How did you go about putting the poems together? What organizing principles did you use, and how much reshuffling did you do over the course of the process?

At first they were in the order I wrote them, which was arbitrary and meant that some of the weakest poems, before I hit my stride with this kind of writing, were first.

When I first sent them to Broadstone Books in the spring of 2020 my query included ten poems, which I selected as representative. I chose Broadstone because of their reputation for publishing coherent collections, which is how I always thought of these poems. The publisher recommended adding a narrative arc to run through the full manuscript, so of course I sent the full manuscript, rearranged to make the narrative arc more obvious. And this time (second try, my first choice publisher) I got an acceptance!

I got the “I’d be happy to publish it” email in September 2020 and the book was published in July 2021. In that time I did more rearranging and created the three sections. Finally in April I did a final rearranging, putting a few more of the poems I like best in the first section, like the one about the Santa Monica pier that I also used for publicity postcards.

Your poems are formatted like postcards, which I absolutely love. Are there other poets you like who tend to work with unusual forms?

Not really. The closest would probably be John Berryman, with his short poems, the Dream Songs, about Henry. My favorite is the one about being bored, “Dream Song #14“:

Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.
After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,
we ourselves flash and yearn,
and moreover my mother told me as a boy
(repeatingly) ‘Ever to confess you’re bored
means you have no

Inner Resources.’ I conclude now I have no
inner resources, because I am heavy bored.
Peoples bore me,
literature bores me, especially great literature,
Henry bores me, with his plights & gripes
as bad as achilles,

who loves people and valiant art, which bores me.
And the tranquil hills, & gin, look like a drag
and somehow a dog
has taken itself & its tail considerably away
into mountains or sea or sky, leaving
behind: me, wag.

How have you filled your time without being able to travel, during the pandemic? If you had to write a book of poetry about your pandemic activities, what format would those poems be in?

I’ve filled my time with reading books and watching movies and TV shows. A lot of the books have been read outside and so I’ve watched the groundhogs and birds and chipmunks and squirrels and all the different kinds of insects.

If I had to write a book of poetry about my pandemic activities, it would be about the wildlife in my back yard. I’ve actually written a few, like a poem about the Wooly Aphid/Fairy Fly, but they’re small poems and that feels too much like a continuation of the very whittled-down postcard poems.

Which poets have inspired you? Which poets do you admire whose work is absolutely unlike yours?

Poets who have inspired me: Denise Levertov, Stanley Plumly, Edward Field, Howard Nemerov, James Wright, Wallace Stevens, Phillip Larkin, Lucille Clifton, Ruth Stone, W.H. Auden, Tony Hoagland, John Berryman, Gregory Corso, Stephen Dobyns, Tom Wayman.

Poets whose work I admire but whose work is unlike mine: Mary Oliver, Sharon Olds, Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, Rita Dove, Carolyn Forche, Louise Gluck, Galway Kinnell, Audre Lord, W.S. Merwin, Marge Piercy, Anne Sexton, Tess Gallagher, Adrienne Rich.

The postcard poems are meant to be “accessible” poems, which is a style perfected by Billy Collins, but I hope influenced by what Nick Courtright says he looks for: “a poem that is friendly, but thought-provoking.” When I use the term “accessible” about my poems, sometimes people think I mean that I’m able to write the more abstract and complicated kind of philosophical or academic poem but I’m dumbing it down. I’m not. I don’t like that kind of writing and can’t do it well.

My mission for Necromancy Never Pays is to make more books appealing for everyone, and my approach to that is usually to take the personal tack and see if I find like-minded readers. If not — to continue the sailboating metaphor — the boat capsizes and I have to try again. When that happens, I try not to take the tone up a notch, as if I understand this stuff but can’t make it clear to anyone else. That’s the last refuge of the scoundrel as writer.

In a book of poems inspired by travel, how do you find the specific moment, story, or image that kicks off a given poem? Do you ever get stuck once you’ve started on a poem, and how have you gotten unstuck again?

I started writing postcard poems when I got home from a trip and had a bunch of postcards to send. I would look at the picture, think about what I wanted to say about the place, and write a poem about something that happened when I was there. I sent a few to my brother and some to a group of my friends who write, the Scarletts. I would write a poem, print it out, tape it to the back of the postcards, and send them.

Then I got more serious about it and went through the stack of postcards I’ve brought home from trips and starting piecing a story together with each poem. By the end of the process I sometimes imagined the picture for a postcard, like for the one about Apple Valley lake. One of the Scarletts found a postcard of the lake on eBay after the book came out, but it was always an imagined postcard.

A sobering note about the scene I picture, at Apple Valley lake, is that there’s a gray lakeside house with a dock where we first saw the big inflatable “Party Island.” That house is in the center of the view from the lake that I think of when I think about that poem. Last year they had a big “Trump” banner across their deck, visible from the lake. It spoiled my view of those happy days on the lake with my kids. More happily, it’s gone this year.

I never got stuck, but sometimes the poem just didn’t go anywhere good. I cut a few from my manuscript. There was one about a postcard of Legolas, and I wrote about when we’d drive with our kids for an hour to Columbus to see the movies, but the poem didn’t end up saying what I wanted it to. It didn’t really come across to anyone else.

What does travel mean to you?

It means seeing people and places I love, or seeing someplace new, which I love. This is what we missed during the Covid year:

• March 2020 conference with me, both kids and one kid’s partner giving presentations
• April fan convention with one kid and her college roommate (who traveled the SW with us when we went to Chaco, the Grand and Antelope Canyon)
• the other kid’s April trip home around a conference
• summer trip abroad (we go to Isle of Palms every other summer, this was the “off” year when we go somewhere new)
• fall trip to Niagara-on-the Lake
• Thanksgiving guests
• Christmas with the whole family

Maybe by themselves none of these things matter so much; in the face of so much grief and loss, I realize how fortunate I am. But what is life if not a collection of small joys?

Do you write a lot of postcards in real life? How do you choose them? What’s the best postcard you’ve ever found and sent?

I do write a lot of postcards! I choose them by the photograph; I like to get a picture of some aspect of the place that I got to see in person. Sometimes I like to get an imaginary aspect—I really do have a postcard of Los Pollos Hermanos, the restaurant from Breaking Bad, which absolutely exists in Albuquerque.

One of the best postcards I ever found and sent was one with a picture of the Bates Motel. I put an X in the window, wrote the line about the “honeymon” from the Faulkner story on the back, and sent it to my college professor, Dr. Chappell. Of course, the one of the Kentucky State Penetentiary was just too funny to send. My dad found it, I think, and he and I and my brother chortled over it and at some point he gave it to me (without mailing it).

When my kids were small, my dad sent me a whole series of postcards that he pretended had been mauled by wild animals. One of the final ones—his triumph—was supposedly shredded by the claws of a lion, and it arrived in a see-through envelope with an apology from the U.S. Postal Service for damage in transit.

Where do you hope to travel next and why?

Italy! I want to see Venice, Florence, and Rome if it’s possible to cram all three into the same week-long trip (we don’t like to be gone for more than a week at a time because our cats have to stay grumpily inside the whole time). I’ve been wanting to go to Italy and Greece for years while our kids got to pick the place we’d go for their graduation trips. My mother started a tradition of taking my brother’s family and mine on a trip when someone graduated, and she left some money to my brother and me, so we’ve continued the tradition. She took us to Maui for Walker’s high school graduation and Stratford, ON for Eleanor’s college graduation. We took both families to Argentina for my older niece’s college graduation, and Switzerland for my younger niece’s high school graduation. I may retire next summer, so I’ve said that Italy should be my “graduation” trip. We’re very tentatively looking into it for the summer of 2022.

I need to go a few more places while my knee holds out. I’m afraid that Greece may already be beyond it. I hope that New Zealand is not, because Eleanor has said for years that’s where she might pick when she finishes her PhD. And Ron really wants to go to Iceland.

The post Postcard Poems: An Interview with Jeanne Griggs appeared first on Reading the End.

Episode 148

You can find Anne of Manhattan wherever books are sold! You can find Brina on Twitter and Instagram, and at her website.

You can get at me on Twitter, email the podcast, and friend me (Gin Jenny) and Whiskey Jenny on Goodreads. As a brand new feature, you can also follow me (Gin Jenny) and Whiskey Jenny on Storygraph! If you like what we do, support us on Patreon. Or if you wish, you can find us on iTunes (and if you enjoy the podcast, give us a good rating! We appreciate it very very much).

Credits
Producer: Captain Hammer
Photo credit: The Illustrious Annalee
Theme song by: Jessie Barbour

Transcript

Gin Jenny  00:37

Welcome to the Reading the End Bookcast with the Demographically Similar Jennys. I’m Gin Jenny, and I’m here today with author Brina Starler, who wrote the new romance novel Anne of Manhattan. Brina, welcome to the podcast.

Brina Starler  00:49

Thank you. How are you?

Gin Jenny  00:51

I’m what my friend calls quarantine fine. How are you?

Brina Starler  00:55

Yeah, same.

Gin Jenny  00:58

Well, would you start by telling us a little bit about the book?

Brina Starler  01:01

So Anne of Manhattan is based on Anne of Green Gables, the iconic book and series by L.M. Montgomery, which came out in, I believe it was, 1918. So I’ve changed it a little bit. I took the bare bones of the characters and wrote them a modern story, how I would imagine Anne and Gilbert Blythe, a boy that she’s had a rivalry with her whole life, and then her best friends and all that, and I sort of took the basic of the original storylines and reworked it.

Gin Jenny  01:40

Yeah, I noticed that you did– I mean, spoilers, I guess for anyone who hasn’t read Anne of Green Gables yet, but I noticed you didn’t kill Matthew. Thank you.

Brina Starler  01:48

Yeah, well, I have had, too many times–because I’ve read the original books so many times. I can’t even tell you. I’m such a huge fan–and every single time, I ugly cry.

Gin Jenny  02:00

It’s devastating.

Brina Starler  02:01

It breaks my heart. And for people who don’t know who Matthew is, it’s her adoptive uncle sorta, I guess you would say? I think of Marilla more as her adoptive mother in that way. And then so I think of Matthew, Marilla’s brother, as her adoptive uncle.

Gin Jenny  02:17

Yeah, definitely. And he’s the first person who really clearly likes her a lot. And like immediately.

Brina Starler  02:22

He has big like dad vibes, even though he’s the uncle. It’s kind of like that. “She’s my angel and she could do no wrong.” He always indulges her, and I think he probably was the first person in her life who just unconditionally loved her.

Gin Jenny  02:39

I’m getting teary just thinking about Matthew dying. It’s so awful. Really. Thank you for sparing us.

Brina Starler  02:44

Yeah, it really is heartbreaking. So I couldn’t do it. I did not have it in me. I couldn’t do it.

Gin Jenny  02:51

Well, tell me about your first encounter with Anne of Green Gables. Did you read those books as a kid?

Brina Starler  02:55

I have read them so many times. I honestly couldn’t tell you the first time. I think I was a young teen. I went through a phase where I was obsessed with Anne of Green Gables and Little Women and The Secret Garden, all those sort of similar classics. Little House on the Prairie. And yeah, I just remember I kept coming back to Anne of Green Gables because Anne Shirley is eminently relatable for me.

Gin Jenny  03:24

How so?

Brina Starler  03:24

I’m an only child. I’m not adopted. But I am an only child. And my mom likes to joke about this. But I was always my head in a book. I was very imaginative. When you’re an only child, a lot of times, I think you have to make your own world, to make your own friends, your own fun, and it’s all kind of very insular. I had cousins, but not anybody who lived near me. So I was very much a loner in a lot of ways. I spent a lot of time playing by myself and whatnot. And I made up a lot of different worlds in my head. And also, I would get the report cards that always said, Brina is a social butterfly. I kind of related to that. And it’s very funny in the way that she is very excitable and she has a lot of imagination, and she just wants to share with everyone all the time.

Gin Jenny  04:16

And that was you.

Brina Starler  04:16

Yeah. I’ve calmed down a little bit since being a kid.

Gin Jenny  04:22

But, um, so did you read the whole series? Like you read the whole sort of arc of Anne of Green Gables, like through to Rilla?

Brina Starler  04:27

I never read Rilla. Yeah. And I kept meaning to because I keep hearing Oh, my God, it’s so good. It’s so good. But I think I just got really obsessed with the Anne of Green Gables arc, all the way to like, Anne’s House of Dreams. So all the way to the end and her kids and everything. Which is my favorite? I mean, I think the first one is obviously a classic, and it’s really funny. Yeah, none of the others are quite as funny, because she’s growing up and she started mellowing. But the first one is hilarious. I mean, it’s laugh out loud funny to me in certain parts. But I think later on when Anne is an adult and her and Gil are married, and they go through some things in their marriage where they wind up losing a baby, they have a stillborn. And then when their kids are older, and I think it’s World War One has started, and several other boys go off to war, and only one of them comes back.

Gin Jenny  05:26

Oh, God.

Brina Starler  05:27

Yeah, some of those books later on, I didn’t appreciate them as much, I think, as a younger person. But now that I have teenage boys in my own, I kind of can relate to those a little bit more too.

Gin Jenny  05:40

I think that I found that to be true of a bunch of some of the books you were mentioning like Little Women. Not Little Women so much, although that one too. But like Louisa May Alcott’s other books, like some of them had kind of an emotional depth that I didn’t fully appreciate when I was a kid.

Brina Starler  05:51

Right. And then the great thing about books like Anne of Green Gables and Little Women and The Secret Garden is that you can enjoy them as a kid, but you also can enjoy the complexity of them as you’re older too, and sort of read them with a new viewpoint.

Gin Jenny  06:06

Yeah. Which can be both positive and negative. I mean, I think Secret Garden– Yeah. Secret Garden is tougher to reread at times. I mean, but I still love so many parts of it.

Brina Starler  06:15

Yeah, it is, it is tougher to read. And the same thing with Little House on the Prairie, you find racism in there, which I couldn’t see as a kid. And part of that is who I am. I’m a white woman who was raised in a middle class home in New England. I was raised Jewish, but it was very much in like a white Ashkenazi Jewish community. And so when I went back to look at these books, and read these books as an adult with a completely different viewpoint, and completely different life experiences, I was like, oh, wow, I don’t remember this at all.

Gin Jenny  06:47

This is honestly a benefit of having siblings, because, not always but sometimes, the childhood classics get kind of divided up between you, and Little House on the Prairie books were really my older sister’s thing, so I didn’t really get into them. So I didn’t have that like emotional connection to deal with in adulthood.

Brina Starler  07:04

Yeah. And it is hard sometimes when you look at those books that you have such a nostalgic feeling for. And so I think that’s kind of like, you can love something and be really critical of it. Yeah, I love, I love Anne of Green Gables. But there’s this part in there that’s iconic about how Anne gets from a shifty peddler. She hates her red hair. So he says, Oh, I have something. I’ll make your hair nice and dark. And she’s always wanted like raven-black hair. So she’s like, great, and she takes the hair dye, and she does it and it turns her hair green. And that’s a really funny iconic scene that people who love this series know about. What I didn’t realize was that the peddler in it was called the Wandering Jew. A couple of mentions about that shifty, Jewish, untrustworthy peddler. So you know, I’ve been– I didn’t– Even as a Jewish kid. I didn’t take note of that, as always.

Gin Jenny  07:59

Yeah, definitely.

Brina Starler  08:01

You know, I can look back now and say like, I love LM Montgomery, and I love her books, and I love her characters, and it’s great, but this aspect is problematic.

Gin Jenny  08:09

Sure. Did you read others of her books besides the Anne of Green Gables series?

Brina Starler  08:13

I really didn’t. I never really got into any of the other ones. I tried a few of them. But no, I think it was just the characters of Anne of Green Gables just really, really stuck with me.

Gin Jenny  08:22

Yeah, absolutely. Which ones did you try?

Brina Starler  08:24

I honestly am blanking on it. It was so long ago.

Gin Jenny  08:28

No, that’s totally– The reason I’m asking is I’m gearing up to pester you into reading The Blue Castle, which is my favorite of hers.

Brina Starler  08:34

Oh, somebody else was telling me to read The Blue Castle too.

Gin Jenny  08:37

It’s great. I mean, typical caveats about LM Montgomery and her old time books, but it’s terrific. It’s about this woman who’s, you know, she lives with her family. She’s the kind of Fanny Price sort of person where everyone kind of dumps on her and she doesn’t have that much agency. And she has like a really beautiful cousin called Olive, and everyone’s like, well, Olive’s so great and Valancy is also here. And then one day, she finds out that she has a year to live, and so she decides to just live life however she wants to, and she’s just going to do what she wants and say what she wants.

Brina Starler  09:05

I’ll have to check it out.

Gin Jenny  09:06

Yeah, you really have to. I’m sorry to be a Blue Castle evangelist. But it’s so good. There’s this dinner scene where she’s talking to all her horrible relatives and just saying whatever she’s wanted to say to them for her whole life. It’s so good.

Brina Starler  09:19

Yeah, yeah, that’s, that’s the type of book where you know, you can really fall in love with it. But then of course, it breaks your heart at the end.

Gin Jenny  09:26

I won’t spoil anything about what happens. But you know, LM Montgomery isn’t like the most sad ending person, I’ll just say.

Brina Starler  09:32

True. She will get you sometimes.

Gin Jenny  09:34

Oh my God, it sounds like she had a very sad life. I don’t know that much about her. But from what I’ve read–

Brina Starler  09:39

I think she had a lot of depression.

Gin Jenny  09:42

Oh, bless her. So how did this specific book come to be? What made you want to write a contemporary retelling of Anne of Green Gables?

Brina Starler  09:48

So this is actually a really funny story. So I’m huge on Twitter. You know, we met on Twitter.

Gin Jenny  09:54

We did! I think we met on Twitter because people were talking shit about the South and we both got mad.

Brina Starler  10:00

Yeah, for people who don’t know, I live in North Carolina, but I’m a transplant. But I’ve lived here almost as long as I lived in any other place, including where I grew up. So I’ve acclimated. But I am really into Twitter. It’s kind of like my social media platform of choice. And I follow several editors and agents, and I happened to see one day that Tessa Woodward, who is an executive editor at Harper Collins, William Morrow, was tweeting about some manuscript wishlist that she’d love to see come across her desk. And she was talking to a friend of mine, and they were just chatting. And I had followed Tessa for a while, but she didn’t know me. We didn’t know each other. Well, Tessa had said, Oh, I’d love to see a modern Anne of Green Gables. I jumped in and was like, Oh, my God, you know, what would be amazing? Is if it was like, I don’t know, New York City, and they were competing grad students or something, something like that. And Tessa literally tweeted back: I would love to see that, too! Can you write that for me?

Gin Jenny  11:02

Oh, my gosh.

Brina Starler  11:03

Yeah. And I was like, obviously. But no, but I was like, Oh, my God, that would be amazing. Sure. And she’s like, great. Let me know when you’ve got something. At that time, I had been in talks with Mackenzie Walton over at Carina over a different manuscript, and so I was working on that. And I kind of thought Tessa meant, like, when you get something, send it over. So I wrote down my idea. I wrote down like a summary I came up with and then I left it alone, I went back to work on the other manuscript. And I don’t know, about a month or two later, I had responded to something else of Tessa’s that she’s tweeting out, just like, Oh, yeah, that sounds awesome. And she’s like, yeah, you know what also sounds awesome? She’s like, I would love to see that book come across my desk. Where are you at? I was like, Oh, you meant like, go write that now! Oh! So I explained to her that I hadn’t been writing it, because I’ve been working on something else. But I had a summary, and would she like to see it? So she said, Yeah, send it to me. So I sent it to her. And like two days later, she sent it back and was like, I love it. I’m so excited. I’m super, super excited. I love Twitter. I love Anne of Green Gables. When can I have the book?

Brina Starler  12:15

Wow.

Brina Starler  12:17

Yeah. And I was like, Well, I don’t have a first chapter. I don’t have an agent, so I had to get an agent. So then I sent out some feelers, because I knew a lot of agents. So I sent out some feelers and talked to some people, and then got on phones, conversations with several agents. And then I wound up with my first agent. She’s really great. Jen Eaton, who is no longer with the agency that I’m at now. So I transferred at that point, I was at New Leaf Literary. So I transferred over to Susie Thompson, who was amazing. But I made the deal when I was with Jen. And what happened basically was that we talked to Tessa and she’s like, Okay, give me four chapters and a good synopsis. And then if I like it, then I’ll send it on to acquisitions. And we’ll go from there. And she liked it. And she sent it on, and they bought the book, and then I wrote the book.

Gin Jenny  13:16

Man, so it was just total– A lot of it was really serendipity, then!

Brina Starler  13:19

Very much! I think it was very much being in the right place at the right time and taking advantage of that.

Gin Jenny  13:26

Yeah, absolutely.

Brina Starler  13:27

I definitely could have probably just walked away from it and been like, Oh, no, this is too intimidating, just too much. I’ve never written a full book before. But I was like, This is Anne of Green Gables.

Gin Jenny  13:40

Yeah!

Brina Starler  13:40

Nobody else– I did research. Like nobody else has done an Anna Green Gables updated novel. I don’t know why.

Gin Jenny  13:48

Absolutely baffling to me! Because I was also, as I was preparing for this podcast, I was thinking about that. And I was looking and there’s like nothing.

Brina Starler  13:55

It really blew my mind.

Gin Jenny  13:57

Yeah, especially because it’s so beloved. Did you watch the TV, like various TV adaptations as you were preparing for this? Or were you trying to keep your distance from adaptations of it?

Brina Starler  14:06

I’ve seen the Megan Follows one like a million times, of course, growing up. I love that one, the Canadian TV show one, and I’m a huge devotee because that’s the one that I watched, you know, when I was in my formative Anne of Green Gables years. But I could not watch Anne with an E, because I was writing the book. Even though it was set way back then. You know, it’s kind of the same thing when you’re writing an established property. You never ever, ever go on and read fanfic about it or anything. You have to keep that story, I think, original and in your head and not let anything influence it from the outside. So I really was just too nervous to watch Anne with an E. I was like, I don’t want to get any of that in my head.

Gin Jenny  14:48

Yeah, no, I totally get that. Well, if you do end up going to it, I thought the young actors who played Anne and Gilbert had just superb chemistry, and the kid who plays Anne is just excellent. They were great.

Brina Starler  14:59

Yeah. I will probably get to it. I just don’t watch very much TV, but I will probably. I think it’s in my queue.

Gin Jenny  15:06

Well, you also shouldn’t listen to me because, I hesitate to bring this up to you, lest it affect our friendship. But I was always more of an Emily of New Moon guy than an Anne of Green Gables guy. So I feel like my opinion on the adaptation is worth nothing because I’m all in the Emily in New Moon camp.

Brina Starler  15:21

No, because I think, I know for a fact there are a lot of people who are huge fans of the show who never even read the books. Just like any property. You know, where people love the Harry Potter movies who never read the books, or Percy Jackson or whatever. What’s the most popular one right now?

Gin Jenny  15:38

Shadow and Bone.

Brina Starler  15:39

Shadow and Bone! There are a lot of people who have read the books and that’s cool. That’s fine. Like I am very much of a mind of however you get to the fandom does not matter. If you get there via Emily of New Moon, because you decided to read that because you loved Emily of New Moon, and you wanted to watch Anne with an E, or read the books, then I don’t care.

Gin Jenny  16:05

What do you think makes an adaptation good? Like what are some favorite adaptations of yours?

Brina Starler  16:09

Mmm. Definitely all in on Shadow and Bone, cause I am a huge Six of Crows fan.

Gin Jenny  16:17

Oh my God. Six of Crows is great. Like I watched the whole thing this weekend, and Jesper and the goat were just absolutely flawless. I mean, all of it was enjoyable. But like Jesper and the goat were the best.

Brina Starler  16:28

Yeah. And I’m really, really, really looking forward to next season because I know Wylan will be coming in. I don’t even know who they have playing him yet.

Gin Jenny  16:35

No, I don’t either. But I feel like all the actors they cast have been excellent so far.

Brina Starler  16:39

And I will say in a reverse sort of adaptation of the universe, Star Wars obviously came out with the first three, and it wasn’t an adaptation, it was movies. But then the Star Wars literature, the novels came out. They started coming out, not long after, I think in the 80s they started the first ones. But I would say Timothy Zahn is my favorite Star Wars author, and I say that having several friends who have written Star Wars. So I love you guys, but!

Gin Jenny  17:09

So is he the guy who invented Thrawn? Is that the guy?

Brina Starler  17:12

Yes.

Gin Jenny  17:13

Yeah, so I haven’t read– I read a couple of Star Wars books when I was a kid and I first got into Star Wars, but I haven’t read any more. But my brother in law is super into Thrawn.

Brina Starler  17:21

I read he’s coming out with something new, and then I think they’re adapting Thrawn for the screen.

Gin Jenny  17:27

Oh, are you excited?

Brina Starler  17:28

Yes, very excited. But yeah, and then another property,  would say an adaptation that I’m actually excited about is the Dragonlance–Dungeons and Dragons Dragonlance–is coming out in a year or two. They’re doing a movie, and I am super excited because I was obsessed with Dragonlance as like a young teen. I actually did not know it was Dungeons and Dragons. That was literally not on my radar until three years ago.

Gin Jenny  17:58

No, me neither. I found that out just now as you said it.

Brina Starler  18:02

I actually did not know that, but I was completely obsessed with that whole world.

Gin Jenny  18:06

Wow. I’m really surprised. I feel like I need to pin my brother in law down and discuss this with him.

Brina Starler  18:11

Oh, you definitely should, but but be prepared to have like an hour of free time if not more.

Gin Jenny  18:16

Oh no. I am. He’s a big Dungeons and Dragons guy. I think he runs his current group’s campaign. So I know what I’m getting into.

