Illicit Liaisons: Celebrating Summer Romance with Suzy Langevin and Marissa Marinello

This week, we're celebrating the upcoming release of Fireworks & Flirtation with our authors, Suzy Langevin and Marissa Marinello. We discuss:

• Bookish drama over an editor asking an author to remove similes and other metaphorical language from their story to avoid being accused of using AI
• With the popularity of MM romance, where is the love for sapphic romance? 
• Plus a whole lot more. 

Suzy Langevin writes happily ever afters where people are loved because of, not in spite of, the things they see as their flaws. She is the winner of the 2024 RWA Golden Heart Award, and her short fiction appears in anthologies and magazines. Suzy lives in Massachusetts, and does, in fact, run on Dunkin'.

Marissa Marinello writes urban, high fantasy, and cozy-romantasy. A TTRPG nerd who grew up on Tolkien, musical theater & comics, she's inspired by finding the fantastical in the mundane. Her work can be found in several anthologies, and she is an active participant in fandom and her writing group in Southern California.   

LINKS TO SUZY AND MARISSA

Suzy's Website https://www.suzylangevin.com/
Suzy's Books https://www.suzylangevin.com/team-3
Suzy on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/suzylangevinwrites/

Marissa's Website https://marissamarinello.com/
Marissa's Books https://marissamarinello.com/books/
Marissa on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/mmarinello_author/

BOOKS MENTIONED ON THE SHOW

Fireworks & Flirtation https://amzn.to/4uacLtQ

BEACH READ RECOMMENDATIONS

Moonlight & Margaritas: Steamy Romance Anthology  https://amzn.to/4tNokqt
Summer Sisters by Judy Blume https://amzn.to/4u7XuJO
Chesapeake Bay Series by Nora Roberts https://amzn.to/42tZksA
Persuasion by Jane Austen
It's About Damn Time (Skullhaven Bay) Free at https://tenderandtemptingtales.com/free-romance-story/ or https://tenderandtemptingtales.substack.com/
Urna Semper on Substack https://urnasemper.substack.com/
Tress of the Emerald Sea by Brandon Sanderson https://amzn.to/49GJsGQ
Paws & Peril: Steamy Romantic Suspense Stories with a Dog (Tender & Tempting Tales Magazine) https://amzn.to/4nmxg3M

TENDER & TEMPTING TALES

Tender and Tempting Tales Substack: Subscribe and get a FREE story! https://tenderandtemptingtales.substack.com/

Tender and Tempting Tales on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tendertemptingtales/

Calls for Submissions: https://tenderandtemptingtales.substack.com/p/write-for-tender-and-tempting-tales

ILLICIT LIAISONS PRODUCED & HOSTED BY

Tara Leederman Substack: https://taleederman.substack.com/

Jenna Harte: https://jennaharte.com/

Outline and Show Notes: T.A. Leederman
Editing: Jenna Harte

Transcript

SPEAKER_03 0:00

Hey romance readers, welcome to Illicit Liaisons with Tender and Tempting Tales, where each week we talk about the good, the bad, and the naughty of romance fiction. I am Jenna Hart, a romance author of the Southern Heat Contemporary Romance series and of the Sexy Valentine Mystery series, all of which are in Kindle Unlimited, and I'm also the managing editor of Tender and Tempting Tales, a scheme romance anthology for readers who like quickies.

SPEAKER_01 0:25

Hi, I'm Tara Lederman, social media manager here at Tender and Tempting Tales, and Laura Maven and main fiction writer for Starship Valkyrie, a science fiction game and story universe. All right, science fiction stories, including romance, and you can often find me in our anthologies alongside these ladies, including in our upcoming new summer anthology, Fireworks and Flirtation.

SPEAKER_03 0:43

And of course, today we are here to celebrate the release of Fireworks and Flirtation, with several episodes we're going to have celebrating the authors who submitted and are in the book. We will be doing these in groups so that we can meet several authors, often in a thematic sense or based on the kinds of stories they write, or the character of the authors themselves. And in today's episodes, we're really excited to have Susie Langavin and Marissa Marinello. Now, Susie, we've had on the show, we've had both of you on the show recently. So here we go. Susie loves love, which I love too, even though she forgot how to say it in Latin when she was a contestant on Jeopardy. And she channels that love into writing happily ever afters where people are loved because of, not in spite of, the things they see as their flaws. She's the winner of the 2024 RWA Golden Heart Award, and her short fiction has been featured in several anthologies and magazines, including some of ours. Yay. Susie lives and writes in central Massachusetts and does in fact run off Duncan.

SPEAKER_01 1:52

Love that. And Marissa Marinello is a SoCal native who writes Urban, high fantasy, and cozy romanticy. A TTRBG nerd who grew up on Tolkien, musical theater, and comics. She's always been inspired by finding the fantastical and the mundane and building amazing worlds to tell rich stories in. Much of her work is inspired by real life moments that spark something more. Her work can be found in several anthologies, including ours, and she is an active participant in fandom and a writing group, also my writing group, here in Southern California.

SPEAKER_03 2:19

And as usual, Tara and I like to start shows with hot takes or drama, tea, whatever you want to call it, gossip in the bookish world. And it turns out that Marissa brought this one to our attention. Apparently, a debut author was asked by their editor, uh, who was asked by the press to remove similes and other metaphoric language from their story. The stated reason was that they viewed all metaphoric language as quote-unquote tells that would associate the story with AI in the minds of readers. I'm gonna be honest, this is one of the things I've been terrified is going to start happening. Ladies, what are your thoughts about all this?

SPEAKER_02 3:06

It's it sucks because I have so many friends who are digital artists or like handcrafted artists and things like that, that even, you know, every form of art media these days is getting to this point of like, oh, well, that's clearly AI. Well, how do you know? No, I'm a live human being. I definitely made this, you know, like I promise you this is not AI. So that it's this double-edged sword of, well, now we're able to tell more easily when something is AI, but also now everyone's just assuming everything is AI. And for writing, it's like, of course, the AI is going to start sounding like us. It's stealing from us and learning from us. That that's how that works. But it just it blew my mind that an editing press would actually say that to an author. Like, yeah, don't use metaphor. What?

