416. Beekeeping and Romance with Olivia Waite

[music]

Sarah Wendell: Hello, and thank you for inviting me to hang out in your eardrums. I’m Sarah Wendell from Smart Podcast, Trashy Books. This is episode number 416, and my guest today is Olivia Waite. Olivia is the author of The Care and Feeding of Waspish Widows, which is out now, and she’s also the new romance columnist for the New York Times. So we take a deep and joyful nerdy dive into beekeeping, confronting bi erasure in romance, and all of the fun ways in which she interacts with romance research. It’s a really fun conversation.

I want to thank Kate, Shana, Aarya, Claudia, and Leigh for questions that helped make this episode so interesting.

Now, I know you like podcasts because you are listening to this one, but you know about Jeff and Will, right? Sure you do! But if you don’t, let me let them introduce themselves:

Jeff: Hi, I’m Jeff.

Will: And I’m Will from the Big Gay Fiction Podcast. We’re proud to be part of the Frolic Podcast Network.

Jeff: Our show is for avid readers and passionate fans of gay romance fiction. Each week we bring you exclusive author interviews, book recommendations, and explore the latest in gay pop culture. We’ve talked to a wide range of authors, such as Casey McQuiston, Adriana Herrera, Becky Albertalli, and Suzanne Brockmann. T. J. Klune has appeared a number of times on the show to tell listeners about his epic tales featuring werewolves, wizards, and drag queens.

Will: New episodes are available every Monday. You can find us at biggayfictionpodcast.com and wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. We hope you’ll join us soon. Until then, keep turning those pages and keep reading!

Sarah: I will have links to where you can find the Big Gay Fiction Podcast in the show notes to this episode, along with all of the books we talk about, at smartbitchestrashybooks.com/podcast.

This episode is brought to you by Candlewick Press, publisher of The Mermaid, the Witch, and the Sea, the new YA fantasy novel by Maggie Tokuda-Hall. Now, you might remember Maggie was a recent guest on the show, and if you didn’t know, this book has everything: genderfluid pirates, witchcraft, Japanese cultural themes, and a nuanced exploration of colonialism. The pirate Florian, born Flora, has always done whatever it takes to survive, including sailing under false flag on the Dove as a marauder, thief, and worse. Lady Evelyn Hasegawa, a highborn Imperial daughter, is on board as well, accompanied by her own casket. But Evelyn’s one-way voyage to an arranged marriage in the Floating Islands is interrupted when the captain and crew show their true colors and enslave their wealthy passengers. Both Florian and Evelyn have lived their lives by the rules, and whims, of others. But when they fall in love, they decide to take fate into their own hands, no matter the cost. The Mermaid, the Witch, and the Sea by Maggie Tokuda-Hall is published by Candlewick Press and is available now wherever books are sold.

Hello again to our Patreon community. Thank you for being so wonderful. If you have supported the show with a pledge of any amount, you are making sure that every episode is accessible to everyone, and you’re keeping it going each week. If you would like to join our Patreon community, please have a look at patreon.com/SmartBitches.

As always, after the interview and conversation, I will end the episode with a really bad joke, and I will have links to everything we talk about in the show notes as well.

But for now, let’s do this interview. On with my conversation with Olivia Waite.

[music]

Olivia Waite: Hello! My name is Olivia Waite, and I’m a romance and sci-fi/fantasy author. I also write essays on the history and criticism of the romance genre, and I am the brand spanking new romance columnist for the New York Times Book Review.

Sarah: You are not!

Olivia: I so am! Oh my!

Sarah: [Gasps] Congratulations!

Olivia: Yeah, I got, like, the official go-ahead to tell people like last week, so I’ve been kind of slowly leaking it out there, but I’m very excited.

Sarah: Oh, that’s wonderful! How did that happen?

Olivia: The day that my last column went live at the Seattle Review of Books, I got an email from Tina Jordan saying, hey, so Jaime Green’s actually leaving after her next column goes up. Do you want to take over – like, do you want to do some reviews for us? And I’m like, oh my God, I just spent this whole week grieving because I was going to miss being a columnist so much! Um, yes! [Laughs]

Sarah: Oh, wow, congratulations!

Olivia: Thank you! So we did, we did one to test it out, but, you know, unsurprisingly, I loved doing it, and so while we’re fact-checking that, I’ve been starting to get pitches from a lot more publishers than I’m used to talking to.

Sarah: I should say!

Olivia: Yeah!

Sarah: So that, that actually leads to one of the questions that one of my, one of my writers, Aarya, had about being a, a critic and columnist while also being an author. How do you, how do you handle that?

Olivia: Well –

Sarah: Is it possible for you to shut off your brain while you’re reading as a critic versus as an author versus as a reader?

Olivia: No. But it nev-, it never has been?

Sarah: Yeah.

Olivia: I mean, I’ve been a critic even longer than I’ve been a writer, and I’d been –

Sarah: Mm-hmm?

Olivia: – hoping to be a critic even before I thought about writing fiction. Like, initially when I started out, you know, I loved books. I started working in bookstores; I thought about being an editor; I thought about being, you know, a copyeditor; I thought about doing book reviews professionally? Because I did actually have a, a book review column in my college newspaper, which was extremely seat-of-the-pants, ‘cause I was also the copyeditor, so I would just write up what books I’d been reading during the all-nighter we pulled getting the issue together.

Sarah: [Laughs] How many words will fit in this column? How many books do I need to fill this space?

Olivia: Exactly. That kind of –

Sarah: Yeah, I’ve been there.

Olivia: – it. 

Sarah: I was the editor of my college paper! [Laughs]

Olivia: Exactly. It was really fun, and I really loved it, and then when I went to grad school it was Comparative Literature, and so I’ve always been kind of taking books apart and seeing how they worked and how the machinery flows, both within genres and in literary fiction, poetry, ancient literature, all that good stuff. So I don’t really have an off mode, I think. [Laughs]

Sarah: I get it! I have the same problem. So can you give me a preview of some of your future columns?

