [Laughs]

Sarah:  You have a lot of feline commentary.  What’s up with that?

Petra:  Well, I have three cats –

Sarah:  You do.

Petra:  – and they’re all young and rambunctious.  And they, and I –

Sarah:  Are they all related?  They look similar.

Petra:  No, they’re not.  They’re all shelter mutts.  But I was away at Comic-Con, and so now they’re like, Mommy!

Sarah:  How was Comic-Con?  What did you do while you were there?

Petra:  I worked.  And then I worked some more.

Sarah:  Wait!  Does, does, does NPR have, like, a booth at Comic-Con?

Petra:  Oh, God, I wish.  No, I was there, I mean I was there to report some stories.  I, I actually did a really interesting, I, I spent a day with Nicole Perlman, who’s a screenwriter.  She’s the first woman to get a credit, a screenwriting credit on a Marvel Studios movie.  She co-wrote Guardians of the Galaxy.

Sarah:  Cool!

Petra:  Yeah, she’s incredibly cool.  I really enjoyed talking to her.  And, and, and the, I was, it was interesting, because, like, this, Guardians of the Galaxy was last year, so technically I should have done this story last year, so I was looking for a way to kind of take it to a new, to take the next step, and then I, she told me that she was writing her next, one of her next, she’s doing the Captain Marvel movie, which, yeah!  But her, her most immediate project is she’s writing a Gamora comic book.

Sarah:  Whaaat?

Petra:  Yeah, it’s a, it’s a limited series, and it’s coming out sometime this year, and I forget what, but it was, what was cool about it was that she needed to learn how to transition from screenwriting to comic scripting, ‘cause they’re kind of two different languages, and so what she was doing at Comic-Con was just going around and talking to all these women in the industry about, like, what the differences were between the different kinds of writing, so I got this really – like, she was talking to Kelly Sue DeConnick, and we had lunch with Willow, G. Willow Wilson, and we had this lovely exchange with Noelle Stevenson, like, right before she won an Eisner for Lumberjanes.  And so it just ended up being this really cool piece about sort of – I mean, yes, we all know it’s not news that women get all kinds of shit in the world of comics and fandom, but it was like a little look at this network of professional women who are incredibly good at what they do kind of advising and supporting each other.

Sarah:  Yep.

Petra:  So it made me super happy.  Plus I got to fangirl at G. Willow Wilson.

Sarah:  Well, what could possibly go wrong with that?

Petra:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  That sounds like a really fun story.

Petra:  I will send you a link to it.  It was, it aired on Sunday.

Sarah:  Yes, please!

Petra:  ‘Cause then I had, what was not fun was having to be up until three in the morning to file it because of computer problems.

Sarah:  Oh, dude, that’s the worst.

Petra:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  That is just the worst.

Petra:  Sitting there like – [laughs] – so, this is, this is how, this is how the radio sausage gets made:  when we are filing remotely, and you know, you’re in a hotel room and you’re tracking or whatever, you have to do, you have to make this, you have to sort of make your own sound booth.  So what we always do is we pull the quilt over our heads.

Sarah:  No!

Petra:  So there I was, kneeling on the side of the bed with my computer on the bed and all the recording gear in there with me, and the stifling, this quilt was over my head –

Sarah:  Oh, God.

Petra:  – like, at three in the morning – [laughs] – trying to do the very professional yet perky NPR voice.

Sarah:  Oh, my God.

Petra:  Oh, I wanted to die.

Sarah:  So what does the quilt do?  Does it muffle background noise?

Petra:  It muffles, it stops, it, it stops the sound from outside getting in, and it creates a kind of – it can, it’s not ideal, but it creates a very flat, neutral kind of background, so if you’re in a hotel room where there’s climate control or somebody in the next room or traffic noise, that’s kind of the way to do it.

Sarah:  It gets rid of all that.

Petra:  It’s a baffle.  It’s like soundproofing.

Sarah:  So you shouldn’t record in the bathroom, because that’s a hard surface.

Petra:  Bathrooms are really echo-y.

Sarah:  It would echo.

Petra:  Yeah.

Sarah:  And you don’t want to go under a hotel bad; that would just be gross.

Petra:  Not under the bed, but like –

Together:  – under the quilt.

Petra:  Yeah, you put the quilt over your head.

Sarah:  Wow!  I had no idea!

Petra:  There you go, trick of the trade.  [Laughs]

Sarah:  Any other tricks you want to share?  ‘Cause I’m wearing a gaming headset from Amazon that cost me twenty-two dollars, and that’s how I record my high-tech podcast.

