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First Draft Episode #320: Sarah MacLean
August 26, 2021
Sarah MacLean, New York Times bestselling author of romance novels, including Nine Rules to Break When Romancing a Rake, A Rogue By Any Other Name, and many more, talks about Bombshell, the first book in her new Hell’s Belles series. Sarah also co-hosts the Fated Mates romance podcast.
Welcome to First Draft with me, Sarah Enni. This week I'm talking to Sarah McLean, New York Times bestselling author of romance novels, including Nine Rules to Break When Romancing a Rake, A Rogue by Any Other Name and many, many more. She's also the co-host of the Fated Mates romance podcast and Sarah is joining us today to talk about Bombshell, the first book in her new Hell's Bells series.
I had such a blast talking to Sarah and I love what she had to say about the early 'no' that set her back for a minute and the ways in which she overcame that and, in fact, possibly built her entire career in spite of it. Her history degrees, and not in the kind of history you might expect, on keeping an id list for inspiration, and her advice for people who are setting out to write historical fiction.
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Okay. Now please sit back, relax and enjoy my conversation with Sarah MacLean.
Sarah Enni: So hi, Sarah, how are you this morning?
Sarah MacLean: Hi, I'm so excited. I'm really thrilled. Thank you for having me.
Sarah Enni: I am so excited to have you. You are the first just straight up romance author that I've been able to talk to you for this show so I have a ton of questions about your work. And I'm so interested to get a little behind-the-scenes about how publishing in that genre works, in that category, cause I know it's a little unique.
Sarah Enni: But before we get into all of that wonderful writing business talk, I would love to learn more about you. And I like to go all the way back to the beginning. I'd love to hear about where you were born and raised.
Sarah MacLean: I was and raised in Lincoln, Rhode Island, which is a little town north of Providence on the Massachusetts border. Rhode Island is very small. So... Rhode Island.
Sarah Enni: I'd love to hear about how reading and writing was a part of growing up for you.
Sarah MacLean: I have always read. I mean, I was a bookworm as a kid and I have an older sister who's about 10 years older than me and she was a huge romance reader. And those of you who are listening who are romance readers might remember that back in the day, Harlequin produced these monthly book kits. Like you could subscribe and it was a book-of-the-month club, but just for Harlequins, just for the particular line of Harlequin romance that you liked to read.
And my sister was a subscriber. And it would come, four or five books in a box with like a commemorative plate or something, some item that also came with it, usually like a glass that had etching on it. And she would read the books and then shove them under her bed. And we shared a room so when she went off to college, I was young and found this treasure trove of books under her bed. And I started reading romance when I was really, really young, I mean, 10 or 11. And then just as soon as I read the first one, I just was off to the races.
Sarah Enni: Was that the first time that you were reading substantially or had you been reading other stuff before that took off?
Sarah MacLean: I was a huge reader beforehand. I'm like the Babysitters Club, Sweet Valley High generation. And so I really feel like those primed me for romance in some ways. Because there was one every month, you could tear through them, there was a big summer special [laughs]. You know, those Babysitters Clubs summers specials? And Sweet Valley High too. I was just gobbling them up.
And hundreds of those books were in my house. That was the beginning of genre for me. I knew the structure of the book. I knew how it would go. I knew the beats of the story. And those books really, I think, to so many of us who write now in genre or in YA, or even middle-grade, cut our teeth on those really big series, which of course existed before that, right?
I also read Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys and Encyclopedia Brown. Basically, if there was a character who I could follow, or a series of books where the structure of the book was the same every time, that was what I wanted.
And you're actually making me realize it was just imprinted from birth. I was destined to write genre. There's something really relaxing and fun about it. My big thing about the way the world looks at literature, in general, is that it's really topsy-turvy the way most people think about books.
I feel like a lot of people feel like reading should be work. Reading should be a thing that we devote ourselves to in some sort of puritanical way, or like it's for the betterment of ourselves. And it is for the betterment of ourselves, but it should be fun. Life is too short for bad books, or boring books, or excruciatingly long books, you know?
I say all the time that if it takes you longer than six hours to read one of my books, I've done something wrong. I want you to tear through it, I want it to feel really fun and like you can't put it down. And I think that's good for us too.
Sarah Enni: I totally agree. And I think it's wild, even the number of writers that I've talked to, how many of them fell away from reading in high school? Because it became literally homework.
Sarah MacLean: A burden. It's burdensome, high school, college, all that. For me, I had romance. And I was taught by those books, by romance novels, that you should be able to read them in a sitting. And so I didn't fall away in high school or in college from reading because I would read The Scarlet Letter for the sixth time and then stop midway through and read a romance novel.
Sarah Enni: Because it's more fun!
Sarah MacLean: It's always been natural for me to read a romance novel when I wanted to do something fun. So I never had to get permission for romance, which is good.
Sarah Enni: That is good. I love that. And having an older sister get into them, then I imagine with an older sister you're like, "I just want to do what she's doing." And then you just use it as a template.
Sarah MacLean: And when you're a bookworm at nine or 10, you'll read whatever's around. Right?
Sarah Enni: I think I went to my reading above the level, I think was right into Anne Rice (author of Interview With the Vampire and The Vampire Lestat) and Stephen King and all that stuff.
Sarah MacLean: Sure. And now I have a seven-year-old and she is also a bookworm, which is amazing. Because I know that doesn't always pass down, but it has passed down in this particular case. And she's just now tearing through these middle-grade series and she'll get a book, read it within like an hour, and then be like, "I need the next one. I need the next one."
And I said to my husband the other day, "We gotta get this kid reading romance cause I can't afford two separate libraries." I will take her into my romance collection and say, "Here is your inheritance."
[Both laughing]
Sarah Enni: Oh my gosh! Well, I do want to ask about writing. So obviously you were a voracious reader, but when did creative expression in the form of writing happen for you?
Sarah MacLean: I've always journaled, or when I was younger I journaled a lot in middle and high school and I certainly always had the bug. When I was in high school, I did this project at some point. And it was sort of a 'get to know you' project at the beginning of the year. And one of the questions was, "What's your dream job?" And it says 'romance novelist' on it and it's still hanging in my childhood bedroom.
And so I think I always wanted it, but I never believed that people actually had this job. I still feel that way. I can't believe I have this job. So I was not an English major. I didn't do creative writing in college. It just never occurred to me that this could be a legitimate career.