Olivia: Oh! Ah, well, let me tell you, the book already came out, so I’m very happy to talk about this one, but one book that’s going to be in the first one is Vanessa Riley’s The Duke, a Lady, and a Baby?

Sarah: Oooh!

Olivia: Or, it’s A Duke, the Lady, and a Baby. It’s so fun. It’s so Vanessa Riley. She’s got this incredible period voice? Like, I read a lot of historicals, and I love historicals, but there’s definitely, like, a modern historical romance voice, and then there’s something that hews a bit closer to primary sources from the time period voice? And I think Vanessa Riley does that better than just about anybody else out there. Like, you just, you feel transported in a very particular way. Oh my gosh, this one’s so good. And they’ve given it this beautiful cover, and it’s so gorgeous, but the fonts are all very rom-com? And it, it’s ve-, it’s not super angsty; it’s, it’s very, like, kind of light angst? Like, a little murder-y. You know, a little melodrama. It’s really kind of Gothic? And I’m like, oh no! People are going to see the baby, and they see the little ribbon, and they’re going to, like, they’re going to think this is, like, some frothy historical romance like an Evie Dunmore type situation, and I’m like, no, no! There, there’s, like, a sinister chandelier; and somebody has been drugged at some point in the course of the plot; and the angsty duke lost a leg in the war and is not, like, good at dealing with it yet; and, like, it’s so Gothic!

Sarah: Whoa! That’s not what the cover communicates at all!

Olivia: [Laughs] No! It’s –

Sarah: Oh dear!

Olivia: No, I, I loved it! I mean, any discussion of prosthetics in historicals is just always welcome. And so, like, to have that kind of detail in here is just so good. And her, her heroine, Patience, is a, a Black Caribbean – I want to say rum. She’s an heiress, and she has family back across the ocean, but she doesn’t have anybody on her side in England, and now that her husband’s dead, she’s in a very tight spot concerning his relatives and custody of her son. It’s so tense and beautiful and wonderful, and it’s definitely something I was excited to talk about.

Sarah: Also sounds like one of those books, and there’ve been a few of them lately, where my writers and I often feel like we have a responsibility to say, hey, heads up! This cover does not match the insides –

Olivia: Right.

Sarah: – and if you pick this up expecting this, you’re going to get something very different.

Olivia: Yes. Yeah, and it can be so hard, you know, ‘cause reader expectations of covers are so complicated.

Sarah: And the cover is doing a job that has often nothing to do with the book, but it’s sometimes better if the cover represents the book a little more accurately!

Olivia: Yes. Like, for instance, my, my upcoming that comes out in one week is The Care and Feeding of Waspish Widows, and my heroines are both about forty-five? And they’re like, Olivia, we’re sorry; we’re not going to put forty-five-year-old women on the cover. And I’m like, ohhh, okay. I know. With stock photos and, like, all that stuff, and I’m like, you know, this – [laughs] – I did not feel like having that fight, like, on the day that they mentioned that, and I’m like, yeah, I’m, marketing, I know, I know. I mean, that’s part of what was so great about Mrs. Martin’s is there’s a woman with silver hair right there on the cover in a historical gown.

Sarah: I know! So congrats on your Waspish Widows. Tell me all about these waspish widows.

Olivia: Well, there’s really only one widow. Actually, no, that’s not true. There’s a bunch of them, but one widow is, the, the her-, only one of the heroines is a widow. Her name is Agatha; you met her in The Lady’s Guide to Celestial Mechanics. She’s a printer and an engraver. I’m very sorry about her lovely husband Thomas; I had to kill him off.

Sarah: [Laughs]

Olivia: – did not realize I was going to do that. He actually, like – I knew he was going to die, but then I had to expand his scene in The Lady’s Guide, and I’m like, I’m so sorry, Thomas! I love you, you deserve better, but you’ve got to go.

[Laughter]

Sarah: Sorry, dude.

Olivia: So, like – actually helped me. I was able to write him something really sweet and encouraging because I’m like, I know I’m going to be mean to him later. I’m so sorry!

She’s struggling under these new taxes and these new burdens on printers and publishers, and so in order to, like, kind of bump the profit margins, she’s pulling stuff from the warehouse. She’s pulling old plates of things and reissuing because those are things that are cheap to produce and guaranteed sellers, right. They know which ones are popular. You can always bring back an old edition of some poetry from like ten years back kind of a thing.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Olivia: Her print shop is in London, as we’ve seen, but she has the stereotype plates and a bigger press for the magazine out in a small town called Melliton about an hour outside London. And she goes to the warehouse, and oh my God! Bees have gotten in, and they’ve started building honeycomb on some of these printing plates, and she’s like, this seems dangerous. I have no idea what to do about it. She goes to her mother-in-law, her late husband’s mother, who is one of the many widows here, and says, hey, you know about bees; what should I be doing? And she said, you need to go talk to Penelope Flood. Penelope Flood is a local beekeeper. She’s not a widow; she’s still married. Her husband is a whaler; he’s away at sea on the same ship as her brother – dun-dun-dun.

Sarah: [Laughs]

Olivia: And she says, and Penelope’s like, oh yeah, I can help you with this, but they clearly like something in this area; otherwise, they wouldn’t have set up shop here. So why don’t we just set up a beehive right out back of the printing house, and I can keep an eye, and now you can have, like, some bees of your very own! So they start writing as Penelope, like, cares for the hive and sends her updates, and they start this epistolary friendship, and the next thing you know they’re kind of into each other. And it just takes them a while to get to the point where they realize, oh, you’re into me too! Oh! Oh no. And in the meantime, there’s a whole bunch of events around other local wives and widows and the mass protests that are happening in support of Queen Caroline, who is on trial during the year? It’s very, it’s very fun. Because if you’re writing about bees, you kind of have to write about communities. You can’t – like –

Sarah: Yeah!