Petra:  [Laughs] Ah, no?  I mean that, apart from that, that’s the one really weird one is putting the quilt over your head.

Sarah:  The one I was surprised was how many people will say to smile when you’re recording because it comes through in your voice?

Petra:  Yeah, it does.  Well, the thing that I tell everybody, because I get a lot – I, I, I coach people a lot on, you know, when I track, I, I record their tracks for a story or their commentaries or whatever, or guests that we’re interviewing, and I run across the problem a lot that people sound like they think NPR should sound.

Sarah:  Yes!  NPR has a very specific sound –

Petra:  We do.

Sarah:  – that it’s hard to imitate.

Petra:  And it sounds much different inside your head than outside –

Sarah:  Yes.

Petra:  – so what I always tell people is, the more you sound like a complete wingnut, the better it comes across.

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Petra:  Because when I do it, I’m listening to in-, my voice inside my head and going, you are a parody!  And then I listen back to it and go, eh, that’s about right.

Sarah:  Yep.  So the more energy and the more enthusiasm you have in your voice –

Petra:  Right.

Sarah:  – the more interesting it is to listen to.

Petra:  Exactly!

Sarah:  Well, I often found when I interview people that the really good interviews are fr-, are with people who are super passionate about whatever they’re talking about?

Petra:  Super passionate and able to break it down for a general audience –

Sarah:  Yes.

Petra:  – ‘cause I’ve discovered that scientists may be super passionate about – I was a hard news producer for ten years before I was a books review editor, so –

Sarah:  Do you like books better?

Petra:  [Laughs] I get paid to do what I would do anyways –

Sarah:  Yes!

Petra:  – you tell me!  [Laughs]

Sarah:  Is that not the greatest thing?  Like, you wake up sometimes and you’re like, still my life, right?  Okay!  [Laughs]

Petra:  Yeah.  Yeah.  I do sometimes have that feeling.  [Laughs] I was, I used to live in the Czech Republic, I used to live in Prague and worked for Radio Free Europe, and I would walk home over the Charles Bridge, and I’d go, fuck!  I live here!

[Laughter]

Petra:  And I kind of sometimes have the same feeling now.

Sarah:  Oh, dude.  Living in Prague must have been amazing.

Petra:  I loved it.  I loved it.  It is a really beautiful city.

Sarah:  Don’t they need a books editor in Prague for NPR?

Petra:  [Laughs] Yeah, if I spoke Czech, maybe.  Nah, I don’t want to leave.  I like what I’m doing, you know?

Sarah:  You do have a really nice office building now.

Petra:  Yes, it’s like a space ship, and it still has that new building smell.

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Petra:  Even though it’s, it’s, it’s two years old at this point, it still – well, the old building was kind of moldy, so – [laughs] – I miss the old building in a weird way, like, I feel like I grew up there.  So – [laughs] – ‘cause I worked in –

Sarah:  So what kind of books do you have to read for NPR books?  Do you have to read what’s sent to you?  Do you guys develop a list, or are you, do you get to choose a lot of the things that you cover?

Petra:  Oh, well, that’s a, that’s a good question.

Sarah:  How does the NPR Books sausage get made?

Petra:  [Laughs] It’s a mix of things, because we review so much stuff that I cannot possibly read it all myself.  I also have a counterpart in New York who handles a lot of the literary fiction, but it’s a mix.  I, I have a, a group of, a solid group of reviewers whose taste I really respect, and when they come to me and they say, Petra, I want to review this, this, this, and this, I discuss it with my coeditor in New York, and I usually say yes, because they are bringing things to the table that I haven’t had a chance to see.  And then, of course, we are also, we actually maintain, we go through all the catalogs, my colleague and I, Rose Friedman up in New York, we, we kill ti-, a lot of time on Edelweiss, which is the online catalog site?  Yeah, you know, I see you making that face.  So –

Sarah:  Oh, Edelweiss and NetGalley.

Petra:  Yeah.  Yeah, and so we live on those two sites and just con-, we’re constantly going through the catalogs – well, Rose more than me; I’m kind of a slacker about it – and adding everything to a big document which is our Books of Note list, and that’s a reference document for us and for the shows and for reporters who want to see what we think is interesting in the next six months, so I will find things on catalogs that I think are interesting and assign them.  Even though I don’t want to admit this, sometimes a publicist will pitch me something and I’ll say, yes, but don’t take that as a reason to call me all the time.  [Laughs]

Sarah:  You know what?  I completely understand.  I have the same experience.