So I went to college and I did whatever I did in college. And then when I graduated, I moved to New York City and I worked in publishing. I worked for a small boutique PR firm that worked with particular authors with a particular personality [chuckles].
Sarah Enni: What does that mean?
Sarah MacLean: That's my kind way of saying, well, you've interviewed a lot of authors, we all have particular personalities. But I worked for a PR firm that basically managed what we called 'hard-to-handle' authors.
Sarah Enni: Interesting.
Sarah MacLean: The stories I could tell you over wine! And it's actually really interesting cause now, every once in a while, I bump up against an old client and they're always like, "Oh, it's you." If they remember me at all. So I did that for a while.
And then while that was happening, publishing is a really small world. You meet a lot of people. You end up being friends with people who are editors, people who are agents, people who are in the world. And your whole friend universe becomes publishing people.
And right around that time, it was like that sort of turning point of YA. It felt like YA was going to be a big thing, you know? Twilight was happening and it just felt like, "Oh my God, there's so much money in the hill. Everyone is looking for YA novels."
I was out for drinks with friends and I was like, "I feel like I could write one of these." Like, "I feel like I could do this." And a very good friend was like, "Well, I dare you." And I was just drunk enough that it sounded like a great idea. And I went home and I wrote the first chapter of my first book, which was a YA romance, historical YA.
Sarah MacLean: I was reading all romance, but I was reading historical romance voraciously. And so I was like, "Well, if I'm gonna write something, I'm gonna write a kissing book." So I wrote a historical YA and it sold very quickly and I felt really lucky.
And prior to that I took a romance writing class online. It's hard to even believe that it was online because it was so early... I don't even know the formatting of it. And I tried to write a contemporary for that class. I wrote a hundred pages of a contemporary, and I'm gonna tell this story cause I always think it's helpful for people who are trying to get found, they're working toward publishing.
I wrote a hundred pages and I was really excited about it. And it would have been, had I finished it, it would have ended up being a category length romance novel. So the small, for those of you don't understand romance, like the small Harlequin book, the narrow one. It's about 250 pages, between 50 and 60,000 words. And so, it would have been that.
And in the first chapter, the hero is drunk. The heroine owns a bar and the hero is drunk. And I turned it in to this person who is kind of a well-known romance novelist, she's been around for a long time, and she was teaching this class. And she turned it back around to me. And she had only read like the first two pages. And she was like, "This would never get published. The hero can't start the book drunk." And she didn't read any of the rest of it.
And I was really disappointed and disillusioned. I no longer have that manuscript. I don't know what happened to it. I'm disappointed in that too. And so I just sort of told myself like, "Writing wasn't for me." I heard 'no' one time. I mean, now I know like, "Thicker skin necessary."
But now I think about that, that lives like rent-free in my head, that moment. And since then I've written multiple heroes drunk on the first page, just to prove like, "Hey, I can do it, in fact." Don't let anybody tell you what you can and cannot do.
Sarah Enni: I love that. I mean, I really appreciate you sharing that story cause I do think it's helpful for people to hear that. And I have talked to many people that have had instances like that of being in a position really early on, I mean, truly... I can't even imagine, in that role, this person teaching the class - not to vilify them - but truly, your role is just to encourage a young writer to get something out. And that feels so counter to it. It's tough. The early discouragements are really tough. I'm glad you got over it.
Sarah MacLean: That was a really rough one. Now that you've asked about those early things. There was also a creative writing class, I went to Smith for undergrad, and there was a creative writing class there. And you had to essentially write into it. Meaning, you had to turn in a writing sample in order to take the class. And I turned in a couple of chapters of a romance novel. There was never a question that I was gonna write something other than romance.
Turned in a few chapters of a historical romance novel. And his response was, "No, you can't join the class." Like, "This is derivative schlock." Or whatever it was. And that's another one where every once in a while I see his name dance by like on a Smith College email and I'm like, "God, I'd really like to email that guy and be like, 'Hey, I did okay with my derivative schlock.'"
Sarah Enni: Also, "Screw you!"
Sarah MacLean: I do think romance, particularly, although YA I know gets this to a certain extent and all genre struggles. But romance really struggles with this perception of like romance isn't valuable as a genre. And so like, "Get out of my class, get out of our pool. You can't get sold in our bookstore." We're often kind of shunted to the side as a less than valuable genre.
Sarah Enni: I mean, unfortunately, I think you're right. I know you have thoughts on this and why that is. So I want to get to that in a minute. Actually, I do want to take this opportunity, early in the interview, just for the listeners who might not understand what the parameters are when we're talking about a romance book.
Sarah MacLean: There are hard and fast rules.
Sarah Enni: Do you mind explaining that for us?
Sarah MacLean: Sure. There's only two rules. One is that, the relationship between the main characters has to be the primary plot. And two is that they absolutely have to have a happily-ever-after. If they do not end up together, it is not a romance novel it is something else. It's commercial fiction or a love story, but it's not a romance novel.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. That's important to know.
Sarah MacLean: And there are lots of other genres that have romance as a subplot or as a strong B plot. There is a ton of women's fiction that the primary plot is the story of the heroine, in her life, finding herself, finding her joy, finding her future, taking control, and also she falls in love along the way. That is not romance that's women's fiction with strong a romantic element. We're very firm in our rules. It has to be the A plot. And it has to be a happily-ever-after.
Sarah Enni: Yes. Before we get too far in, cause I do want to talk about The Season and your first book and kind of transitioning to adult romance, but I read that have a history degree as well.
Sarah MacLean: I do. I'm a history major from Smith and I actually have a graduate degree from Harvard in cultural anthropology.
Sarah Enni: That's amazing. What was your specific focus?
Sarah MacLean: Well, it'll probably be a little bit of a surprise. I was an American studies major, and my focus was post-Vietnam.
Sarah Enni: Really?
Sarah MacLean: Yes, the post-war years after Vietnam. Now, in hindsight, it's actually not that surprising in that the kind of heyday of contemporary romance novels, or rather when contemporary romance really rocketed to success and was a powerhouse in the industry, it was being written by a lot of women whose partners were either home from the war, or who had then married men, largely men, who had been serving in Vietnam.
Vietnam obviously has left an enormous scar on two whole generations of Americans. And you could argue more generations of American people. Contemporary romance is, all romance, is really political, right? It's a domestic genre it's largely written by and for women.
