285. Labyrinth, Girl Scout Cookies, and Good Book Noise: An Interview with S. Jae-Jones

[music]

Sarah Wendell: Howdy, and welcome to episode number 285 – wow! – of Smart Podcast, Trashy Books. I’m Sarah Wendell from Smart Bitches, Trashy Books. With me today are Amanda and S. Jae-Jones, better known as JJ, who is an author of a very much anticipated YA title coming out this week! She basically answers all of our nosy questions, and we have a very wide-ranging, goofy conversation that was a lot of fun. So some of the topics we cover include how being an editorial assistant prepared her for a career as an author and what secret knowledge (not really very secret) she shares with fellow writers. We talk about how Labyrinth, Phantom of the Opera, the myth of Hades and Persephone, The Magic Flute, fanfic communities, and fandom terms influence her writing; how she navigates the issue of sexytimes in YA with her own writing; and in a very key portion of this interview, we discuss the parameters of identifying which Girl Scout cookie are you? Spoiler alert: Amanda has extremely strong opinions about peanut butter, Girl Scout cookies, and oatmeal. JJ also discusses bipolar characters, writing mental illness, writing with mental illness, making Cho Chang the heroine of a magical world, and how headcanons help her with feelings of isolation. Like I said, this interview kind of goes everywhere, and sometimes the audio gets a little bit muddy, for which I apologize, but fear not: we have an extra-strength collection of book recommendations from JJ, complete with Good Book Noise, creepy stories, and books that are really hard to describe but should be required reading. JJ likes to read books specifically looking for the romances, so this is a very tasty recommendation list.

Now if you have ideas or suggestions or questions, I would love to hear from you! You can find us on Twitter @SmartBitches, and you can email us at [email protected]. You can even record a voice memo and tell me what’s on your mind. You will sound awesome, and I love getting your voice memos, so please get in touch with us if you’ve got questions or ideas or suggestions or you just want to tell me something.

I just re-listened to the intro that I just recorded, and I have to say, I talk really fast! I did not realize, and I think it might be because when I listen to audiobooks and I listen to podcasts, I listen to them at 1.4 times normal speed, so I think that might be how my brain thinks people talk, so I apologize for the super speediness, or maybe if you’re listening to this on 1.4 speed it sounds really great!

Either way, this episode is brought to you by More or Less a Marchioness by Anna Bradley. The Somerset sisters, three beautiful, headstrong debutantes in Regency London, are discovering that a bit of scandal is a delightful thing. For the sake of propriety, Iris Somerset has kept her rebellious streak locked away, but though she receives a proposal from a suitable match, Iris can’t marry a man she knows isn’t truly enamored with her. In fact, Iris no longer wants to be chosen; she wants to choose. What kind of debutante in their right mind refuses a marquess? Iris is just beginning to find out. You can find More or Less a Marchioness by Anna Bradley everywhere e-books are sold and at kensingtonbooks.com.

This week’s transcript is being brought to you by Lauren Dane’s Whiskey Sharp: Unraveled. The sharpest ache comes from wanting what you think you can’t have. Whiskey Sharp: Unraveled is the newest contemporary romance from New York Times and USA Today bestselling author Lauren Dane. Maybe Dolan has lived independent, free-spirited, and unattached since leaving home at sixteen. Whiskey Sharp, Seattle’s sexy, vintage-style barbershop and whiskey bar gave her a job and a reason to put down roots. The temptation of brooding and bearded Alexsei Petrov makes it a hell of a lot better. You can find Whiskey Sharp: Unraveled available at all book retailers, and you can learn more at laurendane.com.

Now I have compliments. I love this part.

To Jennifer T. – also, Orville apparently has compliments, and his compliments include kicking my equipment off the desk while I record. Dude, seriously! I – chill! – I will pet you; calm down. Okay. Back to the compliments; Orville has many, mostly that he wants you to rub his belly.

To Jennifer T.: You know that feeling when the ice cream parlor has a brand-new container of your most favorite flavor? That is the feeling you give people when you walk into a room.

And to Anna B.: Your personal coat of arms involves high fives, the clink of champagne glasses tapping together, and excellent chocolate. You are an amalgamation of excellence and celebration.

Now if you are thinking, those are nifty and I want one! have a look at patreon.com/SmartBitches. The Patreon community is a deeply appreciated source of support for the show. They’re the first place I go to take recommendation requests, and if you make a monthly pledge you help me help the show keep growing, you help me commission transcripts for older episodes, and you become part of the podcast Patreon community. And eventually I’m going to be able to say podcast Patreon without, like, stuttering. I have a bunch of interviews scheduled in the next few weeks, and the community also helps me with question ideas. So if you are interested, I hope you will make a pledge and join us. With one dollar a month, you make a very big difference, and thank you, thank you, thank you!

I also want to thank some of the Patreon folks personally, so to Bea and Lenora and Leah and Karen, thank you for being part of the Patreon community!

Are there other ways you can support the podcast? Of course there are! Are you here listening? You’re awesome; thank you! Thank you, thank you, thank you. Like I’ve said before, I’ve always wanted my own radio show; and now I have one; and I have, like, 280+ episodes; and I love knowing how many people discover the show and enjoy listening to it. You can also leave a review wherever you listen to your podcasts, whether that’s the Apple Podcasts app or iTunes or Podbean or any of the other podcast services. Leaving a review helps other people find us, and if you tell a friend or subscribe or just hang out each week, you are a wonderful person, and thank you.

The music you’re listening to is provided by Sassy Outwater. I will have information at the end of the podcast, and of course I will have links to all of the books that we discuss in this episode, so stay tuned for a wonderful recommendation list, and you can find the show notes at smartbitchestrashybooks.com/podcast.

Speaking of, let’s get to it! On with the podcast.

[music]

1. Jae-Jones: I’m S. Jae-Jones; I go by JJ. I am the author of Wintersong and the forthcoming Shadowsong.

Sarah: Woohoo! Thank you so much for emailing us about being on the podcast. I had thought, oh, I should totally email her! No, there’s no way she’d want to talk to me; I’m way outside her genre. And then I was like, that was dumb! ‘Cause you sent me the nicest pitch letter!

Amanda: [Laughs]

JJ: I, I mean, I have been listening to your podcast for a couple of years now. I think it’s like a really regular thing, and I just was like –

Sarah: Ooh?

JJ: And I had same thought, which was, oh, you know, like, I shouldn’t reach out because we don’t really have any overlapping spheres or anything. [Laughs]

JJ: And then I heard Amanda talk about my book, and I was like, well, maybe I should?

[Laughter]

Sarah: Yes, and you absolutely should have, and I was an idiot for not contacting you, so thank you! Thank you for, for contacting us, because this is going to be so great! You and I met a really, really long time ago.

JJ: Yes.

Sarah: I have no concept of time, but I know that was a long time ago, when you were working in publishing.

JJ: Yes. I think – so I started in publishing and worked as an editorial assistant, and I think I got that job in, like, late 2009, so that must have been, like, 2010, 2011, maybe? [Laughs] I worked in publishing before I became a writer, yes.

Sarah: And I think we met at a meeting for Sweet Valley Confidential? Is that right?

JJ: Yes. So – yes – so my boss at the time was working on Sweet Valley Confidential, which was the adult Sweet Valley High book? I think when the twins were, like, twenty-seven? I think that’s what it was. And so the publisher had hosted, essentially, a blogger party reaching out to influential women and readers of Sweet Valley High, and you were one of them, so I, I remember there was this party, and I, I even think that they had swag made up for that party, which was like, there was, like, a mirror?

Sarah: Yeah.

JJ: Yeah. [Laughs]

Sarah: There was a shirt, and you, and you had to be, you were either Jessica or Elizabeth. You had to identify.

JJ: Yes, that’s right. [Laughs]

Sarah: Hilarious, given that they are really clearly psychological archetypes. I think one is the superego and one is the id.

JJ: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

Sarah: So you mentioned when you wrote to me, which as a person who receives a lot of pitch letters, clearly you’ve worked in publishing, ‘cause that was –

JJ: [Laughs]

Sarah: You talked about having a career as a writer after being an editor. Are there advantages to that, or is it mostly like, I cannot turn off my evil editor voice, no matter what I do? Like, what, what are some of the things that influence you as a writer, having been an editor?

JJ: So there are kind of two ways that having worked in publishing influences me as an author. One is the craft aspect, which is, so, when I was an editor, what I actually got really good at was honing or identifying what I liked, basically, and why I liked it and what made it work for me.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

JJ: And, so working with other authors and reading a lot of manuscripts and, so, from a craft level, if I have an idea of what I want to write, because it is my catnip, has everything that I want in it, which was essentially Wintersong was, which is basically a kitchen-sink book of all of my things that I loved?

Sarah: [Laughs]

JJ: And – [laughs] – how to, basically, how to get the most out of that is what I got on a craft level, but on an author level, from the business side, I know a little too much about how the sausage gets made, so I don’t actually have any expectations.

Sarah: [Extended laughter] Yep, I imagine that might be a bit of a, a bit of a challenge.