Petra:  I, I find that the publicists that I work best with are the ones that know what’s appropriate for NPR and what my particular tastes are?

Sarah:  I am somehow on a list for a publisher that I believe that this list is:  it has a woman on the cover; send it to Sarah.

Petra:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  I will get the weirdest shit.  Like, at one point I got hardcovers of Benazir Bhutto’s biography – not a romance, not a happy ending.

Petra:  [Whispers] No.

Sarah:  Nooo.

Petra:  I will get –

Sarah:  But it had a woman on the cover, so I got a copy.

Petra:  [Laughs] I get a lot of stuff because I’m still on people’s lists as having been a producer at weekend All Things Considered, which I was for ten years.

Sarah:  I remember, ‘cause you organized an interview for me and Candy and Robin Roberts.

Petra:  Yes, when Beyond Heaving Bosoms – Yes, and I made, I made her read, I forget what we made her read.

Sarah:  Bet Me!

Petra:  Was it Bet Me?

Sarah:  And you know, she emailed me, and she said, that was really great.  Can I have more?

Petra:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  And I was like –

Petra:  Our work here is done!

Sarah:  Yes!  Do the Dance of Joy!

Petra:  Yeah!  [Laughs] So anyways, that was a totally incoherent answer, but the, the condensed version is, it’s a mixture of things that I think we should cover that I glean from catal-, like, diligent catalog reading and going to trade shows like Book Expo?

Sarah:  Mm-hmm.

Petra:  Book Expo is a great discovery tool for me, because not only can I see what publicists want me to see, I can see what the marketers think is important, and I can see what the fans are lining up for.

Sarah:  Yep.  You ever get to talk to editors?

Petra:  Not as much, no.  We run into them at parties sometimes, because this –

Sarah:  Are you coming to RWA?

Petra:  For half a day.  I’m interviewing Beverly Jenkins.

Sarah:  [Gasps] Yay!

Petra:  [High-pitched voice] I’m so excited!

Sarah:  One thing that Jane from Dear Author told me that is very true is that often you get really great recommendations from the editors, because they’re the ones that acquire the book, so they’re the ones who actually purchase it to work on it and then have to explain it to sales and marketing, and sometimes sales and marketing is like, I, words, what?  Huh?

Petra:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  But then you talk to the editor and they’re like, oh, my God, I’m so excited about this book.  This book is amazing.  Like, there was one book that Shauna Summers, who’s an editor, acquired called A Lady Awakened by Cecilia Grant, and this book rocked my world.  If you like historicals –

Petra:  Feel like I read that.

Sarah:  This is the one about the woman whose husband is a drunk idiot and he dies, and she finds out that the heir to the estate is a horrible human being who raped kitchen maids and got them pregnant and then ran off.

Petra:  I’m looking on my Kindle right now, ‘cause I feel like I read that…

Sarah:  All of the – it’s a, it’s a green cover with a woman sort of lying back, and she has red hair, and it’s sort of flowing off the, off the bed, but – the, the servants basically say, look, if, if this guy inherits –

Petra:  There it is.  Oh, it’s the Blackshear Family series!  Of course!  I read, like, all of those!

Sarah:  Yeah!  So, Shauna’s explaining this book to Jane, and Jane’s like, oh, my God, I want to read this.  Then she tells me, and I’m like, oh, my God, I want to read this!  And she’s like, you know, I really get better recommendations sometimes from the editors, because they’re the ones who get excited about the book first.

Petra:  That’s a really good –

Sarah:  But they don’t ever talk to the outside world; that’s sales and marketing’s job.

Petra:  Yeah, and we don’t run into them, sort of.  I, I very occasionally run into editors at parties, but it’s –

Sarah:  Yeah.

Petra:  – it’s very rare.

Sarah:  And I’ve also noticed that publishers, forgive me, are not very good at organizing and communicating what’s coming out at a given time.  Like, that work is still on me.  If I can find a specific catalog, that’s great, but there’s still no one cohesive place where they put all of the things that are coming out in a specific genre in a specific month.

Petra:  Yeah, I, I rely on sort of outside, like, Locus magazine or io9 for my sci-fi.  Like, they do really great upcoming, like, what you need to pay attention to this month.

Sarah:  Yep.

Petra:  The other problem for me is that I’m planning six months ahead, so –

Sarah:  Yes.

Petra:  – I do, I do rely very extensively on publicists for that, and they’re pretty good, because they know me and they know what I want and that they’re, you know, they can tell me, okay, in September I have these three books that you’ll be interested in, and generally I am, so.