And because it's so domestic, because it's so internal - it's all about internal emotions - it ends up really holding a mirror to society. So even now I write historical, but I'm writing about 2021 with the wrapping of the 19th century. And romance has always been that way. And contemporary romance really post-war, was about this kind of push-pull of how do you make, in many cases, like men feel their feelings? Cause patriarchy is a hell of a drug, right?
Patriarchy is incredibly destructive to everyone who is marginalized, including white women who were married to men post-war. And I think that though the genre certainly struggles with diversity, just like all publishing struggles with diversity. In this case, post-war, a lot of women were writing their feelings and then finding their own relationships, their relationships with their husbands, with their fathers, with their brothers, they were seeing that kind of PTSD, untreated, super-alpha, hyper-masculinity, being unpacked on the page in these texts. So maybe it's not a surprise that I was fascinated by post-war America.
Sarah Enni: That's so interesting because what you're saying, I just want to be clear, is post-Vietnam America, which is we're talking like what, mid to late seventies?
Sarah MacLean: I was particularly interested in gender and how the war was impacting women on the home front, families on the home front. And then when men were coming back from war and they weren't being hailed as heroes cause it was a messy war you know? It wasn't heroic, it wasn't like, "And we're saving our allies." It was just a weird, messy thing that was happening. So they were coming home and they weren't being hailed as heroes, and they weren't being supported by the government, and they weren't getting mental health services.
And they had seen horrors because war is horrific and they're coming back into their families and they were just shells of who they were. And certainly for many, many years, romance has been about unpacking patriarchy, unpacking misogyny, unpacking gender construct in America. And sort of breaking it down and then rebuilding it so that there is parody and partnership and hope and love and all the things that romance promises at the end. Which isn't a promise in real life.
Sarah Enni: Hence that being a rule. I think that's the important thing, or was for me, to understand like, "Oh, there's a reason." Romance books can do the work they do because of the promise at the end. And that gives people the solace in their day-to-day life to say like, "I can bravely go with this author where she's going because I understand where we're going to end up at the end." And that gives you a little bit more freedom in the middle.
Sarah MacLean: And it has always tackled these kind of huge issues, right? Romances is a genre that has put assault on the page, it puts trauma on the page, regularly. Trauma that women experience regularly. The reason why they call them bodice rippers is because in the early days of the genre, heroes were assaulting heroines at the beginning of the book. And then by the end they were redeemed and married and in love and partnered.
And looking back through the lens of 2021, you're like, "That's problematic and not great." But in 1972, there was no such thing as marital rape. Wives couldn't be raped by their husbands, right? Legally. So the idea that that would be put on the page, and addressed on the page, and named on the page, and unpacked on the page was a really transformative thing. And these heroines didn't die. They didn't die. They weren't left miserable. They found happiness and they broke down a monstrous hero into a hero who could feel feelings.
Sarah Enni: Wow. Yeah, when you put it that way, I'm like, "Yes!"
Sarah MacLean: I mean, it makes sense in 1972. Now, it makes less sense. Although, that still exists in parts of the genre. And I have lots of feelings about why and how, and maybe we'll get into it. Maybe not. You should listen to my podcast.
Sarah Enni: Yes, you definitely talk about this on the Fated Mates.
Sarah MacLean: If this caught your interest, come and listen to Fated Mates and we talk about it on the regular.
Sarah Enni: The Season, I think, is the YA book that you first published.
Sarah MacLean: Yes, that was my first book.
Sarah Enni: Can you talk about what that debut experience was like? And then what made you decide to move on to, I'm pretty sure, Nine Rules to Break When Romancing a Rake was your debut adult.
Sarah MacLean: Correct, Yeah, that was the first adult.
Sarah Enni: Can you lead us to that?
Sarah MacLean: The Season was YA because, like I said, I had a lot of friends and YA was like the hot genre, it was 2008 maybe. And it just felt like if you were gonna write something and you were gonna be a superstar, it was gonna be YA. And so I wrote a historical YA called The Season. I came out in March of 2009. Actually, it was probably earlier. 2007 is when I probably wrote it.
It came out in 2009. The experience was really wild. It was right when it felt like YA was... that was all there was. All anybody wanted to talk about was Twilight. People were writing fantasy series and making hundreds of thousands of dollars a book. It just felt like money was just everywhere in publishing, not in historical YA unfortunately, but in fantasy it was a big, big time for paranormal YA.
And it was also the beginning of this time where people were connecting on the internet. Now, you probably know about these debut class years in YA. And they all get together online and they have a community of people who knowledge share. We were doing that on Live Journal. We were one of the first years where a group of debut authors were coming together on Live Journal.
So I came out with Sarah Rees Brennan (author of Unspoken, The Demon’s Lexicon, and In Other Lands and more), and Carrie Ryan (author of The Forest of Hands and Teeth, Daughters of Deep Silence, and more), and Aprilynne Pike (author of Wings, Glitter, and more), and others who you've heard of.
It was great. It felt like, "Oh my God, we're all on the precipice of something huge." And I signed a bad contract, essentially. Which I'm actually very grateful for because I was not destined to be a YA writer. I was destined to be an adult romance writer. I've never looked back.
But I signed a bad contract and it was one of those things where, in the moment, I was miserable and now I'm like, "Oh, thank God that happened." I signed for one book and there was an option for a second book. And the publisher was dragging their feet, dragging their feet. It was very clear that if I tried to write a second YA, I wouldn't be able to sell it anywhere else.
I had come up through romance. So I knew I was writing a series. I had three best friends in this book, and the concept was that each one would get their book in the series. And you can really see both my influence from romance, and ultimately where I would end up going in that series.
But they only bought one and they basically were like, "Too bad, Sarah. We own you in YA. You can't do anything else."
Sarah Enni: Wow.
Sarah MacLean: So I was like, "Fine, I'm gonna go write sex then [laughs]. Bye!" And so I went and I banged out Nine Rules. It was fast. I mean, I banged out The Season too, because I wanted to prove I could do it. You've probably noticed now, by all the stories, that if you tell me 'no', I'm definitely gonna do it. So, I banged out The Season to prove I could do it.
And then as soon as my publisher was like, "You can't write another YA for anybody." I was like, "Well then fine." And I went off and I wrote Nine Rules really fast. And I basically opened a vein. I was very much like, "What are all the things I love about a romance novel? What are all the tropes I love? What are all the plot points I love?"
