314. Talking Travel with RedHeadedGirl and Sonja Rouillard

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Sarah Wendell: Hello, and welcome to episode number 314 of Smart Podcast, Trashy Books. I’m Sarah Wendell from Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, and with me today are Redheadedgirl and Sonja Rouillard. We are going to talk about travel. Sonja Rouillard is author of the book Romance Readers Guide to Historic London, so we are going to talk about the origin story to that travel guide and how it helped Redheadedgirl’s own trip to London. We also learn about what locations may be next for the travel guide editions and what research is like when building a reader-focused travel guide. And of course we talk about travel and favorite places.

During the interview, Redheadedgirl asked a question that I’ve been having a very good time pondering as well, so I want to ask you: if money and time were not an obstacle, where would you want to go? Cool question to ponder, huh? If you want to tell me your answer, I would love to hear it. You can email me at sbjpodcast@gmail.com, or you can leave a voicemail at 1-201-371-3272. I would really be curious to hear where you would like to travel to.

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Sarah: Redheadedgirl and I are here with Sonja Rouillard. Is that correct? Rouillard?

Sonja Rouillard: Yes.

Sarah: Could you please introduce yourself and tell the people who will be listening who you are and what you do? And you can introduce all your names; it’s totally fine if you’ve got more than two.

Sonja: Oh, thank you. Thank you, thank you! Yes, hi, I’m Sonja Rouillard, and I am an erotic romance contemporary author as Kate Allure, and I have a  nonfiction book that’s my baby that is the Romance Readers Guide to Historic London, and that’s under my name, Sonja Rouillard. And, and that’s who I am! And I have, as Kate, I’m super excited; I have a bunch of books coming out from Entangled. The most recent one will be My Gentleman Dom in October. So, so it’s me!

Sarah: Fabulous! Welcome!

Redheadedgirl: Hello!

Sarah: So Redheadedgirl, you have questions. Would you like to ask your questions?

Redheadedgirl: I do have questions. I used the Romance Readers Guide to Historic London when I was in London, which was great.

Sarah: I am glad that you used the guide to London in London; that seems like the logical place to make that happen.

Redheadedgirl: Yeah. [Laughs] It was very useful! ‘Cause, ‘cause even though I was not able to sneak into White’s, I knew where it was, and I took a –

Sarah: They don’t have a sign, right? There’s no sign.

Redheadedgirl: There’s no sign, and with, it, it hadn’t occurred to me that it still existed and was still a thing and was still a place that I could take a very annoyed selfie outside of?

Sonja: Yeah, it doesn’t even have a, it doesn’t even have a street address, so, yeah.

Redheadedgirl: No! It’s just a plain, like a completely nondescript thing that exists that’s there. It’s on the way to the –

Sonja: But it’s super –

Redheadedgirl: – you know, on the way to the Tube.

Sonja: It’s super cool to know that Beau Brummell, I mean, the, the bay window’s still there, and Beau Brummell sat in that window and made fun of people walking down the street, so – [laughs] – it’s just kind of cool to be there and see it. Yeah.

Redheadedgirl: [Laughs] Exactly. I’m sure his ghost made fun of me too. So my, my question for, like, the process of writing the whole guide was, like, some, some of the, the locations you pick are super obvious, like White’s or Brooks’ or Vauxhall –

Sonja: Mm-hmm.

Redheadedgirl: – and some of them are a little bit less obvious, like Newgate Prison or, I think there’s, like, a random wall that’s left of the tollbooth or something that I meant to go see, and I just ran out of time –

Sonja: Sure.

Redheadedgirl: – and stamina. [Laughs] So how did you pick what was going to go into the book?

Sonja: Sure! And maybe I should explain a little bit about what the book is for people. So I was going on a, my fiftieth birthday to London. I love to travel. I try to go with my husband’s on his trips, but I’d never been to London, and I’m a closet historic romance reader, all my life, even though I was writing contemporary. So I went looking for a book to show me where all these places are that are, that are really common in historic romance books, like Almack’s and White’s gentlemen’s club, and, and there was no book! There was, like, a hundred books to London; there was even, like, this little teeny book on medical museums; but there was nothing for the thirty million historic romance fans to show us, so that’s how it came about. And then once I had that in my mind and I’m going to write this book, it was, well, what goes in it? And of course, so, you know, it was kind of fun for six months. I kept, you know, I can’t make dinner, honey; I’m doing research! I read and read and read and kept a list of places and, and, and just developed this list. And so some of the more obscure ones, either I ran across it in a book or in researching, looking for those, basically, looking for those bits of history that are still there in London: surrounded by the modern city, those places that are still there. So that’s why, you know, it kind of came up, something would pop up. In fact, you go off and research and you’d end up spending, you know, I’d spend a day, like, suddenly off on this tangent and have to kind of pull myself back. So that’s why it’s this combination of things that are very common in historic romance novels, plus there’s more obscure things, plus museums where you can go into an actual historic mansion that would be the kind of mansion that a heroine would be in and see, you know, furniture or furnishings or costumes or, you know, historic dresses to also, you know, add to that experience. So I don’t know if that answers your question quite, but that’s how, that’s how the, the A to Z listing of places came about.

