Hello everyone and Happy Christmas!

I’m Jenny Wheeler, the host of the Joys of Binge Reading, and this is our last episode for 2020…  

As we did last year, we’re taking a break in January to refresh and renew ourselves.   As many of you know, I’m in New Zealand, and as a country we pretty much shut down post Christmas and head for the beaches and forest – which we call bush….It’s like a whole nation goes on holiday together…

I’m going to be spending time relaxing in my little 1975 Sprite Major caravan  – yes the ones with the cute rounded windows – in a field with fantastic views over the Coromandel coast, now and then going down the hill for swims in the gorgeous sea waters  there –like swimming in champagne.

But before I pack up for the year, I wanted to round out things by first thanking you all for sticking with us this year.  The Joys of Binge Reading has grown this year – it’s lovely to see it. And we’re getting lots of fantastic authors on to talk about their work, and I can promise more of those next year.

For this end of year episode I thought I’d take a look at the shows that have attracted the biggest audience – the people that for whatever reason more of you tuned into – over the last twelve months.

The difference in the numbers listening to these guests compared with  many of the others – are sometimes small – and it’s true that I get a great pleasure out of every single author I talk to – but these are the ones who’d make the “Top Ten” if we were doing one…

I was thrilled to see where the author came from seems to make no difference to popularity – the spread of author nationalities between the US, Australia, New Zealand and the UK is pretty evenly shared– so you’re a pleasingly global lot!!

So instead of having just one voice on the show, you’ll be hearing from ten or more…And as usual, if any of these snippets spark your interest and they are a show you missed out on, there will be links in the show notes to make it easy for you to find them and tune in – so there’ll be plenty of new people to keep you going over the break.  The shownotes for this episode can be found on the Joys of Binge Reading .com, or you can find us on the Binge Reading Facebook page.

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I’ve taken the dates December 1, 2019 to December 1, 2020 as the period we’re looking at for obvious reasons – December 2020 isn’t over yet.

I’m proud of the fact that we’ve now got 150 episodes on the Joys of Binge Reading, and I think every one of those authors are fantastic.

However, taking that period, there was one author who stood head and shoulders above the rest in terms of the number of people who tuned in to listen to him – and that was Martin Walker – author of the much-loved Bruno the police chief mystery series, set in Perigord, France.

Before he turned to writing French mysteries, Martin had a formidable career as a diplomatic correspondent on top UK newspapers.

He shared some highly entertaining stories about his days working as a correspondent in Thatcher’s England, Gorbachev’s Moscow and Clinton’s Washington, but you’ll need to head over to his episode to hear those. 

So, what was it that made him chuck in such a fascinating glamorous career? To turn to fiction writing. Well, he explains it all here.

Martin Walker: When we were based in Brussels, my wife decided that we’d been foreign correspondents for all of our lives and our children needed a place to be rooted. She decided we should get a house in the Perigord, which we’d visited from time to time where we have some friends who were there.

And I became increasingly fascinated by the Perigord, particularly by the prehistory, the prehistoric caves, like Lascaux. I remember the shock when I first saw it and thought, my God, these people were in no sense primitive.  We’ve been quite wrong about this. I mean, the artistic sensibility, it was like our own.

And so I began researching, interviewing the archeologists and reading books and visiting all the caves. And I wrote my novel, The Caves of Perigord, which is still in print, I’m proud to say, which is really about what kind of human society could have produced  at Lascaux.

You’ll understand from that – Bruno is contemporary, but you’ll also get some fascinating history in everyone of the Bruno books – the region is steeped in it.  Oh and lots of food too. But what is the secret of Bruno’s charm. He’s no James Bond “he man.”  Is it because he does show his vulnerabilities?

Here’s Martin talking Bruno’s appeal.

I think that that might be part of it. I think the first thing is that we, all of us have this sense that our police ought to be our neighbors, we ought to be able to trust them to like them. And in fact increasingly these days, particularly in the US where police are armed, that’s less and less the case, given the kind of social problems that are being thrown up that the police have to handle.

But I think we, all of us have an ideal cop, someone who is honorable, decent, and brave and who realizes that in a sense, his work is as much a social worker as being any kind of agent of state repression. So I had this idealistic image , of what a policeman could be from what I’d seen of my friend in France.

He’s 40, he’s the most eligible bachelor in the village… what happens when you finally marry him off?

Martin Walker: Well my wife, whose views I always take with great seriousness, says with the moment I marry Bruno off, I lose half my readers. So we have to bear that in mind. He hasn’t found the right woman yet. I mean, he hasn’t told me yet.

The thing is, Bruno has become a hugely realistic person in my head, as has the whole of St Denis, the people who live there and so on. I mean, they are as real for me as are my real neighbors. 

I remember once when I was writing one of the books , called The Devil’s Cave, and in that, I had  a dangerously attractive woman who was really quite a bad, quite a baddie. She  was determined to seduce Bruno for her own purposes. And my plan for the book, I mean, I’d thought, well, of course.

Bruno is just a guy. He will fall for her subtle seductive ways. But as I was trying to write this chapter, it was like a force field came out of my desk, and my gut was saying, “I am not ready to drop my trousers for this woman”.  It was like he had a mind of his own, this character in my head. And so I’m waiting for him to tell me, what he is you going to do next?

If Martin was doing it all over again, what would he change?