I don't know if anybody on your podcast has ever talked to you about Dr. Jennifer Lynn Barnes (professor studying fiction and the brain, and also author of The Inheritance Games, The Naturals, Little White Lies and more) in Oklahoma?
Sarah Enni: No, I don't think so.
Sarah MacLean: She's a professor at one of the universities in Oklahoma and she studies fiction and the brain. And she has this theory of like, there are these universal pleasure centers. She has six universal id things where if you put them into a book, or a piece of fiction, they'll push buttons for almost everyone. Universal, in sort of air quotes, obviously. It's most people, not the whole world.
But it's like beauty, power, wealth, sex, competition, all the things that when you hear the list, you're like, "Oh yeah, those are things that I just really love." But she has this really great theory which is, in writing successful commercial fiction, you also need to be sort of pushing your own buttons. So make a list.
I've started doing this and I'm gonna share it with you even though it's Dr. Barnes's idea. Her whole thing is like, "When you're reading, or when you're watching television, make a list of anything that just scratches an itch for you, like a primal itch." So for me, I really love it when characters slow walk. They put on sunglasses and they're shot at normal speed, but then it's played like 0.3. I love that so much!
Sarah Enni: Yes, with a song.
Sarah MacLean: Sometimes there's an explosion behind them, but it doesn't even matter. I love that. So that's on my id list. I love it when characters are on rooftops, that's on my id list. I love it when characters have strange colored eyes, that's on my id list. And so I have this long list and anytime I see anything that makes me happy, like I love heroes who have beards, or whatever. I put it on my list.
And then when I'm looking at a document, I'm like, "Well, what can I do?" Like, "Let's send them to the roof." If you like characters who like ice cream, make them go eat ice cream, or whatever the things are. All that is to say that I feel like I learned about that a couple of years ago, but back in 2009, when I was writing Nine Rules, I sort of intuitively knew like, "I'm just gonna write everything I want." The hero's a twin. One of them has a scar. They have strange colored eyes. She's curvy. He plays the piano. It's sort of like a nonsense group. They fence, cause I like fencing in books.
So it ended up sort of packing in like 15 years of romance reading into a book that ended up being my first romance.
Sarah Enni: It feels also, a little bit, like Nine Rules to Break When Romancing a Rake, there's a bit of a promise, even in the title, about a bit of a meta relationship with romance writers. And maybe this is common in the genre, I'm not totally sure, but it feels like you're sort of signaling to readers like, "I'm one of you." So you know what you're gonna get here is gonna be in this world.
Sarah MacLean: I mean, I don't think this is special to romance, but when you read a romance novel by somebody who loves romance, it feels like that. You feel like you're reading an old friend. That title was nonsense. My agent and I came up with it strictly as the subject line for an email, trying to get editors to open it.
And then when Harper bought the book, I remember about a month later I said to my editor, because most of the time you don't get to pick your own title. Marketing picks your title, sales picks your title. And I said, "What's the title gonna be?" And she was like, "What are you talking about? It's gonna be Nine Rules to Break When Romancing a Rake." And I was like, "That's nonsense! It's so long. It rhymes. What are you doing?"
And then, of course, the rest of the series had to be numbered titles that also rhymed. I was like, "What? This is not how it was planned. I made a huge mistake!"
Sarah Enni: That is kind of a big task.
Sarah MacLean: It was sold as a series only because my agent at the time was a YA agent. And so she'd never touched romance. So we were really flying by the seat of our pants by virtue of like, I knew what the book needed to be, but I didn't know publishing in romance. I didn't have any friends who were in romance publishing. Because romance is often, you know, it's on the side always. They're happy to make a ton of money off of romance, but you're not invited to any of the parties.
So I wrote Nine Rules and it went out to publishers and my editor at Harper, who ultimately bid for and won the series, said we want three books. And I said, "But there's only one book." She was like, "No, but there are three books." There's Ralston, who's the main hero. And then his twin brother, cause twins, he obviously gets a book. And then they have a sister, a half-sister. And so she's obviously the third book.
So that first series was the siblings. It was just a family series. I always sell in series now. And so even in that first trilogy, there is a kind of overarching storyline. Their mother is a figure through the whole series who's sort of a mysterious missing figure. And then she turns up in the third book. And I think that was the start of a Sarah MacLean series. There will always be a thing that if you read the whole series in order, you will be rewarded. But it's not quite the same as YA fantasy say where you have to read every book in order or else you're lost.
Sarah Enni: Right.
Sarah MacLean: They're standalone stories and you can read them in any order, at any time. And they definitely stand alone. But my books, if you go in order, there are Easter eggs and fun little treats for you.
Sarah Enni: I love that. I want to talk about your process and I love that you kind of set me up for the selling in a series, I want to talk about that in a second. But first, I was listening to an interview with you where you talked about entering the adult romance space in 2010 and you said, "I came in feeling the wind at my back blowing the door closed." And you said that in reference to self- publishing.
So this is a big question, I know, but I'd love to just hear you characterize for us what has happened in romance since then. And how you are a traditionally published romance author and that's becoming kind of a rarity almost.
Sarah MacLean: I mean, I think, yes. 2010 feels like forever ago, in romance especially, because it was right then that eBooks started. We were all just starting to think about eBooks. To give you a sense, my first contract did not have eBooks in it.
Sarah Enni: Wow, that's wild.
Sarah MacLean: I did not have a digital clause. When I started, Borders still existed. It was a very different landscape. Romance tries everything first. And part of the reason why is because we're pretty nimble and we write really fast. I write incredibly slow and I write a book every 11 months. But many, many of us were writing a book every six months, every four months in some cases.
And traditional publishing, part of the reason why Nora Roberts, for example, has two names is because she was writing so fast that she started writing her in-death series. And her publisher was like, "Well, we can't publish anymore Nora Roberts."
Sarah Enni: Right, you cannibalize, your own sales, in theory.
Sarah MacLean: Sounds totally silly. Like you definitely can publish more Nora Roberts (author of Visions in White, The Next Always, and Year One also publishes as J.D. Robb, author of the In Death series). I think she can handle it. So they put her out as J.D. Robb too. So that there were just two liens for her. Anyway, so we have always written very fast.
So it means that the genre romance tends to shift more quickly than all the other genres. We were the first in the mass market format, we have always been kind of the leading edge. Publishers throw us into the pool and say like, "Well, do they sink or swim?"
