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[music]
Sarah Wendell: Welcome to the 2011 edition of the Dear Bitches, Smart Authors podcast. I’m Sarah Wendell from smartbitchestrashybooks.com, and with me is Jane Litte from dearauthor.com. Unfortunately, due to technical difficulties, this first podcast has some audio crap. One of us will be in one ear, and the other will be in your other ear. As Holly E. said on Twitter, just think of us as an angel and devil on your shoulder, spending your book budget. We apologize for the somewhat crapful audio, but future editions will be better.
The music you’re hearing is by Sarah Outwater. You can find her at twitter.com/SassyOutwater.
And now, on with the podcast!
Why are you doing the podcast again?
Jane Litte: Because you emailed me and asked me if I wanted to do it again?
[Laughter]
Jane: Actually, because I enjoyed doing them in the past, so I’m glad to do this.
Sarah: They are really fun! What surprised me is, when I was thinking about starting it up again, no one’s really doing a podcast about romance novels. There are podcasts about, like, toenail polish and how to paint your wall and probably how to watch the paint dry, but there’s still no podcast on romance novels, so, well, who better than us to, than to enter that virgin, virgin sphere?
So, what are you reading?
Jane: Well, I am reading Jillian Hunter’s book right now, which is about a fencing master.
Sarah: Oh, that’s a different one!
Jane: Yeah! I, I like, I think, the idea of it more than I’m liking the actual execution of the story, but I’m intrigued enough to keep going. It’s called A Bride Unveiled. I’m not sure when it’s out; maybe November?
Sarah: It’s out October the 4th! Yes.
Jane: But it’s about a fencing master and a niece of a baron, so she’s probably, what, what would you call it, landed gentry? But not titled, which I appreciate, and I, you know, very much appreciate that the fencing master is also not titled, and it’s a friends-to-lovers story. They met when they were children. He was actually a pauper and lived at the paupers’ “Palace” and would escape and pretend that he was fighting ghosts in the graveyard, and she saw him from her window as a young girl, and she was a very lonely child, and she snuck out to meet him, and she was able to do this because her governess was only nineteen, and she was dallying with a local village boy, so in order for –
Sarah: Everybody’s sneaking out!
Jane: Yeah! So, in order for the girl to keep her governess’s secret, the governess had to allow her to do these totally improper things.
Sarah: So –
Jane: So what are you reading?
Sarah: I just finished – the other night, staying up way too frigging late – I just finished Sarah Morgan’s October release, Doukakis’s Apprentice, and I have to say, first of all, that the Greek Presents hero I find so hysterical because of the, as you said, the Greek financial problems? It makes these, makes these Greek billionaires seem somewhat fake? But also, Doukakis? All I could think of was political Dukakis, which is so not sexy, so I tried to overcome that, and it’s actually a really fun book. The hero is a corporate-raider type who takes over other companies, and Morgan plays with the, the trope of visiting revenge upon someone by taking over their company and seducing their daughter, but instead of being this victim without a spine, the heroine is actually the creative brains behind the advertising agency that her father has been very neglectful of. He’s just a general, generally neglectful father. So the, the hero, Mr. Doukakis, takes over the company and finds out that even though she has the title of executive assistant, she’s more like super-duper awesome secretary who pretty much holds the company together and is the creative brains behind it, and what I found kind of funny was that part of her strength was that she understood social media and was making sure to include social media in every campaign, which I found really funny. And she had all these interesting ideas in the course of marketing, I think it was a hosiery company, that had stockings that you would want to wear. Like, every, every Sarah Morgan book, there’s always something that I’m like, damn it, I wish that was real, and in this one, it’s the hosiery company, ‘cause those stockings are just so awesome! And I really enjoyed it because this, the heroine had a spine, and she stood up to him, and he had to appreciate her skills.