Well I’d endeavour to meet my wife earlier and have been married to her for longer, I guess.  Other than that, no, not really. I just think that like so many people of my generation who were born in World War II, we have this sort of extraordinary growth. Public free education and in Britain free. healthcare.

I mean we were so lucky in all of that. And then in my career, being in Moscow for years end as the Cold War and then  Washington,  I am just so lucky and all the things I’ve been through. I think if I have to put anything on my gravestone, it will be, “He didn’t miss much.”

Isn’t that a wonderful tribute?

Martin Walker’s Website: http://www.brunochiefofpolice.com/

A clutch of other mystery authors are not far behind Martin in listenership, and the settings and approaches they took to their mysteries show our listeners are very happy with variety. 

Popular mystery episodes included SW Hubbard’s twisty edgy mysteries set in the Adirondacks and the world of Florida estate sales, Chuck Greaves irresistible likeable rogue hero in the Jack MacTaggart series, Dwight Holing’s contemporary Westerns with the tortured ex-soldier Nick Drake, and Anne Hillerman’s Navajo mysteries, carried on from her father Tony Hillerman after his death.

Chuck Greaves is a former LA lawyer who writes literary historical fiction as well as sharp contemporary mysteries like the Jack MacTaggart series.

One reviewer described Jack this way:  “Take John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee, Jonathan Kellerman’s Alex Delaware, and the best of John Grisham’s protagonists, shake and serve, and you’ll have the hero of Hush Money. ”

Hush Money – that’s Book One in the series…..

Here we are talking about Jack….

Jenny Wheeler: Yes. So Jack is a lovely character. He’s irrepressible, he’s a bit roguish and rough around the edges, he might scorn the legal formalities a bit, but he’s got a heart of gold.

I had the feeling when I was reading it that it’s almost like a wish fulfillment thing, that you wished that law would enable guys like Jack to make a living, but perhaps it doesn’t. Is there any sort of truth in that suspicion?

Chuck Greaves: Well, you know, I think the Jack MacTaggart character is probably my fantasy self, you know, except that Jack is smarter than me, funnier than me, and better looking than me. But other than that, there’s a bit of me in there for sure.

And as he explains in this next clip, real life intrudes into his stories more often than you might think…..

Jenny Wheeler: I think I had seen reference to a particular case with the wine story, the Napa Valley wine company. You did have a case yourself that was relevant to that plot line, didn’t you?

Chuck Greaves: At the beginning of that book there’s a story, it’s not the main story in the book but it’s Jack’s entry into the case.  It’s a case in which a wealthy person dies and leaves behind two wives.

In the book the person who dies is a film executive and a media mogul and he leaves behind a wife and a mistress, both of whom claim to be the wife, and the mistress sues the wife for half of the decedent’s estate, and that’s how Jack gets into that whole Napa Valley scene.  I had a case just like that.

I had a prominent citizen, a client who passed away and left behind two wives.

And that was quite an interesting case and I thought that was a fun way to kick the book off. So yes, I have used actual cases from my practice, not too often, and never as the main storyline, but I’ve used them. I had a very interesting law practice.  

I represented some from interesting people, including for 10 years I represented Richard Pryor, the comedian, and we did a lot of fun stuff together. There’s a lot of grist for the mill there.

Chuck Greaves’ Books Website: https://chuckgreaves.com/

Dwight Holing’s modern Westerns are deep, painful and soul searching, raising issues about the way our society has treated returning soldiers from modern wars.

As I commented to Dwight in the podcast chat:

Jenny: He’s escaping PSTD by being a wildlife ranger in Oregon. It’s a set up that gives you tremendous scope for both high action as well as some telling personal and social commentary. Tell us how Nick came about as a character

Dwight Holing: Well, Nick Drake is really an embodiment of people I know and love – both family, friends and people I met while traveling or writing nonfiction, both people living in dead. I grew up in the late sixties too, and we all know people like Nick, we all see parts of them and ourselves.

People who have experienced great heights and fallen into great depths. People who have loved and lost and learned to love again, people who have a moral code that helps guide them when facing good and evil.

In Nick’s case, he’s a decorated soldier in a war without rules. He blames himself for the death of all the men in his squad and their deaths led him to become an addict, where he wound up being held at Walter Reed Hospital for treatment of what is now called PTSD. 

It wasn’t called that back then, but someone saw the inherent good in him and threw him a lifeline and paying that forward allows him to help others and in doing so reclaim the humanity lost in a war.

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Dwight is an experienced magazine and non fiction writer, but he finds himself writing his fiction at a pace, with four books out in the Nick Drake series in a short time. As he says:

Dwight Holing: There’s a few reasons for this breakneck pace, and one is the characters themselves. They’re speaking to me really loud and clear right now.

And as soon as one story’s finished, the characters are telling me about the next. The second reason are my readers. They read a lot faster than I can write, and they’re not shy about telling me that, be it on email, Facebook posts. I mean, even in reviews on Amazon and Goodreads, they’re saying, Hey, Dwight Holing, we’re ready for the next.

 The third reason is., I love doing this. I love writing. I love connecting with readers and hearing what they think. I love the online community. I’m part of a big international community of other writers and bloggers like you, editors, photographers, cover designers, and of course readers.

Momentum is an important component in each of the Nick Drake novels.  I’m striving to mimic that in my writing habits as well.

