220. New Books and Deep Dives into History: An Interview With Loretta Chase

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Sarah Wendell:  Hello, and welcome to episode number 220 of Smart Podcast, Trashy Books.  I’m Sarah Wendell from Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, and with me today is bestselling author [deep breath] Loretta Chase.  Eeee!  Okay.  [Sniffs, clears throat] My, my inner thir-, thirteen-year-old is now firmly under control.  We’re going to talk about her new books; about writing horrible, dreadful men; and where she starts in her writing process.  We’re also going to talk about historical details, the research that she does, some of her favorite museums, and about deep dives into the rabbit holes of history.  And we get to find out about the books that live on her keeper shelf.  Most of all, we learn the important lesson of the power of building smoochies, which is easily the best part of this entire interview.

Our transcript sponsor is Judy, who is a listener overseas and a generous supporter who loves the transcripts and emailed to ask if she could sponsor one.  She tends to overspend on romance novels and perfume, she says.  What could be better?  She really values our efforts to make the transcripts available and says thanks to garlicknitter, maybe more than she could possibly know.  Thank you, Judy, for sponsoring the transcript this week!  You are incredibly kind, and I am so happy to know that the transcripts make you happy!  [gk:  Me too, me too, me too!  Thank you, and I’m glad you like the transcripts!]

Our music is provided by Sassy Outwater.  I will have information at the end of the show as to who this is.

And if you’re thinking, I would like to shop for the books that we mention, ‘cause there’s a lot of books that we mention, I will have links to all of the places that we talk about, plus links to the books that we mention in the podcast entry, or you can go to our iTunes store at iTunes.com/DBSA.  It’s more of a page than a store, but it’s in the store, and it’s got the last few episodes, plus books that we’ve mentioned, and links to download the episodes, so it’s pretty handy-dandy.  So you can go to iTunes.com/DBSA or smartbitchestrashybooks.com/podcast and get all the information you’re looking for, because usually I know you listen when you’re, you know, on the treadmill or walking the dogs or walking the dogs on the treadmill or doing stuff like that.

If you are a fine and awesome listener of this show, which you are, ‘cause you’re hearing my voice, and you’re thinking, I would like to support this show, you can have a look at our Patreon page at Patreon.com/SmartBitches.  For pledges of a dollar a month, three dollars a month, five dollars a month, you can help support the show, help me commission transcripts for all the back episodes, and help me keep the podcast ever-increasingly awesome.  If you’ve already sponsored or had a look, thank you very much!  You are excellent!

I am so excited about this interview, and I hope that you enjoy it as much as I did.  And now, without any delay, on with the podcast with Loretta Chase.  Eeeeee!

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Loretta Chase:  I’m Loretta Chase.  I write historical romance novels.  The funny kind, I hope.

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Loretta:  And I have been doing this for many, many, many years and feel very fortunate to have this career, something I never dreamed was going to happen to me when I was dreaming about being a writer.

Sarah:  Do you ever look at the total number of books that you’ve written and just, like, wonder, like, how did I do that?  How did that happen?

Loretta:  Yeah.

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Loretta:  Especially when I’m struggling with a work in progress.  Like, okay, I, how did I do that now?  I used to know how to write a book.

Sarah:  I did it last time.  What’s wrong this time?

Loretta:  Yeah!  Yeah, yeah.

Sarah:  So what are you working on right now?

Loretta:  Right now I’m, it’s a new, I started a new series.

Sarah:  Yay!

Loretta:  I went as far as I could, I thought, with the Dressmakers.  And it’s hard for me to talk about works that I’m actually working on because they go through so many changes, but what I can tell you is, I’m planning a three-book series, and it, the, each, the, it, it’s, works around heroes, and they’re three awful men who are event-, who are going to make, meet the woman who, well, changes their life and changes their outlook on life.  I’ve done awful men before, and I, they are really, I love writing about them.  The last hero in Dukes Prefer Blondes was kind of awful.  He was, he was so obnoxious, and it was such a joy to write that kind of character and then find the, what was redeeming about him and who was the right woman for him.  That’s just an interesting writer’s challenge.

Sarah:  I’ve been doing a lot of reading to sort of prepare for this interview, and it’s really interesting to see the aggregate of what readers and reviewers and fans talk about when they talk about your books, and invariably, they mention incredibly strong heroines who take none of the hero’s crap and some seriously awful men who transform.

Loretta:  [Laughs] Yeah, yeah.  That, I like that.  I, I think it, it just gets started with the idea, when I was, when I was first thinking about writing romances, I wanted the women to be really strong, and I, the idea of a woman being the hero of her own story I took very seriously.  And it seemed to me that a great thing about having strong women was that they could stand up to men who were really dreadful, as it’s often difficult or impossible in real life for women, so there’s that element of the fantasy that I really enjoy writing about.

Sarah:  Plus, that creates a lot of good dialogue.

Loretta:   Yes!

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Loretta:  It does, it does.  It’s, well, yeah.  It makes the, the dialogue’s much more fun when you have that kind of big conflict, because – and also remembering that the men of this time are – there, there’s, women are not supposed to be uppity!  They’re not supposed to answer back, so it’s an extraordinary experience for these men to come up against these women, and that makes the dialogue really fun for me, ‘cause they don’t always know what the woman’s going to say, and if it’s the right guy, of course he’s going to be charmed and challenged by the way she responds to him.

Sarah:  When you’re writing, do you start with the dialogue, or do you start with a scene?

Loretta:  I usually have to have the scene in my head.  I have to be able to picture where they are.  A lot of my stories start with the idea of the place, and elements of the plot evolve out of, out of the place.  You know, this is a hard question to answer, because I think every book is different –

Sarah:  Mm-hmm.

Loretta:  – and sometimes I’ll have three lines of dialogue come into my head as I’m falling asleep, and I immediately write them down, because I know that’s what’s going to start the next scene, or it’s going to be integral to the next scene.  So –

Sarah:  And if you don’t write it down, you won’t remember.  If you’re like me –

Loretta:  Right.

Sarah:  – if I don’t write it down, it’s gone.

Loretta:  Right.  That’s why I hate the ones that come to you in the shower.  Like –

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Loretta:  – really.  You know?  I’m going to write soap?  Ah, yeah, I don’t know.  And good ones come in the shower, too, ‘cause that’s when you’re not, when your mind is free.

Sarah:  Yep.

Loretta:  You’re not thinking about your story, so, yeah.  Like that moment before you’re falling asleep and you’re thinking, I don’t want to get up and write it down.  I’ll remember tomorrow.  But you won’t remember tomorrow –

Sarah:  Nooo.

Loretta:  – so you have to get up and –

Sarah:  Yep.

Loretta:  – maybe you won’t fall asleep for another hour.

Sarah:  One thing I’ve noticed about your, your blog, Two Nerdy History Girls, is (a) it’s been going for a really long time.  Congratulations!

Loretta:  Yeah!

Sarah:  That’s awesome!

Loretta:  Thank you!  Yeah, that was a surprise to us.  We didn’t have big expectations when, when we started it out.  We thought we’d maybe have, you know, three, five followers.