Jane: Well, I like those Harlequin Presents stories. You know, I have the – I don’t, can I say this on the podcast? [OMINOUS TONE] Asshole-to-doormat ratio? [Laughs]
Sarah: Yes, I believe you can say asshole-to-doormat ratio, because I’m sure in the coming weeks it will get much worse. [Laughs]
Jane: All right. Well, you know, I have my, that’s how I grade my HPs, you know. If the asshole-to-doormat ratio is high, then I’m probably not going to like the book very much. But, so, there has to be, you know, a low doormat/low asshole in order for the HP to work.
Sarah: Or it has to be an asshole who understands that he’s an asshole and then grovels appropriately and says, I have learned not to be an asshole, and then you believe him, ‘cause you don’t want to believe that the asshole will return and, you know, screw up their marriage. What I liked about –
Jane: Correct.
Sarah: Exactly! You can’t have a man, like, poisoning the marriage in the future. What I liked most about this book was, not only was the heroine confident in her ability, but she was also aware that because she was young, and she was fashionable, and she was the secretary, and she was the boss’s daughter, she knew everyone prejudged her, and she just did her own thing and didn’t really care, and, and that includes the hero. He comes in with all of these prejudgments about her and realizes that he’s wrong and then says, I was wrong, and it’s pretty frigging sexy – [laughs] – when a guy says, yeah, I was really wrong about you, and you’re awesome. Plus, it has all of the, the glitzy, sudsy elements of a good Presents, where they go to Paris, and it’s, you know, this glittering, romantic city, and they have this very contentious relationship, plus it’s a workplace relationship, and, and they’re both conscious of the fact that it’s not appropriate, as opposed to, no one cares if we have wild monkey sex on a business retreat, which in the real world never happens. They’re conscious of the fact that it’s not okay.
Jane: So, how – is Sarah Morgan your introduction to HPs? Like, how long have you been reading HPs?
Sarah: My introduction to HPs was you, because you suck.
[Laughter]
Jane: I, I know this. I mean, I know that I –
Sarah: This is all your fault!
Jane: – am a gateway to many, to, for many readers to the HP world.
Sarah: Yes, you are the gateway drug, you hussy. Actually, my first Harlequin Presents wasn’t a Harlequin Presents. Julie Cohen sent me one of her books –
Jane: Okay.
Sarah: – from the Modern Heat line, and she was my first Harlequin Presents. Oddly, I didn’t know that it was a Harlequin Presents; I thought it was only released in the UK, and come to find that in the US it was renamed and recovered, and this was one of the worst covers, because she’s, this is the one where the woman’s lying in bed and her hands are, like, five feet long and they’re red? She’s got, like, man hands, giant, red, I-washed-the-dishes man hands, and she’s in this gorgeous bed, and it was about a taxi driver, so it completely didn’t fit. But that was my intro. The authors that I tend to gravitate to in Harlequin Presents are Julie Cohen and Sarah Morgan, because they both like to take the established, sort of stereotypical roles and twist them around. Oh, and Maya Banks, when she wrote Silhouette Desires, did some of the other twisting, because she would take the, the virgin heroine and make her the sexual aggressor, and I, I love when people play with the established expectations.
What about you? Who are the authors that you always read in, in HPs?
Jane: Caitlin Crews is probably my favorite Harlequin Presents author. She has a lot of high drama. I love her use of language, and the way that she writes her dialogue is very smart, and again, she has very independent, strong heroines. Her heroes are huge assholes. Like –
Sarah: [Laughs]
Jane: – I mean, on the scale of 1 to 10 –
Sarah: Nothing like a giant asshole!
Jane: – the, the, the asshole quotient in her books are, is, like, 15.
[music]
Jane: Let’s talk about a book that I had you read from Random House, the historical.
Sarah: Oh, God! Can I make good book noise?
Jane: Yeah!
Sarah: This is so good! Oh, my gosh, I cannot wait for people to read this book. I, I, like, I owe you, like, a puppy for having –
Jane: [Laughs]
Sarah: – for having her send me this book! It was so delicious. Like, I had that reader experience where I sort of looked up in the middle of the book and was like, I’m having the best time reading this book, and it had been a while since I felt that way. Okay, you, you start. Oh! Good book noise.