SPEAKER_00 3:55

Like, like why? Basic building block of literature. Like, I don't know how you avoid those things. It's also so interesting that this like keeps evolving, right? Because at first it was don't use m-dashes, because m-dashes are the telephone for AI. And frankly, you can pry my M dashes from my cold dead hands. And I use them all the time. Um, so and then it's oh, it's this metaphoric language. Next, it's gonna be if you use the word the more than four times in a paragraph. Clearly, that's AI. Like there's no real rhyme or reason, it seems, to the things that people are pointing out are these tells that obviously something has been uh generated by this. And I think the more things get fed into it, the more people use it for other purposes, the more it's going to start looking like more human writing. So I don't know. At some point, I guess thank you. If it looks like AI, it means that I sound like a person because that's what the whole circular logic is eventually going to come back around to. But it's it's so silly. I share the same concern, Jana, because I have a whole bunch of stuff coming out in the next like year and a half that was sort of my backlist before I started publishing really at all. So I'm gonna have five books that come out between now and the end of 2027. And so people always say if you write too fast, that's a tell for AI. It's like, no, this is just everything I've been working on since literally 2022, is all like hitting the world at the same time. So it's interesting, all these different things that people say are tells that are really have other explanations or other ways of making their way into the world that have absolutely nothing to do with AI technology.

SPEAKER_02 5:40

Oh, another one I heard that is a new one popping up is if you use like three adjective words in a row, like he was charming, comma, handsome, comma, and whatever, that that's now an AI tell. And I'm like, that just might be too many descriptions in one sentence, maybe. And then on the other.

SPEAKER_01 6:00

If someone did that in every paragraph, I might end it once. I certainly would not. This editor is such a lazy bastard. This is so lazy. Press is being lazy. Like, you know, don't use metaphorical language because the readers might associate it with AI is so lazy to me. Like, that's not how you tell AI at all. Like, it's the character of the metaphors. You might be able to tell something is AI from the character of the metaphors. That was certainly to take this feels like a lesson learned from Shy Girl where people completely missed the point, right? The problem in Shy Girl was that the metaphors made no sense. Fanged gauze, like that's that was the problem, not that it had metaphor to for the lesson to be don't use metaphors. That's just buck wild to me. This is this is coconuts, it's bananas, it's a full fruit salad. Don't be lazy editors, don't be lazy presses. Like, and and stand up for your authors. Like, if your author uses metaphorical language and some crazy reader says, Well, it's AI, like, stand up for them, stand up for them. We're allowed to use metaphors. We invented the metaphor. That's ours, not AI. We're gonna cede all of writing to the AI because we're that paranoid. This is crazy.

SPEAKER_03 7:08

Well, that's just it. And it and at some point, all of a sudden AI is going to be the better writer because I know that um writing has evolved quite a bit. Everybody does, right? Your your fifth book is better than your first book, your tenth book is better than, you know, you do get better as you go on. I ghostwrote, so I I wrote, I don't know, 90 books for other people. So I have a lot of writing behind me. And the more you write, the better you get. But I also am very active in my own writing of trying to level it up, of trying to do better. This whole thing about the AI and the metaphors, all of a sudden has me thinking, well, maybe I shouldn't do this. I'll be accused of AI. So I'm gonna use a dumber word to write. I mean, I've never been an M-dash person, so no biggie on me. Editors can add them if they feel I need them. So that hasn't been a thing for me. I very rarely use them. But uh now I'm gonna have to change how I write. I remember writing to Jane Friedman because other people were talking about this. Now it's impacting how human writers are writing because we don't want to be accused of writing AI. And if we do that, then yeah, the AI is gonna get better than us because we're dumbing down our writing so we don't get accused of writing. It's I don't even know what to think. It's but it's the pitchforks are coming, but now they're coming for us. We've swung the pendulum, it's going too far. I I can only have fingers crossed that at some point it will swing back in the middle and settle. I don't know. Scary.

SPEAKER_01 8:55

Yeah, I think readers need to calm down a bit on this so that they don't make presses feel paranoid. Although I blame the press on this one. This was absolutely the press's fault. Another hot take that Susie brought to our attention, uh, since her current work in progress includes a sapphic pairing, uh, but I often wonder about this myself. With all the attention currently on MM hockey romance and the intensity of the fans for gay romance, I I often wonder where is that intensity of love for Sapphic romance? And Susie was wondering the same thing. So, have any of you seen like a sapphic fandom with this kind of fervency, like we saw with Heated Rivalry? Um, and like where's the love for the ladies?

SPEAKER_02 9:28

It's weird because I grew up with like fan fiction being kind of honestly, fanfiction was my foray into romance because that's what most of the fanfiction I read focused on. And it was the same way with that, where it was, and then was the big draw for all of it, and was honestly a lot of times better written than some of the hetero stuff, which I thought was funny. But now we're finally starting to see more Sapphic stuff getting in popularity and growing in popularity in like a fandom space, which I thought was very interesting. So I'm like, okay, if it took, you know, the distance from when the MM fanfic and the MM hockey romance kind of thing, so how long are we gonna see for the Sapphics? Like there's certain shows and TV shows that I love that, you know, there's no romance happening on the screen whatsoever. But the fandom sits there and goes, na-na, the girls. And then the actors will like those posts or repost them or something like that. And it's like, okay, maybe we are starting to see, you know, the the equality swing or whatever, things like that. It's just fascinating to see it, how those arcs and you know popularity dips work through fiction.

SPEAKER_00 10:40

Yeah. Yeah, go ahead. Fandom spaces, because I think that is the one place where I have seen that pop up and there's like shades of it. You're right. I think MM fiction is always more popular in fandom spaces, even when the male characters are canonically straight.

SPEAKER_01 11:02

Especially when they're canonically straight.

SPEAKER_00 11:03

Yeah, especially on there's a show that I um used to watch it and did some fanfiction writing for where there was a gay male pairing in the cast, and uh 90% of the MM fanfiction that was written was about the two hetero lead males. Like I it made no sense at all. But and even like Mpreg stuff, like really digging into for some reason, we're gonna go full bore MM with all of this stuff and ignore the entire rest of the context of the show. But in spaces like I know La Norder SVU, there's been different characters throughout the years that people have like paired with Olivia with some of the different female ADAs and things like that. So it's popped up in those fandom spaces, but it hasn't had the staying power that I think you see in some of the MM pairings. And I mean, sports romance is such an interesting space for it because, in some ways, it's so much more accepted in the female professional sports realm that you're going to have gay athletes, that it's almost not news when a female athlete gets engaged to another female athlete, but it would be very different on the male professional sports side of the house. So it's really interesting to me that this is happening in the sports romance space, especially with Heated Rivalry, that like that's the place where where the wall started to come down. And I don't know if there is like a similar watershed kind of space for that to happen for sapphic romance. I I wish there was, I just haven't figured out where that would be yet.

SPEAKER_01 12:43

So it's sort of like well, like right. So like MM pairings, I feel like a lot of us really got into it from Gundam Wing, if you're as old as I am, right? It was big on MM pairings, like female characters were almost tangential.

