535. All Things Magical with Freya Marske

[music]

Sarah Wendell: Hello and welcome to episode number 535 of Smart Podcast, Trashy Books. I’m Sarah Wendell, and my guest today is author Freya Marske. I did not know that she was longing to be on the show, and I’m so excited to have her on today. Her latest book, A Restless Truth, is out this week, and if you like queer, magical, historical mysteries with murder, you will like this series. We’re going to talk about magic having a physical cost and how her favorite magical systems in fiction work, plus magical spells, and we have many, many recommendations, which are a kind of magic all their own, aren’t they? So grab your cauldron and join us.

Hello and thank you to our Patreon community. Patreon folks get bonus episodes; we have a Discord; it is a lovely, charming, beautiful place. We would love to have you join us. Every pledge keeps me going, keeps the show going, and helps me make sure that every episode has a transcript from garlicknitter – hi, garlicknitter! [Hi! – gk] Have a look at patreon.com/SmartBitches. We would love to have you join our community.

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Are you ready to discuss magic, murder, mayhem, and all of the recommendations? Let’s do this: on with my podcast with Freya Marske.

[music]

Freya Marske: I am Freya Marske, and I’m a writer of fantasy and romance and romantic fantasy. My debut novel A Marvellous Light came out in November last year, and it’s a queer, historical fantasy which kicks off a queer, historical trilogy!

Sarah: I love a good trilogy. It was one of my favorite things when I was researching this: all of the things you said about building a trilogy, which I will get to. But congratulations on A Restless Truth!

Freya: Thank you!

Sarah: Okay, first of all, I love the covers so much. I love the –

Freya: Oh my God.

Sarah: – Edwardian wallpaper. I mean, it, like –

Freya: It’s so beautiful!

Sarah: – did they just sort of wake up Morris and be like, listen, we just need you to come back to life for like three covers. You can go back to –

Freya: Look, I wouldn’t put it past the art department.

Sarah: [Laughs]

Freya: I mean, Will Staehle, who did this, the covers, is incredible, and they were really lovely and said, look, do you have any ideas, any inspiration? And I said, do I? and then –

Sarah: Oh! Funny you should ask!

Freya: – very politely sent them an email with about twenty attachment images.

Sarah: [Laughs]

Freya: Well, here’s a few initial thoughts! And I think they sort of went, okay.

Sarah: Yeah! Oh, clearly we know what we’re talking about here.

Freya: But I, I love them. I can’t wait to see what they come up with for book three.

Sarah: What will readers find inside A Restless Truth? I absolutely loved your description of a fantasy of very bad manners?

Freya: Yes! Yes, A Marvellous Light, being book one, was definitely more in the fantasy of manners. I’m thinking we, in A Restless Truth, which is book two, the pretense at manners gets a little bit thinner.

Sarah: Yeah.

Freya: So in terms of what readers will find inside this book, my initial list is a Sapphic romance, which is a rake/wallflower speed run –

Sarah: [Laughs]

Freya: – all the fun, grandeur, and aesthetic of the Titanic, but zero icebergs –

Sarah: Good call.

Freya: – a lot more of the magic worldbuilding that we see in book one; live readings of Victorian pornography; and at least one ghost.

Sarah: That’s fabulous!

Freya: That’s the list!

Sarah: That’s actually a really good roundup. I would have, I would have –

Freya: Yeah!

Sarah: – I was trying to describe it to my husband, and I was like, okay, so there’s, it’s a murder mystery, but with magic and fantasy and lesbians on a cruise ship, so it’s, it’s, it’s the cruise ship version of a locked-room mystery, with magic –

Freya: Mm, it is; it’s a locked boat.

Sarah: Yeah, it’s a locked boat. And, and it’s, it’s actually kind of terrifying. One thing that I love that you did, by the way, is that in the, in about the midpoint they all kind of meet each other. Like, they all know who the enemy is. They know –

Freya: Mm!

Sarah: – yeah, they’re like, okay, we know you’re on deck two, you’re on deck three. Okay, we all know who we are; just stay out of our way.

Freya: I quite like it when a midpoint does change not only something about the relationship status quo but something about the status quo of the book –

Sarah: Yeah.

Freya: – and I quite like the idea that the whodunit aspect becomes a little bit less relevant in the latter half of the book, and it’s much more about, how do we get this thing back? Who has the MacGuffin?

Sarah: Yeah.

Freya: And it’s just hijinks on a boat from that point onwards. [Laughs]

Sarah: Yes. And because book one and book two fit together in this, in this progression of the larger story, pieces of book one inform book two, but if you haven’t –

Freya: Hmm!

Sarah: – read book one, you can kind of figure stuff out in book two, but it’s just much richer if you’ve read book one.

Freya: Yeah, and I think I liked that it was a very different type of story. So for people who haven’t read it, in book one we meet Edwin and Robin, we get their relationship, their romance, their introduction into this conspiracy adventure, and book two features Robin’s younger sister Maud, who we meet briefly in book one, and she is absolutely determined to take part in this adventure. And the other narrator is a woman called Violet, who is new, and she’s been working as a theatre magician in New York City and is now coming home to England after coming into an unexpected inheritance. And as narrators they are very different people to Robin and Edwin, and so I knew from the beginning that the tone of book two would also be very different, so I think it feels more like a companion than a sequel –

Sarah: Yeah.

Freya: – because the people that you’re seeing, that, whose eyes you’re seeing the story through are completely different.

Sarah: Absolutely. And the world that the, the characters are operating within, the rules are pretty consistent from book one to book two, so once you figure them out, that part is, is, is systematically the same.

Freya: Book three starts to dig into those rules and –

Sarah: Oh?

Freya: – break them apart a little bit.

Sarah: I love this plan! I’m thrilled to be a part of it.

Freya: [Laughs]

Sarah: One of the things that I admire so much about this series is that for the characters in the world of magic, magic is a finite resource. It’s, it’s like the energy you have to do things; it’s like your, your cognitive energy, your physical energy. It’s not a limitless resource! You can’t just summon it and use it all – you get tired!

Freya: Mm.

Sarah: There are costs to the magic, which I appreciate very much as one of the rules. What are some of the other costs of magic in this world?

Freya: I like that you enjoyed that aspect, because that was something I did very deliberately. I, I agree: I don’t like it when magic is too easy and too simple and cost-free, and I really enjoyed writing Edwin especially as somebody who operates in this world that puts a huge amount of value on how much magic you have, i.e., how much you can use at once or in a day. As somebody who has never had that much and is operating from a place of, basically, an inferiority complex about how much magic he has and has compensated with the kind of personality he has by coming at it from a very systematic, precise, academic perspective. But the idea of what are the costs of magic is a question that I’m addressing a lot more in book three, which I have finished the first draft of.