Olivia: – have single bees. At least not honeybees. Like, you definitely have, like, single mason bees or bumblebees and things, but honeybees are very much, like, a communal kind of creature, so you have to write a whole community.

Sarah: And with what’s happening with different women at different social levels, that still affects other women –

Olivia: Absolutely.

Sarah: – much like what happens to one bee affects the community.

Olivia: Exactly. And, you know, the community has to continue even if some of the community members are not great, and so –

Sarah: Yep.

Olivia: – you’re going to have – it’s, basically, you’re going to have to have this fight over and over and over again. Like, your job of maintaining this community is never really done.

Sarah: So when I initially emailed you, I was like, let’s talk about bees! What were some of the things you learned about beekeeping, and how did they influence the characters and the story? And, and, and do you just sit around, think about bees all the time now?

Olivia: I do. I mean, I kind of do!

Sarah: Yeah.

Olivia: I’ve been in love with bees since I was a kid. Like, I get –

Sarah: Oh?

Olivia: I would, I would read nonfiction books about bees and get that thrill like when you’re reading good poetry. ‘Cause bees just –

Sarah: Yeah.

Olivia: – feel like living little pieces of poetry to me. They’re just, they’re amazing! And they’re weird. And they’re weirder than I actually was able to put in the book. Like, for instance, we didn’t discover bee dances until much, much later, so I can’t have people talk about bees using dance to communicate and going all into the beauty of that, because we didn’t know about it. And I’m like, oh, crap!

And we didn’t know about bee space, which is magical. Like, the reason modern hives work is because of bee space! There’s a certain ratio, if you leave spaces between the frames of a hive. So a rec-, a big box hive with rectangular frames inside, the frames are spaced precisely so the bees do not build honeycomb between them. If you give bees too much space, they’ll fill it with honeycomb, and if you give them too little space, they won’t go in there at all. They won’t actually, like, move around. If you give – and it’s really precise. I forget what the actual ratio is, ‘cause I couldn’t use it in the book! But it’s something like one and three-quarter inches?

Sarah: Wow!

Olivia: And that’s the space that they will move around in but not fill with stuff. And so moveable frames are spaced so that the, the honeycomb doesn’t connect from frame to frame, so you can take one out and check it and brush the bees off and get the honey and then put it back and take the next one, instead of having to, like, get all of bees out of the whole hive and then take out all the comb and then put the bees back in, and they’re like, where’s all the stuff we built? What’s going on?

Sarah: Right. Right, I have a bunch of neighbors that have pretty healthy hives in different places, and it’s very cool to watch them do exactly that, to check the, check the combs and check what’s going on inside.

Olivia: Yeah, it’s really something! My great-grandfather had Langstroth hives, the same kind of box hives, when I was growing up. And it was –

Sarah: Oh, that’s cool!

Olivia: Yeah! No, it was great. They had three box hives out by the little plot of – well, it was like a miniature farm, really. There was corn and vegetables and raspberries and an orchard and – I mean, obviously now I recognize, I’m like, oh yeah! Those bees were his pollinators for all of these plants.

Sarah: Of course!

Olivia: And, and at the time, as a kid, I was just like, oh my gosh, they’re buzzing so loud! I’m going to be way over here, thanks!

Sarah: [Laughs] Now I’m thinking like, hmm, bee dances. Country dances. What, what would the –

Olivia: Right?

Sarah: – bee country dances like back in the day?

Olivia: [Laughs]

Sarah: Kind of dances did they do at the social gatherings? [Laughs]

Olivia: Well, there were, there were actually a lot of, like, big social events around bees. Some of them were earlier than the Regency, and I don’t think I was able to fit any of them really in the book.

Sarah: So how did beekeeping influence your characters?

Olivia: Honestly, it’s because the more you read about bees, the more, the more you see how much people want bees to be like people? In both good ways and bad ways. And so you have –

Sarah: No kidding!

Olivia: – who are trying to, like, fix how bees are bees, especially in the early 19th century, which is before the – so the Langstroth hive was invented in 1852, and it became standard very quickly because of the way it used bee space and because it was so much better for the bees and for the beekeepers. It’s like, we still use them to this day with very little modification because they’re just so low, low-impact and so simple.

Sarah: Huh!

Olivia: But before that, you had this wave of, like when science was kind of exploding and amateur science was, was very popular in, in this romantic era and this big post-Enlightenment modern science explosion, you have a lot of people trying to design better beehives. So you had, like, ‘cause this, the traditional skep hive, your coiled straw hive dome, is very good bees. It’s great for bees! It’s extremely hard to get honey out of without destroying the colony.

Sarah: Right.

Olivia: Yeah, so you either have to kill the bees, or you have to take all of their comb away from them, and they’re not really happy about that. And it’s like –

Sarah: That’s not a thing they’re going to be in favor of, no.

Olivia: No. There’s ways of modifying them, one of which you do see in the book. So, like, putting, if you put a little wire mesh over a hole in the top of the skep to keep the queen out so that she doesn’t lay any brood, then you can have the, you can put a glass jar upside down on top, and the bees will fill that with honey and comb, and then you can just, you pop off the jar and you put down a new jar, and they’ll start filling that as well.

Sarah: Right.

Olivia: But a lot of these scientific hive designs didn’t really catch on. My absolute favorite is called a leaf hive, and it was invented by an entomologist named Francois Huber, who was blind, and he was Swiss, and his wife and his servant did a lot of observations, and then he would, you know, kind of put together the data and make hypotheses and write, and write the resulting books. And he was, he, he had a very troubled life. Not just the blindness, but he was prone to bouts of depression as well. His journals apparently haven’t been published specifically because they get so dark, and a lot of people didn’t want to expose his personal struggles like that?