Brina Starler  18:24

Yeah, my son also, my oldest one, he’s 15, he DMs. He’s a dungeon master for his group too.

Gin Jenny  18:32

It seems really hard.

Brina Starler  18:33

Yeah, it’s well, you know what? He gets very creative. He’s actually– He does some writing himself. Now he’s like, into a little bit romance, too, as far as like, storylines.

Gin Jenny  18:44

Awww!

Brina Starler  18:45

He’s always busting into my office like, what if?

Gin Jenny  18:51

Oh, that’s really really sweet. Oh, bless him.

Brina Starler  18:55

The only thing that my son has written that is like an existing property, oddly enough, is he wrote a short story, completely– No words, but it was from the game Unravel.

Gin Jenny  19:05

I love that game! I’ve played two games and that’s one of them!

Brina Starler  19:09

And he really likes– It’s very relaxing, like listening to the music.

Gin Jenny  19:13

Yes, it is. Yeah, I had to stop because the last level was really stressful, because the poor little yarn guy is in the snow and can’t escape from the snow. It’s horrible.

Brina Starler  19:21

Oh, I don’t know that he ever went that far into the game, so.

Gin Jenny  19:24

Well, I advise him not to. It’s depressing. So as I was reading this book, so I knew you were a fic reader anyway, because we’ve we’ve talked about it on Twitter, but had we not been, there’s a part in this book where Anne tells Gilbert that the bananas we eat today aren’t the same as old time bananas.

Brina Starler  19:42

I did fact check that by the way, but do you know where I got that from?

Gin Jenny  19:46

Yes, I do. From Steve Rogers fanfic, I assume.

Brina Starler  19:49

Yes, and usually, if that fact appears, it is Stucky, the Steve and Bucky romances. That’s where I first heard it. And it made me laugh and I was thinking about it and I was like, I’m gonna throw that in there and see if anyone notices. I did fact check it to make sure, because fanfic writers love to throw things in there and pass them off as facts and then you have to guess.

Gin Jenny  20:16

Yes, absolutely. Yeah. One thing I like about my current fandom is people often will post–because I’m in Untamed fandom now, RIP me–and people will post little like sources lists for their fics, which I really appreciate.

Brina Starler  20:27

Yeah, I do too. The author’s notes, a lot of times will contain notes about anything that you see that you might have a question about, or trigger warnings, which is helpful.

Gin Jenny  20:38

Yeah, I love it. Do you think of this book as being fanfic?

Brina Starler  20:41

I do. And I don’t think Tessa loves what I say that. She’s never said anything. But I was thinking from her point of view, she probably doesn’t love when I keep telling people it’s authorized fanfic. But, being that it’s in the public domain right now, it’s not like I’m cribbing off of anyone’s actual work that they’re–that’s–out there.

Gin Jenny  21:00

Yeah, like copyrighted work.

Brina Starler  21:02

Yeah, copyrighted. I kind of do think of it that way, because it’s an existing property, and I’m sort of playing on somebody else’s playground, which I really love. But it’s funny, because a lot of people have this attitude about fanfic, they see it as like not real writing, not real stories. I actually think that sometimes it takes more imagination, or at least just as much imagination, to translate somebody else’s work into an entirely new story, and not like tooting my own horn, but I can think of several other authors whose fanfic stories I’ve read that are just, I mean, better than probably 70% of original work that I’ve read out there.

Gin Jenny  21:49

Oh, God, yeah. Yes. Oh, my God. And I think in some cases, even to the point that for me, it kind of replaces the canon. Not to be predictable, but especially with Harry Potter, where the canon is now so like, depressing to think about.

Brina Starler  22:04

Oh, yeah. And, you know, I’m completely on the JK Rowling– To me, I do think of her as a TERF. I am so immeasurably disappointed in the person she turned out to be, and I think she did stain her legacy. And the books themselves have some issues, but no, actually, that’s one of my most active fandoms that I read in, is Harry Potter. And I just love it, because people are so– They put in so much diversity into it, that it’s kind of like, this is what Harry Potter could have been.

Gin Jenny  22:34

And they get really deep, I think, into the moral questions that the book either doesn’t grapple with or grapples with shallowly, but that the fic really digs into, which I love so much. How did you get into fanfic?

Brina Starler  22:45

Actually, via the BBC Sherlock.

Gin Jenny  22:48

Oh, sure. Sure. Yeah, drew so many people in. Yeah!

Brina Starler  22:51

And I don’t remember who first told me about fanfic. It was a long time ago. So I came in as an adult.

Gin Jenny  22:56

Me too.

Brina Starler  22:57

Yeah. But I look back now too, and I think: Well, actually, I mean, reading Timothy Zahn and Dragonlance with the Dungeons and Dragons, and then reading comics coming up is all kind of fanfic. Every new comic writer in a series, the person who’s currently writing a Captain America series or She-Hulk or Batman, I mean, they’re writing fanfic, because you’re writing new stories off of established characters. You know, I think for me, it wasn’t that big of a sidestep. It was just an, Oh my God, look at all this stuff already online. And it’s free. There is a lot of wading through.

Gin Jenny  23:33

Yeah, but I mean, I think that’s true with anything.

Brina Starler  23:35

One thing I have noticed, and there are such, I mean, just like with anything, and we see this a lot with like the Star Wars movies, you have a really toxic element of the fandom. But you also have people who just love the media, they just love the books, or they just love the movies, and they just want to experience that joy and spread that joy. So that’s one of the best parts about fandom.

Gin Jenny  23:58

Yeah, absolutely. What are some of your favorite tropes?

Brina Starler  24:02

Enemies to lovers is my number one. Always my number one favorite. I love that. Proximity is another one, and that can be translated into like only one bed or just kind of like thrown together in a situation or even a physical space where they’re kind of stuck with each other.

Gin Jenny  24:20

Yeah, I love a shared project for proximity.

Brina Starler  24:23

Yeah. And that one I used.

Gin Jenny  24:25

I was gonna say, yeah, which I loved. Yeah!

Brina Starler  24:27

Yeah, I used that one. So I guess you could include rivals to lovers too, which is what I kind of wrote with this one. Also, and recently, I’ve come to appreciate friends to lovers, because there’s a lot to mine there. I think that I didn’t used to appreciate, when I was younger, that sort of looking at someone in an entirely new light, who’s been in your life forever, or that you’ve been friends with forever, and then all of a sudden, you realize, Oh, my God, actually, I’m really attracted to them. I really, actually, I’m in love with them and I have been for I don’t even know how long, and like, wow, I’m an oblivious moron.

Gin Jenny  25:03

Yes! It’s so satisfying.

Brina Starler  25:06

Yeah. And I love the trope of like one character being really grumpy and sort of has a lot of shields up to avoid getting hurt. And then the other one is just like this ray of sunshine who comes in like a wrecking ball and just upends their entire life and worldview.

Gin Jenny  25:22

That’s the best. I mean, that’s really the source of my Untamed fandom in these troubled times.

Brina Starler  25:27

Yeah.

Gin Jenny  25:27

You had a shared project in Anne of Manhattan, which I thought was so fun. Can you say a little bit about what Anne and Gilbert are forced to do together?

Brina Starler  25:34

They’re paired up, and this doesn’t usually happen. I did do some research. Usually, if you have a thesis project or thesis paper, you’re working on your own, but there can be group efforts.

Gin Jenny  25:45

Also, who cares? It’s fun!

Brina Starler  25:46

Right! Author’s license! So I decided that because of lack of space, or whatever, that their thesis advisor would say, Okay, you know what, you guys work together, and I’m going to mentor you both at the same time. So being that they were both in the teaching master’s program, I had them working on where they had to come up with something to collaborate on, and so what they settled on was working with middle school-aged kids in an afterschool extra program for kids who were struggling with their English language arts classes, or who wanted to elaborate a little bit more on learning creative writing, just kind of those combinations, those all volunteer, but definitely would help the kids in their grades or just furthering. The school that they picked was sort of an art school, focused more on creative arts and everything. Like, you do have those. I think the most famous one is from Fame, the movie Fame, which is like really old, and I don’t think many people now have seen it. That’s what I was thinking of. But yeah, I decided, I thought that would be kind of fun, because I actually really liked the idea of them trying to figure out how to interact with middle school kids. Having a 15 year old and a 13 year old, I’m like, mwahahahhah, they can be terrible snd give them a hard time. But no, I liked the idea of them collaborating on something and also sort of showing different sides of being able to relate to these kids and how to figure it out, and how to figure out how to work together in these situations.

Gin Jenny  27:26

Yeah, especially because I think that when kids are portrayed in media very often, especially teenagers, very often it’s like, these kids are terrible. And I appreciate that you didn’t do that, because I love teenagers. I think teenagers are great and hilarious.

Brina Starler  27:38

Yeah, and they can be because it’s the age. But like, I mean, I remember what middle school is like. It’s rough. But yeah, they’re also good kids.

Gin Jenny  27:49

I’m totally out of step with everyone, because I had a great middle school experience, and then high school was when things got really– Like, I think like elementary school was terrible, high school was terrible, but middle school! I got my braces off. I grew really tall. I was good at Latin.

Brina Starler  28:04

That’s so funny. I had the opposite experience. I actually transferred from public school to private school because no, bullying was so bad.

Gin Jenny  28:12

Oh, my God, you poor baby. I basically had that experience in elementary school and like, got it over with.

Brina Starler  28:17

I don’t know what happened. I was fine in fifth grade, and then we transferred to middle school and it was like open season. I transferred, and it was like, I went through seventh, eighth, ninth, and sophomore year. And I transferred back to public school, and then it was okay, because even though the same girls kind of picked up where they left off, I was a lot more confident in myself. So I had a lot of different experiences with kids from all over the world. I don’t know. It just gave me a lot more confidence in myself, and especially when you have the attention of teachers and mentors, but it was also cool because James Van Der Beek went to school with me.

Gin Jenny  28:55

Oh, my God! Dawson crying gif himself.

Brina Starler  28:58

Yeah, we went– We used to be in the same theater plays. We were in theater together.

Gin Jenny  29:03

Whoa, that’s wild.

Brina Starler  29:04

Yeah. My mom has photos of him somewhere in a cow costume. It was really funny. He was Danny Zuko in Grease.

Gin Jenny  29:14

Oh, that’s good casting, I think. Who were you in Grease?

Brina Starler  29:17

Oh, I was like an extra. I can’t sing.

Gin Jenny  29:22

That’s what I was about to ask.

Brina Starler  29:23

I was background.

Gin Jenny  29:26

That sounds really fun, though.

Brina Starler  29:28

Yeah, it was fun.

Gin Jenny  29:29

One thing I thought was really fun and cool in this book, in Anne of Manhattan, is that, you know, it’s set in the present day, but there’s also flashbacks to when Anne was a kid, some of which map quite closely on to Anne of Green Gables. How did you choose those scenes? Like what things did you want to revisit versus what did you want to leave out?

Brina Starler  29:45

You know, it was almost intuitive. In fact, it’s really funny because sometimes I go back and I read it and I’m like, Whoa, I didn’t even remember that I actually wrote that as an echo. I was just writing it. And I forget how much of that I have in my head. It’s like permanently burned into my brain. Yeah, no, mostly it was just a: This was funny, or I felt like this was a really important part of her life, so I want to throw it in there. There were scenes that I couldn’t, or things in the original book that I couldn’t make into entire scenes, like the time that Anne accidentally got Diana drunk and sent her home. And it was a whole big thing, and her mother freaked out. But I made like a quick reference to it and translated it, of course, for modern time. I didn’t want to leave it out completely. I was like, but it’s such a funny story!

Gin Jenny  30:35

Yes, it’s so charming. And it’s such an LM Montgomery scene, like having read some other stuff, it’s like a classic LM Montgomery scene.

Brina Starler  30:44

It really is. And then I have a couple things tucked away that I might put on my website that were flashback scenes that never made it into the book.

Gin Jenny  30:53

Yeah, no, for sure. How did the book change as you were writing it, and as you were going through the editing process?

Brina Starler  30:58

Oh, it changed so much. In fact, if you look at the original synopsis that I sent Tessa versus the finished book, I’m shocked that Harper Collins wasn’t like, This is not the book you sold us. The bare bones that are still absolutely where they were, where it’s their grad school, and they were rivals to lovers, and from seventh grade on they went to school, but then I also had them taking a break, because I thought it’s better if they separated for a while and then kind of come back together as reunion. But no, I think a lot of it shifted. Anne’s sleazy advisor– This is where I kind of wish that publishing companies would allow you to put trigger warnings on books. And I feel a little bit guilty, because I feel like it might be springing this on people, but I definitely have sort of a MeToo situation going on in there. And I think it’s probably a situation that a lot of women are familiar with, with her mentor just being kind of a scumbag but doing it in a way that’s so subtle, most of the time that you can’t really call him on it.

Gin Jenny  32:05

Yeah, totally.

Brina Starler  32:06

It’s very predatory. And I think, you know, maybe you haven’t had a professor who’s done it, but maybe you’ve had a manager who’s done that, or you’ve had someone else in a position of power who’s done that.

Gin Jenny  32:17

A high school teacher, for instance.

Brina Starler  32:19

A high school teacher, yeah. People have said, you know, youth group leaders.

Gin Jenny  32:23

Oh, yeah.

Brina Starler  32:24

Yeah! And it doesn’t necessarily mean anything will ever come of it or that that person even truly is trying to make something come of it, but just sometimes the way they make you feel is super uncomfortable, like prey! Unfortunately, a situation a lot of women are very familiar with.

Gin Jenny  32:44

Yeah, regretably. It was very, like how far can Elle go?

Brina Starler  32:48

And that situation– Actually, that plotline came about when Tessa and I had met at Romance Writers of America national conference the last year that they actually held it in person, which is 2019, I think.

Gin Jenny  33:01

I can’t remember that far back, but I believe you.

Brina Starler  33:04

Yeah, I think that’s the summer 2019. And this was before she had bought the book, but we were talking about it. I said, Oh yeah, here’s what I want to do; and she said, Would it be too much to put in some elements of this? I was like, No, I like that idea. And so then I came up with the plotline. But I also kind of think of that as a reference to Legally Blonde. Yeah, I have a couple different sort of homages to different properties.

Gin Jenny  33:31

How did you reconceptualize these different characters? Like Diana is one that struck me because I feel like– I do want to preface this by saying I only read the first three books, I think, in the Anne of Green Gables series. So I don’t know what happens to Diana ultimately, in her life, but I feel like in the book, she was kind of drippy. And I feel like you did a good job of fleshing– Poor Diana! Bless her heart! But I feel like you did a good job of fleshing her out. So I mean, how did you kind of build the characters? What did you drawn from the original and what did you want to add to them?

Brina Starler  33:58

Well, I wanted to keep the friendship between Diana and Anne, because I feel like that is such an important female friendship. They call each other their bosom friends. So close as sisters. And I think it’s incredibly important because Diana is Anne’s first true friend who wasn’t part of her imagination. You know, and again, other than Matthew, probably one of the only people has ever unconditionally loved her from the very beginning. She didn’t have to grow to love her. She didn’t have to love her in spite of various flaws, but she was the first person who just looked at Anne immediately and was like, You’re amazing! Even though she was a little scared in the original books, because she was such a sedate person. She’s not very adventurous in the beginning. Anne was as good for her, drawing her out of her shell and making her more adventurous, as Diana was for Anne, giving her someone who just loved her like that.

Gin Jenny  34:54

Yeah.

Brina Starler  34:55

But yeah, you’re right. In the original book, she is very quiet in a lot of ways. She’s very much a scaredy cat. And sadly, she’s portrayed as not very smart, especially compared to Anne, who’s like brilliant, blazingly smart. So next to Anne, Diana comes up short a lot of time. So I wanted to keep the original friendship and everything. But I felt like I needed to evolve Diana a little bit, give her a little bit more of a chance. And in the original book, she actually does wind up with Fred, and they pop out a whole bunch of babies. And, you know, her ambition, that’s what she wanted, she want to be a housewife and a mother. And that’s what she did. And that’s what she wanted. She was comfortable doing that. And that’s great. But I wanted to change that a little bit for this book, especially because they’re not really at that time of their life where they were interested in doing that. And I also, one of the things that apparently has been a bit of a bone of contention for early readers is that I’ve put a lot more racial diversity and LGBTQ diversity in there. One of the things I did with Diana is I changed her to a Black woman. I did that because I felt like in the original books, they’re super white, and super Christian, and super straight, which makes sense. It was 1918. She lived in Prince Edward Island, which is at that time majority white, majority Christian, and that’s what she knew. And that’s what she wrote. But I don’t think that makes sense for someone who’s growing up on Long Island and then lives in New York City. Yeah. So I just changed it up, and some people are like, Oh, it’s diversity for diversity’s sake. And I’m like, Why does it have to have, you know, a motive there? And one of my favorite things is– Somebody sent me, they saw on Reddit, there was a thread about it. And I thought it was really funny. The person who had started the thread was like, yeah, so apparently, she’s gotten dragged a couple of times on Goodreads for diversity, and somebody is mad because she put a LGBTQ relationship in the book, that wasn’t in the original books. She’s like, Sometimes people are just gay, Diane! And it made me laugh, because I was like, Yeah, that’s true. Sometimes people are just gay. There doesn’t have to be a motive.

Gin Jenny  37:11

Yeah, you wouldn’t say they were in there being white for whiteness’s sake, although they are! Would you ever write more in this world? Or would you ever write more in the LM Montgomery, like drawing from the LM Montgomery pool?

Brina Starler  37:21

I don’t think so. And as I would love to, I had talked to Tessa about doing a spin-off, books with Jane and so on, and she said, I think I just want to do a standalone. And I was okay with that. Because I feel like once I knew that, I was able to weave a little bit more into the background, but I couldn’t really concentrate too much unfortunately, on this background relationships. No, I definitely have some other ideas for original stories. But also, there are a few other adaptations kind of floating around in my brain.

Gin Jenny  37:53

Oh, can I ask what properties?

Brina Starler  37:56

So I had a couple of adaptations in my brain. And I haven’t sent anything over to Tessa yet. But so I was thinking of one that was sort of a adaptation, the bare bones of The Secret Garden. And then: I Capture the Castle meets the Vanderbilts. So yeah, sort of along those lines, and then another one I was thinking of was– Oh, so you know, Pride and Prejudice retellings are super popular. Such a great story! I was like, well, Pride and Prejudice, but Mary Bennett’s story. Because I was thinking, Mary Bennett is so obsessed with like music, and you know, she’s kind of like dour and religious. But if I cut that part out. Pride and Prejudice, but Mary Bennett meets A Star Is Born.

Gin Jenny  38:39

Yeah, I love that.

Brina Starler  38:40

Which is a weird, a weird idea. And I–

Gin Jenny  38:43

No, I love that.

Brina Starler  38:45

That makes sense in my head.

Gin Jenny  38:47

It makes total sense. I’m rereading Mansfield Park right now, and I love Mary Crawford so much. So the whole thing of like, pulling out smaller characters in Jane Austen to do something with them is so fun.

Brina Starler  38:58

Yeah, I was thinking about Mansfield Park at one point. And then interestingly enough, Swan Lake hit me too. I have a prose version of it by Mark Halpern that was given to me. It’s a beautifully illustrated cloth bound book. It was given to me when I was like, 12, I think. It’s surprisingly adult, for a story that is put together like a children’s book.

Gin Jenny  39:23

Yeah.

Brina Starler  39:24

it’s very political. Yeah, it’s a really interesting story.

Gin Jenny  39:29

I think I had that same book when I was a kid. Was it like kind of a blue, and it had a picture in the center?

Brina Starler  39:36

Yep. And it was like a swan taking off from a lake in the center of the cover.

Gin Jenny  39:42

Yes. I totally had that book!

Brina Starler  39:43

And it’s funny. It’s like, again, I read it as a kid and was like, oh, cool story! And then I read it when my first son was a baby. He was terrible at going to sleep. So I was like, What can I read that’s gonna bore him and put him to sleep? And I started reading it. I was like really caught up, and I’m like, wow there’s a lot of politicking in here, and a lot of hierarchy drama and royal court drama in here, and then there’s forbidden love, secret love. As Anne would say, a tragical ending. But then it’s really not. You think it’s a horrible tragic ending, but actually the very, very end, there’s a lot of hope.

Gin Jenny  40:23

Oh, man, I need to go to my parents and see if they still have it and reread it. I read it as a kid but I barely remember it.

Brina Starler  40:28

It’s really lovely.

Gin Jenny  40:29

Yeah. Okay, cool. All right. So those are all, those are the things you have in the in the hopper?

Brina Starler  40:34

Yeah, those are kind of things are bouncing around. But then I also have a couple of, you know, you always got to have like, a million things cooking, right? Because you never know what’s gonna stick. I have something set in the 90s during like the grunge era, sort of my love letter to my growing up: flannels and Doc Martens and Pearl Jam and you know, Stone Temple Pilots, you know, and then I have a road trip book.

Gin Jenny  40:56

Oh, I love a road trip book!

Brina Starler  40:57

Yeah, who doesn’t like a good road trip? That’s sort of that thrown together trope.

Gin Jenny  41:02

Oh, I’ve just gotten really nostalgic for like all my favorite road trip books. Well, before I let you go, what are you reading right now?

Brina Starler  41:09

What I’m reading right now: On my desk, I have The Atlas Six by Olivie Blake. She came on my radar actually as a fanfic author, and she’s under Olivie Blake so I’m not outing her. When I said earlier that there were some people out there who write fanfic that is mind blowingly good, and like 70% better than any original stuff I’ve read, I was talking about her. She’s amazing. She wrote a 350,000 word fanfic that can literally be broken into probably four books, long books. There were something like 24 points of view, and literally everyone in that story has their own arc. And then it weaves into an overarching art and it is tight. So it’s really good. She makes me jealous as a writer. And then I have The Meet Cute Club by Jack Harbon, which– He’s really great. He writes really cute, funny stuff, and then he writes like super filthy stuff, and he’s great at both.

Gin Jenny  42:15

Great! The two food groups!

Brina Starler  42:16

Yes, exactly. That’s what’s on my desk like right now. And I had, just last night because it came out today, something hit my Kindle. I’ve been reading a lot more print lately.

Gin Jenny  42:28

I tend to prefer print, unfortunately, because I love romance, and a lot of that is just in ebook form. But I do prefer reading print books.

Brina Starler  42:35

Well, I got Arsenic and Adobo: A Tita Rosie’s Kitchen mystery book, by Mia P. Manansala. And I hope that i’m pronouncing that right. But she is completely new on my radar. It looks so good.

Gin Jenny  42:48

Yeah, I read that. I really enjoyed it. I don’t read that many mysteries. Don’t necessarily take my word for anything, but I found it so fun and charming. And there’s so much food in it, which is great.

Brina Starler  42:57

Oh, awesome. I’m super excited for that. Yeah, no, I am not usually a mystery person either. My mother is. She’s huge into, especially, cozy mysteries. So I have to tell her if I really liked this one, I’ll have to tell her.

Gin Jenny  43:08

Well, thank you so much for talking with me. Where can people find you online?

Brina Starler  43:13

Well, I am online as Brina Starla everywhere. So I’m on Instagram and Facebook and Twitter. But I’m most active, I would say, on Twitter and Instagram.

Gin Jenny  43:24

Well the book again is Anne of Manhattan. It’s so warm and lovely. And if y’all are LM Montgomery fans, you should read it. And if you’re not, you should still definitely read it.

Brina Starler  43:31

Thank you so much for having me, Jenny,

Gin Jenny  43:34

Thank you so much for coming on. And please do read The Blue Castle. I think you’re gonna love it.

Brina Starler  43:38

I will. I will definitely put that on my radar.

Gin Jenny  43:41

All right, take care. Thanks for talking with me.

The post Episode 148 – Interview with Brina Starler, Author of Anne of Manhattan appeared first on Reading the End.

Episode 147

Things We Discussed

Prague in Black and Gold: The History of a City, Peter Demetz
Bartimaeus Sequence, Jonathan Stroud (first one is The Amulet of Samarkand)
Ghost Talkers, Mary Robinette Kowal
The Watchmaker of Filigree Street, Natasha Pulley
Twilight, Stephenie Meyer
Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Hulu)
Mercy Thompson series, Patricia Briggs
Zotero (bibliography/note-taking app)
Miro (online post-it board)
The Untamed (Netflix)
Fruits Basket

You can find Nicole on Twitter here, and her website is here. The book is The Lights of Prague, and it has vampires and gas lighting, and you should check it out!

Credits
Producer: Captain Hammer
Photo credit: The Illustrious Annalee
Theme song by: Jessie Barbour
Transcripts by: Sharon of Library Hungry

Transcript is coming soon!

The post Episode 147 – Interview with Nicole Jarvis, Author of The Lights of Prague appeared first on Reading the End.

Episode 144

Things We Discussed

The Battle of Algiers (movie)
Ici on noie les Algeriens (movie)

Cherae talks a bit about different dialects of Arabic, so to break down what they’re saying a little bit: Darija is Moroccan Arabic; Masri is Egyptian Arabic; Shami or Sami is Levantine Arabic (Syrian, as well as Lebanese). The question I ask about saying the G is because the Arabic letter J (?) is pronounced as a G in Egyptian Arabic. The thing Cherae says about negative sh is about the consonant construction “sh” that’s used to negate a statement.

The Wheel of Time, Robert Jordan
Ancillary Justice, Ann Leckie
Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card
The Thousand Names, Django Wexler
Powder Mage series, Brian McClellan (first one is Promise of Blood)
Broken Empire trilogy, Mark Lawrence (first one is Prince of Thorns)
Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey
Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla
What Remains of Edith Finch
Machinarium
Shadow of Mordor
Stardew Valley
Winter’s Orbit, Everina Maxwell
The Monster Baru Cormorant, Seth Dickinson
A Desolation Called Peace, Arkady Martine

You can find Cherae on their Twitter or subscribe to their newsletter here. The book again is The Unbroken, which you can get wherever books are sold!