JJ: Yeah, I, I mean, it’s interesting; particularly in the YA world, there are a lot of sort of groups that form what, what they call debut classes? So if your book comes out in 2018 you will be, most likely, in, in smaller groups, Facebook groups or Google groups or whatever these sort of online groups are with other members of your “debut class” –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

JJ: – so I was one for 2017, because that was when Wintersong came out, and everyone, it was so strange to me because everyone was just, like, so bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and naïve and, and they would ask all these questions, and I hated to be the person who comes in and is like, well – [laughs] – this is the truth, and so I, I didn’t have that part about being a debut, so that helps! I think everything is a pleasant surprise, actually, if I know everything that can go wrong first.

Sarah: You know, you’re probably right about that; if you know everything that can go terribly, terribly badly, when things go well you’re like, wow! I know all the forces that were stacked against me for this to happen, so yay!

JJ: Yeah, I actually think it, it helps my state of mind – [laughs] –

Sarah: Yes.

JJ: – ‘cause everything in this business is, is, is emotionally fraught, not just for a writer but for everybody who works in publishing as well. It’s just a business of just emotional highs and lows, so. [Laughs]

Sarah: How is it emotionally fraught for people who work in publishing? ‘Cause I think there’s a very popular perception that people in publishing are just either incredibly artistically focused editors or people who are focused on a spreadsheet, and there’s no overlap there, which I know is not actually the case – and hi to your dog.

JJ: [Laughs]

Sarah: I love when dogs are on a podcast. What’s your dog’s name?

JJ: My dog’s name is actually Bentley, but I call him Goober Dog.

[Laughter]

Sarah: Well, I mean, every pet has six names.

JJ: Yeah, exactly! [Laughs]

Sarah: It’s like a law!

Bentley: Bark!

Sarah: So – hey, Bentley, or Goober Dog.

JJ: So it’s emotionally fraught for people in publishing because we all still attach hopes and expectations to the projects we acquire –

Sarah: Right.

JJ: – and it’s the same for people who work in the editorial department and people who are the ones writing the checks. I used to joke that if I ever wrote a memoir about my time in publishing it would be very boring, but the title is Required Drinking: –

Sarah: [Laughs]

JJ: – Or Every Step of This Process Is the Worst.

Amanda: Yes.

Sarah: Okay, it doesn’t matter what the inside says, because that title is fantastic!

JJ: [Laughs] It’s the only thing I can title. I’m actually terrible titles. When I got books and Marketing was like, oh, we need to change the title, I would basically punt the responsibility off to them and be like, well then, you title it! It’s fine!

Sarah: [Laughs] So everyone does get emotionally invested in the things that they create. Or that they want to acquire.

JJ: Yeah, I mean – yeah, people do. It’s, it’s still a business of taste as much as it’s a business of, you know, profit and everything else, and, and art and commerce have always gone, well, it’s never really gone hand in hand particularly well? So when you attach hopes and expectations to your prod-, to whatever you’ve acquired, whatever product that you’re going to put out, if you want to look at it that way, and it doesn’t hit in the market as you would have liked, or if it doesn’t get the critical reception that you were hoping it does, it still doesn’t matter that you weren’t the one writing it or editing it; you still put investment in it, not just financial but emotional.

Sarah: Yes. So much of publishing, whether you’re an agent or an editor or you’re persuading Sales, that’s still emotionally invested labor, ‘cause it’s –

JJ: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: – all persuasion, and, like you said, it’s the commerce of taste.

JJ: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: That is, that is a lot! So my next question is a slightly awful one, so I want to beg your forgiveness in advance, but I would like to ask you if you could please tell us about Wintersong and tell us about Shadowsong.

Amanda: [Laughs] I can’t believe you’re asking this question, Sarah.

Sarah: I know. Tell us about your book. Just start reading from page one –

Zeb: Woof!

Sarah: – and don’t stop till you get to the end. My dog, by the way, Zeb, is super in favor of this decision that I ask you to read the book.

JJ: Awesome. Hi, Zeb.

Sarah: Two dogs on the podcast; I’m so psyched right now!

JJ: I mean, you can’t really break a streak, or it’s, it’s tradition, really. You’ve got to have pets on this podcast, right?

Sarah: Yeah, it is.

JJ: [Laughs]

Sarah: Totally. They, they get their own line credit in the transcript. Like, it’ll be like, Goober Dog: Bark!

Amanda: Aww!

Sarah: They get lines in the transcript. This is serious business, pets in this podcast! So I know Wintersong –

JJ: I love it, I love it!

Sarah: I know Wintersong is your homage to Labyrinth.

JJ: Yes. And Phantom of the Opera and Hades and Persephone and all the sort of really Goth-y things that I loved when I was sixteen, but Wintersong is essentially the story of a young woman who is a, an aspiring composer. She lives in sort of late 18th-century Bavaria and has grown up listening to the stories of the Goblin King all her life, and then one day her younger sister gets abducted by the Goblin King, so she has to journey underground to rescue her. So that’s kind of my basic couple-sentence pitch for, for Wintersong?

Sarah: And I imagine that when this airs, people will be listening and going, I need that in my eyeballs now.

JJ: [Laughs] And Shadowsong is the sequel, and it, it just continues the story.

Sarah: So there’s part one and part two. You can’t really pick up Shadowsong without having read Wintersong; is that right?

JJ: Yes. Although I had somebody on Goodreads who reviewed my book positively but had not read Wintersong? So I was kind of like, that’s interesting. I – [laughs] – I don’t know if you could, what your reading experience would have been like, but the review basically ended with them saying, like, oh, I know I liked it enough; maybe I’ll go back and read the first one.

[Laughter]

Sarah: Well, you know who everybody is; you’re already introduced. It’ll be great! So you mentioned in your letter to me that fanfic made you a writer.

JJ: Oh yes.

Sarah: How is that the case? Please tell me all the things.

JJ: Obviously Wintersong is an homage to everything that I loved as a young girl or a teenager. Labyrinth is pretty obvious, but it’s even something as small as The Sound of Music –

Sarah: Mm-hmm?

JJ: – which is a pretty big influence on Wintersong that not everybody automatically picks up because of the sort of external trappings of it. But I read and wrote fanfiction almost even before I knew what fanfiction was? I think.

Sarah: No kidding!

JJ: Yeah, so when I was really little, I was an only child for about ten and a half years, so a, a long stretch of my childhood was just me without any siblings, and so I, I kind of made up these elaborate pretend scenarios to sort of keep myself, you know, occupied or company or whatever, and it was often credibly influenced by what I was reading. The most detailed sort of, like, pretend scenario that I can think of when I was real young was after actually having read Anne of Green Gables. I had, I basically put myself in a version of Avonlea in my own head when I was playing pretend, ‘cause I really wanted to live there. I really wanted to live in Avonlea, and over time this, like, elaborate pretend scenario got so big and complicated that I had to write it down. So, like –

Sarah: [Laughs] You needed a story bible for your own pretend.

JJ: For my own pretend, yeah. [Laughs]

Sarah: That’s adorable!

JJ: Yeah, that’s kind of the first time, like, if I look back on it, but I’ve always been really influenced by what I consumed as a child, so aside from Anne of Green Gables I, when I first read Jane, Jane Austen I was probably in high school –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

JJ: – and I really loved it, and I wrote a bunch of really terrible Regency romances before I even knew Regency romances were a thing, because I, I just wanted to live in that world that these authors had created, and it wasn’t just, you know, Jane Austen or Anne of Green Gables. It was Harry Potter and The X-Files and Sailor Moon and all those sorts of things. I just wanted more, and therefore I just started writing it, and then I discovered fanfiction when I was, like, ten. [Laughs] And my very first fanfiction fandom was actually The X-Files. This is like –

Sarah: Ohhh. There’s hardly anybody in that fanfic fandom!

4JJ: Oh, I know, right? [Laughs] I was probably one of the youngest people, like, on these, like, fanfiction boards, ‘cause I was, like, ten, and there were a lot of, like, grown women writing a lot of this fanfiction?

Amanda: I feel like that goes for most fanfic boards in that we all discover them as, like, kids, and we probably shouldn’t be there?

[Laughter]

JJ: Yeah, well, you just sort of, like, lurk around. You don’t really say anything, but you just like reading the stories anyway. [Laughs]

Sarah: And I have the opposite of experience of discovering fanfic very, very late and feeling like I’m the oldest human being in the, in the room.

[Laughter]

Sarah: Like, I’m sorry I, I’m sorry this – somebody’ll chapter update – I’m sorry this is so late; I had, like, four finals, and then it was Christmas break, and I was like, aw, I remember those days!

JJ: I mean, I think for me, the experience of being on the internet is actually completely inextricable from the idea of fandom.

Sarah: Yes! Absolutely true.

JJ: I’m thirty-two, so a lot of it was kind of booming with me. I’m thirty-two, and I was twelve when the first Harry Potter book came out, and in between books I wanted more, so I would obviously turn to the internet to find more, you know, and then that would lead me down other things like LiveJournal communities and role-playing games and, you know, that sort – it, to me, being on the internet is just being, is just kind of synonymous with being a fan of stuff I like.