Sarah: Hmm.

Olivia: Hopefully those will see the light of day someday, because I think that would be some really interesting reading and a view back into coping with disability and mental health in the past that is still really incredibly rare to see in first-person accounts.

So that’s a bit of a tangent. [Laughs] He invented –

Sarah: [Laughs]

Olivia: – an observation hive that was specifically for use by scientists, not by, like, people who wanted to sell honey or people who just wanted to keep bees as pollinators. This was specifically for scientific observation. And it’s called a leaf hive, and it’s a bunch of boxes with glass sides, and they hinge at the back, and so when they open it’s like the pages of a book opening, but it’s a book full of bees.

Sarah: Whoa!

Olivia: And so, yeah, you have these, like, individual, like, rectangles that are full of bees, and you can open them up, and then when you close them the bees an get from one to the other.

Sarah: So sort of like those ant farms that are –

Olivia: Exactly!

Sarah: – two thin panes of glass with, with sand, and you watch them build tunnels.

Olivia: Yes. Exactly, yeah! And you can see, you can see the activities, and you can spot the queen, and you can keep an eye on the brood and all of that.

Sarah: Oh!

Olivia: But it looks so freaking cool.

Sarah: What about, what about your character’s relationship to her bees? Because that’s almost like a romance inside the book!

Olivia: It is, yeah! Like, she, Penelope is intensely protective of not just her bees but everybody else’s bees, and that’s essentially what she does. So she’s, she’s got a comfortable living, so what she does for an occupation is she helps out the local cottagers, ‘cause bees are a great little, like, side hustle for a farming family?

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Olivia: ‘Cause they don’t take a lot of maintenance, and you can have the kids do it, and they add, like, you can either keep the honey and eat it, or you can sell the honey and the comb and the wax, so it’s a nice little, like, miniature income stream, which farming families at the time were really all very much in need of, with enclosures and the way that agriculture was changing.

So Penelope kind of goes from house to house in the neighborhood, checking up on the bees and doing kind of the heavy maintenance stuff and making sure that everybody’s hives are in good shape and also, you know, making notes about the data and honey production and doing, like, kind of the science part of things. But she feels, she feels as protective about the bees as she feels about her community? Like, one of the ways we get to judge people in this book is, what do they do to bees, and how do they treat bees? And a lot of people are very, very awful to bees in this book, and you know that’s a metaphor for how good or bad they are to other people. So I’m very, extremely pro-bee in life and in this book.

[Laughter]

Sarah: Now, you recently did an interview with the Tea & Strumpets podcast that I listened to, and you talked a little bit about how moving your characters out of the upper classes meant that they had all kinds of stuff to do! They were really busy!

Olivia: Yes.

Sarah: They became people who had a lot of things to do, and you mention your, your characters have side hustles, and they’re trying to figure out what to do with different problems in their businesses. Did your character to-do list ever get, like, too unwieldy? I mean, it must be really fun –

Olivia: Oh my gosh.

Sarah: – to write characters who’ve got so much to do!

Olivia: There’s, what I’m thinking of as the secret novellas? Like, so far each book in the Feminine Pursuits series has kind of a, a novella that’s happening concurrently about side characters? And so, like, like, the first one, it’s Peter Violet and the second one – well, I’m not going to tell you who the second one is.

I don’t know if I’ll ever get to write these, but there were so many people, and there was so much going on, and there are things I haven’t even gotten to explore yet, like there’s a secret book in here somewhere about the paper factory that everybody’s using. You know, the way that paper was made at the time and the way that printing happened, there’s this whole, like – there’s something happening at that paper factory, but I don’t know what it is yet. [Laughs]

And I don’t know if, when I’ll get to actually deal with it, but there’s just, there’s so much stuff here, and I’m realizing one of the things I like about historical romance in general is the stuff. And it’s the gowns, and it’s the horses and the grounds and the gardens and all, and, like, ballrooms and food and all that wonderful stuff, but once you open it up to, like, historical jobs, you get to describe some of the best and weirdest things, and they’re so fun. And they, you get, you get opportunities that you don’t get if you’re focusing on just social engagements. I actually spent an hour at a local letterpress company getting a sense for, like, how does the ink smell? What does it feel like to pull an engraving off of a plate? You know, what does setting type feel like?

Sarah: Yeah.

Olivia: Some of which was stuff I’d done before, and some of which was quite new. And so one of the things that this printer told me was once you get, once you get your whole thing set up, you know, your, your type is set or your plate is in place and your press is ready to go and you’ve inked everything properly, once you start getting into that rhyth- – and your paper’s all wet properly – once you start getting into that rhythm, it’s actually, it’s very calm, and so you and whoever you’re working with, ‘cause it’s generally, there’s generally at least two people working on these presses, the big –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Olivia: – old letterpress ones in particular, ‘cause it’s just more efficient with two people? You have all of this time and all of this familiar, repetitive motion that you’re all very used to, and so that’s when the conversations tend to happen.

Sarah: Yep.

Olivia: And I’m like, oh! Well, that’s amazing! So you get this very hands-on, very deliberate kind of action, but once you’re actually doing it, it doesn’t take that much concentration, so you’re free to talk or listen to things or, like, engage with other people and discuss things, and I’m like, well, if that’s not a setup for an author, then I don’t know what is.

[Laughter]

Sarah: Especially because, much like the conversations that happen when you’re doing something with your hands like stitching or knitting or cooking –

Olivia: Yep.

Sarah: – or doing some sort of repetitive, intricate motion that becomes almost autopilot for your brain, that’s when you start to engage different thought patterns that, that make for very interesting conversations. They’re my favorite types of conversations.

Olivia: Exactly! I mean, I think that’s why I rewatch so many things so often, because I know how it’s going to happen, so we can pause to talk about how it’s happening or why it’s happening –

Sarah: Yeah.