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Credits
Producer: Captain Hammer
Photo credit: The Illustrious Annalee
Theme song by: Jessie Barbour

Transcript

Gin Jenny: Welcome to the Reading the End Bookcast with the Demographically Similar Jennys. I’m Gin Jenny, and I’m here with author CL Clark, author of the new fantasy novel The Unbroken. Cherae, great to have you on the show.

CL Clark: Hi, thanks so much for having me.

GJ: I wanted to start by— Could you tell us a little bit about the book and about yourself?

CLC: Sure! I’m CL Clark, you guys can call me Cherae. I am a writer from Kansas City, Kansas, though I haven’t lived there in quite some time. I’ve been on the road for the last several years. I am the author of The Unbroken, which is a novel about Touraine, who is a conscripted soldier for the Balladairan Empire. And she’s very loyal to it, at least when we start the book. And it’s also about Luca, who is the Balladairan Empire’s princess, and her main goal is to get her throne back from her uncle. And so when they both end up in Qazal, all of their best laid plans get turned upside down.

GJ: Awesome. That’s a great description. Let me ask you a question that’s not about this book. When people say they’re from Kansas City, Kansas, versus when they say they’re from Kansas City, Missouri, can you explain what that distinction is? I know it’s a city in two states, but I don’t understand that specific thing.

CLC: Okay, so to be fair, usually—I don’t even know why I made that distinguishment now, but I usually just say Kansas City, because for me, they’re the same city. But there are distinct law differences. Like you can’t buy alcohol on Sunday in Kansas City, Kansas, but you can in Missouri, and so my friends would exploit that quite a lot. But they’re one greater metro area, really. And when I became like, a young adult with my own apartment, I technically lived just a block over the state line. And so I was technically in Kansas City, Missouri. And so, you know, it’s for me, it’s one large sort of super-city, I guess.

GJ: Okay, awesome. That is so enlightening. Thank you so much. The last thing is fascinating. Okay, so returning to The Unbroken, which I loved. What was the germ of the idea for this book? You’ve been calling it Touraine’s Arms on social media, which I feel like distills it down to its most fundamental assets. But where did you start with it? Was with the characters, the relationships, the setting?

CLC: Actually, when you mentioned Touraine’s arms with it, though, I did not literally think of her physical arms, one of the things I really wanted to do and explore was when female characters in fantasy are allowed to be violent. And so it really is about her arms, her weaponry, like how she gets to physically hurt people. And yeah, so I guess that’s not— I mean, there are a lot of things to say about that. But, um, so it was like, when women get to be violent, and how they’re allowed to feel about it, like, do they have to feel remorse? Must it always be in service of saving a child or themselves? Because so often it was, and if it wasn’t, then they were a bad guy. You didn’t see the same thing with the guy characters. So there was that, and there was also, I was also in this class, a couple classes, studying postcolonial literary theory, and reading books by colonial, postcolonial authors. And so it all just kind of slammed together into one book, specifically one scene, which was the soldier who had to execute people who were her own people. That was the beginning.

GJ: Yeah, that scene is, yeah, remarkably impactful. So what changed from your first idea that— As you’re writing, is there anything that really significantly changed as you were going through? Or is it pretty true to your original vision for it?

CLC: The book itself is pretty true to that original vision. But there is one major, major change that happened in the last draft in between my like despair at never getting an agent to finally getting an agent selling the book. And that is a character, there was one character who—I’m not going to say any names, but if you’ve read the book already, you can probably guess—there’s one character who was Touraine’s brother, and I changed that character. They are not her brother anymore. They are someone else. But I didn’t change anything else, the rivalry and the hatred and the anger, even the like, fistfights, they all stay the same. And it changed the book so dramatically. And I just fell in love with this character. And yeah, so that was the biggest change.

GJ: That’s really cool. Why did you make that decision?

CLC: I cannot tell you because that would tell you who this character is now. And I don’t want to do that on air. Okay. But I’m happy if somebody wants to, like, do it off books, and I will answer that question for people.

GJ: All right, that makes sense. So you talked about some of the ideas from the book, arising from you studying postcolonial literature. What can you tell me about your research? I’m always so fascinated by what authors do to prepare for writing, especially, fantasy novels, where of course, the research can go in a lot of different directions, because ultimately, you’re making it all up.

CLC: I did, I did make up a lot of things. But before I did that, I really wanted to better understand how colonialism has worked in practice in the real world. And since my area of study was French, French language, and French literature,  it was my first real inroad into this, because at first I was, you know, I was, like many Americans, I was in love with France and in love with Europe. And that love led me to digging deeper into the language and the culture. But that also meant I was digging deeper into the history, which means you’re seeing the underbelly of everything that made this perfect nation. And so actually one of the things I did was start learning Arabic as well, because I wanted to have access to some primary source documents from the colonial era. And even after, so I could see what people were talking about in their own language, not just North African writers writing in French. I watched, as well as reading books, I watched films by French and North African French artists, like Battle of Algiers is one pretty famous one, but also Ici on noie les Algériens, which is Here We Drown Algerians, and yeah, it’s a— So yeah, it was not really light reading by any means.

GJ: Yeah, no, sure. So I took a little Arabic in high school. My teacher was Tunisians so I have a Tunisian accent. What kind of Arabic are you learning?

CLC: So I had to learn Moroccan standard when I was studying, but they also taught it to us with one colloquial and tandem and but I had different teachers each time. So one teacher was Moroccan, but he taught me Egyptian because that was what the department said everybody had to do. But we had, we had like, Darija club. And so I would speak Darija with him outside of class. But then I had another teacher who would speak I we only really had Egyptian, we have Masri or Shami, so Syrian, dialects to choose from an actual class. And so we did Syrian dialect, Leventine dialect, in another class. And so it was back and forth. And actually, I, my partner and I, sometimes we speak Arabic, but she makes fun of me because I have a in general I have a Moroccan or Egyptian accent.

GJ: And you say the G?

CLC: Mmmm… Sometimes! Sometimes, okay, but I still I have my kafs from hanging out with my Moroccan professor a lot. And oh, gosh, what else? I keep all of my negative shushes. And they do not.

GJ: So yeah, I remember when I was taking Arabic because my mom studied Arabic as well. But she and she lived in Egypt for a year. So I would be pronouncing things the way I was pronouncing them. And she’d be like, No, no, no, it’s this way, the Egyptian way. So how did you decide what to put in the book from history and what to ditch? Like one thing that I found really interesting is that Balladaire, which is clearly inspired in part by France, is an atheist state rather than being Catholic as France was. So how did you make that kind of decision?

CLC: Well,one thing that I didn’t want to do was to make just straight analogs of these nations. I wanted on one hand, just to be able to write, you know, a fantasy world with different magic and stuff like that. And so if I were going to distinctly create a Catholicism and Islam or whatever, I’m not actually really writing fantasy, I’m just writing historical fiction. And that wasn’t where I wanted to go. But also, I’m not a historian, and I’m not North African. And so that’s not really, I don’t think, for that, really for me. Not unless I’m doing a substantial amount more research than I have done. And I’ve done research in general, but also specifically, and I just don’t, I would never call myself expert enough to write like a straight historical fiction about France and any North African country.

GJ: Oh, that makes total sense. Do you have any—are there books that you thought were particularly good? Like, if people were interested in learning more about the actual French colonization of North Africa? Are there books that you thought were particularly superb?

CLC: The films would be a good start.

GJ: Okay, awesome. Yeah. I’ll include those names in the show notes so people can look for them. So how did you come to the fantasy genre? Have you always been a fantasy reader? What are some books you started with?

CLC: Have I always been in the fantasy genre? Definitely, almost to the exclusion of science fiction for a very long time. Yeah. But I can’t remember what my first young fantasy book would have been. But the one that really changed the game for me was when I first read The Wheel of Time, the first Wheel of Time books, and because I had like a kids’ edition—

GJ: Oh my God, that’s adorable.

CLC: Yeah, it was like, I mean, I don’t know if it was intended to be for kids. But it came in like my school’s little book catalog. And it was like divided into two, so it was like, small hand size, smaller hands, I don’t know. And so that was kind of the beginning of the end. And then like, my parents noticed me or family members noticed me—like I was always a bookworm, but they started seeing that I was interested in this fantasy. And I will never forget, I had a family member, a couple aunts of mine who really loved Lord of the Rings. And basically, they found out I liked fantasy. The night that I was hanging out with them at their house, and Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers had just come out. And so they kind of looked at me, and then they looked at each other. And they said, Okay, we’re going to the movies tonight. And they sat me in front of Lord of the Rings number one, bought us tickets for Lord of the Rings number two later that night. And then I got about like halfway to like Gandalf fighting the Balrog, and then they just sort of picked me up and whisked me away to the movie theater. And that was the end, and then like for Christmas that year, I got Lord of the Rings book, I got Lord of the Rings soundtracks. I got all the movies up to that point. It was—yeah, that was it.

GJ: That sounds like a near perfect movie viewing experience. It’s actually so validating to hear someone else say they saw the movies first. My sister was a big fan. My older sister was a big fan of the books. And I tried to read them numerous times before the movies came out. And I just couldn’t get past—like I know, everyone says Tom Bombadil, and I did struggle to get past Tom Bombadil. And then I really couldn’t get past the Council of Elrond. When Fellowship of the Ring came out, I just saw the movie. And then I skipped and read The Two Towers first, which worked really well.

CLC: Yeah, I don’t know if I would have made it if it hadn’t been for seeing the movies first. And then I mean, the third movie didn’t come out for so long that I had nothing else to do. I was, you know, I was a kid. So I just read through it, I guess.

GJ: And you said to the exclusion of science fiction— Are you reading more science fiction nowadays?

CLC: Yes, yes, I am. I’m, I’m sure I had like some bad experiences reading like classical science fiction. And at this point, I don’t blame myself. I’m like, Well, of course you did. But now things are a bit different. And so I think I think the first one that kind of really got me into science fiction— And so now I’ve gone back and been reading through things, but I think Ancillary Justice was, I don’t know, my science fiction gateway drug, maybe?

GJ: I read Ender’s Game when I was in middle school, and I really liked it. So as you can imagine, that’s been a whole journey since then, given that its author is just an absolutely terrible person.

CLC: Yeah, I did read Ender’s Game. And that was the only one

GJ: Yeah, it was the only one for me to– I’m not really sure why, I’m not really sure what bounced me out of reading more SF. And then for military fantasy, is that a subgenre that you’ve read a lot of? Because I have read a moderate amount.

CLC: I feel like I’ve read a lot. But part of that for me, it was just that I feel like so much of fantasy has been military fantasy. It’s always about somebody going off to fight this war and that war. But I do think that the subgenre is getting more specific. And I remember stumbling upon Django Wexler’s The Thousand Names. And it was, as I was rolling this seed of an idea, that scene of Touraine having to execute some people, and in my head at the time, it was her with a rifle. And she was part of a firing squad. And I couldn’t quite reconcile the idea of, you know, jumping forward in technology like that, in fantasy. And so seeing The Thousand Names was like, this light bulb going off, like, oh, it is fantasy. You can, you can do whatever you want.

GJ: Whatever you want. It’s great.

CLC: Yeah. And that proved that there was a market for it, as well as Brian McClellan’s Powder Mage series. And so I just sort of ran with it. I didn’t really look back, didn’t ask any questions, though, I probably will, I will go back and probably write something that’s just like, swords because I like them. But sorry, to go back to your actual question. I’m—the other sort of scholarly interest I have, it’s related to postcolonial stuff, but it’s also war literature, and war narratives, and how we talk about war, how we engage in it, how we memorialize and how we fantasize about it. And so, I probably still have some more military fantasy coming out in the future.

GJ: That’s awesome. Am I right— Did I read that you have a background as a personal trainer?

CLC: Yes.

GJ: Was that useful to you in writing a character like Touraine, whose living depends on her being in really good physical shape?

CLC: I don’t know that I use that, per se. I mean, like, I have a pretty solid idea of what humans are capable of training to do. And not just like what they could do in a fantasy book. But I didn’t—I don’t think I really used it so much. But it did impact how I conceived of her and how I conceived of characters’ physicality in general.

GJ: Yeah, for sure. So what is the best workout routine to attain arms like Touraine’s like if you were going to do something that didn’t require you to be taken from your home and raised by a punishingly racist imperial system of warfare,

CLC: I mean, I am primarily a body weight training emphasis. And so my go-to would always be different varieties of push-ups and pull-ups. But if you’ve got some dumbbells laying around your house, by all means, pop up some curls and stuff and load them up.

GJ: All right, this is great to know, I have very weak noodle arms.

CLC: I would definitely start with the push-ups then.

GJ: Okay, all right, noted. I definitely can’t do a push-up, but I guess I can work up to it. Um, so Luca and Touraine’s relationship is obviously really complicated. Luca’s trying to prove herself as a ruler so that she’ll have access to her rightful throne. And I’m curious about the writing process when you’re writing about a character who, who personally is sympathetic, but who structurally as part of the ruling class of this empire is capable of doing and is doing a great deal of damage,

CLC: It was a very interrogatory kind of process. Like, I would not even say that I made her all that sympathetic. Like, I think that there’s, there are some people who will see more, and some people who will see less, put it that way. But I really just wanted to show that she had these conflicting desires, and like many of us do, and that sometimes we don’t always want the good thing, more than we want the thing that is for us. Yeah. And sometimes, you know, the good thing is what helps people and what is for me, is just for me.

GJ: One thing that I thought was interesting about Luca is that she really hasn’t asked herself about the ethics of holding power at all. She’s thinking exclusively in terms of, well, I think I would be better than, say, my uncle. So she’s not really thinking about the fundamental ethics of running an empire. Do you think there’s an ethical way to hold power in a monarchy? You know, the easy questions on Wednesday evening.

CLC: Well, I’ll put it this way. I do not think there is an ethical way to have an empire at all.

GJ: Yeah, agreed. I think it’s inherently violent.

CLC: But I do like my little fantasy books where we can just, you know, la la la la la, princess is cute, kiss. But that’s also not what I’m writing here either.

GJ: Yeah. I mean, the relationship is at all stages very fraught. Are you—if I understand book schedules correctly, you must be at least well into writing Book Two.

CLC: Yes, I have, as of now, given a draft to my editor, and am thinking revision thoughts about it, as well as trying to figure out how we’re going to wrap this whole thing up.

GJ: Sure. Is there anything you can tell us about what’s ahead?

CLC: Well, we’re going to have a few different points of view, a few new characters coming in. I’m not entirely sure how many of them will make it, at least their point of views will make it into the actual final second book, but they are all characters you’ve met before, or at least heard about. And so I am excited to let people get to know these characters a bit more

GJ: Awesome. And how was the process of writing the second book, as compared to writing the first one,

CLC: It was very fast.

Gin Jenny 20:51

It seems incredibly hard.

CLC: In between my very, very first draft of The Unbroken, and this draft, I became an outliner. And so that was very, very helpful. And so I actually was able to outline and write through it for the first draft of book two—We have some titles, we just need to get them approved. I can’t wait. But I think it also just invited its own new challenges, you know, because I’m, like, like many authors say, when they’re writing their book twos, especially when they’re writing them on like genre schedule publishing, like a year later, and a year later, you start seeing people’s reactions. And sometimes, you know, that’s getting into your head and impacting things you thought you wanted, but don’t want and, and so on. So it’s definitely an exercise in finding your core desire for the story and being able to block out the noise and other people’s opinions for what story they want you to write. So in that way, it’s actually quite difficult.

GJ: Yeah, I’m sure. So you said you became an outliner? How did you become an outliner? What were you before?

CLC: Like a very just faint sketch of an outline, like, here’s some vague ideas. This is the beginning. And this is the end. And this is probably how they get there. Because you know, they need this scene and this scene. And so I went kind of like that, and that was not the worst idea. I think someone’s described, basically, what I did is like the headlights method, you can see as far as your car’s headlights, and it was fine. But I also had to do a lot of revision. And so like nine years later, here we are. And yeah, very different from the outline and the year.

GJ: Yeah, no, I’m sure. The headlight method, that’s really good. I haven’t heard that before. But that’s an extremely good analogy. Another thing I always like to hear about is the cover design process. Were you involved much in that and what was that process like on your end?

CLC: It was exhilarating. Because I found out very early on that I was going to get Tommy Arnold who I’ve been in love with his work for forever. Even before I knew it was him, like, he stopped the show for everybody with the Gideon covers. So when I found out the same guy was going to do the art for Touraine, I just lost my mind. But before that, I was talking with Brit, my editor, and she really understood the kind of story I was telling and the kind of writer I am and the kind of person I am, honestly. And she said that she wanted to take the idea of the man in the center of the cover on a throne or in his pile of bones chair whatever. Like think of The Prince of Thorns and King of Thorns and like that series, those covers, or think of The Powder Campaign, the Bryan McClellan books, think of those covers. And she’s like, I want to keep those elements but I want it to be a woman, and I was like, that’s exactly it. That’s what I want. And so we have Touraine, and we’ve got power, we’ve got biceps, destruction in the background, all those things that are usually guy things are now hers.

GJ: Yeah, it’s a beautiful cover. I think it’s really great. We’ve been in quarantine for a year now. Have you discovered any new quarantine skills? Or is there anything that’s gotten you through quarantine?

CLC: Um, do I have any new skills? No. But I wouldn’t have minded—I thought a lot that I wish I had my instruments. I play the cello, but my cello has been at my mom’s in Kansas City for the last few years while I travel. Well, you know, so I guess I could say I picked up running a couple years ago, but started doing it more, racking up my mileage this year, training on and off for races that are not happening, but still, you know, pretending. What else helped me get through? The Assassin’s Creed games. I spent the first half of quarantine playing Assassin’s Creed Odyssey. And now a year later, I started playing Assassin’s Creed Valhalla. So that’s where I’m at with my quarantine life.

GJ: Those seem like amazing things. I just started gaming for the first time ever in quarantine.

CLC: Oh, welcome, welcome.

GJ: Thank you. Thank you. People are very welcoming. Overall, I feel like everyone’s like, Oh, good for you. It’s a good time to be a gamer.

CLC: What are you playing?

GJ: I like walking simulators. They’re not stressful, and I’m a very stressy gamer.

CLC: Oh, like what?

GJ: Oh, like, um, okay, what if I haven’t played that many games yet? So bear with me. Um, I think the first one I played was What Remains of Edith Finch.

CLC: Oh, okay.

GJ: And then what else have I done? Oh, like, Machinarium, and then there’s another one from—maybe, that’s maybe that’s not a walking simulator, in which case I apologize for forgetting the terminology. But yeah, Machinarium. And then I played a couple other games from that company, because they’re, they’re cute and not stressful.

CLC: I’m partial to—I mean, I don’t really know terminology either; like, I know basic stuff. But I just know, I like games that have stealth modes assassination. So the Assassin’s Creed games, obviously, are a go. And also the Shadow of Mordor, Shadow of War series have a similar play style. I can either stab in the dark or range weapon, or melee, I have the option of deciding who I want to be that day. And either being a sneaky killer or just laying waste, and then it just depends on my mood. But I also, I don’t know, real gamers may not care for these things. But I like the settlement aspect of Valhalla right now. You get to kind of build your own settlement. It’s a little bit Age of Empires. It’s kind of funny, because my partner is also playing Stardew Valley at the same time. And so there are all these little parallels, like they go fishing, and I just have a fishing rod now so I can go fishing. And I have to go and collect these little iron pieces, and they have to go collect these little iron pieces. I do a lot more murder.

GJ: So there’s more that unites us than divides us. And then before I let you go, just wondering what you are reading right now?

CLC: What I am trying to read would probably be more accurate, because I’m actually just sort of surfing gently between books that I’m really excited about, but my brain space just, I’m struggling to sit down sometimes and just read. But I’ve got Winter’s Orbit by Everina Maxwell. I have very high hopes. I am very excited for something nice and warm, especially given that my other read is The Monster Baru Cormorant. I’m rereading that.

GJ: Oh, yeah, I’ve heard it. I’ve heard it’s brutal.

CLC: Yeah, I love it. And then I also just got my copy of A Desolation Called Peace by Arkady Martine, so some really good stuff on deck.

GJ: So Winter’s Orbit came out of fanfiction, sort of. Are you a fanfiction reader at all?

CLC: I have been, but I haven’t lately. I think actually, honestly, part of it was, and I’m sure other fanfiction readers will describe their adventures into it the same way. But, you know, I was a young queer reader, and I couldn’t find anything. I mean, there were some books but not like the plethora there is now. And now that there is just so much more, I’ve found myself reading these outside books instead. Now that I’ve been talking about it more with people, I’m thinking about, you know, finding some good stuff. So if people have recs, by all means, please, I’m ready. I actually found myself wishing— So this is a call maybe to your listeners for some good Eivor/Randvi fic, like, the gay one. Which is from Valhalla, the video game? So if anybody’s got any of that, I want it.

GJ: Oh, okay. I’m gonna ask my video gaming friends. This is all a mystery to me, but I’ll ask them. What did you read fanfiction in when you were younger?

CLC: It was not a specific property, but just like original fics that people were writing. Though I did used to belong to a writing role playing forum for the Wheel of Time series, which was my gateway drug.

GJ: Alright, awesome. Well, hopefully we’ll be able to get you some fantastic recs. It has been a nice solace during the pandemic to have fanfiction to return to I’m relatively new to it. I’ve only been reading it for, I don’t know, five or six years. It’s been really nice during the pandemic when my brain just doesn’t have room for anything else.

CLC: Yeah, I bet.

GJ: Well, thank you so much for coming on the podcast It’s been really great. Where can people find you online if they want to say hey, or learn more about the book?

CLC: My Twitter is at C_L_Clark. And you can sign up for my newsletter at clclark.substack.com. And I think my website is attached to both of those things.

GJ: Okay. Perfect. And the book is The Unbroken and it’s out now and everyone should read it. It’s really great. I couldn’t put it down. I was really so excited to find out what was going to happen next. And I can’t wait to read the rest of the trilogy.

CLC: Thank you so much.

GJ: This has been the Reading the End Bookcast with the Demographically Similar Jennys. You can visit the blog at readingtheend.com; you can follow us on Twitter @readingtheend. We are both on Goodreads as Whiskey Jenny and Gin Jenny, and you can email us—we love it when you do—at readingtheend@gmail.com. If you like what we do, you can become a podcast patron at Patreon.com/ReadingtheEnd. And if you’re listening to us on iTunes, please leave us a review. It helps other people find the podcast.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

The post Episode 144 – Interview with CL Clark, Author of The Unbroken appeared first on Reading the End.

Episode 143

Things We Discussed

The Wife in the Attic, Rose Lerner
Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
Knight’s Castle, Edward Eager
Ivanhoe, Sir Walter Scott
Rebecca and Rowena, William Makepeace Thackeray
Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier
My Cousin Rachel, Daphne du Maurier
Castle Rackrent, Maria Edgeworth
Here’s the deal with Lady Elizabeth Cathcart.
All or Nothing, Rose Lerner
True Pretenses, Rose Lerner
Strangers: Homosexual Love in the Nineteenth Century, Graham Robb
this is the guy Rose Lerner thinks Thomas Jefferson had killed
This is the Morris Kaplan book I was talking about re: Oscar Wilde. Coincidentally, it also goes into depth on one of the two scandals Rose is talking about, the Cleveland Street Affair! The other scandal she references is a newspaper series on sex trafficking by WT Stead.
In for a Penny, Rose Lerner
A Civil Contract, Georgette Heyer
The Amateur Cracksman, EW Hornung
Mr. Justice Raffles, EW Hornung
The Charioteer, Mary Renault
Rose Lerner’s AMA with Elsa Lepecki Bean, the audiobook narrator
Big Bad Wolf, Suleikha Snyder
The Edwardians and Their Houses: The New Life of Old England, Timothy Brittain-Catlin

You can find Rose Lerner at her website, on Twitter, or at her Patreon! The book again is The Wife in the Attic.

You can get at me on Twitter, email the podcast, and friend me (Gin Jenny) and Whiskey Jenny on Goodreads. As a brand new feature, you can also follow me (Gin Jenny) and Whiskey Jenny on Storygraph! If you like what we do, support us on Patreon. Or if you wish, you can find us on iTunes (and if you enjoy the podcast, give us a good rating! We appreciate it very very much).

Credits
Producer: Captain Hammer
Photo credit: The Illustrious Annalee
Theme song by: Jessie Barbour

Transcript

Gin Jenny

Welcome to the Reading the End Bookcast with the Demographically Similar Jennys. I’m Gin Jenny, and I am here with Rose Lerner, an amazing romance author whose latest book, The Wife in the Attic, is out now as an Audible Original. Rose, welcome to the podcast!

Rose Lerner

Hi, I’m so excited to be here.

Gin Jenny

Um, can you start by telling us a little bit about yourself and a little bit about the book?

Rose Lerner

Sure. I have been a historical romance author, I would say my best known books are the Lively St. Lemeston small town series. And then this book I’m branching out a little bit into gothics um, it’s still set in the same world as the Lively St. Lemeston books, but it is quite a bit darker. And it is also my first F/F book. I’m very excited about that. And it is my first audiobook as well.

Gin Jenny

Awesome. Yay. So it is inspired by Jane Eyre, which is one of my favorite books in the whole world. What is your relationship to Jane Eyre?

Rose Lerner

I also love Jane Eyre. Yeah, quite a bit. Yeah.