Jane: All right, well, I met Shauna Summers, I think it was last year for lunch at the Tools of Change, last February, and she told me about this new author that she had bought. She said she hadn’t bought an author in, in a couple years, and she had wondered if she kind of had lost her taste –
Sarah: [Laughs]
Jane: – for the, for romance or, you know, ‘cause she hadn’t found anything that really excited her. So this book came across her desk, and she just fell in love with it, and she began to tell me how unusual it was, and when she told me about the premise, I’m like, that does sound very unusual. [Laughs]
Sarah: If you tell people the premise, like if you boil it down to one line, people are going to be like, ugh! No.
Jane: Right! Right, right.
Sarah: No, on many levels no, but nonono. Just, just, just, yes. Trust me.
Jane: So then I met her again in February of this last year, 2011, and she told me again how great the book was, and then she told me about the sequel and how amazing the sequel was, and finally I said to her, Shauna –
Sarah: I’m going to mug you.
[Laughter]
Sarah: Is it in your bag? ‘Cause you’re going down!
Jane: – you’ve been talking about this book for a year, but, you know, if you’d like to send it to me, I would love to read it. So she sends it to me, and I read it before I even get on the plane, because once you open it, you can’t stop reading it, right?
Sarah: No! You can’t. It’s, it’s, it’s horrible almost. You cannot stop reading it, because every, every page there is something where you, you, you want to keep reading, and it’s never the introduction of a character. Like, oh, look, someone has arrived, and I bet they bring conflict. Every one of the characters is, is important and necessary and interesting. God, it’s so good!
Jane: So, I get done reading it at, like, three in the morning or something, and I email Shauna immediately, knowing that she won’t see it until the next morning, but I said, I don’t think I’ve ever read about these people in romance ever before! These are like totally new people, and probably there’ll be a hundred readers that will say, this book has, these characters are just like X, Y, and Z book, but in recent memory, I haven’t come across these characters. They were so fresh; it was such a great story. The way that she told it, how she used the, how she used the societal conventions of the day, along with sex –
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Jane: – to create such a fantastic story, I just hadn’t come across it. So, now, I told you about this story at RWA, and I –
Sarah: Yes.
Jane: – said I really wanted you to read it, and I asked Shauna to send it to you, and she did –
Sarah: Yep.
Jane: – and so what happened? [Laughs]
Sarah: Well, I, I have this, this, this general aversion to squeeing. Like, if someone squees to me, I’m always sort of like, uh-oh, but if it’s, if it’s Jane, our tastes so rarely line up that –
Jane: [Laughs]
Sarah: It’s true! I mean, you and I –
Jane: It is true.
Sarah: – don’t like the same type of books at all, and there have been books where I’ve loved them and you were like, what were you thinking? And there’re books that you love, and I’m, I’m like, this is just not working for me, but for you to say, I know you’re going to like this, it, it was so awesome. It was about really smart characters who did logical, careful, thoughtful things and then took enormous personal risks for both selfish and selfless reasons, and all of that sort of balance between their own self interests and the self, and the interests of the people who, who are, who are depending on them made them so human, by the end of the book, I, first I couldn’t figure out how she was going to tie everything together in a satisfactory way, which she totally does, but I also could not figure out how the hero and the heroine were going to move from this sort of, not antagonizing place, they didn’t like each other very much, they weren’t supposed to like each other, and by the end of the story, I realized how far they had come in, in becoming closer to one another? It was, it was amazing. We should probably tell people the plot, ‘cause people are going to be like, shut up! Tell me what the book’s about!
Jane: All right. Well, it’s hard to tell people about what the book is about, because I think it can be a little off-putting, and I don’t want to –
Sarah: Yes.
Jane: – put anyone off. I want everyone to read this book, ‘cause I think it’s really amazing, and I, when I read this book, and I – and this is her debut book –
Sarah: Yes.