Olivia: – or maybe there’s something –

Sarah: Exactly.

Olivia: – to make the story have, like, yeah.

Sarah: And that leads me to a question from one of my Patreon community members, Kate. She is (a) very excited about this interview, but (b) wanting to ask me about the, the careers and hobbies and callings that your heroines have, such as astronomy, embroidery, printer-, printing. What, what were your favorite to research, and do you have any that you haven’t yet added to your book collections yet?

Olivia: Oh yes. Well, I have so many. This series actually started with the jobs before I knew anything else about the people. I –

Sarah: Oh, that’s interesting! You started with the jobs! How cool!

Olivia: Well, ‘cause I’m writing, I was writing Lady’s Guide, which was a bit of, it just, it felt like a self-indulgence? I had finished one book, a Cupid/Psyche retelling. I was sending it around to agents and editors and such, and I didn’t know what to write next, and I’m like, look, I’ve been looking to read, like, a sparkly, Avon-style, f/f historical for forever, and I haven’t found one that really seems to click; I’m going to have to write it. And I had this old idea about an older aristocrat and a young scholar, and I switched the young scholar to a young lady scholar, and I’m like, well – the initial thought was she was going to be, like, he was going to be a classicist, like Latin, Greek, all that good stuff that I love, and then it didn’t quite work, because women studying Classics had a much harder, like, it was much harder to get educated and to break into that field, ‘cause Classics was an essentially traditional, hidebound, very defended masculine enclave kind of a thing.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Olivia: And I’m like, well, what would, what would a scientifically minded young lady at the time be – oh, astronomy! Of course! Like Caroline Herschel and Mary Ann, Mary Somerville, like, who was Ada Lovelace’s tutor, actually, was an astronomer and a mathematician. And I was just like, oh, well that makes sense! Well, if it’s astronomy, then what else? And it just kind of snowballed from there, and I was writing it, and I was loving it, and I was doing all of this research into the material culture of the time, so the scientific world, but also fabric history and the embroidery of the time. In researching all of these different techniques and all of these different topics, I came up with all of these other things I wanted to go exploring and learn more about and look into and talk about and put people in. Like, I wanted to see people doing these; I wanted to, to talk about what it means for somebody to do this kind of work or that kind of work. And then when Avon made the offer they were like, oh, do you have a series blurb? And I’m like, I have three-quarters of a book. Give me five minutes.

Sarah: [Laughs]

Olivia: And so what I did was for books two and three, I’m like, I have some notes for books two and three, and what I did was I gave people jobs that I hadn’t had a chance to put into book one.

Sarah: [Laughs]

Olivia: So I said, okay, well, book two is a printer/engraver, ‘cause I, I have one of those and that’ll be fun, and, I don’t know, a beekeeper! ‘Cause, you know, you start reading about the science and you start getting into entomology, and the bees are just kind of right there, and it’s really interesting. And I was like, yeah, printer and beekeeper, sure! And then book three is, I don’t know, a silk weaver and a piano tuner. Yeah! Sure!

Sarah: Sure, yeah!

Olivia: Those all sound great! [Laughs] And it’s worked out surprisingly well. Like, really, really well. I’m in the process of writing book three right now, and it’s super fun. And it’s also much less of a slow burn. Like, I did the slow burn in Waspish Widows, like, the slowest possible burn. Book three, they’re hate-making-out by chapter three, so – [laughs] – just so you know!

It’s very much moving away, moving away from the usual kind of setting of historical romance, and part of that is a risk, but part of that just feels so good, and I’ve always really loved getting to see more of the Regency world in things. Like, Rose Lerner’s small town historicals, the Lively St. Lemeston books?

Sarah: Yes!

Olivia: I love those books like life. Oh my gosh, I love every single one of those. And her newest one is actually in the Lively St. Lemeston world, but it’s a Gothic. It’s an f/f Jane Eyre retelling that’s a Lively St. Lemeston Gothic. It’s, they don’t stay in Lively St. Lemeston, but yes! It’s so good, I can’t even tell you.

I like, I like kind of breaking out of the ballroom every now and again. I love ballrooms, I always will, but, like, I wrote six of them, and I feel like I don’t really have anything useful to say about ballrooms anymore? So now I’m going into, like, the forgotten areas of history or the, the parts of history that don’t often make it into historical romance.

I know Carrie Lofty did a romance a few years back called Starlight that’s about a duke astronomer and then a union-organizer heroine, and that made a huge impression on me at the time, because I hadn’t seen anybody who really, who really did say, no, this heroine lives in a one-room house with all her family members, and she’s organizing the union, and it’s real tough.

It kind of breaks you out of this sense of, oh, women could do X and men could do Y, and I’m like, that really only works for a tiny percent of the population. Like, well, women weren’t allowed to have jobs in the Regency. Oh my gosh, yes! Women worked everywhere in the Regency. They just weren’t the upper class women.

One of the things that, that comes up a lot in the research, if you google, like, “printers 1820”, you get a list of men. If you google “women printers 1820”, you get a whole separate list of women that people know quite a lot about. They just don’t come up under the generalized “printer” term. You have to specify you’re looking for women. It’s endlessly frustrating, but also it just shows you that, yeah, of course women were owning businesses and running businesses and working at jobs and earning money and taking care of their families, because they had to, because eating. [Laughs] People like to do that.

Sarah: I mean, I know I do.

Olivia: Yeah!

Sarah: [Laughs] Now, you mentioned you’re working on book three and how much you’re enjoying it, and Shana wanted to know what she can do to convince you to write an f/f romance every year for the rest of your life.

Olivia: [Laughs]

Sarah: She’s willing to sacrifice goats, burn an effigy of an alpha-hole, send offerings of chocolate. There’s many options on the table here, should you be accepting bribes and offerings.

Olivia: Well, that, I mean, that’s very tempting.