SPEAKER_02 12:55

Never brought up, yes, did not exist. Who's really we don't need you? We don't need you.

SPEAKER_01 13:01

And similarly, again, Gundam Gundam leads the way with a witch from Mercury, for instance. Um which is has a huge sapphic fandom community around it. Yeah, and Yuri on Ice, of course, uh also very, very popular.

SPEAKER_02 13:12

So I think that's the irony of it being called Yuri on Ice was not lost on me.

SPEAKER_01 13:17

I think we're there. I and also Urian on Ice is about ice skating, right? So like it's kind of a it's a sports industry. I think we're there. Like I think that I think that we will get there. Um it's only giving the first a bubble.

SPEAKER_02 13:28

I was actually realizing too, there's a I belong to a steampunk community server online that we hail from all over the US. And one of the big things we did do is a lot of book recommendations and book reading because we're all nerds in that way. And we did a whole SAFIC September where it was like all the book club stuff with Sapphic romancing and Sapphic stories, and it was like, here's a huge bookshop list recommendation from her that I can probably dig out and find pretty easily. So I've I think I've noticed it's though the I do not have a good word for this in the right now in my brain, but the marginalized groups or the weirdos, quote unquote, we tend to lead the way when it comes to like trying to get, you know, more representation and things like that. Like, okay, yeah, the steampunks are gonna find the weird niche things or the like, hey, we don't see enough of this representation. We're gonna go find every single book that has it and make a list for you.

SPEAKER_03 14:24

I have a take that I'm a little worried is gonna come out controversial. But here we go. Here's my take. Um, you know how uh heterosexual men, some of them like to see two women together, right? Okay. Uh romance, a lot of it is written by women for women. And so my theory on this is women enjoy seeing two men, and in the same way, men sometimes like to see two heterosexual women. Now, that's not to say people from the LBGTQ community or non-bury non-binary people or um men don't read romance, right? I don't want to come out saying only women like, you know, but in my mind, I'm thinking that that's sort of why things like heated rivalry or MM romance has really taken off because it's women who are interested in seeing men who may not be interested in seeing two women or haven't been exposed to it to know maybe that would be a better way to do it. I do hear a lot more people saying they want to read more. Some of the booktubers I follow have been talking about wanting to see it more. And of course, there are presses who have made this stuff for a long time, but it hasn't been out into general world. Like you would have to go looking for it unless you were in in that community, you know about it because that's what you want to read. You want to read about yourself, right? So uh so anyway, that's that's my theory.

SPEAKER_01 16:09

This is I'm very this is very important to me. This is why I'm editing Sapphics of Saturn later this year, you know. I I really want to see more Sapphic stuff and I want to see us put out more Sapphic stuff. Uh and that one is is a call entirely for Sapphic stories, uh science fiction sapphic stories, incidentally. Uh and I would like to see more of that. Um but I I also have a an academic reason for this, which feel free to shut me down if you like. Uh but I think that the the main reason is that a lot of authors are very used to male characters being the interesting ones and female characters not being interesting. Even in heterosexual romances, I often find that female characters, and this is not true of every story I've ever read, of course, but I'm I I I've noticed a lot of female characters are vessel characters into which the reader can sort of plug in their own traits. They're not necessarily a character you can meet and have a beer with, right? And necessarily someone that you can go and play a game with, you can really imagine meeting. They're actually a vessel for you. And then male characters are often extremely interesting. When I was watching Heated Rivalry, I felt like both of the male characters were very interesting and very much their own people. Not neither of them was a vessel character. And when I see heterosexual, oh, that's not heterosexual romance, when I see like MM pairings in fandom, I notice that it's because that they're pairing up the interesting male characters with each other. Gun and Wing was a big lesson for that, right? Like there are female characters in that show, but they're not very interesting. They're kind of there as a as a beard to stop you from trying to pale the pair the men together, and it doesn't work very well. The interesting characters are Hiro Yui and Duo Maxwell. So people pair them together quite naturally. So I think it's difficult for authors and difficult for readers to imagine two female characters together with the absence of a male because we're missing an interesting character at that point. You'd have to create female characters.

SPEAKER_03 17:49

We have book boyfriends. We have book boyfriends. When we think about a lot of the books we read, that's I mean, Pride and Prejudice. Who do they say first? They say Darcy first before they talk about Lizzie, who is an interesting character, right? Yes, she is. But we talk about Darcy, persuasion, we you know, Wentworth's letter. That's the thing that comes to mind. So even in our world of romance, we have a lot of things that seem to be male gender oriented in terms of how we are putting our thoughts out there. So I I I'm agreeing.

SPEAKER_01 18:22

Right, waifus are types, they're the pink-haired ones, green haired one, the blue-haired ones, the tropes, the Mary and the young Mary one, and the cute little one, and the and the angry older one. They're just they're just these types that you can throw in. They're not really often very interesting.

SPEAKER_03 18:36

A lot of the tropes are male-oriented, right? Yeah. I mean, we have the military, we have the cinnamon roll, we have the alpha hole, we have the, you know, it seems like there's less character tropes for women.

unknown 18:47

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 18:49

Men are allowed to be complicated and trickly and be the grumpy and the grumpy sunshine and blah blah blah without being inherently branded as unlikable. And I think there's so many female protagonists that get tagged with that, oh, I didn't like the book because I found the female character to be so unlikable when really she's just fully fleshed out and a person. So I think there is something to that idea of you know, the self-insert, which is another thing that has come up quite a bit on social media that, oh, I'll only read first person because I have to be able to like self-insert, which blows my mind as somebody who writes third person and does not do that at all. Um, so I could not wrap my brain around that piece of it. But you know, there is that kernel of misogyny underneath all of it, right? That men are allowed to be complicated and complex and be morally gray and all of these different things without being branded as unlikable or somebody that you can't relate to. Whereas female characters are very much intended, it seems, in some stories, to be the stand-in for the reader, which is just not as interesting.

SPEAKER_01 20:01

No, male characters are subjects, female characters are objects. In this case, you know, either something to look at in a in a show or a vessel into which to project your identification. If anything gets in the way of that identification, readers can get salty. In a lot of cases, even not being in first person will get in the way of that identification. Too much character can get in the way of identification. It just depends on how you read. Uh, but yeah, I think that there's something very true in that.