Sarah: Oh! Congratulations!

Freya: It is off with my editors.

Sarah: Yay!

Freya: Thank you. [Laughs] Oh, yes, it’s very nice. I mean, it’s great –

Sarah: Cheers to that!

Freya: Cheers! I’m in great post-book lull at the moment while my editors look at it for me. But book three looks a lot more about this big theme that I wanted to explore, which is a very Spiderman, with-power-comes-responsibility kind of theme.

Sarah: Yeah.

Freya: If power was originally granted as a gift in the understanding that it would be used for something in particular, what are the dangers that come when it is then used for something else? And if magic, which is a finite resource, has been shaped and practiced in a way approved by a certain set of people who set the rules in society, what does that mean about previous knowledge which might have been lost? And I laid some seeds for this in book one; I obviously dig into it a lot more in A Restless Truth with some of the revelations we get about the Forsythia club, this group of old women who were young women once and who were doing magic not by the rules set by society; and then once I’ve expanded that scope in book two, oh, we really explode it some more in book three.

Sarah: And of course if you’re going to set this in Edwardian England, there’s a, a, a wee bit of class structure; a little bit; just a –

Freya: Oh, oh! Just, just a, just a teensy little soupcon of class, yes?

Sarah: Just a smidge, right? Yeah. And the same forces –

Freya: Yeah.

Sarah: – that try to keep you in line. I recently had this theory, when I was looking at a lot of the coverage of the, of the queen’s death, actually, that the English are absolutely fucking obsessed with queues. Like, just the line. Where are you in the line? Who’s in front of you in the line? Who’s behind you in the line? Where are you in the line?

Freya: [Laughs] Mm-hmm.

Sarah: And don’t cut the queue. If you – that’s treason! Like, you can say all kinds of dastardly, terrible things, but my God, if you queue-jump, the whole country hates you!

Freya: Yeah! And book one played a little bit with that in that –

Sarah: Yes, it did!

Freya: – Robin is, has the highest social status – he’s a baronet – and he was thrown into this house full of people who have more money than him –

Sarah: Yep.

Freya: – and also have more magic than him, ‘cause he has no magic at all, and therefore they look on his title as, it’s important socially, like it says in the social rules, but they still think of themselves as slightly apart. So it was interesting to play with this idea of a group of people who recognize and exist within this class structure but also have a level of class of their own –

Sarah: Yes.

Freya: – which sort of shifts how they behave within one another, and book three is all about class and all about the Edwardian era and some of the social shifts that were happening at that time. Like, one of the earliest scenes in book three is actually set in Westminster, in the houses of Parliament.

Sarah: Oh! Cool!

Freya: And the entire romance in book three, which, if you have read book two and you have any romance instincts at all, you can probably guess who the central romance in book three is, because –

Sarah: I have some ideas, yeah.

Freya: – you don’t put an asshole aristocrat with secret angst on the page –

Sarah: No.

Freya: – without promising your reader –

Sarah: Yes!

Freya: – that that will be book three. [Laughs]

Sarah: Yes. That, that gentleman is Lord Sequel Bait right there.

Freya: Lord Sequel Bait, exactly –

Sarah: Yeah! [Laughs]

Freya: – from the very beginning, and it’s been wonderful having fantasy readers come to me and say, I don’t know why, but I just, I know he wasn’t on the page very much and, like, I know he was pretty horrible, but I don’t know; I found that character really compelling. And I’m like, that’s because you’re recognizing romance sequel bait –

Sarah: That’s right!

Freya: – in the fantasy novel.

[Laughter]

Sarah: That’s right! He really is –

Freya: Congratulations.

Sarah: – Lord Sequel Bait alll over the place.

Freya: Yes. So as you may imagine, Lord Sequel Bait’s book has a lot to do with class –

Sarah: Yes.

Freya: – and class inequality and how you negotiate a relationship where there is a huge power disparity and some very mixed feelings about that power disparity on both sides.

Sarah: Yes, very much so. Especially because he has a lot of feelings about them that he doesn’t want to talk about because feelings are annoying and he would really rather not.

Freya: Of course.

Sarah: Of course. I mean, that’s what –

Freya: I mean, he was the kind of person where – and this ties into a little bit about how I structured the trilogy, but I couldn’t actually drag him from – he couldn’t be the same person at the beginning of his own book as he was in book one.

Sarah: Yeah.

Freya: There was too much to travel, too, too far to travel, so I had to do some of his emotional work on page in book two –

Sarah: Oh yeah.

Freya: – to drag him a little bit closer towards those emotions –

Sarah: Yes.

Freya: – that he was so reluctant to recognize –

Sarah: Feelings galore.

Freya: – and so by the time we hit the ground running in book three, he has already done some of his emotional arc, and I’ve already done the first two, three beats of his romance in book three.

Sarah: Yeah. Nice!

Freya: In book two.

Sarah: And, you know, here in Romance Land, we are very familiar with the character who’s truly dastardly in book one becoming book three, and suddenly we cannot get enough of this person that we all hated two books ago.

Freya: Exactly.

Sarah: Oh yeah. We’re –

Freya: Exactly.

Sarah: We’re all big fans of that.

Freya: So if I’ve done that, I’ve done the job right.

Sarah: Well done! Yes, I’m a big fan of Lord Sequel Bait, who has to have a big emotional redemption and figure out how to have feelings; they’re so annoying. Ugh!

Freya: Yeah.

Sarah: Now, I read an interview at the LA Public Library website that this trilogy was inspired by the trilogy structure of romance novels, which we’ve talked a lot about, and I’m so excited about this! Because you have the ensemble cast, you have a fantasy plot, but then each book is the love story of a different couple, which I –

Freya: Yes.

Sarah: – personally love, because the more people you can hang out with in a world, the more fun it is? Like, I love fanfic that’s like, okay, these people are all real cool. Let’s talk about this random person who is in like one quarter of a scene; we’re going to just imagine their whole world; and I’m like, yes! Bring it to me! Send them to the coffee shop –

Freya: Yeah.

Sarah: – we’re going to go to IKEA together. I want to read all of this; I’m all about it. I love this so much. How have you liked writing within this structure, and what has feedback from readers been like, who are more accustomed to fantasy structures?