Redheadedgirl: I had planned to go to what a, Vauxhall, which is now just a, you know, generic park –

Sonja: Yeah.

Redheadedgirl: – and the – I was only in London for three days, so the timing really didn’t work, but you had mentioned that they had sort of recreated a version of Vauxhall –

Sonja: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Redheadedgirl: – in the Museum of London, which is, by the way, if your feet really hurt, a really excellent place to, you know, sit down for, like, twenty minutes or so?

Sonja: Yes.

Redheadedgirl: And just kind of soak it all in?

Sonja: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, no, and you walk in there, and it’s just small, but you’re immersed in that feel. They’ve got the sound, they’ve got the people in costume, and you’re just kind of immersed in that feel of what it would be like to be at Vauxhall Gardens, so that’s super cool.

Redheadedgirl: Yeah.

Sonja: And so that’s, yeah, that’s really, you know, the focus is trying to bring history alive and put blinders onto all the modern stuff and –

Redheadedgirl: Yeah.

Sonja: Yeah.

Redheadedgirl: Yeah, and they’ve done such a good job of displaying the costumes and, so you can see how things would have been worn and with, like, the hair and the accessories and everything.

Sonja: Exactly.

Redheadedgirl: It’s great. Highly recommended: Museum of London is awesome. Just go there. So other than London, do you have other guides planned?

Sonja: I do. I am so excited. I’ll be doing this until I’m a hundred years old, but obviously I’m going to do the Bath and the English countryside – or Bath.

Redheadedgirl: Yes!

Sonja: I want to do –

Redheadedgirl: Yes!

Sonja: – Scotland –

Sarah: Oooh.

Redheadedgirl: Mm-hmm.

Sonja: – with an Outlander focus. Paris, which has, there’s Rebecca, but there’s also a lot Georgette Heyer novels that are set there, but the one I’m really excited about that I was going to make last that I might bump to the, sooner is the US edition, and I’m calling it the Antebellum South –

Redheadedgirl: Mm-hmm.

Sonja: – and the Wild, Wild West. I’ll show you where the dude ranches are with the most handsome dudes. But you know, Western romance is really, really popular right now. And right down the middle will be a little Laura Ingalls Wilder, right down the middle of the country, ‘cause there’s places you can see –

Redheadedgirl: Mm-hmm.

Sonja: – from Laura Ingalls Wilder. And in every book I’m going to try to have something that’s a little unique to that book, because, like, in the first book, the London guide, there’s the A to Z listing of all these places, but that doesn’t really apply to other parts of the world. I mean, besides Gretna Green, there aren’t that many, you know, totally recognizable places from historic romance. So, so every book will have some kind of different feature, and the feature for the US edition, I’m going to hunt down historic hotels in every state of the union. And there’s the Historical Romance Retreat, which I would love to talk about in a little bit, but their first two years was in this amazing, the Davenport Hotel in Spokane, and it is just an incredible hotel. They recreated a room from the Doge’s Palace, and the lobby itself is just ornate and historic, and you can take a self-guided walking tour through the hotel. So I’m going to be hunting down those kinds of special places for the entire country, and that will be the special feature in that book. And –

Redheadedgirl: That sounds amazing.

Sonja: – I’m excited about that. And there’re actually some amazing – Lorraine Heath has a bunch of his-, Western historicals, and, and she’s actually set them in some, like, hotels and things that were originally, like, stagecoach hotel and stuff, so that’s, that’ll just be a lot of fun to research.

Redheadedgirl: [Laughs] I would even give that to my, my parents in their retirement. They have a camper van, so they just drive around –

Sonja: Oh golly, I didn’t even think of that!

Redheadedgirl: – to places.