Sarah:  Yep.  I have, I have started having to keep a, a reading list of what is on my Kindle and when it is coming out and when I’m going to read it –

Petra:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  – because I would look at it and be like, books, I don’t know what to read right now.  What the hell?

Petra:  Yeah.  I need to start doing something like that.  I’m incredibly disorganized.  This is a major flaw, I find.  I, I read so much I cannot remember what I’m reading.

Sarah:  Oh, yeah.

Petra:  I, at one point I was, I have an Instagram account and a Tumblr, and at one point I was using those just to take pictures of everything I read –

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Petra:  – and then, so that I could have a visual reference –

Sarah:  And a date stamp.

Petra:  – and even then it got overwhelming.  Now, I can look at my Kindle, but that doesn’t, you know, like, I have a lot of paper ARCs that I read, or half the time, like, I should be reading new books, and I’m like, hey, here’s the incredibly hefty eight-book fantasy series from the mid ‘90s that’s very female centric that I didn’t read that I should read –

Sarah:  Yep.

Petra:  – even though I, each – that would be Kate El-, Kate Elliott’s Crown of Stars, by the way.  [Laughs] Not something that you should try to read all at once.  Some of those books are, like, 800 pages, but very worthwhile.

Sarah:  Did you get any information or an ARC of Sorcerer to the Crown by Zen Cho?

Petra:  I, you know, I was just thinking of her.  I have that, it’s on our list, and I actually met her editor at Comic-Con.  [Laughs]

Sarah:  No way!  Really?

Petra:  Yeah, I met her and her editor at Comic-Con.  I didn’t have a chance to speak to them, because we were just running around doing all kinds of other stuff, but it looks really interesting.

Sarah:  I, I got an ARC and nearly fell out of my chair ‘cause I was so excited, but, like, I’m saving it, because I’m worried that if I read it and then I start talking about it, people are going to be like, it’s not out yet, Sarah.  Shut up.

Petra:  I know.  We, we have this problem every Friday, ‘cause we do Friday reads, and it’s one of the most popular things on the NPR Books Facebook page.  People love to tell me what they’re reading, and I like to hear about it, actually, because –

Sarah:  Of course!

Petra:  – it’s a really great barometer for if they care about what we’re covering, and you know, it’s nice to have back-and-forths, ‘cause there’ll always be somebody who’s reading some random, obscure thing that I thought I was the only person I, that liked.  Like – [laughs]

Sarah:  Mm-hmm.

Petra:  – I started calling it ARC privilege.  Like, I can’t flaunt my ARC privilege, because inevitably I’m reading something that isn’t going to come out for six months, and people get mad at me.

Sarah:  Yep.  So one last question.

Petra:  Yeah!

Sarah:  Is there one book, other than N. K. Jemisin or Kate Elliott, is there a book or a series that you wish more people knew about?

Petra:  A book or a series that I wish more people knew about.  Can I say, like, half of one series and half of another?

Sarah:  Totally!  I don’t have hard and fast rules.  This is the internet.

Petra:  So there are two series that I think don’t get enough – well, first of all, Kage Baker.  Do you know Kage Baker?

Sarah:  No!

Petra:  She also passed a few years ago.  She was a, a sci-fi writer based in California who wrote a series of books about a mysteri-, they were called the Company novels because they were about a mysterious company that had mastered time travel and had also mastered a kind of immortality technology and had created a series of essentially cyborgs that they implanted in the deep past to live forward through history –

Sarah:  Ohhh?

Petra:  – preserving things that, that history thought were lost.  And so you have things like – and the first three or four of them are just incredible.  The first one is the best.  The first one is actually a romance, although it has not got a happy ending.  It’s a tee-, a sort of hot-tempered teenage cyborg, Spanish cyborg in the sixteenth century, and she goes, her first assignment is in England during the persecutions of Bloody Mary, and she falls in love with a, with a hot-headed, you know, dissenter, and it’s very, very delightful until it’s not.  But anyways, she’s one of these people that has a somewhat narrow scope, but what she knows, she knows really well, and she’s, creates wonderfully complicated and well-rounded and not always sympathetic but always – not always nice, but always sympathetic characters.

Sarah:  Yep.

Petra:  And, and it’s the same set of characters, because they’re traveling forward through history, so that’s, you know, the same set of characters in wildly different settings, and you can see, like – oh, the best, there, she has a great short story where one of her cyborgs has to solve a mystery set on the William Randolph Hearst estate during the 1920s, and it’s all like, you know, William Randolph Hearst hiding liquor bottles from his drunken, from Marion Davies, and – [laughs] – and silent movie in-jokes and stuff like that, which I love, because I love silent movies more than anything.  So anyhow, Kage Baker’s Company series, and the-, but only the first three or four books, ‘cause after that it kind of goes off the rails.