Freya: Yeah! I have loved, loved writing this way, ‘cause I think it really appeals to the kind of stories that I want to write. And, look, I have enormous respect for people in both spheres, romance and fantasy, who can pull off a multiple-book series –

Sarah: Oh yeah.

Freya: – with the same characters, and especially in romance, so. Look, I think K. J. Charles’s Will Darling adventures is my most-often quoted example of this done phenomenally well. But I always knew I was building, essentially, a queer found-family Leverage heist crew. Like, that’s, that’s where we’re at by book three, really.

Sarah: There! Yeah!

Freya: And so I wanted to build that crew across the three books, and, look, I’m a sucker for the falling in love romance process, so this way I get to tell three love stories and give the reader all the stuff that we love about this when we see it in romance novels, which is we get to dangle the sequel bait in the first couple of books –

Sarah: Yep!

Freya: – and we also get to give the reader, especially in book three, a lot of on-page time with the previous couples so you can see them when they’re together and being a bit more couple-y, rather than going through all of the ups and downs and angst of the getting-together process.

Sarah: Yes.

Freya: So for me, like, it was an absolute joy to write it this way, and it was a little bit of a gamble because, you’re right: fantasy, I think, is less used to that kind of thing, and there are a lot of people who are fairly disappointed. You know, they got really attached to Robin and Edwin in book one, and, like, oh, okay, so I guess we’ll, we’ll spend some time with somebody else, and you don’t actually see a great deal of Robin and Edwin in book two, and that, again, was a bit of a risk that I took.

Sarah: Yeah.

Freya: Like, I made sure I put them in a little bit.

Sarah: They are there, yeah!

Freya: Hopefully – they’re there, but a lot of the, the there-there is in the negative space and in the way that they’re thought about and referred to, but they are there on the page as well.

But hopefully by book three all will be forgiven, because book three brings in everybody –

Sarah: Yep.

Freya: – from the previous two books, which was a headache –

Sarah: [Laughs]

Freya: – at the beginning, ‘cause I was very used to juggling only two people! So –

Sarah: Yeah.

Freya: – Robin and Edwin’s book is very you-and-me-against-the-world, you know, forced proximity quest romance.

Sarah: Yeah.

Freya: Book two is a bit bigger; like, we still have the two central people, but then we have some strong supporting characters, and we’re starting to get the sense of a, a crew being built.

Sarah: Yeah.

Freya: And book three I had to juggle seven primary characters who I involved in this, a whole lot more secondary characters, and we’re still only having two narrators.

Sarah: Right.

Freya: So there’s a lot of who narrates this scene, why is this person in this scene, but also getting to do the really fun thing that you do with Leverage, which is break the group off into little twos and threes –

Sarah: Yes.

Freya: – the people who maybe haven’t interacted much before, and get to really just swim around in the delicious dynamics of having an ensemble cast.

Sarah: Yes. That’s one of my favorite things about videogames: when you have all of the characters, and then you go on a quest, in some multi-, large multi-player games, and in some open world games, you have to pick the players that are going to go with you on a specific quest. You can’t bring everybody; you’ve got to bring three.

Freya: Mm!

Sarah: So you might have a warrior or a mage or a rogue or somebody who can, like, do cool things with swords. Like, you have to figure out, wait, where am I going, and who am I bringing? But my favorite part is taking the long way around to wherever it is I’m trying to go so I can hear all of the dialogue between the characters that’s been built in?

Freya: [Laughs]

Sarah: That’s the best part, right? When you put these people into little –

Freya: Yeah!

Sarah: – combinations, you’re like, oh, you’re going to bring out this side of this person, and, like, you two are going to start to flirt. This is great; let’s walk all the way around the forest before we go inside ‘cause I want to hear all your dialogue. Like, that’s really fun because it’s a way of adding to the characters by having them interact with each other in different subsets.

Freya: I’m so glad you said that because I have a tendency to start with the characters and then work backwards the plot.

Sarah: Yeah, yeah!

Freya: Because, because I’m coming from a romance side of things, and so a lot of planning of book three was what side quest can I give this group of people or this –

Sarah: Yep!

Freya: – duo of people that ties into both of their skills, so it makes it obvious that these are the, the logical people to be going on this side quest.

Sarah: Yes.

Freya: But also means I can then get them to have a conversation about feelings.

Sarah: Yes, absolutely, and the more, the more dialogue that you use to do that, the more the characters get to speak for themselves, which I always love as a reader. I am awful, terribly awful, about skimming long paragraphs of exposition. I just want to hear people talking to each other. I am a shameless eavesdropper, whether it’s texts or podcasts; I just want to listen to the characters talking to each other, so the amount of talking and arguing is just, it’s top, top shelf.

Freya: Ah! Oh, I am so looking forward to your reading book three.

[Laughter]

Sarah: You can send it to me! I mean, if you just want to start reading, you know, chapter one, that’s fine! I mean, I’ve got time. Bedtime’s not for another hour and a half. [Laughs]

Freya: Oh, all right. I’ll, I’ll consider it. It’s still in first draft form. [Laughs] It’s going to change.

Sarah: It’ll change; it’ll change a little bit.

Freya: But I think it’s, probably the first draft is the one that is the closest to, like, my ideal self-indulgent vision for the book, which means there’s probably a lot of just, what if all just sat around a table and talked?

Sarah: Yes!

Freya: Which I’m pretty sure my editors will come back and be like, Freya, they have sat around a table and talked for three scenes in a row; please give them something to do.

[Laughter]

Sarah: I recently read a book called The Monsters We Defy by Leslye Penelope? And it is a 1920s magical heist set in Washington, DC, in the Black business community – I think it was northwest DC – and it’s fabulous, but the characters are all coming from different parts of the community, and they’re all, they all have different magical affinities and abilities, and they’re realizing that people are disappearing, and there’s a lot of time where they all sit around a table and they talk, and they go to a lot of speakeasies, and I’m like, listen, I do not care if you ever get to the Big Bad; just keep talking. [Laughs] So this is why I’m not an editor!

Freya: It is, it is a real part of the heist genre that we don’t think about so much is –

Sarah: Yeah!

Freya: – because you have a group of people planning a heist – and, like, the Ocean’s Eleven films do this so well – is that you can put two people in a ridiculous situation; they are there to prep some ridiculous side aspect of the heist – who cares? We don’t care – and they just have a ridiculous conversation, and so the joy of those films is all, is often in the conversations that people are having when you have just planted them in plot location B.