Sonja: That’s fabulous! Take my book and –

Redheadedgirl: Yeah.

Sonja: You know, you can, you can have an afternoon tea. Doesn’t always mean you stay in the hotel.

Redheadedgirl: Exactly!

Sonja: – hotel, yeah.

Redheadedgirl: Exactly; you’ve got to research to make sure that there’s good food!

Sonja: Yeah. Yeah.

Redheadedgirl: Very important. [Laughs] So I saw that you have done lots and lots of traveling –

Sonja: Mm-hmm.

Redheadedgirl: – in your time.

Sonja: Mm-hmm.

Redheadedgirl: What is your favorite place that you’ve visited so far?

Sonja: Well, you know, I had used to live close to Canada, so I’ve been in and out of Canada as a child, but the, the, when I married my husband, we both took our first trip out of the, real trip out of the country, and it was to Paris. And we went on a honeymoon in Paris in December, and that first trip we took a train out – and it was a total budget trip. We stayed in an attic room, but you could open up this attic window and peer down through all of Paris and see the Palais Garnier and the Eiffel Tower; it was amazing – but we took a train out to the Fontainebleau castle, and it’s snowing. There are only seven of us – I think it was a palace, Fontainebleau Palace – there are only seven of us in there, and it’s right before lunch, so they were kind of following along and shutting the doors behind us, but we got to walk through this place all by ourselves, and that was amazing. Then when we went into, to the park, and it’s snowing, and he, and my – I have picture – like, he has a, a red umbrella, and it’s heavy snowing, and there’s a swan in the pond, and this is, like, magical, so. So Paris is my go-to place.

But then I went to London, and I just fell in love with London! The people there were so nice. And then you get to the hotel – in this case it was the Grosvenor House – you get to the hotel –

Redheadedgirl: Mm-hmm?

Sonja: – and they’re like, we have our historian here to talk with you, and he had spread out all this information, all these pamphlets from their entire history, and I was just, like, floored that even, that a hotel would have a historian, you know?

Sarah: I was just going to say, I didn’t realize that, that hotels had on-staff historians!

Sonja: I, I know.

Sarah: That’s a seriously cool job. Like, that’s a romance hero job.

Redheadedgirl: Oh yeah, but I want that job. [Laughs]

Sonja: I know; it was great! And so the hotels, to be in the guide, the second half of the book is the hotels, the restaurants, and to be in the guide, you either have to be historic, you have to be old, or you have to have amazing connections to Americans or to princesses, and so the reason the Grosvenor House is in there, which is, you know, not that old – from 1929, I believe – was these ties to Americans. First that the little princesses, now Queen Elizabeth and her sister, like, learned to skate – there used to be a huge skating rink – they learned to skate there, and there’s those connections, and there used to be these, like, what we call debutante balls, but they would have their balls there. But then during World War II it became the officer’s mess for US soldiers, and there were, they were feeding ten thousand a day out of that, what formerly was the ice rink. So, so every book has some kind of, you know, has to fit either historically or have these, like, amazing connections to princesses and princes, because, you know, that’s historic romance and –

Redheadedgirl: Mm-hmm.

Sonja: – to Americans. So, like, Brown’s Hotel is that, where the first phone call was ever made. Alexander Graham Bell was, was trying to pitch his phone idea to, to people in London, and he was staying in that hotel and found out that they had run a telegraph line out to, the owners had an estate just out of town, and they’d run a telegraph line. So the big thing was, he was going to run his, try out his phone there. And the first time he did it, it was a failure. There was just clicking noises, and it didn’t work, and it took him a minute to realize that this was a, a public line for telegraphing –

Redheadedgirl: Hmm.

Sonja: – so they tried it again at, like, 2:30 in the morning when nobody else was on and made that first, you know, successful telephone call in England, and of course he, he was of Scottish descent, but by that time he’d made the US his home, so I think he’s a US person, so. Anyway, this just, it’s just so much fun and, and, and I love the research. I didn’t even know this was a part of me, but that’s why I said I could go off on a tangent for days – [laughs] – you know, and finally have to reel it back, or the book would have been, like, you know, ten thousand pages long.

Redheadedgirl: Right. Right. I, I admit that I ended up leaving my copy in London when I left London. I, the hotel I had, I was in, had a little book collection, including some travel books, and I don’t know if this is a familiar problem to anyone listening, but I tend to buy a lot of books when I travel? So I needed to lighten the load. [Laughs]

Sarah: Oh, sure.