SPEAKER_02 20:27

I also think it's interesting because even like because you mentioning a few titles made me think of like, huh, what are some of the there's literally a TTRPG called Thirsty Sword Lesbians based on tropes from anime and other media about the very sapphic, but we didn't say it out loud, pairings. And looking back on all those pairings, realizing that a lot of the sapphic romances that we did see was all very emotional-based. There was almost no physical contact whatsoever. So you'd think that's like prime real estate for a lot of romance stories. We should this should move over more easily, but it's very difficult to do if most of the female characters you're seeing are, you know, just vessels, like you said. Whereas these, you know, trope characters were, you know, the the lady knight and the princess, you know, it was very tropey, but they were like, we they didn't work the same way as maybe an MM relationship would, because it was like, no, no, it's all longing glances and vows of devotion, and that's it.

SPEAKER_01 21:28

My recommendation is to apply those MMC tropes to the ladies when you want to, you know.

SPEAKER_02 21:33

I now want to write a black cat golden retriever relationship, but the golden retriever's the guy. Like, I want the grumpy sunshine where the grumpy one's the girl. That is my goal now.

SPEAKER_03 21:42

I'll fire one where the woman was the billionaire. Perfect. And he had a vineyard or something and he needed no money to save his vineyard. So I've seen that. I think that's fun to turn tropes, you know, make her the firewoman, or she can't be a mafia don, but she could be something. I mean the mafia dons in the real world have a have somebody who stands as the face who's a man, right? I mean that that world. But you you could have some sort of secret society or some sort of dark romance where the you know the woman is the uh scary, intriguing, shadowy one.

SPEAKER_02 22:26

Although it's interesting, the movie great ladies.

SPEAKER_00 22:30

Well, but it's interesting that that tends to happen more in romanticy or in the fantasy world, because I think it is so far removed from our contemporary zeitgeist that a woman could occupy that position. And I'm working on the book that I'm working on now is actually an FFF love triangle and sort of playing with the dynamics of like hard and soft within each of those characters. I'm trying really hard to not have any one of them present as a way that, like, oh, this is the typically male person in this relationship, right? So it's um doing that with three different characters at the same time is a super fun juggling act, but really, you know, trying to shy away from this idea that there has to be a male and a female energy in a pairing, that it can be something that gets spread across uh multiple characters and they can mean different things to each other and and play different roles has been a really interesting exercise that is requires kind of stepping back from those gender norms in a really intentional way to be able to craft this out.

SPEAKER_03 23:37

As a as a the opposite of that is we don't see a lot of diverse men in terms of their energy. They're all 6'2, they're all muscly, right? They're all, I mean, we don't see very many, not very tall, uh scrawny. Uh and even if they are in the book supposed to be the geek, they're still very handsome somehow, somehow, in their glasses or whatever. So it's also an opportunity to push that a little bit too, right? Like men who are not Brad Pitt can still find love in the world, right?

SPEAKER_00 24:18

I am deeply invested in the short king agenda that I keep writing male love interests who are like five foot seven and fine with it. That's we're leaning into the channel.

SPEAKER_01 24:27

I think of your character from your Christmas novella, your most recently White Light Christmas, you know, with his slutty little glasses. And he was a shorter character and and he wasn't big and burly.

SPEAKER_00 24:37

He was a super skinny long distance runner, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 24:39

Yes, exactly.

SPEAKER_03 24:40

Yeah, I agree with that. Well, let's let's go on and and chat a little bit with our authors here. Susie, you have a new book out, American Royalty. Yay! Thank you. Why don't you tell us a little bit about it?

SPEAKER_00 24:56

I actually have it right here from when I shoot my TikToks at my desk. So American Royalty is a standalone romance, and it really came out of the idea of looking at the Taylor Swift Connor Kennedy romance back in like 2012, and not that relationship, but what happens on the other side after you have this thing that is this huge blow up in the media that everybody's talking about, and then all of a sudden it ends. So, what does it mean to be on the other side of that kind of a relationship? So the centers on Trip Ashworth, who is the son of a prominent US senator who is gearing up to announce his presidential candidacy. And in the midst of all this, he has a summer flame gone wrong with a pop superstar. And now in the aftermath, the staff in his dad's Senate office has to clean up his image. So that falls largely to Jasmine, who is the junior communications person in the office, to sort of babysit him and rehabilitate his image to not get in the way of his father's eventual presidential announcement. And there is in this book, there is an entire Sapphic B plot that sort of makes up the reason behind the breakup with Tripp and this pop star. That the whole book is really about playing on the difference between what happens in public and what happens in private. And who are you to the world and who are you to the people that you love? And how do those things come together and come apart? How do you allow yourself to be a full, whole present person, flaws and all, and still believe that people are going to love you? So that kind of carries through the whole book, and we see Trip and Jasmine's relationship unfold and they get their happy ever after, as do Test and Allison, who are our Sapphic B plot. We do no bury your gaze here. We are everybody gets their happy ever after at the end.

SPEAKER_01 26:56

Yay! No randomly shooting your Sapphic, a member of your Sapphic pairing.

SPEAKER_00 27:00

We do not how we get away with how I get away with murder here. Like this is not we're not going that route.

SPEAKER_03 27:06

I I actually really enjoyed the book when I read it. So um very excited for to do well. Thank you.

SPEAKER_01 27:13

Your story in Fireworks is Red, White, and You, a Second Chance Enemy Solovers Contemporary Romance Story. And I was hoping you could tell us a bit about it and especially your characters.

SPEAKER_00 27:22

So I love a second chance romance. Um, I think there's just something so interesting about going back to like a what if and what if things had been two degrees different? Would everything be different now? And sort of the almost like time machine wish fulfillment that comes out of writing second chance romance, along with this idea that who you are now is not who you were before. So, how do you get to know this person in front of you who's a different person than they were the last time that you were together or something was going on? Um what changes, what stays the same, and how do you reconnect and rekindle something that it was really meaningful to both of you? So the story is set on Cape Cod, which is um a popular vacation destination for where I'm from in central Massachusetts, and it's a very sort of specific aesthetic and like specific look and feel. So I wanted to really have that moment of like summer love and summer connection, and and what can that look like, and how do you take that and bring it back into the real world? So, you know, meeting Chelsea and Sean, who are the two main characters in the book, it also is like a brother's best friend type deal. So they've known each other for years and they're rediscovering each other in this new context and figuring out what they are to each other now. Um I really love the like young adult time in people's lives. I think adolescence gets a lot of airtime for being coming of age, but I actually think like 20 to 25 for a lot of people is a lot more formative when you're stepping out into the real world for the first time, like after you graduate college or as you're starting your career. So I love playing with characters in that time frame of how are you gonna decide who you want to be as an adult. Um, and so both Chelsea and Sean are kind of on that journey of Chelsea's just graduated from college, Sean's been out for a year, and they're trying to build their own lives independently and figuring out how do they fit into each other's lives. So I think there's a lot of r richness in that time period of trying to figure out how to adult that's a lot of fun to play around in.

