432. Saving Endangered Animals, Plus Romance: A Conversation with Michelle Hazen

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Sarah Wendell: Hello there. Thank you for welcoming me into your eardrums. I’m Sarah Wendell with Smart Podcast, Trashy Books, and this is episode number 432. My guest today is Michelle Hazen. She is a romance author and a wildlife tortoise biologist, a semi-nomadic career, both the biologist part and the romance writer part, that informs a lot of her writing. We are going to talk about saving baby animals, writing about trauma, life in the desert doing biologist work, and romance tropes that, you know, really work well in the desert.

I do want to warn you that around twenty-six minutes in [26:00], for about two to three minutes, we talk about the fact that when you wander around in the desert you find things that are dead and also murder weapons, so if you’re not really into a slight turn into the True Crime genre, please skip ahead about three to four minutes at that point.

Now, if you are looking for a podcast to try, may I suggest Tea & Strumpets:

Zoe: Hi. I’m Zoe –

Kelsey: And I’m Kelsey!

Zoe: And we’re the hosts of Tea & Strumpets: A Regency Romance Review.

Kelsey: Join us each week as we take a trip across the Pond and into the past in search of swoon-worthy Happily Ever Afters.

Zoe: We talk about all your Regency favorites, like Julia Quinn’s Bridgertons or Lisa Kleypas’s Ravenels. Plus we dive deep into exciting new releases from rising stars like Scarlett Peckham, Cat Sebastian, or Evie Dunmore.

Kelsey: We’ve got book reviews and fabulous interviews with bestselling authors in the genre like Kerrigan Byrne and Maya Rodale.

Zoe: So check us out on your podcatcher of choice or learn more about us at romancepod.com.

Kelsey: See you on Thursdays, and may all your Ever Afters end Happily.

Sarah: You can find Tea & Strumpets wherever you get your fine podcasts or at romancepod.com.

Now, I have a new sponsor for this episode, and I am so excited about this one. This episode is brought to you in part by a new sponsor, Headspace! 2020 has been A Lot, and Headspace could not have come at a better time for me personally. Headspace is your daily dose of mindfulness in the form of guided meditations in an easy-to-use app. Headspace is one of the only meditation apps advancing the field of mindfulness and meditation through clinically validated research, so whatever the situation, Headspace can really help you feel better. Overwhelmed? Headspace has a three-minute SOS meditation for you! Need help falling asleep? Headspace has wind-down sessions that their members swear by – Amanda loves these. And for parents, Headspace even has morning meditations that you can do with your kids! Headspace’s approach to mindfulness can reduce stress, improve sleep, boost focus, and overall increase your sense of wellbeing. I found that the techniques and guided meditations in the Headspace app have helped me make meditation a deliberate part of my day. Headspace has also made my meditation habit goals a lot easier to reach. I particularly like that the exercises to increase my ability to focus on my breath also give me time for my brain to do its thinky thing, ‘cause brains like to think, and mine definitely does. The app techniques are extremely reassuring for me. Headspace is backed by twenty-five published studies on its benefits, six hundred thousand five-star reviews, and over sixty million downloads. Headspace makes it easy for you to build a life-changing meditation practice with mindfulness that works for you on your schedule, anytime, anywhere. You deserve to feel happier, and Headspace is meditation made simple. Go to headspace.com/SARAH – that’s headspace.com/SARAH, S-A-R-A-H – for a free one-month trial with access to Headspace’s full library of meditations for every situation.

Hello and thank you to the Patreon community. Your questions made the last two episodes so much fun, and I cannot thank you enough. In fact, I will thank you by saying we’re going to do more of them because it was so much fun to include you in the episodes.

If you would like to join our Patreon community, help keep the show going, and help make each episode accessible to everyone, go to patreon.com/SmartBitches.

This episode is also brought to you by Ritual, a daily multivitamin now available in Essential for Kids! Ritual knows how difficult it can be to get your kids the nutrients they need; that’s why they made Essential for Kids to help fill gaps in the diets of ages four through twelve without making a single compromise to quality or taste. Not only do they have a natural citrus berry flavor, but they’re also convenient by design: each gummy features a three-in-one design that combines a daily multi, vegan, omega-3 DHA, and a good source of fiber per serving! I like Ritual because of the convenience of the delivery schedule and the literal transparency – my capsules are see-through, which I think is really neat. I also like knowing the source of every nutrient that’s in the vitamins that we take! When it comes to what goes into our kids’ bodies, they’ve got being picky down to a science – I mean, mine definitely do. That’s why Ritual is offering my listeners ten percent off during your first three months. Visit ritual.com/SARAH – that’s S-A-R-A-H – to start Ritual or add Essential for Kids today. Visit ritual.com/SARAH.

I will have links to all of the books we mention in this episode and links to where you can find Michelle Hazen in the show notes at smartbitchestrashybooks.com/podcast. But for now, let’s go do this podcast thing! On with the show.

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Michelle Hazen: Hi there! I’m Michelle Hazen. I’m the author of Unbreak Me, Breathe the Sky, the Sex, Love, and Rock & Roll series, and I’m also a seasonal desert tortoise biologist.

Sarah: Those are not words I usually hear together.

Michelle: I know, right?

Sarah: Like, the, the author part, the book part, like, that I get, no problem. Seasonal wildlife tortoise biologist.

Michelle: Yeah, I usually say –

Sarah: That’s cool!

Michelle: – semi-nomadic as well, but that just confuses the issue even more – [laughs] – so I’ve learned to leave it off.

Sarah: Right? So, um, yeah. Want to ask about that. [Laughs] When you, when you emailed me, you described Breathe the Sky as “a grouchy construction foreman meets a shy wildlife biologist in the Mojave Desert, which means there is an egregious amount of saving baby animal scenes in the book.” So I’m imagining that a lot of your own experience as a biologist informs the character of this one.

Michelle: Yeah! Absolutely, but there’s even more saving cute baby animals in the book than I normally get to do in real life. I wrote this book to cheer myself up when I was working about a trillion hours, and I was working a winter in the Mojave, which everybody thinks of the desert as really hot, but it’s also really, really cold. So I was standing outside all day long; I was working so, so, so, so many hours; and I was really grouchy – [laughs] – and I needed something to make me laugh, so there’s a lot of saving baby animals because that’s what cheered me up at the time. And so I think in the book they end up – I had to cut some of these for pacing, but I think in the book they end up saving a baby tortoise, a baby bunny, baby birds, rare lizards, there’s baby kit foxes. I’m pretty sure I had to cut the saving the rattlesnake scene. There’s a lot –

Sarah: Aw!

Michelle: – there’s a lot. So you’ll learn a little bit about desert animals in the course of the book, but not so much that, like, David Attenborough’s going to start narrating? Like, you’re not going to learn an encyclopedic amount about anything, except maybe how cute they are.