Sarah:  Yep, I know that story.  I didn’t think anyone was going to read Smart Bitches, and then –

Loretta:  [Laughs] Right?

Sarah:  – and now I’m like, oh, my God, who are all these people?  What are you doing here?  [Laughs]

Loretta:  So, yeah.  Yeah, yeah.  So, yeah, we didn’t, that was not anything we expected, and we were doing it mainly for our own pleasure, because we found so many interesting things in the course of doing research, and you know how you can go down those rabbit holes.  So, there, we find tons of material we can’t use in our books, and it’s, might be contemporary, or it might be from a different period than we’re writing about, and so we’d get on the phone and we’d talk about these cool things we found out, so it was just really nice to have this place to share them with other people and then to find other people got as interested as we did.  That was just, that was the bonus.

Sarah:  I have to thank your blog because, as I was researching for our interview –

Loretta:  Uh-huh.

Sarah:  – I realized that there’s a new post about fashion after the American Revolution at the Daughters of the American Revolution Museum in DC, and I am right near DC, so I’m going to have to go see that.  It looks amazing!

Loretta:  It does look amazing.  I would like to get to see that too.  And until Susan posted that, I didn’t realize that Americans really were trying to have a different look.

Sarah:  No!

Loretta:  They were trying not to follow London and Paris, and I, ‘cause everyone followed London and Paris –

Sarah:  Right.

Loretta:  – so that was important –

Sarah:  I was, I was –

Loretta:  Still.

Sarah:  – fascinated by the idea that at the time of the, after the American Revolution the entire question of what we were going to look like, how Americans were going to dress is a really big question.  I had no, I’d not even thought of it, and now I want to spend, like, six hours in this museum checking out what we looked like, so I totally want to go see that exhibit now.

Loretta:  I do too.  There are, there are several that I’d like to see.  There’s also one in, in New York at the Fashion Institute of Technology, which it just, it’s a, again, it’s not my time period, but it just looks so interesting.  Proust’s mistress, and some of the clothes that I’ve seen are, they’re just fantastic.  I mean, it’s, it’s the art of the, the fashion from that time period was, it’s just extraordinary.

Sarah:  There is a woman who I follow on Instagram who recreates historical costume, and much of her, of her photography is extreme closeups of specific details of either, of what she’s creating or something that she’s bought so that she can figure out how it was done, and –

Loretta:  Uh-huh.

Sarah:  – even just the artistry of sewing a hem is incredible!

Loretta:  Yeah, it’s, it’s really interesting.  We had gone, I had gone to see – I don’t, I don’t know if this is the same person, Astrida – hmm, I can’t remember her last name, but she also, she does that too.  She also specializes in showing people how to treat the historical clothing they have by building these mannequins that are as easy on these old fabrics as possible.

Sarah:  Oh, that’s smart!

Loretta:  But she al-, she had done a book that had, where she showed the way that the, the mater-, the things are constructed and how the, say, the embroidery is done, or the way the buttonholes are done.  I mean, this is a little deep for me, ‘cause I’m just –

Sarah: [Laughs]

Loretta:  – but it’s still, it’s art, so it’s fascinating.

Sarah:  So, I actually have on my list of questions for you, ‘cause you mentioned rabbit holes, is, I wrote down, when you’re doing historical research, is it like a rabbit hole?  Are there subjects where you start reading and then, well, darn, it’s, it’s been six hours.  I, I missed the day.  Whoops!  Does that ever happen to you?

Loretta:  It happens way too much.

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Loretta:  It slows me down.  Hard to be disciplined, and a part of the problem is, you know, in the old days when I first started out way back in another century, I had to go to the library!  Yeah.

Sarah:  Oh, my gosh!  Now you don’t even have to put on real pants!

Loretta:  I know!

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Loretta:  And there are materials that I would have had so much difficulty even finding at the library.  I would have had to do interlibrary loan, even if I could do that, and now they’re just available online, and so I can just be looking for one piece of information, and then I find this fabulous book, and I want to keep reading and reading and reading because it’s so interesting, or it has so many images that I had never seen before.  But, yes, it’s definitely a rabbit hole, and that’s, I mean, that’s one great outlet that they, the blog provides for us is –

Sarah:  Yep.

Loretta:  – [laughs] you know, at least we feel like we’re doing something useful with this, all this extra material that we covered which was not necessary to our books.

Sarah:  I, I, I often, sometimes, myself think, oh, okay, have to, have to come up with some content for tomorrow.  I’ve got to write a blog for tomorrow.  I’m getting the sense that for you, you’re not really going to run out of things to say about the details of history that you discover.

Loretta:  You know, we don’t run out, but sometimes, you have a hard time thinking what you’re going to post about.

Sarah:  Yep.

Loretta:  Because, it, you, I might have been reading a book that was really, really fascinating, and I can find material that makes an interesting blog, but other times it’s interesting to me, but I don’t have a way of illustrating it, I don’t have a way of making it relevant to my audience.  It’s just, it’s, it’s way nerdy, even for Nerdy History Girls.

Sarah:  [Laughs] Too much nerdy.

Loretta:  Too much nerdy, yeah.

Sarah:  I was fascinated by the post that you did on erotic watches.

Loretta:  [Gasps] Oh!

Sarah:  I had no idea that that was even a thing, and then, you know, you start talking about it, and I’m like, well, of course this was a thing!  Well, of course it was a thing –

Loretta:  Yeah.

Sarah:  – that totally makes sense, but I had no idea that existed.

Loretta:  That was my feeling when I first discovered them.  I had no idea it was a thing, and then you see it, and it’s, oh, but of course!

Sarah:  Oh, it’s a tiny little mechanical device!  Of course there’s a mechanical curtain and some naked people behind it.  Of course!

Loretta:  Right!  Right, right.  Well, that, that blog post came, I had done a, an author event with, that Caroline, Caroline Linden had sponsored, Katharine Ashe and I, and that was a, a question that Caroline asked at the author event, and I thought, oh, my God!  I never, I haven’t blogged about that?  So that’s where the blog post came from.

Sarah:  Well, I am very grateful.  That was fascinating.

Loretta:  Oh, thank you, thank you.  We’re still –

Sarah:  Is there –

Loretta:  – looking for them, the watches.

Sarah:  I, I’m a little hesitant to go and Google, not because of the results, but because I’m going to be gone down a rabbit hole for, like, three hours looking at naughty watches!

Loretta:  Well, I’ll tell you, there’s one link there that has a whole page of watches, and that pretty much covers the territory, so the link in the blog post will cover it pretty much for you.

Sarah:  Okay.

Loretta:  There aren’t that many online, and I was very disappointed that I couldn’t find the particular watch that was in the book, and I only had the black and white illustration.

Sarah:  See, I find that very strange because my understanding was that the Internet was for porn.

Loretta:  [Laughs] Yeah, I know!

Sarah:  Right?  Like, that’s why it exists.

Loretta:  Right.