Sarah: [Laughs]

Olivia: The goat especially, somehow. I don’t know; that’s very – I was, I was a Classics major as an undergrad, so sacrificing a goat is very flattering. But – [laughs] – but book three is my last contracted f/f, and I have some other ideas coming later, and I don’t know what they are quite yet. I mean, I have, I have a whole stable full of, of ideas constantly, and some of them are f/f, but I also really want to get back to writing heroes at some point, because I love heroes. I want to write, I want to write, like, that hapless, lovelorn, like a smart Bertie Wooster? I think –

[Laughter]

Olivia: – I want to see that guy get a romance. You know, I want to write queer m/f, because I love queer m/f books, and so there’s, there’s a ton of things that are going to happen. There’s definitely f/f in the future, because, honestly, writing f/f is so much fun.

Speaking of kind of breaking out of, of older Regency romance habits, when I started writing two heroines, I’m like, oh my gosh, the chaperone problem goes right out the window. Nobody cares. You girls can just hang out together, and nobody thinks anything of it. They can sleep in the same bed and people are like, well, I guess that’s a little intense, but whatever. You know, like –

Sarah: [Laughs]

Olivia: – like, this makes so many things so much simpler!

Sarah: And it, and it places the tension keeping them apart on very different elements.

Olivia: Yes! Exactly.

Sarah: Claudia wanted me to ask you, what queer media has been inspiring to you?

Olivia: Oh gosh! Well, I mean, f/f romances in general, and particularly f/f romances and m/f romances with bisexual characters have really gotten me where I am today. I came out as bisexual and started to realize I was bi because I started reading f/f romance. I read Cathy Pegau’s Rulebreaker, which is a sci-fi heist romance with a bisexual heroine, and it’s amazing. It’s so much fun. It’s, it’s like a boss/secretary thing, except the secretary’s also a spy trying to get secrets from the boss’s company? And so the power differentials are very complex.

Sarah: Oooh!

Olivia: It’s super good. It was the first time I’d read, like, an f/f romance, and I thought, okay, well, this might be, as a straight gal – “straight” – this might be a little uncomfortable for me, and it wasn’t. It really felt like, like looking into a mirror at times, and it felt like coming home a little bit, and I was like, oh, I’m going to have to think about this! And then I started to notice how many other bisexual characters I was seeing in media. Rosa Diaz from Brooklyn Nine-Nine and, oh, what’s her boss on Crazy Ex-Girlfriend? Just suddenly it felt like bisexual characters were really, you know, well, coming out and having a moment. I watched a lot of Steven Universe, which is incredibly queer and just beautiful, and there were all of these story possibilities, and there were all of these possibilities for existing that hadn’t seemed possible even two, three years ago. It’s kind of been a very sudden but very comprehensible?

There’s a, there’s a bit in Lady’s Guide that I, that I put in that is very much kind of how I feel about it, where it’s not like you’re, you’re opening up this whole new chapter. It’s like you’re looking back at a letter you’ve been writing about your life, and you’re realizing there’s lines written crosswise. And they’ve been there the whole time; you just didn’t know to turn the page to see them. And so it’s not so much an, oh, I guess I’m this going forward. It’s, this has been here all along, and I just wasn’t able to see it for various reasons. Internalized biphobia is a hell of a thing, turns out.

F/f romances and queer women’s writing and queer women’s media in general have been really, really instrumental in all of that for me. Malinda Lo’s romances, her YA fairytales, like her Ash, which is a YA f/f Cinderella: gorgeous. Absolutely stunning.

And a lot of these are also very femme-friendly. When I first started reading f/f romance, I read every f/f romance I could find, and a lot of them just felt really hostile. And partly that’s because I am a queer woman who’s married to a man and very happily married to a man, and so there’s this whole, like, I don’t know if you’re familiar with the term toaster oven romance?

Sarah: [Laughs] No, that’s a new one for me!

Olivia: Yeah.

Sarah: Is this like you, you, you bring somebody into the fold and you get a toaster oven?

Olivia: Literally, yes. That is –

Sarah: Oh, for heaven’s sake.

Olivia: And that’s the joke that was made on Ellen way back when, when Ellen came out.

Sarah: Yes.

Olivia: And it became a trope. And –

Sarah: Oh my!

Olivia: – but people will tag it, and so I guess technically Lady’s Guide is a toaster oven romance, because Catherine didn’t know she was bisexual until she fell in love with Lucy. But –

Sarah: So when did you, when do you get your toaster oven? Is it a good – maybe, maybe –

Olivia: It’s not like what –

Sarah: – if, if we need to update this trope and you’re the writer, maybe you could get an air fryer?

Olivia: [Laughs] That would be nice. I like air fryers.

Sarah: Yeah, right? That’d be – I mean, everyone has an Instant Pot, so, you know.

Olivia: – air fryer romances, yeah. When somebody realizes they’re bi and doesn’t have to pick a side.

[Laughter]

Sarah: That seems like an ideal appliance pairing.

Olivia: And so it’s been, it’s been a bit tense, I’m not going to lie, especially because the Feminine Pursuits series, these books get tagged as les fic a lot, which is fine! There’s nothing wrong with les fic, but I’m like, these ladies are bi or pan. Like, they always tag them with the lesbian side, and they never tag them with the bisexual side, and I’m like, man! That’s just, it stings a little sometimes.

Sarah: I can understand that! I know that for a lot of the reviewers on my team, they talk a lot about bi erasure in a lot of the published lesbian romances and how painful it is.

Olivia: It is. It’s like getting punched in the face.

Sarah: Almost as if, if you don’t pick one thing, your existence is in-, invalid.

Olivia: Yeah. You’re supposed to balance on the head of this pin, and people, like, people are like, oh, but you, you should be on one side of the pin or the other side of the pin, but you’re standing of the middle of the pin; what’s wrong with you? How can you stay there? You can’t stay there; that’s not sustainable. A lot of it comes from that classic Dan Savage, well, bi is just what you say before you actually come out as gay kind of idea?