Sarah: So basically, you would have a shitty day, and then you would go back to your truck or RV or wherever you were living or your, your extremely well insulated tent, I hope, and you would write more baby animal saving.

Michelle: Yes, absolutely.

Sarah: That sounds like a really good coping mechanism.

Michelle: It’s not the worst.

Sarah: No! So we’re talking about a lot of baby animal saving.

Michelle: [Laughs] Yeah, a little bit.

Sarah: Nice!

Michelle: So it’s technically Mari’s job to save the baby animals in the book, right? But Jack ends up helping her a bunch because he’s really good at tracking and he’s good at trapping the animals, and so they’re trying to get the animals out of the way of construction for their own safety, and so sometimes –

Sarah: Right.

Michelle: – when she has trouble catching them he starts helping her, and that bridges the initial divide between construction worker and conservation biologist, which I can tell you from experience is a, a gulf to start with.

Sarah: I was going to say! That’s kind of a large, a large valley with two people working at cross-purposes.

Michelle: Yeah! Well, it’s super funny, because I’ve worked on a ton of construction sites as a biologist at this point, and it always starts the same way, you know? The guys are like, I don’t like rules! I just want to do my job! And, you know, it turns out that almost all construction workers love animals? But they’re looking at it like, I have to follow ridiculous rules, not, I have to save animals? So the real trick is to find a couple of the animals and show them to them, ‘cause they don’t think they’re there, because here’s the thing about a desert tortoise spot: like, you’ve just walked past twelve of ‘em. You have no idea that they’re there. Like, they are so hard to find, and so if you dig up a few and show ‘em to the construction workers, they start believing you that the animals are there, and then they start caring and they want to help you, you know, and do the right thing –

Sarah: Aw!

Michelle: – and that’s pretty much what happens with Jack in the book too.

Sarah: Do they start naming them?

Michelle: You know, they haven’t! I haven’t had that happen yet – [laughs] – but they do start asking me worried questions about them all the time.

Sarah: Aw! So they’re, they’re, that, that would be a really excellent ground for a romance then!

Michelle: Yeah!

Sarah: I can see why you went there!

Michelle: Yeah, absolutely. It’s perfect for Enemies to Lovers, right, because the spark is going to be there at first –

Sarah: Ooh.

Michelle: – where they’re arguing, but then they find common ground and get to like each other more and more, and also Mari had a secret weapon in the book, which was brownies? Solar-oven-baked brownies are the way to a construction worker’s heart for sure.

Sarah: Well, I mean, I think you show up anywhere in the middle of nowhere with baked goods and people are like, yeah, what, what do you want? You, you want a, you want a pool? We’ll dig one.

Michelle: Right? Yeah, I’d like to pretend that I haven’t resorted to bribery in my biology career, but we would all know that that was a lie.

Sarah: Oh! Come on, bribery is essential in every career path, but most essential –

Michelle: Yeah.

Sarah: – in desert biology, I would presume.

Michelle: Oh yeah, sugar –

Sarah: Especially –

Michelle: – sugar-based bribery for sure.

Sarah: Oh, absolutely! So with your book, I know that it deals with some trauma and survival for the characters, but also with hope and humor – and sexytimes – and those are really tricky elements to, to balance, ‘cause you have baby animals, but you also have two characters who have survived some, like, really brutal shit, and are also themselves in a brutal environment while they’re working. How do you balance the stories of traumatic recovery and the, you know, painful backstory with laughter and, and sexytimes in writing? You know, how do you, how do you approach that as a writer?

Michelle: So the first thing you have to understand is that I’m not trying. This just happens to me.

[Laughter]

Michelle: All my sad books, all my sad books end up being funny, and all my funny books end up being sad, and the things that you just said are true of almost every book I’ve written, to some extent or another. I think I’m just too realistic to write purely escapist fantasy, and so what happens is all the emotions end up in there by the end of the book. You know, it’s messed up, and it’s funny, and there’s friendship, and there’s love, and if you hang on long enough, hope is always around the corner, kind of just like life.

Sarah: So when you’re writing characters with a lot of tragedy and abuse or fear in their backstories, you end up balancing it with normal amounts of humor. Because not everything is, is miserable.

Michelle: Yeah, absolutely, and I think the characters, just like real people, end up relying on their growing friendships and relationships to, to balance that, you know? The people that they find and draw closer to in the story help them deal with that and help them find humor and comfort, just like we do in real life.

Sarah: I don’t want to go too much into spoilers, ‘cause I, I try really hard not to spoil the books that I’m talking about with a, with, with a podcast guest, but I know that one of the things that happens in this book is that the characters learn to recognize each other’s trauma and how it has, how it has affected their behavior and their habits. For example, the hero seems to equate love with yelling, and –

Michelle: [Laughs]

Sarah: – with caretaking with a lot of yelling, and not everyone interprets it that, that way when he’s yelling, and then he and the heroine start to recognize each other’s trauma but also help each other heal. How hard was that to develop as a, as a character? As, as a, as a basis for a character?

Michelle: Yeah! So the thing about them is they’re both so bad at making friends at the beginning of the book, in completely different ways, right? The, what you said about Jack is like, he’s, he’s so grouchy when he’s being the nicest because he’s uncomfortable about it. You know, if you catch him being nice he, like, kind of grouches twice as hard at you? But the fun thing about him and Mari is that they are both so awkward that it gives each other confidence to be able to, like, reach out and make mistakes. Like when they first, I think, when they, they first end up on a date, it’s because – I’m trying to do this without spoilers; it’s so hard – when they first end up on a date –

Sarah: It really is, so thank you.

Michelle: – it’s because one of them is so awkward that the other one is like, you know, I can’t be worse with people than they are – [laughs] – so I’m just going to go for it. You know, because –

Sarah: [Laughs]

Michelle: – sometimes in life, you know, you think, people don’t want to hang out with me because I’m not fun, and then you don’t reach out, and then they’re thinking the same thing about you, right? And then everybody ends up alone, and so if nobody has the confidence to make that first move and put themselves out there, like, maybe you all thought each other was cool, you know, and you just didn’t have –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Michelle: – the confidence to reach out and be like, hey, do you want to hang out, and so we get to kind of see that through Jack and Mari, where they’re both super awkward, they’re bad at making friends, and they’re so bad at it that they end up being perfect for each other.

Sarah: Isn’t that lovely when that happens?

Michelle: [Laughs] It is! It is, and they also both end up being better at making other, like, platonic friends throughout the book. They, they learn from their relationship and kind of reach out to their coworkers and to people around them and end up making more friends, and that part, those parts were really fun for me to write too.