Sarah:  Why are there not more pictures of naughty watches?

Loretta:  Right!

Sarah:  Like, it seems like this would be a logical thing!

Loretta:  Well, there is, there’s one on YouTube.

Sarah:  Good!  I’ll find that one.  [Laughs]

Loretta:  They, they show how it works in motion, so that is very amusing.

Sarah:  [PBS voiceover voice] And this has been Erotic Watches with your host, Loretta Chase.

Loretta:  Yes, yes.

Sarah:  And please sponsor your PBS station.  [Regular voice] So –

[Laughter]

Sarah:  What are some of the other historical details that you’ve discovered with the research that you’re doing for your current books?  Are there any things that you, that you’ve been like, oh, my gosh, this is fascinating; maybe it’s only fascinating to me, but this is amazing?

Loretta:  I’ve done, it’s making discoveries, I’ve done some, I’ve done lots of road books.  This one, the one I’m doing now seems to be somewhat of a road book, and making discoveries about different parts of London I haven’t explored before, but also people traveling by water and what, what that was like, and I, it, it didn’t occur to me how perilous this was, and, and when I go to London next year I’m going to have to, I have to take some trips on the Thames to get a sense of this, but it was very difficult navigating the waterways because of the tides, and I had an understanding of this from reading other books, but I didn’t realize quite how complicated it was un-, until I actually looked into it.  So it’s sad to sort of think, but you know, I think some of it is just so nerdy that only the bits that are in the book are going to be interesting.

Sarah:  [Laughs] So you, you, you’ve done a lot of reading about traveling by water at that time, which I imagine took a lot of time.

Loretta:  Yeah, it, there was –

Sarah:  It was very slow.

Loretta:  It was slow, and it was dangerous, ‘cause I’m setting my books in the 1830s, and by this time they have, there’s steam travel, there’re steam boats going on the river, and they would create a huge wash, and they were knocking over the other boats in the river, so it’s, traveling became even more dangerous.  But the other weird thing that is, like, so crazy, I don’t understand it, they had these two bridges that were, I don’t know how they were built.  They were built by, by crazy people.  They’re very crooked, and they have ton, like, dozens of piers holding them up across the, and they’re made out of wood, and they’re built at a strange angle so that boats are constantly crashing into them.

Sarah:  Uhhh, that seems bad.

Loretta:  And, and I thought, well, why didn’t they build them correctly?

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Loretta:  At least to coordinate them with the current so that boats wouldn’t crash into them?  It, I just – that was, okay, so that’s a little odd thing that I discovered with the – the two bridges were the, the Putney Bridge and, oh, what was the other one?  I’ll, I’ll think of it later, but, yeah, they were these little old, they were old wooden bridges, and from the time they were built people were complaining about them.  And they didn’t get replaced until, one of them, I think, was 1900s before it was re-, actually replaced.

Sarah:  Wow!

Loretta:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  That’s fa- – and you know, it’s actually, it’s kind of, it’s kind of soothing –

Loretta:  Mm-hmm.

Sarah:  – that, you know, complaints haven’t changed that much?

Loretta:  Yeah.  Yeah.

Sarah:  Like, I can imagine that complaint happening today just as easily.

Loretta:  Yeah!  Yeah.

Sarah:  Oh, my gosh.  That’s incredible.  [Laughs]

Loretta:  Yeah, yeah.  Oh, yeah it was, it was the Battersea Bridge and the Putney Bridge; those were the two.  They were just these old wooden bridges.

Sarah:  So do you have favorite museums or exhibitions that you like to visit for inspiration?

Loretta:  Oh, yeah.  When, when I’m in New York I do go to the Met.  I now have, it’s more on my list, but I haven’t been able to get to New York recently.  However, we are going to London.  We haven’t been to London in the last couple of years, so I love to go to the V & A.  I’m looking forward to going to the Museum of London.  I had not realized, but they have quite an extensive costume collection.

Sarah:  Really!

Loretta:  Yes, with the, and their curator is just this delightful man.  He’s, he’s, he’s a dandy!  He has great hair and a great beard, and he dresses really interestingly, and they have this amazing costume collection that goes back to the 1300s.  So that’s something I’m looking forward to seeing.  The V & A is always interesting, the British Museum – I mean, we’re going to spend a month there, and I will, I know I feel, I’m going to feel at the end of the month as though I didn’t have enough time.  That whole area of, like, south Kensington, I mean.  You could spend weeks in, in any one of those museums.

Sarah:  And spend hours and hours wandering through, and then even if you look at the same thing three different times you’ll see –

Loretta:  Yes.

Sarah:  – something different each time.

Loretta:  It’s true.  It’s true.

Sarah:  I often find that if I go to museums, like when we would go to the Met, I have favorite paintings I like to visit?

Loretta:  Mm-hmm.

Sarah:  Like, if I, if I haven’t seen those paintings I have to go make sure that I take a look at them and, you know, make sure they’re still there.  Then I, then, and it’s partially a challenge to see if I can find my way around, because the place is so huge I get lost?

Loretta:  Yeah.  Yeah.

Sarah:  It always takes me at least four tries to figure out which staircase is the one that goes down to the costume area.

Loretta:  Oh, yeah.  I, oh.

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Loretta:  I’m always getting lost in museums.  I’m wondering now if I can use my GPS –

Sarah:  [Laughs more] Google’ll be like, turn right.  Go down the stairs.

Loretta:  Yeah.  Well, and I don’t have a sense of direction anyway.  I mean, I’m the kind of person who gets lost on an airplane leaving the ladies’ room.  I –

Sarah:  [Laughs again]

Loretta:  Really!  Turn the wrong way, find myself, oh, my gosh, I’m going into the first class area, and they have to politely chase, politely chase me out.  Yeah, so, museums are difficult, but eventually I emerge.

Sarah:  One, one blog post I found about you is pretty old for the Internet.  It’s from, from 2007, about how fashion reveals a character, and it was specifically about Jessica from, from Lord of Scoundrels, that the way she dressed was a way for her clothing to be a conflict and also to communicate a lot about her.  And I found that really interesting because I love the scenes in romances where, it, it must be very boring to, to write, or it could be, it must be very difficult to make interesting, but when the characters are all in a room together looking at fashion plates and talking about the clothes they’re going to order or going out to go shopping clothes, I find that fascinating!  I want more, (a) I want more girl shopping in my romance, but the idea that clothing communicates so much about a character, I hadn’t thought about it, but it’s very, very true.

Loretta:  I think it’s, I think of it as, as a character, as –

Sarah:  The clothing is a character?

Loretta:  – as a, yeah, as a character in that it, it, it expresses character, it is a character.  If, if you’re going to have clothing in a scene, it needs to be doing something.  It has to serve a purpose.  There, I don’t describe clothing in a scene where it doesn’t have a purpose.  If I’m describing it, it’s doing something, it’s accomplishing something.  Very often I describe it from the man’s point of view, partly because it gives you perspective on the male think and the way he’s viewing the heroine, but also because he’s translating what would ordinarily be very complicated fashion terms into just a sort of simple language.  If I try to use the language that I’m getting out of the fashion books, I’m concerned that my reader’s going to fall asleep.