Gin Jenny

When did you read it for the first time?

Rose Lerner

I think I was 10, my mom read it to me.

Gin Jenny

She read it to you, the whole thing? That’s amazing!

Rose Lerner

Yeah, I mean, we like did a lot there’s a lot of reading aloud to my family. And it started— I really wanted to read Ivanhoe because I had read this like children’s fanfiction of Ivanhoe called Knight’s Castle.

Gin Jenny

Oh my god. Yeah, we experienced the same Ivanhoe trajectory.

Rose Lerner

Okay, so I was obsessed with Knight’s Castle, I wanted to read Ivanhoe and I was like nine, you know, and my mom was like, well, I feel like emotionally you’re ready for Ivanhoe but maybe like reading Ivanhoe might be like a little beyond you. So like, I will read you Ivanhoe. I think she maybe regretted that decision.

Gin Jenny

It’s so long.

Rose Lerner

Well, she I think she skipped, like I think she abridged it, but um, but like, I she had to at one point make a rule that I could not talk about Ivanhoe at the dinner table because—

Gin Jenny

Oh, my God, it’s like looking in a mirror. I also read Ivanhoe, I read Ivanhoe, when I was nine. I did not consult my mother first. And it’s very long. It’s really difficult for a nine year old to get—

Rose Lerner

Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I had a lot of questions, like my mom explained a lot of things to me.

Gin Jenny

My recollection of Knight’s Castle is that it’s very hostile towards the actual ending of Ivanhoe. Right doesn’t want Ivanhoe to get with Rebecca. [Note: I said Rebecca, but I meant Rowena.]

Rose Lerner

I would say that like there’s a large Ivanhoe/Rebecca contingent. William Thackeray wrote that sequel where Ivanhoe gets with Rebecca, you read that?

Gin Jenny

I haven’t. I’ve heard of it, but I haven’t read it because I tried to read Vanity Fair in college and really couldn’t get on with it. So I haven’t tried it.

Rose Lerner

Oh, okay. Okay, I love Thackeray; I like really, really love Thackeray.

Gin Jenny

Maybe I’ll give him another try. It’s been a really long time and I was pretty depressed in college so I don’t think it’s a representative sample of like my response.

Rose Lerner

The thing about Rebecca, I believe the sequel is called Rebecca and Rowena. Is that it? Rebecca does convert to Christianity to marry Ivanhoe, which sucks, but a very clearly Thackeray was like this will not stand! And there are some very good jokes in it, like there’s this whole bit like Ivanhoe goes back to the crusades, as in disguise. Then he becomes known as the night of the wig and spectacles. I cannot emphasize enough how hilarious that is to

Gin Jenny

Oh my God, I feel like I need to do an entire like reread Knight’s Castle reread Ivanhoe and then read the Thackeray fanfic of it.

Rose Lerner

Oh my god, I would be down for that as like a book group situation. Oh my god.

Gin Jenny

I have to say when I’ve when I’ve reread Edward Eager, it is much more racist than I remember. Overall.

Rose Lerner

I would believe that. Knight’s Castle is the only one I really remember very strongly.

Gin Jenny

Okay, did you read the other ones or not at all?

Rose Lerner

I think I read all the books in that series. So I read Half Magic, Time Garden.

Gin Jenny

Time Garden. That was my favorite. It’s very racist, unfortunately. I don’t know if you remember, but there’s a time when they go back to a Revolutionary War era. They get attacked by Native Americans. It is really yeah, it’s really intense. And then also, there’s the whole thing where they go back in time to Civil War era and then they’re like part of the Underground Railroad and so the children rescue this Black family, which isn’t as like hostile as the Revolutionary War, but it’s still pretty dicey.

Rose Lerner

I completely believe you. Clearly I repressed the whole thing.

Gin Jenny

Well, I did too. I reread them and I was like, Oh my god, I remember none of this.

Rose Lerner

Yeah, I mean, I definitely like shipped Rebecca with Brian de Bois Gilbert, which is such a problematic ship, but I did not like Ivanhoe. I thought Ivanhoe was dull. I was like, okay, obviously Brian who needs to like learn, you know, the error of his ways. And also, Rebecca so like, he’s a he’s like an atheist. I feel like he has like a sexy face scar. I’m pretty sure he has a sexy face scar.

Gin Jenny

I mean, that all sounds completely correct.

Rose Lerner

I definitely wrote a sequel to Ivanhoe, as like a 10 year old. It was my first long form work.

Gin Jenny

My first long form work was a story called The cat, the dog, the mouse and the fairy.

Rose Lerner

Amazing.

Gin Jenny

I was like four. I remember dictating it to my mother’s godson.

Rose Lerner

Wait, how long form?

Gin Jenny

I was four! To me, it seemed very long. It was the bulk of one of those— Remember those little memo pads that are about the size of like, a business card and a half?

Rose Lerner

Okay, I had written things that like before! This is my first actually—

Gin Jenny

I mean, when you’re four—

Rose Lerner

Not to denigrate it! I’m just clarifying that when I said long form, I really did mean novel.

Gin Jenny

Anyway, so you read Jane Eyre in your youth? Because I feel like Jane Eyre/Rochester is my most original like trash ship.

Rose Lerner

I might have older trash ships, but certainly, yes.

Gin Jenny

I got a bit older and read Rebecca. And I felt pretty shippy about horrible, horrible Maxim de Winter, who’s an awful person?

Rose Lerner

Really?

Gin Jenny

I know. Right?

Rose Lerner

I definitely shipped her with Frank when I read the book, which is such a nice guy tm. And that was a terrible choice as well. But like, I was like, ditch this guy and marry Frank.

Gin Jenny

I mean, as an adult, I think she should just take the dog and run.

Rose Lerner

But I mean, she’s also trash, right? Like, right? That’s the thing like, she comes into her own at the point where she is like, really owns like, her misogyny and how much she hates Rebecca. It’s like, I’m an empowered woman now! It’s like, Wait a second.

Gin Jenny

This is a bad decision.

Rose Lerner

Oh, it’s such a bad decision! Coming into your own as a woman by helping your husband get away with murder is the wrong call.

Gin Jenny

it sure is. Well, that was something that I really loved about The Wife in the Attic, because I think the Gothic novel inherently, because it tends to be that sort of setup where there’s a, you know, a woman who doesn’t have that much power, and she’s in this spooky house with a guy who may or may not mean her ill. And I feel like the gaslighting that the more powerful man does is really inherent to the genre. Yes. So I thought it was so amazing that in The Wife in the Attic, it actually turns out that like, Sir Kit is a pretty bad dude, and will definitely harm her.

Rose Lerner

I mean, look, you know, I did want there to be like some ambiguity. I certainly know what I think. But I did try to leave it so that there was some room for the reader to like, have their own opinion about like how evil Sir Kit is. However, I think I made my position plain. But I really love like, have you seen or read My Cousin Rachel? Okay, so I really wanted kind of that thing, right? Where it’s like, I saw that movie. And I was like, clearly Rachel did nothing wrong. But like, I read a lot of reviews and they were like, clearly Rachel was a murderer. This is a movie about misogyny, sir! They were convinced that actually she was poisoning him and like, that’s not disproved. Like she could be poisoning him. It’s just a much less satisfying story that way. Right?

Gin Jenny

Right.

Rose Lerner

I definitely wanted there to be that space for the reader to be like, I don’t think Sir Kit did anything. I think they made it all up. Like I talked to the narrator, but I was like, I don’t want him to have like an evil voice. Like, I know, I want there to be that space. Because I feel like that ambiguity is like even if you feel caught, right, the fact that like, I feel confident that Rachel didn’t, didn’t do anything, it’s still more satisfying that it’s not said.

Gin Jenny

Yes, yeah.

Rose Lerner

To me, choosing what I believe I think is part of the satisfaction. And so like, I really wanted the reader to have that.

Gin Jenny

Yeah, no, I thought that was really effective. Because he— Yeah, like you said, he’s almost certainly doing terrible things. But there is space to be like, Is he though?

Rose Lerner

And I also wanted like Miss Oliver to not have that certainty, you know, because yes, she has to make a decision and act despite not being sure. And like that is difficult for her.

Gin Jenny

So one thing also that I thought was interesting is that although this is very clearly inspired by Jane Eyre, you’ve changed the characters quite a bit. So how did you decide what to keep from the original novel and what to throw out and change?

Rose Lerner

You know, Jane Eyre is certainly like one of the main inspirations for the book, and I did reread it while I was writing the book, but still good, right? It’s so good. I mean, there’s, you know, there’s a lot of things now as an adult, where I’m like, Oh, yeah, this is racist or like this is—But I still I do love it. And I think that I have as an adult a new appreciation for the like, I think as a kid when I would reread it, I would skip right to her going to Thornfield. And skip the early part. I think as an adult, I have like a new appreciation for that.

Gin Jenny

Yeah, the very gay. Yes.

Rose Lerner

Helen Burns, Helen Burns forever. But I also drew on other stories. So like Castle Rackrent by Maria Edgeworth, one of the episodes in it is about a guy who keeps his Jewish wife locked in her room to try to get her jewels.

Gin Jenny

Oh, my God.

Rose Lerner

That story in Maria Edgeworth was based on a real case with Lord and Lady Cathcart.

Gin Jenny

What happened to her?

Rose Lerner

I believe that he died and they found her in her room. And they were like, Oh, my God, what is going on here, we thought you were sick.

Gin Jenny

Oh my God, that’s horrible. Well, I really hope he died and that she just had like a fucking bomb life after that.

Rose Lerner

In the Maria Edgeworth, in the Rackrent book, the guy’s actually named Sir Kit and I was gonna change it, but I didn’t because it was too—

Gin Jenny

Yeah, that’s great.

Rose Lerner

So the deal in that book is— It’s so good. Everyone thinks his wife is sick. And like he, all the ladies in the neighborhood are competing over who’s going to be his second wife, when his first wife dies. Sir Kit is in a duel with one of their brothers and dies. The Jewish wife takes all her stuff, and she goes back to England and she’s like, peace.

Gin Jenny

Oh, man, I’m so happy for her.

Rose Lerner

But so I actually read that for a previous book, All Or Nothing, I was like, just needed a book for someone to be reading, you know, in a scene or whatever. And I picked that book, and so I read it then. And I was like, What if there was a governess? So it’s kind of like there’s a lot of different kind of narratives that I’m drawing on. But I think the main thing with Jane Eyre is that if—I mean, look. I love Mr. Rochester.

Gin Jenny

Oh my God, me too, even though he’s the worst.

Rose Lerner

And I’ve said this before, and like, I think not everyone agrees with me. But like, if Mr. Rochester is telling the truth about what happened with his first wife, fundamentally, you know, he has not done anything unforgivable I think, with his first wife, if what he says is true.

Gin Jenny

No, I completely agree. Because to my understanding of what passed for mental health care at the time, you know, she was not in a good situation, but she would not have been in a better situation had he sent her to an institutions.

Rose Lerner

Absolutely not. I mean, this the horror stories about men, I mean, there was like a whole like, I just read a thing. It was like, pardon the slur, but the headline of the expose was like, how all the lunatics are being smothered or something like that. I mean, there was like, horrifying. If you look in the OED, I was looking up the word asylum to see if the word asylum was used. And there’s an entry in there for asylum ear. Asylum ear is a malformation of the ear that was common in asylum patients. And there was an argument made that it was somehow a symptom of like a spontaneous symptom of mental illness. However, it looks just like boxer’s ear.

Gin Jenny

What is boxer’s ear?

Rose Lerner

It’s when you get punched in the side of the head enough your ear starts to be shaped weird. This was just very clearly a symptom of physical abuse, that they were trying to pass off as like— So obviously the situation with the first Mrs. Rochester is not ideal, but like, it’s unclear what a better one would be if again, if what Mr. Rochester is saying is true, but there’s no way to know if what Mr. Rochester is saying is true. If he’s lying, he could have done anything.

My parents actually, when they were first together, they wrote law review article called, I believe, Sex Discrimination in the Mental Institutionalization of Women or something like that. It was actually pretty influential. Like if you Google it, it’s like cited a lot and stuff. There were certainly many men who wanted to get rid of their wives and couldn’t get a divorce or wanted to keep their wives’ money or whatever it was and had them institutionalized because it was fairly easy. So you have to trust his word. And like that’s, I think the essential horror of the Gothic is the necessity in life of taking things on faith, because you only have access to your own internal life, you know? You have to evaluate with really very little information, like what is going on outside of yourself and like, make important decisions, you know?

Gin Jenny

Yeah, no, for sure. Yeah. Well, I think Miss Oliver is kind of worried through a lot of the book that she is making decisions on the basis of Jael being Jewish, and her feeling a kinship to her. And I wondered if you could give us a little background on how Judaism was viewed in England at this time? And what kind of actual risks Miss Oliver is facing as, as a Jewish woman and particularly a poor Jewish woman?

Rose Lerner

What do you mean by risks? I guess?

Gin Jenny

Well, so she’s very concerned about being found out through most of the book that of being Jewish, and she kind of talks around it a lot. And then towards the end of the book, she’s a little more open about it. So I was wondering kind of what it was like to live as a Jewish woman—

Rose Lerner

Well, I mean, so the reason that that she’s pretending to not be Jewish is because she doesn’t want Sir Kit to know. It wasn’t a secret before, right. Like it wasn’t a secret when she lived in Lively St. Lemeston. It didn’t come up a lot because like, her mother was dead, and she lived there with her father, who was a Methodist. And like, you know, when she mentioned it, people acted weird. She just didn’t talk about it that much. But it wasn’t a secret. When she comes to Golden Grove, she pretends to not be Jewish, because she thinks that because Sir Kit specifically wants like a good English education for his daughter, and she figures if he knows that she’s Jewish, he won’t think that she’s qualified to give a good English education, and she’ll be fired. And Lady Tassell makes that recommendation to her.

Gin Jenny

Oh, that’s right. I forgot that happened.

Rose Lerner

Yeah, it’s not just that her mother’s Jewish either. It’s that her mother was working class. She’s also hiding that. Obviously. I’m not trying to downplay like, there was certainly like mob violence against Jewish people, you know, as there always was. I think in Lively St. Lemeston, most of the risks were probably like, a lot of microaggressions.

Gin Jenny

Uh-huh, yeah. I think I do have a general sense of what it would be like in lively sent lemons den from my favorite of your books, True Pretences, which is about a Jewish guy who comes and falls in love accidentally, sort of, with a wealthy Englishwoman.

Rose Lerner

And he’s in the same boat, right? Where he could be openly Jewish, but he doesn’t want to because he doesn’t want to deal with the bullshit. And again, also, he’s also passing, right, there’s a class element there.

Gin Jenny

Right, right. He’s pretending to be a little posher than he is

Rose Lerner

Jael, though, people know that she’s Jewish, and like, she was living as a Jewish person, right? It’s not. It’s not like Portugal, where it was illegal.

Gin Jenny

So can you talk a little bit about your research on queer women of this period? And what we kind of do and don’t know about what queer women were up to in this time?

Rose Lerner

I definitely always recommend Strangers: Homosexual Love in the 19th Century by Graham Rob, if anybody’s interested in this topic, and they want kind of a starting point. The nice thing for queer women was that only male like homosexual sex was illegal, right? Obviously, there were still social risks, but you were not going to be like prosecuted. There were certainly, I mean, as now, there are always a lot of queer people in the world. There were many queer people in Regency England, the most famous were probably the Ladies of Llangollen, who were celebrities.

Gin Jenny

I don’t know about them, please tell me about them.

Rose Lerner

Oh my gosh. Okay, so this lady Sarah Ponsonby and Eleanor Something or maybe it’s Eleanor Ponsonby and Lady Sarah Something Else. I don’t remember. They eloped together and went to Wales and were living in— And I believe they basically elope together because I think Lady Sarah’s family was trying to marry her off or something, and then eventually, their families agreed that they could live together in this house in Wales. And they were like celebrities, and I don’t remember, I think I think they were just independently wealthy but they were like, literary celebrities, like poets and stuff were always visiting them. I haven’t read too much about them, but they were kind of the like, lesbian icons. Like people knew who they were. Wordsworth went to visit them, and Coleridge went to visit them, and there was like, a lot of like, speculation about the nature of their relationship, because like, most people assumed that they were a lesbian couple, but like, obviously, they didn’t say so. So there was like, this space for people to like gossip and speculate about it. There was an incident where their local newspaper published like an article about them and it said that like— It didn’t say that they were lesbians, but it said, it basically said that, like Lady Sarah was femme and like, Eleanor was butch. They were like, incensed and they like wanted to sue the paper for libel, which they did not but like—

Gin Jenny

Yeah, I was just gonna say that seems like a terrible idea.

Rose Lerner

It didn’t work out for Oscar Wilde, but like, there are a lot of factors right, like— It didn’t work out for him because the standards of libel in England are very different. In US law, truth is a complete defense to libel if you can prove that what you said was true. It’s not libel, Alexander Hamilton gets some credit for this too, because so there were the Sedition Acts. Sorry, I don’t need to go into this.

Gin Jenny

No, please. I’m so curious. No, please tell me more.

Rose Lerner

So there were the Sedition Acts, which are passed under Adams to stifle criticism of Adams in the press, which of course, Thomas Jefferson said was a great injustice, as it was. Then when Thomas Jefferson became president, he immediately started prosecuting journalists. So there was this guy James Callender, who I’m like, fairly sure that someone in the Jefferson party machine, if not Jefferson himself, arranged to have whacked. And if you want to hear all about that, I have a very, very long blog post about it on my website; I don’t want to go into all that because we’ll be here all day.

But this guy James Callender had been a hatchet man—he was a journalist, he had been a hatchet man for Jefferson. And then they had a falling out because he wanted like a political, he wanted like a sinecure, and when Jefferson became president, Jefferson didn’t want to give it to him. So Callender then started publishing takedowns, and he was actually the guy that first broke the Sally Hemings story. So he had written this book that was called like The State of the United States in 1798, or something like that, and was this like, pamphlet that was put out during the election, I think about how Adams was terrible, but it also talked a lot of shit about George Washington, which was like fairly taboo among like, sort of politicians at the time, right? Like Jefferson would never have said anything nasty publicly about George Washington. But he financed this pamphlet secretly. So Callender revealed that Jefferson had paid for the publication of this pamphlet being nasty about George Washington, and Jefferson tried to have it shut down under the using the Sedition Act. Some of the details on this might be a little, because I read this a long time ago, but like the core of this is accurate. The editor of a New York newspaper that reprinted the Callender story, he was prosecuted under the Sedition Act. So he lost it, but then Hamilton argued his appeal. Hamilton argued the appeal for Croswell, and he made like one of— You know, like, this is apparently normal. He talked for like eight hours. Apparently that was normal, not just for him, but for like lawyers in general. Like, an eight-hour statement in court was not unusual, which is wild.

Gin Jenny

I’m such an old lady. I can’t sit still for one hour.

Rose Lerner

But apparently, it was like incredible, like people that saw it were like blown away by like how poetic it was, and how amazingly eloquent, but he argued that truth should be a defense to libel. That kind of was set as precedent at that time. But in England, it’s very different. You have to, if something is defamatory, it doesn’t necessarily matter whether it’s true. Which is why with the Oscar Wilde case, the Marquess of Queensberry didn’t just need to prove that what he said was true; he needed to prove that there was a public interest for him to make the information public in order to defend the libel suit, which is why things got so out of hand.

Gin Jenny

Well, but even I think for the Ladies of Llangolen, I think there’s always just that risk that someone will find it worth their while— Because in the Oscar Wilde case, I mean, I don’t know if this is true, but Morris Kaplan or somebody argued that the reason that they prosecuted the Oscar Wilde stuff so vigorously is that because the current prime minister was Lord Rosebery, and he was potentially implicated, not in the Oscar Wilde case, but that there was a risk that Oscar Wilde’s boyfriend’s dad would reveal that Lord Rosebery had been boning Oscar Wilde’s boyfriend’s older brother, who was now deceased. Sorry, that’s a little bit like in the weeds.

Rose Lerner

Like, it seems like the fact that there were a bunch of lords that had got away with like, predatory sexual stuff in like,The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon Scandal and the Cleveland Street Scandal. They needed to prove that they were actually like, Oscar Wilde was somebody that didn’t have any connections to protect him. So they can make an example of him. But yeah, so the Ladies of Llangollen, I mean, maybe they could have sued this paper, but they didn’t. But the point is, people at the time, and if you read like, there’s a lot of like odes to them and stuff, and they often emphasize very strongly that their friendship is pure. The only reason they need to say that is because obviously their friendship was probably not pure, and so in order to like, be respectful, they needed to like— Anyway, you know, but Byron, for example, wrote a letter to one of his friends about, I believe, him and John Edleston, and he compares them to like a list of like famous queer lovers. It’s very cute. I wish I could remember who all he names, but he names the Ladies of Llangollen, and then he says that they only need a reversal or whatever to give David and Jonathan the go-by. But yeah, so the Ladies of Llangolen were like queer celebrities at the time.

Gin Jenny

I definitely need to read a book about them. They sound amazing.

Rose Lerner

Yeah, I want to read more about them too. But I have not yet but like, I’ve always really enjoyed knowing who like the icons were at the time during mean like.

Gin Jenny

Yes, yeah, just the kind of reference points. So what research did you do for this book specifically, what was the trickiest bit?

Rose Lerner

I mean, I did a lot of research as I went, like, a lot of the stuff was stuff I’d already researched. Like, I’d already researched like, marriage breakdown and the Regency. I finally read my married women’s property rights book for this, that was sitting on my shelf for a long time. You know, so I mostly needed to research like the location and then little things that came up as I went like good luck charms, and like, were there blood oranges?

Gin Jenny

Oh, my God, the blood oranges were very creepy.

Rose Lerner

Marsh sheep. You know what I mean? Like, little things that came up like the weather, things like that.

Gin Jenny

Yeah. So The Wife in the Attic is kind of I think, fanficcy, and I was wondering if you were a romance reader first or a fic reader first.

Rose Lerner

Well, that’s kind of a complicated question because like obviously, I was writing Ivanhoe fanfiction and reading—like Knight’s Castle is fanfiction. So it depends on like, how you define it. I mean, in terms of like, genre romance, I was reading genre romance starting in middle school, and I didn’t discover sort of like online fanfiction communities until college. So I definitely was a romance reader first. But like, I was writing fanfiction long before then; I just didn’t—I just was doing it by myself. You know what I mean? And I think that genre fiction is sort of inherently related to fanfic because it’s so intertextual. Right? Genre and genre conventions operate rather similarly to fannish spaces, writing in response to like other— You know, my first my first published book was a retelling of a Heyer book that I didn’t like.

Gin Jenny

Wait, I didn’t know that. What Heyer book? I’ve only read like two of her books.

Rose Lerner

A Civil Contract.

Gin Jenny

I might— My mom probably owns that. I’ll look for it.

Rose Lerner

Don’t read it.

Gin Jenny

Don’t read it? What’s wrong with it?

Rose Lerner

So have you have you read In for a Penny?

Gin Jenny

Yeah, it was one of the very first romance novels I read ever.

Rose Lerner

Ah, so it has a very similar plot to In for a Penny. Except that it sucks. And it’s really classist, it’s like really awful about her dad. It’s one of Heyer’s only books where the hero is not madly in love with the heroine by the end because she’s like gross and middle class, and he can never feel that way about her, so they just have like a partnership or whatever. And some people really love that book because they’re like, yes, realistic partnership marriage. It’s like—the only reason for that that is because she’s ugly because she’s poor. And it’s also really like fatphobic, I just I hate it so deeply. Let’s end it at that because I will be like spewing frothing rage like very quickly.

Gin Jenny

Well, instead of that, listeners, y’all should definitely read In for a Penny. It was probably the second or third romance novel— The first romance novel I ever read was, um, oh, God, I can’t remember the title. It was a Courtney Milan book, and the heroine’s name was Jenny and I was like, yeah, I’m gonna try that one because we have the same name.

Rose Lerner

Oh my gosh, I have such a bad memory.

Gin Jenny

That’s the thing. I’m so bad at titles. It’s the woman, she’s a psychic.

Rose Lerner

Is that the one where she’s a medium? Proof by Seduction!

Gin Jenny

Proof by Seduction, oh my God. You’re a genius. Yeah, so she’s a she’s a medium—

Rose Lerner

As a math major. I love that title.

Gin Jenny

Yeah, she’s a pretend medium and she is kind of helping this guy, I think his name is Nick, and his brother is like, oh, how dare you, you know, talk to my brother, and he comes to like, stop her.

Rose Lerner

The rest is history.

Gin Jenny

Well, I think it had some of the same elements that I really loved about True Pretenses where she is kind of scamming him, but kind of she also really, like cares about him and wants him to prosper.

Rose Lerner

That’s a very generous description of what happened. I mean, obviously like Ash doesn’t do anything to Lydia, but I mean, you know, he’s choosing to be a con artist. He’s not acting in anybody’s best interest except his own, which is valid, you know?

Gin Jenny

His and his brother’s, yeah. Um, so you got into fic in college. How did you encounter it first?

Rose Lerner

I knew about it because I had a friend that read Buffy fic, but um, I think I started really reading friend of mine recommended the Cassie Claire Draco trilogy, and I really, really loved that. And then I started reading a lot of like Harry Potter fic. I also started reading like Buffy fic, but I was just lurking at that time. It wasn’t until later that I started like writing fanfiction as well. And I don’t wanna be like, too specific about like, what—and dox myself, but—

Gin Jenny

So you were a Harry/Draco fanfic reader.

Rose Lerner

I was when I read all—Like I read pretty widely like I wasn’t too picky about ships, but definitely that was probably my top ship. But like I read a lot of different— Yeah, I didn’t really go in for the intergenerational. I never have, like, you know, I never read like Snape/Hermione or whatever. But like in terms of the kids, like I would read basically, almost anything.