And Dwight tells a great childhood story about the romantic idea of writers from his grandfather.

Dwight Holing: Well, my mother’s father, my grandfather, who I’m named after – his name was Dwight Mitchell Wiley, and he was a short story writer back in the 30s and 40s. He wrote for the Saturday Evening Post and McCall’s and periodicals like that.

His stories his genre, was light, romantic, humorous pieces, and he was good at it. I mean, they’re just great stories for the time. One day the call from Hollywood came in and he was hired to write a screenplay and he became part of the Paramount scribes.

And among them also was Raymond Chandler, the great detective writer, Philip Marlowe’s creator, and they would hang around and together and my mother tells the story of them in their bungalow waking up in the morning, and there was Raymond Chandler asleep on the couch.

Still wearing the white gloves he liked to wear when he played poker and drank gin. It was just this fabulous story. And that always stuck with me about this romantic idea of the writers, you know, living in Hollywood and writing screenplays and writing for magazines or writing novels, no doubt had had an influence on me.

Whether I inherited the talent from my grandfather or not, I don’t know. But it makes for good memories, that’s for sure.

Dwight Holing’s Books Website: http://dwightholing.com/

Anne Hillerman has done something extraordinary in taking over the hugely popular Navajo mystery series from her father. Tony Hillerman after his death.  Her dad was – as the New York Times noted in his obituary “a rare figure, a best selling author who was adored by his fans, admired by fellow authors, and respected by critics.”

She’s now five books into her part of the work, all of them New York Time bestsellers.

Anne explains where it all started:

My father started the mystery series that people have loved for a long time 50 years ago.  He came up with the character of Joe Leaphorn, Navajo detective.  In that first book he hadn’t really intended to write a series about the Navajo Indians. 

He had always loved mysteries and his idea was that he would bring in this interesting character and do a setting that people weren’t familiar with and that that would give his books a little something different.  The Blessing Way came out on March 11, 1970, 50 years ago.  It’s amazing.  

And how did Anne get the idea to continue her father’s legacy

Anne Hillerman: My background was nonfiction, and I had been working on a nonfiction book about the places in the Navajo world that my father wrote about – places that he visited and loved.

My husband and I, my husband’s a professional photographer, had spent I guess about two years traveling all through Navajo land, talking to people, taking photos.  

I was almost done with the book when my dad died so my husband and I finished the book and a year after my father’s death, the book was published and my husband and I did a little book tour to libraries and bookstores and we’re talking about the book. 

Every time I would do the talk, the first or second or maybe third question would be, are there any more books in the series? Was there something that your father was working on that was at the publisher, something another editor could finish, you know, a collection of short stories?

And I would say no, sorry, my dad really took care of business before he died.  Then the person asking the question would say oh, I love those characters.

I love those stories, oh no, this is the worst news I’ve ever heard.   I heard that longing for those stories so many times, and at the same time of course, I was dealing with my own grief at my father’s death, and after a while it dawned on me that just like those fans, besides missing my father, I was thinking how can it be that there will be no more Jim Chee/Joe Leaphorn stories?  

This just isn’t right.  I had never written a novel, but I thought I could give it a try and the worst thing that happens is that I use up a few years of my life and then I get it out of my system.

Those things were the combination that led me to think maybe I could continue the series.

Anne Hillerman Website: https://annehillerman.com/

Others in the mystery/thriller genre who proved highly popular were thriller authors Michael Robotham and Ian Austin. 

Michael’s heart stoppers include The Secret She Keeps, a stolen baby thriller made into a six part TV series and the Cyrus Haven series with Evie, the girl who has an unusual ability to tell when people are lying. And before you say that sounds far-fetched, Michael explained that it is a real thing.

Here’s Michael Robotham: Yes. There are about 1 in 500 people have an 80% ability to tell when someone is lying. Invariably, they are people that have spent decades working in the prison service or the police or child services or even schoolteachers.

If you are lied to every day, you get a pretty good antenna about when you are being lied to. They have about an 80% ability. Normally of course we have a 50/50 shot as the average whether someone is lying.

Evie Cormac is very young to have this sort of skill. It’s not proven, but there is a growing body of, I say evidence, but people have begun to speculate that when a young person has this ability, it is sometimes because they have suffered such an abusive childhood that they have learned to pick up on the very fleeting micro expressions to keep safe.

They don’t know from one split second if someone is going to hug them or hit them, and it becomes a means of survival to pick up on these sorts of tiny expressions to stay safe.

And you might find it hard to believe that Michael’s intricately plotted, edge of your seat stories surprise him as much as they do the reader. He comes up with the seed of an idea and lets the story unfold.

Michael Robotham: Absolutely. When we reach a point in the story where people are in great danger, then I’m not sleeping. I’m sitting there thinking, how on earth am I going to save them?

How are they going to get out of this? It’s a very organic way of writing. It’s a very exciting way of writing.

When I come in from my writing room, the office here, I say to my wife, you would not believe what just happened. I’m genuinely excited. I know there are a lot of writers who plot the whole thing in advance, and they know what’s going to happen, they know what’s coming.

Whereas I like not knowing. I think it’s incredible, but it’s also like writing without a net. You fall and crash and burn and you throw out a lot of material, but it’s a fun ride.