Sarah:  Right.

Loretta:  Or they’re not going to understand.  They’re not going to be able to picture it, but if I give it from the man’s point of view and he’s not talking about, he’s not using those fashion details but is a lot, a lot of it is opinion or it’s analogy, it makes the picture clearer at the same time that it’s giving his perspective on the heroine.  But also the way she dress, she’s dressed tells you something about her, whether she’s disheveled or how close, how fashionable she is.  That was something that made the Dressmakers books just so much fun to work with, particularly while the first book, when Clara doesn’t care about how she looks, and her mother has no taste, and there are those conflicts with the dressmakers, who are horrified?

Sarah:  [Laughs] Yeah.

Loretta:  Because to them that, this is the, be all and end all, that the way you look tells the world so much, and you have to tell it the right things!  So, yeah, yeah, and how that, her evolution, I think, is, it was interesting for me to write.  I hope it was interesting for the readers.

Sarah:  Are there any pieces of clothing that you really love writing about?

Loretta:  There are two things.  Well, the time period, one of the things I love about the time period I’m doing now is the, in the 1830s, is it’s so crazy and exuberant.  It, they, those huge sleeves that are, that they have to use the puffs underneath to keep them all –

Sarah:  [Laughs] You could hide an entire roasted turkey in those sleeves.

Loretta:  Yes!  Yes!

Sarah:  You could pack, like, two Thanksgiving dinners.  They’re so huge!  [Laughs]

Loretta:  They’re huge!  And the skirts, they were, they were starting to come out, but that hadn’t yet got the hoop thing going –

Sarah:  Yep.

Loretta:  – but, so, that they weren’t, they weren’t out that much, but they are, and they make such a strange shape for the woman, but the thing I really love is the hair.  It’s so nutty.  They have these big loops and braids that come, coming straight up out of the head, and then they, like, shoot, put arrows through them, and I recently showed Susan a picture.  We’re trying to figure out where the thing came from, but this woman has what looks like chopsticks going through the, the little, the big curls on the top of her head, and they have bells on the end of them.

Sarah:  Well, you know when she’s coming in the room.

Loretta:  Yes, you do!  [Laughs] And I was thinking, does she tinkle when she goes –

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Loretta:  You know?

Sarah:  That would be like the equivalent of leaving the microphone on when you go to the bathroom?  Like –

Loretta:  Yes!

Sarah:  – that poor girl’s in the water closet, jingle-jingle-jingle-jingle-jingle.  Like, everyone knows where she is!

Loretta:  Yeah, yeah.  Anyway, I loved it.  I think I’m going to have use that at some point in a scene or something like it, but it –

Sarah:  I vote yes.  My vote is definitely yes.

Loretta:  Yes.  But I, I do love the hair particularly in this time period, and it’s, like, within a few years, it gets down, it goes down and droopy, and it’s very close to the head, and it’s not as interesting.  Then that’s when they start going for that little sweet-faced, innocent look.  But this is when women were still, still dressing wild, and I love it.  It’s a little bit like the ‘80s?

Sarah:  Mm-hmm.

Loretta:  You know, the big hair, and then that also, the 1700s, Marie Antoinette period, the big hair.

Sarah:  Yep.

Loretta:  Only this isn’t, like, a big pile of hair or a beehive on your head.  It’s, they make arrangements, they’re architectural arrangements that are just fascinating.  Well, you can tell because I’m so excited talking about it!

[Laughter]

Loretta:  It’s great.  And they put it together; they didn’t have hairspray lacquer, so they –

Sarah:  No, you would use, like, egg and wax and –

Loretta:  The lard.

Sarah:  – lard.  Oh, then your hair smells great!

Loretta:  Well, actually, it, it didn’t smell bad.  It, they mixed herbs with the lard, and so you would have, like, rosemary or lavender –

Sarah:  Ooh!

Loretta:  – or something like that.  The, the, the women, the milliners and mantua makers in Colonial Williamsburg have experimented with the, the pomades that were used in the time period, and they’ve actually become converts to that style of maintaining their hair, and they don’t use –

Sarah:  Wow!

Loretta:  – regular shampoos anymore.  They use the same methods that were used in the 1700s, and their hair is, like, so healthy now they don’t want to go back to the normal way of doing things.

Sarah:  Oh, that’s fascinating.  It must be a, a sort of a conditioner.

Loretta:  It apparently is.  You have to comb your hair every single night, comb it out, and they use something like what would be a dry shampoo today.

Sarah:  Right.

Loretta:  But apparently the pomades, these, they’re grease-based things like conditioners that they put in their hair and really make the hair very healthy.  It, it opens your mind –

Sarah:  Yeah.

Loretta:  – to, okay, maybe this isn’t the only way to do things.

Sarah:  I, I can’t say that I’m going to go enlarge the diameter of my sleeves –

Loretta:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  – per se, but there are some things I could totally bring back.  I mean, if you were, if you were going to try to sneak leftovers out of the all-you-can-eat buffet, I can see those sleeves being very handy, especially if they came equipped, like, to hold the structure?  If they had, like, Tupperware built in?  Hey, you could put, you could use Tupperware as an interior structure for your hair, too!

Loretta:  Oh, yeah!  [Laughs]

Sarah:  Oh!

Loretta:  Oh, yeah.  It’s amazing to me that everything was so full.  It was, the hair was full –

Sarah:  Yep.

Loretta:  – the sleeves were full, the, the skirts were full.

Sarah:  Yep.

Loretta:  It was, it’s just fun, and it makes it fun to write about.

Sarah:  And the women, like, that physically would take up a lot of space.

Loretta:  Yes, they would.  Although not as much as when they started wearing the, the crino-, crinolines?

Sarah:  Mm-hmm.

Loretta:  That were much wider than these, but yes, because the sleeves would take up so much space, and that’s always something interesting when I’m doing a scene like if they’re both in a carriage.  The carriage is not that big –

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Loretta:  – so they’re very squished together, and her sleeves are taking up a lot of room.  And, and you have to think about those things.  Like, he can’t just grab her arm because there’s a puff thing on her arm that’s keeping –

Sarah:  [Laughs] There’s, like, two roast turkeys and a ham in the way.

Loretta:  Right!  Can he get his hand around it?  Well, actually he can, ‘cause it’s, the puffs are filled with very soft, like, wool or, or feathers or something.  It’s, they’re very soft and squishable.

Sarah:  So if she wanted to take a nap, she is set.

Loretta:  She’s set!  Just put her arms up, yes.  I hadn’t thought about that.

Sarah:  You know –

Loretta:  Oh, Sarah, I might use that in a scene.

Sarah:  Please do!  I, I saw a, a fundraising effort online for a travel hoodie or jacket, and one of the features was that the inside of the hood was lined with a very soft fabric and that it was inflatable so that you could just zip up the hood, and then you’d have a, a pillow basically surrounding the sides of your head, so you could just go to sleep, but if you had big, puffy sleeves –

Loretta:  Yeah.