Gin Jenny

My shoulders went up around my ears when you said that. Actually, this is one thing that really struck me when I was reading The Wife in the Attic is that Miss Oliver says something about that there were all these situations at her school that all the students knew about. They were kind of imbalances of power, but they didn’t tell anyone. But everyone knew. And it really felt consonant with my own school experience.

Rose Lerner

Yeah, me too. You knew who the teachers were that were creeps. But like, yes, did you go to the principal and be like, That teacher’s a creep? No, because like, the principal must—like, No! You didn’t!

Gin Jenny

Well and also, I went to the principal with like, I remember this so vividly. It was shortly after 9/11. And on the morning announcements, they had started doing this thing where they were having a moment of silence for like the troops in Iraq, right. And I went to the principal’s office, and I was like bros like we’re bombing Baghdad, like, maybe we should have a moment of silence for the civilians of Baghdad, and the principal was so unreceptive to that. She was like, I don’t think there have been any casualties. Like, I think it’s probably fine— So I mean, the idea that someone would have listened to me if I had been like, oh, the algebra teacher kind of creeps me out is beyond comprehension. Even now as an adult.

Rose Lerner

Yeah, yeah.

Gin Jenny

So what fandoms are you reading in these days?

Rose Lerner

You know, I haven’t really been reading that much. I did have like a brief Harry Potter nostalgia moment before all of this JK Rowling stuff—

Gin Jenny

Yeah. Now it’s extremely complicated.

Rose Lerner

Yeah. Now, it’s complicated. I mean, I kind of always have thought that JK Rowling was problematic. And so I think it wasn’t as big a shift or disillusionment for me as it was for some people. Definitely the fic that I’ve always liked the most has been the most sort of critical of the original text, I would say. So I don’t necessarily feel like I have to stop reading it or whatever. But this happened to be before that. It wasn’t as fraught but like, I don’t read as much as I used to, just in general, I really want to make more time for that. But like, I think if I make more time for reading that I really want to make more time for like research. Yeah, I’m not really reading a ton of fic. I did read a whole bunch of Raffles fic recently, but I didn’t really find like that much good stuff.

Gin Jenny

Oh, great. So okay, since you have brought it up, please tell us about Bunny and Raffles.

Rose Lerner

Are you serious?

Gin Jenny

Yes, of course. I am serious. I know about it because I’m on your Twitter, but the listeners need to know.

Rose Lerner

So cut me off when I’ve gone too long. Otherwise, I will literally just talk indefinitely at this point.

So Bunny and Raffles are the main characters in the Raffles stories by EW Hornung, who was Arthur Conan Doyle’s brother-in-law, and they are basically a Holmes/Watson gay jewel thief AU. I was initially concerned that there was maybe some kind of situation with EW Hornung and Arthur Conan Doyle and like I feel at this point pretty confident there wasn’t and it was simply that EW Hornung was a Holmes Watson shipper before he met Arthur Conan Doyle. So he was excited to meet Arthur Conan Doyle and then he fell in love with his sister. I’m pretty sure there was nothing weird going on there. So that’s nice because I’m very invested in EW Hornung’s marriage to Connie Doyle. They seem lovely and like in the Raffles stories, everything is very poly all the time. So I feel good about it. But so like everybody’s wife understands, like always! In Mr Justice Raffles, which is the novel which is like not that great and really antisemitic, so don’t necessarily recommend it, but there is some good stuff in it. The plot is that like, it’s like a flashback like being written now but it’s a flashback and like there’s like this guy who’s like on the cricket team with Raffles, and he tries to like forge a check from— I don’t remember honestly most of the plot, but he’s got this girlfriend who had kind of a flirtation with Raffles, but Raffles like cut it off because he’s with Bunny, and he’s also you know, a burglar. So he was like, This obviously isn’t going anywhere, to kind of cut it off. And she started dating this guy, Teddy. And so but Raffles likes her. And so he wants to prevent Teddy from being ruined. And all this stuff happens. The point is, it ends on this little like framing device where Bunny is like in the Turkish Baths on Cumberland Avenue. He runs into Teddy many years later, obviously. And Teddy is like, Oh, hey, and he’s like, even though I’m now like a disgraced criminal, like you still are saying hi to me. And Teddy’s like whatever. Teddy’s like you should write more about Raffles, like I want to hear more about and he’s like, I’ve kind of written everything I have to say. And he’s like, well, you never wrote about our story. But he is like, so you don’t care if I talk about how you like tried to forge a check? And like your wife was like dating Raffles, and he was like.

your wife wouldn’t mind? He’s like, me and my wife would both be thrilled. Just change our names! We both loved him! And Bunny is like, wow, I always kind of thought this guy was a jerk, but like he seems okay. Also the number of women that Bunny has bonded with over how they’re both in love with Raffles. It’s kind of incredible.

So anyway, Bunny and Raffles were at prep school together. So I’m gonna use the word that’s a slur in other contexts, but in this context, it refers to a younger student who was sort of a servant to an older student and kind of did like chores and errands for them. Yeah, it was called fagging. So he was Raffles’ fag at school, and Raffles would like sneak out in the middle of the night and like, pretty clearly go cruising. I mean, it doesn’t say that. But it’s like he would wander around town and a fake mustache and a checked suit. What was he doing? And Bunny’s job was to let him back in when he got back.

It’s now been many years. You know, Raffles is now like an amateur cricket player, which means that he’s a gentleman and he plays cricket. But he’s not paid, right? He’s not paid to play cricket but he plays it as if he was a professional player, like they get him to come and do matches and he’s on a team and there are professionals on the team as well. It’s a very complicated, I don’t really fully understand it myself. The fact that he’s an amateur cricket player, doesn’t mean that he’s like not professional level, it just means that he is not paid because he is a gentleman. But so he’s an amateur cricket player, but he’s like very, very good. It happens to be the Ides of March. I really feel like Raffles set this all up. It happens to be the Ides of March. Raffles happens to very clearly be a serious Brutus/Cassius shipper, happens to invite Bunny over for the first time in years on the Ides of March.

So Bunny has come into some money a few years earlier. So it seems pretty clear that Raffles was planning to like win a bunch of money off Bunny. Bunny comes over, loses all this money at cards, doesn’t have the cash so he writes checks for the amount that he owes, leaves, comes back, and is like, Raffles, I’m actually completely broke. Content warning suicide but he’s like, I’m completely broke. I don’t have the money to pay my debts of honor. Those checks are not worth the paper they’re written on. I’m desperate. And Raffles is like, what? I thought—really? And Bunny’s like, yes. He’s like, Okay, well, can you sell your furniture? Like Raffles has all these plans for how Bunny’s gonna make money including, you used to edit the lit mag, didn’t you? Couldn’t you like write— And it’s like, there’s no way that Bunny was editor of the lit mag when they were at school together because like Bunny was a freshman and Raffles was like a senior, so he’s clearly been keeping tabs on Bunny in the meantime.

Bunny shoots this down, he’s like, no, I’m just completely broke. Raffles is like, thinking and Bunny is like, Never mind, like I’m leaving, and Raffles is like, No, like I can’t you leave until you tell me where you’re going and what you mean to do. Bunny’s like CAN’T YOU GUESS, and Raffles is like, Yes, that’s why I’m not letting you leave the house. And then Bunny is like, FINE! I’ll just do it right here!, and he like whips out his gun and he’s like, gonna shoot himself. And like, Raffles is like— Raffles is such a creep!

Gin Jenny

He is! Yeah, no, this part really—Raffles is like, oh, I really admire you for—

Rose Lerner

Raffles is like clearly turned on and Bunny’s like, you’re such a creep! And Raffles is like, sorry, and then he takes the gun, he’s like, I’m keeping this gun, I’m taking the bullets out like you can’t— It’s over now. Sorry about being a creep. So he’s like, don’t worry, like I’m gonna make this right for you, but I’m also broke. I really was excited about winning that money from you because I thought my problems were solved, but we’re just gonna roll with the punches. I really respect that Raffles does not hold a grudge for this because clearly like he needed that money.

Gin Jenny

Yeah, he’s so chill about it.

Rose Lerner

He’s so chill, he doesn’t reproach Bunny at all, it’s like, well, I guess I gotta take my lumps. He’s like it’s cool, I have this whole plan, like we’re gonna go borrow some money from a friend of mine. And by the way, he puts on a soft felt hat and a cover coat, which is a reference, I’m pretty sure to [Tulanie?] which is like a queer porn novel, which also features like a similar scene where like the character puts on a soft felt hat. Anyway, turns out Raffles is a burglar, he like kind of springs it on Bunny that like, Oh, we’re burgling now. Bunny’s like, what? We’re burgling now? He’s like yeah, I like wanted to tell you but I was like, embarrassed, but you did say he was like, Bunny, like so, we’re gonna get your money but like, are you cool with it if it’s a little shady? And Bunny’s like, No problem! And he’s like, What it’s a crime? and Bunny’s like, Name your crime and I’m your man!

It’s so gay. Okay, so they’re like burgling and Raffles is like, I shouldn’t have sprung this on you. I’m sorry. It’s all my fault. Like, you don’t have to stay, you can just go, I know you won’t like tell anyone about how I’m a burglar, it’s fine. Bunny’s like, but like, are you gonna be okay? Were you already planning to burgle this place, or are you just doing it because like I was broke? Raffles is like, Well, this is a two-man job, and I was considering doing it by myself but it’s very dangerous to do it by myself so I was very excited when I won all that money from you, because then I didn’t have to go do this two-man job by myself. Bunny’s like, Okay, I’ll do this one job with you, cause I don’t want to leave you in the lurch. Today they do this burgling, it’s very gay, they describe like Raffles drilling the lock, it’s a metaphor for anal sex.

Gin Jenny

Yeah, listeners, whatever you’re imagining it’s like twice gay as that.

Rose Lerner

People continually think I’m exaggerating and then they read it and they’re like, oh you undersold it. Raffles like inserts a forefinger into an orifice at one point and then he gets all his four fingers in up to the thumb, it’s very clearly—

Gin Jenny

Yeah it’s staggeringly gay.

Rose Lerner

They do this burgling, and then it emphasizes very strongly that it’s a felony and so what you have to understand is that the misdemeanor for gay sex was gross indecency, which was sort of unspecified what it was. But the main felony was sodomy, which is like anal sex. So, it’s emphasized very strongly that like Bunny and Raffles have now committed a felony together. That is how they joined felonious forces on the Ides of March.

So they do this crime, they go back home, Bunny is like, what have I done, I’m a burglar now. I should not love Raffles anymore, he’s like, oh but I’m still into Raffles. So, Raffles Is like okay like see? We’re burglars, great! I’m so excited for our life of being burglars together, and Bunny’s like what? Raffles is like, I mean, I thought now we’re burgling together? And Bunny is like, this is a one off, like I’m not looking to be a professional burglar now, and Raffles is like, you said you would do anything for me—you said I had only name your crime—but I knew you didn’t mean it. It’s fine. I’ll pay your debts, it’s fine. Just come tomorrow for the cash, but like don’t you see how great it would be if we were burglars together? And Bunny is like, I don’t think we should burglars together, and Raffles wants him to stay so bad. Anyway, finally Raffles is like, you’re right, I’m worse than wrong, go, it’s fine, and then Bunny is like, NO! I’LL STAY!!!

Gin Jenny

See, it’s funny, because if it were me and I was trying to entice someone to a life of crime, I would have been like, No, I totally get what you’re saying, how about we just do one more and see how it goes and then you can see how you feel after one more crime! And if you’re still feeling good, we’ll do like more crimes.

Rose Lerner

Well the thing is that like it’s not always clear— Like Bunny tends to assume that Raffles is being manipulative, like purposely manipulative, when he does this, like, “It’s okay, Bunny, you don’t have to” thing, but I feel like it’s sort of ambiguous. And even if it is manipulative, I think that doesn’t mean it’s not also genuine. Generally I think Raffles doesn’t want to pressure Bunny into life of crime; he just really wants a life of crime with Bunny. I think he means it when he’s like, I’ll stop asking you to be my partner in crime forever, but like, also that is clearly very effective on Bunny. Like that gets Bunny every time. It’s so good. And then they’re just together forever.

Bunny likes to pretend that like he likes Raffles more than Raffles likes him, but like the, like it’s absurd, the degree to which— Raffles literally basically was like let’s get married after like one date. And Bunny is always like accusing Raffles, of like, like there’s a story where like, Raffles does a crime and Bunny is like, you couldn’t possibly have done this by yourself. Clearly you’ve brought somebody else in, like I always thought you would, and Raffles is like. One is enough, Bunny.

Gin Jenny

Oh, gasp!

Rose Lerner

And I’m not saying Bunny isn’t useful. Bunny is useful, but if Raffles was simply hiring, Bunny would not probably have been his choice. He loves Bunny, like he’s always telling Bunny how much he loves him and how useful Bunny is and how he trusts Bunny, and how he knows— And Bunny is just like, Raffles doesn’t care about me. I pine, I pine alone. It’s like, Raffles just told you that he thought about you all day, that he couldn’t do without you, and that like all he wants in life is to be friends with you and then like, go to the club and have champagne.

So there’s like this whole thing where they get caught and like ruined and like Bunny goes to jail and Raffles escapes, leaving Bunny behind which is bad but of course, Raffles, staying would not have helped Bunny. But it is very sad.

Gin Jenny

Oh God, that sounds so sad, I haven’t gotten to that point yet, that sounds terrible!

Rose Lerner

It’s really sad, especially because like, this is the other thing! People are always like, Raffles isn’t nice enough to Bunny! Bunny has left Raffles multiple times; Raffles has never tried to leave Bunny and like consistently plots and plans to get him back. Bunny has dumped Raffles to try to go straight, but now is broke, and like kind of wishing that he could go back without—like not lose face, but he like doesn’t know how. Raffles, of course, doesn’t know that, so he has come up with a whole plan where he’s going to tell Bunny that they’re going on a cruise to Italy, and he’s gonna spring this on him that they’re going to steal this giant pearl that he chose as their target because Bunny wrote a poem about it in the paper. And Bunny’s like, but how are we going to fence the pearl?, and Raffles is like, well I thought we could rent a pearl fishery for like several months.

Gin Jenny

Oh my god I’m crying. That’s so funny.

Rose Lerner

And Raffles is paying for the cruise, like Bunny is like, I can’t afford to go on an Italian cruise; he’s like, It’s on me. Taking Bunny out this romantic cruise. He does the crime naked, like he’s pulling out all the stops, and he’s flirting with this girl, he’s flirting with her so she’ll tell him where the pearl is. Bunny is like dying of jealousy. He like hates this girl, and it’s so good because like, EW Hornung does the thing where like the subtext is the text and the text is the subtext. So it’s like this plot with this girl is like, in theory, like a straight cover for the gay love story. Right? Bunny straight up says, the narrator, Raffles didn’t like this girl, he was just flirting with her to make me jealous. Literally there’s like two lines where like Raffles sort of like looks conflicted or something, to sort of hint that maybe secretly he actually likes this girl, and all the straights are like, Raffles is in love with that girl! It’s like, Bunny told you! You didn’t listen!

But they get caught. And Raffles jumps off the side of the ship, leaving Bunny behind.

Gin Jenny, visibly upset

Oh.

Rose Lerner

The thing is that, like—I mean, whatever, I don’t need to justify Raffles’s behavior. Obviously he’s not always the best boyfriend, but if he stayed I think it actually would have ended up being worse because in his trial, all of this further incriminating information about Bunny would have come out, right, and like, he would have gotten a much longer sentence than Bunny because Bunny is his sidekick, and like he’s done a lot more crime. Bunny only gets like a year and a half, because it corresponds to Oscar Wilde’s prison sentence. Like if you look at the date that Bunny serves, it’s the dates that Oscar Wilde—like it corresponds to the dates of Oscar Wilde’s sentence.

Gin Jenny

Oh God that’s heartbreaking

Rose Lerner

And Horning wrote the first collection while he was staying in Italy with his wife like just down the street from Oscar Wilde and Alfred Douglas. I do need to clarify that Raffles does come back for Bunny when he gets out of jail like immediately. Immediately! And then he tries to play it off like it’s a coincidence, and it’s like, right, you just happened to come back like the week that Bunny got out and then immediately set up a really romantic reunion crime that involves you like buying him an engagement ring.

Gin Jenny

Oh my God. That’s the most romantic thing I’ve ever heard.

Rose Lerner

Oh my God, it’s so romantic. He buys the engagement ring. Then they, together they steal the wedding ring, and then Raffles says, “But some things are worth paying for, and some risks you must always take.” Bunny has been writing exposes in the newspaper about the prison system, which are based on Oscar what like Oscar Wilde wrote exposes of the prison system when he got out. Right so, Bunny has been writing exposes on the prison system anonymously and Raffles recognizes his style. He goes to Bunny’s editor to get his address and like, talks him into giving him Bunny’s address and then he’s like, I danced down the stairs with your address in my pocket. Like I cannot emphasize enough how romantic this.

Gin Jenny

I’m clutching my face. I like, oh my God.

Rose Lerner

There’s a point where Raffles makes a joke about how they should be buried together in a golden— He steals this golden cup. He refuses to sell it because he loves it, and Bunny is like, I can’t even be mad. This is just absurd at this point, like, what are you going to do with that cup? And he’s like, When I die, Bunny, cremate me and put my ashes in yonder cup and bury us together in the deep delved Earth. Now it actually took me a couple times reading this to realize that when he says us he does not mean me and the cup. He means him and Bunny. Then I realize that this is a reference to Achilles and Patroclus’s burial.

Gin Jenny

Oh my god, you’re kidding. I should know this! I’m ashamed of myself.

Rose Lerner

Their ashes were buried together in a golden vase. Bunny does not recognize it. Raffles quotes it, and Bunny is like, What is that? Like it sounds kind of familiar! Raffles is like, Never mind. Bunny thinks about it and he’s like, oh my God, I wrote that. It’s like, what has Raffles been doing in all the intervening years? Just thinking about how one day he’s gonna have Bunny again?

Gin Jenny

No, I assume that’s what he was doing. Yeah, I’m nodding vigorously. Have you read The Charioteer by Mary Renault?

Rose Lerner

Maybe? I read a couple of hers but I don’t remember—in like high school, but I don’t remember which ones.

Gin Jenny

So The Charioteer is one of her like modern setting novels so it’s set during World War II.

Rose Lerner

Okay, I don’t think I did, then.

Gin Jenny

It is excellent. It has a lot of, I mean, like many of her books it has a lot of issues. However, the premise is that there’s this guy called Laurie, he has this enormous crush on his prefect in school, and his prefect is forced to leave. He’s expelled because he has been doing a gay thing, so he’s expelled, but Laurie is very struck by him, and when he’s leaving Ralph gives him like the Phaedo [note: I remembered this wrong! It’s the Phaedrus, which actually is what I said first but then I questioned myself and corrected myself and cut it out of the audio recording and by the time I realized my first instinct was the right one, it was already too late], and then many years later, Laurie is injured in World War Two. He ends up at this hospital and he falls in love with this like—

Rose Lerner

Wait, Laurie is the prefect or Laurie is—

Gin Jenny

Laurie is the other one, like the non-prefect, yeah. Ralph is the prefect. So Laurie ends up at this hospital. He’s been badly injured at Dunkirk, and there’s a conscientious objector Quaker guy called Andrew, who’s very drippy, but Laurie falls in love with at this hospital, but then he’s also reunited with Rafe, so he has to kind of like—

Rose Lerner

Oh my gosh.

Gin Jenny

Yeah! And Ralph’s very sexy and Andrew is very innocent and he’s like, oh I can’t like tell Andrew about being gay because then his innocence, etc.

Rose Lerner

Let me guess: Andrew already knows about being gay.

Gin Jenny

I don’t want to spoil it for you. But then Ralph is—like he reunites with Ralph at a party, it’s the best party scene in all of literature in my opinion, and Rafe is like extremely sexy, wants to get with Laurie, and he’s in this sort of, you know, spiritual struggle between his, his pure love with Andrew and his sexy love with Ralph.

Rose Lerner

Is his pure love with Andrew like not sexy?

Gin Jenny

So it’s complicated. He and Andrew do kiss one time, and then he’s like, oh, like, you know, it would be so pure if nobody knew about it, but if people saw it, then it would, it would seem sexy, and Andrew’s innocence would be spoiled. But it’s superb, I can’t recommend it highly enough.

Rose Lerner

Okay! Since I’ve now talked about Raffles so much, I just feel like I should warn people if you’re going to read it: The second story—I mean there’s like xenophobic and like racist and anti-Semitic things sort of sprinkled throughout, but the second story in particular, “A Costume Piece,” is quite bad, so just like either don’t read it or be prepared.

Gin Jenny

Yeah, I should say for The Charioteer it has kind of Mary Renault sort of typical things like a real suspicion of feminine gender performance by any gender. So that kind of comes up throughout The Charioteer, it’s kind of a mess. Okay, I’m so sorry that I like drew you on this long Bunny/Raffles tangent.

Rose Lerner

It’s all I ever want to talk about, so…

Gin Jenny

So, but I do want to kind of talk a little bit about the process of doing an audiobook original, like what was the process of working with the audiobook narrator, because you mentioned earlier that you had communicated with them. So like how closely did you work with her?

Rose Lerner

I had made some notes in the book about sort of like my vision of the different characters. I really tried to not be like too prescriptive, because I wanted the narrator to have freedom to like make different choices or whatever, but like, more, you know, in case it was helpful, like the actor that I imagined and then like some information about people’s like accents and like stuff like that, class backgrounds. So they sent the book to the narrator, and then she had the option, if she wanted to get in touch with me to talk to me about the book, and she did, so we had a phone conversation where she asked me like characterization questions and stuff like that; and then she had some like second round questions as she was going, we had like another call, but that was pretty much it. I really loved Elsa’s audition and I could tell like in the phone calls that like the book was in safe hands. You know, clearly like she got it.

Gin Jenny

Well, good! I’m glad it was such a good experience and I mean I love the end result. I thought she did a really really great job.

Rose Lerner

I’m so thrilled with how it turned out. I really appreciate like Audible going the extra mile to find somebody that like spoke Portuguese and like, yeah, I just couldn’t be happier. I did like an AMA with Elsa where I asked her some questions and I asked her some like questions that were submitted by readers, and that is on YouTube, if anybody wants to watch it, and it’s linked from the extras page on my website as well.

Gin Jenny

Oh awesome. Okay, well I’ll link to that as well.

Rose Lerner

She goes into like a lot of sort of nitty gritty like performance and recording stuff. I was fascinated because it’s like, definitely like an artistic angle that like I just don’t know a lot about. And she had a lot of like really smart things to say and was like really—explained a lot about her process and was really, it was great.

Gin Jenny

Awesome, well, before I let you go, what are you reading right now?

Rose Lerner

Well I am reading Suleikha Snyder’s Big Bad Wolf and really enjoying it. It’s delightful. I get the impression that it’s like—this doesn’t actually mean anything to me because I did not watch the series—but it’s like a Punisher AU. I think like it was inspired by her love for the Punisher character on one of the Marvel shows.

Gin Jenny

I’m nodding vigorously, but I do get Punisher mixed up with Venom and I know those are two extremely different, Marvel Superheroes.

Rose Lerner

Venom is like the Spiderman alien symbiote. Punisher—the character is played by an actor who is sort of a similar type to Tom Hardy, which I think might be why you’re confused.

Gin Jenny

Yeah that probably is why. He’s some kind of vigilante?

Rose Lerner

I don’t know what the deal is. Anyway, so it’s like this guy, and he’s just a regular guy, but he’s like a werewolf and he’s got— He was running around, he went in the Army, and they made him a werewolf, but he killed a bunch of like Russian mafiosi, and the heroine is on his like defense team.

Gin Jenny

Oh great.

Rose Lerner

I’m also reading The Edwardians and Their Houses: The New Life of Old England, Timothy Brittain-Catlin. I’m researching my next couple of projects, so the other books that I’m reading are mostly like research stuff.

Gin Jenny

Can I ask what you’re working on next?

Rose Lerner

So I’m working on the sequel to The Wife in the Attic, which is going to be about Iphigenia.

Gin Jenny

Oh, yay!

Rose Lerner

So like I don’t know if you remember, but she goes to work as a lady’s companion for somebody else in the neighborhood. So it’s going to be about that situation.

Gin Jenny

Oh, wonderful.

Rose Lerner

I’m excited. So I’m working on that, and then I’m also working on co-writing a mystery with Katie Welsh, which is still in the very early stages, but I’m very excited about it.

Gin Jenny

Oh, that’s awesome. That’s so exciting.

Rose Lerner

I’ve never co-written anything before.

Gin Jenny

Yeah, it seems really hard.

Rose Lerner

Like I’ve always kind of wanted to do a mystery, but I am bad at plot. But she agreed to keep track of the plot.

Gin Jenny

Well, fantastic. Um, well, so where can people find you online?

Rose Lerner

So, my website is RoseLerner.com, like all my books are listed there, and I also have like a ton of extras up there too. So you’ll see there’s like an extras tab, you can check that out. I’m on Twitter @RoseLerner, that’s L E R N E R. I have other social media accounts but Twitter is the one I use the most. I also have a Patreon, which is also roselerner. In there I share, like every week I share like a little something of what I’m working on which like most of the time ends up being like cool research stuff. But yeah, I think those are the main places that I am

Gin Jenny

Awesome! And the book again is The Wife in the Attic, it is an Audible Original, it’s so good. Everyone should definitely read it ASAP. And Rose, thank you so much for joining me! This was awesome!