Michael Robotham Website: https://www.michaelrobotham.com/

Ian Austin’s under-cover cop Dan Calder is a man with a tendency for trouble – either creating it or falling into it…  and he’s the protagonist in a crime series that’s been favorably compared to international names like John Grisham and Ian Rankin. The fact that Ian Austin had a long career in the police force before he turned to writing guarantees he knows his subject.

Ian Austin Website: https://www.ianaustin.org/

Not all of our top episodes were mysteries however.

Historical fiction, uplifting and emotional family stories and romantic comedy all found a place in the top line up.

World War II stories dominated, from Stephanie Barron’s fictionalized study of Winston Churchill’s mother, That Churchill Woman, to female spy stories from Christine Wells The Traitor’s Girl and The Juliet Code, Natasha Lester’s The Paris Secret, and Fiona Valpy’s French novels The Beekeeper’s Promise and The Dressmaker’s Gift  all drawing on true wartime experiences for their stories.

Here’s Stephanie Barron talking about the attraction of World War II and Jenny Randolph Churchill.

Stephanie Barron: I just found it fascinating when I was researching Churchill for other books I’ve written, which are  World War II espionage novels, that he revered his mother and credited her with so much influence in his upbringing, character, and destiny.

And yet most biographers of Churchill dismiss her in ways that range from disparaging to truly contemptible. I think in the language they use to dismiss Jennie Jerome Churchill, has at its root in several things.

Namely, a lot of Churchill’s biographers are both male and British and they really hate the fact that the cherished  son of  British destiny, Winston Churchill, the man who saved not only England, but arguably Europe from the Nazis, was in fact only half British.

 It’s really hard for them to accept that that Churchill was half American, and being male, they tended to dismiss Jenny as an influence on Churchill, because she is someone that they regarded as frivolous, and selfish  and as a bad mother.

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As a profligate financially and ultimately as sexually licentious. She was someone who lived very much by her own rules. She was married to a man who may have been homosexual and certainly I think had syphilis.

So her marriage was unhappy and she refused to stop living because of it. So she’s an interesting, complex and provocative figure that history has not necessarily agreed upon, but that I found to be a fascinating subject for exploration in a novel.

Stephanie Barron Website: https://francinemathews.com/

In the Paris Secret Natasha Lester touches on the true story of Catherine Dior, sister of the famous fashion designer Christian, tangled up in her spy ring story.

Here’s Natasha:

Natasha Lester: I read about Catherine Dior in a book called Les Parisiennes by an historian called Anne Sebba. It’s a wonderful book about the role of French women during the Second World War, both those who worked with the Resistance and those who collaborated with the Germans. 

Anne Sebba mentions Catherine Dior in that book two or three times, just in passing, but there was enough in there for me to glean that Catherine did work for the French Resistance and that she was captured by the Nazis and deported to Ravensbruck and that she’s one of the very lucky few who survived that dreadful experience at that concentration camp.

Her work for the Resistance had been so important that she was awarded a Legion d’Honneur by the French and Croix de Guerre and the British awarded her as well because of her work with the Resistance.   I just couldn’t believe that she was so heroic, she risked her life quite literally for freedom and nobody has ever heard of her.

But we all know about Christian, her brother who made beautiful dresses, whereas arguably Catherine is probably the more heroic of two Dior siblings.  

The moment I read about her in that book, I knew that I wanted to include her in a story some way down the track.  It was probably in about early 2017 that I read that and I always like an idea to kind of fester in my mind for about six months before I begin seriously researching and writing.  So the germ of The Paris Secret was born from that.

Natasha Lester Website: https://www.natashalester.com.au/

Melanie Benjamin too, covered World War II in her The Mistress of the Ritz – an startling tale of goings on in the famous Paris hotel during Nazi occupation in the 1940s.

But like several of our other high raters, Melanie also  turned to movie history for another of her works, The Girl In the Picture, which examines the remarkable collaboration between Hollywood star Mary Pickford and screen writer Frances Marion.

Says Melanie:

Melanie Benjamin: That was to me was the shame of this, that this whole history about women in Hollywood had these women who had almost been forgotten. I mean, Frances Marion was the first woman to win an Academy Award for Best Screenplay and the first person ever to win two of them, and she was the highest paid screenwriter of her time, one of the most influential screenwriters in Hollywood history, and no one’s heard of her. There are no awards named after her. 

I find it so frustrating that women were just as responsible as the men were in inventing Hollywood and inventing the art of film making and yet it’s the men we remember, like Cecil B de Mille and Louie B Mayer, and we don’t remember Frances.

We don’t remember Dorothy Arzner, and we don’t remember Alice Guy-Blaché and all these incredibly pioneering women. And I thought that’s was one major reason why I wanted to write this book, because I really felt it’s time we remember these women.

And Mary Pickford we may know about, certainly, you know a name, maybe a face, but we probably don’t remember that she was the first female head of a motion picture studio and that these two women together had not just an amazing, what I think is a truly empowering female friendship, but it also a collaboration that resulted in the most popular movies of their time.

A hundred years ago. Two women were making the most popular movies in Hollywood and that just doesn’t happen anymore. And you know I just thought this story needs to be told as well.