SPEAKER_01 29:39

I've been associating you aesthetically with that sort of like all American Massachusetts summer fireworks, cape cod, lobster roll with with between red, white and you and American royalty. Like I I, you know, I like to think of each of our authors with a color palette, so I made sure to do red, white, and blue for your author's.

SPEAKER_03 29:57

I dressed accordingly today, then were were there uh uh moments you had while writing it that sort of stood out as being your favorites or you're excited for readers to read?

SPEAKER_00 30:10

Um I am a big fan of a really ridiculous kind of meet cute and having it be something or having a moment where characters come together in a way that's really like a little bit uh slapsticky or or rom-commy in a really out there in your face kind of way. And so at one point in the story, these two characters, she's returned back to the house at night, she doesn't think anybody else is there, and she thinks somebody's breaking into the house and she's like screaming in his face, and he's trying to get her to so I love those little moments of levity in the the progression of these stories of just those moments of like ridiculousness that happen because I think that's life that there are these moments that are just absolutely absurd. Comments are finding those those pieces, you know, in my holiday novellas, like characters meet, one of them is naked in an apartment, and the other one walks in. So, like I love to put those things in that are just like these little pockets of absurdity in this otherwise romantic story.

SPEAKER_01 31:11

Oh, that's Mariah's really good at those too. I was curious. I so I know you you tend to set a lot of your stories in the Northeast, you're proud of where you're from and stuff. And I was wondering if you had started to interconnect them with little Easter eggs and stuff like that and created like a little Susie verse.

SPEAKER_00 31:25

You know, I haven't yet, but that is a great idea. So this book series that I'm working on now is set on Martha's Vineyard, and it feels like it would be the perfect place for the Ashworth family from American Royalty, who are these you know rich people from Pennsylvania to go on vacation. So I think we're gonna have to find some way to work that in a reference into those books because it would be funny to be like self-referential.

SPEAKER_02 31:50

It is very fun, I can say that.

SPEAKER_01 31:52

I love a Susie verse. I like a verse.

SPEAKER_02 31:55

Honestly, the reference to being a Mets fan, I started laughing so loud. My coworkers were looking at me weird. My family is all I have a lot of family from New York. So the choice of baseball team from there is a very key. Like, ah, you are clearly from the East Coast, you have an opinion on things for a little fun, Marissa. Do you have any question for Susie about so actually, yeah, kind of leading off of that whole um, you know, knowing you're from the East Coast kind of thing. So hilariously, our podcast today, we have two West Coasters and two East Coasters. And something I'm noticing the more and more I'm reading contemporary, because admittedly I'm a fantasy girly, so it's not like you get a lot of people uh where you can tell they're from the East Coast based on how they write their dwarves. But so do you ever notice when you're writing, or especially when you're reading, like if there's a very specific geographical area that you feel like, oh no, the the readers are gonna come for me if I don't describe this right, or as maybe even a reader, you sit there and go, oh, they're clearly from here. They get it, or like maybe they vacationed it here, but they don't really know what it's like being from you know, this area or something like that. Because I I've definitely noticed it with Southern California set places. So I'm wondering if that's something you've ever noticed.

SPEAKER_00 33:14

I'm laughing because when I am drafting, I think the thing that I use most often is Google Maps. I am obsessive about how long it should take to walk from this place to this place, or that doesn't make any sense. In American Royalty, there's actually a specific line about the fact that the metro in DC does not go to Georgetown because it's like the black hole in the metro that nobody knows why. So I am so like such a stickler for those details because I think it can take you out of the story. You know, I'm from Massachusetts, and the number of people who write about, talk about, or like set shows in Boston that have no relationship whatsoever to the reality of what the city is like. One of my favorite things to talk about with Boston is that with the way that our traffic works, you can drive an hour from Boston and still be in Boston.

SPEAKER_02 34:11

That actually goes very often for California as well.

SPEAKER_00 34:14

We we also have that problem. When people talk about, like I remember this was um, I've never watched the whole show, but I've seen clips from The Last of Us, and they were supposedly an hour outside Boston, and it looked like the Rocky Mountains. And I'm like, I don't know where you are, but it is not anywhere close to Boston.

SPEAKER_02 34:33

There was an aerial shot of a city that was supposed to be, you know, like somewhere between Boston and New York, that it was a major metropolitan area. I think they made it up for the show, but they did this big cool area shot up downtown. And I was like, that's Los Angeles. That is absolutely like you're not doing a very good job of hiding this guy.

SPEAKER_00 34:50

I'm not cooling anybody. Yeah. And it I actually come from what is probably one of the bigger cities between Boston and New York City, and I can guarantee you that it did not, whatever they showed, that's not what Western looks like. That's not it.

SPEAKER_03 35:06

Oh, that's funny. I use like Zillow a lot to look at at homes for sale, just to get a sense of uh to describe it on the street. Right now I'm writing some stuff in New Orleans and I went down there, but I haven't lived there or anything. So street views and looking at homes so I can describe them. Uh looking, well, I need something like this to happen. Where could this happen? And so looking at the swamps and how far are they from the city? And you know now.

SPEAKER_00 35:39

My next book does have a couple of scenes set in San Diego. So you'll have to tell me if I get San Diego. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 35:46

Well, San Diego's a whole different creature, but I know couple of what's important, what's important is that you call the freeways the number. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 36:00

You know, and here, I don't know about where you are, but we don't call them freeways here. No, they're highways. They're not freeways there. Yeah. They're interstate where I am.

SPEAKER_02 36:09

We call them interstate. I think there's only one interstate in Southern California that I'm aware of. It's it's such a weird beast.

SPEAKER_03 36:15

But we have, I mean, we would call it Interstate Five. We would call it, you know, you'd call it the five, or you'd call that a freeway. I grew up calling that a freeway because I'm from California. But out here they call it there's a lot of different ways they say things here in Virginia. And that's one of the problems.

SPEAKER_01 36:36

I don't think it gets to be called a freeway anyway.

SPEAKER_00 36:39

We don't have anything that's four lanes out here because it's the roads have all been around since they were paths, so they're like two lanes wide is considered like super.

SPEAKER_02 36:48

Unless you go to a turnpike and then it expands just enough from teleboots and it goes right back again.