Sarah: Yeah, because it, one of the foundational aspects of the relationships in the book is that the friendships are as vital as the romance, that they build a support network and a found family as the book progresses, and all of those relationships are just as important.

Michelle: Yeah, absolutely. I wish there was a genre for that, like for romance, only for friendships? I would write the crap out of that.

Sarah: Oh, that’s really a good question! Why – huh! Because a lot of books are about friendships, but then you have other elements surrounding them. And that’s usually my favorite part of a, of a book, especially if it’s, if it’s a series, where you get to hang out with the people who are in it, who are friends with one another? I mean, there’s found friendship, there’s found family and friendships in historicals and, and mysteries, but there needs to be a good genre tag for it, doesn’t there? You’re totally right!

Michelle: There totally does, but it, it’d be like bromance, but then we’d need the female version too, for, so it’d be like friendmance? We need something alliterative; friendmance is never going to fly.

Sarah: No, and we already have bromance, but that’s a different thing.

Michelle: Yeah.

Sarah: We do a need a word! Now it’s going to bug me. I’ll, I’ll, I’ll call –

Michelle: [Laughs]

Sarah: – I’ll email you or call you at like three in the morning and be like, I have a name now. It’ll be a bad one, ‘cause I’m not allowed to name things, but oh, that’s so true! We really do need a word for female friendship, like, close, supportive friendship romance.

It’s so interesting you say that, ‘cause I just finished listening to an audiobook called The Art of Showing Up, which is about friendship and how to show up for yourself and then show up for your friends in ways that work for them and work for you, and how to handle, like, really awful and traumatic experiences as a friend, and one of the things that the author talks about is that friendships are some of the foundational and most important relationships we have, especially as we grow and change into different people, and it’s hard to make friends. It’s hard to find people and, like with, with your characters, when you’re already dealing with all of the baggage, the enormous amount of matched luggage that they each carry emotionally, it’s even harder to make friends, so there definitely needs to be a genre tag that talks about it. I’m going to chew on this for like six weeks now, thank you.

Michelle: [Laughs] I like you so much more for the fact that you’re reading books about friendship in your spare time. Like, what an amazing thing to do.

Sarah: Oh, thank you! I really liked this book. It was very, very thoughtful, but it also referenced a lot of other books that now I want to go read, like There Is No Good Card for This, and it talks about, you know, awful friendships, breaking up a friendship – that was the end of the book – being there for your friends and how to recognize when your friends need help, and also just how to communicate in ways that your friends appreciate, but most importantly how to show up for yourself first, because you can’t be a resource for someone else if you’re not already a resource for yourself, which I appreciated because the Quarantimes are hard. They’re very hard.

[Laughter]

Michelle: Mm-hmm! Yeah.

Sarah: So I do like that book a lot. But now you’re totally right! You’re totally right! Okay. Hmm. Now I’m going to think about it. It’s going to be a really boring interview ‘cause I’m going to be over here going, hmm, friendship –

Michelle: [Laughs] Now I really do want you to email me when you come up with a word for that. So actually, this ties right back into a book that I was just reading. So have you read Alexa Martin? She does the NFL wives series? I think it’s called The Playbook series?

Sarah: I have read some of her books. Which one did you just finish?

Michelle: Well, so I was just starting Snapped, but her series –

Sarah: Oh!

Michelle: – has such strong, really fun female friendships, where like half the reason you’re reading it is ‘cause you want to hang out with these girls, right?

Sarah: They start a bar just for their friendship!

Michelle: And it’s a great bar! It’s amazing!

Sarah: I want it – I don’t like gathering in, in places with strangers where you breathe anymore, and I wasn’t –

Michelle: [Laughs]

Sarah: – I wasn’t all that fond of it before the Quarantimes, to be honest with you, but I would totally go to that bar, it’s so great!

Michelle: But I’d go to that one! You know, my husband and I always want to go to bars and read, and we want to, like, have a drink and read, and we want no one else to be there, and we’re always sort of annoyed when other people show up, and it’s like, Michelle, you could stay home and have a beer in your living room and read and no one would be there, but I want to go out and also have no one be there. Is that too much to ask?

Sarah: I would love a bar that was like a library –

Michelle: Yeah!

Sarah: – where you would have drinks but also be expected to be a little bit more on the mellow and quiet side?

Michelle: Yes! Yes, we’ll call it The Library Bar.

Sarah: Yes! The Quiet Introvert Bar –

Michelle: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: – and, like, if you, if you go with friends you, you got, you know, you can have a booth, but it’ll have a big, heavy curtain in front of the booth so the sound stays in and you can be –

Michelle: Ohhh, nook booths! That’s an even better idea!

Sarah: Yeah! And there’s –

Michelle: Oh yeah. Anyway, so I was, I was started on that ‘cause Alexa Martin, she just sold a women’s fiction that’s, I think it’s really centered around the female friendship, like, and the romance is sidelined, so she went, like, all the way in on this friendship genre. It’s called Mom Jeans and Other Mistakes, and it’s coming out from Berkley at some point – I don’t know. I just saw the deal announcement, so it’s new, but maybe she’ll pioneer this genre for us, and she and I can, like, be the, be the starters.

Sarah: Oh yeah! And, and she’ll come up with a good name for it.

Michelle: Yeah, somebody will!

Sarah: [Laughs] Okay, so I have to ask you about being a biologist. That your, your real-life job is nomadic tortoise biologist. That’s a real job that people have.

Michelle: Al-, like twelve people.

[Laughter]

Sarah: Okay, so twelve whole people have this job. How did you end up with this job? And are you still doing it? Like, do you still live in your car and everything?

Michelle: That’s a complicated question. So it’s seasonal, right, so it’s job by job. Like, you go when there’s work, and there’s never work when you need it to be, and there’s lots of work when you don’t need there to be. [Laughs]

Sarah: Course.

Michelle: But it doesn’t last all the time, and so a, it’s very different from a lot of kinds of biology. Like, the reason I said there’s like twelve people do it is most kinds of field biology, you have, biologists have a lot of different skills, and they work on a lot of different projects and species and whatnot, but with tortoise biology they would have those regular, like, city-based biologists come out, and they would basically lie down and die, and so – [laughs] – they realized very quickly it was not going to work out, and so I got hired into this with very little experience as a biologist because of my primary credentials, which is that I could live in my truck – I was already living in my truck – and I could suffer real good.

Sarah: [Laughs]

Michelle: My husband and I were on the great road trip of our twenties because we learned the amazing secret of twenties life, which is that if you don’t pay rent, you don’t have to work that much? And so we were both working, or we were both living in our Toyota pickup and looking for work that didn’t last year round, that we could just go, do a job, get a little bit of money so we could buy food and then keep rock climbing and stuff, right? And tortoise biology was perfect, because they were like, hey, you’re already living in your car; we can stick you, you know, in a grocery store parking lot in a hundred and twenty and you won’t die, so can you come out here and find tortoises for us? So we were like, yeah, we’re in.