Melanie Benjamin Books Website: https://melaniebenjamin.com/

Kate Alcott too, took us inside the sparkle of the star system in Hollywood’s golden days, In her book A Touch of Stardust.. to reveal people like Clarke Gable and Carole Lombard on the set of Gone With The Wind, – the only Hollywood star the Kate says she ‘truly fell in love with.” 

Kate says of the bombshell actress:

I think I discovered her as I went along, but you know what I try to do, with Carole Lombard, or Ingrid Bergman or any of the major true life characters. I do as much research to give me a really strong sense of connection of what they actually truly said. So I use some of the things that they said in their words and weave it into the story so that’s been a part of  building the story.

And when I saw some of the things Carole Lombard did, she was a real kook. I would have loved to put my feet up and have a talk with her. She was exuberant about her love for Clark Gable. They were obviously such turbulent times. I think the marriages in Hollywood are under such intense scrutiny all the time.

They deserve some sensitivity. She was just so alive.  She became one of my favorite characters of any of my books.

Kate Alcott Website: http://www.katealcott.com/

And popular Kiwi author Deborah Challinor was a bit of an outlier here – in the top ranking group with the episode talking about her latest book, The Jacaranda Tree, the story of an exotic dancer in the 1960s Sydney nightclub scene different from everything else on the list…

Deborah Challinor Website: http://www.deborahchallinor.com/

It couldn’t be a year of pandemic without some heart-wrenching emotional women’s fiction –  and Barbara Hannay and Nicky Pellegrino both made the top group with stories that make you want to laugh and cry.

Here I am asking Barbara Hannay about writing uplifting stories:

Jenny Wheeler: You say on your website, in your mission statement, that as a romance writer you want to give readers an “uplifting heart-wrenching fantasy while keeping it believable.” And I wondered if you could explain to us a little bit how you manage to do that, keeping the fantasy element, but also making it believable.

Barbara Hannay: Well, first of all, I’ll work on the emotional element first because I do think readers like to have their emotions engaged, so I always try to make sure there is a situation that I know will be an emotional one. Often it involves some kind of loss for one of the characters. They’ve lost their job, or they suffer a broken relationship, or they’ve lost a loved one, or there’s been a serious mistake they’ve made in the past.

Something like that, which will be very involving on an emotional level. I try to make it believable by making sure my characters are well motivated so that whatever they do, you understand why they’re doing it. But I think for me, the fantasy level probably comes from the feeling of being swept away.

Probably the whole romance of falling in love, but also the setting. I don’t go in for wealth and billionaires and all that sort of thing so much. The fantasies that I create are more about going to a different place, a place that might be different for the reader who might be busy in the city, hard at work, dealing with traffic and all the rest of it. I try to make my settings a bit like a far-away dream.

Barbara Hannay Website: http://www.barbarahannay.com/

And Nicky Pellegrino – a top seller in New Zealand, and known for her food, fun and romance in Italy formula, was on talking about Tiny Pieces of Us, a story with a darker side than many of her other works – appropriate – maybe – as we recorded it just as the pandemic was hitting. Nicky get’s philosophical about what writing that book – and what was going on around her – was teaching her about life.

Nicky Pellegrino: In a weird sort of way, I think I’ve learned the lesson that my character in Tiny Pieces of Us learns, that you can’t live a safe, small life without any risks because the outside world is going to come in and change things for you.

You might as well take those risks that you really want to take. I’m risking failure, which you never want to do. No one likes the idea of not being good at something, but you’ve might as well do that because life is going to come along and change stuff for you anyway.

I never, ever in my life expected something like the COVID lockdown to happen. I thought there might be wars, I thought there might be disasters, but this was something I never considered. Now I feel anything could happen.

I found level four very difficult, partly because of the broken leg and having elderly, frail parents in the UK. I don’t know when I’ll be able to see them again or that they’re going to be okay because things in England are still very seriously wrong.

To try and create some positives and take charge of my life and make some changes became important to me, because I feel like we’re being buffeted by things we can’t control and we all need a little bit of control in our lives.

Nicky Pellegrino Website: https://www.nickypellegrino.com/books/tiny-pieces-of-us/

We’ve got two romances to round off this year’s list – Lucinda Brant’s Georgian historicals and Bronwyn Sell’s contemporary romcom Lovestruck set in a tourist resort in the Whitsundays…

Lucinda Brant’s been described as “Giving the Golden Age of romance a modern voice.” Her Roxton series is up to eight books and she says there’s still more to come.

Here I ask her about the genesis for the series:

Jenny: The book on your website that’s free for download, Midnight Marriage, is based on real events, a secret midnight marriage establishes a dynasty. I was fascinated by that. What were those real events that are at the back of that whole story?

Lucinda Brant: I read Stella Tillyard’s book, Aristocrats, which was  based on the Lennox family. The first Duke of Richmond was an illegitimate son of Charles II and his son was married off to settle a gambling debt.

He was brought into a room to this girl who I think was 12, because it was the age of consent that girls could marry, and they were married off there and then. The gambling debt was settled, and she was sent back to the nursery and the boy was sent off on the grand tour. I thought, this is a fantastic story.

Then what happened? He returned from the grand tour, was at the theater, saw a girl across the theater in a box and thought, she looks very nice, I want to be introduced to her. Can someone tell me her name? And someone said, well actually, that’s your wife.

Jenny Wheeler: Amazing story.

Lucinda Brant: Truth is stranger than fiction.