Sarah:  – and one sleeve had lunch, and the other sleeve was a pillow –

Loretta:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  – like, you don’t need anything!

Loretta:  You’re all set!

Sarah:  You’re so set.  Like, forget a man; you are good.

Loretta:  Yeah.

Sarah:  You have, you have lunch for weeks, and you have your own pillow no matter where you go.  All is well!

Loretta:  Yeah.  So –

[Laughter]

Loretta:  Oh, it’s really fun.  I, I mean I love, I love doing it.  I also like have, when I have the opportunity to look at real dresses from the time period, it’s, it’s just amazing to me the, the craftsmanship and, and just the ingenuity.

Sarah:  Oh, yeah!

Loretta:  Yeah.  So, yeah, it’s lovely.  It’s, it makes me, it’s one of the things that makes it so great to be a writer, because, I mean, this is just fun to do as it is, but to have it be part of your work and something you incorporate into your work is just bonus.

Sarah:  And in a way you not only get to bring the history into the present, but you also get to bring the people who wore these creations and the people who figured out how to make them into the present.  Like, you get to bring them sort of back to life in a way.

Loretta:  Yeah.  Yeah.  And it’s also being able to pay more attention to the women’s world, which is –

Sarah:  Oh, yes, please!

Loretta:  – overlooked so much in historical books, and particularly, even in, in social histories, the women get short shrift, so it’s really great in the historical romance to work, to – because so much is from the woman’s point of view, you can cover so much of the territory of what women were doing.  That was another fabulous aspect of doing the Dressmakers, because these were working women, and they were very ambitious working women, and it was an opportunity to just show that aspect, because it, you know, very often in Regencies, and I, I did this for years and will continue to do it, we’re talking about the ballroom scenes –

Sarah:  Yep.

Loretta:  – scenes in the houses, it’s nice to periodically go into a different world where women are in charge.

Sarah:  Yep.  And in Regencies, especially in historical romance, you have set areas that everyone’s sort of familiar with?

Loretta:  Mm-hmm.

Sarah:  Like, I would like to think that if I went back in time I would know what not to do at Almack’s, and I probably wouldn’t get in the door ‘cause no one would give me a voucher, but I know enough about, you know, Almack’s, what to wear when it’s raining, what to wear when you go to the park, you know, what balls are like – it’s really, really crowded; I would hate it ‘cause I’m way too introverted for anything that’s described as a crush?  I want to avoid all things described as crushes –

Loretta:  Yeah.

Sarah:  – but the part where they go shopping?

Loretta:  Oh – [laughs] – yeah.

Sarah:  If you, that, that is, like, the highlight, especially with, with a, with, like, with the Dressmakers series.  Like, it’s just a lot of shopping, and it’s a women’s-only domain.  Like, dudes don’t go hang out in the, in the place where you get your dresses fitted.

Loretta:  Yeah, right, right, and I loved, I loved that part of it, and you could, and when I, the last time I was in London I walked up St. James’s Street, I walked down St. James’s Street to, to get a sense of that world, and I knew what building was going to be where my dressmakers were.  And I have, I have such a strong sense of the women going in – it was like with Gertrude, Lady Gertrude in the –

Sarah:  Mm-hmm.

Loretta:  – in the Vixen in Velvet, that, that her shopping in the place, this, I had such a clear image of the mannequins and the interactions with the people and the upstairs and the downstairs of the business.  I just loved that world, and it’s one that we don’t enter very often.

Sarah:  No, there’s, it, it, there’s the everlasting perennial sense that if it’s surrounded by and entirely populated by women and pat-, and the patrons were women, then it is clearly not worth very much, and we don’t need to pay much attention to it.

Loretta:  You’re right, right.

Sarah:  I studied abroad twice, and once – both times in Spain, but once in a university in Salamanca that was, I think the University is celebrating its eight hundredth anniversary this year.

Loretta:  Ah!

Sarah:  And so I would, you know, be in this super modern classroom inside a building that was, you know, seven hundred odd years old.  No big deal.  Like, there were statues, and it was Ferdinand and Isabella, you know, who sent Columbus?  Like –

Loretta:  Right!

Sarah:  – them.  Like, yeah, okay.  And that’s –

Loretta:  And doesn’t that twist up your mind?

Sarah:  Oh, my gosh.  It was –

Loretta:  Yeah.

Sarah:  – so strange, and the thing I remember thinking, and it’s, and I, and I think similarly when I’m looking at exhibits of, of historical clothing, or when you look at an archeological exhibit, okay, armaments and, you know, knives and stuff like that, okay, that’s interesting, but if you find, like, a sewing needle or something that was used by somebody on a daily basis?  I find that fascinating!

Loretta:  Yeah.

Sarah:  And I would walk down these streets in, in Salamanca and be like, I’m touching a wall – ‘cause there’s a car going by – that probably someone has touched this wall for hundreds and hundreds of years longer than the country I live in has existed, longer than a lot of things have existed.  I’m, and this wall and I are right here right now?  That’s amazing.  And then I look at –

Loretta:  Yeah.

Sarah:  – and I look at a historical piece of clothing and I’m like, okay, someone made this.

Loretta:  Right.

Sarah:  A person made that tiny, tiny stitch.  A person made this embroidery, and then another person wore it.  Like, we don’t know anything about those people, but we got this dress!

Loretta:  Yeah.  Yeah.  I, oh, yeah.  So, well, there’re so many things like that, it’s like – and because there, there is not, we don’t have that in this country –

Sarah:  No.

Loretta:  – so the, that’s the excitement when you, when you go abroad, because you’re, you’re in environments that have been around for, you know, as you said, eight hundred years, a thousand years, whatever.

Sarah:  Yep.

Loretta:  And, and I’m so grateful that we can, we can still see these artifacts that, I think Susan’s done posts showing, like, pins?

Sarah:  Yeah.

Loretta:  With, that, that were made, and, and looking at the sewing needles and the, and the scissors, and I’m, and, and we’re both fascinated by automatons.

Sarah:  Oh, goodness, yes.

Loretta:  Those clock-, all those clockwork mechanisms, and you know, I thought, oh, you know, it’s very cool, it’s in the 1800s, but we’re, we’re finding stuff going back to the 1600s that just, this amazing work.  One thing for me was in Greenwich, going to Greenwich and seeing the, the clock –

Sarah:  Yep.

Loretta:  What’s-his-name’s clock – geeze! – and thinking, okay!  He did this in whatever it was, the late 1700s to early 1800s, and there it is, and it’s still working!  It’s running!

Sarah:  You mean the, the Shepherd Gate Clock?

Loretta:  No, no, this is the, the longitude clock.

Sarah:  Oh, oh, oh-oh-oh, okay.

Loretta:  What’s the name of the – Harrison!  Harrison’s clock.

Sarah:  Yes.

Loretta:  They had all of Harrison’s clock, and to me it’s amazing.  They had all of Harrison’s clocks in the Greenwich observatory.  It, it, it just boggled my mind!