And then, so everybody knows Lois McMaster Bujold, because she wrote, you know, the Vorkosigan saga, and some people know the Sharing Knife, which is a romance, and I quite like it, but she wrote a book, it’s actually three books, but the first, I can’t remember all the titles.  The first one’s called The Curse of Chalion, and they’re classic high fantasy, and what I like about them is particularly the second one, the heroine is the tragic queen from the first book who’s kind of this washed-out, middle-aged, everybody overlooks her figure, and she gets this lovely arc in the second book and, like, kicks ass and finds love – [laughs] – and I –

Sarah:  Awesome!

Petra:  Yeah!  So, The Curse of Chalion by Lois McMaster Bujold.  That’s one.

Sarah:  All right.  I like this.

Petra:  Yeah.  I forget what the second one’s called, unfortunately.  Oh, well.

Sarah:  That’s okay, I have the internet; I can look it up.

Petra:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  There’s this web, it’s world-wide.

Petra:  Yeah!  When I, when I think about books that, like, when I want to force books on people, those are usually the ones.  Like, I don’t think I need to pimp Naomi Novik’s Temeraire series, ‘cause everybody knows those.  Those are the other books that I give everyone when I want to give someone a book.

Sarah:  Those are amazing.

Petra:  But I don’t think they’re, like, undiscovered.  [Laughs]

Sarah:  No, I, I think enough people have heard of those.

Petra:  And Jacqueline Carey.  God, I love Jacqueline Carey.  You want to talk about, like, pure crack.  The first –

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Petra:  Kushiel’s Dart in the first, the first series – oh, my Lord.  I love those books!

Sarah:  Did you see the absolute squeeful guest review we had for that book about a month ago?

Petra:  No!  I’ll have to look it up.

Sarah:  I had a guest reviewer, Betty, who was like, I love this book.  I have loved, I love this book so many ways, I’m going to tell you all about them.

Petra:  The writing is hilarious in those books.  I, I always fixate upon the, on the fact that she hasn’t figured out that the word betimes doesn’t mean sometimes.  It means early.  [Laughs] But in terms of worldbuilding, they’re wonderful, and I kind of love the inversion that, like, here’s a, an ass-kicking heroine who save the world by getting her ass kicked repeatedly.  [Laughs]

Sarah:  Yeah, it, I, it subverts a lot of things.

Petra:  It’s, and I love the, the vision of, of Europe without Christianity.  I think it’s really interesting.

Sarah:  It’s a major thing to take out and build a world, too.

Petra:  Yeah.

Sarah:  Like, it changes every significant piece of, of European bedrock.

Petra:  [Laughs] I could just talk about books I like and cats I like forever and ever and ever and ever and ever, so –

Sarah:  It’s a good thing it’s your job.  Hi, kitty!

Petra:  This is Godfrey.

Sarah:  Hi, Godfrey.  Mom, you’re home.

Petra:  [Laughs] Yeah, he’s, he’s glad that Mom is home.

Sarah:  You’re home.  I’m going to stay like this.

Petra:  [Laughs]

[music]

Sarah:  And that is all for this week’s episode.  I hope you enjoyed that interview.  I want to thank Petra for taking the time to hang out on Skype and all of her cats for speaking with me.

If you have questions or suggestions or you want to find out more information or you just want to tell me about a book you really liked or didn’t like, you can reach us here at [email protected].

This podcast was brought to you by InterMix, publisher of national bestselling author Anne Calhoun’s Evening Storm, the new e-novella in her sinfully addictive Irresistible series.  Download it on August 18th.

And we have a podcast transcript sponsor this month, as well.  If you prefer to read rather than listen, this week’s podcast transcript is being brought to you by Wattpad, a community of over forty million people from around the world writing, reading, and connecting over stories.  Whatever you’re into, there is a story you will love on Wattpad, maybe the new romantic suspense from K. A. Tucker, Burying Water.  You can connect for free from devices that you already own into Wattpad’s engaging and supportive community.

The music you’re listening to was provided by Sassy Outwater.  You can find her on Twitter @SassyOutwater.  This is the Peatbog Faeries, and this song is called “Tom in the Front,” and regardless of where Tom is, I dig this song, and I hope you’re enjoying it too.

I will be back next week with yet another episode, most likely talking about romance novels, because that’s what we do here.

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

[toe-tapping music]