Sarah: Yes, absolutely. Okay, yes, keep going, keep talking. Get another round!

Freya: Just keep talking.

Sarah: Yeah. Get another round. More beers. More beers. [Laughs]

Freya: Mm-hmm. Keep talking. Yep.

 Sarah: So where did the idea of cradling to learn and then cast magic originate? Was this from, like, finger, string finger games when you were a kid? ‘Cause every time I pictured cradling I was like, oh, like, you mean, like, the witch’s broom with the string and then I would make a shape and –

Freya: Yeah, essentially. And they –

Sarah: Yep. That’s so cool! I hadn’t thought about that in forever!

Freya: – they refer to it in, they refer to it in book one. Robin refers to it as scratch cradle, which is the old word for, it was, like, around before they called it cat’s cradle.

Sarah: Yeah.

Freya: It was called scratch cradle or cat’s cradle. And a lot of, when it was first done it was something that you did in pairs. Like, one person did a design; somebody else did it like that, but –

Sarah: Stuck a hand through the bottom, yeah.

Freya: Yeah, and then it developed into string tricks like the witch’s broom –

Sarah: Yeah.

Freya: – and things like that, and I had a book of string tricks, like the cat’s cradle that you can do by yourself, when I was a kid, and I just worked my way through it and learned to do them all, and so that was a very, it was always just sitting in the back of my mind as something you can do with string.

Sarah: Yeah.

Freya: But the idea of cradling as a magical system is something that I stole from myself from a short story that I had written where the magic system was very beside the point; it was a very sort of epistolary romance kind of short story, but I needed a new magical system, and so I just, I found myself just writing the word cradle –

Sarah: Yep.

Freya: – for, like, a system of gesture, because I was thinking, like, something to do with gesture magic, and then I was like, oh, like cat’s cradle. Oh, cradle, okay, cool.

Sarah: Yeah.

Freya: And I just used it for that. The, the story hasn’t been published, and I just sort of left it there, but the idea of that as a magic system stuck with me, and so when I was writing A Marvellous Light, I knew I wanted to build on that. And it became quite good because of what I wanted to do with Edwin as someone who didn’t have much power.

Sarah: Yeah.

Freya: The idea that you would learn to do magic with almost training wheels –

Sarah: Yeah.

Freya: – and then the string would be how you learned to hold your hands in the correct position, but then once you had learned the, the spell, you weren’t expected to use the string anymore; you were expected to just move much faster. Almost like speaking a language, not enunciating all of the words in the sentence –

Sarah: Yes.

Freya: – with perfect grammar.

Sarah: Absolutely.

Freya: You know, a native speaker would just sort of flow the words together and drop particular parts of words, but because Edwin doesn’t have much magic, he has to be incredibly precise for his meaning to come across to the magic that he’s trying to do.

Sarah: Absolutely.

Freya: And so he, so he uses the string, and it is looked upon as something that only children or very weak magicians would do.

Sarah: And it works as a, as a dual meaning of cradle, because that is the, the, the bassinet or the cradle of their magical training is from that, that once –

Freya: Hmm!

Sarah: – using the string is the, is the, like, the, the crèche of their magical abilities, and they’re supposed to grow out of it, like you said, but they don’t –

Freya: Hmm.

Sarah: – but the foundation is always still there.

Freya: But it’s so limiting as well.

Sarah: Yeah.

Freya: Like, it’s there, like, this is how you learn magic; British magicians use string and they do cradles, and only in book two, in A Restless Truth, do I start to show you that maybe other places don’t do it that way. Then maybe there used to be potential for, even in Britain, for magic to be done in different ways –

Sarah: Yeah.

Freya: – but it was just decided that this is the way it’s going to be now. It’s going to be very contractual, very precise, and then once you start only using one system –

Sarah: Yeah.

Freya: – then the way you think about magic becomes quite blinkered, I suppose. Like –

Sarah: Yes, it’s a very rigid structure; it’s the same –

Freya: Yeah.

Sarah: We will do the magic with this shape, and that is the only shape.

Freya: Mm, ‘cause all you can see is the way that you’ve been taught.

Sarah: Yes, exactly, and if we’ve always done it that way, then that’s the way we always have to do it, which is, like, the worst thing you can say to me: oh, we do it this way ‘cause we’ve always done it that way, and I’m like, okay, but why? That doesn’t actually answer my question. And I, I say a lot, you know, tradition can be very comforting; it can connect you to a heritage; tradition can connect you to people who are no longer with you. Tradition can also be peer pressure from the dead, and they don’t know everything –

Freya: Hmm!

Sarah: – ‘cause they’re dead! You don’t have to listen! It’s very particular what you, what you decide to carry forward. And what I love about the cradling aspect of these, of these books is that some – for, for Edwin, for example – the cradling is a source of enormous comfort, and it is a way for him to channel as much of the limited power as he has into what he does, and for some of the women in A Restless Truth, the cradling is something that they don’t even have access to. That’s not, that, they’re not allowed to learn that. That, well, that’s for –

Freya: Hmm!

Sarah: – that’s not, that’s not for women! Women aren’t supposed to have that! You’re supposed to go have babies and grow a garden and walk around; that’s all! That’s fine!

Freya: Hmm, and learn some of the magic, but only the kind of magic we think you should have.

Sarah: Yes, yes –

Freya: And –

Sarah: – just the homey stuff; that’s fine. Soup magic.

Freya: Yeah, yeah. And I wanted to do, like, I didn’t want, A Restless Truth, I didn’t want my characters to be the ones who are like, we are the special ones who are reinventing magic and looking for new systems. I wanted to show that the people who were doing the reinvention had been around for a long time.

Sarah: Yeah.

Freya: You know, that you have this previous generation of people who became frustrated with the limitations placed on them and said, fuck it; we’re doing it ourselves!

Sarah: Yeah! We’ll do it our way.

Freya: And so by the time you hit our generation, that knowledge has been quite deliberately hidden, suppressed, kept secret, and so even though my characters might think of themselves as being, breaking the mold and looking into new ways of doing it –

Sarah: Yeah.

Freya: – they’re not, actually. They, they have to stumble across this that was done by old women, all dead old women and go, oh, actually there is more to what was done than we have seen. Edwin, in and of himself, is not a revolutionary person; it is not in his makeup. Like, he would have just kept doing string forever.

Sarah: Yes! Oh, yeah, absolutely. But it’s also very comforting: once you know a methodology that works for you, it’s very comforting to hold onto it.

So what are some of your favorite worlds with magic in them?