Sarah: So you became nomadic tortoise hunters, but not hunters like killing them; just, you know, like hide-and-seeking.

Michelle: Just finding them so that they won’t die.

Sarah: Whoa! So your husband’s a biologist too! Or did he get trained on the job ‘cause he happened to be in the truck?

Michelle: [Laughs] Yeah, he did kind of, actually. But yeah, we were, we were tortoise biologists together for like eight years, and then he left the industry. He got a different job where he works from home, and so now when I go tortoise working I can bring him with me, and he works from home as long as we have Wi-Fi. It’s a little tougher on the jobs when it’s far enough out that you have to live in your truck, ‘cause that’s where the truck-living part comes from is a lot of the times they’re so far out from towns that it doesn’t make sense to drive back to a town at night, and so you just have to camp out, but you can’t camp in tents because the wind in the Mojave would rip any tent to just ribbons, so you, you sleep in your truck because it doesn’t get ripped to ribbons. But, I mean, there’s been nights in the Mojave where it was so windy that I got literally seasick –

Sarah: Mm!

Michelle: – in my truck because it was rocking so badly from the wind.

Sarah: And this is like a pickup truck, and you just –

Michelle: Yeah.

Sarah: – live in the back of it.

Michelle: Yeah, don’t picture, like, campers with, like, sinks and little beds and stuff. That’s, those are for rich people. I’m talking, like, a truck with one of those little metal, like, just little roofs over the bed.

Sarah: Right. And so you have equipment and a computer and a bed and I’m assuming water and food and a camp stove.

Michelle: Mm-hmm! Yeah, yeah. Most of these jobs –

Sarah: Wow.

Michelle: – you get a resupply about once a week, depending on what kind of job it is and where you’re at.

Sarah: So how did you become a biologist? Was this something you always wanted to do, or did you just sort of fall into wild nomadic tortoise hanging out?

Michelle: No, we definitely just fell into it because we needed seasonal work. We were, we were wanting something that wasn’t in the summer, ‘cause a lot of seasonal work is in the summer –

Sarah: Right.

Michelle: – but that’s the good time for rock-climbing and hiking and all the good stuff, so you don’t want to be working during the summer! So we just fell into it because it was something that you didn’t have to do year-round, that we were qualified for, because of our suffering, and it wasn’t, it didn’t take place in the summer. But you know, the real – it’s funny how you just, like, fall into things in life that end up being the perfect thing, right? Like, the people in desert tortoise biology are some of the best people I’ve met anywhere on any continent; like, they’re just incredibly kind, interesting, weird people.

Sarah: Well, I mean, you kind of have to be yourself to go into the job, and I’ve also noticed a, a tendency where the longer someone lives in a place where the land will kill you if you’re stupid –

Michelle: [Laughs]

Sarah: – the far less artifice there is to that person. Like, I – you live in a place where the land’ll kill you if you’re dumb and you be like, I hate my neighbor, he throws really loud parties, but if he’s stuck he’s going to die, so I’ll go save him.

Michelle: Yeah! Yeah, you may have just explained tortoise biologists better than anybody I’ve ever heard, Sarah.

Sarah: [Laughs]

Michelle: Well put!

Sarah: Thanks! I try. Words are a thing I try to do with some accuracy. But, like, how – so what is being a tortoise biologist like? Like, you just sort of hang out and go from spot to spot looking for the tortoises? Do you tag them? Do you hang out with them? Do you, like, race them, you know? Like, slowly?

Michelle: It – [laughs]

Sarah: I don’t mean like racing each other, like you race them and see who can move more slowly?

Michelle: You know, that’s actually a fun story! So back in the day when there were still a lot of tortoises and they weren’t on the endangered species list yet, construction workers used to walk out into the desert on their lunch break, and construction worker lunch breaks are only like thirty minutes?

Sarah: Right.

Michelle: So they would walk out, they would all find a tortoise, they would bring ‘em back to the site, they would draw a circle in the dust, and then they would bet to see which tortoise would get out of the circle first, because construction workers’ll bet on anything, you know, even a tortoise.

Sarah: Of course.

Michelle: And so they would race ‘em, and that story was told to me by a construction worker that’d been out in the Mojave for a long time, and my jaw just hit the ground because I was like, you can find a – not only can you find a tortoise fast enough to get back and still have a tortoise race in a thirty-minute lunch break, but you all could find a tortoise. Like, every member of the crew could find a tortoise, and now –

Sarah: Wow!

Michelle: – the numbers have declined so much that we can walk out across the desert in teams of highly trained, really focused searchers, walking five meters apart, and walk search grids for months without finding a tortoise.

Sarah: Oh!

Michelle: You know?

Sarah: That’s very sad!

Michelle: Isn’t that crazy, how that’s changed? Yeah, that, the, the numbers of tortoises have really declined. But no, so one of the weird things about tortoise biology is that if you spend a lot of time walking around in the desert, staring intently at the ground, what you find are a lot of murder weapons and dead bodies?

Sarah: Oh, I was just going to ask you about this! I, I, I am very curious about these weird murder-y parts. Are the tortoises the ones committing the murder? Are they all actually in hiding because they have criminal records? I mean, like, what, what is the deal here?

Michelle: I think that’s the best explanation, because nobody would expect a tortoise.

Sarah: Oh no! And, and they would leave a very deliberate trail, so of course it wouldn’t be the tortoise! I mean, you can still see him! He’s right there! Nah, wasn’t him!

Michelle: Yeah! I mean, he could sit right by the body and you’d never, you’d never suspect him. Actually, that ties into another true tortoise fact, which is that they have the most testosterone of any reptile? Like, they are really, really vicious, actually – [laughs] – when they fight –

Sarah: No kidding!

Michelle: – but nobody expects it of them. Yeah, and they fight like a dueling pair of pancake flippers.

Sarah: [Laughs] So you flip ‘em over, you win?

Michelle: Yes! That’s exactly it! So the – I wish you could see me right now; I’m acting it out – but, so male desert tortoises have a bony protrusion of their shell that comes out underneath their chin and kind of curves upward a little bit, just like a pancake flipper, and when they get mad and they try to fight for the females, they’ll, like, come at each other and try to use that tiny little protrusion to flip each other over. So it’s just dueling pancake flippers, but yeah. 

Sarah: And if you, and if you get flipped over, are you dead?

Michelle: No, they can flip back over. Like, they’ll just lie there on their back and wiggle around and flail until they get flipped back over, but you know, if you flip over in the wrong spot with the wrong combination of sand and bushes and rocks, then you do die, you know, and sometimes you’ll see –

Sarah: Wow!

