First Cup of Coffee with Jeffe Kennedy
First Cup of Coffee with Jeffe Kennedy
First Cup of Coffee - July 12, 2021
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A special celebrity interview today with fab author and great friend, Minerva Spencer! We talk about historical romance, why there's so much set in the Regency Period, gender flipping, and Scotland as the original Las Vegas.
You can find OUTRAGEOUS here (http://minervaspencer.com/minervas-upcoming-releases/).
You can watch this podcast on YouTube here (https://youtu.be/ANIxpg7Y3x4).
First Cup of Coffee is part of the Frolic Podcast Network. You can find more outstanding podcasts to subscribe to at Frolic.media/podcasts!
Good morning, everyone. This is Jeffy Kennedy, author of Fantasy Romance, and Romantic Fantasy. I'm here with my first cup of coffee. And I am here with a special celebrity guest, my good friend Minerva Spencer. Good morning, Minerva. Good morning, Jeffy.
SPEAKER_01And here's my cup of coffee. Beautiful. I like how you march it across the street. This is actually my special writing mug. I use this every morning and hand wash it every every day after I'm done writing. So I don't let anybody touch the special, the special writing mug. It's beautiful. Do you have a special writing mug? Is that your writing mug?
SPEAKER_00I I I have a number of them. I I rotate through and I put them in the dishwasher because I am not really so exacting as you are.
SPEAKER_01I'm afraid what will happen if this breaks. I mean I'd have to glue it together back together, obviously, but yeah, I'm afraid of the impact on my writing.
SPEAKER_00I I know what you mean. Like you get uh these sort of lucky totems and then you freak out if you lose them or something happens to them. So very important, what is in the cup? Because we are first cup of coffee.
SPEAKER_01It is a uh uh double oat milk latte, meaning two shots of of uh coffee, so espresso.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I'm I'm having a latte also, but it is cow milk. So but I know you're a vegan and you don't approve of my cow milky ways. But you're allowed to have your cow milk. And it's from Happy Cows. I mean, it's it's organic milk from happy cows.
SPEAKER_01My best friend from high school is actually an organic dairy farmer, believe it or not. And they also raise uh free-range beef. So I'm a live and let live type of attitude, vegan.
SPEAKER_00Which is the best way to be. There's like, I don't know, like a whole Reddit for uh militant vegans who ruin people's lives.
SPEAKER_01Well, I respect them for their devotion to the cause. I guess I'm probably a lazy vegan in that respect.
SPEAKER_00Well, we put our energy where it needs to be, right? That's right. So you are up in northern New Mexico in your beautiful gothic hacienda.
SPEAKER_01Uh here's a there's a shot of one ceiling. I have these really cool ceilings. If you're not from the um Southwest, you maybe haven't seen they're called vegas, large uh so we killed trees to make our our ceilings. So I'm a vegan, but not a not not an arborine, I guess.
SPEAKER_00What what is it? Uh the the person who's like in Nottinghill, there's the gal who like doesn't eat vegetables. They don't she won't eat anything that hasn't died on its own because otherwise it's murder. It's like uh I've had that thought before.
SPEAKER_01I'm like, I didn't do trees feel but then I'd cut it off really fast, or I'd be sitting here eating dirt.
SPEAKER_00So you are a among many things. You have had many incarnations, various careers in your life, but now you are writing historical romance, like pretty much regency romance, right?
SPEAKER_01Uh yes. I think so. I guess the last book in this current series, the one that uh I think you just read outrageous, the very last book in that series is set in the early early Victorian, very early Victorian.
SPEAKER_00So oh, okay. And it's yeah, it shows you what I know. I'm like, uh Regency Victorian were the umpire.
SPEAKER_01People tend to call that first part of the uh 19th century the Regency, when in reality it's only an 11-year period when uh the prince regent was in charge before he became king and um his his father George III. There was a period of time there you may have heard that George III went crazy. And uh heard rumors about that, mostly because I saw right? That's you saw what? I was gonna say Hamilton. Oh, Hamilton. Oh, is that referenced in Hamilton?
SPEAKER_00Yes, yeah. Okay, yeah.
SPEAKER_01So anyway, that's but people tend to think of it as anytime between, I don't know, probably 1780 and 1820. So technically it's 1811 to 1821. Now I can't even remember. Anyway, a short period of time. Um, but uh for some reason, I guess probably Georgette Hayer is responsible for it capturing uh modern imagination so much.
SPEAKER_00That that was going to be my question, is because sometimes it feels to me, and and historical romance was my gateway drug to romance, I think, as it was for many of us. Uh but it sometimes it feels like 90% of historical romances are set in this 11-year regency period, right?