Sonja: But you left it there for somebody else. I love that!

Redheadedgirl: But I, I left it there for somebody else to find.

Sonja: I love that.

Redheadedgirl: Yeah!

Sarah: Which is lovely!

Sonja: But yes, no. I end up picking up books too, you know, wherever I go. In fact, in the, oh, they called the Catwalks – shoot. In Brighton, very, very old section, there’s a little warren of, of little streets, and –

Redheadedgirl: Mm-hmm.

Sonja: – and Kate Allure, the erotic romance author, always likes to go to sex shops. In fact, in Europe they’re really kind of nice; they’re really elegant. And so I did, I went down, and I found it, and I end up getting, like, books there and, yeah. So I do that too, end up coming back with books.

Redheadedgirl: Yeah. How do you feel that your travels have enhanced your writing process? For either one of your personas?

Sonja: Well, for, so there’s, so for Kate – you know, this is the thing: my favorite movies are rom-coms, but I like rom-, travel rom-coms. You know, the ones that are set, like, there’s a time-travel-y – course I’m a drawing a blank on the names of these – but any kind of one that’s set in, in, in Italy or in, well, just watch Mamma Mia again in Greek isles. Course I’ve never been to Greece –

Redheadedgirl: Yeah.

Sonja: – and now I have to go! I want to go to that, you know, I want to stay in that hotel, if it exists, right. So there’s that, and then so for Kate, I actually like to set my stories in all different cities. So they’re short, they’re all, like, they’re more like forty thousand words, and so I’ll set them in different places. And sometimes – and it’s weird; it’s happened several times where I hadn’t yet been to the place and then ended up going there before the story ever comes out. So New Orleans was one –

Redheadedgirl: Mm-hmm.

Sonja: – and I – so the story was already written, but it was still being, you know, edited, and there I am, and so I went to all the places I mentioned, and I ended up moving. Like, this restaurant didn’t turn out to be right, so I found this amazing little dive-y place with a jazz band, and so suddenly I used that one, and it, there’s a scene set in the old rundown courthouse, so it was kind of fun to walk around, just walk around the courthouse and – so that happened a couple times. Same with, with a, a story set in, in Dallas, and then after the fact, I ended up going to Dallas, but the book hadn’t come out yet, so then I could –

Redheadedgirl: Mm-hmm.

Sonja: – kind of go there and check out to see how accurate it was.

Redheadedgirl: If money and time were not an obstacle, what is the trip you’d most like to take? You can’t say Greece, ‘cause you already said that.

Sonja: [Laughs] Most – I have a bucket list a mile long, but, so the place I want to go for, in a few years, is a little island called – and I don’t know if I say it right – Rangiroa? In the South Pacific?

Redheadedgirl: Mm-hmm.

Sonja: On this island there are five grass huts and a communal hut, and for the last thirty years there was a French chef and his wife, and there’s just these five huts, so the most guests – ‘cause a hut could hold three people, but the most huts in those, most people that could be in there would be maybe three, so at most you might have fifteen people on the island. That’s my bucket list. Unfortunately, they retired, and when you go to the main resort that oversees this called Kiraoro, K-I-R-A-O-R-O, they said it’s, you know, currently closed, and they will let you know when it reopens, so I’m hoping. It’s on the bucket list for a few years from now, so hopefully it’ll reopen. But that’s, that’s on my bucket list, so. And then, of course, if you’re over there, you, you could fly into Tahiti –

Redheadedgirl: Right.

Sonja: – and –

Sarah: Oh darn.

Redheadedgirl: Life’s rough!

Sarah: That’s just terrible.

[Laughter]

Sarah: I’m sorry; you have to connect through Tahiti. [Huffs] Fine!

Redheadedgirl: If I must.

Sonja: And I’m going to be writing an erotic suspense. I’ve been working on it for years, but it actually is set on this, like, private island in the South Pacific, so I know that if I get to go, I’m going to arrange to meet with – and that is the cool thing, when you asked how does it work with the traveling, ‘cause you know, I, I just start writing to people, and they’re amazingly helpful! So I’m going to ask for, to meet the manager and ask for a tour of the, like, facilities, and how do you run a resort on a little island where you have to ship everything in and just, like, you know, kind of find out how that –

Redheadedgirl: Yeah.

Sarah: It’s a good question.