Lucinda Brant Website: https://www.lucindabrant.com/

And to round it all out, Bronwyn Sell reminds us of the challenges writers face in a year of pandemic that you mightn’t have thought of…We recorded this in April, 2020, when New Zealand was in its first lockdown and Covid 19 was still a strange new thing.

Bronwyn Sell: So my next novel is due out in February but I don’t know what the world’s going to look like in February.

And of course this is a tourist company.  The island is a resort island.  So what’s that going to look like for them?  I’ve written the book already. It’s with my editor at the moment, although it’s got a few layers of editing to go through, but I have people flying in from America to go to this island and I have people flitting over the world.

Interestingly, the book does open with the characters facing a bit of a dilemma because the tourism industry is down, or their own numbers are down and they’re wondering how they can get more people to come.  From that point of view it’s probably quite brilliant, but then what do I do with it?  Do I get people pouring into the island again?  It’s impossible to know that.

We’ve only got a couple more months to wait to find out what she decided.

Bronwyn Sell Website:  https://www.bronwynsell.com/

That’s it from us for 2020. I do hope everyone listening has a wonderful Christmas and a healthy New Year… We’ll be back on February 1, 2021.  In the meantime, explore some of the fabulous authors we’ve talked about here today – and more than 100 others who are just as good who couldn’t get a mention here…  And See You Next Year!

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Jan Moran is a USA Today best-selling author with a slew of 20th century standalone historicals as well as several women’s contemporary fiction series to her credit.

Hi there, I’m your host Jenny Wheeler, and in today’s Binge Reading episode Jan talks about how she moved from being a successful beauty care entrepreneur to full-time novelist and why she loves to write strong, independent characters who are striving to build lives that make a difference.

Support Binge Reading on Patreon for as little as a cup of coffee a month and receive regular exclusive bonus content on featured authors and the making of the podcast.

Bonuses include regular weekly Getting To Know You Five Quickfire Questions with authors, giving a fund candid snapshot of their likes and dislikes, as well as an exclusive monthly Behind the Scenes newsletter giving previews of upcoming books. You can join and get this bonus content and having the satisfaction of knowing you are helping pay some of the hosting and production costs for the show. The time I give to the show in sourcing guests and researching their books is still free. Become a Patreon supporter today by going to https://www.patreon.com/thejoysofbingereading/

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

Where to find Jan Moran: 

Website:  www.JanMoran.com

Facebook: @janmoranbooks and Private Facebook Group to join: https://www.facebook.com/groups/584252208399841

Twitter: @janmoran

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/janmoranbooks/

Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.nz/janmoran1/

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/9056.Jan_Moran

Bookbub: https://www.bookbub.com/authors/jan-moran

What follows is a “near as” transcript of our conversation, not word for word but pretty close to it, with links to important mentions.

But now, here’s Jan.

Jenny Wheeler: Hi there, Jan. It’s so good to have you with us. Welcome to the show.

Jan Moran: Hello, Jenny. Lovely to be here with you. Thank you.

Jenny Wheeler: Let’s get the geography set. I’m in Auckland, New Zealand. I think you’re in California. Where in California?

Jan Moran: Yes, I’m in Southern California, Los Angeles and San Diego and over to Palm Springs. That’s my area.

Jenny Wheeler: You are a USA Today bestselling author with multiple series, as well as stand out historical fiction and nonfiction to your credit. You are what other people would look at and say is the complete author package, but they always love to know, how did you get started on that road?

Jan Moran: I think it began as a child. I was always an avid reader and I began to write as a young girl too. Fast forward a few years, I studied at the University of California in Los Angeles, their writers’ program, and went for my MBA as well. Shortly after that I began my pursuit of this career, although I did a few other things in the interim as well.

Some authors might start young, but I am glad that my books came out a little bit later because I was able to bring in such a wealth of experience that I’ve had. That’s given me stories I can mine for many, many years.

Jenny Wheeler: You have done the standalone historicals as well as the series, and the latest historical that you’re publishing at the moment is The Chocolatier. It is a dual timeline story set between post-war US and Italy with a marvelously twisted emotional plot. It really does keep you on the edge of your seat.

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A newly widowed war bride discovers that the man she married almost immediately after the war, when everything’s over – she suddenly discovers she knows very little about him when he dies suddenly. I don’t want to give away any plot points, but it’s a great platform to launch a story from.

Jan Moran: Thank you. It was such a delightful novel to write and of course research as well, as you can imagine. That particular one I wrote for my editor in Germany, Goldmann. People ask, do you write in German? No, I don’t, but it’s translated. My historicals are translated into quite a few languages.

The Chocolatier was one I’ve been dying to write for a long, long time. I saw that as the third in what I call my sensory collection, from The Perfumer, Scent of Triumph, to The Winemakers, to The Chocolatier. 

All of these are based on gifts of nature – wine, chocolate, perfume, these all emanate from our earth and I love writing about agriculture and the luxury goods we think of these as, that we bring forward.

This particular one starts under the Ghirardelli sign in San Francisco, the brilliant sign which was there during the fifties when this begins. Then from there to the beautiful shores of Amalfi, a lovely area of Italy.

Then of course I take readers on a mountain trek in Peru. I loved researching it and I had the opportunity to meet and learn from a Venezuelan chocolatier who is living in San Diego – co-founder of Chuao which is fabulous artisan chocolate that’s gone very wide here in the States.