Rose Lerner

Thank you for having me! Thank you for letting me talk a bunch about Bunny and Raffles, the only real thing in the world!

Gin Jenny

I mean that’s all I wanted.

The post Episode 143 – Interview with Rose Lerner, Author of The Wife in the Attic appeared first on Reading the End.

To my delight, Talia stopped by the podcast to chat with me about her latest book, her love of fanfiction, and her latest DIY project (why do the British love DIY so much? can anyone explain it to me?). You can listen to the podcast in the embedded player below, or download it directly to take with you on the go!

Episode 142

Books We Discussed

Get a Life, Chloe Brown, Talia Hibbert
Take a Hint, Dani Brown, Talia Hibbert
Act Your Age, Eve Brown, Talia Hibbert

A Duke, the Lady, and a Baby, Vanessa Riley
Boyfriend Material, Alexis Hall
The Jasmine Throne, Tasha Suri
Empire of Sand, Tasha Suri
Realm of Ash, Tasha Suri
White Whiskey Bargain, Jodie Slaughter
KJ Charles
Kennedy Ryan
Danielle Allen
Sweet on the Greek, Talia Hibbert (LINK TO THIS)
For the Love of April French, Penny Aimes

You can find Talia Hibbert at her website or on Twitter! The book again is Act Your Age, Eve Brown, and I can’t possibly recommend it resoundingly enough.

You can get at me on Twitter, email the podcast, and friend me (Gin Jenny) and Whiskey Jenny on Goodreads. As a brand new feature, you can also follow me (Gin Jenny) and Whiskey Jenny on Storygraph! If you like what we do, support us on Patreon. Or if you wish, you can find us on iTunes (and if you enjoy the podcast, give us a good rating! We appreciate it very very much).

Credits
Producer: Captain Hammer
Photo credit: The Illustrious Annalee
Theme song by: Jessie Barbour
Transcripts by: Sharon of Library Hungry

Transcript

Jenny: Welcome to the Reading the End Bookcast, with the Demographically Similar Jennys. I’m Gin Jenny, and I’m here with Talia Hibbert, the author of a number of amazing romance novels, most recently Act Your Age, Eve Brown. Talia, welcome to the podcast!

Talia: Hi! Thanks for having me!

J: Thank you so much for coming on! I was wondering if you could start by telling us a little about yourself and the book.

T: Yeah, sure, so, my name’s Talia Hibbert, and I write romance novels. I really like biscuits and romcoms, so I’ve written a few romcoms and the latest one is Act Your Age, Eve Brown, which is coming out on March 9^th. It’s really special to me because it’s an autistic romance of two autistic main characters, and it’s enemies to lovers, which I really enjoy writing, and it’s set in a small town at a bed and breakfast, so there’s some forced proximity as well. But my favorite thing about this book is that it starts with the heroine hitting the hero with her car by accident.

J: [laughter] Have you ever hit someone with a car or been hit with a car?

T: Um, I’ve never been hit with a car, luckily for me, and I can’t drive, so I’ve never hit anyone with a car, luckily for everyone else.

J: I have been hit with a car. It was not a good time.

T: Oh my God, that sounds terrible!

J: It was terrible! I officially broke my neck, which sounds very dramatic, but it was the tiniest little—it was just a teensy teensy little break. But it was awful. I had to wear the most embarrassing neck brace for six weeks—eight weeks!

T: That is terrible. This is like a, a romcom version of hitting someone with your car, so he pops back up again. It’s minor injuries.

J: Well, I appreciated it! He does have injuries that he then has to deal with, and I was like, mm, yeah, it’s a nuisance, eh, man? Okay, so you said you liked biscuits and romcoms. What is your favorite biscuit, and what is your favorite romcom?

T: My favorite biscuit, that’s a very tricky one, but… I love cookies. I feel like in America you’d call all biscuits cookies, but—

J: We do, yeah, but I was trying to speak to you on your terms.

T: They’re very—here we only call them cookies if they’re, you know, chocolate chip or chipped with something. They’re my favorite. And my favorite romcom, I actually—can I say two? Is that bad?

J: Yes! Of course! No, you can say two. Two can be tied for—I always say two.

T: Okay, so A Duke, the Lady, and the Baby, by Vanessa Riley is historical, and there’s not a ton of historical romcoms, compared to contemporary, but it is a historical romcom in my opinion, and it’s hilarious, and I love it. And then I also love Boyfriend Material, by Alexis Hall.

J: Yes!

T: Yes, everyone loves that one, it’s—a banger. So, those are my two favorites. They’re both so funny; you know, laugh out loud, I love that.

J: Yes, they absolutely are. Actually, that was one of the things that I immediately loved about—I mean, all of your books that I’ve read so far, but Act Your Age Eve Brown especially was just making me laugh from the first page, and it just stayed really like funny and clever throughout, so, yeah, a very classic romcom, I think.

T: Yay! Thank you.

J: Well, I’d love for you to talk more about writing two autistic protagonists, because one thing that I thought was really interesting in this book is that Jacob, the hero, is autistic and that’s discussed quite early on and he’s very aware of it. Whereas Eve sort of starts to figure this out about herself over the course of the book, and by the end of the book she’s kind of like, yeah, I probably am, but I don’t need to deal with it right now. And so I thought it was interesting that you had those two very different approaches.

T: Yeah, because for one thing, there’s a huge disparity in how different kinds of autistic people are treated and supported and diagnosed. So I mention in the book that you’re a lot less likely to be diagnosed if you’re a woman, and that kind of gets worse if you’re a Black woman or a woman of color. That’s something that I’m very aware of, because I’m an autistic person and I was diagnosed very young, but it was only because of the very concerted efforts of my mum, who is actually an educator herself and works with people with all kinds of special educational needs. I was very lucky to always be supported, but I know that it’s really not the case for a ton of people, so I definitely wanted to highlight that.

But I also really wanted to—you know, a lot of the time in media, autistic people are written or portrayed by people who aren’t actually autistic, and you can really tell. Very annoying! And, you know, you end up with these stereotypes that really—they’re informed by, and then they go on to inform, the ways that autism is treated in real life. So you know, you’re more likely to be diagnosed if you’re for example a white man and then all the TV shows are about white men, so then people think only white men can be autistic, and it kind of rolls on like that. I really wanted to show that autistic people are all different and have different experiences of their autism and how they relate to the world and how they feel about it. So I felt like this was a good opportunity to do that, because these characters are so different and their whole thing comes from their being so different.

J: Yeah! Absolutely. This is such a silly question, but is singing quietly to yourself a lot really a stimming behavior, because I do that and I did not know that’s what that was.

T: [laughter] Yes, or, it—you know, it’s something that can be a stimming behavior. I’m sure some people do it and they just are doing it, but— You can definitely stim that way, and I used to do that a lot when I was a kid, and it annoyed people so much.

J: It probably annoys my friends and relations. I literally can’t stop. Among my family—I’m one of four sisters—and among my family, I’m the best at keeping secrets. I’m just a vault. But when it comes to song-related secrets, absolutely cannot ask me to do it. I just can’t do it.

T: Oh dear.

J: I was at my friend’s wedding, and she was—she told me, because she knows I can keep a secret cause we’ve known each other since we were ten, she told me that she had changed the song she was gonna do for her first dance, and it was gonna be a secret from her parents, cause they would try to convince her to change. And she was like, “okay, but, so, don’t tell!” and all through the day as we were getting ready, I would start singing it and she would be like “SHUT UP!”

T: Oh my God! [laughter] That would be a problem for me as well, definitely.

J: Yeah! I mean, it was awful! [laughter] So you said that this book was close to your heart because you’re autistic yourself and that you identify with these characters. I really loved all three of these books so far, and I was wondering which of the Brown women you identified with the most, or had the easiest time writing.

T: Ooh, that’s tricky! I think I identify with Chloe the most, just because there’s like a little bit of myself or my life experiences in all of these books, but Chloe as a character is the most like me, and maybe the person that I would get along with the most. But Eve was probably the easiest to write, because she’s just so fun and she’s so, like, she’s so accepting of everything. She’s just gonna take what comes and try her best to have fun with it, and I’m not like that at all.

J: Oh God, me neither. [laughter] So this is, like you said, this is part of a series. How much of it was planned before you started? How did it change as you were writing it?

T: Oh God, so: When I started, I knew that I wanted it to be a series. I knew the heroine would have two sisters and I wanted to write about the sisters, but other than that, I really didn’t know very much. In the first book, you kind of meet her sisters, and I set their personalities loosely from there, but I didn’t go too in depth because I knew that once I write a character from their perspective, my understanding of them changes. So I didn’t want to say, like, this character’s like this!, and then get to the book and be like, oh God, I don’t want her to be like that! I tried to keep it loose, and for that reason, I didn’t really decide on the plot of their stories until I got to the next two books, because I tend to build the plot that suits the character.

With Dani’s book, the middle book, the second book—

J: Yeah, that’s my favorite one! I love that one.

T: Oh really?

J: Yeah, I mean, they’re all great, but I really identified with Dani.

T: Well, that was like the hardest book to write, because I had this loose idea of how it was gonna go, and I rewrote it like four times and it changed so drastically. But I’m happy with how it turned out.

J: What did you start with that you had to end up changing?

T: So, the initial idea was that—I can barely remember now, but it was basically to do with blackmail.

J: Oh! [laughter]

T: [laughter] Yeah! And then I started writing it, I was like, this is kind of hardcore for a romcom! Like, maybe I should lighten it up a bit! So that changed. And I think at one point, I was gonna try and do like a virtual relationship, like that they met on camera, like, webcams? It was gonna be like a sex thing. But then I, again, I was like, this is very hardcore for a romcom. I reined it in. And then, yeah, it turned into this whole different story. Because I always knew that Dani was an academic, so then in the end, I was like, why don’t I write something that kind of stems from her job? Which is not something I typically do, which is probably why it was so difficult for me to write. But I did it! And it was fun.

J: It was great! I remember talking about that book with my podcast partner, and one of our favorite most touching moments of the whole book was when Zaf reads her academic articles! It’s like, that is so sweet! I barely read my friends’ academic articles!

T: Oh my God, yeah. I don’t—I’m terrible! I don’t read anything my friends write, unless it’s romance. Sorry, guys!

J: I understand! Well that was actually something I wanted to ask you about. I love People with Jobs as a subgenre of anything. How do you choose the jobs that your characters are gonna have, and how does the career inform the character and vice versa?

T: Well, I’m not really a People with Jobs kind of writer, because first of all, I’m really lazy and I hate research, so— I try to write jobs that I have some personal experience of, cause that makes it easier for me, but I don’t have that much work experience. So….. it’s like, I’ve worked at coffee shops, I’ve been a waitress, I’ve worked at McDonald’s, I was a hotel cleaner, I worked as a tutor, and I went to university, and that’s like it. So I’m running out of jobs!

J: [laughter]

T: I might have to start reading some nonfiction books at this point, which is gonna be excruciating. I tend to choose the job that kind of matches their personality or their goal as a person, but also matches the life—the daily life that I want them to have. For example, in Get a Life, Chloe Brown, Chloe is a web designer, and she kind of runs her own business, because I wanted her to work from home, because of her disability but also because it was like a neighbor romance, so I wanted her to be in the house all the time, ready for romance.

J: With Jacob running the B&B and Eve going to work for him, was that informed by your time as a hotel cleaner?

T: Yes! Absolutely it was. I was such like—crap! I’m running out of jobs! What have I done? I knew that I wanted them to work together, and I knew that I wanted it to be a situation where they were forced to spend a lot of time together, so I was like, they’re gonna have to live where they work. Bed and breakfast! Boom! I also really like coziness.

J: Oh God, yes, it was wonderful. They have a gingerbread festival, listeners, just so you know what to expect. Are you much of a baker?

T: No. God, no.

J: Oh, God, me neither. No, no, no, me neither.

T: [laughter]

J: My sister is making increasingly fancy cakes in quarantine. She just kind of keeps making fancier and fancier cakes, and I’m sort of at home with my, you know, books and cross-stitch, admiring her from afar.

T: That sounds ama—I’m one of four sisters, as well, and none of us can bake, unfortunately. I feel robbed now.

J: [laughter] What are your four sis—what are your three sisters’ most useful skills?

T: Let me think. Well, my older sister—oh, she has a really useful skill, actually. She’s really great at painting and decorating, so I moved house this summer and she like, painted my house. Thank you!

J: Oh, bless her!

T: [laughter] But then my two other sisters are a lot younger than me, so they have great skills, but not adult skills. They are children. [laughter]

J: So they’re pending cases.

T: Exactly. I’m sure they will be so useful in like, ten years’ time. Looking forward to it.

J: Absolutely. Do I remember hearing that you—you do DIY, right? You’re a DIY person now.

T: I attempt DIY.

J: What have you been trying in quarantine?

T: Well, here’s the thing about my hobbies. They peter out.

J: [laughter]

T: But—what was the last thing I did? Oh, this is boring. I had to—my kitchen had like this really ugly counter, and I could replace the counter, but I don’t like spending money, so I elected to just cover it with this like, paper thing that all the DIY people on YouTube use. It’s like this marble effect paper thing, but it was really hard to stick on! Like, it got bubbles in it, and you had to use a Stanley knife, and I’m very clumsy. It looks good, though. I did it. I’m very proud of it.

J: Well done! What’s a Stanley knife, as a non-DIYer I must ask?

T: It’s like a little thing that you hold in your hand and then you flick it up and it’s got a little knife bit. That was the worst explanation ever! [laughter]

J: I think I can picture it. My sister who’s good at DIY came over and recaulked my bathtub recently, and I think she had a Stanley knife.

T: Ooh!

J: I know! It was—not recaulked. I said that wrong. Re—yes! No, recaulked, I’m so sorry. I kept mixing up grout and caulk, and she kept yelling at me, and then I kept making caulk jokes.

T: [laughter]

J: But I think she had a Stanley knife to wedge in the caulk saver.

T: That sounds about right.

J: Okay, great!

T: [laughter]

J: So this series was published through traditional publishing, whereas your backlist books were self-published. How has that adjustment been?

T: I was a bit apprehensive when we started, because, you know, just because it was something I’d never done before, and I knew that it could go very badly. So my brain was like, obviously it’s gonna go badly. But actually it’s been really great! Everyone at Avon that I’ve interacted with has just been so relentlessly lovely, and I feel very lucky to be working with the people that I’ve been working with. They’ve made the whole thing just such a really lovely experience. I’m saying lovely a lot, but it’s how I feel, I’m sorry.

J: I think that’s on brand. I feel like all British people I’ve ever met say lovely a lot.

T: Okay, I’ll take it.

J: What’s the most useful edit you got from your editor for this book?

T: Ooh. Always, I feel, she’s fixing my pacing, because I have a tendency first of all to forget that time exists at all.

J: Sure.

T: Secondly to forget that like, this is a story that needs to move along. You can’t just wallow in the characters giving each other looks. You have to make things happen.

J: [laughter]

T: So there’s always a point where she goes through the whole book and she’s like, why are we still here? Can we move on? What’s happening? Can this story move? What day is it? Can you fix this? And I’m like, [sad voice] okay! If I must!

J: Well this may be completely off the mark, but um—The first joke that made me laugh out loud in this book is when Eve is thinking about journaling and she talks about a work in progress on AO3 that hasn’t been updated in years. So I’m wondering if that tendency in you is influenced by reading fanfiction, because I feel like fanfiction often tends to sort of linger in glances for a very long time, by design.

T: Yeah. I think you’re right. I love to read fanfic and I think it’s the best, so when I’m writing, I’m like, yeah! Fanfic! Drabble! This doesn’t have to have a point! And then I’m like, oh wait, yes it does! Boooooo!

J: What fandoms do you read in lately?

T: [hiss of trepidation]

J: You don’t have to say! If you’re not comfortable saying, you don’t have to.

T: [laughter] One came to mind that I am not gonna say, but— [laughter] I recently watched Yuri on Ice!!!, like the whole thing, cause everyone was saying how great it was, and they said it so much that I was like, Surely it can’t be that great, they’re exaggerating. But then I watched it and it was true! So now that I’ve finished it, I’ve just been reading like nonstop fanfic cause I don’t want to leave that world.

J: Oh, that’s fanta— And there’s a lot of, I feel like there was a real explosion of Yuri on Ice!!! fanfic.

T: Yes. I’ve been enjoying it.

J: How did you get into reading romance?

T: When I was twelve, I used to go to the library a lot, because reading was like my only hobby, cause I’ve been a giant nerd my whole life.

J: Same!

T: I was literally just going through the books, and I was in the adult section because, I don’t know, my grandma told me that I should go in the adult section. I think she was hoping that I would find grand literature, which I did, but probably not the kind she was thinking! She’s very serious. So I was looking, and there’s this like, lime-green book with a cartoon drawing of a girl on the cover, and I was like, oh! Twelve-year-old me enjoyed that imagery, so I took it out, and it was a historical romance by Julia Quinn, and I was like, wow, this is great! And then they like went on a picnic and DID IT and I was like—

J: [laughter]

T: [laughter] Oh my God! I hope Grandma doesn’t ever see what this book is about! [laughter] But yeah. It was amazing.

J: So from then on, it was just, you know, all romance all the time?

T: Oh, yeah, I was like, I need more of this. This is great. The bits that I liked in other books, just people talking to each other and having feelings, this was all that. And nothing else! And I was like, Perfect! Exactly what I’ve been looking for! And I’ve never looked back.

J: Who are some of your favorite romance novelists?

T: Oh my God that is such a hard question.

J: You can just say a few, it doesn’t have to be a comprehensive list. Just a few that pop into your head.

T: Okay. Um, Tasha Suri, I just finished reading an ARC of one of her books—

J: Ah! Yes!

T: Incredible. Incredible.

J: The Jasmine Throne?

T: Yes! Yeah.

J: I’m so excited to read that! Oh, is it good?

T: It was incredible, like—

J: I’m so excited to read it! I loved Empire of Sand, and then Realm of Ash was even better, so I just—I have—my expectations are sky high.

T: Like, I went in with really high expectations, and then I was like, oh my God, it’s exceeding my expectations! How is this possible?

J: I’m literally bouncing up and down in my chair with excitement.

T: It was amazing. Um, oh, I really love Jodie Slaughter, especially this one book White Whiskey Bargain, which is a marriage of convenience but it’s a contemporary romance, and that’s like my favorite thing but it’s really hard to find. So love that one, love her, um, Courtney Milan, obviously.

J: Of course.

T: KJ Charles.

J: Oh, I love KJ Charles.

T: Kennedy Ryan. Danielle Allen. I feel like some authors I just really enjoy, obviously, but then some authors I’m like, this is what I’m wanting my books to be like. Danielle Allen is one of those authors.

J: Ooh, that’s a great recommendation! That’s a great list, that’s a tremendous list. I think it was a good—there’s some that I have heard of and also love, and then some that I’m really excited to check out now.

T: Okay cool.

J: Is there a romance subgenre that you love reading but would never consider writing?

T: That’s a tricky one because I think most things that I enjoy, I would consider writing, but the only thing that would stop me is that it would be too difficult. For example, like I love reading romances with mysteries, but I’m not smart enough—I’m just not that kind of smart, right? I can’t do mysteries. I know I can’t do it. I’m not even gonna hurt my own feelings by trying to do it. I’m not there as a human being.

J: It seems incredibly hard. I don’t even have—I don’t even have like a good confidence that I can have a theory of mind about what people will guess and not guess—

T: Exactly.

J: —in the most basic sense, just writing an email to a friend.

T: Absolutely. Exactly. No idea what people are thinking, what they’re gonna think. I just don’t know. So it would go badly.

J: So what are some romance tropes that you really love? Obviously, marriage of convenience.

T: Yes. Love it. Also, you know, like, arranged marriage, which I feel is kind of similar, that’s also great. I really like anything that involves forced proximity. Snowed in.

J: Snowed in!

T: Woo! Only one bed, or you’re like, on a mountain for some reason and someone lives in the mountains, amazing.

J: The best thing is when some TV show or book property or podcast has a thing where the characters everyone is shipping have to go to a cabin for a bit, and it’s like, are you doing this for me?

T: [laughter] Absolutely they are. The fact that it’s like a cabin, as well. It’s never like a house. It’s gotta be a cabin because—

J: A cozy cabin, maybe it’s a bit rubbishy so they have to do some fixing up together.

T: And they like have to sleep on one bed, or in the same room cause there’s only one fire. That’s a great historical trope.

J: Oh, that’s a fantastic one. Yeah, historical seems like it would be hard to write, but it would be very to have to deal with the logistics of fires.

T: That’s another one that, like, I consider, but then I’m like, ooh, am I smart enough to do that?

J: [laughter] How did you get into writing romance? You know, how did you make the transition from reading to writing it?

T: Well, I always wanted to be a writer, just because I love books so much, and I felt like it was my only real skill. What can you do? I’m like, I can write stuff.

J: Yeah, I feel the same about myself.

T: But then at the same time I never actually managed to finish anything I wrote, but then one day it kind of occurred to me, because I hadn’t actually tried to write any romance novels. I’d written a lot of kind of YA or fantasy attempts. The idea of writing romance seemed very intimidating to me, because I enjoyed romance so much, it was very much on a pedestal for me. But then I decided that I needed to get a job, and it needed to be something that I could do from home, because of the circumstances that I was in, and I was like, okay, what skills do I have? Writing! So I decided to give it a try and like, commit to actually finishing something and to self-publish that something and kind of see what happened. And what happened was that no one bought it, but I enjoyed writing it so much that I kept going, and that’s how I got started.

J: And here you are!

T: Indeed.

J: Would you go back to self-publishing, or are you happy with traditional publishing?

T: I’m definitely happy with traditional publishing, but I’m still gonna self-publish as well, just because I feel like it depends on the book, and on how you want to release the book, and I really like both.

J: Where do you stand on the illustrated covers / clinch covers hot debate?

T: Oh my God! I don’t know why we’re arguing about this because they’re both—

J: I don’t either! I love them both!

T: That’s exactly how I feel, like, I love a classic clinch cover, because they look so good! They look so intense, they look so romance-y, I love it. I also love like, the—is it the Harlequin Desires? Have been doing amazing covers lately that are like very modern, very contemporary, but with big clinch cover energy. I love those. But then at the same time, illustrated covers are so cute!

J: The covers of this series are so cute! They couldn’t be cuter.

T: Oh, thank you! I really, really love them, and I love like how easy it is to be accurate with your characters when it’s an illustration.

J: I was just thinking, I really love the illustration of Eve. She just looks so—her hair is so pretty, and she’s adorable.

T: Thank you. I love them so much.

J: How much input did you have into what that design was gonna be like?

T: Well, when we started the series, I was kind of asked to give descriptions of the characters, but also talk about color combinations I liked, and maybe provide examples of illustrated covers that I did like versus ones that I didn’t like, you know, art styles and things? And I kind of responded with like a multi-page PDF report, which was very specific.

J: That sounds great.

T: Yeah! I mean, I think it helped, because I ended up with a cover that I thought was amazing, and I guess I was really lucky that they were so open to me giving that initial input, and then kind of off the back of that, they very obviously listened to that and listened to what I wanted and gave me a lot of options to look at and be like, okay, what do you think of these? So it felt very collaborative, and I really enjoyed that process.

J: Oh, that’s interesting. So how many—they gave you a bunch of options and this was kind of the design you went with. What were the other ones like?

T: The options they gave me were for the very first one in the series, because then from that point on it all had to be the same.

J: Right, right.

T: But um, it was like, different art styles mainly, and then once we’d settled on an art style that we all agreed on, it was different color combinations and different kind of doodles on the cover and placements and positions of the characters and things like that.

J: That sounds really cool! Um, I will say for illustrated covers, one benefit is that I—my parents are more likely to read romance novels if they have illustrated covers, and that makes my birthday present buying much easier.

T: I mean, it was an illustrated cover that kind of started me on romance. Not because I wouldn’t have been interested in a classic romance cover, but because I was twelve, so, they wouldn’t have let me take it out. Not that I’m saying twelve-year-olds should read romance, just saying I did and it was great.

J: Yeah, I don’t think they shouldn’t. I think it depends on the twelve-year-old.

T: Definitely, cause I feel like it was good for me, individually.

J: Yeah! One of my deepest regrets—I feel like I was overall a good big sister, but one of my deepest regrets is that I tattled to my parents about my younger sister reading a book with sex scenes in it, and they took it away from her.

T: [gasp] Oh no!

J: I know! I feel awful. It’s like the only time I remember my parents intervening in our reading choices, and I, I just feel so guilty about it. It was one of the Tamora Pierce books.

T: Oh wow. Gosh.

J: Yeah. But, you know, she’s forgiven me, we’re friends now.

T: Oh good.

J: So what’s next for you? You finished the series. What are you up to next?

T: Yeah! I actually just started writing my next book, like, earlier this week.

J: Ooh!

T: And I’m very excited about it. It’s a romcom again, and—yeah. I’m super excited about it, but I don’t know how much I’m allowed to say, so I’m going to stop talking now.

J: Oh, okay. No, that’s fair enough.

T: [laughter]

J: Do you have a favorite among the books you’ve already published?

T: Oh my God that’s so hard. Okay. I would say that I have the books that I think are the best that I’ve written, they’re not necessarily the same as my favorites. Also, I don’t want to say which ones are the best, cause that implies that the other ones are bad, which they’re totally not. [laughter] But I would say that one book that I really love, I don’t think a lot of people know about, is a book called Sweet on the Greek, and it’s the last book in a series, but you don’t actually have to read the rest of the series. It’s basically about a professional football player who falls in love at first sight, which is like a trend in his family, with a very cynical goth who is not interested, and then he hires her to be his fake girlfriend but he’s completely making up that he needs a fake girlfriend.