Sarah: And, and, and looking for other people who like the thing that you like.

JJ: Yes, yes.

Sarah: Even if the only way you communicate with each other is through text on a screen. Like, you don’t hang out or, God forbid me face to face! What is that crazy business?! But you, you, you find the people that you, who love the same thing you love and create together about that thing.

JJ: Yeah, and some of it, some of the people I made friends with online are still my closest friends today?

Sarah: Yep.

JJ: You know, I, I ask them how are their children doing, you know; how, you know, whatever it is, they’re, you know, we are, even if our interests have grown beyond what initially connected us, we’re still friends, and I loved that about, about being online.

Sarah: And, and being online with your friends means that you have this safe space that’s just for you.

JJ: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: I love that part. So fanfic influenced you as a writer because you’d always been writing. How did you make the jump to, I’m going to take the themes of the thing that I love and make my own story? Is that just sort of a written outlet of your pretend Avonlea?

JJ: To some extent, yes and no. So I wrote fanfiction before I knew what fanfiction was –

Sarah: Right.

JJ: – and then I discovered fanfiction and then wrote fanfiction with the characters and the properties of whatever it was. Writing has always been an – so I always also wrote original fiction. It was, of course, heavily influenced by what I had consumed and some of the fanfiction creations and the pretend worlds that I’d made when I was younger, but I’d always sort of written stories to amuse myself. It’s really kind of an extension of having to amuse myself when I was a kid. I think that’s sort of where it comes from. As far as – there’s almost two different impulses, actually, because when I was writing for myself, that was more original stuff, because this is original stuff that, like, literally everything that I wanted to see in the books that I wasn’t seeing, so I wrote all of that down, and then fanfiction was almost for other people? If I wrote fanfiction it was for other people, and it was meant to be read, and it was meant to be shared, whereas a lot of the stuff I wrote for myself was just for me. Publishing is kind of weird because it has to, like, marry those two impulses?

Sarah: [Laughs] Yes, that, it really does!

JJ: [Laughs] So I still write for me first, you know, as I did when I was a kid, and then I, I had to sort of force myself to want to share it with other people.

Sarah: I know that for many writers, they talk about the first book they wrote for them, and then the second one is harder because you’re thinking about all the people who read the first one, and you know what they’re thinking, and you’re aware of people having the expectation to read it, that this will be read by other people, that it’s not just for you. It seems, from what you’re saying, that by writing fanfic and also writing for yourself, you entered writing as a career with a pretty good balance of both, that you could write for yourself but also were aware that this was going to be read by people, and was it easy for you to sort of listen to one and not the other in different parts of your process?

JJ: Oh gosh, no.

[Laughter]

Sarah: I was really hopeful that you were like, yeah, I got this licked!

[Laughter]

JJ: You know that thing where you can understand something intellectually but, you know, you don’t really get it until you, like, feel it when you’re in the middle of it, and –

Sarah: Yep!

JJ: – I – [laughs] – I have a lot of friends who were published before I did, and everyone universally struggles with the second book under, the second book. So the first book that was, was purchased or acquired and then the first book under contract –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

JJ: – or the second book that comes out, everyone I talked to struggled with it, and so I knew to expect it, but, but living the reality of having to write it still sucked! A lot!

Sarah: I’m, I’m kind of relieved and also kind of like, maybe that’s just a universal experience, and everyone goes through the part where it sucks. Why did it suck for you?

JJ: A lot of the things that everyone had said. So this is the, it was the first book that I was writing to a strict deadline, because most debuts are completely, completed manuscripts before they’re acquired, right? So you’ve had all this time before your editor even buys your manuscript to work on the story as much as you want, and then on top of that, after it’s been acquired, you can have up to eighteen months of an editorial process before the book comes out. This, this is the, the case in YA, anyway.

Sarah: Of course.

JJ: And so you have all this time to sort of let, let the story grow or breathe or whatever and then, depending on what your deal structure was like – mine were bought separately, so they acquired Wintersong and then probably six months before it came out they were like, oh, hey, we’d like a book two –

Amanda: [Laughs]

JJ: – so –

[Laughter]

JJ: Whoops! So they kind of, so I had a little bit of a, of a time crunch there in terms of having to deliver, but unfortunately this also meant I was writing my book, I was writing book two as the first one came out –

Sarah: Ohhh!

JJ: – so there was no way I could escape what people thought of my first book at all.

Sarah: Oh God. [Laughs] Oh!

Amanda: Yeah.

JJ: Other authors, if they have, like, a multi-book deal, you know, it’s, like, a trilogy, or it’s a companion novel set or whatever, and a lot of them, at least – and I tell people this, too – if you’re writing a continuing series, try and write your second book before your first book comes out.

Sarah: [Laughs] Good plan!

JJ: I did not have that luxury, so – [laughs] – so there’s, there’s that aspect of it, and I couldn’t, it was hard to find my own voice amidst all the competing voices of what everybody else wanted, so that was really hard for me to – I went through so many different starts and fin-, false starts on Shadowsong because I was trying to find the story that I needed to tell myself, but it was sort of getting drowned out by what I thought people wanted from me, and ultimately, even though this was going to be published and read by other people, I still had to write it for me, so that took a long time. I was also working a full-time day job at that time, which was pretty taxing. I would have, you know, I would often end up working, you know, fifty, sixty hours a week and then having to come home and write?

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

JJ: But not just coming home to write. Once you become a published author, there’s writing, but your writing time then has to be carved up with all the mana-, like, the business managing part of being an author?

Sarah: Yes.

JJ: So that was a, a huge problem, and also I was writing most of Shadowsong in 2017 or, like, late 2016, 2017 –

Sarah: Ouch!

JJ: – which was when the election happened. [Laughs]

Sarah: That’s, that’s tough.

JJ: Oh my gosh. So I think, if people read Shadowsong, I think you might be able to tell the exact mental state I was in when I wrote that book.

Sarah: When you started writing Shadowsong while Wintersong was coming out and during 2016 and 2017, when there’s all of these things that make it more challenging, and you’re also carving out time for yourself, what are some of the things that motivate you to keep going?

JJ: Mmm, that is a very good question!

Sarah: Other than having, you know, other than having signed your name in ink on a contract which is therefore legally binding and that comes with –

JJ: Yeah.

Sarah: – you know, expectations.

JJ: Yeah, I know.

Sarah: [Laughs]

JJ: I think what keeps me going is, it, it kind of comes down to play still? You know, it’s the one thing that’s for me. Writing is the only thing I can really control in this business, so it’s the only thing that, the only place where I’m not beholden to anyone. Obviously, like, my day job, I have to manage all the clients or my bosses and supervisors or whatever; I was beholden to them. When I’m an author, I’m beholden to my readers. You know, when I’m at an event or a signing or something, I, you know, I’m really there for them, but when I’m writing and it’s just writing, if I can kind of erase the – [laughs] – the business part of it, it’s still the only place where it’s for me, and that’s kind of the only thing that really kept me going, because everything else in my life, you know, being an adult sucks! You have to go grocery shopping; you have to do this; you have to pick up dry cleaning and –

Sarah: And put on pants and wear shoes and go outside.

JJ: Oh gosh, and particularly, my partner is, is a surgeon, he’s a doctor, and so he doesn’t have time to do any of that for himself, so I do. [Laughs]

Sarah: Yep.

JJ: So that was kind of the thing that kept me going was I, this was the only place I could carve out for myself; even if that space was harrowing in its own way, it was still, like, the only place where I am my own boss.

Sarah: And that when you create your fictional world it’s, it’s like playing pretend; it’s your playground.

JJ: Yes. Yeah.

Sarah: Must have been a little restorative in a way.

JJ: It didn’t feel like that at the time, but yes, it was.

[Laughter]

Sarah: So one of the other things you mentioned in your, in your email to me was that you host a publishing-related podcast with your agent. How did that come about?

JJ: Oh, it’s act-, she’s actually not my agent; she is a friend of mine who –

Sarah: Oh.

JJ: – is an agent.

Sarah: I beg your pardon; I must have misread that; I apologize.

JJ: No, no problem!

Sarah: So you have a podcast with a friend who’s an agent.

JJ: Yes. So the podcast actually came out – well, you actually inspired it, because I was listening to so many different podcasts at the time. Both Kelly and I write for Publishing Crawl, which is just kind of a website where just a bunch of us kind of write different, you know, blog posts and articles about writing, publishing, et cetera, and both Kelly and I listen to a ton of podcasts, so, and we both like to talk, and we just –

Sarah: That’s a good combo.

JJ: Yeah!

Sarah: You’re fine!