SPEAKER_01 36:52

Exactly. I wouldn't call that a freeway, anyways. You know, like if it's not eight lines long, eight, eight, you know, eight lanes long and like guaranteed to kill you, it's not a freeway. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 37:02

Yeah. I don't think they use freeway at all here. No, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 37:07

So although we do have one place in Boston where you are going south and north at the same time. I love it. So that's you're on 90. I think it's 93 south and 95 north at the same time. No big deal because you're just breaking space-time continuum daily. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 37:24

All right. We've got Marissa who's doing bonds and settlements, a fish out a water story about a normal barista, Josh, who attends his Dampier Loves Interest birthday party and meets her vampire family. Well, that that'll that's gotta be nice, right? Like, no later. What could possibly go wrong? Uh so maybe you could tell us a little bit about your story.

SPEAKER_02 37:51

Um, so I the main characters, Josh and Angela. They actually meet in my Reader Magnet, Trials and Traditions. And when I was writing the Reader Magnet, I based it off of this idea of like a fairy tale adventure where everything is done in threes. You have to go through three trials to do the thing. There's, you know, a helpful, older, interesting, creepy person in the woods. There's something that happens, and there's, you know, a princess that needs to be rescued. So that happened to Josh and Angela. And everyone who had read it when I was working on it and finalizing it was like, so they're gonna be a romance, right? You're gonna write them, aren't you? And I was like, I guess I am, cool. And meeting the parents is always a fascinating and awkward situation, no matter what your lineage is, I feel like. And I'm especially the vampire I had in my brain whenever I pictured Angela's dad, I was like, this is gonna be so awkward for this poor boy. This is like, it's already awkward that I'm meeting my girlfriend's dad, but he might just drink my blood and drain me dry if I piss him off. So that all of the usual, like first, like, oh God, this relationship is so new and and we're so new, and we're still figuring things out. Oh, and on top of that, you're insanely rich. And I'm an assistant manager at a coffee shop. Like I love this idea of fish out of water on every level possible, like financially, socially, supernaturally, and Josh kind of accidentally becoming this everyman hero, but also still kind of like I know so many people like Josh in real life that if they had told me someday, like, yeah, I met my girlfriend's parents and they were like super weird and like really particular about like the threshold or their doorway and stuff, it wouldn't surprise me in the slightest.

SPEAKER_01 39:47

I just want to say I love Josh. When you were when Marissa was drafting trials and traditions and then of bonds and settlements, she was asking me and her wife, who have both worked at coffee shops or just, you know, incidents, coffee shop incidents for the city.

SPEAKER_04 40:01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 40:01

And you know, like and like Josh at this point is, you know, been through the worst of it, you know, like making frappuccinos at four in the morning for a mother of four. Like he is just not impressed by the vampires. I was like, I am not afraid of you. I love that so much. Like you've seen you've seen it when you're a barista that you are not afraid of anything. I I love him. Um so Marissa, your story is set in your West Coast Weird universe, and you know I love a verse. Um, and I was hoping that you could tell folks a little bit about it and about the novel that I know you are working on in the background, aren't you?

SPEAKER_02 40:31

Getting called out on this. So I actually have a couple of now novels uh working on for West Coast Weird. The one that is probably closest to being presented as like, hey, this is a finished thing, please read this, is not the one I intended to be first. Uh the original idea that I had was more slice of life, less romance, where it was packs and transactions, P-A-C-T-S, not to be confused with my uh Midnight Mist of a mistletoe story, PAX as in Wolfpack and negotiations. But the idea was this girl working at a day job in an office, finding out that it's owned and operated by the Fae. Totally not influenced or inspired by my real life day job and a very weird temporary office we were living in, that I was like, this feels like a weird liminal space, and like some puck-looking entity is gonna walk through that door at any moment. But realizing that I was like, oh, I have a very easy way of building out this universe of just weird things happening all over, you know, the West Coast and like what are some of the weird superstitions from the Pacific Northwest versus the Southwest. And when I started writing uh the romance story, which I gotta say, uh the whole reason I even attempted it was finding resources from your website, Jeddah. So that was that was the best resources I had read. I'm like, oh, maybe I can actually do this. And that one, Packs and Negotiations, is the story that was in Midnight Misty and Mistletoe. It is actually how that couple, Val and Alec, meet, how they she finds out that he's a werewolf, how they navigate this relationship that accidentally turned into a holiday story because it starts right before Halloween and went all the way through uh Valentine's Day. But they just, as a couple, I'm so proud of how they turned out because they're both so flawed and work really well at figuring out each other's flaws and both working around them, working through them, and calling each other out on it a little bit too. But the idea of apparently now building a romance universe where one of the parts of the romance is a totally normal average person, and then the other half is a werewolf, a damphere, a shapeshifter, uh whatever. It's there's too many fun fairy tales and folklores out there for me to not play around with, and realizing I can have them all know each other in some way is even more fun.

SPEAKER_03 43:04

Yeah, I call that woo-woo, and I love woo-woo. I love myths and folklore. I think you've hit on this a little bit, but what really inspired this story? And I mean, you mentioned it came out of something else, but you have a whole, you do have a whole universe, don't you?

SPEAKER_02 43:25

Yeah. The this particular one was really just like this guy was, he's just he's I wanted him to be so normal. I wanted him to be not quite the vessel character where you could, you know, drop yourself in, but he is just that guy that, you know, everyone has that friend that is like such a solid person and they're so chill, and they seem like they have such a normal, boring life. And then you find out something absolutely crazy about their backstory or their life, which I have known friends like that, and I don't A lot of baristas with that kind of story too. So it's just been really fun to build up Josh and Angela as characters and kind of dive into what their dynamic is like and what their relationship is like. And there is, if I ever do a novel with them, there is a line Angela's father's going to have that is very much based on something my father said to my spouse right before we got married. And I'm like, this is already a terrifying concept, but add in that it's a vampire, it's gonna be even funnier.

SPEAKER_01 44:32

Love it. Love it. And so a little extra spice. Susie, do you have any questions for Marissa?

SPEAKER_00 44:39

So I am a committed contemporary romance girly. Like that is pretty much all that I write. And I have recently started to tiptoe into doing more paranormal, but in the context of in a modern setting. So we're not going like grand gothic or anything here. It is creating this sort of shadow universe in the modern context. So I wanted to know what are your like best tips for how you create this world within a world when you're working in this modern context, but then still trying to bring in those elements of the fantastical and the folkloric around it.