Sonja: So that’s, you know, a plan. And then you can write off a little of it. Can’t write off the whole trip, but you can write off some, so. [Laughs]

Redheadedgirl: I support it. [Laughs]

Sonja: Yeah, exactly, exactly. And I, you know, ‘cause, like, I can do a lot of research, but when you’re actually talking to people and you’re actually there, there are things that you didn’t know or didn’t even think to ask, and then they can make the story more realistic or can add an interesting plot point that you can turn the story around.

Sarah: Now, you mentioned when you were talking about your upcoming guides that you want to write one about Scotland.

Sonja: Yes.

Sarah: What are your plans for that one?

Sonja: Well, start by reading a whole lot of Scottish romance, historic romance novels, and wonderfully, I’ve met and worked through, through this book – I don’t know if I mentioned that in the book I have short excerpts of the places whenever possible, and the one that gave me the idea was Sabrina Jeffries – I’m looking it up right now – Sabrina Jeffries had this amazing, sensual little scene set in the British Museum, and it’s from The Forbidden Lord, and in this scene, the lord takes this young heroine to, to see the Elgin Marbles, and they’re, like, naked statues, and, and he’s wanting to kind of, I don’t know, make her – I don’t know what he wants to do – unsettle her, whatever, but instead she’s really intrigued by the statues, and she kind of reaches out and she touches them, and then he’s a little bit taken aback, right. He’s like, oh my. So I was reading that, and I was like, wow, that would be so great to have that in the book, and so I wrote to her and got her permission, and, and then she was kind enough then to write the foreword for the book, and after that I started looking for more places for, you know, and through that process I met all these amazing authors, and so now I’ll be doing the same process for people that write in Scotland and looking for – and like I said, they’re not common places like, you know, White’s gentlemen’s club is a common place, but they, they do often set them in real hotels, real, real castles, I mean.

Redheadedgirl: Mm-hmm.

Sonja: And so that, that will be the first step, and looking at, then I’ll be researching where are there castle hotel stays or mansion hotel stays? Then I’ll be looking also at Outlander. There are some packaged Outlander tours and, but, you know, just how can I go experience these, these places from Outlander? I’m hoping to save a little time, little money, to do those, to do the two books at the same time. Bath and English countryside is one, and Scotland is one, but kind of go over there and work in them at the same time. It’s interesting because, you know, the, like, particularly for London, one of the most time-consuming things was finding places that had four-poster beds, the hotels, ‘cause their websites, they want to tout how modern they are, and particularly for businessmen and their modern conveniences, but then if you do the research and you find, oh, but they actually do have one suite with a four-poster bed that’s historic, and so I think, I’m thinking for Scotland it won’t be quite that difficult, ‘cause they’re not really, you know, trying to get businessmen into their facilities, but, but finding those unique places that you can stay and experience.

Redheadedgirl: Mm-hmm.

Sonja: And, and speaking of that, even for people that can’t afford to go to Europe, there is this amazing experience here, and it’s called the Historical Romance Retreat; I mentioned it earlier. The first one was set in the Davenport Hotel in, in Spokane, and now this time it’s going to be in the Mission Inn in Riverside, California, and for that four-day period there’ll be thirty-eight historic romance authors, and while during the daytime, you know, we don’t really wear, you know, period clothing all day long necessarily, but for the afternoon tea, everybody decks out in historic clothing or just dresses up a little bit, there’ll be a grand ball and, and the activities are very immersive. Like, last year with Eloisa James, we made hats, Victorian fascinator hats, and that’s what was so exciting, because the readers, I mean, the readers made the most gorgeous hats. My hat was lopsided and kept falling off. It just was not a success, but the, the readers got to wear their hats then to the afternoon tea, and so it’s just a very immersive experience, and that is what I’m looking for over in Europe. I may not find it, but I was really excited to find it here in the US.

Sarah: You mentioned that one of the things that you include in your guides and also with the Historical Romance Retreat is the experience of doing the things that you’re reading about, not just being at a place where you read about or visiting, but actually immersing yourself in that experience in one way or another. What is it that that brings for you as a reader? What are the things that really draw you to that type of experience?

Sonja: Even before I was a writer, even before I had any idea of doing this guide, traveling, for me – and I think this, I can give this, my mother has, has passed away, but this is one of the things she gave me was this adventurous spirit, and we had no money. Like, you know, it was get in the car, throw in a tent, and go somewhere, and – but that adventurous spirit is what she left me, and then when I get to go somewhere amazing I want to, to research it ahead of time. That’s almost half the fun for me is researching it ahead of time, and that’s what I think for the fan of historic romance is to have these experiences, to do things, and like in the book, I say you can go into the, Hyde Park, and you can go on a paddle boat in the, in the Serpentine pond there, and there’s spots where you can’t see the modern world, and you can, and, but there’s swans floating by, just like in the books, just like it was a hundred years ago, two hundred years ago, so you can have that kind of experience and kind of feel like what it would be like for the characters in the book. So it kind of just makes it all a, a fuller, richer experience.