SPEAKER_01They are, and that's uh one of the good things about I'd say the last 10 years and with the explosion of self-publishing is that you get romances set in the Viking era, um, medieval, just a lot, a whole lot more range uh than I think, gosh, for years. I mean, that's uh I suppose Victoria Holt, who wrote the early Gothics, wrote in the uh late 19th. But otherwise, yeah, it was pretty much regency. Um and so do do you blame Georgette Hare for that? Yeah, probably her. Although, you know, I guess she was uh riffing off of the Jane Austen, you know, the the ultimate Regency romance writer. But um yeah, I think that uh it's funny because as I at first I took everything Georgette Hare wrote as kind of, oh well, she's did a lot of research, therefore it must be true. And the more I've uh kind of checked up on her research, the more I realize, well, actually, a lot of the, especially a lot of the dialogue, the witty dialogue, which sounds suspiciously like Nick and Nora movies, is because it's from the 30s and 40s. So uh the history is accurate, but I think a lot of the jargon, uh and certainly the slang is not necessarily from the Regency.
SPEAKER_00Oh, I'm I'm very disappointed in Georgette now. If I didn't think he was such a brilliant writer, but I mean it makes sense. But in some ways, you can't do the actual language of, I mean, like I know you're a stickler for um for historical accuracy. You've like you've been a lawyer before and all of these things, right? So I mean you you know about getting things right, but you don't try to replicate the exact dialogue of the period, right? Because of the miserable.
SPEAKER_01It's at first I did. I thought, oh, that's that's what I'm supposed to do, is you know, write it like an early 19th century person would expect to read. And then I realized that I lost half of the audience, you know, immediately. So um, but uh, you know, I it's funny that you asked that because I just read a book. Gosh, and I have such a terrible memory for book titles, ironically enough, but it's I'm researching for my next book, which is called The Boxing Baroness, and I'm I'm kind of at that point now where I've like read that story early on.
SPEAKER_00Oh, really? Didn't yeah, you gave it to me like an early version of Boxing Baroness, right? That's right. I thought you meant you read it somewhere else.
SPEAKER_01I'm like, oh no, my idea. No, you were my yeah, you were my earliest, you might have been my first reader for that for the first three chapters. Um as I'm researching uh boxing, women's boxing, which was a thing, uh as long as men's boxing has been a thing, really, I realized that the reality of it is not anything that any romance reader would ever want to read about. I mean, it is a it was mainly a sideshow act, and and it was brutal. They would have women fighting with men, fighting with dogs. I mean, it was you know the usual kind of blood sport activity of the early 19th and late 18th century. And it's it's kind of interesting because I'm thinking, well, I want to depict what the struggles these women went through, but you know, that's that's just too grim, I think. So anyway, yeah, my my boxing very necessary gonna have. I'm sorry.
SPEAKER_00Struggles are not sexy, exactly.
SPEAKER_01So sometimes you have to make that executive decision about uh how much history you're gonna include in your historical romance, and I'm sure Georgia did too.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah. So so that's a good segue into your new book that's just out. Um, Outrageous. Yes. And show us the cover.
SPEAKER_01I have to sneak off and grab it since I moved locations. Can you hum something entertaining?
SPEAKER_00Okay. We had to have her move because her Wi-Fi in the other spot wasn't good. So we had uh a restart here. So we had this on like perfectly.
SPEAKER_01Isn't that wasn't that one of the things during the last year? People would be naked and then forget and get up and get up and you see their underwear.
SPEAKER_00Okay, so that oh, there we go. Outrageous. And and it's great because we've got the carriage on there, because this is uh a Gretna Green running away to the Scottish border to get married uh romance, which is a um a staple of many Regency historicals. But you did a couple things with this one. Um you gender flipped it, but you also did a lot of um like research into the legalities of it, right?
SPEAKER_01Uh yes. In fact, I got in touch with a woman from uh the Scottish border who I of course I can't remember the name of their organization, but it's basically a historical trust for the border area. And it's from Coldstream, Scotland. So everybody thinks of Gretna Green, but anywhere along the border would do. Anywhere in Scotland would do, obviously, for these kind of shotgun weddings.
SPEAKER_00And um knew if like shot if if Gretna Green was like a town or a chapel or what.
SPEAKER_01I mean, I like it's just a little town that kind of grew up around the industry of providing these marriages and um sorry, like Las Vegas, right? Exactly, it is, it's exactly and and it's funny that you know their their kind of motivation for doing that is completely the opposite of Las Vegas. I mean, they're very much trying to promote weddings, right? You know, just getting married and you know, being godly and whatever. I I'm not I guess Vegas would be about money, right? But uh anyway, yeah, so that was a lot of fun, and having her kidnap him was uh for that character who I've referenced on and off since my very first book, Dangerous. It's the two series there's six books total, and they all are interconnected to various degrees. And so she was mentioned in the very first book, and she's kind of problematic, and so it was something that she would have done, I think. Why is she problematic? Um, her father kept her and her two sisters at home, didn't socialize them until she was 16 because uh her birth mother was mentally insane, so it was kind of like keep keep your family hush-hush because I mean everybody knew, and back then, of course, the attitudes toward mental illness were extremely harsh to the point where most people would get locked up or you know, just tucked away. So and in the course of my research, I found that again, another grim statistic that women were the majority of people who were lobotomized, and that kept went on until the early 1980s. So it's just amazing. I mean, just amazing.