Freya: Oh, I had to think for a long time about how to cut this one down.

Sarah: [Laughs]

Freya: I think, okay, so I think, I grew up reading Terry Pratchett’s Discworld –

Sarah: Yep.

Freya: – from the time I was in my early teens, and what I love about the magic in that world is that the magic is stories.

Sarah: Yes.

Freya: Like, all across the board, no matter what type of magic it is, on one level magic is story, and magic is narrative and is about the ways in which we tell ourselves stories about reality shaping reality –

Sarah: Yeah.

Freya: – and that’s true of the wizards, it’s true of the witches, it’s true of all the weird sort of one-book magical events that come up. It is always about human belief and human story turning reality into something else, which I love, and I think for a, a storyteller as masterful as Pratchett was, it’s the perfect way of using magic in books.

Sarah: Yeah.

Freya: I have, I must, I really love Naomi Novik’s Scholomance series, and again I think it’s because the cost and the rules and the academic geekery around magic are so clear. You know, I think a lot of people said of the first book, it was just the narrator telling you stuff about her studies for three hundred pages, and I was like, I could have done six hundred pages! Yeah, I, I really enjoyed that. I loved a magical world that was both dangerous and about learning and the cost of learning and –

Sarah: Yeah.

Freya: – you know, that was just a very, very satisfying world to live in. I’m really looking forward to the third book, which I picked up this week.

Sarah: Ee!

Freya: And I’m going to say for my third one Lois McMaster Bujold’s World of the Five Gods –

Sarah: Oh my goodness, yes.

Freya: – which is where the Penric and Desdemona books are set –

Sarah: Yes!

Freya: – and I think I actually picked up the first Penric book after your episode –

Sarah: Really!

Freya: – on them. Yeah! ‘Cause I’d read a lot of Bujold’s space opera books –

Sarah: Mm-hmm!

Freya: – but never read any of her fantasy, and I was like, oh, okay, well, these are novellas; I’ll see how it goes; and then I blinked and fell over and resurfaced a fortnight later with all of the novellas. [Laughs]

Sarah: Yes. They were my comfort reading, they were some of my comfort reading for 2020 and 2021. I went –

Freya: Mm-hmm! Yeah, well, I ordered –

Sarah: – very much into Penric world.

Freya: – the special edition from Subterranean Press of the first full-length novel –

Sarah: Oooh!

Freya: – and that is sitting on my shelf as a very break-glass-in-case-of-emergency, having a terrible day, just need something I know I’m going to love book.

Sarah: Oh, it’s so good.

Freya: They’re so good, and what I love about the magic in that world is that the intersection between magic and faith –

Sarah: Yes!

Freya: – is pretty much where that, that particular world is, so it’s not magic and story, it’s magic and faith. And so even for the, the early novels set it that series, before we meet Penric and Desdemona, the novels set in that world, it’s always about faith and it’s always about the idea of gods as a source of magic and faith as a source of magic, but again, it’s rules-based, and it’s not just you ask your god for permission to blow up the world –

Sarah: [Laughs]

Freya: – and may-, maybe, depends on the god, depends on you – like, it’s all quite rooted in personal relationships?

Sarah: Yes.

Freya: And that’s what makes the magic really fun and interesting, I think.

Sarah: And the idea that Penric doesn’t have magic except because of this demon that is living in his body, and he’s got all of these other, he’s got like thirteen other echoes of people, and he knows that someday the demon will move on and he will be one of the echoes, and he sort of knows that his magic is a finite time –

Freya: Hmm.

Sarah: – and that there’s a finite resource. Like, Desdemona gets tired.

Freya: Yeah! And because she’s a demon, it has to be in some way not, like, “evil,” –

Sarah: Yeah.

Freya: – but it has to be a destructive kind of magic –

Sarah: Yes.

Freya: – even when he’s doing good. I think there’s one of the novellas where he essentially gives someone radiotherapy for breast cancer –

Sarah: Yes!

Freya: – by seeing where the tumor is and then being destructive –

Sarah: Yes.

Freya: – towards it, like killing demon destructive magic very targeted towards –

Sarah: Yes.

Freya: – the tumor.

Sarah: Yes.

Freya: – which I thought was such a wonderful way of showing that it doesn’t really matter what type of magic it is; what matters is the intentions of the caster and the personality of the caster.

Sarah: Yes, and when, and when Penric is restoring the eyesight for someone, it’s so much uphill magic that he has to go out, he’s completely giddy –

Freya: Yeah!

Sarah: – he’s out of his mind giddy, and he has to go out and, like, cause some chaos somewhere, which is not his – that’s the thing I love about Penric and Desdemona: he’s not actually an agent of chaos on his own, but he now has an agent of chaos in his body, and he’s kind of like, well, all right. Well, guess I, guess I’m a chaos person now.

Freya: Yeah, and that’s the thing: it’s, it’s about magic and faith, but it’s also about personal relationships –

Sarah: Yes!

Freya: – and balance –

Sarah: Yes.

Freya: – and you have to balance your uphill magic with your downhill, of course, is a great big metaphor for what it’s like to exist with someone and share a life with someone.

Sarah: Oh, absolutely! Absolutely!

Freya: Which is what he’s doing with Desdemona.

Sarah: Yes.

Why does magic appeal to you as a writer and a reader? I personally love magic stories. I, I love the Ben Aaronovitch Peter Grant series so much?

Freya: Mm!

Sarah: I can’t re-, reread all of them. Sometimes there’s death of young children and I’m like, oop, gonna skip that chapter, gonna skip that chapter. But I love them because there’s the very familiar trope of a character who knows nothing about this world coming into the world and realizing that they have some affinity within it, but also there’s politics and there’s, you know, structure and bureaucracy. I, maybe my thing is just magical bureaucracy.

Freya: There is something to be said for magical bureaucracy.

Sarah: I think that’s my jam!

Freya: I think it’s because it makes it feel grounded.

Sarah: Yes, absolutely!

Freya: Like, you’re like, no matter how much power this person has, they still have to fill out a fucking form –

[Laughter]

Freya: – in order to do something.

Sarah: Yes! God, I have to wait in line at the magical bureaucracy store. God!

Freya: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: It’s like going to the DMV. Argh! Fine! I’ll renew my license.

Freya: Yeah. But it’s also because I think any genre can be made better with magic in it; that’s just my opinion.

Sarah: Oh, completely agree.

Freya: I like romance; I like it, then you add some magic. The Rivers of London series is what happens when you have a police procedural and you add some magic to it.