Sarah: So what led you to include excerpts in your book, and will you do that with the future books that you’re writing?

Sonja: Like I said, I don’t want the book to be dry, and having just that first view from the point of view of a, of a character could bring it really alive, and so in, in Tessa Dare’s story, the character, before they had a bridge over there, the character has to take a boat over, and of course in the scene, the boat rocks, and she falls into the arms of the hero, and there’s a little clutch there, and then she, they paddle across – a boatman takes them across – and when they get there, she gets out, she climbs the hill, and the lights come on, and you see it from her point of view, so it just kind of brings it alive, whereas I give you the details of how – oh, there it is. Tessa Dare’s Any Duchess Will Do, that’s from that book, and for instance, she said, “Pauline looked. She blinked. She caught sight of a glowing orb, one single ball of light. And then there were two, and then there were ten.” And so you, you get that. I mean, it just gives me tingles reading it, makes me want to go back and read the Tessa Dare story again. So that’s why I realized that that could really add some, bring it to life, bring these places to life. So absolutely, that’s what I want to do.

I did, I did learn. A cheat is that I’ll go with a bunch of keywords, and I’ll just sit there and go into, like, Amazon or Google, and you can put the keywords in, and they’ll pop up books that have those words in them, so that’s one way I found them. But then when you actually read the excerpt, it has to be the right excerpt too. So, but yeah, I think it’ll be fun. It’ll be a lot of fun, and that’s why I said Georgette Heyer has wonderful scenes set in Versailles. Of course Jane Austen will have some scenes set in Bath, and so –

Redheadedgirl: Hm.

Sonja: – those are easy. Those’ll be easy to find, so.

Sarah: I imagine that it’s also important that the things that you’re writing about be in places where it’s less likely for them to have been torn down, so you’re looking at cities that have pretty good care of their historical features; otherwise, you’re going to be sort of like, well, here is the remains of where there was a house.

Sonja: Exactly.

Sarah: You can sort of see it.

Sonja: Exactly. My aunt wanted to research her, our, our history, and so she took me with her. Part of my family, my, my dad was almost a hundred percent Native American, Mdewakanton and Santee Sioux, so that’s that part, but the other part is German and Norwegian, and she wanted to research the German, and so she took me there, and she took me to what was called Tiegenhof, but now it’s called Nowy Dwór, ‘cause now it’s part of Poland. After World War II, that part of Germany got give-, given to Poland, and now it’s Polish. So we went there, and we found the street, and it, and, now, this was right after the fall of the Berlin Wall, so there was a radical, I mean it was just a radical difference. You crossed out of, out of Germany, out of western, out of western Germany into the east, and it was radically different looking, so that was interesting. So I bet this road is, you know, not the same now, but we found all these foundations. We found foundations, brick foundations for these old homes. We never could isolate which would have been – ‘cause she had the street address – which would have been the house, but still –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Sonja: – I just couldn’t resist; I took a brick.

Redheadedgirl: [Laughs]

Sonja: I think they were digging up the bricks and using them for rebuilding during –

Redheadedgirl: Mm-hmm.

Sonja: – during the bad times? But there were all these, like, loose bricks and these foundations, and so I, yeah, I brought one back, and – but, so, exactly right. If the, if the, if they’re gone now, it wouldn’t work. But, you know, luckily, a lot of the castles have either turned into hotels or museums. You were asking about finding places, going to places that still exist, and that, I think, you know, will be pretty easy to start with, and then trying to, I think for Scotland – Bath and English countryside, it’s pretty contained, but for Scotland I’m going to have to do, and I think that will be the feature for that book, will be more of, like, a driving tour kind of thing, because it’ll be more spread out. It’s going to take more effort to get – you know, you can see half the sites in the A to Z listing in a couple days in, in the current London book, right, but this one will be harder because it’ll be longer drives to different places, and so I think I’ll end up doing, like, suggested driving tours, how to connect them all together. And I’ll also be exploring as, like, companions to go with that is the, there are some companies – Kristine Patrone, have you met her ever? She has, I think, One London Travel [Number One London]. She does some very wonderful, like last year, I went to Historical Romance Retreat, but she was doing a, a Scotland castle tour, so it was just like, oh, wouldn’t I love to do that! So I’ll look at those kinds of offerings too, for people that want a simple, easy way to do it. I know there’s some packaged Outlander tours.