J: [laughter]

T: It’s just ridiculous!

J: That’s so good! Oh my God, I love it. Well, you’re right, I hadn’t read that one yet, so I’m putting it on my list, and I will link it in the shownotes, so that everyone else can read it. That sounds amazing. That sounds like so many good tropes stacked on top of each other.

T: Well, I hope everyone likes it. I like it.

J: All right, so here’s a question. This is my last question and maybe it will be too difficult, in which case just tell me and I’ll cut it. How do you define happily ever after? Because one thing that struck me while I was reading this book, and then looking back at your previous work, I could see it as a really clear throughline, is that the thing that Eve is searching for throughout this book is a place where she can feel safe, like supported and fulfilled. And that she really hasn’t had that to date, where she feels, you know, really unsteady with her friends, and even with her family. So what makes a happily ever after for you?

T: For me, a happily ever after has to be the characters in a situation, in a space, and in like, a relationship and a support network where you can see that even if things go wrong in the future, the way they tend to cause that’s life, they will be in the right space to come out on top.

J: Oh, that’s a lovely answer! I like it so much. Well, before I let you go, so, um, my friend has criticized me for giving overly saucy books to my parents as gifts. However, my mom and dad both really love your books, and I was wondering if you would say hi to them. They’re having a hard time this week.

T: Oh my God, really? I love that!

J: My dad can never remember the names of any books he’s ever reading, so he always calls them things like Happy Happy Chloe Brown.

T: That’s amazing.

J: [laughter]

T: Oh my God! I love that so much! That is so lovely. Well, hello to your mum and dad, and thank you for reading my books, and I’m so glad you like them, and thank you!

J: Um, and before I let you go, what are you reading right now?

T: I’m reading—it’s an advance copy of a book that’s coming out by Penny Aimes, who is super cool, and the book’s called For the Love of April French, I believe?

J: Great title.

T: Yeah, it’s a great title, it’s a great book. I’m only like a few pages in, but I’m having a great time, so—

J: Fantastic. Well, I’ll have to keep an eye out for it when it comes out. Well, Talia, thank you so much again for taking the time. Um, the book again is Act Your Age, Eve Brown. We’re recording this in advance so I’m not sure exactly what date it’ll come out, but it’ll be around release date, so y’all should be able to get it right away, and you definitely should. It’s so much fun. And yeah, thank you so much!

T: Thank you! This has been super fun.

The post Episode 142 – Interview with Talia Hibbert, Author of Act Your Age, Eve Brown appeared first on Reading the End.

Episode 136

Find Andrea on Twitter, at her website, and on Facebook! The book is The Bone Shard Daughter, and it’s out now from Orbit. You may behold the ivory carvings cover here:

And here’s a list of books and other things we talked about!

Dragonriders of Pern series, Anne McCaffrey
The Harper Hall series (comprising DragonSong, DragonSinger, and DragonDrums), Anne McCaffrey
The Blue Sword, Robin McKinley
Royal Assassin, Robin Hobb
Heralds of Valdemar series, Mercedes Lackey
the Black Sails credits (watch Black Sails!!)
The Chronicles of Narnia, CS Lewis
Prydain novels, Lloyd Alexander
Broken Earth trilogy, NK Jemisin
Spinning Silver, Naomi Novik
Uprooted, Naomi Novik
The Wolf of Oren-Yaro, KS Villoso
Star Eater, Kerstin Hall

You can get at me on Twitter, email the podcast, and friend me (Gin Jenny) and Whiskey Jenny on Goodreads. As a brand new feature, you can also follow me (Gin Jenny) and Whiskey Jenny on Storygraph! If you like what we do, support us on Patreon. Or if you wish, you can find us on iTunes (and if you enjoy the podcast, give us a good rating! We appreciate it very very much).

Credits
Producer: Captain Hammer
Photo credit: The Illustrious Annalee
Theme song by: Jessie Barbour

Transcript

Gin Jenny (00:38):

Uh all right, so welcome to the Reading the End Bookcast. I’m Gin Jenny and I am here with Andrea Stewart, the author of the new fantasy novel, The Bone Shard Daughter. Andrea, welcome!

Andrea Stewart (00:47):

Thank you so much for having me.

Gin Jenny (00:49):

How are you doing? This is such a weird year to be releasing a debut novel!

Andrea Stewart (00:53):

It really is. It was not something that I was expecting when we sold the book, but, you know, I mean, everything’s been pretty great as far as, you know, having a book coming out and being able to do all these online interviews and online events. So I’m just grateful that we at least have that technology.

Gin Jenny (01:18):

Well, why don’t we get started, if you could just tell us a little bit about the book?

Andrea Stewart (01:21):

Sure, so it’s an epic fantasy that’s in an Asian inspired setting, and it actually follows several characters. There’s a daughter trying to reclaim her rightful place as heir; There’s a smuggler who professes not to care, but can’t seem to stop doing good things; two women in an established relationship, struggling with the class differences between them; and there’s a stranger on a remote island trying to unravel the mystery of why she’s there. This is all against the backdrop of a brewing revolution.

Gin Jenny (01:47):

Oh man. That was so smooth. I’m really impressed.

Andrea Stewart (01:50):

I’ve been practicing.

Gin Jenny (01:52):

I know. I mean, it was great. It was so professional. So you’re juggling four main narrators, like you said. And then you have a couple of chapters from other points of view. Did you have a favorite character to write for?

Andrea Stewart (02:03):

That’s like asking me to choose a favorite child? So I think it really depends on kind of the mood that I was in. I mean, I really enjoyed writing Lin for her determination and for all the stuff that she is trying to figure out. And then sometimes, you know, I really enjoyed reading Jovis because he’s got more of a sense of humor. And then like the other characters too, it just kind of depends. So, can’t say I really have a favorite.

Gin Jenny (02:34):

There wasn’t anyone who was more challenging to write?

Andrea Stewart (02:36):

I think maybe Sand sometimes was a little bit more challenging just because she’s coming from this perspective of not really knowing why she’s in the place that she is and what exactly is her purpose for like, why she’s there. And that was a little challenging in the sense that I wanted to keep her engaging, yet also keep that mystery going.

Gin Jenny (03:01):

I was going to say, one thing that I found really fascinating about the book as I was going through it–and I tore through this, I read the whole thing, uh I started the night before yesterday, and then I read the whole thing yesterday–but I think that one thing that made it so engaging is that it turns out all the characters have a lot of pretty important stuff that they don’t know, whether it’s about themselves or about the world that they live in. Was it hard to kind of parcel out those reveals and not say too much too soon?

Andrea Stewart (03:26):

Yeah, definitely. I think that was one of the things that, you know, when I was putting in my outline like these are the things that they’re trying to figure out, and this is like when they learn those results and it is like difficult to do that in the way that, you know, that some readers are going to figure it out ahead of time, which is fine. But you also want for the readers that don’t figure it out ahead of time to not feel lost when you reveal that information. So, yeah, so that’s like a little bit of a balancing act.

Gin Jenny (03:57):

Well, I thought you did a good job. I say that– I as the name of my podcast implies, I read the end before I read the middle, which I don’t know if I know some authors don’t love that, but no, I mean, but it was really great to kind of find out some of those reveals when I was about halfway through the book, and then going back and reading the rest of it with the stuff in mind was really fascinating and exciting and suspenseful.

Andrea Stewart (04:18):

Well, that’s good to hear.

Gin Jenny (04:20):

What was the Genesis of your idea for the book? Did you start with the characters, some element of the magic system?

Andrea Stewart (04:24):

Actually the whole thing started with an element of the magic system with the bone shard magic. I was at the San Antonio WorldCon with my friends as a long time ago, and my friend Marina, she found a shard of bone in her lunch food.

Gin Jenny (04:40):

Andrea Stewart (04:40):

Um yeah, so it was like, oh, like, you know, what, if some shards of bone are used for magic? So that was kind of like where it all started. I kind of built things out from there as far as like, well, why is it shards of bone? What does that mean? I knew I wanted to have constructs in there. So it kind of grew from there. And then the characters kind of followed

Gin Jenny (05:07):

For listeners who haven’t read the book yet, can you say a little bit about how the bone shards get used? Because it is very creepy!

Andrea Stewart (05:13):

Oh yeah, sure. So the emperor actually collects a shard of bone from every citizen’s skull when they turn eight years old, and he uses these to power, his bone shard constructs, which are basically like these amalgamations of animals that he’s just kind of sewn together the parts of. And these shards are actually also used to write commands on. So he writes the commands for these constructs. They go inside the constructs, and the life force of those people actually power the constructs. So if your bone shard is in use, then your life is kind of just slowly being drained by that.

Gin Jenny (05:52):

I liked the use of almost like programming commands on the bone shards.

Andrea Stewart (05:55):

Oh, yeah. Yeah. I was thinking about that when I was putting together the whole magic system, because I really like logic puzzles. A lot of like if then kind of statements.

Gin Jenny (06:05):

Sure! What kind of logic puzzles?

Andrea Stewart (06:07):

Um well, I used to work as a compliance officer for contracts and grants at a university. So I kind of did a lot of work with that kind of thing where, you know, we’d have all of these different regulatory documents and you’d have to kind of figure out well, can they spend money this way on the grant? And you’d have to go through these like hierarchies of documents and try to figure out like, was this an allowable expense or not? And you know, sometimes it was kind of, the answer was like, maybe, and then you’d have to refer to another document. So it’s kind of like that.

Gin Jenny (06:42):

Oh my God, that’s such a good genesis for truly some of the creepiest magic that I’ve encountered in a while.

Andrea Stewart (06:48):

Went from something very boring, does something a little bit more interesting!

Gin Jenny (06:53):

So what changed between your first draft of the manuscript and the book we have here?

Andrea Stewart (06:57):

There’s actually not like huge changes. I think there was a subplot that I realized was not working after I finished the first draft, so I had to toss that whole thing and replace it. Where I had like, Jovan infiltrating this palace and it was like, ah! It doesn’t really make sense. So that was like the big thing that changed. And then the rest of it, I think were just kind of like smaller nudges.

Gin Jenny (07:26):

Was there anything that you had to leave out in the end that you were sad to lose?

Andrea Stewart (07:29):

Well there was like a couple of funny lines I thought from the part where he infiltrates the palace, but that’s like, that’s about it. I was just thinking, you know, I save those for later.

Gin Jenny (07:40):

Sure. Can, can future Andrea incorporate them into the sequel?

Andrea Stewart (07:43):

Possibly. I don’t know. We’ll see.

Gin Jenny (07:46):

So I am always interested to hear about the editing process. What did you do a lot of, like, it sounds like you had a pretty clean first draft, so I mean, how was it working with the folks at Orbit to do the edits on it?

Andrea Stewart (07:55):

Great, actually! Yeah, I was very lucky in this one in that I had a pretty clean first draft. I did that. And then I worked with my agent on one round of revisions and then it went out on sub, and after it got picked up, yeah, we went through and did a round of edits, which were pretty light, which was nice. I don’t generally like work like that. Got very lucky on this one. So yeah, it was really great working with the folks at Orbit. Like I, I love their books, so it was wonderful.

Gin Jenny (08:30):

Oh, that’s so nice. Well, you talked in the acknowledgements about having a writing group or writing groups. Were they involved when you were kind of in the early stages of writing the book?

Andrea Stewart (08:39):

Actually, there was a writing group in Sacramento that I took, like the first part of the first chapter to back when I was kind of just thinking about, should this be a book? That was Stonehenge in Sacramento, and they meet at like a roundtable. So like, you know, everybody has some pizza, we have somebody else like read whatever it is that you brought, and you kind of can hear it from somebody else’s voice, which is interesting. And then everybody kind of comments on it. So that was the writing group that I brought like the first part of it to.

Gin Jenny (09:15):

You must have nerves of steel to sit through that. It sounds so stressful.

Andrea Stewart (09:18):

It is a little bit!

Gin Jenny (09:18):

But they were, I mean, they kind of understood what the premise was and enjoyed it? Because I was, I mean, I always am a little nervous about secondary world fantasy because I have, I don’t really make pictures in my head. So I sometimes have a hard time, like picturing what the world is like. I felt like this was so immediate and concrete. I just felt situated in it right away.

Andrea Stewart (09:37):

Oh, that’s good to hear. Yeah. I mean, that’s one of the things that I really try to work on with my writing is to make it immersive, to pick out the right details so the reader can kind of feel like they’re there, and also get information at the same time about the world.

Gin Jenny (09:52):

I also think you were very wise to incorporate the cutest little cuddly bastard. Do you say Mephi?

Andrea Stewart (09:59):

Yeah, it’s Mephi.

Gin Jenny (10:00):

Oh my gosh. The cutest little guy. How early did you come up with him? And also why don’t more fantasy books have cuddly little dudes?

Andrea Stewart (10:12):

Well I, that was one of the things that I wanted to put in from the beginning. So yeah, this was the seventh manuscript that I had tried to sell. I’ve been through quite a few. And when I got to this one, I was like, you know, let me just think about all the things that I really enjoy in fantasy novels and let me see about putting them into this one. So one of the things I really enjoy are magical animal companions. I knew that I wanted to have one. I knew like, you know, especially with Jovis where he’s kind of like a little bit grumpy, but also like thinks he’s quite funny, I knew I wanted to have somebody to kind of like play off of him. So, you know, Mephi’s like this mischievous little guy that kind of worms his way into Jovis’s heart.

Gin Jenny (11:00):

And mine! So what are some of your favorite magical creature companions in in stuff you’ve read or seen?

Andrea Stewart (11:05):

Oh gosh, like Dragonriders of Pern. There’s like the Harper’s Hall, um series in there with like Menally, where she’s got her fire lizards. I was way into that. There’s well, not necessarily magical, but there’s Robin McKinley’s The Blue Sword and stuff where she’s got this beautiful horse who’s like super intelligent, and then she’s also got this, you know, amazing cat that follows her around. I’ve really loved that too. And then Robin Hobbs, like, you know, Night Eyes my God, I, yeah, I loved that series.

Gin Jenny (11:45):

Oh my gosh. I’ve still never read a word by Robin Hobb. It’s a vast gap in my SF knowledge.

Andrea Stewart (11:51):

Oh, it’s amazing. I loved it so much.

Gin Jenny (11:53):

What’s a good book of hers to start with? Because I know I need to like get into it and I just haven’t yet.

Andrea Stewart (11:58):

I really loved so there’s Assassin’s Apprentice, that’s the first one in the whole Fitz and the Fool series. And I love that series. It’s so great. I actually have not read the very last one in the most recent trilogy that she’s written in that series because I’m like sad for it to end, so I’m like holding off on that.

Gin Jenny (12:19):

Oh, I so understand. I read the I’m embarrassed to admit this. Do you remember those Mercedes Lackey, Heralds of Valdemar books and they had their magic horses?

Andrea Stewart (12:30):

I do.

Gin Jenny (12:33):

Yeah, I read those when I was in seventh and eighth grade. And I feel like those were the like most animal companion books that I’ve read. I feel like I haven’t read that many.

Andrea Stewart (12:41):

There’s quite a few out there and they’re marvelous.

Gin Jenny (12:44):

And this one I think a really strong entrant in this series. Can you, can you tell us anything about Mephi that we don’t know from the book? Cause he’s a little mysterious.

Andrea Stewart (12:52):

Well, I kind of want to just leave it at that right now, just because there, there is a lot more stuff that happens and you do learn more about him and where he comes from in book two.

Gin Jenny (13:05):

Okay, great. Is he going to stay fluffy? Cause I liked it that he was first mistaken for a kitten, but it seems like he’s getting less fluffy as he goes along.

Andrea Stewart (13:10):

He’s still going to be quite fluffy. I mean, he’s very, he’s very soft.

Gin Jenny (13:14):

This is so important. This is the important work that you’re doing. I think they need to make a little Mephi plushy.

Andrea Stewart (13:21):

Oh my God. I would love that.

Gin Jenny (13:23):

Internet, take note. Another huge piece of the story is about failing governments, which is kind of relatable in the U.S. Right now. So is there any, if you could talk a little bit about if there were real world histories that inspired you when you were writing the book and coming up with the world building?

Andrea Stewart (13:41):

Well, I think like, I was just thinking about, I mean our history, and then just history in general, how we kind of go in these cycles, and there’s always a good reason in a lot of ways for these changes of regimes, but they don’t always work out the way that we hope that they do.

Gin Jenny (14:02):

Almost never!

Andrea Stewart (14:02):

And I also wanted to kind of explore throughout the trilogy, that idea that you see in a lot of fantasy novels where, you know, the good person becomes king and everybody lives happily ever after. And you know, that’s not really the way that things kind of work out, like historically, either. I mean, once you have a change of regime, like people really expect change quite quickly, which is not always possible. And then, you know, there’s a lot of complications that you’re dealing with that not everybody may understand.

Andrea Stewart (14:37):

So it’s like kind of like some of the things I was thinking about when I was writing and planning this series. So you kind of just get a little bit in the first book where, you know, the, the emperor is definitely failing his people, and there’s a brewing revolution because people are very dissatisfied. Although the emperor thinks that he’s got a very good reason to be in power and that he is like protecting everybody, but you know, over time, things always change. So whether or not that’s actually still a thing that he’s doing is a bit of a mystery.

Gin Jenny (15:15):

Did you end up doing like research into world history for this book? Or what kind of research did you do when you were preparing and thinking about it?

Andrea Stewart (15:20):

I just did a lot of kind of general reading. I think I didn’t really do any like in-depth, like history kind of stuff, I think.

Gin Jenny (15:28):

So how did you go about doing the world building?

Andrea Stewart (15:30):

I kind of, so I read like a little bit about like some of the climates and everything that I wanted to put into the book. Like I knew I wanted it to be these islands. I knew I wanted it to be more of like a tropical climate. I mean, I’ve been to Thailand before, and I remember like, there’s, you know, the wet season and the dry season and that’s basically what I have going on here. And yeah, so I kind of did a lot of reading about like– oh, I did a lot of travel reading!

Gin Jenny (15:57):

I love that! That’s such a neat, I wouldn’t have thought of that, but that’s really neat.

Andrea Stewart (16:02):

Yeah. Because when you read the travel books too they do talk about the history of a place and they talk about, you know, the buildings that they have there and what these ruins mean, what they’re there for, like things like that. So I did a lot of kind of reading about that and a little bit of like the mythology of different places stuff like that.

Gin Jenny (16:20):

Cool! At what stage did they make you a map? Like, did you have a draft map that you were working from or did they, was it just completely…

Andrea Stewart (16:25):

Okay. This is like one of the things I’m always terrible about. I write the book first, and then I realize, I don’t know where anything is and like I’m contradicting myself. So then I have to take out a sheet of paper and I kind of just draw blobs on it, you know, do a north west east south. And like, ah, I think these things are all, this is where this is relative to this thing. And then they said, oh, do you want to do a map? It’s like, ah, okay!

Gin Jenny (16:55):

Like I said, I, I am not very good at secondary world fantasy, but I actually consulted this map several times while reading. It was very useful.

Andrea Stewart (17:02):

I consulted it while writing! Um but yeah. So then, then, then I made something a little bit more refined, and they took that and made it into a beautiful piece of artwork. So yeah, I’m very happy with it. I’m glad I have it now to refer to as I’m working on book two.

Gin Jenny (17:19):

How much input– I’m always so curious about this, how much input did you have into kind of the look of the map? Because I think in addition to being a useful geographical resource, I think it looks really beautiful and cool as well.

Andrea Stewart (17:30):

Oh, it’s gorgeous. Yeah. I mean, they asked me about like, if I had any ideas, as far as like, you know, what kind of time period and what influences and you know, it’s like, I kind of just wanted it to look like, like an ancient Chinese map and it came back looking beautiful. Yeah. They’re very, they’re very good about getting input.

Gin Jenny (17:52):

I especially like the– I’m sorry, I’m just looking at it right now. I especially like the compass rose, which has a little creatures on it.

Andrea Stewart (17:57):

Yes, so it’s got like the Phoenix for the Phoenix Empire and then it’s got a sea serpent on there too, which actually they become a little bit– I know I would just mention them in book one, but they make more of an appearance in book two.

Gin Jenny (18:11):

Which, phoenixes or sea serpents?

Andrea Stewart (18:14):

Sea serpents.

Gin Jenny (18:14):

Great. Great. I love a sea monster. Actually, very often on this podcast, we ask our guests to choose between sea or space. So which would you choose?

Andrea Stewart (18:23):

Oh goodness. I would probably choose the sea because it, yeah, it actually has a smell and it’s it’s closer and it’s not quite so scary.

Gin Jenny (18:34):

Oh, see, this is fascinating! Because I choose sea because I find it maybe infinitely scarier than space because although it’s right here, there’s so much we don’t know about it. It’s just a vast unknowable mystery down there.

Andrea Stewart (18:47):

Yeah. I mean, I’ve been scuba diving and I swim quite a lot, so it’s a little less scary to me, but space I’m like, ahhhhh!

Gin Jenny (18:55):

So you would not hop on a generation ship if offered the opportunity.

Andrea Stewart (19:01):

I totally would, but I would be terrified probably the entire time. So

Gin Jenny (19:07):

If they offered you a generation ship a seat right now, you would, you would take it?

Andrea Stewart (19:10):

Probably! I just, you know, I’m, I’m, I’m just too motivated by curiosity. I would have to.

Gin Jenny (19:18):

Oh man. I’m fascinated. Well, so I think that I probably would not take a seat on a generation ship at this moment, but I’m also a little scared to go scuba diving.

Andrea Stewart (19:29):

It’s actually really neat. It’s one of those things where when I jump into the water first, I’m always terrified because I don’t know what’s underneath me, but like once you start descending, then it’s like, oh, you can actually see everything around you. And it’s a little less scary, I think.

Gin Jenny (19:46):

Where have you done it? And how far do you descend?

Andrea Stewart (19:49):

I’ve done it at Monterrey and Hawaii, like Cancun. I can’t remember if I’ve done it anywhere else. Another place Porta Rialta. Yeah, but yeah, you go down usually about like 60 feet or so. If the water is clear, which, you know, usually you’re trying to choose places that have got relatively good visibility. You can see quite a bit, so it’s, it’s really neat. I, I really love it, but I haven’t been in awhile.

Gin Jenny (20:17):

Yeah. I think my dad’s been scuba diving. I’m a little nervous. I’m not specifically scared of fish or anything, but I’m not sure I want them looking right at me as equals.

Andrea Stewart (20:25):

Yeah. It gets a little bit worrisome when you see like the big groupers and everything that are just these massive fish.

Gin Jenny (20:33):

But they’re not interested in you. Right? They leave you alone.

Andrea Stewart (20:36):

Yeah. Yeah, they do. I mean, they’ve been known sometimes to be a little bit aggressive, but generally they’ll just leave you alone. I’m probably not making it any better.

Gin Jenny (20:48):

I mean, I think that I’m, I think my level of fear has stayed has stayed the same throughout this conversation. I’m so curious about the cover design process.

Andrea Stewart (20:58):

Oh yeah. They did, you know, send me the sketches and everything before the final version was done. I didn’t really have like any input as far as– I mean, cause I’m like, you know, I trust you guys, like whatever, whatever you think is going to be great, I’m sure it’s going to be great. So they sent me the sketch that the artist did and then kind of like her little inspirations as far as like what she had used to come up with it. And even the sketch I was like, that is incredible. And I love it. They

Gin Jenny (21:35):

Wait, so they sent you, they sent you a sketch and they also sent you her like, artist’s statement about it?

Andrea Stewart (21:39):

No, she sent sent her the inspirational, like photographs that she had used to kind of–like these ivory carvings basically. And then, you know, they sent me like updates as she was working on it, which was fascinating to see because, you know, I really like seeing the process behind artwork.

Gin Jenny (22:00):

Are you an artist at all?

Andrea Stewart (22:02):

I am actually. I used to do some illustration work like way back in the day, but yeah, there’s actually some stuff that’s going to come out that like, I’ve done a couple of paintings for the book, so that’s gonna come out a little later.

Gin Jenny (22:18):

Amazing. That’s amazing. That’s like magic to me. I have, I am the least artistic person imaginable. So when someone can, I mean, even when someone draws the most basic picture, like my sister draws the pencil sketch of our dog, I’m like, HOW THOUGH?

Andrea Stewart (22:33):

I had like a really kind of isolated childhood in some ways, like, you know, it was very nerdy. So it’s like, ah, just off in a corner or like reading or drawing. But yeah, so I was, I was really, really impressed with the cover. That was, it was one of those things where I felt like the artists had kind of like reached into my brain, because you know, how it’s got all those carvings and everything on the front? When I was a kid well, my parents still have this chest at the foot of their bed, and it’s got all these kinds of very kind of similar carvings on it, and I used to go in there and like play with it, like kind of like trace all the little carvings, like, oh, like, you know, little trees and buildings and people. So it was kind of neat to see that in a cover, where I was like, well, this just reminds me a lot of my childhood.

Gin Jenny (23:22):

Oh my gosh, that’s so neat. It reminded me of I don’t know if you’ve seen the show Black Sails, but the credits um–

Andrea Stewart (23:27):

You know, that’s, that’s funny. Yes. other people have mentioned that to me. I actually have not seen the show, but now I’ve seen the credits, so.

Gin Jenny (23:35):

Okay. So yeah. You know, so they have sort of similar carvings like this and it’s just, it’s very beautiful.

Andrea Stewart (23:42):

I’m very excited to see what they’re going to do with the second book.

Gin Jenny (23:45):

Oh my gosh. Me too. You said earlier that this is the seventh book you’ve written. Can I be extremely impudent and ask if this one is your favorite out of all the books you’ve written?

Andrea Stewart (23:54):

Yeah! I mean, usually the last one that I’ve written is always my favorite, and it actually got me a book deal.