Michelle: – where they’ll sit there and wait for the other tortoise to flip itself back over and then go back after them, but that just ties back into your theory, because clearly tortoises are creating, like, all these murders because nobody would suspect them, but they’re secretly very vicious under all that zen tortoise calm.

Sarah: And they’re armed! They already have this bony protrusion. They could cause –

Michelle: They’ve got a pancake flipper!

Sarah: – all kinds of damage! 

Michelle: I know! Imagine what they could do with actual, like –

Sarah: Yikes!

Michelle: – teeth and claws and stuff.

Sarah: Fuck you up!

Michelle: Mm-hmm, totally. No, but it, it is like when I, I had my very first tortoise job right outside of Vegas, and when I started hearing the dead body stories I thought it was just messing with me because, you know, in the outdoor guide industry, you’re always messing with the tourist and the new guy. [Laughs] You’re always, like, telling them –

Sarah: Oh, obviously!

Michelle: – telling them the tall tale to see how much you can get ‘em to buy, but, like, it, it’s just hard to believe how many dead bodies you can find in the desert, and how many weapons, like, weapons that people have discarded, like, way out there, and you’re like, well, there’s only one reason that you’ll walk your kitchen knife all the way out here, you know, or all these guns and things, and it’s just crazy! I mean, new bodies, old bodies, like, pieces of bodies; it’s just like years and years and years of these stories.

Sarah: So you would walk around looking for tortoises that are endangered and hard to find, and you would find boatloads of dead people.

Michelle: Yeah. Usually, like, we’ve never found like a group? It’s always been one at a time, you know? Out there?

Sarah: Oh, does that, like, screw up your day? Like, do you have to, like, stop and call it in and mark the location, or do you just sort of tag it with the geolocation coordinates, send it in, and be like, all right, off to more tortoises?

Michelle: Actually, that part is very annoying. It’s not at all what you would expect, and I feel a little upset with the movies for not preparing me for this?

Sarah: [Laughs]

Michelle: Like, they could have really done a better job, the movies. But, like, for instance, like – [sighs] – what was it? One or two, like a couple jobs ago, I found this assault rifle, and –

Sarah: As you do! Just lying in the dust, right.

Michelle: As you do! And it wa-, I mean, they didn’t even bury it, Sarah! Like, they didn’t even walk it very far off the road, this assault rifle, and it’s like full-auto AK-47; like, you don’t legally own a gun like that anymore. And so the construction workers I’m with, I’m like, are you going to call it in? And I’m like, ugh! Every time you call it in, you, like, take the GPS point, you call it in, you tell them the GPS point, you tell them what you found, time, dates, pictures, everything. They say, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. They’re never interested, first of all, which you would think if you, like – ‘cause this is a gun, but it’s the same when you call in a skull or a body: unless it’s fresh, they don’t get excited. And so –

Sarah: Oh, see! Now, that is misleading. You’d think they’d be like, oh, we’re getting in the car right now!

Michelle: Right? But they’re just bored about it. They’re just bored about it, and I was like, if I call it in they’re not going to care, and they’re not going to be able to find it. They’re going to call me back thirty times asking about the GPS point, right, and it’s just a waste of my time! Like, I watched my friend go round and round for like three weeks about a skull he found, you know, and, like, you’d think they’d get excited about a human skull, but nope! So anyway, so I didn’t call in the assault rifle, ‘cause I was like, whatever; they’re not going to care. Well, then we find another one like fifty feet later, and I was like, all right. [Laughs]

Sarah: Oh great! So either –

Michelle: It was like, this is too many guns! So I called it in, and I gave them and I gave them the G- – and I called it in. They said, I’m sorry, ma’am; that’s the county? You’re going to need to call the county; we’re the state.

Sarah: Ah!

Michelle: And I was like, fine, I’ll call the county. So I call the county, and I tell them the GPS coordinates, and I’m like, this is the UTM; this is about where it is on the road, mile markers and everything, right, and they’re like, okay, great, great, great, great! They call me back the next day; they’re like, we don’t under- – like, it was the husband of the officer that I talked to or something. They’re like, I’ve been plugging it into the Google, trying to figure out what these GPS numbers are that you gave me, but I can’t, I can’t figure it out! Can you just – and they ended up having to drive out, and I had to walk them over to it, ‘cause they just could not figure out the GPS coordinates. So, like, the, the takeaway message is, if you ever find a body anywhere, like, you can take the point, you can take the picture, but just, like, you might as well flag a trail all the way back to the highway, because there’s no way they’re ever going to find it if you don’t walk them out there.

Sarah: So, like, someone is leaving a breadcrumb trail of AK-47s; like, they’re leaving them in the dirt to find their way back; and the police is not interested in that.

Michelle: [Laughs]

Sarah: Wow!

Michelle: It’s so weird, right? And it made so much sense after that, why they didn’t bother hiding the guns better. ‘Cause, I mean, they were –

Sarah: Oh –

Michelle: – right off a highway.

Sarah: Just chucking ‘em off the truck.

Michelle: Just chucking ‘em off the truck!

Sarah: Holy shit. Wow! And you’d think, like, okay, well, remains would be a person, and a person would be likely reported missing. You’d think this would be like, oh! All right, well, you know, we’ll go find the body and figure out what ha- – no! What? Oh, come on!

Michelle: Yeah, yeah.

Sarah: Are you sure you don’t want to write murder mysteries and, like, have some, you know, baby animals and murder solving?

Michelle: [Laughs] And murder – well, actually, Sarah – no, I am writing a serial killer book, if that makes you feel better.

Sarah: Ooh! Yeah! That sounds good. I mean, you know where to hide the AK-47s.

Michelle: Mm-hmm. And it’s just like my other books, right? I was like, I’m going to write a serial killer book. I’m going to write a wild, crazy serial killer book, and you know what happened?

Sarah: You wrote a comedy?

Michelle: Love snuck right into it.

Sarah: God damn, I hate when that happens.

Michelle: And now it’s a love story too. I’m like, what are you doing in the serial killer book, love?

Sarah: [Laughs] So annoying when that happens!

Michelle: So annoying.

Sarah: So I’m curious: when you get a job as a biologist, who is hiring you? Is it the government? Is it private investors? Is it like a tortoise group? Do they have a fandom? I bet they have a fandom.