Jane: – I think to myself, oh, my God! How awesome that we’re going to read so many more books by this amazing writer. So the author’s name is Cecilia Grant.
Sarah: And the title is?
Jane: A Lady Awakened. The story opens with the heroine having just been widowed, and it comes to her attention that the heir is a very scurrilous man. Her –
Sarah: He’s a piece of shit, basically.
Jane: Right. So, and even her husband knew that, because he never allowed that man to visit them, even though that man was their heir, his heir. And it comes to her attention that he had ruined at least two maidservants in the household, like, you know, several, what was it, ten, fifteen years ago?
Sarah: I think it was fifteen? Fourteen, fifteen years ago, and he, he basically raped them.
Jane: Right. He probably raped a ton of maids, but only two of them got pregnant and then were cast out. So, her personal maid suggests that sometimes, you know, women don’t know right away that they’re pregnant, and not knowing that would delay the succession. So that plants the seed in the heroine’s mind that she needs to get pregnant in the next thirty days. Fortunately for her, a, a rake, a son of, the oldest son of a baron, is sent down to the small property that neighbors hers, and she propositions him. And he’s –
Sarah: Yep!
Jane: – happy to do it because he lives a life of total pleasure-seeking, and having sex with this attractive widow is no problem for him.
Sarah: Really not a problem! [Laughs]
Jane: And, even better, she’s going to pay him quite a bit of money, and that means that he doesn’t have to abide by his father’s instructions anymore. Or at least for a period of time, till the money runs out. He agrees to have sex with her.
Sarah: Repeatedly, every day.
Jane: But she doesn’t really want to have sex with him. It’s a laborious task for her. So much –
Sarah: It is the most unsexy sex.
Jane: [Laughs] It is! It is, it is worse than, you know, watching paint dry for her.
Sarah: Oh, God, it’s horrible.
Jane: So, I think it’s, like, the third time that they have sex, and he’s trying, he’s like, he’s the romantic of the two. He, like, fantas-, has all these fantasies, he creates all these imaginary events in his head, and so he’s trying to imagine her as a merry widow and that she’s, her sighs of ex-, exasperation are sighs of pleasure, and, but, but finally, he can’t do it anymore, and he says to her something like, look, you have to help me here, or it’s never, or I can’t, I can’t continue to have sex with you! So their sex really patterns their emotional involvement, because in the beginning, their emotional involvement is bare tolerance, and as they get to know each other, and as they begin to forge a real friendship beyond the sex, the sex becomes more intimate, to the point where she has a hard time even having sex because it’s so intimate with him.
Sarah: Yes.
Jane: And the, there’s a really funny scene later on in the book; one of the things that she teaches him is the importance of the, the responsibilities he has as a landowner and the, the care that he provides to the tenants who really rely on him, and he gets to know these tenants, particularly one bachelor tenant who’s older and whose circumstances are made poignant for him because he’s told that this man, as he gets older, will have no one to care for him –
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Jane: – and so when he’s too old to be a paying tenant, he will go to a poor house or some type of really un-, unsavory situation, and that, that situation really tugs at the hero’s heartstrings, and he begins to start to care for his tenants and realize what it means to be a landowner and how having that kind of privilege puts responsibilities and duties upon him. And so he learns from her about land management and farming and tenancy, and their discussions, post-coital discussions become more important than the sex itself.