Ebooks happen and so many writers who had been sitting on old rights, I mean, books that had gone out of print. Books that they now had access to because again, with romance, everything that we do is sort of short tail, or at the time it was, right? Like my books sell the most in the first month. I think this is true of other genres too, but then they get taken off the shelf. They're just gone.
It's not like a trade paperback that could hang around for a while, or a hardcover that might hang around on the shelf. There's only room for a certain amount of romance novels on the shelf. And after a month they come off the shelf and they are pulped. Like they are just garbage then. So there were many, many, many books that were already out of print. So the rights immediately revert.
Sarah Enni: Just to be clear for people listening who might not understand, you mean it's off the shelf and that they're out of print, no new versions are being printed. And so then, in those cases, the rights revert to the author.
Sarah MacLean: Right, in your contract you will have [chuckles], this basically doesn't happen anymore because of eBooks, but at the time, there was a clause in your contract, there's a number in your contract. And it says, "If fewer than a hundred books get sold in a six month period, the book is considered out of print and the rights will revert to the author." So in my case, Harper Collins would no longer be able to publish my book. I could have it back and then do with it what I wanted.
So what was happening is all these women who had been writing for decades and written literally dozens of books that were now out of print, had them all. And eBooks happened. And it was like, "Oh my God, they could just put up an entire backlist." Barbara Freethy, for example, who's the bestselling-est author ever on Amazon, she had a whole backlist. She had 50 books that she'd written and she just put them all up.
And suddenly people had a new e-reader, they had a Kindle, and they were like, "Well, what can I read?" And there they were. Bella Andre was in a similar situation. Same time period. She did the reverse, she wrote her backlist. She sort of sat down and was like, "I'm gonna write 12 books as fast as I can and put them up. And then instantly I'll have an existing backlist that readers can get to."
And at the time there weren't that many people doing it. And so anybody who was doing it was making tons of money, just printing their own money. Ebooks happened and they just exploded. And people started discovering that there was money in the hill.
So when I say I feel like the door slammed shut behind me, I feel like it slammed shut behind me for a number of reasons. One, when Nine Rules came out, it sat on the New York Times bestseller list for four weeks, which is basically unheard of now for a romance novel. And the reason why is because Borders existed, right? Borders, Walden Books still existed at the time. There were just enough stores that they you could buy romance novels in bookstores.
It was before Barnes and Noble became like a game store. And it also just predated eBooks. They existed, Nine Rules was out in ebook, but at the time I was selling like six to one, print to E. And so it was a really different world. It was a world where it was easier to become a name that people knew. And now I think the world is just bigger. The pool is bigger, there's so many more of us writing, and that's so good.
I just want to say, the thing about romance is like, whatever your kink is, it's out here, we have it, someone's writing it just for you now. And you can find those books now in a way that you couldn't in 2009.
Sarah Enni: Right. I mean, we just talked about devouring series and books are kind of built to be consumed all at once. So my friends who are avid, avid romance readers, are AVID romance readers. So they're on their Kindle, they buy the book, they finish the book, they buy the next book, they move on and finish it. It's just suited to that.
Sarah MacLean: There was a piece of data from six or eight years ago. And it was like, "Romance readers, on average, read 10 to 12 books a month."
Sarah Enni: Which is wild.
Sarah MacLean: First of all, that's on average. There are a lot of us, myself included, who read at least 20 to 25 books a month. I mean, we cannot be stopped, right? We are voracious. We'll read whatever you put in front of us. And that makes us really different than other genres.
Sarah Enni: Thank you for explaining all that. That's so interesting. I just am interested in what made you decide to continue with traditional publishing? And whether you've been ever tempted by self-publishing or how that's been for you?
Sarah MacLean: I'm a slow writer and it does feel to me like self-publishing serves fast writers better than slow writers, now, especially. It just feels like if you're not feeding the beast, it's much, much more difficult, in my opinion. I mean, what do I know?
But for me, the slow and steady pace with the sure thing, the kind of, "I've got four books on this contract. That's three-and-a half years locked-in. The money is what the money is." It feels solid for me, in a way, as a slow writer.
The other piece is that I've been, like I said, I was very lucky. I came in just at the tail end of traditional publishing being a viable career for a job that would pay your bills without too much concern. And now I think it's much, much more difficult to get a deal where you feel comfortable quitting your day job and writing full-time. But I would be lying if I said I don't think about self-publishing. It's clearly here. It's clearly something that we are all gonna have to tackle at some point. Publishing is who knows? Who knows?
I have a book coming out in August and who knows how it will sell? It's the first in a series, thank god. So I know I'm locked in for three-and-a-half years, but you know, who knows? It's such a big question mark. The genre's changing, the industry's changing, the world is changing. What is it gonna look like? Self-publishing obviously is on the table as like, "Oh, well that's another avenue.
I have self-published. I self-published a Christmas anthology with some friends, that was great. I self-published a contemporary anthology last year. That was fun. That book is actually going up next week as a standalone. So at least I understand how the system works, but it also feels like a huge, totally different world.
My job right now is, I mean, it's not quite cause writing is not just about writing the book anymore. None of us are Thomas Pynchon, but my job is mostly writing the book and being on Twitter, sort of being in the public space. Doing a podcast.
But if you're gonna self-publish, you've got to manage all the money. You've got to do all the covers. You've got to make sure that you're handling audio and all those pieces. And there is some freedom to saying, "I'm gonna let Harper Collins take care of that." But I don't know. Maybe it'll come back to bite me in the ass one day.
Sarah Enni: I appreciate you speaking to that. Just cause I get, every once in a while, questions from people who listen to the show about self-publishing and I have to tell them like, "This is not a resource for that." Because there is so much involved in self-publishing. You have to just know that you have the energy for that. And I've come to the same conclusion that you have where I'm willing to offload a lot of that detail work and logistics and that's just my comfort level.
Sarah MacLean: I might get in trouble for saying this, but whatever, I think it's important. I think that somewhere along the line there was a shift in the perception of publishing. It used to be that you felt like publishers were paying you for your book.
Now I feel like the perception is a little bit, I'm paying them to handle everything, right? Like I could maybe make more on my own, but I don't have to worry about how is it gonna get on a shelf somewhere, right? And there's value in that.
Sarah Enni: I see what you're saying. You're taking whatever cut, because they are designing the book, printing the book, storing the book, shipping the book, like XYZ.
Sarah MacLean: Yeah, and when something goes wrong, I can send an email to somebody and be like, "Hey, this thing went terribly wrong." And they'll fix it and I don't have to.