Michelle: [Laughs] A fan- – oh, that’s interesting! It’s like forty-two layers of subcontractors. So it’s usually, like, the – most of, most tortoise jobs that have funding, like, it’s really hard to get funding for the research jobs and the stuff where you actually are involved in conservation work? Like, a lot of the stuff that you actually get paid for is moving tortoises out of the way of construction, just like Mari’s job in Breathe the Sky, so it’s, the company that’s doing construction has been, they have to follow the laws, and so to follow the laws about endangered species they hire a biological consulting company, and the biological consulting company has a lot of biologists on staff that, as I previously displayed, would all lie down and die if they came out to the desert, so they call one of, like, just a handful, just a tiny handful of tortoise biologist companies, where they all know all of us and they can bring us out and do the job, but it’s really, it’s weird in that they don’t really give you information. Like, when you get an email, you never get any notice that you’re about to go on a job, and when you get an email it’s sort of like Navy SEALs being sent out? They’re like, we need you to show up on Monday! And here! And they don’t tell you, like, how much you’re getting paid or what hours you get to work or, like, what you’re going to do or any of that boring stuff that normal people who get jobs get. They’re just like, show up on Monday, general location in the middle of the desert, Southern California. Like, I had a job last spring where they just gave me GPS coordinates, like twelve different GPS coordinates that were just way, way, way out in the desert, and those were my sunny plots, and I would just show up to those and figure out how to get out there, whatever way I could, and then survey for tortoises when I got out there. But yeah, it’s, nobody’s ever heard of it because, like I said, there’s only a few of us that do it? And there’s not that many tortoises, there’s not that many jobs, there’s not really enough work to keep a normal biologist who has a house payment going, so it’s just like –

Sarah: Right.

Michelle: – the small group of us weirdos who are willing to do this and used to it.

Sarah: I know in your bio it says that you and your husband gave up your jobs and moved into your truck. Do you still live in a truck?

Michelle: No. We lived in the truck for, full-time for four years, and then we got an apartment, and then we would live in the truck during tortoise work, and then we would do a bunch of traveling, and then, you know, we’d mo-, we’d come back to the apartment in between when we wanted, like, a roof and walls and things?

Sarah: Right.

Michelle: And so we’ve slowly been becoming more and more like real people with houses? And now –

Sarah: [Laughs]

Michelle: – we mostly live in the truck just for tortoise biology and, like, a little bit of, you know, and then we do, like, a more normal amount of camping and traveling. But we were doing a ton of traveling, and it’s like, up until this year, being in my apartment for more than two weeks straight was, like, really noticeable. I’d be like, we’ve been here for two weeks! And my husband would be like, I know! It’s amazing!

[Laughter]

Michelle: You know, and, like, all the way up until COVID, really, even last year, I think, when I finally  hit four weeks straight that I’d been home in the apartment, I was like, what?! This is so strange and weird! So we’re just kind of all over the place. That’s why I say semi-nomadic, because it’s just, people don’t understand that every time they talk to me I’m in a different time zone, you know, and, like –

Sarah: Right!

Michelle: – this week I’m living in my truck, and this week I’m in a cabin, and this week I’m in a tent, and this week I’m on a boat, and, like, you just never know what you’re going to get, and I’ve written a lot of books that way, which is really bizarre. Like, looking back, I’m kind of like, how did I concentrate? But I just really like to write, so I’ll pretty much do it, like, hanging upside down like a bat, what-, or whatever, you know, people allow me to do. Like, I’ve written a lot outdoors in the Mojave in the middle of, like, sandstorms and windstorms and heat waves and ridiculousness.

Sarah: Well, I mean, there’s not much else to do, right?

Michelle: That, yeah, that’s exactly it. And, you know, sometimes on construction jobs you’re, like, sitting at the road waiting for your construction crew to show up, and so you’re just sitting there until they show up, and you can’t do anything until they do, so might as well entertain yourself.

Sarah: Right! So where are some of your favorite places that you’ve lived?

Michelle: New Orleans, for sure. So my last book, Unbreak Me, was set half in New Orleans and half on a horse ranch in Montana, because I think that’s, like, my dream life? [Laughs] But we’ve, we go down in New Orleans and spend weeks to months there whenever we can afford it, ‘cause it’s just, like, something about that city just fills me up like I’m taking a big, long drink of it into my soul, you know. Oh, I love that place. Yeah! So that’s my favorite. We’ve done a lot of traveling. I really love scuba diving? So I’ve liked a lot of the scuba diving trips that we’ve done, but for just pure place, New Orleans is my favorite.

Sarah: So it sounds like you’re really good at being physically uncomfortable and finding ways through that discomfort to write books and find tortoises.

Michelle: [Laughs] That’s accurate. Yep, yep. I would say that’s accurate. Tortoise biology – I say this, I think, in the acknowledgements of Breathe the Sky, but it’s the best preparation for publishing that you ever get, because you have to just look for tortoises for thousands and thousands and thousands of hours without finding one, and also in writing, you need to be very persistent. I’m not sure if other authors have told you this, but, you know, it takes –

Sarah: Oh yeah.

Michelle: – it takes a while to get where you want to be –

Sarah: Oh yeah.

Michelle: – in publishing, so – [laughs] –

Sarah: And the, the, the pace of publication is also tortoise-like sometimes.

Michelle: [Laughs] Yes, yes! So I was very well emotionally prepared for this career through tortoise biology.

Sarah: Right! It’s slow moving, it can be frustrating, it can leave you very parched – yeah, yeah! Makes sense! Sure! Absolutely!

Michelle: You’re passing dead bodies left and right as you go.

Sarah: Yeah, you know, as you do! With the number of places that you’ve lived and all of the different things that you’ve seen, you know, COVID notwithstanding, where would you go next?

Michelle: Ooh, that’s a good question! I like that! We were actually in New Orleans when COVID hit this year. Like, it went from not being a thing at all to, like, the whole city closing down within just about –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Michelle: – like two weeks when we were down there, and so our trip got cut short, so I definitely want to go back there, but there’s a live-aboard dive trip that we’re saving up for that we’d like to be able to do someday, where it’s like this lagoon way, way, way, way out in the middle of the ocean, but because it’s a lagoon and it’s, like, kind of like rimmed in by coral sort of, so that it’s not, there’s no terrible currents, but there’s a ton of shipwrecks down in there, and so you can go out and dive down to the, down to the shipwrecks.

Sarah: [Gasps] Cool!

Michelle: Yeah. I would really love to do that, ‘cause I was a history major, well, history and psychology major back in college, and so shipwrecks are just like the archaeology site of the sea, you know? I love to go down and look at those. And, you know, you get sea turtles and, and –

Sarah: That’s cool!

Michelle: – all these fish and shipwrecks? Like, it’s just too cool.

Sarah: I also read in your bio that you were, were and are heavily into fanfiction. What are your top fandoms? You don’t have to give away any of your writing names or anything like that if you want to keep that part separate – totally get it – but what are your fandoms?