SPEAKER_00Well, I guess um you don't you don't need a brain to spread your legs, right? You know, that's the pretty much.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah, it's I mean, I I was just stunned by I knew that it would be disproportionately female, but I didn't expect that that it would be so many women. So um, you know, and that that was a really kind of delicate issue to communicate, the mental health issue, because and I did I try to I tried to be as realistic as I can in some ways, but obviously, you know, the modern reader wouldn't want to read how these women were really treated. So it it was a balancing act. I wanted to show how much prejudice she'd faced, but then I didn't want to enrage the reader with uh probably how graphic and cruel it would have really been. So right, again, with the not sexy. Yeah, yeah, for sure. But I I did kind of isolate her so that her decision making was um, you know, she makes her own decisions based on her world and her experience, which has been limited. And as I was discussing with some of my beta readers, like, well, she's so immature, she's such a brat. And it's like, well, look at her life, you know. I mean, it she she wasn't socialized to interact, she's kind of catapulted out of her home at 16 and into society, and uh yeah, she's she's got some issues, but I think I think I gradually mature her as much as I think the character uh really needs to mature, and also I mean I I'm immature myself, so I I appreciate aren't we all? Yeah, the inner child. So uh yeah. Um and and it was fun too to have the prior the hero being the villain from the prior book, so that that was an interesting exercise that I've seen other authors do many times and haven't hadn't done before. And uh turned out to be fun. Because I wasn't in his point of view the last time, and I had to be this time.
SPEAKER_00Right. And and is that why you decided to to gender flip it from the usual the hero kidnapping the heroine, or yeah, and actually he he had she stole the idea from him because he was planning some vengeance and had kidnapping on his mind.
SPEAKER_01So she kind of did what she did, as outrageous as it outrageous as it is, to hold up the book title when you do that, but outrageous. She did it to stop him from doing a similar act. So, you know, it was it was just, I would say. Uh she picked the right the right weapon. Well not wisely, as it turned out, because she thought she could get away with, you know, she could get her way. But uh turns out he's he's got some he's got some surprises for her.
SPEAKER_00That sounds like the good voiceover.
SPEAKER_01She thought she could get away with it, but I didn't want to like I realized, oh man, I'm I'm about to give spoilers. So Yeah, I know.
SPEAKER_00Sometimes you have to like haul those things back. Oh, but wait. Uh I my listeners get annoyed with me all the time because I'm always like referring to secret things or redacting stuff, you know, and it's like, oh wait.
SPEAKER_01It's so hard to remember what what's out there and what's in your head. And then all the I think of all the stuff we cut, right? I mean, all the characters and interactions you cut, and then you think that they're still floating around out there. It's uh right.
SPEAKER_00And it's like, oh no, I never put that in the book.
SPEAKER_01Do you do you outline? I can't remember if you're a pantzer or a plotter. I'm a total panzer. Okay. So me too. So we both understand that uh those things just happen, right? These characters hijack stories, and sometimes it's a shame, right? You love them, but they don't fit into the story. Yeah, yeah, and that's like, no, I'm sorry, gotta go.
SPEAKER_00Yes. So so what was it like trying to turn the villain into the hero? Well, you said you hadn't done that before.
SPEAKER_01Well, I hadn't. And then also because she's been her reputation is that her mother was crazy and that she's probably crazy, and nobody, you know, she's she's got a she's a wealthy young woman and she's also very beautiful. So those two things are, you know, attractive to suitors, but then there's the insanity gene. And back then, you know, they they didn't insanity could come from a knock on the head, or it could be something you were born with, but they they didn't make any distinction. They just thought it was probably gonna be passed down to the child. So she's damaged good.
SPEAKER_00Just because you had this miserable life where you never got to do anything or have a voice of your own.
SPEAKER_01I mean, yeah, yeah. So they'd want her for the money, right? Uh, but they'd like to she's pretty wise to that about what will happen to her. So um, and anyway, I thought, well, the hero's got his own problems, his problems have brought on he has PTSD, which of course is something that you know they didn't recognize back then. Um, from being he's been in the Napoleonic Wars for I think it was 15 years. So, and his family was killed while coming to visit him in a in a hospital. And uh, so he's he's kind of off his rocker when he's doing these crazy things that that she decides to stop him doing. So I think they both kind of meet on that uh common ground in that sense. Um but yeah, it was it was tricky because he did some he didn't said some horrible things in the other book, but in which other book?