Sarah Enni: I think you're right. But it's also an empowering way to think about it. You, as a business person, are making that decision because then your energy is going where you want it to go.
Sarah MacLean: Yes.
Sarah Enni: I appreciate that. Okay, let's talk about process. I love what you said earlier, and I was reading another interview with you where you said, "When I conceive of a series, it's always with the idea of approaching a single theme from multiple angles," which I think is so interesting.
Sarah MacLean: Yes, so I always sell as a series, and that's not abnormal in the genre. What is abnormal about how I sell a series is there's usually an overarching, over the course of the three or four books, there's something going on that will impact every book. Most of the time in romance, the series are loosely connected. So it's like a family where every kid gets a book. It's Bridgerton, right? Every kid gets a marriage, or a group of friends, or whatever.
But in my series, usually there's a conceit that brings all the characters together. And then there's a larger arc of a story, again, light touch. So you can read any of them at any time, but there's a rewarding moment, either a twist or something at the end of this series.
And when I start, I usually am thinking about like, "What's the thing I want to talk about?" I wrote a series set in a casino where every one of the characters had been born into privilege and then immediately lost all of their privilege in some way, or at some point, over their childhood. They had lost all of their privilege. And so I wanted to play with this idea of birth versus destiny.
And then I did a whole series that was really about historical takes on modern celebrity scandals. This question of like, "What is scandal? How do we use our scandals as power? How do we use our flaws as power?" And then the last series of books that I did, which was the Bare Knuckled Bastards, I stopped writing nobility in that series. I didn't want to write anybody with a title. And the reason why was because [pauses] well, first of all, billionaires were in power and I hated it.
[Both laugh]
Sarah MacLean: And I was like, "No, none of that. Only people who have pulled themselves up by their bootstraps." So I wrote this series where I started to get really interested in the difference between being noble acting nobly, and being born into nobility. How those two things don't almost ever go together. And now I'm writing a series about a Victorian era girl gang, which is really about just patriarchy sucks. Which is really a light touch or anything [laughs].
Sarah Enni: But a very timely thing to explore, I would say. So let's use Hell's Bells as a series as a way to talk about your process. But before we dive into that, do you mind pitching Bombshell and the Hell's Bells series for us?
Sarah MacLean: Sure. So Hell's Bells, the conceit of the series is Victorian era girl gang, and they're gonna smash the patriarchy and fall in love at the same time. And it's four books, at least at the start it's four books, and they're each titled - I haven't announced all the titles - but they all have a title like Bombshell.
I was really interested in the way that we talk about women in the world and the way that we identify women as problems, right? Most of the words we use to describe women are just problematic words, but they all have such power. Like bombshell there is power in a bombshell.
So I started to get really interested in like Rebecca Traister's Good and Mad, and Sadie Doyle's Trainwreck, and Mona Altahawy's the Seven Necessary Sins of Women and Girls and this concept of the strength that women have in anger and the strength that women have when they've built community around that anger.
So the series is about a girl gang. It's four heroines, each one of them will get a book. It's a little like Ocean's Eight, it's a little The A Team. They all have a particular skill. There's the character The Duchess who sort of brings them all together and keeps them all on the path of smashing patriarchy. And over the course of the four books, each one of them will find love.
So it begins with Cecily, who readers will know from an old series, but again, you don't have to have read that series. She was a leftover character from an old series who I had to give a story to. So she's the first of the Bells, it's sort of an unrequited love, kind of the one that got away story. He's American and he comes back to England and she is a troublemaker and a scandal, but with a plan. And he follows along behind her and feels like he has to save her. But of course, she's always one step ahead of him.
And it's a little bit, "only one bed," and a little bit, "you're my best friend's sister," and lots of romance tropes that people will love, I think. But ultimately it's about women and power and community and partnership.
Sarah Enni: I'd love to just talk about your process of writing a book and using Hell's Bells as kind of the template for that. So you mentioned Rebecca Traister and the reading about modern feminism, but I know that you also were getting interested in Forty Elephants, a historical.
Sarah MacLean: Have you read Bombshell?
Sarah Enni: Yes.
Sarah MacLean: Oh! You're the first person I've talked to who has! So it's like, "Forty Elephants?" I knew I wanted to write a girl gang, and research often comes simultaneous to the idea for me. Because what I have learned over writing for 12 years of historical is there is literally no idea you can come up with that you can't find in history.
So often I like start with the idea and then I go looking for, "How did that work? Who was doing it then? How do we get close to it?"
Sarah Enni: Can I ask a really quick, very granular question about that? And this is for people who may not have your background in history, but if they're interested in writing historical, when you say you start to research and look into it, literally, where are you going? Who are you asking? What are your resources for that kind of work?
Sarah MacLean: So, well now I have a pretty extensive research library. So you can always tweet me and I will help you. Or send me an mail and I will help you. So I'm gonna say it because it's true. Start with Wikipedia but look, don't buy into everything Wikipedia tells you, but the one thing about Wikipedia is there are so many resources linked on those pages.
Sarah Enni: Right, there is a bibliography there.
Sarah MacLean: Google is your friend. And my podcast co-host is a middle school English teacher. And she's like, "You're not supposed to... They can't just..." And I'm like, "No, I know, but it's a good start." I trust you all to know that Google and Wikipedia are your friends, but they are not the end of the line.
And so often what I do is I'll say like, "Okay, gangs in London in the 1800's." And then there's a man named Brian McDonald who's written a couple of books on gangs in London. One of them is literally called Gangs of London.
And so I bought that first. I was like, "All right, I'm gonna read this book first." And I knew I was gonna do girl gangs because I had just come off doing a series on working class Londoners. This idea that women were somehow separated from the rest of society, separated from men. Women sat at home and men went to work. That's a real upper class, high class, kind of rule. Women have done real work since the dawn of time.
I think we end up allowing ourselves a lot of mythology in history, which is how we get into racist, classist, misogynist ways of thinking about the world. Because the truth is that all people have been everywhere since the dawn of time, doing important work since the dawn of time.
So I had just come off doing a whole series on the working class. And so I knew there has to have been a gang that was run by women, more than one. A Twitter thread went by that vaguely mentioned the Forty Elephants, which was a spinoff of a larger gang in London at the time that was really running the streets.