[Laughter]

Sarah:  I know.

Loretta:  You know?  I mean, it was almost the same as having the person there!  Ho, my God!  You know, those are the clocks that, that I read about in the books, and that, I mean, that experience, for me, that just never ends.  I’m reading, I, I read something, I’ve done all my research, and then I get to actually see the place, and sometimes the building I’m interested in is no longer there, but I’m standing on the spot where it was.

Sarah:  Yes.

Loretta:  It’s, yeah.  I get chills.

Sarah:  Oh, me too.

Loretta:  It was like writing the book that was set in Egypt; they were visiting monuments that had been already in existence for thousands of years, and yet I’m setting a book that’s set in the, in the early 1800s and trying to get the perspective of how people looked at those things then and what was, you know, and it was thrilling to them, because they had nothing like that.

Sarah:  Yep.

Loretta:  Yeah.

Sarah:  And, and –

Loretta:  Oh, yeah.

Sarah:  – and the various perspectives of what’s history is, will break your brain if you think about it too much.

Loretta:  Yeah.

Sarah:  [Laughs] So I have questions, and oddly enough, one of them does relate to some of the books that you wrote that are set around archeology and Egypt.  So, Sherrylynn asked me to tell you that she’s pretty sure that if she ever got the chance to meet you she would squee, try to hug you, turn bright red, and run away screaming.

Loretta:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  Because to her, Lord of Scoundrels and Mr. Impossible are basically perfection and what she uses to judge all romance novels –

Loretta:  Aw!

Sarah:  – and she used to daydream – this is my favorite part; I love this!  ‘Cause you’ve done this, and she’s like, she’s right on, ‘cause you’ve done this before – she used to daydream about a sequel to Lord of Scoundrels where Dominick falls for the daughter of the couple from The Last Hellion, cousinhood be damned.  Speaking of which, could you write that? is what she wants to know.

[Laughter]

Loretta:  Well, I don’t know if I could write that.  Probably –

Sarah:  Not that, you know, not that we do books to order or anything like that.

Loretta:  No!  No, well, I always say that if the inspiration comes, of course I’m going to write it.

Sarah:  Well, of course!

Loretta:  But the, the, one difficulty for me now is just that I’ve been away from those, you know, those books were written such a long time ago –

Sarah:  Yep.

Loretta:  – that it’s hard to get into that head.  I’m, I’m not even, I’m not that person.  And I have this, and what may be blocking me too is I have this terror:  what if I did that and it just didn’t live up to anyone’s expectations?  I mean, it was scary enough doing the fourth book in the Dressmakers series.

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Loretta:  Oh, boy, Clara’s guy had better be the right guy or the readers are just not going to be very happy with me.  So can you imagine that?

Sarah:  Yep.

Loretta:  Like, times ten? 

Sarah:  Oh, you know, no big deal!  No pressure!

Loretta:  No, but thanks!  I, I’ll, okay, some-, maybe someone else’ll write it.  I’m not sure I can, I don’t think I can pull it off.

Sarah:  ‘Cause –

Loretta:  And never say never.

Sarah:  No, no, because one of my, one of my favorite books of yours is Last Night’s Scandal where you –

Loretta:  Uh-huh.

Sarah:  – brought back children from prior books as adults.

Loretta:  Yeah, that was, and now it’s tricky!  It took me four years to figure out how to do it.

Sarah:  Oh, I love – it was, those four years were entirely worth it, in my opinion.  I love that book.

Loretta:  Oh, thank you!  You do child characters, and how, so you have to figure out how they have evolved.

Sarah:  Yep.

Loretta:  What – and I, I try not to make them too much older because if I, beyond certain – I still wanted to get some of that adolescent mind in there –

Sarah:  Yep.

Loretta:  – so I couldn’t make them too much older, but they still had to be adults, and that was, that was the scary and tricky part.  And it took me a while, and I, I remember my husband and I brainstorming over my several failed attempts to figure out what, really get the right handle on Olivia, because you could, I could see where Kyle’s go-, where Lisle was going, but I couldn’t, but Olivia was trickier, and then, I think it was in the course of this brainstorming session we had that idea of the scene where she’s in the middle of this group of men, and it’s sort of this Scarlett O’Hara kind of thing, only she’s –

Sarah:  Right.

Loretta:  – more daring, and that was, that was, that kind of set it for me, and once I – sometimes it’s just, you know, you had asked earlier about where it starts?

Sarah:  Mm-hmm?

Loretta:  Sometimes it’s something like that.  You get the scene in your head, and then you understand who the character is.

Sarah:  Yep.  There’s that sort of a, the, the, the pivotal moment at which –

Loretta:  Yes.

Sarah:  – all the other book can, all the other parts of the book can rotate around that one sort of, the, the, what’s that called?  The, the lynchpin!  That holds the –

Loretta:  Okay.

Sarah:  – that holds the joint together.  Everything will rotate smoothly because you’ve got that center piece of the character.  That was, like, nine different metaphors in one sentence.

Loretta:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  I’m so proud of myself right now.

Loretta:  Yep!  You should be!  That’s impressive.

Sarah:  Wow!  I, I get a snack.  That’s what I –

Loretta:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  Now, I have been asked to ask you about your thoughts on the first original cover of Lord of Scoundrels.

Loretta:  I don’t think it’s a big secret:  I was not happy with that cover.

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Loretta:  And now, you know, when people make fun of it, I’m right there with them.  No, I’ve heard, I don’t know, there was something about, it looked like a bed of baby food or, I – the thing is, it was, those were supposed to be rhododendrons.  That, they put a scene in rhododendrons, and I was like, where did they get this?

Sarah:  [Laughs] It’s very, very hot pink and orange.

Loretta:  The, yeah, the colors and, yeah, it was not, no I wasn’t happy; I didn’t love it.  But I, what, they took that scene, and they redid the colors, and they put it as the stepback when they redid the cover for Lord, the sec-, the next edition, and it worked!  When they –

Sarah:  It totally worked.

Loretta:  Totally worked when they changed the cover and it became the clinch in the, in the stepback, and that, I thought it was really nice!  The colors –

Sarah:  And that’s the one where she’s looking over her shoulder on the cover.

Loretta:  Yes.

Sarah:  Yes, that, and it, it is a really interesting evolution of cover style, too.

Loretta:  Yeah.  That was, I don’t know how many years apart they were, but it was a, yeah.  It, I was, I was very happy with that cover.  And in fact, I’ve been pretty happy with the covers I’ve had from Avon.  They, they’ve done some nice, nice work.

Sarah:  They do beautiful covers with a lot of the, the use of color?

Loretta:  Yes.

Sarah:  Like, you can tell them from across the room, not just because of the branding but because the, the attention to color is, is fascinating.  It’s not just, oh, here’s a jewel tone dress.  There’s –

Loretta:  Right.

Sarah:  – a lot of, of use of color that makes those covers stand out.

Loretta:  Yes.  There, there’s some really nice design, and I, like, I heard at the last event that I did, more than one person said to me they had not read my books before, and they were attracted to the cover –

Sarah:  Yep.