SPEAKER_00In Notorious.
SPEAKER_01Notorious, yes. So this is where you first meet um both Godric and meet Eva in earlier books, but you meet them in in there, and in fact, actually, when I was writing Notorious, I had written several chapters from Eva's point of view, where she's plotting the subduction, and that was a lot of fun. But my beta reader said you need to take that out and save it as a as a surprise. So there's more chapters lying around, unused, unloved.
SPEAKER_00But you could put them in in like your newsletter or something like that.
SPEAKER_01I should do that, and and people always say that use your cut work. And uh I was discussing with the Sherry Thomas once, we were both writing, and she said, My cut file has now become larger than my work in progress file. I'm like, when is it not? So it's like this tangled mess that I keep. But every time I think about going through it and cutting some stuff out to share in a newsletter, it's like, oh, really, this is too much mess.
SPEAKER_00Do you have do you have a large cut file? I I have a large, I call it outtakes, but yeah, I have I I keep one for each book, so I don't have like one massive one. I I do it for each book. But I I have the same problem because it's like there's a reason I deleted it, and so the I I don't want to I I don't show them very often, and and I do get that, you know, people are like, oh well, maybe you could share that with us in the newsletter or something like that. And I'm like, oh, maybe.
SPEAKER_01But it's uh edit it, proofread it. Sounds like work to me.
SPEAKER_00So well, speaking of work, can you tell us about your beautiful sparkly glasses?
SPEAKER_01Oh, yes, I would love to. These are as uh I was discussing my tight-fistedness as we were chatting before your show. I really wanted a pair of glasses like this, but they were $40 for reading glasses. So I decided that was too much. So I bought a pair of, I think these are seven bucks, and and then I got a deal on rhinestones. It was like 4,000 rhinestones for $20. So if you have anything you need rhinestone encrusted, I'm here for you, Jeffy. Um so here is what they look like, and they're so tiny. I think they were made, I think they were made for fingernails, they came from like a cosmetic distributor. Right. So I had to handle them with tweezers and use other reading glasses to be able to see while I did them, and it took me like probably five days of not constant work, obviously. But I I would come back to them after my eyes could see again. But yeah. So maybe the $40 wouldn't have been a bad idea after all.
SPEAKER_00Well, one thing I talk about on the podcast a whole lot is you know, coming up with that balance between time versus money, you know, and at what point is it more cost effective to pay someone else to do the thing as opposed to how much your time is worth. But but you're very much uh you're a very crafty person. You do a whole lot of things on your own.
SPEAKER_01Well, I I think I think better if I my hands are busy. So um usually when I get frustrated with writing, I'll just do something and and that'll kind of shake my brain loose. But uh not as much as I used to. You and I were doing some sewing there before the pandemic. I think we were both really hitting it pretty hard, and then I don't know, have you sewed anything?
SPEAKER_00That you know, that gown that you were going to help me with right before the pandemic, it's like all cut out, and it's just the pieces are in a pile now that we can see each other again, and it's been almost two years. You realize that in September it'll be two years since we've seen each other in the flesh. That's true, because that was uh the new we went to saw each other in New York and then came to Santa Fe for the launch party of Orchid Throne.
SPEAKER_01That's right. God, has it been that long? That's amazing. It's been that long.
SPEAKER_00I gave you a present of it because I bought you that present in Dublin at WorldCon and I forgot to bring it to that party, and I've had it sitting here waiting until I like see you again someday.
SPEAKER_01There's a present waiting for me.
SPEAKER_00I mean, I guess I could have mailed it, but you know, it's like no, no, that's good.
SPEAKER_01We'll we'll I'll come collect my present and we'll have margaritas.
SPEAKER_00Or or I'll come up and you can have this dress for me while I pretend like I'm helping. There we go.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, anytime.
SPEAKER_00That'll be fun. Well, so so show us the whole series.
SPEAKER_01Okay, let's see. There's so that's notorious and outrageous. And then I have an early copy of Infamous, which is the last book in the series. And uh this one doesn't come out until September 28th. So it's okay coming up. These these three books came out within a year, uh, which has been an unusual experience. I feel like I never leave the promotion stage. Um, it started last November and it's been going for so November one launched, June one launch, and now September.
SPEAKER_00Well, I'll go ahead and do my sign-off. I'll see if I can get her back for a sign-off. But uh, I'll remind you all that first cup of coffee is part of the Frolic Media Podcast Network, and you can find more podcasts that you'll love at frolic.media slash podcasts. And check out Outrageous by Minerva. And I hope you all enjoyed the conversation with her today. You all take care. Bye bye.