So if you are a Peaky Blinders fan, very similar. You're in the world of multiple gangs or rival gangs, they have turf, et cetera. The Forty Elephants was run by a woman named Alice Diamond who also had multiple aliases. And it was generally a shoplifting gang, but it also did many, many other things. There's a fantastic book, also written by Brian McDonald called Alice Diamond and the Forty Elephants. Again, very on nose, very useful for researching.
Then when you start searching, then you sort of know. You're like, "All right, now I'm looking for Alice Diamond. What do we know about her? What can I find?" Usually I go to England twice a year and spend at least part of my trip in the British Library, doing research. The librarians there are absolutely amazing. And you can register ahead of time and tell them what you want to do and they'll deliver for you.
There was a time when I thought I was gonna write a circus, which has sort of seeded, there are a few little circus-y things in Daring and the Duke, which is my last book and Bombshell, which is coming. Because I was like, "I don't think I'm gonna write a circus," after doing some research on circuses. I told the librarian of the British Library like, "I want to write about a circus." And suddenly I got there and there were just piles of things to look at regarding historical circuses.
This year I wasn't able to go, but we did a fair amount. They really took care of me virtually. I don't know that I would say I'm a trained historian, but because I have always had an interest in history, I am always very happy to sit and read about whatever the thing is. And if you're writing historical, there has to be a part of you that's interested in, "How did this work?"
And now it's funny because periodically an idea will come up, I'll read something historically interesting, and my friends who write historical and I'll say, "Oh, that's a Sophie Jordan idea!" And I'll send it to her like, "Hey, you should write this." Or, "That's a Tessa Dare idea. Does Tessa know about this?"
So for me, 40 Elephants was, "Oh my God, this is it!" And they were maniacs. I mean, they absolutely terrorized London. They ended up having to expand outside of London, people knew who they were. They had these specialty skirts made, these kind of diaphanous skirts made with specialty pockets. You can see I'm sort of seeding that there's gonna be a dressmaker at some point in the series.
And they would walk into stores and store owners would panic because the 40 Elephants had come in and they knew they were about to be just taken for everything that they had. But Alice ends up falsifying documents to work in a munitions center, like a place making bombs, so that she could get access to gunpowder so that she could blow things up. She needed to.
I mean, truly anything that you have seen in Peaky Blinders, it's just not even close to what is going on for real on the streets of London and other places in England. And I'm sure around the world, right? Like New York too.
So the other piece of it is having good friends, right? Joanna Shupe is a dear friend, she writes gilded age, Victorian, New York set stories. And I was writing an American hero so I was like, "Joanna, I need to know what he's wearing. I know where to look for British fashion, but help me."
You build a real strong network of people who can help you. But honestly, I could've called the New York Public Library and a brilliant librarian there would have helped me figure that out too. So remember libraries exist and your tax dollars pay for them.
And librarians love this shit. I've never called a library and been like, "I'm researching girl gangs," and have them be like, "Well, we're sorry, we don't have time for you." They're like, "Yes! I want to research girl gangs too."
Sarah Enni: This is a personal question that I had. Bombshell is two points of view. And I have questions about maintaining mystery in a romance, or maybe mystery is not the right word. But when you have the points of view of both people who are kind of falling in love with each other...
I'm speaking as a writer who right now is only writing from one point of view and trying to amp up the horniness, basically, in this teenage romance, for lack of a better word. And it seemed to me like it would be an added challenge to be in the head of both characters because a lot of mystery is like, "What is this person thinking?"
Sarah MacLean: Yeah.
Sarah Enni: So I would just love to hear what your thoughts are about that.
Sarah MacLean: That's a good question. I do think in first person it's harder to be in both heads. Although I think it's point of view its first person versus third, right? So my books are written in close third, which Jane Austin wrote in close third. So Jane Austin basically invented close third. So it makes sense that romance is written in close third.
So the benefit of writing in close third is that I can pull away as the narrator, anytime I want and hide from the reader, or from the character, whatever I want to hide. I tend not to. I tend to write liars, right? So I write characters who lie to themselves. So the reader is always aware of what's going on.
So in the case of Bombshell, Cecily and Kayla are the main characters, and both of them are sort of telling themselves that this is not gonna happen, they can resist it. They can keep themselves organized. But we know, the reader knows, that's nonsense, they're absolutely falling hard for each other.
And I think that the value of close third is that as the narrator, I can show you the twitch of the hand, the way the heart races, the physical characteristics. When you're in the heroine's point of view, she can feel all of that, but she can't see what's happening to him. He's still a cipher in her POV and she's a cipher in his.
So that as the story progresses and you start to stitch the love story together, as they start to notice each other, the twitch in the hand, or at one point he might be touching her and he can feel her pulse race. That feeling again, in close third, you start to unpeel intimacy.
There's a guy named Desmond Morris. And he has a concept, a theory, called the 12 Steps to Intimacy. And it's pretty well known in the sense that it begins like eye-to-eye. Like, I look at you and that's the beginning of our intimacy, like eye-to-body. And then it goes all the way to body-to-body, right? There's literally all the different ways, hand-to-body, hand-to-hand. And I think that's really an interesting way of playing with it. Like, how do you use intimacy? How do you continue to build intimacy using all the tools that you have?
Sarah Enni: Right. I love that.
Sarah MacLean: But I do think first person makes it challenging, first person single POV. Because the other character becomes a cipher.
Sarah Enni: Well, and you nailed it cause that is what's happening here cause its first person. But in some ways I think that actually can be an advantage because...
Sarah MacLean: You're keeping the secret.
Sarah Enni: You don't know. And then finally, when they do open up, you kind of, as the reader, are doing what the narrator's doing, which is thinking like, "Oh, all those signs I missed!" Or, "He really meant this." And that's kind of fun, especially as a teenager, when you're just like, "I literally can't believe anyone would ever love me."
Sarah MacLean: And YA too feels like first person captures all the worry and the concern and the emotional, "Ahhhh!" Whereas in adult, I think, sometimes first person can make you feel like you're wearing a skin suit. Like it's too much [laughing]. I have enough anxiety myself. I like can't, I don't need it.
Sarah Enni: That makes me think of a question I'm interested in hearing your thoughts on. Not necessarily about you explicitly, but just in general about writing romance, is that there is sex on the page. It couldn't be more explicit. And I would imagine close third gives also you a little distance to say, like, "This is not my sex life." Like, "I'm an author. These are characters." Cause I can imagine that would get a little dicey. You have to be personal in that part of writing.