Michelle: Oh my gosh, I love fanfiction so much. I will talk about fanfiction all day. Like, I straight up started writing because fanfiction reviewers were so great and wonderful. So I started out in The Vampire Diaries, and I met some of my best and longest writing friends through the Vampire Diaries fandom, and then I’ve done, let’s see, Vampire Diaries, Gilmore Girls, The Walking Dead, Veronica Mars, and just the, most recently, the Outer Banks. It’s such an interesting way to stretch your writer muscles. I’ve written a few blogs about this, but, like, it’s just a fascinating writing exercise to – ‘cause you can make up your own characters, and you can make up your own dialogue, but it’s almost like a better way to break it down and learn it if you’re trying to mimic someone else?

Sarah: Mm-hmm!

Michelle: So if you’re trying to mimic someone else’s character and someone else’s dialogue, you have to be able to conceptualize the patterns there more clearly and consciously than you have to if you’re writing your own?

Sarah: Plus a lot of the things that you need to communicate to the audience are already communicated before you get there, because if you’re writing in an existing universe or an AU with characters, you already have character foundations set up, or you already have the universe set up, and you’re either introducing new things or filling in what isn’t there or subverting what was there in a different way, so a lot of the things that as a new writer can be very difficult to communicate are half established, and you’re building on that so that you can learn those skills as you write.

Michelle: Yeah! That’s true too. You can totally cherry-pick the pinnacle scenes in, when you’re doing fanfiction, so you don’t have to write, like, set-up and exposition if you don’t feel like it. You can just cherry-pick to, like, the emotional pinnacle moment, so that makes it –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Michelle: – just really emotionally satisfying and addictive to write? But what I was saying before is you can kind of reverse engineer characterization and dialogue through watching the show and trying to be like, okay, what are the patterns that make this character sound like this character, and what are the things that make this character recognizable to the audience, you know, and you can break it down –

Sarah: Yes.

Michelle: – with, like, physical movements and tics, verbal tics, what they would do in certain situations. Like, all of this stuff that you may or may not think about when you’re writing original fiction, and so through my whole career I’ve kind of gone back and forth between writing fanfiction and original fiction? Like, I didn’t all the way stop writing fanfiction and just switch to original fiction like a lot of people do? And so it’s been really interesting for me to be able to look at the strengths and weaknesses of the two different kinds of writing and use them to enhance the other, so I’m always using, like, one, my fanfiction to enhance my original fiction and my original fiction to enhance my fanfiction.

Sarah: Well, I mean, I figure all writing is training for something else.

Michelle: Yeah, and it’s exploration too. You know, it’s finding out about who you are and who humans are and what to do and how to live life.

Sarah: And how, how tortoises are. You know, key, key elements to, to fiction. How – are you going to put tortoises in every book?

Michelle: I should be putting horses in every book, honestly. Like, I love horses so much, and I’ve only written one book with horses in it, and I’m just like, Michelle, you’re living your life wrong. What are you even doing?

Sarah: Right! Or both.

Michelle: Yeah, or both. Yeah, it was so fun recently: my horseback riding teacher from when I was a teenager got to read Unbreak Me, which is my book that has horses in it, and –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Michelle: – there’s, there’s quite a bit of – so, in Breathe the Sky there’s wildlife metaphors for their relationship with wild animals? In Unbreak Me, it’s a lot of horse training metaphors for their relationship, and so all this stuff that the characters are doing with training horses is stuff that she taught me, and it was just so cool to have her go back and read that book, and I haven’t talked to her in a few years, you know, ‘cause I’ve, I’ve been out of my hometown for quite a while, but to get to go back and thank her for teaching me assertiveness, which is, like, maybe the most important thing that any teenage girl could ever know? But riding horses is such a great way to learn assertiveness, and I was happy to be able to put some of that into my books and pay it forward from stuff that she taught me.

Sarah: And it sounds like it’s a language, too, that, that biology and tortoises and horse training, this is all, these are all different languages that you learn by being part of that community. Is that right?

Michelle: Yeah! Yeah, that’s kind of an interesting way to look at it.

Sarah: So what do we random, non-tortoise, non-desert-tortoise, not-knowing people need to know about tortoises? I mean, I’m assuming that one of the reasons why their numbers are so limited is because of encroachment and, and predators and humans generally sucking. What –

Michelle: [Laughs]

Sarah: – do we need to know about tortoises if we want to make sure that they don’t, they don’t go completely off the Earth?

Michelle: Oh, that’s a really good one! So if you go out – so I’m dealing with Mojave Desert tortoises, right; so there’s not tortoises in every desert, but if you’re in the –

Sarah: Right.

Michelle: – Mojave Desert, don’t take your dog on and off the leash walk, because dogs love to chew on tortoises? I’ve lived –

Sarah: I’m going to go and ask my dogs how they feel about chewing on tortoises, because one of them is so anxious, I’m pretty sure he would be fucking terrified of the tortoise –

Michelle: [Laughs]

Sarah: – and the other one would be like, yes, I do want a to- – how did you know? The Lady, how did you know I wanted to chew on a tortoise? I mean, he’s very small –

Michelle: It’s –

Sarah: – and he thinks he can bag me a deer? So yeah –

Michelle: Yeah!

Sarah: – I can see that.

Michelle: Yeah, no, it’s so interesting! I was living in this really crappy hotel in the Mojave once for a job, and there was a dog that lived at the hotel, and he had all the toys in the world, and all he wanted was to go find tortoise carcasses from the desert, and he would chew on those all day and ignore all of his toys. Like, I don’t know what it is about them that makes them smell so good to dogs, but dogs, really into it. So yeah, if you take your dog out in the desert, put ‘em on a leash. And then also, if you’re driving out in the Mojave Desert, like, watch the road, ‘cause they will cross the road, and they’re very slow, and they’ll use the road, too, because it’s easier walking than the desert, and if you park your car, look underneath it before you move your car, because your truck is the best shade in the whole desert, and so animals –

Sarah: Oh, of course!

Michelle: – will hide under there, and then when you get – and especially tortoises will tuck themselves right up underneath your tire tread, because the roof of your tire feels like the roof of their burrow to them, so it feels safe –

Sarah: Oh!

Michelle: – which is not safe, tortoises. Not safe. So yeah, check under your tires before you move your car in the Mojave Desert.

Sarah: Good to know! Tortoises like unsafe places to hang out.

Michelle: Yeah. And if you see a tortoise burrow, don’t stick your face in it, ‘cause rattlesnakes live in there a bunch of times too.

Sarah: Oh, that sounds like something I would never ever want to do, ever, stick my face in a burrow of anything.

Michelle: Yeah, it’s –

Sarah: Like, even in random bits of Maryland, I would not stick my face in a burrow. That sounds –

Michelle: [Laughs]

Sarah: – that sounds bad.