Sarah: Yes.

Freya: You know, it just infinitely improves it, honestly.

Sarah: Absolutely!

Freya: I think for me, when I was younger, magic was just a thing that was in books, because of the kind of books that I was reading. So my earliest memories of books that I read myself were things like Roald Dahl, Enid Blyton, the Narnia books, that sort of classic English children’s fantasy books. But that was what I read, so from my perspective, you read books, they had magic in them –

Sarah: Yeah.

Freya: – that was just what a book was. It was something about people having adventures, usually children having adventures, and there was something fantastical or marvelous or magical about the adventure they were having. And so I then obviously romped off into adult fantasy very quickly in my teens. There wasn’t as much YA as a genre as there is now, so there wasn’t a great deal of YA fantasy. I think Tamora Pierce were around; not a great deal else.

Sarah: No.

Freya: For me, in my head, YA was all, like, contemporary books about teenagers facing tough issues, and I didn’t really care! I just wanted some more dragons. So I had sort of leapt from childhood dragons to adult dragons quite quickly, and I always knew if I wanted to write something, I wanted to write fantasy, because, again, like, I just loved the sense of freedom, the sense that you could add more –

Sarah: Yeah.

Freya: – to whatever kind of story you wanted to tell. And so when I got into romance in my twenties – so I was quite a latecomer to romance, because, I think, of that sort of inter-genre snobbery that exists between science fiction and fantasy and romance, I had just, just a small amount of internalized misogyny going on there.

Sarah: Just, just a skosh, yeah. Mm-hmm, yep.

Freya: So it took me a long time to get into romance, despite the fact that I had been reading and writing fanfiction for a long time, and all of that, like the vast majority of what I was reading and writing for fanfic was romance –

Sarah: Yeah.

Freya: – straight down the line.

Sarah: Absolutely.

Freya: And so when I made the hop into genre romance I was like, oh! Oh, here we go! This is where all the good stuff has been hiding.

Sarah: [Laughs]

Freya: And then realized I could bring the magic along with me, which was a wonderful feeling!

Sarah: Oh yeah. In addition to magical bureaucracy, I think the addition of dragons is an excellent addition to any genre. Add dragons –

Freya: Mm!

Sarah: – instant upgrade, no question.

Freya: Yep. Yep. Have you read Jo Walton’s Tooth and Claw?

Sarah: Tooth and Claw? Oh my gosh! Yes! Oh –

Freya: I remember reading that and being like, what is happening? And my brain exploded! I was like, this is, like, I think I’m reading a Jane Austen novel, but –

Sarah: It’s Regency dragons! It’s Regency dragons.

Freya: I’m like – Regency dragons? I love, obviously, those, the traditional dragons of, you know, there are dragon riders –

Sarah: Yeah.

Freya: – and they’re destructive, and they’re dangerous, but also there’s something to be said for dragons who are just worried about their marriage prospects.

Sarah: Yes, absolutely! Dragons can be very worried about the economy and other things. My, my secondary fandom, in addition to romance, is the How to Train Your Dragon franchise? And the thing about the second movie is that when you get to the second movie, Hiccup and Astrid are already in a relationship? So they skipped all of the courtship stuff and they’re already, like, five years into a relationship, so it was like, wow, you’re just, you’re just leaving all this time of romance and courtship for –

Freya: For the fic –

Sarah: – fanfic to fill in? Thank you!

Freya: Yes!

Sarah: [Laughs] It’s only five million words of fanfic now! Yes!

[Laughter]

Freya: Well, I think as somebody come from fan writing, I probably leave a lot less space for, for fan writers.

Sarah: Oh yeah.

Freya: As much as I love fandom and, you know, really hope that I do inspire fan art and fanfic, I am putting a lot more of the stuff on page –

Sarah: Oh yeah.

Freya: – that would normally be left off the page for fanfic writers to do themselves.

Sarah: Yeah.

Freya: That’s just because I’m, that’s what I’m used to. I’m like, well, yeah, I want the book that gives me the action and then the feelings and then the sexing! And so here you go; you can have all of it.

Sarah: Yes. I need the action; I need the sex scene; I need the quest; I need everyone to sit around a table having drinks; I need all of that –

Freya: Mm.

Sarah: – in the book, yeah. Oh, absolutely.

Freya: That’s why I think that, like, fanfic, there aren’t a lot of fanfics – as far as I know – that really like fandoms that really spring up around romance, because the stuff is there already.

Sarah: Yeah.

Freya: Like, there’s huge fandoms that grow up around TV shows that are science fiction or fantasy, whatever, that will then fill in all the romance stuff –

Sarah: Yeah.

Freya: – like the, the episode coda where everyone sits around, talks about their feelings, and goes off and fucks in their bunk on the spaceship, you know.

Sarah: Right.

Freya: That’s what the fanfic is there for, but I think in romance, we are emotionally fulfilled at the end of the book, and maybe we do want some more of that particular couple, and sure, we might go off and write our own little coda, but there’s not that itching yearning for the feelings bits –

Sarah: No. The feeling bit –

Freya: – that other types of media can leave you with.

Sarah: Yes, the feeling bits have been, have been served –

Freya: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

Sarah: – in heaping portions. Thank you.

Freya: They have been served; they have been sated.

Sarah: Oh yes. [Laughs]

So if you could have control over three magical spells, which ones would you want? I figured this was a fair question to ask somebody who’s writing an entire magical world with lots of different spells in your books.

Freya: Lots of spells.

Sarah: I particularly like the one about –

Freya: Okay –

Sarah: – keeping warm? The winter coat that’s spelled to keep warm: I would really like one of those?

Freya: Mmm! Yeah. I must admit, being able to put spells in clothing would be quite handy. I’m going to cheat and say, like any writer, the one that I would want is one that I didn’t actually put in my book, which is the ability to stop time.

Sarah: Oh! Oh yes.

Freya: Just, just think of how many books you could read/write –

Sarah: [Laughs]

Freya: – /how clean the house would be – [laughs] – if you could pause time, but that is a step too much for the magic in my books.

Sarah: Yeah.

Freya: Like, you can’t actually do that –

Sarah: That’s a lot of people to move around.

Freya: – but any, any magical spell, that’d be it. I think if I could have one of the ones that were in my books, like, I would really like a magical house. I love magical houses so much. I put magical houses in book one; there are more magical houses in book three.

Sarah: Oh good, I love the magical house in book one!