JJ: [Laughs] So we just decided why don’t we have a podcast about it? And so it’s a weekly podcast, most of the time, if we can get our stuff together – [laughs] – where we talk about the more business aspects of publishing, so we had a, kind of like a Publishing 101 series where we talk about querying, acquisitions, submissions, sales, marketing, launch. We, we talk about what happens inside a publisher’s. We also have things where we talk about archetypes that we like. It’s like an archetypal narrative series or, or we talk about romances or characterization. It’s pretty freewheeling in terms of form and structure, but we do sort of have three areas that we talk about, which is the business of publishing, the craft of writing, and sort of what it’s like being an author? And, so she and I’ve been doing it for about, I guess, two years now, and over the course of that time it’s actually, like, our careers happen in real time, because I wasn’t published yet. I think I’d only just gotten an agent, so, oh, as the podcast came out, my book came out, and then over the course of the podcast my friend Kelly, who at the time was working in the Contracts department made the career shift to becoming an agent. [Laughs] So it was kind of, it’s al-, it’s sort of our personal journey as well in some ways?

Sarah: Are there stories about publishing that you tell people and they’re still, they’re just shocked or that still surprise you? Or have you both grown so used to the variations inside the industry that it’s sort of like, oh, yes, that again?

JJ: There’s, I really can’t think of a situation where something would surprise me.

Sarah: [Laughs] Yeah. I had a feeling that was the answer.

JJ: Between Kelly and myself, we are, we have a combined fifteen years of experience in publishing. Both she and I started pretty young.

Sarah: That’s a long time.

JJ: Yeah. We were both in our twenties when we were working in publishing, and it, things tend to go in cycles, and we’ve both been in it long enough now that things just kind of repeat themselves or have patterns, so it would be very surprising to actually be surprised by something that happens in this business. [Laughs]

Sarah: I am so relieved you have said that, because I’ve started to have that very same feeling. I’ve been writing the site for, this coming week will be thirteen years, and –

JJ: Whoa!

Sarah: I know! Amazing, right? The site gets to have a little Bat Mitzvah. But –

JJ: [Laughs]

Sarah: – like, there are things where I’m like, oh, yeah, this again! Okay. People are like, no! This has just happened, and it’s terrible! I’m like, yeah, it happened five years ago, happened ten years ago. Okay this again; I know what’ll happen, and, and I’m like, wow, I feel all…boring. [Laughs]

JJ: You know, the thing about – so I’ve, I’ve kind of talked to my friends who are more on the writing side, but I kind of said, if you were able to last in this business for five years, you’re probably a lifer? Because –

Sarah: [Laughs] I love this, and I’m also a little scared.

JJ: Because I think in the course of five years, you will probably witness nearly everything that publishing has to offer you?

Sarah: It’s, it’s true! It’s very true. And everything comes around again.

JJ: Yeah, so I think people, I mean, the people who have careers at all in this business, not just writing but people in publishing as well, ‘cause there’s kind of a large attrition rate there –

Sarah: Yep.

JJ: – are just people with, like, just a lot of tenacity, they, just stubborn. They’re going to stick it out!

Sarah: [Laughs] Yes. And I, I often joke that especially in romance publishing, there’s, like, nine total people, maybe, and the rest is done with mirrors, and then someone rings a bell and they all have to switch houses.

JJ: [Laughs] That’s kind of true!

Sarah: And –

JJ: At some point, everyone has worked for a different, like, a house.

Sarah: Yeah, right?

JJ: It’s like –

Sarah: And so-and-so used to be at such-and-such house, and it’s horrible because I will often and frequently contact the wrong publicist for a house, not because I, I can’t remember who works for who – that is actually true – but I remember that person somewhere else, and they’re like, yeah, I haven’t been there in, like, four years.

JJ: [Laughs]

Sarah: Or that house doesn’t even exist anymore. Yeah, you know, my brain is a sad place, and things are very desolate in the, in the memory department of my brain – ask Amanda – but – [laughs]

JJ: It’s also, publishing schedules everything a year in advance, so you’re kind of in this perpetual state of time limbo where you don’t know what year it is or what season it is.

Sarah: Right? And I think publishing right now is working on, like, summer 2019 or something? Like, right now they’re focusing on next summer?

JJ: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

Sarah: Like, that’s worse than fashion, like when you go to the store in July when you’re looking for warm-weather clothing, and everything is wool and corduroy ‘cause they just put out fall. Publishing, it’s like a full year just to mess with your head!

JJ: Yep, yep, and, oh gosh, launch was, at least where I worked, there were three different launches: winter, spring/summer, and fall, and they had, when I was there they sort of switched everything, so now everything was, like, three months earlier than before? Or not even three months; it’s more like six weeks earlier than it used to be? So it used to be that you would launch your winter titles in March; and you would launch your summer, spring/summer titles in July; and then you would launch your fall titles in, like, November, but over time they just started getting earlier and earlier, so then we would be launching winter titles in, like, January and then –

Sarah: [Laughs]

JJ: You know, so it was just this, like, con-, oh, it was terrible, and I, I truly never knew what year it was.

[Laughter]

Sarah: I used to joke about people who work in publishing trying to write a check at the grocery store and being like, what year is it right now, today?

JJ: Oh, I write, I journal by hand, so when I’m, when I’m drafting, I actually often journal by hand, which is just a process of how I talk to myself or talk myself through a story –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

JJ: – and I do date them from the days that I write them, and I only just realized that I’d still been writing 2017 on them, but then, like, two weeks before I’d written 2019 on them, and I was like, oh God!

Sarah: [Laughs] You have publishing time brain!

JJ: Ugh! I don’t know if I’ll ever get out.

Sarah: Imagine that fantasy series: a bunch of people who used to work in publishing no longer have connection to the reality of time. [Laughs]

JJ: Yeah, they’re unmoored from time. That’s, that’s just what happens. [Laughs]

Sarah: They can travel around. They’re like publishing, they’re like, they’re like time travelers, but only in publishing. [Laughs]

JJ: Yes, only in books.

[Laughter]

Sarah: Somebody listening is going to be like, ooh, oh! Wait, are you, are you going to write that? ‘Cause I want to read that. [Laughs] So with your, with, with Shadowsong, is there going to be a book three?

JJ: No, it is a duology.

Sarah: Yay! You get to be done!

JJ: I know. And, and I don’t, I don’t think there’s room for a third book, and, and to be, to be completely honest, when Wintersong was acquired it was just the one book, so my editor and I worked on it pretty hard to try and give it a complete emotional arc.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

JJ: Even if there were sort of general worldbuilding questions that were left open, we thought it was less important than kind of giving my main character a starting point and an endpoint emotionally, so I was pretty proud of the fact that we had made it standalone, and then everybody in house who read it –

Amanda: Yes.

JJ: – then started asking, oh, where’s the next one?

Amanda: Where is the next one? Yes.

[Laughter]

JJ: In the back of my mind, I always kind of knew where the plot would go, where the, where the worldbuilding questions would go, I guess, and how, not how but what the ending was going to be, so I, I knew that, and I didn’t think it was going to take more than one book to get there, but what I didn’t anticipate was having given Liesl, my protagonist, that emotional closure at the end of the first book, I was like, I don’t know how to write the second book without feeling like I had to go back and, and kind of retread some of the same ground –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

JJ: – that she had sort, what I’d felt that she had gotten, basically moved past in the first one, so that was part of the reason Shadowsong took a long time to write as well, and I finally got there, I think, ‘cause, and I, and I don’t, at least I hope it’s not the same emotional journey that she underwent in the first book –

Sarah: [Laughs]

JJ: – but, yeah, if I had a, if I had a third book, the third book would be nothing. The third book would just be fluffy vignettes of these characters doing nothing.

Amanda: For me, it wasn’t, like, the worldbuilding; it was like, all right, well, I need more smooching, so –

JJ: [Laughs]

Amanda: – can you get to that? Just more smooching is all I need. [Laughs] Like, you can have as many holes in the worldbuilding as you want, but my smooch meter was pretty low. I needed to fill that up.

Sarah: So maybe there will be a book three of smoochy vignettes.

Amanda: Just, just smooching vignettes.

[Laughter]

JJ: I mean, spoiler alert, and I don’t know if I should say this. I don’t know; maybe, Sarah, you can edit this at your discretion, but I actually had an idea for a post-Shadowsong smoochy vignette, and then I was like, I don’t know what I would do with it.

[Laughter]

Sarah: We have many ideas of what you could do with that. Many. So many. Mostly involve sending it to Amanda, because she wants them.

[Laughter]

Sarah: We’re, we’re, we’re not shy here. I, I think that the, the smoochy vignettes, for me, especially in a fandom, are, like, my, one of my favorite things, because it’s –

JJ: Oh, me too.

Sarah: It’s like happy hanging out, smoochy, regular day, like regular what is their life like in the world without the peril looming over them from, you know, the plot?

JJ: Yeah. That’s, like, the beauty of coffee shop AU, right, where it’s just these characters that you love –

Amanda: [Laughs]

JJ: – and they’re just in a coffee shop, and the world isn’t ending.

Sarah: Everyone needs caffeine.

JJ: [Laughs]

Sarah: Coffee and food thing: a vignette collection.