Redheadedgirl: Yeah.

Sarah: There are a couple, I think.

Redheadedgirl and Sonja: Yeah.

Sonja: Yeah.

Sarah: What about castles? That’s something you want to explore as well, right?

Sonja: Castles, absolutely! Well, manor houses and castles, both the ones that you can only tour and then the ones that you can stay in, and what I do in the book, I, I rank – and I will in the future books – I rank how authentic the experience will be, and then I try to give you insider tips, ‘cause it really makes a difference. If you go at the wrong time for Arundel Castle or even, even Buckingham Palace or Windsor, you know –

Redheadedgirl: Mm-hmm.

Sonja: – you go at the wrong time, you’re not going to get in, ‘cause if they’re in residence then you don’t get to go in. Or they do have, like, they have festivals at Arundel Castle, so I try to give, like, insider tips, and also insider tips to the rooms that are the more historic or if they’re offering experiences. Again, what experiences? Some places offer boats. So actually, at Clifton House you can take a very expensive private historic boat tour, which would be lovely if you have the money, but, you know, when I did the research I discovered this, this major park that is attached to it, so you can go there and you can rent paddle boats for practically nothing, or they have a, a group boat ride once a day for, you know, but then again, you have to go in the summer at the right time, but to find those experiences that – at a budget, at a budget-er price than, than the expensive. Another example would be –

Redheadedgirl: Mm-hmm.

Sonja: – Versailles. I went there, and I got to go back, and we took our children with us, and we put them up in a, an Airbnb, little apartment, and right next door, around the corner, we stayed in the original, at the time very rundown, little hotel, but it was now, like, refurbished and lovely, and we stayed there in the same hotel where we had our honeymoon. But anyway, so we all went to Versailles, and it was just, I mean, it was, it was just an ordeal, and it was shoulder-to-shoulder, bumper-to-bumper people, hot, sweaty people. Like, you, I was just panicked. Like, you’re shuffling along, and you can’t even, you know, what, you couldn’t get out if you wanted to, but what I had discovered before was that you could stay later and pay for this presentation of music and dance within the Versailles, so we, after we did our, you know, afternoon tour through Versailles, then we went down to the village and we ate something, and we went back at 7:30 for this thing, and it was only, like, I think there couldn’t have been more than a hundred people. They walk you through the tour every half hour, and you go to one room and there’s somebody playing historic instruments; you go to another room and there’s these dancers dancing in the Hall of Mirrors.

Redheadedgirl: Oh my God.

Sonja: And there we were in the Hall of Mirrors with just a hundred people and these twelve dancers in costume, and so we went through almost all the same rooms that we’d been in this, earlier in the day, but it was just such a better experience. So it takes a little planning. And then we stayed and they had fireworks over the gardens at night, so we just went down and sat down on the grass and waited for the fireworks, and it was amazing. It takes a little planning; we had to buy them advance. The price wasn’t outrageous, but then, you know, getting back to town was a little hard, because the, the train doesn’t necessarily run that late at night; we had to arrange for, like, an Uber to come get us, but, but by and far, like, if you have to, if you can’t go to Versailles in the dead of winter on a Tuesday morning, you know, I would say try to plan for something like this, because the experience is just so much better, and, and particularly if you have some, if you have anybody with claustrophobia or issues, it’s like going in the afternoon, I just, I regretted that the minute we were in there, and there’s not even a way to back out of it, right; you’re just shuffling along in these mobs, so.

So those are the kinds of things I’ll be looking for as I go forward, and, and that for me is fun. I just love the research. I plan, even before I wrote, like, I planned, I plan every trip. [Laughs] I joke I plan every trip to within an inch of our life, but that’s, like, the fun. It’s always been the fun for me is the planning. So, and now I get to do it and write too, so it’s fabulous.

Sarah: So I always ask this question: what are you reading that you want people to know about?

Sonja: So I just finished reading Sabrina Jeffries’ The Secret of Flirting, wonderful new book that just came out, so I highly recommend that. And a local author and a friend of mine, it’s on my TBR pile, but I’m super excited, and it’s getting great reviews, just came out with With Love in Sight by Christina Britton, so, and very excited, very excited about that book too. What about you? What are you, what are you reading right now?