Sarah: Mm, ouch.

Olivia: Which is so toxic. So toxic. People are bisexual, Dan. They just are. But, yeah, so this idea that all bisexuality is therefore kind of a transitional phase, as opposed to, like, some of it being authentic and some of it being somebody’s very necessary need to kind of take, take things so slow in a world that’s hostile to the idea of queerness in general.

Sarah: It must be very upsetting then, to see the erasure of your own work in how it’s shelved or tagged, even though at the same time it’s increasing representation and in an area that does not have a lot of representation.

Olivia: Yes.

Sarah: Very frustrating.

Olivia: Especially, especially in the historicals. It’s like, you know, we get, we get f/f historicals, but I don’t know how many of them are like, how many of the ones tagged les fic are actually pansexual women or bisexual women or some other flavor of queer as happens. I know Cat Sebastian’s, what is it, A Delicate Deception? Her, has two bise-, a bisexual hero and a bisexual heroine, and then one of the secondary characters is asexual, and it was marvelous! I was like, hurray! Look at this! We’re getting whole spectrums of people! And I love that! I love seeing whole communities where not everybody is all one thing.

Maybe this is because I came from mainstream romance, and I came specifically from reading a lot of queer sci-fi and fantasy where trans writers are prominent than they are in romance. Like, there’s a lot of trans speculative fiction authors out there, and they’re doing incredible work, and they’re winning awards, and it’s, it’s really kind of shocking that we don’t have something like that in romance. I mean, there’s been some discussion lately on Twitter about how romance is still very much trapped in the gender binary? Like –

Sarah: Oh yes.

Olivia: Yeah. And it really – [laughs] – it’s, it really goes out of its way to be hostile. A lot of it goes out of its way to be hostile to trans readers and writers, and so it’s, it always strikes me as so weird that, that we’re kind of faction-ing off queer spaces, and I’m like, well, what about, like, you know, everyone else out here? We, we, we want to be part of this. We want to, we want to join this community. We want to have a community together, but you don’t even really seem to see so many of us.

I tend to think that is somebody’s being really hostile to trans – and this is, this is true in real life and in fiction – if somebody’s being really hostile to trans people – which people will be at the drop of a hat; like, it does not take very long – then it tends to, it tends to signal me that they’re not necessarily going to be safe for me either. I’ve used this about RWA in the past, this particular metaphor, but it’s like, you know, when you go out on a date and somebody’s rude to the waitstaff?

Sarah: Yeah. It’s a big signal.

Olivia: Yeah. This is what they’ll do to somebody they have power over.

Sarah: Which, which relates back to what you were saying earlier about bees: how you treat a community that is different from your community says a lot about you.

Olivia: And bees tend to specifically come in for, a lot of people think bees are very much the ideal model of society, so they’re like, oh, everybody has a job, and you never step out of your place, and that’s what makes a good society.

Sarah: Bleah!

Olivia: Or you say, like, everybody has a job and they work together for the good of the community, and that’s what makes a good society. And it’s like, this the same bees we’re talking about! [Laughs]

Sarah: Yes, but it depends: how capitalist is your metaphor? [Laughs]

Olivia: See, well, exactly. Are your bees dependents? Are they indentured servants? Are they slaves? Are they, like, you know –

Sarah: Resources?

Olivia: Yes! Are bees democrats, or are bees monarchists? Depends on who you ask. In 1867 – I looked this fact up the other day – in 1867, George Cruikshank, caricaturist, published “The British Bee Hive,” which was a reworked engraving that he first – he first did it in like 1840, but the, the reworking and the engraving came in 1867 – and “The British Bee Hive” was, it’s this beautiful, detailed illustration of all the different jobs in British society, and they’re ranked according to hierarchy, and at the very top, of course, is the King and Queen, and then there’s, like, the aristocracy underneath, and then there’s all the various trades and their representatives, and it’s like, look, this machine is working. We don’t need to reform nothing.

Sarah: Oh boy.

Olivia: And in the same year, Karl Marx’s first volume of Capital came out. And he talks about bees in that book! He says – [laughs] – so bees do work, but bees don’t do labor, because a bee will make a thing, a bee will build a honeycomb, but when a man makes a thing, he’s already planned it out in his head. There’s an aspect of this labor that the bee is not doing. Humans, better than bees, we have this reflection, and that’s part of what adds value to labor, and that’s part of what the worker’s value is. And this may be a deeply reductionist reading of Marx, because honestly, it’s been a while.

The fact that those two entirely opposed ideas of bees and specifically as meta-, as political metaphor – ‘cause you can’t really talk about bees without getting metaphorical for more than like five seconds.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Olivia: Like, it just, it just happens. [Laughs] At least it happens to me!

[Laughter]

Olivia: And from my under-, from what I’ve read, it happens to a lot of other people too. And we see ourselves in bees more than in other animals, and it’s partly because we’ve domesticated them and we’re familiar with them. And it’s partly because they live in groups like people do.

Sarah: What are you reading that you want to tell people about?

Olivia: Well, right now, since I turned in the column, I’ve got Olivia Da-, an ARC of Olivia Dade’s Spoiler Alert queued up, ready to start –

Sarah: Ooh!

Olivia: – because I’ve heard such good things. And I mean, her stuff’s always amazing, and one of the great things about being named Olivia is that occasionally people email me or tag me when they mean to tag Olivia Dade, which is always fun, especially when it means they’ve just sent you a widget for her new upcoming book, and you really wanted this ARC –

Sarah: [Laughs]

Olivia: – but they’ve emailed the wrong Olivia, and you’re like, do I tell them, or do I just click Send this to me and then tell them?

