Outlander

PODCAST: "So Many Scandals" with Lindsay Emory from Women With Books

There's nothing cooler than having a friend working on a project you're really excited about. Well... maybe there is one thing: getting to join your friend on that project! At the end of January, Lindsay Emory interviewed me for her podcast Women With Books ahead of the release of my new book The Taste of Temptation, which came out on Monday. WWB is kind of like a book club in your pocket. Lindsay interviews authors and librarians about their work, favorite books, movies, and more. And the best thing is that the conversation often veers off into really fun directions.

For my episode, Lindsay and I talked about the royal wedding, Outlander, Persuasion, and so many scandals. You can listen to my episode with Lindsay on her site, Apple Podcasts, and Google Play.

It's Not Just the Sexy Scotsman

A note just for my sister: I want my old copy back... It might just be the communities that I'm in online (hi, Romancelandia), but it seems like every other tweet I've seen between Saturday evening and Tuesday morning this August and September is about the Starz adaptation of Diana Gabaldon's Outlander. Of course, I'm just as guilty as my fellow watchers. In August, I jumped right in, watching the series, listening to The Scot & The Sassenach*, and rereading the first book. Every time I get together with other romance authors, the conversation inevitably makes its way over to Outlander. The internet basically exploded when Claire and Jamie got their first sex scene. I was worried that all of the squee might create a black hole that sucks everything into and ends life as we know it. This still may happen. What with streaming and everything, the verdict's still out.

As we get closer to the mid-season break, I've been thinking a lot about what a big deal book Outlander was for me in my teenage years. I remember the old cover clearly with its red plaid, flowers, and broken clock. I used to walk by it on my mother's bookshelves all the time. One day when I was about 16, she pulled it off the shelf and slid it over to me, suggesting that I might enjoy it. Mum is a very smart lady.

I fell in love with the time slip, 18th century Scotland, that hot Highlander in a kilt, everything. I ripped through the 800+ page book in a matter of days, reading so late into the night that the next morning my eyes were gritty from lack of sleep. I even have clear memories of sneaking it under my desk in AP US History class so that I could keep reading.** I'm pretty sure I walked around school with it in front of my face, blushing something fierce because oh my goodness, people. There was sex and lots of it.

When people ask about the series, I like to tell them that Outlander was the book that made me a woman (my sister finds this mortifying).  What I really mean is that this was first time that I read a book with graphic sex in it^ where the sex wasn't meant to stand as a metaphor for growing up or as way to shame its characters.^^

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Outlander is a book about a sexually self-possessed woman who knows how to ask for what she wants and the man who wants to give that to her. In fact, the show goes one step further. In the first episode, the creators wrote a scene in where Claire's husband Frank moves to kiss her. Instead, she pushes him down on his knees and he lifts her skirt to perform oral sex. The message is clear. Claire is a sexual person and not the least bit afraid of expressing it. Add Jamie in a kilt to the mix and you have serious sparks.

Outlander isn't perfect. I reread my beaten-up copy of the book while watching the show this summer, and there are some scenes that border on uncomfortable for me. I won't spoil them here, but dedicated readers of the series can probably guess what I'm talking about. However, the book does portray a lot of positive aspects of Claire and Jamie's relationship, and I'll always think of it fondly as my gateway into the world of historical romance.

If you had told me that I would be writing historical romance (or really any romance at all) before those days of reading Outlander under my desk in History class, I probably would have called you crazy. But afterwards? Well, it's all I ever really wanted to write.

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*An excellent podcast that I highly recommend for not only recapping Outlander but also breaking down what works in both the show and the book from a narrative standpoint. Seriously, go check it out. It's delightful, and there's a real live Scotsman on it.

**Sorry, Mr. Hall. I did go on to get a degree in History so hopefully that makes up for it...

^Upon rereading, the sex seems so tame, but at 16 all I was reading were Kensington Zebra sweet romances where the characters held hands and had one chaste kiss on the last page. THE LAST PAGE?! I felt so cheated each and every time, and yet I read these books for three years. I had no idea that there were sexy books out there I could buy with my babysitting money.

^^I'm looking at you, Go Ask Alice. If you haven't read it, this is a book where the heroine loses her virginity while on LSD or something and then I'm pretty sure winds up addicted to hard drugs and maybe getting raped or prostituting herself or both. She might also die at the end (sorry, 40something year-old spoilers). Clearly, that was not what teenage Julia was looking for.

Cracktastic White Tigers

Taming Lord RenwickCan an author escape having a blog? Probably not. Especially not in the romance world where the distance between author and reader seems to be shrinking thanks to Twitter and Facebook. So here we go. Time for my own blog!

I started writing romance because, like so many other authors, I was a reader first. I remember the first time I got my hands on a romance novel. I was a pre-teen at one of those remaindered bookstores that was dedicated to selling of the entire inventory of every bankrupt Crown Books in Los Angeles. Books are in my family's blood, so when my mother let my sister and me loose it was only natural that we should start poking around the stacks. Then 12-year-old Julia wandered into the romance section and fell in love.

The book that did it was a Zebra Regency Romance called Taming Lord Renwick. I can't explain why the absurd cover featuring a Jane Austen stand in gazing into the eyes of a mulleted man in britches did it for me. Oh wait, there's a giant White Bengal Tiger lying next to them. When you're 12 anything with tigers on it is an instant win. Then and there I decided I had to get my hands on what I would eventually come to call "romance crack."

And crack it was. Yes, there is a White Bengal Tiger. Yes, there is a mullet. But get this... Lord Renwick is BLIND so his tiger is really a giant, scary seeing eye dog. Romance crack!

From there it was a slippery slope. I've always read fast, but I found that I could rip through a romance in a few hours. From Zebra Regency I made a big jump in steaminess to Diana Gabaldon's Outlander series. I discovered I have a deep love of Westerns thanks to The Trouble with Josh from Harlequin. When I picked up Nora Robert's Midnight Bayou I was officially an addict.

During all those years of reading I started scribbling. I'll tell the story of my first unfinished manuscript another day (it's only somewhat horribly embarrassing). It took until I was in graduate school for me to decide to give writing a romance novel a serious shot. I looked up from my very serious master's project and thought, "I've got to do some fun writing or I'll lose my mind." The scribblings that I made that first night would three years later wind up in my first book.

That first book is a historical, and it's the one that landed me my wonderful agent Emily Sylvan Kim. Agent Emily encouraged me to try my hand at contemporary romance too, so I've now got a book I'm rewriting for submission. If you had asked me a year ago whether I thought I would have two books and an agent under my belt I would have laughed so hard I would have teared up. That will teach this skeptical author.

Like any unpublished author I'm waiting for The Call. One day I hope to join the ranks of women and men who write the wonderful romance novels that keep me reading late into the night when I should have turned the light off. For now, however, I am eternally grateful for the romance community on Twitter who has been nothing but supportive while I'm waiting.

So, here's to new beginnings and white tigers and cracktastic fiction!