Amanda: For me, like, with fanfic, the only vignettes I want, and I talked about this on Twitter the other day, was can I just get vignettes of, like, these characters in situations where they, like, go somewhere and, like, whoops, the room we reserved only has one bed; what are we going to do?

[Laughter]

Amanda: Like, I just want vignettes of, like, accidental bed sharing. That’s all I want.

JJ: Well, you know, it’s like, you know romance has tropes that people look for, right, and fandom does too –

Amanda: Yes.

JJ: – right? Fandom has very particular tropes. I actually went to a, sort of a science fiction/fantasy con a couple weekends ago ‘cause one of my friends was there, and I was just there to support them, and she was on a fanfiction panel. Granted, I’m not as active in fandom as I used to be when I was younger, but there were just, it was just a bunch of women talking about fandom and why they wrote and all these tropes and everything, and there were just some things that I was like, wow, I am definitely outside the times, because they talked about this trope called sex pollen, and I was like, what?

Amanda: What is that? [Laughs]

JJ: What is that? I know! And it’s literally, I guess the trope is like, oh no, we’ve landed on this planet and all of a sudden we’re just really, really horny, and I was like, oh!

[Laughter]

Amanda: Like there’s something in the air.

JJ: There’s something in the air, or they drank something, or, you know, like – and it’s, it’s an actual trope name, and it’s called sex pollen, and I was like, well, good to know. [Laughs]

Sarah: Oh my gosh. Now I’m envisioning, like, boxes of antihistamine and anti-allergen medicines labeled for sex pollen prevention.

[Laughter]

Sarah: And then they don’t work, and then there’s sex pollen problems, or they make you sleepy and horny. [Laughs]

JJ: There were other things that I was just – ‘cause I, I was beyond – they were just talking about this other thing called x Reader fanfiction –

Sarah: Huh!

JJ: – which I’d never heard, and they finally explained to me that x Reader fanfiction is basically where the reader is in the fanfic. You know, so, like, when you tag a ‘ship on a fandom and it’s like, you know, for example, if you were looking for Captain America fanfiction and you’re looking for Steve and Bucky, right? So it’d be like Steve x Bucky, but x Reader would be like, Steve x Reader. [Laughs]

Amanda: I thought that was like whenever someone made, like, an OC, like an original character, I always surmised –

JJ: Yeah!

Amanda: – that, like, that original character was actually the reader? [Laughs]

JJ: No, see, in that instance, the original character is the writer, but x Reader is you, as in a lot of these pieces –

Amanda: Oh my gosh!

JJ: – are written in second person.

Amanda: Ooh! That’s –

Sarah: Ohhh.

JJ: I know; I was, and I, I, it just, it, eh, it, it, I don’t know, I, I would rather just, like –

Amanda: [Laughs]

JJ: – in the, this is a little too close. That’s just too, just, that’s, that’s like a barrier that I still want up there – [laughs] – that I don’t need.

Sarah: You know, there used to be a travel column in an airline magazine – I think it was Continental Airline’s magazine – where it would be like a tour of a place, three days in a place, but it wasn’t written in second person, and I hated it so much. Then you decide you’re hungry – well, what if I’m not hungry, article? How do you know I’m hungry?

Amanda: [Laughs]

Sarah: You decide you want to have some octopus. No, I don’t!

Amanda: You don’t my life, article!

Sarah: Exactly! And I was so, I found, like, I love learning about different place, and I love travel writing, and I was like, I cannot handle second-person travel writing. I don’t think I could handle second-person fanfic either. Like, I don’t think I could do that. That’s –

JJ: Yeah, it –

Sarah: I, I’m –

JJ: – it’s weird.

Sarah: Oh, I don’t know if I could do it.

JJ: It’s, it’s –

Sarah: But then again, I don’t quite – I mean, I understand people have preferences, but there is a virulent rejection in some quarters for first-person writing, and I, I understand that people have strong feelings about it? It doesn’t bother me that much, so I’m like, oh, okay, so I’ll warn you this is first person, but it doesn’t bug me that much, so I’m a little confused why this makes you want to, like, burn things down, but okay, okay, I’ll tell you that’s first person. You don’t, not going to like that, but wow, you really hate it. And then you’re like, and then you – no, no, I do not you. You don’t know me; no second person. My reaction is just as, as firm, like, ah, no, that’s not for me.

JJ: I can do second person in small chunks, but the problem, I think, for me in particular with x Reader fandom is I, it’s like, well, you don’t know what I want, so why am I in this? Like – [laughs] – oh, you know, it’s like, he holds your hand and takes you out, and I was like, but why? Like, there’s something weird about, because for me, reading has always kind of been a – writing, I write for me, and reading has always been kind of a peek into whoever is writing in some, you know, way or another, and –

Sarah: Yeah!

JJ: – it’s like the writer has turned around and, like, dragged me into whatever they were writing like, against my will. I don’t like it!

Sarah: [Laughs] You’re not in control of me! You don’t run my life!

JJ: Yeah, I’d rather just be this voyeur, if that’s okay.

[Laughter]

Sarah: I do love, however, when people gather in a particular fandom or in a particular place around a thing that they love, no matter what that thing is. There is almost always a language created for that thing –

JJ: Yes.

Sarah: – so, like, sex pollen and x Reader. Like, I feel like I’ve just discovered, like, this whole universe because I know some of the words of the new language. It’s like, whoo, this is exciting! And I know people feel that way when it comes to romance, too.

JJ: Oh yes.

Sarah: It’s so lovely that people develop a language to connect with each other.

JJ: Yes. That’s just like, I just love groups and communities of people, like when just people like the same thing and the community that develops and this sort of, like this sharing thing that happens. It’s just like, it just gives me such nice, warm, fuzzy feelings! [Laughs]

Sarah: Yes! Yes, yes, yes! Now I have one more question, but I also know that Amanda has questions for you.

JJ: Okay.

Sarah: Amanda, are you ready to interrogate our, our lovely guest?

Amanda: Hell, yeah.

JJ: [Laughs] Bring it on!

[Laughter]

Amanda: First, I want to start off by making everyone feel really uncomfortable and saying how much I loved Wintersong, so much, and, you know, I’m looking forward to Shadowsong; I have a copy sitting on my desk. And I’m excited for your upcoming series because I’m just all about everything you’re writing, so I creep a little bit.

JJ: [Laughs]

Amanda: The Guardians of Dawn series, which is like Sailor Moon, Captain Planet sort of –

JJ: Yeah, elemental –

Amanda: Elements –

JJ: – magic is –

Amanda: Yes.

JJ: – a thing I loved as a kid too, so. [Laughs]

Amanda: So I’m super excited for whenever that comes out in, like, what, 2019? [Laughs] And I will say that Wintersong has become the first book where I just want all of the extra things. I’m not a huge YA reader, which factors into one of my questions, but my roommate is, and so she’s got, like, all this cool swag like candles and jewelry and, that kind of coincides with her favorite series, and I’ve always been bummed out that, like, romance doesn’t really get that? But with Wintersong, and I think you posted on your Instagram the Wiccan fable candles for Wintersong, and I bought those, and then, like, A Court of Candles had, like, the Goblin Grove candle, so I’m just buying everything related to Wintersong, and someone on Twitter is, like, making a game about Wintersong –

JJ: What?!

Amanda: – like a flash game? Yeah. Jinoraslight is the user. She’s in, like, the early stages, and she made, like, a cool minimalist poster, and I just want all of the things.

JJ: This, like, blows my mind!

[Laughter]

Amanda: Yeah, I just want all of the things related. I’ll send a link to, in the notes or whatever so you can see; it’s in the early stages.

JJ: Okay, that’s awesome! And just, like –

[Laughter]

JJ: Like, it’s so weird, having been a fan of so many different things, to then understand that there are people who are fans of your work, also weird.

Amanda: [Laughs] I can imagine. But when we were talking on Twitter you mentioned doing a podcast about sex in YA, which I think is my main hesitation with reading YA, being a romance reader for so long. I love all this cool sci-fi/fantasy stuff that YA is doing, but some of the romance is very much, like, fade-to-black or off-page, and I’m one of those readers where it’s like, I want all of the details, all of the gross, graphic details. I don’t want fade-to-black; I want all of the good stuff. So that’s my, like, inner turmoil with YA and, like, sexual situations. So how, like, do you reconcile that? What are your feelings on sex in, you know, YA novels and that sort of thing?

JJ: So sex in YA is – mm; where do I begin with this?

[Laughter]

JJ: Wintersong was acquired as an adult novel, and –

Amanda: It definitely read very – I didn’t feel like it was a YA? I felt it was more adult fantasy.

JJ: It wa-, and the sex scenes were much more explicit.

Amanda: Dang it!

JJ: [Laughs] I can send you those, Amanda, if you want it.

Amanda: Yes, please! Oh my God, please.

[Laughter]

JJ: So as I joke, when I was writing Wintersong, I was working at a shitty, shitty – can I swear? I can swear, right?

Amanda: Yes, yes!

JJ: Okay, awesome. I was working at a shitty, shitty call center –

Amanda: [Laughs]

Sarah: Oh yeah.