[Laughter]

Olivia: And I was good; I went, uh, excuse me, I think you emailed the wrong Olivia, but can I have one? But it’s supposed to be great.

And I’ve read – actually blurbed – Alexis Hall’s Boyfriend Material, which came out earlier this summer, and that book made me so happy. It made me so happy. It was funny; like, like, roll on the floor funny, and just, oh, there’s a, there’s a side character, and his name is Alex Twaddle –

Sarah: Yes!

Olivia: – of the Devonshire Twaddles.

Sarah: Yes! [Laughs]

Olivia: I just, I just want to protect him. I just want to, like, wrap him up and give him tea and make sure nothing bad ever happens to him and his possible fiancée Muffy.

Sarah: [Laughs]

Olivia: Like, the fact that they don’t know if they’re engaged, it, I just can’t get over it. I want to just watch them solving mysteries for like four books. And it was, it was great, because, you know, you thought you had him pegged, like, oh yes, the über-controlled character and the hot mess character, and we know how this trope goes. And then, of course, it turns out the hot mess is starting to figure things out, and the über-controlled guy has a lot of mess that he’s been hiding, and that switch is so satisfying.

And then the one I’m reading right now isn’t a romance, but I’m catching up on the new Murderbot novel. And oh!

Sarah: I love it so much! It’s so good.

Olivia: Oh, yeah! Oh, the, the whole anger and resentment and wish to just dive into media, and I’m like, this has never been more relatable!

Sarah: Yep!

Olivia: This is what we all need!

Sarah: I love Murderbot, the whole series. I think it read it twice in a row? I was so happy to just be in that character’s head. Yep! I fully understand. People are annoying. Let’s go watch TV.

Olivia: [Laughs] It’s, it’s so wonderful. It’s such a great take on that whole, like, ah, the humanity of robots! And I’m like, how can we do this in the least pretentious way possible? I know! They’re just like people: they want to fuck off and do nothing. Sounds great.

Sarah: I’m a, I’m a big fan of sarcastic artificial intelligence characters?

Olivia: [Laughs]

Sarah: I didn’t realize that that was a thing I have? That’s a thing I have.

Olivia: I’m really enjoying in this novel because we see Murderbot with, like, a younger human for the first time –

Sarah: Yes!

Olivia: – and it’s clearly, like, struggling, and – [laughs] – oh, and ART. Oh, I love ART.

Sarah: When you’re done with the novel, email me, ‘cause I have to share with you a comment that someone made about some of the relationships in that book, and I’m dying –

Olivia: Oh yeah.

Sarah: – to hear your perspective.

Olivia: I would like that!

Sarah: Well, thank you so much for doing this interview. I really, really appreciate your time.

Olivia: Oh no, it’s always such a pleasure. I love these, I love these podcasts. I read all the transcripts! [Laughs]

Sarah: Oh, thank you! I’m so glad!

[garlicknitter: Me too! Hi, Olivia!]

Olivia: So that’s my, like, I love podcasts, but I can’t focus on just auditory?

Sarah: No, I get it! I get it!

Olivia: Yeah, so –

Sarah: Part of why I have a transcript!

Olivia: Exactly. It’s so nice, and then I, I don’t feel like I’m missing out on a conversation.

[music]

Sarah: And that brings us to the end of this week’s episode. Thank you to Olivia Waite for hanging out with me. I will have links to where you can find her on her website, Twitter, Instagram, and where you can join her email list as well. I will also have links to the articles we talked about, the podcast on Tea & Strumpets where she was a guest, and all of the books.

Speaking of books, I tried something new in this episode and I’m curious if it worked. I tried to make it so that when we were talking about a specific book, that book would appear on the screen of the app that you use to play the podcast. Now, I think I formatted it correctly so it should have worked across all formats, but I’m curious if you saw book covers? Did you see them? Did they work? Did it work? Let me know! You can email me at [email protected] and be like, I saw nothing. What, what are you talking about? Or you can be like, hey, it worked! That was cool! Or it could make no difference; I have no idea. But either way, I love hearing from you, so if you noticed the book covers and you want to tell me about it, please let me know, ‘cause I hope it worked.

Thank you again to our Patreon community for making each episode more awesome. If you would like to have a look and support the show, go to patreon.com/SmartBitches. Every pledge is deeply, deeply appreciated.

This episode was brought to you by Candlewick Press, publisher of The Mermaid, the Witch, and the Sea, a new YA fantasy novel by Maggie Tokuda-Hall. This book has genderfluid pirates, witchcraft, Japanese cultural themes, swashbuckling, throat stabbing, and a whole lot of adventure. And I will link to the episode where Maggie was a guest on the show talking at length about the book. I’ve done a couple of events with her, and if you haven’t checked this book out, you will really, really enjoy it. The Mermaid, the Witch, and the Sea by Maggie Tokuda-Hall is published by Candlewick Press and is available now wherever books are sold.

Okay, it’s bad joke time. You’ve waited long enough; it’s time. Are you ready? This is really horrible. This is, this is a very controversial joke. Very controversial. Are you ready?

Why don’t vegans and vegetarians ever fight?

Why don’t vegans and vegetarians ever fight?

Because they never want to have beef!

[Laughs] I can sort of hear you in the back of my mind going, ohhh. Beef. [Laughs more]

If you want to send me bad jokes, you know I love to have them. You can email them to me at [email protected]. It is enormously exciting when I open that inbox and it’s like, Sarah, I have a joke for you! Yes! So please, if you have terrible jokes, share them with me. It completely makes my day, I swear.

On behalf of Olivia Waite; my dog, who is begging for treats; and the cat, who is trying not to torment him; and everyone else here, we wish you the very best of reading. Have a wonderful weekend. We will see you back here next week!

Smart Podcast, Trashy Books is part of the Frolic Podcast Network. You can find more outstanding podcasts like the Big Gay Fiction Podcast at frolic.media/podcasts.

[cool music]