Loretta:  – and they picked it up, and that’s what got them to buy the book, and I said, Avon’s doing a, their art department’s doing exactly what they’re supposed to be doing.

Sarah:  Nice job, cover art.

Loretta:  [Laughs] Yeah.

Sarah:  Well done, ‘cause usually you hear about the covers, it’s like, oh, I could never read that!  What are you talking about?

Loretta:  Yeah, yeah.  I, I think they’ve been doing a beautiful job.  I mean, I, I’ve looked at so many people’s, the, the covers that, they do beautiful, they’ve done beautiful covers for Sarah MacLean and –

Sarah:  Yep.

Loretta:  So, yeah, they, they really, and they evolve.  I’ve noticed that, that –

Sarah:  Yes.

Loretta:  – in certain subtle ways.

Sarah:  They do.

Loretta:  Yeah.

Sarah:  So I have some more questions from Sherrylynn:  Do you ever think about writing contemporaries?

Loretta:  I have, I’ve thought about it, but it’s way too intimidating.

Sarah:  [Laughs] I totally understand.

Loretta:  And also, I like the escapist element of writing it in, writing historical romances.  It’s part of, you know, escape from the real world, which is –

Sarah:  Mm-hmm.

Loretta:  And there’re so many things that you have to deal with in a contemporary romance that I don’t have to deal with in historical romance.  And there are elements that I use in historical romance that wouldn’t make any sense in contemporary.  For instance, the class structure thing.  You would, you, you could have the conflict between men and women, and that’s perennial, but the, the class structure is a really interesting element that, that goes into the stories that I couldn’t do in contemporaries.  I would also have to deal with, with birth control.

Sarah:  Yep.

Loretta:  I would have to deal with venereal disease, whereas we just sort of slop it over in historical romance.  We pretend like it’s not really there.

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Loretta:  But it’s hard to write a contemporary without, you know – I mean, you can do it, but if they’re going to have sex, are you going to talk about condoms or not?

Sarah:  Yep.

Loretta:  And the other thing is, you know, there’s people like, okay, Susan Elizabeth Phillips?  It’s like, okay, she’s doing it!  [Laughs] There’s no way I’m going to write like that.  There’s no way I’m going to live up to that, so I’ll stick in my place and, and let the people who really know what they’re doing do contemporaries.

Sarah:  [Laughs] I –

Loretta:  I, I love her books.  I just absolutely love her.  I, I’m in awe that she can make me care about football players.  So, yeah, and I, I could never do that, so it’s, it’s more fun for me to just read them.

Sarah:  I can totally understand that.  Plus, the inherent tension in historical is, these two people want to be alone together, and they’re not allowed to be –

Loretta:  Yeah.

Sarah:  – and in a contemporary it’s the reverse of that.  There’s not much standing in the way of two people who want to go be alone together.  Like –

Loretta:  Right.

Sarah:  – there is really nothing standing in the way there.  You go, most of the time it’s not that difficult to set up, whereas with historicals, everything stands in the way of you guys being alone together, ‘cause that’s not supposed to happen.

Loretta:  Yes.  Yeah.  And that make the, makes, it’s a built-in conflict.  So, yes.  But in some ways it makes it harder because you have to figure out logistics.  I’ll come up with ideas for scenes, and I’ll think, well, that can’t happen.  That’s, she, why would she be doing that?  Why would she be there?

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Loretta:  She, she’s not allowed to do that.  Well, how do I get her, how do I get around that?  And what was the last book, was this the thing to put Clara in her little disguises that he thought were ridiculous, and they’re in, and they’re in the hackney, they’re in the hackney cabs, and, and other vehicles where people can’t see her, but they don’t have the, the freedom of movement is the really interesting difference, one of the more interesting differences between historicals and contemporaries, because in contemporaries we just take it for granted:  women have freedom of movement.  You want to go someplace, you get in your car and go.

Sarah:  Right!

Loretta:  In the historical, no.  No, not if you’re a woman of the upper classes.

Sarah:  Oh, no.

Loretta:  You don’t go anywhere on your own.

Sarah:  And whatever it is that you choose to get you where you’re going is going to take forever and a year –

Loretta:  Yeah!  [Laughs]

Sarah:  – and there’s going to be a whole lot of forced proximity, maybe with people you’re not supposed to be alone with.

Loretta:  Yes, yes.  Which, that’s, that’s part of the fun of it, yeah, absolutely.  I mean, I read about London traffic in, in the 1800s, and it was amazing anyone got anywhere, and I was reading that a lot of people walked because it was much faster than trying to get into a vehicle and get anywhere, ‘cause the traffic was so horrible.  You, you don’t think about this, that there are carts in the road –

Sarah:  Yeah.

Loretta:  – and if, if a dog’s running around and, you know, people are just crossing with, blindly, and there isn’t much order to the way the traffic is moving, so it’s just, it’s, it’s chaos, and it’s just easier to be on your feet.  The other thing I found out, which I haven’t incorporated yet, but I intend to, is it was extremely noisy.

Sarah:  Oh, yes.

Loretta:  And you couldn’t hear yourself talk if you were on many of the streets of London, and if you wanted to have a conversation you had to turn into one of the alleys or courts to have enough quiet so you could hear what the other person was saying, and I hadn’t realized how noisy it was, but when you think about it, it’s obvious.

Sarah:  Oh, absolutely!

Loretta:  Yeah.  The iron wheels on the cobblestones or the wood or whatever the surface was on, on the roads, so, yeah.  It’s, when, it’s a very different world is, say, London then, London now.

Sarah:  And yet we all still complain about the traffic.

Loretta:  Yes.

Sarah:  I mean, that’s just a universal human thing.

Loretta:  Right, right.

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Loretta:  You make traffic.  You know, you cluster into the, into our cities, then we make traffic one way or another.

Sarah:  My husband hates traffic, so of course we moved from New Jersey to Maryland, so we lived outside the New York metro area, and now we live outside the DC metro area, so we just have all the traffic –

Loretta:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  – and I like to torture him, because I’m horrible.  He’s like, ugh, we’re in traffic, and I look at him, and I go, no, you are the traffic.  And then he just, like, like, I would like, I would like to explode with anger right now, but I cannot.  Like, I watch his blood pressure go up.

[Laughter]

Sarah:  Thus, I’m a horrible person.

Loretta:  Yes, oh, well, that’s the fun of torturing your husband, and, you know –

Sarah:  Yes, that’s why you have one!  [Laughs]

Loretta:  Yes!  Right!  It’s good to have someone near at hand for that purpose.  So also, for me, it’s good practice for my stories.

Sarah:  Oh, absolutely!

Loretta:  Yeah.

Sarah:  Being trapped in a car is great for dialogue.

Loretta:  Yeah.

Sarah:  So if you could – this is a, another question from Sherrylynn – if you could change one of the rules about romance, are there any you’d like to alter or get rid of?

Loretta:  Rules about romance.

Sarah:  Yes, like the –

Loretta:  You know, give me an example.