SPEAKER_02 45:20

I think it's because there's there's kind of like two main schools of urban fantasy, is kind of what I would call it. There's the one where it's like, oh, well, everybody knows magic exists and it's built into the universe and how it works. And then there's this other one, which I think it's called Wayne's Good Fantasy. I don't know. It might still just be a weird umbrella part of urban fantasy where it's all behind the scenes. And I think for that is the real fun of it is doing it from the perspective of someone who has no idea what's going on, doing it from that human, mundane perspective. Because then as they get introduced into the world, so does your audience. And with American folklore specifically, there's so much great stuff that, you know, we we as humans always imagine well, what if that weird shadow over there was actually a creature and like, you know, weird things we can't explain and things like that. So having them be maybe that insanely talented singer is actually just a siren. And that's why, you know, I've had a very fun job of like, well, what kind of mundane job would this entity be really good at if I gave it to them? Like really funly posts I've seen on a funny post I've seen on social media where it's like, oh, you know, werewolves working as chefs and doctors because they can sniff out cancer or like tell if your food's gone bad, vampires working as phlebotomists because they know so much about blood. They're very fun concepts of like, there's always going to be a few people who know what's going on. There's always gonna be those that, you know, to to reference comic book stuff, there's that John Constantine that knows where the line of weird and supernatural is and constantly weaves back and forth between it. There's, you know, um, I grew up watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which is probably very evident in a lot of my writing, but it's it's also that balance too of like, well, now that I know the weird stuff exists, how more difficult is that going to make my normal life? Like, how am I supposed to go to prom when my date's a werewolf and prom's on a full moon? Like, this is taking very mundane problems and throwing them at supernatural entities is some of the things I have the most fun with.

SPEAKER_01 47:26

One thing that works really well for Marissa is keeping a perspective that is very grounded. And I think that would work very well for you, Susie, because you write it a lot of contemporary, you know, like the the main problem with Val and Alec is not that he's a werewolf, but that he has commitment issues, you know. The main issue for Josh and Angela is not that she's a damn peer, it's that he has to meet her dad, and also like he doesn't realize that they've already, you know, been dating. You know, it's things like that, you know, like it's these very normal human things. No problem, like there's like weird things going on, but it's really it's about being human at the end of the day. Like as well.

SPEAKER_02 48:00

Yeah, as we say, the Paxson transaction story, the one of the main like big oh my god moments is her finding out that her bosses are Faye and what that means for like her worldview. But the biggest problem that happens to her is so normal and mundane and has absolutely nothing to do with the supernatural that it's almost like, you know, I'm actually kind of relieved to find out you're not human because that makes my life seem so much more manageable by comparison. Where she's like, I thought I was going crazy because of this horrible thing that happened to me, but now it turns out I was right.

SPEAKER_03 48:32

I love it. I think also playing with magic in the world can exist, right? Oh, yeah. Um I've started writing a million years ago. I wanted to do a play on Bewitched. So I have a little witch who's a podcaster, she drives around in a tiny home and has a podcast on, a weird, wonderful. She would be going to Louisiana to research the Rougarou or something like that. That's her thing. And she ends up in this place where this house is supposedly haunted, and the love interest is a physics professor. So he's all about science. There's no magic. Physics is magic, as far as I'm concerned, in a lot of ways, right? There is a lot of magic to science and one it really wanting to play off that.

SPEAKER_02 49:18

And I love that too. I love the the straight man in a fantasy story where it's like, no, no, I'm gonna figure out the not metaphysical way of describing this, but the physical way of figuring this out. I have a I attempted to write this series of short stories involving a paranormal detective agency years ago, and I might be trying to bring it back actually. Uh, where so many of the problems were is it like, okay, well, are you actually seeing a ghost or is your ex just trying to get you to give up your lease? Like, what's really going on here? So having the play on not really knowing is it going to be something fantastical or is the problem gonna be normal? And just watching fantastical creatures react to normal problems is always very fun, too, because it's like, yes, I am the Fey Lord of summer and I command armies of pixies and da-da-da. And you want me to do taxes?

SPEAKER_01 50:11

It makes me think of Dead Like Me, which is I I think not a lot of shows, but my religion, where you know, our main character gets turned into a grim rapper, but she was 18 years old and she really doesn't know how to live. She doesn't know how to be a person. And so in her afterlife, she still faces the same problems of growing up. Like she still has to, she has to learn how to grieve her own life and her family. She has to learn how to do how to file and how to get a work how to get a job, like a normal everyday job, and how to like work in an office and how to get an apartment and you know, how to deal with money and how to get around and how to deal with people, really late. And like dying doesn't get her out of that at all. She still has to learn it. It's sort of like the the great learning of her afterlife is all this normal stuff that we all have to deal with, you know. Even though she can pop souls out of bodies, the problem is that she has to deal with a boss. And I I love that, which is probably why I I love Marissa's stuff so much, because it's it's very much like, yeah, you have phenomenal cosmic powers, but have you considered filing taxes still sucks?

SPEAKER_03 51:08

That's no one messes with the IRS, not even the one mess with the these stories um that we've talked about today are going to be in fireworks and flirtation, which is our anthology. And along with, we've got eight other stories in there, and of course, we'll be talking with those authors as well. Uh, and one of the things that we are really trying to get out into the world is that this is anthologies are really a great way to, if you enjoy romance, to sit down and read one and not have to put it down because you have to go do something else and then come back to it. Whenever you can come back to it, you can read an entire story in a sitting and have beginning, middle, in, and three chilies or more spice if you like that. But the other thing is, is you can read authors that you don't know, or read maybe in genres you don't know, like if you've never read uh a paranormal, if you've never read a sapphic story. Uh we have all that. It's a really great opportunity to discover new types of romance, discover new authors. I know Tara has said several times that she didn't like enemies to lovers until she read one of the stories in one of our books. I didn't like writing them either.

SPEAKER_02 52:30

I feel you.

SPEAKER_01 52:31

I would have never picked up a whole novel, but it was like, oh, I'll read Jason's story, and I really liked it. So yeah, you can discover that you actually like something you didn't realize that you would like. You can discover a new favorite, a new favorite author, a new favorite subgenre.

SPEAKER_03 52:43

Yeah, and of course, we you're building an ARC team. So anybody who wants to test it out, let us know what you think. We would love to um add you to the list. Tara would be the person to reach out for that because she she takes care of everything. I just show up when she tells me to.

SPEAKER_01 53:07

We'd love to finish off the show by doing book recommendations. For this one particularly, thank you for the idea, Susie. We are doing your favorite Beach Reads. What are your favorite beach reads, ladies?