Sarah: And it’s also the opposite of what you usually find in historicals, because society conspires, and the rules of society conspire, to keep the couples apart, so that by the time they get together in a, in a, in a solitary place and get naked and do it, they’re desperate for each other, and these two, everyone is conspiring to give them space to be together. The, the heroine’s maid knows what’s going on and makes sure that he is not interrupted or stopped, and no one comes into the heroine’s room when it’s time for their appointment, and it’s the most unsexual sex. They get that out of the way, and then they have these terribly intimate conversations about land management, and –
Jane: [Laughs]
Sarah: – it, it’s, it, you know, when they start talking about tenants, it becomes incredibly touching, because you learn how, (a) how important being a landowner was at that time. I learned a tremendous amount from this book about the, the role of landed gentry in rural parts of, of historical England, but I also saw the hero grow up in amazing ways. He was already old enough to conduct himself in London and establish a really bad reputation, but he grew up as an individual in the course of this story, and so did she in a lot of ways. It’s, it’s really quite amazing. The book, in case you’re curious, is A Lady Awakened by Cecilia Grant, and it is out on the 27th of December. This is the book that you buy, and then it comes in the mail, and then you go hide, and maybe you’ll come out on New Year’s Day, maybe you won’t, but you will read this straight through. It is so good.
Jane: It is, and so hopefully we’ll have some type of wonderful giveaway in early December or late November for this book.
Sarah: Yeah, we should give away some land.
Jane: [Laughs] Some land management texts?
Sarah: Yes, we’re going to give away some – what is it that they do? They set up a dairy? We’re going to give away some eggs, cheese, and milk! Yeah!
[music]
Sarah: Actually, instead of land management and dairy products, we’re going to give away advanced reader copies. If you would like an advanced copy of Cecilia Grant’s A Lady Awakened, please email [email protected]. That’s S for Sarah, B for Bitches, J for Jane, podcast at gmail dot com. Yes, I do ship internationally. First three win a copy! So if you would like an advanced reader copy of Cecilia Grant’s A Lady Awakened, email [email protected] with your name and address.
Thank you again for listening to the Dear Bitches, Smart Authors podcast. Thank you to Jane Litte for chatting with me and to Shauna Summers for hooking us up with the book we’ve spent so much time discussing, and thank you to Sarah Outwater for the music which you’ll be hearing.
Future podcasts will feature interviews, nosy questions, and all things having to do with romance. If you have ideas or something you’d like to hear us talk about, email us at [email protected]. Thank you again, and I wish you the very best of reading.
[music]
[Episode repeats]
This podcast transcript was handcrafted with meticulous skill by Garlic Knitter. Many thanks.
hooray! I’ve been looking Forever for a romance novel podcast. Welcome back.
Just listened to your podcast and it was really good. Unfortunately, the file I downloaded had the same podcast twice. But other than that it was very enjoyable!
This was so much fun! I love listening to people who are sincerely excited about something. Thank you and Jane for taking the time to do this.
The only thing I’d suggest would be to include the full list of books reviewed in the blog post linking to the episode.
I downloaded to my iThingy and listened on the way to work this AM. It made for a great commute. I can’t wait for the next installment. You realize that this podcast only adds to my TBR pile? 🙂
Awesome! I was wondering what happened to your all’s podcast. 🙂 I’ll look for the new episode to show up in my iTunes!
Listening to it now! Each of you owning an ear works. I can tell which voice belongs to who.
Thanks, Sarah! It was so much fun listening to this (I turned the audio all the way up in my computer—no problems listening to you and Jane at all!) The Cecilia Grant book is now on my wishlist!
Thanks for the podcast. I thought the sound quality was ok – but I didn’t listen to it on headphones, just played it on my laptop with built in speakers. Really enjoyed hearing your voices.
loved the pod cast, the audio wasn’t that crappy. I’ve heard worse. Looking for to Lady Awakened. You made land ownership sound kinda sexy.
Hi Sarah & Jane Just wanted to give you the heads up on a book I have just finished reading. Woman Vs Womaniser This is the Book Men Do Not Want Women to Read! By JC Johnson. The first Words that come to mind is WOW! This book should be read by every woman it’s a huge eye opener! I put the url in so have a look, you wont be disappointed!
Let me know what you thoughtx
Listened to your podcast yesterday in the car on my way into work, and it made the drive through peak hour traffic bearable – I am looking forward to the next podcast.
I’m loving the transcripts of the older podcasts – thank you!