Michelle: Well, when you’re a tortoise biologist, like, all you do is stick your head in burrows and try to figure out what’s living in there and if there’s anything back there, right, and so I’ve had badgers come out a couple of times, and come right into my face, ‘cause, you know, tortoises will use old badger digs and stuff, so you’ll look, even if it’s not a tortoise burrow, it’s a badger hole, like, you’ll still look in it, and then sometimes a badger flies out at your face, or there’ll be a rattlesnake right in there –

Sarah: Ahh!

Michelle: – or, like, tarantulas. Like, it’s a perfect topic for Halloween, actually, because if you’re, if you’re excavating a burrow for a construction project, or if you’re just looking in a burrow for tortoises, like, everything that comes out of there is so Halloween-y; it’s just like every spider and creepy-crawly scorpion thing that you possibly don’t want in your pants is, like, crawling out of the burrow and up your pants.

Sarah: And wants to kill you.

Michelle: Yeah.

Sarah: Lovely!

Michelle: Accurate.

Sarah: So what are you, what are you working on right now?

Michelle: In terms of books?

Sarah: Yeah! Or biology, or tortoises. You know!

Michelle: So the next thing in the pipeline is a rom-com called So You Think You’re a Match, and that is a credit card thief – so there’s a guy, he’s been stealing credit card numbers to pay his little sister’s cancer treatments, and he uses one of his stolen card numbers to pay for a dating subscription app, and then matches with the girl whose card he stole?

Sarah: Oops!

Michelle: Oops! So that one’s super funny. Not totally sure what the release date’s going to be on that, but that’s the next one that’s coming out, and then I’ve been revising my crazy serial killer book that accidentally has love in it, and it is the weirdest, wildest – like, I think possibly all the time out in the heat has warped my brain, because I have no other explanation for this book.

Sarah: [Laughs] So are there still tortoise jobs in the Quarantimes?

Michelle: Yeah! I was out this March doing research jobs, because, you know, certain, certain construction projects are essential; a lot of ‘em are involved with infrastructure projects?

Sarah: Right.

Michelle: You know, like solar power or natural gas pipelines or power lines. Like, there’s a lot of infrastructure stuff that’s being built through tortoise habitat, and so a lot of tortoise jobs can be deemed essential. So yeah, this March, it was, it was really scary, actually, March and April, like, ‘cause it was just starting, nobody really knew how bad it was going to be, and I did not want to run all over the desert, living in my truck, when I was trying to keep, like, one hundred percent germ-free? It was –

Sarah: Yeah!

Michelle: – challenging. But then it ended up being amazing, because we were way out in the desert. It was the best flower season ever, I was around this great group of people, and, like, the whole rest of the world was melting down, and we were out there just walking back and forth, looking for tortoises, looking at the flowers, like, supporting each other.

Sarah: That’s really lovely, and it sounds like it was gorgeous.

Michelle: Yeah, it was interesting! It was kind of like, you turn on your phone and it looks like the whole world is on fire, and then you go outside and you realize, you know, everything’s actually okay! Like, things, things are bad, but we’re still here. We’re still okay. Also, we found so many tortoises; there were so many tortoises this spring; it was great.

Sarah: Oh, awesome! That is good news! I mean, I figure that’s what you want in a good expedition, right? More tortoises than dead bodies and guns?

Michelle: [Laughs] Yes, absolutely! Especially when there’s a small group of you very far out. You don’t want to find too many dead bodies, ‘cause then you’re like, well, how safe are we?

Sarah: Yeah! Like, am I about to join the ranks here, because that’s not what I signed up for!

Michelle: Yeah!

Sarah: So what books are you reading right now – I always ask this – that you want to tell people about?

Michelle: Oh my goodness. So first of all, Fearless by Katie Golding. So this book is rodeo cowboys and motorcycle racers, right? So both the girl and the guy in the book race motorcycles, and they both are also in rodeos? And I’m kind of mad at this author, because I do not care about motorcycle racing at all – [laughs] – and she made me, like, really care about motorcycle racing? Like, the racing scenes in there are insane! And you just think, like, how is NASCAR so popular in this country when motorcycle racing is, like, so much more badass and adrenaline-filled? Like, they’re leaning those bikes over so far that their, like, knee will scrape the ground. They’re going like two hundred miles an hour, like, on a motorcycle? But anyway, the cowboy in this book –

Sarah: Whoa!

Michelle: – is just completely adorable. Like, you don’t want to read it in public because you’re going to start, awww! like, at your Kindle, and it’s just humiliating to be caught aww-ing at your Kindle in public.

Sarah: [Laughs]

Michelle: And then the other one that I just barely started is Alexa Martin’s Snapped, which I mentioned earlier. So that’s, she does this series where it’s, like, the wives of NFL players, and this one is dealing with the whole issue where NFL players kneel down during the national anthem –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Michelle: – and she started this book before all the riots and everything that happened this year, and it’s just gotten more and more, you know, important since she wrote it, so I’m really happy that it’s coming out now, and also it’s an interesting book because she’s hilarious. Like, she’s a really funny romance author, and I really am looking forward to seeing the mix of humor and real world problems in that book, because, like, you know, that’s exactly what I like to do in my books? So that’s going to be a fun one.

Sarah: Very cool.

[music]

Sarah: And that brings us to the end of this week’s episode. Thank you to Michelle Hazen for hanging out with me, thank you to garlicknitter for the transcript, and thank you to the Patreon community for making sure each episode comes out each week for you to enjoy.

I will have links to all of the books we talked about in the show notes at smartbitchestrashybooks.com/podcast.

I am curious, though: I do think we need a word for romances that heavily feature friendships as well as romance, and if you have ideas of what to call them, please email me at [email protected], or if you would like a set of recommendations based on what you like, Amanda and I can help you out, or if you just want to tell me some feedback or give me an idea or make a suggestion, [email protected]!

One thing I get a lot of in my email are bad jokes, because I love them, and this week is no different. I have a terrible joke. Are you ready? It’s really bad. I know you love these parts; I love this part too. It’s my favorite thing to do each week: find the worst possible joke to share with you. You ready? [Clears throat] Professional podcaster voice:

What are the opposite of ladyfingers?

Give up? Thinking about having tiramisu? Me too. But what is the opposite – or are – what are the opposite of ladyfingers?

Mentos.

[Laughs] It’s so bad, I love it! That joke comes from /kalbo_boii on Reddit. Thank you, Reddit. And now I want tiramisu and Mentos. They don’t actually go together, do they? No, definitely not.

On behalf of everyone here, we wish you the very best of reading. 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 Tea & Strumpets, to listen to at frolic.media/podcasts.

[dreamy music]