Freya: If the idea of a house that the longer you live in it, the more it grows around you –

Sarah: Yes.

Freya: – and your personality and your needs and wants, and so you’ll just, you know, sit down at the end of a long day, and the house is like, maybe you need a drink.

Sarah: Yeah!

Freya: I think it’s this urge that we, we see the technology is starting to drift in that direction with the idea of, like, a Google home –

Sarah: Yeah.

Freya: – and, you know, all of these smart apps –

Sarah: Yeah.

Freya: – that come with this terrifying tech dystopia baggage of lack of privacy and hackability, and the idea of a magical house is one that can’t be hacked –

Sarah: Yeah.

Freya: – it can’t be, you know, turned against you –

Sarah: Yeah.

Freya: – because the magic is about the bond with you, so it’s somewhere in the realm of, like, horse books and dragon books of having a magical being –

Sarah: Yes.

Freya: – that is bonded to you, that you look after, and it looks after you, with the added benefit of you can sit down and somebody brings you a hot drink. [Laughs]

Sarah: Yes. And I would also like that if there are magical houses, the house will just be like, listen, there’s a little leak on the side here? I’ve got a little leak. If you take care of it now, it won’t be a big leak, but I just want to let you know in the wall over here is a leak.

Freya: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: Like, a magical house could tell me what’s wrong! [Laughs]

Freya: Yeah, I think that’s why it’s very popular for science fiction where the ship –

Sarah: Yes!

Freya: – is itself a character?

Sarah: Yes!

Freya: Because it’s the idea of, like, nurturing shelter and a, a two-way caretaking relationship.

Sarah: Yes. That you live – I know I can’t touch you, I don’t have hands, but I do have walls, and I need you to help me take care of my – oh yeah, I love that.

Freya: Mm, and look, there’s a little sensor that says there’s a leak on the side; go fix it!

Sarah: Beep, beep, beep! Yeah, please. Do you have a termite? Tell me about this termite; I want to fix this termite for you.

Freya: Beep, beep, beep, yeah!

Sarah: Yeah, exactly. [Laughs]

Freya: That would be so handy!

Sarah: Oh my God!

[Laughter]

Sarah: So you have Stop Time –

Freya: Mm. Having a Magical House.

Sarah: – Having a Magical House.

Freya: And again, with the books I like, Violet’s visual illusions, I think, would be so much fun.

Sarah: Oh, for sure!

Freya: Like, the fact that she has that as her specialty was something that I – as soon as I knew she was a theater, like a, she’s a theatre kid, basically.

Sarah: Oh yeah.

Freya: She’s like the original chaotic, bisexual theatre kid –

Sarah: Yes. Complete disaster.

Freya: – and as soon as I knew that she was in the theatre I was like, right, well, what kind of magic would be useful if you were a theatrical kind of person? And of course it’s illusions, being able to create visual effects.

Sarah: Yep.

Freya: So that was really fun to play with in A Restless Truth, and I think that would be a lot of fun, especially if you’re somebody who likes creativity and, like, I haven’t got a great deal of artistic talent, but I am a very visual writer. Like, I’m, I very much visualize scenes when I’m reading and when I’m writing, and the ability to create a scene with magic and look at how it plays out – just think how useful it would be for the blocking of sex scenes!

Sarah: Oh my gosh!

Freya: Oh, here we go! No Barbie dolls needed, yeah.

Sarah: Nope. I know exactly where all the arms are. It makes sense.

Freya: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

Sarah: Yep, absolutely.

Freya: Yep.

Sarah: So I noticed from your Twitter feed that you have started watching A League of Their Own, which I just did a podcast episode on, and I was wondering how you are liking it.

Freya: Ah! Yes, my Twitter feed suggests I have started A League of Their Own.

Sarah: So have you actually –

Freya: My Twitter feed is a little behind.

Sarah: So you’ve finished it and you started it over again.

Freya: I have now finished A League of Their Own.

Sarah: Yes.

Freya: I finished it. I watched it in about a day and a half.

Sarah: Yep, yeah, me too!

Freya: Yep, yep, just sat down and zoom! We had an unexpected public holiday because of the queen’s death.

Sarah: Yep.

Freya: So we had this public holiday foisted upon us, which was very inconvenient in many ways, but it did mean I had an entire free day in which to sit down and watch about, a show about gay baseball, which was –

Sarah: Hey!

Freya: – wonderful!

Sarah: I mean, isn’t that what the queen would have wanted? Some gay baseball?

Freya: I, I like to think so.

Together: I think so.

Sarah: Absolutely.

Freya: Oh, look, I, I, I adored it. I laughed; I nearly cried; like, the sheer variety of queer experience and, like, the focus on finding community and history –

Sarah: Yes.

Freya: – when you thought you were alone –

Sarah: Yes.

Freya: – was just – every scene where somebody walks into a place and has their eyes just light up with stunned recognition –

Sarah: Yeah.

Freya: – that a community and a history exist –

Sarah: Yeah.

Freya: – that they are not on their own; they’re not reinventing this or inventing it in isolation.

Sarah: No.

Freya: It is something that other people have done and have gone through and are there to welcome you was just absolutely amazing.

Sarah: Isn’t that lovely?

Freya: Just everything about that, I just, ah! So yeah, very, very touching, but also just a hilarious show. Like, I love that the found family of the team, I love D’Arcy Carden in some of those outfits. My goodness! Just, there’s a lot happening on that screen.

Sarah: Oh yeah. Oh, very much.

Freya: Yep.

Sarah: So what books are you reading that you want to tell people about?

Freya: How many am I allowed?

Sarah: As many as you want! It’s the internet; we haven’t run out of room yet.

Freya: All right, so I have a few that are out now, and I’ve got a few that I read in ARC form –

Sarah: Brilliant.

Freya: – that are coming out that I can sort of tease you with.

So sticking, I will stick mostly in the romance sphere. So I really, really love Charlie Adhara’s The Wolf at the Door paranormal series.

Sarah: Ooh!

Freya: And, which is the five-book series. Another one that does this following the same couple across a series incredibly well. Like, each book, the mystery is really interesting; like, the plot is fascinating; it’s always thrilling; but it also advances the relationship in a really meaningful way. So you always feel that you’re ending on a happy finale, and, like, if the book series didn’t continue any further you’d still feel really comfortable that this couple is going to be together forever.

Sarah: Yep.

Freya: But each time you get a little bit more in a really wonderful way.

Sarah: Yeah.