Then French Valrhona – Valrhona invited me in to meet with a trio of Peruvian cacao farmers, so I was able to do some marvelous firsthand research. And several others. It was a wonderful experience.

There is a family secret at the heart of that, as there is with so many of my books. I love that bit of mystery, history, family secrets. I love to write about sagas, particularly the immigrant story, about what a character might have left behind in the old country.

Back then, before we had Facebook following us around the world, it was easier to go to another country and re-create yourself. Well, whatever you left behind, does that have a bearing on the future? As you’ll see in many of my books, the answer is yes, it does indeed.

Jenny Wheeler: That’s great. I was going to comment on the family secret. I think we all love family secrets, we find them irresistible, and practically every family has them to a greater or lesser degree.

A number of your books are set in the fifties and sixties and you say you particularly love that era. What is the attraction for you of that time period?

Jan Moran: I think my mother and my grandmother. I remember their stories of those periods of time. My mother was married in the forties. My father was a pilot based in Newfoundland and used to ferry planes from North America to England via Greenland.

I have a fascination with that period, the fifties, a flashback to the twenties and the forties. Simpler time in many ways, but also, because of the lack of communication, it was often easy to lose track of people. I think that’s often a very good plot twist as well.

It was a time when women were on the emergence. There was a seismic cultural shift going on. While the men were away at war, the women were working, they were holding the fort. Then afterwards, either through circumstance or choice, many of them continued in the workforce and laid the groundwork for where we are today.

I write about women who were very determined, creative, who are resilient and they’re forging their own path. That’s a common thread you’ll find throughout all my books.

Jenny Wheeler: You’ve got a new historical coming out next month which sounds fantastic. It’s called Hepburn’s Necklace and it’s based around the set of the classic 1953 Hepburn movie, Roman Holiday. That’s a classic film. How did you research that and what attracted you to it as a story idea?

Jan Moran: It was one of my favorite movies and has been for many years. I grew up in Texas and then went to school in Boston and moved to Los Angeles. My husband at the time, my then husband – his family was from Los Angeles and had been very immersed in the film industry.

They counted a lot of people as friends – the Marx brothers, Frank Sinatra. I don’t like name-dropping, but they were their neighbors and friends and club members. They were hard working entertainers at that time, and so I got to know and hear a lot of the stories.

I knew William Wyler, the director of the film, and there were a lot of stories about Audrey Hepburn who was one of the most charming, kind souls. She had been through so much during the war.  And she was a ballet dancer.

I was also brought up dancing. My mother was in the Houston Ballet, studied under the great Kotchetovsky from the Ballet Russe who also trained Gene Kelly. So there are all these connecting threads.

Audrey used to have these clandestine ballet performances, where she would raise money for the Resistance. People couldn’t clap and they were very silent, and I thought about the kind of person, the kind of young girl who would do that.

She was barely a teenager at the time. Then as she went on through life, her humanitarian work – I’ve always thought of her as such a ray of sunshine, so to write about her was such a joy.

But the story isn’t about her. It’s about another young actress, Ruby Raines, who is from Texas and my first Texas heroine, so she was very close to my heart. The story begins on the set of Roman Holiday on a scorching summer in 1952 in Rome.

That was the first American film filmed entirely in Italy, and so it was quite the happening in Rome, as you can imagine. Then in the present day, I bring it back to an older Ruby and her great niece and I take them from Los Angeles, Palm Springs to Lake Como – Lago de Como – which is one of my most favorite places on earth. Beautiful, beautiful area.

Although that story was conceived prior to the pandemic, a great deal of the writing took place at that time. I call them my pandemic books, some of these, and I wanted to make them extra heartwarming. That’s the kind of book it is, and I can’t wait to share it with people.

Jenny Wheeler: You have generously agreed to let one of your Christmas books, Seabreeze Christmas, from the Seabreeze Inn series, be included in our Twelve Days of Christmas giveaway, and we are absolutely delighted about that. Have you written Christmas stories before?

Jan Moran: No, this is my first one. There I was, by the pool in Los Angeles, sipping my hot chocolate and listening to Christmas music, and then I’d have a break and take a dip in the pool. It was such fun. It reminded me of the old story about White Christmas. That was the song which was written by the pool in La Quinta, California or Arizona, depending on which story, maybe both?

I loved it and I’ve had so much positive response from readers on it, and I’m already planning one for next year as well. I think Christmas stories touch our hearts, our memories, how we wish life could be all the time. There are so many cherished memories that people have associated with the holidays.

Jenny Wheeler: It is especially so this year, isn’t it? People have a feeling of wanting to somehow grab back some of that warm, secure feeling we used to have before the pandemic struck.

Jan Moran: Yes, and we will have again, I’m sure.

Jenny Wheeler: Yes. Tell us about your Seabreeze series. What was the genesis for that?

Jan Moran: I was walking on the beach in Southern California, one beach I like in particular, Moonlight Beach, which is very much a family beach in North San Diego County, Encinitas. I walked on the beach and I was trying to plot and dream of stories, as I often do. And I thought, why don’t I set one here, right in my own backyard?

In this one, I also aged up my heroines. In my historicals, my heroines are often in their mid to late twenties, early thirties, but I always have very strong secondary characters. In The Winemaker, for example, the mother is just as much a heroine as the daughter who the story revolves around.

