Joanna

Shupe’s Gilded Age New York heroes are giving Regency Dukes a run for their

money on romance best seller lists, making the age of the Astors and

Vanderbilts “hot” with contemporary readers.

Hi there I’m your host Jenny Wheeler and Joanna talks about feisty women, ostentatious wealth, dinner parties on horseback and how so often truth is stranger than fiction.

Six

things you’ll learn from this Joys of Binge Reading episode:

Why surprising readers is importantThe lure of the Gilded AgeYouthful passions - Edith Wharton or Jane Austen?The dawn of the independent womanLots (and lots) of great reading suggestionsWhy she'd like to slow things down a little

Where to find Joanna Shupe

Website: http://www.joannashupe.com/

Facebook: @joannashupeauthor

Twitter: @JoannaShupe

Bookbub: https://www.bookbub.com/authors/joanna-shupe

Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.co.uk/joannashupe/pins/

What

follows is a "near as" transcript of our conversation, not word for

word but pretty close to it, with links to important mentions.

Jenny: But now, here’s Joanna. .  Hello there Joanna and welcome to the show, it’s great to have you with us.

Jenny: Hello there Joanna, and welcome to the show. It's great to have you

with us.

Joanna: Hello, and thank you so much for having me. I'm so honored.

Joanna Shupe,Gilded Age romance author

Jenny: I always like to ask the 'Once Upon a Time question' because people always like to the answer. How did you get started? Was there a moment at some stage where you thought, I've just got to write fiction, even if you were already doing nonfiction or was it something you always wanted to do?

Joanna: Well, I've always been writing. I went to college to get a

journalism degree because I knew I wanted to be in the field of writing

somehow. But I always read romance. From a very early age I was reading things

that I'm sure were completely inappropriate for me.

People like Johanna Lindsey, and Amanda Quick and Jayne Ann Krentz.  That's how I came into romance.  So when I graduated college, I came home, and I didn't have a job yet, and I was reading a lot of romance while I was job searching and trying to keep my stress levels low.

And my oldest sister said, you know, you

should write one of those. You'd be really good at it, and it seems like it's

pretty easy. You just come up with a plot and then you sit down and write it.

And I was so stupid that I thought, yes, that sounds pretty easy. I could

totally do that.  So I was waiting tables

at the time, and I would come home at one o'clock in the morning and I would

write until four or five, go to sleep, get up at noon and do it all over again.

 So

in a couple months I had a book.  I let

some people read it and I was encouraged by the feedback. That book will never

ever be published. It was a practice, but I was really encouraged by the

feedback that I got and my oldest sister, who's the one that tried to get me to

do it, said, "I don't know where you came up with half the stuff that you

thought of in this book. It's really impressive." And that stuck with me.

Then I went off and I got a job in marketing and advertising and real life took

over for a little while. But when I met my husband he encouraged me to dig it

out and try and polish it up and, and get it published.