Freya: And recently the first book in the spin-off series, which is starting a new romance called, so it’s called Pack of Lies? Romantic suspense; it’s a snowed-in murder mystery; it’s very hot. So that came out, arrived on my Kindle; I read it immediately.

Sarah: [Laughs]

Freya: It’s like, Charlie Adhara is one of my, like, order in advance and read the night it arrives authors. So I love that; highly recommend.

I also recently read Sarah MacLean’s Heartbreaker because I love Sarah MacLean’s historicals, and this one also just hit a lot of buttons for me. It’s a road trip; it’s a thief and a lord, which you now having an idea about what book three’s romance is going to be, you’ll understand that I really love a thief and a lord –

Sarah: Yep.

Freya: – as the basis for a romance.

And read a little while ago, but I have been shoving this book at everybody I can: Akwaeke Emezi’s You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty?

Sarah: Yes.

Freya: Which I think has sort of flown a little under the radar for Romancelandia, because it is being sold, ‘cause Akwaeke Emezi writes across genres and it’s sold as if a very literary space?

Sarah: Yeah.

Freya: But this is romance. Like, it is a straight, capital R Romance. It is technically about falling in lust and then love with your boyfriend’s dad, so it’s kind of in that area of romance, but is actually one of the most sensual, detail-oriented books I have ever read. It’s about food – like, the love interest is a chef, so there’s so much food porn – about making art, ‘cause the main character is an artist. It’s about recognition that happens through art and shared grief –

Sarah: Yeah.

Freya: – and daring to accept something that just rocks your foundations. It is an incredible book. Everyone should read it. I think if you’re into romance it is a very, very satisfying romance.

Sarah: Awesome! So what –

Freya: And I’m trying to think about, okay, two ARCs that I’ve read of stuff that’s coming out:

Aliette de Bodard’s The Red Scholar’s Wake. So this is a space opera featuring a marriage of convenience between a captive engineer and a pirate queen who is also the space ship.

Sarah: Oh, as, as you do! Yeah!

Freya: As you do!

Sarah: As you do.

Freya: So Aliette de Bodard is incredibly good at Sapphic romances where one of them is maybe a spaceship or a dragon or something –

Sarah: Yeah!

Freya: – like that. And this has got really good space opera politics plot, but also a really lovely trope-y but sort of slow and mature romance in it. That’s coming out I think sometime early next year? I can’t tell you the exact date, but definitely keep an eye out for it, and the cover is just beautiful.

Sarah: Ooh!

Freya: And I also just finished a book that is coming out from Mills & Boon next year called One Night in Hartswood by Emma Denny. Now, this is wall-to-wall trope deployment. So it is technically about a medieval nobleman who goes into the forest to find the runaway noble who was meant to marry his sister but disappeared on the day of the wedding –

Sarah: Oops!

Freya: – and of course he finds a mysterious runaway servant in the woods, and both of them are lying about who they are. So we have two layers of secret identity, and we have a road trip; we have so much huddling for warmth; we have sexy dagger-fighting lessons.

Sarah: [Laughs]

Freya: But it’s about basically you shedding your old self in order to find the freedom to be your true self –

Sarah: Yeah.

Freya: – and it’s just a lovely romance that’s got some of those great old-fashioned tropes about, you know, terrible fathers and cast-, medieval castles and arranged marriages that you run away from and terrible wounds and thinking the other person’s dead. Like, it starts off really slow and comforting, and then it just rockets off into these amazing plot places. So I, I was really surprised by that. I think it was just sort of offered to me as an ARC, and I said, oh, this sounds fun! And I just devoured it; it was so much fun.

Sarah: Where can people find you if they wish to find you? If you wish to be found; some people don’t want to be found.

Freya: If I wish to be found –

Sarah: If you want to be –

Freya: Largely on Twitter. I think Twitter is where I mostly hang out, author-wise. Partially Instagram. Mostly I have an Instagram so I can keep track of people taking beautiful photos of my book. Very occasionally I will post a picture of myself ice skating on it, ‘cause I’m a figure skater, but mostly –

Sarah: I didn’t know that! How cool!

Freya: Mm! Yeah! That’s my, like, secret hobby that’s not really a secret.

Sarah: That’s awesome!

Freya: And – yeah! Well, at least, this isn’t really a secret, but I have actually written a couple of contemporary romance novels about figure skaters, which we are attempting to go on submission with –

Sarah: Ooh?

Freya: – which is fun.

Sarah: But it’s spring for you, so you’re just coming out of winter, right?

Freya: Yes! It’s a little odd: the ice skating season, such as it is, starts about now –

Sarah: Oh!

Freya: – and goes through to March, because –

Sarah: Yeah, okay, that makes sense.

Freya: – international winter.

Sarah: Winter.

Freya: So it means that I am watching ice skating, like, lying on my couch under the air conditioning –

Sarah: [Laughs]

Freya: – fanning myself, being like, that looks nice! Yay! Cool!

[Laughter]

Sarah: Can I just lie down on the ice? You can jump over me; it’s fine.

Freya: Yeah. No, and so going to the ice rink in summer in Australia is lovely, ‘cause you just step in, ah! Beautiful! Yeah, room full of ice! It’s wonderful!

Sarah: Let’s do it. Can I just –

Freya: And I still go to the rink during winter, but there’s no ice skating on during –

Sarah: No.

Freya: – Australian winter, because it’s –

Sarah: No, ‘cause it’s summer here.

Freya: – summer.

Sarah: Yep. That makes sense.

Freya: Anyway, I got a little sidetracked. Yes, largely Twitter, partially Instagram; both of those are just @freyamarske; and my website is freyamarske.com.

[music]

Sarah: And that brings us to the end of this week’s episode. Thank you to Freya for getting up early to talk to me from Australia, and thank you to her publicist Caro Perny for setting this up. I will have links to all of the books we talked about and her two books in this series, A Restless Truth and A Marvellous Light in the show notes at smartbitchestrashybooks.com/podcast.

As always, I end with a really bad joke, and this one is perfect for right now. Are you ready? This one comes from my husband Adam.

Why is voter turnout so high in Transylvania?

Give up? Why is voter turnout so high in Transylvania?

Because every count votes!

[Laughs] One vote! Ah-ah-ah! Two! Ah-ah-ah! [Giggles] That, that joke makes me very happy. And if you are able to, I hope you are voting.

On behalf of everyone here, we wish you the very best of reading. Have a wonderful weekend, and 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 to subscribe to at frolic.media/podcasts.

Vote! Ah-ah-ah!

[end of spooky music]