Redheadedgirl: I am currently reading Kelly Bowen’s Last Night with the Earl, which comes out –

Sonja: Fun.

Redheadedgirl: – when does this come out? [Hums] It doesn’t come out until September. Sorry, people. But it’s a historical where the hero was at Waterloo, and he got badly injured and is badly scarred, and there’s all sorts of angst, and the heroine was his best friend’s fiancé, only she found out that her fiancé was kind of a dingbat, and so there’s angst, and there’s art and angst and some smuggling on the side.

Sonja: Oh fun.

Sarah: – possibly go wrong with angst and smuggling?

Redheadedgirl: Nothing! Absolutely nothing.

Sonja: [Laughs]

Sarah: Angst and smuggling are an ideal pair.

Redheadedgirl: Yeah!

Sarah: I am going to start Wild Hunger by Chloe Neill. It’s been a really long time since I’ve read urban fantasy, but I’m very curious about it. It’s a whole spinoff series, so I don’t have to jump in and be like, who are these people? It’s the start of a new series in an established world, so I am pretty excited about that.

Sonja: Oh, that’s good.

Sarah: Yeah!

[music]

Sarah: And that brings us to the end of our interview. I want to thank Sonja Rouillard for hanging out with us. If you would like to find out more about the Romance Readers Guide, we will have links to all of the books we mentioned, of course, in the podcast show notes at smartbitchestrashybooks.com/podcast. You can find more information about romance reader guides at romancereadersguides.com, and you can find Kate Allure at kateallure.com.

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Today’s podcast transcript is brought to you by Fling Club by Tara Brown. It’s revenge, sweet and hot, in this first book of the sexy and wickedly funny series by international bestselling author Tara Brown. For the rich, young, and beautiful, summertime in the Hamptons means one thing: Fling Club. Only this time, Cherry Kennedy won’t be selecting a boy for a fleeting romance. Nope; this season, Cherry is out for revenge. Her target? The Fling Club founder and society darling who slept with Cherry’s now-very-ex-boyfriend. And all Cherry needs is the perfect guy for her plan… Ashley Jardine can’t afford to refuse. He scored almost a full ride to MIT, but that almost still costs a lot. And this is so much money for a little game of revenge and a chance – albeit short – to live the high life. Here, rich girls rule the shore, and everyone has a role to play. Only nothing in the job description warned Ashley that the redhead who’s running the scheme would be so crazy and cute, or that he wouldn’t be able to stop thinking about her. Now, everything is going to plan – until an unexpected attraction raises the stakes. It’s enough to turn the perfect payback into absolute heartbreak. Readers who love New Adult, revenge fantasies, and sexy summertime romances will swoon over Fling Club. Fling Club by Tara Brown is published by Skyscape Books and available wherever books are sold. Learn more about the author at tarabrownauthor.com.

I want to thank all of our Patreon supporters for helping the podcast continue and helping me commission transcripts for the episodes deep in our archives. Did you know this podcast is almost ten years old? Isn’t that just amazing? It’s amazing to me! If you would like to have a look, you can take a peek at all of our support levels at patreon.com/SmartBitches.

If you have had a peek, if you’ve left a review, if you’ve told a friend, if you subscribed, or if I’m hanging out in your eardrums right now, thank you! I’m really honored that you do that.

The music you’re listening to is provided by Sassy Outwater. You can find Sassy @SassyOutwater on Twitter. This is Caravan Palace. This track is called “Beatophone.” You can find their two-album set, Caravan Palace and Panic, at Amazon and iTunes, and you can find out more about Caravan Palace at caravanpalace.com.

And now it’s time for a terrible joke, because this is my favorite part. This is really bad! This is from Lum1nar. Okay, you ready? [Clears throat]

What happens if you slap Dwayne Johnson on the ass?

What happens if you slap Dwayne Johnson on the ass?

Well, you’ve hit Rock bottom!

[Laughs] Oh, I hope this really doesn’t inspire anybody to go smack Dwayne Johnson. He’s a, he’s a decent dude; he doesn’t deserve all that. [Laughs more] Hit Rock bottom! I wonder if that would hurt? I bet it would. [Still laughing]

And that brings us to the end of the episode. On behalf of Sonja Rouillard and Redheadedgirl and myself, we wish you the very best of reading. Have a great weekend, and we will see you back here next week.

[jamming music]