JJ: – and I – it, it wasn’t so bad; it wasn’t, like, consumer relations type of calling. It was just, like, people who had problems with their accounts, and they needed people to, like, help them walk through the website or whatever. So I worked from, like, 10:30 to 7:00 p.m., and after 5:00 p.m. the call volume would drop off, and so between 5:00 and 7:00 I, like, maybe one or two calls would come in, so I had this long stretch of time where I could write, and I couldn’t really do anything else. I had to sit in front of my computer and wait for a call, so that was when I wrote Wintersong. And I wrote it for NaNoWriMo, and I was writing it because the previous project I had tried to write just was not working. It felt flat. It just, something about it seemed really lifeless, and so I told my friend, I was like, I’m going to write Fifty Shades of Labyrinth! And that –

Amanda: [Laughs]

JJ: – is the genesis of where this, of, really, actually, how it started. [Laughs]

Sarah: That’s amazing.

JJ: Yeah, so I, and what it, what it was was that I, the previous work that I was trying to, that I was writing was actually a retelling of The Magic Flute, which is my favorite opera by Mozart, and just, it was not working, and now that I look back on it, I understand why it was not working, because what I love about The Magic Flute is the music, not necessarily the story, and it wasn’t, it’s hard to convey music in text in that way, so that wasn’t working for that reason, but I said I was going to write – actually, what I did was I set out to write erotica? I’d never written one before, and I was like, this is a challenge in a completely different way for me, so I’m going to write sexytimes. And then over the course of writing it the, they didn’t, I don’t even think my characters kiss until, like, sixty thousand words into the book, so it was a bit of a failure on the erotica front. Like, I just, I, I, I could, I didn’t do it, but it, it was kind of the framework for it, so it was much sexier, like, much more explicitly sexy, and it was also kind of kinky, which is not exactly something that publishers want to put in a YA novel?

Amanda: [Laughs]

JJ: And it, and it wasn’t because of the explicitness of the sex. So sex in YA can kind of run the gamut, because there are sex scenes in YA that are pretty explicit. I would say that Sarah J. Maas’s A Court of Thorns and Roses books, those are also pretty explicit when it comes to sex scenes. A lot of, and, and sort of even more contemporary novels also have explicit sex scenes in them, but the difference in what, between YA and adult sex scenes is actually the lens through which the character’s experiencing the sexual, the sexytimes. So part of the thing that I had to do when I edited down the sex scenes in Wintersong with my editor was, was basically, Liesl is nineteen in the book, actually, so she’s – but it’s still a first for her, and a lot of teenagers experiencing sex are doing it for the first time in YA, and so that’s a different approach to sexytimes than people who’ve already figured out what they like about sex or what they want from their partner or what they – you know, that kind of a thing? So that’s kind of the only real difference, because it can get pretty explicit, and the, the kinkiness of the original sex scenes in Wintersong were, not that it wasn’t appropriate for YA, but it kind of read, it came from a point of view of somebody who really knew what they wanted, and when it’s kind of your first time you don’t really know that yet?

Sarah: Right, yes.

JJ: Actually, I have a friend of mine, she’s a YA author, Christa Desir, and she, she and another YA author, Carrie Mesrobian, have a podcast called The Oral History Podcast where they actually do discuss sex in YA, and when I was editing down Wintersong, I actually sent the scenes to her and was like, help me out, because – [laughs] – I don’t know where to cut; I don’t know what to do; I don’t know how to get this down to an appropriate level, aside, aside from doing to the fade-to-black, which neither my editor nor I really wanted to do.

Amanda: So I have one final question, and it’s not super serious – [laughs] – but, so on Twitter you mentioned that your favorite Girl Scout cookie was the Do-si-do, and I was taken aback.

JJ: Yes. [Laughs]

Amanda: Not that it’s a bad cookie, but I feel like it’s a bottom-tier cookie. [Laughs]

JJ: Oh, I know.

Amanda: I mean –

JJ: I know it is.

Amanda: There’s just some, like, I’m very opinionated about peanut butter in any sort of desserts, but peanut butter and oatmeal are both very, like, rich, thick flavors, so when you said that my mouth instantly dried up, and – [laughs] – it’s like I needed a glass of milk immediately. ‘Cause they’re just tough to eat!

JJ: They are tough to eat. I am fully aware that most people do not like Do-si-dos – [laughs] – so I’m, this is actually something I’m struggling with in my, in the first Guardians of Dawn book, because the character in that book is a foodie, but I am not!

[Laughter]

JJ: I’m, like, the least sensual person on the planet, actually. I just don’t care!

Sarah: [Laughs] I’m just, I’m just picturing this incredibly, incredibly erudite foodie person just going on about Do-si-dos and having everyone in the room be like, what?!

Amanda: And putting, like, catsup on her steak.

[Laughter]

JJ: Ugh! I’m not that bad. I have, so, I always describe food like this: I have a lot of friends who really love food, who are actual foodies, who really enjoy the experience of eating food and tasting and everything, but for me, food falls into three categories, which are good, bad, and food, and eighty percent of what I eat just falls under food.

[Laughter]

Sarah: This is a calorie with some nutrient.

JJ: And Do-si-dos do fall into food, because – but of all the cookies in Girl Scout cookies, I’m not a huge sweet person, so I don’t really like a ton of sugar. My suspicion is, is I am one of those super tasters? Yeah, I just, so and eating, like, it, it even comes down to things like, I don’t actually like things like carrots, because I find carrots too sweet, that sort of a thing. So Do-si-dos being kind of the bland cardboard –

Amanda: [Laughs]

JJ: – of all of the Girl Scout cookies is, like, one I can eat, as opposed to getting, like, the kind of, like, ugh, like – [laughs] – like, too much sugar reaction that I get from nearly all the other cookies.

Sarah: Whereas I could eat, like, an entire sleeve of Thin Mints and not realize that I ate the entire sleeve of Thin Mints.

JJ: Well, as Amanda said, a serving size is a sleeve. That’s just how it goes.

Amanda: Yeah.

Sarah: I mean, that is entirely the case.

Amanda: And the sleeves are getting smaller, so you get, like, three cookies in a sleeve at this point. [Laughs]

Sarah: Ah, no.

Amanda: They’re, I mean, things are getting real tiny. As someone who was a Girl Scout –

Sarah: Yes!

Amanda: Yeah. Like –

Sarah: Come on.

Amanda: Yeah.

JJ: I was also a Girl Scout!

Sarah: Yeah.

Amanda: So all those, like, boxes, I feel like Samoas are the size of, like, half dollars at this point. They’re very, they’re getting very small.

Sarah: And they’re wrapped up like each one is some sort of two-thousand-year-old Faberge egg!

[Laughter]

Sarah: Like they’re each in their own little plastic boat, and they have, like, so, like, I’m, next year they’re going to be in bubble wrap, but you’re going to get, like, two whole cookies.

JJ: [Laughs]

Amanda: Which is silly, because at the end of a box I’m, like, shaking the plastic into my mouth to get every last crumb.

Sarah: [Laughs] Yeah, the, the cellophane holds, holds out on you. You need to, you need to address that problem. There needs to be a whole series, like a whole fantasy romance series set up around Girl Scout cookies.

Amanda: Yes, please.

Sarah: Like, they could be –

JJ: Mmm.

Sarah: – like, a type of magic or, or a house of magic.

Amanda: Or, like, instead of, like, Sailor Mars it’s like Sailor Thin Mint.

[Laughter]

JJ: I mean, that’s the genius part about Sailor Moon, right? You’ve got all these girls, and they’re all distinct from each other, so you can be like, I know what, you know, I’m the most like Sailor Mars or whatever, and so you, it’s like that, but with cookies!

Sarah: Yep.

Amanda: But, like, sometimes you get a cross. Like, I would say I’m like a Mars/Jupiter hybrid.

Sarah: So what Girl Scout cookie are you?

Amanda: Ooh, that’s tough. I love, I’m probably, like, a Tagalong/Samoa hybrid, I would say. That would be my thing.

JJ: Hmm. As a cookie, I think what I like as a cookie and what I think I am as a cookie are two different things.

Amanda: Okay, that’s fair. That’s fair.

[Laughter]

Amanda: I wish I was a Tagalong/Samoa hybrid. That’s what I aspire to be.

JJ: If I were a cookie, if I, I would, I might be – okay, so this is a discussion I know people have talked about; is it pronounced treh-foil or tree-foil [Trefoil]?

Amanda: I pronounce it tree-foil.

Sarah: And I pronounce it treh-foil, so –

Amanda: We’ll have to dis- –

JJ: Anyway, the shortbread cookie.

[Laughter]

Sarah: What, I know which one you’re talking about, and let’s just say, however you say it is right.

JJ: Yes.

Amanda: [Laughs]

JJ: And I think that’s probably the cookie I might be?

Amanda: Maybe it’s like –

Sarah: Yeah.

Amanda: – Trefoil in the streets, Samoa in the sheets.

[Laughter]

Sarah: Oh, I love it!

Amanda: It’s like a public/private persona sort of deal.