Gin Jenny (24:02):

Do you have plans to go back and revisit earlier manuscripts once this trilogy is finished?

Andrea Stewart (24:08):

No!

Gin Jenny (24:09):

Oh, wow, a resounding no!

Andrea Stewart (24:12):

No, I mean, I feel like I learned something with every manuscript and I’ve gone back and I’ve looked at my old writing, and it’s just like, you know, I don’t want to, I wouldn’t want to put something out there that I don’t feel is the best that I can do. I mean, I’ll maybe cannibalize parts as far as like, oh, I liked this concept or something, or like, you know, I like the setting, but yeah, no, they’re dead.

Gin Jenny (24:40):

I was going to ask about without trying to make you tell me spoilers for book two, it seems really, really hard to write a trilogy where one book comes out before the other books are even finished. How do you rise to this challenge?

Andrea Stewart (24:52):

Oh goodness. Okay. So when the book went out on submission, I did have to write up like a little summary for what would happen in books two and three. So I knew what was going to happen. I had a plan. It is kind of funny though, where I’m working on revisions for book two right now, and I’ll see people pop up on Twitter and say, oh, like, I hope this little thing is in book two. And I’m like, oh, actually should maybe have some of that in there. So that’s been kind of funny because you know, I do want readers to be pleased with the second book. At the same time. I do have a plan for it. And I think, I think people are going to like it. We’ll see.

Gin Jenny (25:36):

But what if you think of something that you should have put in book one, but it’s too late?

Andrea Stewart (25:38):

Then I just have to put it in book two, I guess. I mean, the big thing is like right now just trying to figure out, like we talked about before, spacing out those reveals and what needs to be in book two and what needs to be saved for book three. And I think I’ve got that mostly. I think I’ve got that figured out. It’s just a matter right now of kind of going through my checklist of things that like ahhhh! I need to fix this. Yeah, totally.

Gin Jenny (26:06):

Yeah, totally. Do you have an outline–like how much of an outliner are you?

Andrea Stewart (26:09):

I’m definitely an outliner. I go through and I have a summary for each chapter and I just kind of follow that. Sometimes I don’t, and then I have to fix my outline, but I definitely outline before I start writing, because for me especially dealing with multiple perspectives, I really need to make sure that they all have their own arc, that they’re intersecting in the right ways at the right times. So, yeah. So that’s pretty important to me.

Gin Jenny (26:36):

Sure! Was it exciting to actually reach the point in writing where some of these characters meet each other? Because Jovis meets some of other characters, I guess, maybe midway through the book, but he doesn’t meet Lin until quite a bit later. And I was very excited.

Andrea Stewart (26:50):

Yeah! So that’s like part of the fun of writing book two for me, is actually having these characters interact and, you know, having these backgrounds clash and kind of figuring out like where they go from there and what their relationship with one another is going to be like. That’s that’s been really fun for me.

Gin Jenny (27:11):

Is there anything you can tell us about book two? Because I don’t wanna get into spoilers for this one, but Lin and Jovis are both– Well, actually everyone are in very, very different situations than when they began.

Andrea Stewart (27:22):

Yeah. So I can say like a little bit just, you know, there’s, there’s definitely more constructs, more creatures. You learn more about Mephi. You learn a little, a lot more about the Alonga and the history of the empire and how it became the way that it is, and also you learn a little bit more about the bone shard magic and how it came to be and some of the mystery surrounding it. So I think that’s kind of specific and also a little bit vague, but, you know!

Gin Jenny (28:00):

That’s great. We’re gonna, we’re going to find out more about, about little Mephi?

Andrea Stewart (28:05):

Yes. And there’s, there’s more islands that they visit and everything in book two as well. So you kind of get to meet some of the other people that live on the other islands and kind of get a sense for how they’re dealing with all the changes.

Gin Jenny (28:20):

Man, that sounds great. We’re going to do a spoiler for something that happens about a third of the way through the book. Are we going to find out why Deerhead sank?

Andrea Stewart (28:27):

You’re going to get some more hints.

Gin Jenny (28:32):

Okay. Um that was so– That was so distressing. That was really effectively frightening and terrible.

Andrea Stewart (28:38):

Yeah. I mean, there’s definitely more happening in book two in regards to that. And you know, they’re all obviously desperately trying to figure out what exactly is happening. Whether or not they do in book two, I don’t want to say. That’s something I think that should be discovered as you kind of go along through the story.

Gin Jenny (29:03):

Perfect. And then I was also curious, we talked a little bit about some of the animal companions and fiction that you’ve enjoyed, but have you always been a fantasy reader?

Andrea Stewart (29:11):

Yeah, I have been. Since I was a kid. Fantasy and sci-fi actually, but I used to go to the library every week. My parents would take me, and then when I got older, I would just ride my bicycle. So I started out with like, you know Chronicles of Narnia and then the Prydain novels by Lloyd Alexander, I loved those, and I kind of just started reading, you know, more adult stuff as I got a little bit older. Some stuff I think I read before I should have.

Gin Jenny (29:44):

What did you read before you should have? I definitely read Mercedes Lackey before I should have.

Andrea Stewart (29:48):

Oh gosh. I can’t even remember. There were some there was just some stuff that was, I think probably a little bit too violent for me at that age. And when you’re a kid, and you’re just looking for more materials to consume, it’s not like they have like a, a rating on them.

Gin Jenny (30:06):

Right! Which is fortunate because I was a very law abiding kid. So I would certainly have been like, oh, I can’t read the ones with the higher rating. That’s against the rules.

Gin Jenny (30:14):

So who are some of your favorite SF authors now?

Andrea Stewart (30:17):

Oh gosh, there are so many. So I really, really love N.K. Jemison. Her Broken Earth Trilogy just blew me away. It’s one of those things where I read it and I was like, oh God, I will never write anything this brilliant. And that’s amazing. There was that I really liked Naomi Novik’s Spinning Silver and Uprooted. I loved those. They were so engaging, and I’ve been reading like some new stuff lately, which has been fun. I’ve been getting books like before they come out right now, which is like, oh my God, so exciting. So I got to read Wolf of Oren-Yaro before it came out.

Gin Jenny (30:56):

Oh, how is it? I’ve been wanting to read it.

Andrea Stewart (30:58):

I loved it. It’s told from a first person point of view, and the main character is so interesting and complex, and you know, you can understand exactly why she makes all the decisions, but she doesn’t at the same time sometimes you’re like, oh, but I wish you hadn’t! But then it like makes the story go.

Gin Jenny (31:19):

Sure. Yeah. That was, that was my experience of reading Harrow the Ninth, like exactly.

Andrea Stewart (31:25):

I mean, you have like these characters who are flawed, so obviously they are going to do flawed things.

Gin Jenny (31:32):

Oh man. Those are, those are good ones. Well, before I let you go, how are you managing coronavirus? Is anything exciting happening in your quarantine life? Have you learned how to do anything new?

Andrea Stewart (31:42):

I’m very typical, I guess, because I did a sourdough starter, so, and how

Gin Jenny (31:49):

And how did it go? Did you– I don’t actually understand what a sourdough starter is, a hundred percent.

Andrea Stewart (31:52):

So it’s just like, basically you grow your own, like yeasty starter.

Gin Jenny (31:58):

Okay, and then once you have it, do you like take a piece off or like, what do you…

Andrea Stewart (32:05):

Some of it’s like, just like it’s kind of like liquidy doughy and it’s like a batter almost. So you take it out and you use it to start like your sourdough loaf, and you have to kind of replenish your little sourdough starter. You actually have to feed it like once a week. It’s like a little pet.

Gin Jenny (32:24):

Oh. I thought it was, I was picturing, like, I thought it was like a liver where you could take a piece off and it would regenerate, but you have to like do stuff to it consistently.

Andrea Stewart (32:32):

You kind of have to, you have to give it flour and water, and that feeds it basically.

Gin Jenny (32:36):

Okay. So I had it totally wrong. I was picturing liver, but now I’m picturing more like a Tamagotchi.

Andrea Stewart (32:40):

Yeah, it’s like a Tamagotchi.

Gin Jenny (32:40):

Okay, great. Great, great, great, great. So have you made sourdough with it?

Andrea Stewart (32:46):

I have, yes. And I gave some of the starter to my mom too, so now my starter has offspring.

Gin Jenny (32:52):

Oh my gosh. Congratulations.

Andrea Stewart (32:54):

So, yeah, so that’s basically, I mean, I don’t think I’ve done anything else except write and stay isolated.

Gin Jenny (33:03):

Yeah, pretty much me too. I keep meaning to learn, to pick locks. That’s kind of the next thing on my docket.

Andrea Stewart (33:10):

Ooh. Yes. That sounds super interesting. Actually I know some people that have gotten into that.

Gin Jenny (33:15):

So someone on Twitter recommended a lock pick set for beginners, and it has like a transparent padlock that you can practice on. So you can kind of see what, what all the little triggers are. So that’s what I really want to do. But apart from that, I haven’t done anything. I made a risotto. That’s my accomplishment.

Andrea Stewart (33:34):

Oh, that’s nice. That’s a good accomplishment.

Gin Jenny (33:38):

I mean, I haven’t kept a sour dough starter alive, so!

Andrea Stewart (33:40):

I mean, it’s not that hard. It’s like a fish.

Gin Jenny (33:46):

Well, and oh, I did want to ask you actually, what are you reading right now?

Andrea Stewart (33:48):

I’m actually reading another book that has not come out yet. It’s called Star Eater by Kirstin Hall, and I think that comes out in early 2021. I think it comes out in January. It’s been kind of slow going just because, you know, I’ve been working on a bunch of other stuff, but it’s really interesting so far and I’m looking forward to finishing it.

Gin Jenny (34:09):

Yeah. I think my brain is broken. I’ve had a really hard time reading, which by the way, I really appreciate this book again because you know, I, I really tore through it and it was so nice to actually be able to like read and finish something.

Andrea Stewart (34:20):

Oh, I’m so glad. That’s like the best feedback that I can hear as an author, is that it was like, you know, a quick read.

Gin Jenny (34:28):

Well, especially my, my friend Alice and I kind of joke with each other that when books are a little longer, we’re very nervous to start them. But this, I mean, this is over 400 pages, but it felt like nothing. It went by in a flash.

Andrea Stewart (34:39):

That’s so good to hear.

Gin Jenny (34:40):

Well, Andrea, thank you so much. This has been lovely.

Andrea Stewart (34:43):

Thank you so much for having me. I mean, you know, debut, author, pandemic, I really appreciate anything that can get the word out. So

Gin Jenny (34:51):

Well, and absolutely, listeners, I loved this book. I have not been able to, like I said, I’ve not been able to read that much in quarantine, but I just tore through this one. Andrea, where can people find you online?

Andrea Stewart (35:00):

Twitter mostly! I’m at AndreaGStewart on Twitter. And then I have a website, AndreaGStewart.com. I’m on Instagram, but I’m still like figuring that out. Like Stories. What are these? This is how I know I’m getting older, but I’m still kind of getting used to the whole interface there. And then I’m on Facebook as well. I have like an author page that I never update, but I have a personal page there as well that is public. So.

Gin Jenny (35:29):

All right, perfect. Well again, thank you so much for joining me and listeners until next time, stay safe volunteer for your local Senate candidates and take care.

The post PODCAST – Episode 136 – An Interview with Andrea Stewart, Author of The Bone Shard Daughter appeared first on Reading the End.

Episode 128

You can find Intisar at her website, as well as on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram. The book is Thorn, and you can acquire it — we hope you will! — wherever books are sold. For my part, I have preordered it from the queer SFF indie Tubby and Coo’s!

Get at me on Twitter, email the podcast, and friend me (Gin Jenny) and Whiskey Jenny on Goodreads. If you like what we do, support us on Patreon. Or if you wish, you can find us on iTunes (and if you enjoy the podcast, give us a good rating! We appreciate it very very much).

Credits
Producer: Captain Hammer
Photo credit: The Illustrious Annalee
Theme song by: Jessie Barbour
Transcripts by: Sharon of Library Hungry

Transcript coming soon!

The post PODCAST, Ep. 128 – Interview with Intisar Khanani, Author of Thorn appeared first on Reading the End.

How did you get into reading/writing fic? What were your earliest fandoms, and what’s the newest one you’ve fallen for?

I first found online fandom when I was teaching Buffy as a TA for seven discussion sections and I got desperate (that is a lot of discussions). I got into reading Buffy fic a couple of years later, only after several failed attempts at looking for fic and really not enjoying it, by which I mean feeling scarred for life. I didn’t like it when the characters didn’t sound like the show and I honestly had no idea what I was looking at. One night I was bored to tears in the ER, and I finally found one I liked, and, Dear Reader, the rest was history.

So with fic, first it was Buffy and then out into the Whedonverse. I very selectively (remembering the scarring) ventured into certain beloved fandoms of my youth (though back then I wouldn’t have called it fandom), like Star Wars, some comic books, X-Files, Sherlock Holmes, and The Breakfast Club. Soon enough, I had read every single Veronica Mars fic. I have a distinct memory of researching in the French national library, getting an update on a Bones fic I was following, and looking it up in the reading room.

Recently, I am very carefully reading both new and old Veronica Mars fic. FOR REASONS. Mostly these days, I find secret old dead fandoms and read in them and tell no one. I don’t really like to weigh in as me in fandom arguments or conflicts (because of the professor thing), and I don’t really like having a hidden identity for that kind of thing, either, as it seems a bit disingenuous (for a pen-name, it seems different). But also, it has been a while since a current fic fandom really grabbed me. Probably the last one was Hannibal.

How has fic (reading or writing it!) influenced your professional work?

I began incorporating fanfic into my teaching in various ways from around 2007, a couple of years after I had started reading and writing it. I was very interested in the different ways fic could present narrative structure, genre, character, and frankly presented these very different forms that many people were writing and reading but people like me were considering. And of course I began considering issues of authorship, originality, and even literary history from a very different perspective.

Writing Fic changed my career pretty dramatically because I became a visible expert at a time when a lot of people in the media suddenly wanted an expert. So now fan studies is a big part of my career—but my most recent critical book was on Kafka and Czech culture, and that was a lot closer to my training.

When I started out, writing fanfic was more of a pure pleasure—I loved to try to have a completely different voice, to sound like someone else and adopt their concerns, to push back a little on elements I hadn’t liked. And in a profession where “publish or perish” is such a big deal and everything is tallied through a lens of accomplishment and prestige, I was thrilled to write completely outside that economy. To “waste time” felt like a kind of chocolate. I had studied fiction (and poetry) writing in New York and at Princeton and I kind of lost the joy of it, didn’t like the publishing industry (interned in publishing), and wrote poems destined only for my sock drawer. Fanfic was a very different mode, and I valued that about it.

But then I wrote 200K words of Breakfast Club fanfic, and then I wrote a novel, In Between Days, that is in many ways a Breakfast Club AU or Breakfast Club-critical fix-it fic. So that blended fic and professional, in a way. And I think writing fic made me more willing to publish it myself rather than take it out of the 80s, which is what my agent thought it needed in order to sell it. I don’t blame him at all! I am sure he was right. But I think based on my experiences with fic, I had more faith that someone would hear “John Hughes Noir” or “The Breakfast Club, but with more coke dealers” and think it sounded cool. And I definitely had become less invested in commercial publishing and the kinds of legitimacy it affords. I don’t think it is as much fun.

However, I also have tenure so other material concerns are not as pressing and I probably have cultural legitimacy to spare in some respects.

Are there things that you find fic generally does better than pro writing?

Fanfic can do sex better than pro writing, especially around consent—whether making it sexy or exploring the various ways consent can be dubious through power relations, etc. Of course, fanfic can fail massively at all of that! But when it does it well, I think it does it better. I think it can do a kind of granular emotional level better because readers will tolerate a slower pace. It can represent sexual and gender minorities and neurodiversity and disability better (and fail to represent them! And do a terrible job representing them! Fanfic is very, very big).

But really, fanfic can do so many different things that published fiction cannot, because fanfic can be as long or as short as the writer wants, can start or stop in the middle or at the end. It is much more free, and often more original, for all its various derivativeness.

You literally wrote the book on fanfiction! Did studying fic in a professional context impact how you read it?

I read fic differently for work than I do for pleasure. For example, I think the Omegaverse is one of the most fascinating things fanfic has ever done, and that some of the stories do weird but important political work. But it’s never what I’ll read when I read for myself, because it makes me vaguely nauseous (so many fluids). When reading for work, I’m more analytical, and I’m not just following my bliss or whatever. I’m looking for interesting, and I don’t care as much if I’m invested in the characters or world, because it’s not about me. I’ll be fascinated by something going on in BTS fic when I couldn’t recognize one of their songs.

When I’m reading for myself, I tend to want a particular combination of good writing, intellectual interest, and emotional engagement that’s not so different from what I’ve often read for pleasure. Sometimes I want more of a good thing, and sometimes I want solace or absolute denial of terrible things dumb show writers have done—like any other fic reader. I will read in a fandom where I don’t have emotional investment if the fic is good enough—because then I get the emotional investment. But that is rare for me. It happened with Twilight fanfic, where I never cared even one bit about the books, but some of the fic kept me up all night.

What makes you ship a set of characters together? Or what elements in canon make you want to read or write fic?

Angst plus humor is my OTP. I want a certain kind of friction, banter, tension, angst or conflict, but usually affection underlying those elements. The fiction can be about corpses or curtains—don’t care. Operatic or domestic, all good. A lot are variations on the Holmes/Watson or Kirk/Spock dynamic (or are, you know, those exact ships), and the others are basically variations of Elizabeth/Darcy. Han/Leia, Mulder/Scully, House/Wilson, Logan/Veronica, Spike/Buffy, Will/Hannibal, Merlin/Arthur… I find there is less femslash with these elements, and often it entails a genderswap, but I love it when I find it. Then sometimes there’s a show like Battlestar Galactica where I will read all the ships because they’re all weird and interesting. That’s the rare example where the world is compelling enough to drive fics I’ll want to read. Fantasy can do that, but I’m not a big fantasy reader.

Sometimes a fic fandom will start doing a particular thing very well. For instance, some of the historical fic around Steve Rogers is amazing, so even though I don’t get into any MCU ships, I’ll read that from time to time. MCU can also sometimes produce really entertaining gen or bromance, and I like that. I’m a sucker for bantery gen fic. My Little Pony had some incredibly funny stuff, and I didn’t respond to the canon world at all. I can’t really stomach The Walking Dead but some of the Michonne fic is awesome, so I read that just for the characterization.

When I think, oh look! Here’s something only fic can do!, I do a happy dance. And when someone does something weirdly literary, I squee, like Hannibal-Schopenhauer or Veronica Mars-Lovecraft, Sherlock Holmes-Nightmare Before Christmas, Brontë Juvenilia AU, etc, weird Victorian crisis of faith Sherlock AU. That kind of thing makes my English professor heart sing.

Do you have fanfics or fanfic authors that most influenced you, or that you often return to? (Or are there fics that changed how you thought about what fanfic/storytelling in general are capable of?)

TheBlackArrow from the Twilight fandom really changed my understanding of what fic could do—it was a Twilight/Wuthering Heights crossover that I read because the author was one of my first commenters on a fic, and I was intrigued she said it was Twilight, but it didn’t matter if I hadn’t read the books. That was the first time I’d really read a standalone fic and the first time I’d ever read fic that was (although I didn’t know it at the time) so much better than canon. Obviously there are many others! I did write a book…

What are your favorite things about fic as a medium? Are there things about the fic world that you’d like to see changed or improved?

I like the collaborative elements, the fictive worlds, the strange collective relationships among stories and tropes, not just authors.

I wish fanfiction could be better about race. I think you can learn a lot about race from looking at fanfiction, but mostly what we learn is not encouraging. Of course, it would be odd if fanfiction were somehow immune to structural racism. But taken as a whole—and I am not talking about individual writers or stories—fanfiction exposes how entrenched whiteness is in patterns of storytelling, characterization, norms of attractiveness (and, of course, casting, although it doesn’t all come down to that).

Tell me your favorite tropes! What tropes are your catnip, and what tropes do you tend to steer clear of?

Catnip: Enemies to lovers, there is only one bed!, hurt/comfort, huddling for warmth, mutual pining, office/professional tensions, friends to lovers, social media/texting/digital relationships, set in fandom, casefic

Nope: soul mark/soulmate; very underage; omegaverse (unless for science!); daddy kink; feeding; reader insert

Authors in Fandom is an interview series where I talk to professional authors about their backgrounds in fandom and fanfiction. If you have suggestions for traditionally published writers I should talk to, let me know in the comments or hit me up on Twitter!

The post Authors in Fandom: An Interview with Anne Jamison appeared first on Reading the End.

Anyway, the arranged marriage in Empire of Sand immediately made me think “now here is an author who has been in fandom,” and thus we are back! Once again! Doing an Authors in Fandom interview with the inimitable Tasha Suri. Enjoy!

How did you get into reading/writing fic? What were your earliest fandoms, and what’s the newest one you’ve fallen for?

I got into fandom almost twenty years ago, but I remember exactly how I fell into reading and writing fanfic: I’d become totally obsessed with Sailor Moon and I was googling it when I stumbled on a fanfic and fell in love with it. I started writing my own stuff immediately and flinging it onto the web. I’m pretty sure the first thing I posted was a .txt file Neptune/Uranus fanfic to the long defunct A Sailor Moon Romance/moonromance.net. I was ten.

I feel really old now. Anyway.

Lately, I haven’t really had a fandom, which feels kind of weird, though I still go back and read old favourites. If someone wants to point me to some good Star Trek: Discover fanfic about Georgiou though, I wouldn’t say no.

How has fic (reading or writing it!) influenced your professional work? Are there things that you find fic generally does better than pro writing?

I don’t think my professional work would exist without fanfic. Fandom is an amazing place to learn how to write, because other fans are so hugely supportive. I wrote a lot of bad stuff and a lot of stuff that was better, and all the way through other fans cheered me on.

Fanfic does relationships really, really well. I’m not sure I want to say it does relationships better than pro fic, because I think pro fiction and fanfic have different audiences and purposes. But that edge-of-your-seat, breathless feeling good fanfic gives you? It’s special.

And if you’ve written fic in the past: What have you found to be different about writing fanfiction vs pro fiction?

Fanfic was 100% a labour of love for me: love of writing, of the source material/canon, and of fandom itself. The more you engage with fandom the more it gives you the energy to keep on writing. Pro fiction is a lot lonelier, at least at first. You don’t have that same community around you, unless you actively build one, and rejection is built into the process of publication. You have to churn all that love and excitement up in yourself without the impetus of a fandom. It was only when I decided to be a fandom of one for my own stuff that I was able to finish any pro fiction, honestly.

What makes you ship a set of characters together? Or what elements in canon make you want to read or write fic?

I love shipping characters who have conflict. I’m a sucker for it. I don’t necessarily mean hero/villain, but I like when there’s something thorny in the relationship between two people that fanfic has to unravel for a romance between Character A and Character B to work. Do two characters have animosity, a tragic history, conflicting missions or secrets? I’m there, cheering them on.

Do you have fanfics or fanfic authors that most influenced you, or that you often return to? (I remember you saying that some fics should be counted as modern classics – tell me some!)

I’m not sure how much they’ve directly influenced my own writing, but these are all fanfics I’ve read over and over again for years. I’ll leave it up to you to decide if they’re modern classics, though I do think at least some of them are!

Truth and Measure is an alternate universe The Devil Wears Prada fic that asks: what would have happened if Andy Sachs hadn’t quit her job and left Miranda Priestly in Paris? I started it reluctantly then fell deep in love with it. It’s a properly epic love story that takes canon and runs with it, winning you over like only the best fanfic can. The sequel The Parting Glass is also wonderful.

If you like your fic a little more meta, then Steve Rogers at 100: Celebrating Captain America on Film is hysterical. United States v. Barnes, 617 F. Supp. 2d 143 (D.D.C. 2015) is no comedy, but it tells a heartfelt story through constructed social media and news items.

I’m also a big fan of a bunch of DC and Superman-related fic and I could read Reconcilable Differences over and over again.

What are your favorite things about fic as a medium? Are there things about the fic world that you’d like to see changed or improved?

Honestly? My favourite thing about fanfic is that it looks at a piece of media and says ‘this is mine now, and I’m going to explore the bits of it that the author won’t’. It’s transgressive and transformative and both an act of love and rebellion. What’s better than that?

The one thing that always used to sadden me about the fic world was how easily fanfics could be lost. There are so many fics I’ve read that are gone forever, thanks to websites going down, fanfics being intentionally deleted by their authors, or sites being purged. But Archive of Our Own has fixed that issue by providing an archive for fanfic and also creating a system for orphaning works, and I’m so thankful for that.

Tell me your favorite tropes! What tropes are your catnip, and what tropes do you tend to steer clear of? (I admit I am not typically a fan of arranged marriage stories, but Empire of Sand made me love it, dammit.)

I love soul bond fics! Love ‘em. Also stories where characters have to fake a marriage or relationship. The arranged marriage trope is my absolute favourite, of course. Maybe that’s obvious in Empire of Sand, haha.

I’m one of the few people in the world that hates coffee shop AUs. I just don’t get it. Otherwise, I’ll read pretty much any trope, I’m a trope omnivore.

Tasha Suri was born in Harrow, North-West London. She studied English and Creative Writing at Warwick University, and now lives in London where she works as a librarian. To no one’s surprise, she owns a cat. A love of period Bollywood films, history and mythology led her to begin writing South Asian influenced fantasy.

Tasha hangs out on Twitter, Instagram and has a Newsletter.

The post Authors in Fandom: An Interview with Tasha Suri appeared first on Reading the End.