Sarah MacLean: You know [sighs], I think that's a question that comes up a lot with romance writers. I have to tell you, writing sex is really difficult. It just feels like work. It is not pleasurable for me in any way. I never end up at the end of it going like, "Wow, it was great." Not anything like that. It is a job. Right?
And I think that when you think about romance writers writing sex on the page, the nearest comparison is like mystery writers writing murder, right? I mean, it is a critical piece. Intimacy is the whole ballgame for us. I often find that the people who don't like romance novels, and I think there are a lot of people who think they don't like romance novels because they are afraid to try them.
But I think there are some people who just don't care for them. And I think part of the reason why is because they are so internal, right? Even when it's Bombshell, where there's a mystery or a B plot and there's explosions and things happening. It's so internal.
And so all that internal stuff, including intimacy, is the job. My work is to mine human emotion for happiness and joy. And that means that I need to take you on a real rollercoaster, right? I need to give you grief, and I need to give you pain, and I need to give you sadness, in order for you to ultimately feel really rewarded by the joy. And sex for my books is essential. The sex is essential for bringing two people closer together.
The sex on the page in romance should be doing a lot of emotional character work. There is no such thing as a sex scene, at least in one of my books, that doesn't ultimately either really transform a character or really fuck up the plot. It has to be one of those two things.
So I would just say, I don't have a problem with like, "Oh, this is my sex life." Like it takes me two weeks to write a sex scene. It takes me two weeks to write four chapters at a different point in the book. So, it's a slog. I hope it doesn't feel that way, but it is. It's work.
Sarah Enni: I do want to just wrap up by talking about the podcast. I love for you to just let listeners know what Fated Mates is. And I'd love to hear about how it came about.
Sarah MacLean: Yes, I have a podcast it's called Fated Mates. I host it with my friend, Jen Prokop, who is a romance critic. So when we talk about romance novels, we talk about them from the perspective of both a writer and a reader. Which is really fun because often she'll say, "I think this is happening in this book." And I'll say, "Hang on a second. As a writer, I can understand why this choice was made and the work that it's doing."
So it's a really interesting partnership. It came about because we both are huge Kresley Cole fans (A Hunger Like No Other, first in the Immortals After Dark series by Kresley Cole). Kresley Cole writes a paranormal romance series which, for those of you who don't read romance, is basically a fantasy series, it's urban fantasy. It's set in New Orleans there's, as my husband refers to it, a monster mash. Every single paranormal creature you could imagine exists in this world.
And there is a war that's about to come to pass that is potentially world-ending, apocalyptic. And so it's 18 books long. When I discovered this series, it's called Immortals After Dark, when I discovered it, I immediately read all 18 books in a two week period.
And same thing, it was just like I finished one and immediately ordered the next one and started talking about it online just because I was so consumed by how the world building was, and how the romance was so great. And the sex was so sexy. It just nailed every single thing. It hit every button that it needed to hit for a romance series and also have this like fantastical feel to it.
And Jen, who was my Twitter friend at the time and not my real friend. Although, Twitter friends can be real friends. But she's my Twitter friend. And she also was super into it. So I said, "We should do a podcast." And it was supposed to be 18 episodes long. And that was it. And now we're in our third season and we no longer talk about Kresley Cole, although she comes up quite a bit.
But now what we do is, every other week we read a book that we think is a really great example of the romance genre. And we deconstruct it and talk about the work that it does and how it's structured. And sometimes the shows are about craft. They really get into the nitty-gritty of how a book is structured. And sometimes they're about the larger important work that romance does in the world, which I've talked a little bit about here for everybody. So if you liked that part you'll like Fated Mates.
And then on the off weeks, on the interstitial weeks, we talk about a trope. So we pick like, 'there's only one bed.' And we talk about why it works, why it scratches your itch, what the promise of that premise is for readers. What there must be in order for that to really work as an intense experience as a reader. And then we just fill your TBR with books and books and books and tell you what books to read.
So, if you are not sure about romance and you want to try it, or if you've liked some romance, but the pool is so big you don't know where to go next. You can go to FatedMates.nets and find a trope or a book or something that sounds interesting, and listen. We are also out every Wednesday.
Sarah Enni: Perfect. I love that. It is such a great resource, especially the interrogation of tropes. And as a writer, it's so interesting to be like, "We know that works. We know it feels good to read it, or to see it on TV, or in a movie, but what is it really doing?" The interrogation of that has been so interesting for me as a listener. So I love that.
Sarah MacLean: I think it is interesting, especially when we come up against, we just recorded a couple of weeks ago, an episode on dark romance. So I sort of got into this a little at the beginning, but there's this whole world of largely indie romance that's really dark. The storylines are very dark. They often include kidnapping, or some sort of really scary stuff. They're usually erotic. And they always end with happily-ever-after. And it's a really intense sub-genre and I don't read it and neither does Jen.
So we had some people on to really get into, "What is it about this sub-genre that works for readers who love it? For writers who write it? What are we trying to do with this genre?" And the goal has always been to both take romance seriously, and also remind everybody that it's kind of bananas and fun.
Sarah Enni: Right. And I just listened to the most recent Christina Lauren episode about embracing the bananas-ness.
Sarah MacLean: Yeah! Yeah, I mean, truly bananas. I think that's the thing that people don't realize about romance, in many cases, we know exactly what we're doing. We know that the stories are sometimes bananas and we want you to have fun with them. We want you to tear through them and read them like they're Marvel movies,
Sarah Enni: Right. Oh my gosh. This has been such a fun conversation, Sarah. Thank you for giving me so much of your time this morning.
Sarah MacLean: Thanks for having me. And you're gonna come on Fated Mates. We have to find a date.
Sarah Enni: Yes. Oh my God. Couldn't be more excited. So, so, so thrilled for that. All the podcasts, all the book podcasts.
Sarah MacLean: Yeah, exactly.
Thank you so much to Sarah. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram @Sarah MacLean. And don't forget to follow the Fated Mates podcast and go check out more of what she has to say there. You can follow me on Twitter and Instagram @SarahEnni (Twitter and Instagram), and the show @FirstDraftPod (Twitter and Instagram).
First Draft is produced by me, Sarah Enni. Today's episode was produced and sound designed by Callie Wright. The theme music is by Dan Bailey and the logo was designed by Collin Keith. Thanks to social media director Jennifer Nkosi and transcriptionist-at-large Julie Anderson.
And as ever, thanks to you, reformed rakes and burly rogues for listening.
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