Sarah: Of course, of course! I do think, though, that if you are going to be a Girl Scout cookie in terms of a character development, like you’re creating a slate of characters for people to identify with, the Do-si-do cookie will be the one with secret, hidden-depth powers that no one knows about. Like, that’s the –

Amanda: See, I disagree; I feel like she’s the wholesome, like, freckled, you know, earnest, heart of the group.

Sarah: The one your dad likes best, but not in a creepy way?

[Laughter]

Sarah: The one who’s like, go, you’re going out with that girl? I don’t need to worry about you.

Amanda: Yeah!

Sarah: She is going to keep you safe.

JJ: You know, basically it’s like, it’s the girl version of, in a, in a group of guys – at least this was my case in middle school – it’s like, why don’t you have a crush on that boy?

[Laughter]

JJ: That equivalent of a cookie.

Amanda: Yeah!

[Laughter]

Sarah: I would love to read this series. Oh my gosh!

[Laughter]

Sarah: So I feel horrible because I’m enjoying this conversation so much, but I do have one question that I don’t want to forget to ask, and if you wish to use cookies to answer it please do, but you mentioned in your letter to me about writing mental illness in your characters and creating a protagonist that’s bipolar. What are some of the things that you were deliberate and careful about in creating a bipolar character?

JJ: Well, in Wintersong – well, I am bipolar, I have bipolar disorder, so it wasn’t necessarily intentional at first. So I was writing – and actually, Wintersong is the first thing I’ve ever written in first person. It’s not normally a POV that I write with or that I’m especially comfortable with, actually?

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

JJ: So, but it was in first person, and a lot of her emotional state and how she reacts to things is very much mine.

Sarah: Ah.

JJ: Very up and down, kind of selfish and reckless and arrogant and manic and all those sorts of things that people don’t necessarily see on the surface, obviously, but that is kind of like my entire interior world. So I didn’t initially set out to write Liesl as bipolar until I did, if that makes sense, and Shadowsong actually does grapple with that much more directly than the first book did, because it, it, what it, it’s – both of these books sort of mirrored my own artistic journey in their own ways, and that sounds super, like, white-dude pretentious when I say it that way, but the first book was basically about this young woman who has, who just has this desire to write music, to compose music, and she’s been kind of keeping that close for multiple reasons, and finally, by the end of the book, she’s sort of given herself permission to create, and that was kind of the emotional journey that my editor and I worked on that I wanted to write. So then where do you go from there in Shadowsong when you finally come to the realization that, yes, I have permission to write? Yes, I have permission to be an artist on my own terms, and, and how do you write when you’re also mentally ill is kind of what is actually literally the question that I was struggling with in the course of writing Shadowsong. And there are a lot of – I don’t, so I didn’t necessarily go about writing it consciously. She does mirror my emotional state or my mental state pretty closely in that, that’s a real and lived thing –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

JJ: – that she goes through. It, it was also difficult to not actually say bipolar, because this is, in my own head, this is 1795. Bipolar as a diagnosis doesn’t really exist yet.

Sarah: Right.

JJ: So I do kind of talk about mania and melancholy, which were sort of two terms that they did use back then to describe what they sort of dis-, kind of like mood disorders at the time. So that’s about as explicit as I could make it by being historically accurate-ish?

Sarah: Right.

JJ: [Laughs] But I also, when I was growing up and when I was first diagnosed with bipolar disorder, I also never read a character that had bipolar disorder, and there were some, there were more issue books around it, so, like, contemporary novels that dealt with characters who were going through therapy or discovering their diagnosis, and I think two years ago Neal Shusterman wrote a really beautiful book called Challenger Deep that, it’s not about bipolar disorder; it’s actually about paranoid schizophrenia, but that, it’s about whatever the mental illness is, and I didn’t want that? It’s, you know, it’s like I’m, I’m also Asian, and a lot of the fantasy novels that I read as a kid mostly had white protagonists, and a lot of the books with Asian kids in it were, like, about being Asian? [Laughs]

Sarah: What, like you don’t walk around and think about your, your, your ethnicity, like, all the time?

JJ: I know, right? It’s just weird. So it’s like, you know, I, basically, I wanted Harry Potter with an Asian girl in it, but not Cho Chang. I wanted her to be the hero, essentially. [Laughs] And so that was kind of the thing about writing Wintersong is I was conscious of, that I didn’t want the book to be about that. So does that make sense?

Sarah: That absolutely makes sense. I agree with you that knowing that there hasn’t been that character scene means that that character needs to, that type of character needs to be there.

JJ: I mean, there, it’s, it, I, I – headcanoned was a word that I’d learned, I remember, when I was in fan-, fandom – I headcanoned a lot of characters when I was younger as bipolar.

Sarah: Really!

JJ: Yeah, I did, because it sort of helped me make sense of the world, or it helped me feel less like I was the only one. So there are a couple of examples: The Monstrumologist is a series by Rick Yancey, and they are, they sort of straddle the YA/middle grade line, actually, and I actually didn’t read these until I was an adult, but the character of Dr. Pellinore Warthrop, the titular monstrumologist, to me reads as a bipolar person –

Sarah: Hmm!

JJ: – and so does Hamilton from the musical.

Sarah: Oh, that’s very interesting.

JJ: Yeah, and I, you know, when I read the biography by, what’s his name, Ron Chernow, a lot of Hamilton’s actions to me read like the actions of a bipolar individual, and of course he lived in that time period where they wouldn’t have had that diagnosis either, so, and, you know, obviously, you don’t want to diagnose somebody in hindsight, but my headcanon, he is One Of Us.

Sarah: [Laughs] Well, I mean, who’s to say you’re right or wrong? However you pronounce Trefoil in your own interpretation is correct.

JJ: [Laughs] I’ve always heard tree-foils, and then, but I moved south, and then people started saying treh-foil, and I was like, is that what it is?

Sarah: [Laughs] So the one question I always ask people is if you have any books that you want to recommend or if you want to share with people that you want to spread the word about.

JJ: Ooh boy, there’s a lot. [Laughs] I’ve been kind of all over the place with my own reading these days. Kind of partially in a slump and kind of not? It’s kind of weird. But, but I ju-, this is not a new release of any kind, but I just finished reading The Bourbon Thief by Tiffany Reisz.

Sarah: What did you think?

JJ: I really loved it! It’s, I mean, I actually really like Tiffany Reisz’s other books. I read the Original Sinners –

Sarah: Mm-hmm?

JJ: – and so I was really curious what a book not in that world would be, be like from her, so I really enjoyed it. So that’s kind of the most recent thing that’s on my mind right now when it comes to reading. Most of my reads will be Y-, most of my recommendations – not all of ‘em, ‘cause clearly, Tiffany Reisz isn’t YA, but – [laughs] – I’m, I’m the kind of person that reads a lot, and it isn’t until someone’s like, well, I like this, then I can come up with, like, twenty-five other books that they should read, such as –

Sarah: Yes, this is the danger of being anywhere close to the book industry.

JJ: I know. Oh! So books that I personally really, really loved, some of them are not published yet, so I’m not going to talk about them. [Laughs]

Sarah: You can if you wish, but I understand the problem.

JJ: Yeah, it’s, I feel like it’s unfair to be like, so I read this manuscript, you guys, and it probably won’t be out for another eighteen months, but –

Sarah: [Laughs]

JJ: And it may not even have the same title, so! [Laughs]

Sarah: Lots could change between now and then, but let me tell you all about it. Yes, I understand this problem.

JJ: Over the break I read, and reread, actually, some of my favorite books from 2017, ‘cause I was home. Aside from just playing Dragon Age, I also reread my favorite books from 2017.

Sarah: That sounds like an ideal holiday.

JJ: It was great! My family hosted my relatives. I went, I went home to Los Angeles, and then my dad’s side of the family came, and we hosted them for Christmas. And I love my dad. His family, I love them as, as I should, but –

[Laughter]

JJ: – they’re a lot, so in between cooking Christmas dinner I would just escape and slay some dragons and come back.

Sarah: That’s a really good coping mechanism; nice job! [Laughs]

JJ: But in 2017, I really loved, I don’t know if you guys have read the Diviners by Libba Bray?

Amanda: Yes! I read the first one.

JJ: Okay, so I more or less read nearly anything for romance. I like the romantic – I, that’s kind of what I read for in my most books, and the third Diviners book has the absolute, just the best ‘ship ever?

Sarah: [Laughs]

JJ: Ah, like it, like, I actually was listening to the, on audiobook; and I was cleaning my house; and I was, like, clutching my chest in, like, good pain? You know, like, that kind of like, oh yes!

[Laughter]

JJ: Oh! So, oh, it, I just, I loved it so much. So the, it’s actually the third Diviners book, so the, which is called Before the Devil Breaks You. I am a huge fan of Libba Bray, actually, so I always recommend Libba Bray to people, ‘cause she has, she’s a writer with incredible range, and also, I think she is, like, the next great American novelist, so that’s, that’s my opinion. So the Diviners are set in the 1920s, and they’re kind of like a supernatural – pfft – like, a, a supernatural mystery/horror kind of series, but they’re also just really, really intelligent and smart and say amazing things about America and what it means to be American, and it sounds super-pretentious when I tell it to you that way, but that’s what these books are to me, and I really, really love the Diviners series. So that’s one.