Sarah:  Well, you have –

Loretta:  ‘Cause I don’t –

Sarah:  Is there anything where you, I think what she’s trying to say is that when you’re, when you’re writing, is there ever a point where you’re like, well, I wish I didn’t have to do it this way, but I have to do it this way ‘cause it’s a romance, or are you most happy within the genre boundaries?

Loretta:  I really like working within the boundaries.  I need structure.  Otherwise I go off in a hundred different directions.  When I was first trying to write novels –

Sarah:  Mm-hmm.

Loretta:  – my problem was I couldn’t hold them together.  They just went off, and there was no really, there was a beginning but there was never really a middle and an end, and romance gave me that structure, and I like working inside it, and I like being up against the challenge of working inside it.  And one of the reasons I came to writing romance was that, the happy ending!  [Laughs] You know, love conquers all!  That’s why I’m here!  I think that’s, you’re in genre writing, I would think, because you believe in the genre.  I mean, if I’m writing, if I’m writing detective stories I would want to make sure that the perpetrator of the crime was brought to justice by the end of the story, and it’s the same thing for me with romance, that, yes, this, whatever’s going on in the story, I need that happy ending.

Sarah:  Right.

Loretta:  The other thing is the structure.  I use a three-act structure in my story, and I think within that three-act structure I have now, after all these years, a sense of what needs to happen in each act in terms of the relationship in development, and it’s not always something I can articulate.  I tend to write organically.  It’s not, I, I don’t analyze my work very much, but I know that, you know, there’s going to be a certain level of smoochies in the beginning, and the –

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Loretta:  – I know I have to build up the smoochies towards the middle, and then maybe right after that we go to the super smoochies.  It’s like in a movie?  No, like in action movies.  There’s that book, Monster, that was, John Gregory Dunne wrote about making a movie, and they talked about the, the action movies where you had to have whammy, big whammy, big big whammy, and I think of that in terms of sexuality, the, the sexual relationship with the characters, that they have the smoochies, and they have the bigger smoochies, and they have –

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Loretta:  – super smoochies.

Sarah:  That makes total sense to me!  Like, I’m, I’m totally charmed by the word smoochies, but yes, that’s absolutely true.

Loretta:  Yeah!  And I like having, knowing that’s where I’m going with the relationship.  I, it gives me a form to build my story on.

Sarah:  Right.

Loretta:  And it’s not necessarily I draw a chart and say, this is when they’re going to have sex, or this is when they’re going to have the first kiss.  That’s going to happen when that’s going to happen, but I have a sense of what I’m building up to as I’m going along in the story, so I think, I may think of something later that I object to in the, the rules of the genre, but at this point, I think the, the rules have been pretty much my friend, because they keep my mind, my sort of ADD mind within a, a structure where I can actually work and complete something eventually.

Sarah:  Right.  That makes sense.  So, do you have a favorite romance or some favorite romances that exist permanently on your keeper shelf?

Loretta:  I have a couple.  I don’t read that much romance, but a couple have had huge impact on me, and I just love them, and I go back and read them.  So, I love Jennifer Crusie’s Bet Me.  I have Susan Elizabeth Phillip’s Heaven, Texas.  I mean, I’ve loved all her books, but for some reason, that one, I just, that’s special.  Edith Layton, I still have kept her Regencies because when I was first looking at writing Regencies, she was the person that gave me the idea that this was something that would, I could fit into.

Sarah:  I love her books.  I love her books.

Loretta:  Yeah.

Sarah:  I actually have on my schedule an interview with her son and her daughter to talk about how they are preserving her legacy as a writer?

Loretta:  Uh-huh.

Sarah:  And I, and I, I cannot wait, but I, I, you’re, I, I’m not surprised that she’s on your keeper shelf.  I have several of hers that I just adore.

Loretta:  Yeah!  I was, well, Love in, Love in Disguise, I was just glancing at it ‘cause I’ve got a stack of books that need to be put away, but there, you know, it’s, Love in Disguise I thought was just brilliant.  And she was a beautiful writer.  It’s –

Sarah:  Oh, yes.

Loretta:  – not, not simply that she told a good story, but her writing was just beautiful, and it was such a pleasure to – because I would sit down and I felt, I’m reading a romance that’s on the level of literature in terms of the writing style.

Sarah:  Oh, so agree.

Loretta:  Yeah, yeah, so she’s, she’s one of them.  Those are the, those, those are the main ones who come to mind.  I mean, you know, I, I like, I like Julia Quinn’s work, and I like Eloisa James’s work, and I, I like Sarah MacLean’s work, and I love Laure Lee Guhrke, and – but the, the ones I’ve mentioned are the people who are the, you know, they just stay on the keeper shelf, and I take ‘em, take them down and read them periodically, or I just go back and read a favorite scene or something like that.

[music]

Sarah:  And that is all for this week’s podcast.  I want to thank Loretta Chase for hanging out with me and talking about all the things.  If you are thinking that you would like to take a look at some of the links that we discussed, specifically the naughty watches, I will have links to all of these places, plus the museums, plus the costume exhibits, plus the links about dressing characters on the podcast entry at smartbitchestrashybooks.com/podcast.  You can check out all of the books we discussed, or you can go to iTunes.com/DBSA for the iTunes store collection of the books that we discuss in this episode as well.

Our transcript this week is sponsored by Judy, and she is a listener overseas who contacted me ‘cause she loves the transcripts and she wanted to sponsor one.  When I asked her for a bio, she wanted me to tell you that she tends to overspend on romance novels and perfume – I know this story.  She really values our efforts to make the transcripts available and says thanks to garlicknitter, maybe more than she knows.  I agree, garlicknitter does an outstanding job [gk:  blushing], especially when it’s a podcast of, like, the group of five of us, and I am so pleased to have Judy sponsor the transcript.  Thank you, Judy!  You’re excellent!  [gk:  Ditto!]

Our music is always provided by Sassy Outwater.  You can find her on Twitter @SassyOutwater.  This is the Peatbog Faeries.  This track is called “Jakes on a Plane.”  You can find this album at Amazon.  It’s from the album Blackhouse, and it’s also available at iTunes or wherever you like to buy your fine and funky music.

If you have questions or suggestions or you’re thinking, I have a burning topic that I must have discussed in the podcast!  That’s cool; you can call and leave us a voicemail at 1-201-371-3272, or you can email me at [email protected].  I love hearing from you, ‘cause you’re all really awesome!

And if you would like to have a look at Patreon page, I would be very grateful indeed.  It is Patreon.com/SmartBitches.  Monthly pledges starting with as little as a dollar help the show immeasurably, so if you’ve had a look, if you’ve sponsored the show, I am truly, truly thankful and very grateful for your support.  Thank you very much!

Coming up next week:  me, other people, talking about romance novels, because that’s what we do here.  But in the meantime, on behalf of Loretta Chase and everyone here, including Orville, my sound engineer, who’s trying to get inside the sound box, we wish you the very best of reading.  Have an excellent weekend!

[awesome music]