SPEAKER_00 53:17

So, my favorite book of all time is Summer Sisters by Judy Bloom, which is more like women's fiction. It's not necessarily romance, but it explores this sort of decades-long friendship between two young women. It starts when they're in sixth grade and it really goes all the way through their 30s. Um, it's also set on Martha's Vineyard, which is really one of the things that I like fell in love with around the setting for that story and how rich and immersive it is. Plus, Trudy Bloom is just a fantastic storyteller. People who only know her kid stuff really are missing out on the incredible rest of the breath of her work. But I always recommend that one because it's set on Martha's Vineyard in the summer. It's like the perfect thing to sit down with with your sunscreen because I look like this, so I wear SVF 80 like on a cloudy day, and just relax and take in this this really epic story of friendship.

SPEAKER_02 54:15

I'm probably not the best person to ask about beach reads besides the fact that I live 20 minutes from the beach. I almost never go. And the last time I did bring a book, it was a Brandon Sanderson novel. So it was like a thousand pages.

SPEAKER_01 54:28

Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_02 54:31

Um also if it's if it's like summery and fun and and lighthearted, honestly, moonlight margaritas. Like that is quintessential beach read to me. Like it's summer theme. It's got margaritas in it. It's like short little snippets of awesome, little, delightfully lovey-dovey, you know, awesome, fun, spicy bits. And you can, you know, pick and choose what genre you want as you go. So if it's like, okay, before I go in the water, I'm gonna read the Sapphi story. Okay, out of the water drying off, I'm gonna read this historical romance. Like it, I loved it so much, like immediately upon starting to read it. And I it just it was a delightful read.

SPEAKER_01 55:15

Thank you, Marissa. And remember, Marissa has no incentive to say that. She is not in Moonlight and Margaritas. She is saying it because she truly loved it.

SPEAKER_03 55:22

And we didn't pay her or anything.

SPEAKER_02 55:24

Don't pay her to say I went on Amazon and bought a hard copy with my own money and everything.

unknown 55:30

Thank you.

SPEAKER_02 55:30

Um then probably wrote down like half the recipes for the margaritas because those all looked so good.

SPEAKER_01 55:35

I really want to do a version of that book with like little, little like recipes for every single story. A special edition of Moonlight and Margaritas with recipes. Yeah, it is very thick. It's true. It's a thick boy. Most recently I took Penna B Noir with me so I could read Parish's story in it. Uh and really I was enjoying some of the other stories. I took a Parish's anthology of some of his short story, where all past years are with me to a recent trip. Um, I've taken Moonlight and Margaritas when I was reading it for uh for marketing reasons. That was really, really fun. Um, so yeah, anthologies are really great for the beach. I'm not just saying this because like we're in them, but also like they're good because you can just read a quick story, go do something, you know, like dip in the take a dip in the water, come back, you know. And if you if you lose your place in it, it's easier to find where you were, you know, than in a large novel. And it's easier to be distracted. What about you, Jenna?

SPEAKER_03 56:27

Well, I'm having a hard time because beach reads, they're supposed to be light and fun, and all, but then I'm thinking maybe it should be on the beach. And my beachy reads aren't when I, for example, the beach books that are coming to me aren't really even beach, they're Chesapeake Bay books. Nora Roberts has a has a Chesapeake Bay series, it's romantic suspense. So I'm like, well, maybe not beach read with that, because beach kind of dark, it's kind of dark, and you know, somebody's gonna die. Then then I go to persuasion because you know, persuasion, and they go to Lyme, that's kind of the beach. It's Jane Austen, I think for some people that's a tough read on the beach when you're just trying to do something fun and light. So I am struggling to find something. Well, there's the Skullhaven Bay stories, one is free off the Tender and Tempting Tales Substack or website. That's a fun one, and then another one is coming out in Fireworks and Flirtation. That's on a it's an Outer Banks Island, Oker Coke. It's a mix of Okra Coke and Chikateak, which are actually in two different states, but those are amazing names. Well, Chikateak is the island of ponies, right? Did you ever read Misty of Chikateak? Well, I guess when I was coming up, that was they were these young, they they were middle grade books, I guess. Um the ponies swam from Aceteak Island to Chikateak, and um they do have wild ponies out there. Amazing.

SPEAKER_02 58:01

Um, okay, I have one that's good. Uh sort of BT Reed, and it is more the fantastical realm because I'm realizing that is that is definitely kind of more my jam. Tress in the Emerald Sea. It's a Sanderson story, standalone. It takes place on an ocean. There's pirates, there's sailing, there's true love. It's got such a princess vibe, stardust vibe to it. And it even though it was like some very high-action moments, anytime I put it down, I felt like I could pick right back up again and where I was going. And it's not a huge book either. Like it's it's a relatively decent-sized novel. It's not like his other gigantor brick-sized books. But it's fun and lighthearted adventure with a little sweet romance in it as well. And the main heroine is amazing.

SPEAKER_01 58:48

I think if you want romantic suspense to be your beach read, Jenna, it totally can be. Yeah. Speaking of, our zines would make an excellent beach read. Yeah, romantic suspense zine, and I think Carol would make an amazing beach read if you wanted to take the beach. It's got pictures in it, it's got bingo. What more could you want? I love the bingo. There's nothing wrong with that. All right, folks. Thank you so much for being here, Susie and Marissa, and like for giving us such amazing hot takes and ideas. Like it was really lovely having you. And I hope that we will have you on the podcast many, many times again in the future. Thank you. And and also like congratulations to Susie. I know you just had congratulations. Like, really from the bottom of my heart, congratulations. I know this is like your first big release, and it's a really, really, really big deal because I know you're getting trad published and you've been waiting for this day. So congrats. Thank you.

SPEAKER_00 59:39

We can still be there in July.

SPEAKER_01 59:41

So we're honored to have you here. We're honored to have you in our in our anthologies, and we really appreciate your ongoing support with us. We we love that. And Marissa, oh my gosh, thank you so much for being here and for writing with me. You are truly the best, like a wonderful beta reader. We are Tender and Tempting Tales. You can find us on Instagram, that's TenderTemptingTales at Instagram. You can find us on Substack, that's Tender and Tempting Tales. We've got weekly articles written by Jenna, by me, and by other guest writers. That's you just subscribe with us and you'll be getting great stuff in your inbox every single week. You'll also get the podcast that goes up there. You can also find the podcast on all your favorite podcast platforms. You can also find us on uh Facebook. We've got a reader group there that you can join. You can hear about all of our ARCs there. We would love we could hear from you on the bottom of this podcast if you want to join our ARC team. It'd be lovely to hear from you. Uh Jenna?

SPEAKER_03 1:00:25

And thank you so much, Susie and Marissa, for joining us. Always have a great time chatting with you. And thank you for all of you who are listening and for taking time to listen to all us chat about bookish romance things. And until next time, peace, love, and happily ever after.