On a slightly more, like, less weighty subject, I also really loved Warcross by Marie Lu, also YA, and if you like video games, that’s basically a book for you. It’s set in the near future with this girl who is a hacker, and she gets tapped to play in essentially what’s like a cross between, like, League of Legends type of game, like a big tournament that she has to, again, she has to, like, solve this mystery of who is trying to sabotage the tournament, and there’s two hot dudes in it.

Sarah: Excellent!

[Laughter]

JJ: I’m trying to think, what did I read this year? What did I read this year that came out in 2017? Oh, The Language of Thorns by Leigh Bardugo, which is, it’s actually a collection of what she calls twisted fairy tales.

Sarah: Hmm!

JJ: Yeah, so Leigh wrote Six of Crows, Crooked Kingdom, and a trilogy of books called the Grisha Trilogy –

Sarah: Right.

JJ: – and The Language of Thorns are fairy tales set in this universe, but they don’t have the characters from the trilogies; they’re just fairy tales that people in this universe would tell each other?

Sarah: Hmm?

JJ: And they’re so good. And they, there’s just one little twist in every single one of them that just, they’re, they’re recognizable but different. There’s, she’s, I mean, I think Leigh is absolutely brilliant, and also the packaging on this book is really, really gorgeous, and I’m a sucker for that kind of a thing? But I also recommend The Language of Thorns.

Amanda: Is it necessary to read or finish the Grisha Trilogy before reading?

JJ: No, no.

Amanda: Okay.

JJ: These are complete standalones, because they’re essentially fairy tales, so what, and I think for me the joy of reading them was recognizing the fairy tales that she was riffing off of? The ones that we know, like “The Little Mermaid,” the, you know, The Nutcracker, the little soldier, or the tin soldier; like, all of those are in there, but remixed in ways that are just new and different? Yeah. I, I love kind of fairy-tale-ish sort of retellings, so that, that was a real big standout for me this year. My own tastes are so varied, but, like, I love anything that is, like, dark and Gothic and fairy-tale-ish?

Sarah: Perfect.

JJ: I mean, I think that you can probably tell based on –

[Laughter]

JJ: – my first two books. Other, other sort of, in, in the vein of that kind of, like, dark fairy tale, I really love The Bear and the Nightingale?

Amanda: Oh, that one is really good.

JJ: By – yeah – by Katherine Arden. Oh, I just love that. The second book, her second book, The Girl in the Tower just came out, which I haven’t picked up yet, but I’m looking forward to. The Hazel Wood, I think, is coming out next week by Melissa Albert?

Sarah: Oh my gosh, that book is so good, and it is so absorbing, and it scares the shit out of me. Like, I have to read it, and then it’s like, okay! It’s fifteen minutes before it’s time for you to go to sleep. You need to switch to something else, because you can’t read this and then try to go to sleep. ‘Cause the, the creepy menace that’s in each scene is so very palpable, it scares the – like, it, it’s not like I’m afraid to go to sleep; it’s that I know my brain is in the wrong state for me to go to sleep. Does that make sense?

JJ: Yeah, no, your brain just spins out and goes, what if?

Sarah: Yep.

JJ: [Laughs] I love creepy. I love creepy.

Sarah: Oh, creepy, that book, the creep factor is like, it’s extremely high-grade level, highly refined creepy.

JJ: Uprooted by Naomi Novik.

Sarah: I love that book.

JJ: I love that book so much! I actually just reread it the other day, and I also really love the romance in that book. It’s just, it’s like, it’s like Grumpy Cat and a dog. Like Grumpy –

Sarah: [Laughs] Yes!

JJ: Sarkan is totally Grumpy Cat, and then Agnieszka, she’s totally like the puppy who’s like, well, I’m going to make a mess and do things – oh, I just love that romance; it’s so cute!

Sarah: I have got a magic! I’m going to do a magic now! Whee!

JJ: Exactly! [Laughs] And Deathless by Catherynne Valente.

Amanda: Oh my God, that book turned my heart inside out. It is –

JJ: Ohhh!

Amanda: – so beautiful, but so heartbreaking. I probably ugly-sobbed twice during that book.

JJ: I had to reread the ending, like, five times, ‘cause I was, what happens in it, is it –

Amanda: And it’s such a tough book to describe to people.

JJ: Yeah.

Amanda: It’s just like, just read it. Please just read it.

JJ: Yeah.

Amanda: You don’t need to know what it’s about.

JJ: So, yeah, those are my –

Sarah: [Laughs]

JJ: – those are my recommendations.

[music]

Sarah: And that brings us to the end of this episode. Thanks to S. Jae-Jones, or JJ. Her book Shadowsong is out as of Tuesday, February 6, 2018, so it is on sale now! You can find it and the first book, Wintersong, wherever books are sold. I will have links, of course, to Wintersong and Shadowsong, plus all of the other books we mentioned, at smartbitchestrashybooks.com/podcast in the show notes for this entry.

Next week I am going to have an interview with Jasmine Guillory, author of The Wedding Date, which you might also have heard many things about. I hope you will come back and join us for that.

This episode is brought to you by More or Less a Marchioness by Anna Bradley. The Somerset sisters, three beautiful, headstrong debutantes in Regency England, are discovering that a bit of scandal is a delightful thing. For the sake of propriety, Iris Somerset has kept her rebellious streak locked away, but though she receives a proposal from a suitable match, Iris can’t marry a man she knows isn’t truly enamored with her. In fact, Iris no longer wants to be chosen; she wants to choose. What kind of debutante in their right mind refuses a marquess? Iris is just beginning to find out. More or Less a Marchioness by Anna Bradley is available everywhere e-books are sold and at kensingtonbooks.com.

Each episode receives a transcript, and the transcript is handcrafted by garlicknitter; thank you, garlicknitter! [You’re welcome! – gk] This week’s transcript is being brought to you by Lauren Dane’s Whiskey Sharp: Unraveled. The sharpest ache comes from wanting what you think you cannot have. Whiskey Sharp: Unraveled is the newest contemporary romance from New York Times and USA Today bestselling author Lauren Dane. Maybe Dolan has lived independent, free-spirited, and unattached since she left home at sixteen. Whiskey Sharp, Seattle’s sexy, vintage-styled barber shop and whiskey bar gave her a job and a reason to put down roots. The temptation of brooding and bearded Alexsei Petrov makes it a hell of a lot better. You can find Whiskey Sharp: Unraveled at all book retailers, and you can learn more at laurendane.com.

If you enjoy the podcast and would like to help us continue to grow and commission transcripts for older episodes, or you’d like a fresh and piping hot compliment crafted by yours truly, have a look at patreon.com/SmartBitches. Monthly pledges of as little as one dollar a month are deeply appreciated and make a sizable difference in the continuing growths of the show. Did I just say growths of the show? I think I did, and I’m going to leave that in there because now I’m thinking, like, the podcast has an extra arm like that Christina Dodd cover, and then maybe it has, you know, some extra appendages for cooking things so I could keep recording, and then my other arms, or the podcast arms, can make me lunch? I’m kind of hungry, so that’s probably why my brain went in that direction.

Either way, I want to thank some of the Patreon folks personally. So to Laurel and Kendal, to Becky and Brad, thank you for being part of our podcast community.

Are there other ways to support the show? Of course. You’re listening, so you’re awesome, and thank you for that. If you would like to leave a review and help other people find us or tell a friend or just yell, you should listen to this show! I don’t think anyone would look at you very strangely, and I appreciate your support, that you listen, that you recommend, that you subscribe, and you review! They’re all excellent.

The music you’re listening to comes from Sassy Outwater. You can find her at @SassyOutwater on Twitter. This is “Strictly Sambuca” by the Peatbog Faeries from their new album, Live @ 25. You can find the Peatbog Faeries at their website, peatbogfaeries.com, and you can find the album at Amazon and iTunes, and much like all of the other things we talk about, I will have links in the podcast entry, better known as the show notes.

I will also have links to JJ’s podcast, the development of the game based on her books that Amanda mentioned, and if you are really feeling like you want Girl Scout cookies, now that we talked about them so much, I’ll have a link to order them online. Girl Scouts are awesome.

And finally, I end with a joke because I’m a terrible human being, and Anoia is enabling me because she sent me great ones. So are you ready for a terrible joke? Here we go:

Why do cows wear bells?

Why do cows wear bells?

‘Cause their horns don’t work.

[Laughs] More cowbell! We all need more cowbell. Yes, or at least Orville – Orville doesn’t want more cowbell. He is still on the desk; he just wants to bang his tail against my sound box.

Anyway, on behalf of JJ and Amanda and Orville and me and everyone here, we wish you the very best of reading. Have a wonderful weekend, and we will see you next week! Bye-bye!

[dreamy music]