But in this one I wanted to age her up. She’s 45, newly widowed. She’s every woman. She has a bit of a muffin top around the middle, she doesn’t really care as long as she’s healthy and strong. She accepts her aging. She has two daughters, one in college – a bit spoiled – and another one just out of college.

These are things that so many of my friends have dealt with, I’ve dealt with. We are the sandwich generation, between our grown children and our parents. In the story, she becomes very worried about her mother, but her mother is a very vibrant 70 something, and her parents.

In this one I bring in the whole family. She has a sister, a very artsy sister. She’s a horticulturalist, Ivy is an art teacher. It’s really about these women re-creating their lives in mid-life.

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Those choices – sometimes they’re ones we make; other times they’re forced upon us. I wanted to follow two women who are re-creating their lives and the backdrop is this historic house. I

t was designed by the first licensed female architect in California, Julia Morgan, who also did a lot of important work up and down the coast of California. The house is just as much a character in these stories because the former owner was an art collector from Europe.

What sets these beach stories apart from others, I think, and that readers have gravitated towards, is that there is a lot of history and mystery in it too. They’re not mysteries, but there are some discoveries let’s say, and that’s what I really enjoyed, bringing my historical background into these stories as well.

Jenny Wheeler: Does that house actually exist?

Jan Moran: No, it doesn’t. Nor does Summer Beach. Unfortunately, I’ve had people googling and saying, I really want to visit Summer Beach. Where is it? It was a mashup between La Jolla and Laguna Beach. But there are a lot of older homes built along the California Coast that I drew inspiration from.

Jenny Wheeler: I haven’t finished the first book but it’s a very intriguing beginning. I always love these beginnings where somebody’s husband dies and then they discover they’ve done a whole lot of things they had no idea about. She inherits that house from a husband’s estate without even realizing he bought it, doesn’t she?

Jan Moran: Yes, he drained their retirement account. Unfortunately, this is a story that has happened before.

Jenny Wheeler: That’s right. Every woman’s nightmare probably. I don’t know how it turns out because I have not finished it yet, but it’s got a great beginning.

Jan Moran: Well, Ivy is very resourceful and very resilient, and nothing holds her down.

Jenny Wheeler: Just like the heroines of your other series, the Love, California series, which I became quite addicted to. I’ve confessed to you that I listen to them through the night on audio on more than one occasion.

They are more contemporary with younger women and more racy in terms of the lives that they lead. It’s a contemporary setting – a group of entrepreneurial women who are all looking for both business success and love in parallel steps in industries like perfume and skin care and fashion.

There are plenty of chances for some fascinating settings and set ups. Have you been asked for any more of these? I think they’re quite addictive books.

Jan Moran: Yes, I have. As with Seabreeze, the Summer Beach series started off as a trilogy and then readers wanted more. I was thrilled at the acceptance and to be able to go back into that world and write again. It grew from three to five.

Now the Coral Cottage is also set in Summer Beach and I have merged the characters. One of the women in Coral Cottage is Ivy Bay’s best friend from Seabreeze Inn, so there’s still some interaction.

Very much like Debbie Macomber does in her world. I really enjoyed that. The Love, California series stands at six books right now, and I may add another special to that.

Again, if I hear from readers that they’re enjoying it, then it’s something I’ll go back to. I really enjoyed writing that series as well. That series follows very much my own experiences – moving to Los Angeles as a young woman, full of ambition and looking for a new life.

Many of my friends in Los Angeles are in the creative fields, as I was myself. I have a background in the beauty industry, and I created a couple of touch screen technologies that I eventually sold to Sephora.

That took me around the world. I started the company, along with a team of software developers created this – it’s called the fragrance IQ and skin IQ. I ended up selling that to Sephora, but before I sold the company, I had it in Sephora stores in Europe and the US, in the duty-free stores, in Hong Kong and the Middle East and all over.

That was my life for a while. It was a lot of fun, a lot of hard work. These glamorous industries look like so much fun on the outside, but on the inside, it’s a lot of work.

As I was flying transatlantic, transpacific flights, I can only watch so many movies and I had a hard time sleeping on the plane at that time, so I would pull out my notebook and start writing. That’s where many of these stories grew from.

One thing about the Love, California series too is that those are standalone books, unlike the Seabreeze, the Summer Beach series, which is a longer running series.

These are standalone books starting with Flawless, and in each one of those I take the readers on a journey. It might be Paris or Spain, Sydney, Monaco. You’ll get front row seats at New York’s Fashion Week or the formula one races in Monte Carlo.

I love that, it’s all the fun things we want to do in life. But at the heart of each one of these stories is a woman’s journey.

In each one of those stories, her dream is dashed. I don’t want to say too much, but life doesn’t always turn out the way we plan. It’s what we do after that, that I think is the interesting story.

Each one of these women goes on a journey and comes out the other end with a life. It may not be the life they wanted in the beginning, but it’s the life they embrace. It’s the life they were meant to have. I do believe in a bit of Kismet as well, and that’s at the heart of many of those stories. Great fun to write.

Jenny Wheeler: It’s interesting how often Kismet comes up in them. There’s a wonderful escapist glamor in them all too. It’s a reflection back to the eighties, the Jacqueline Susann types of stories, but reframed for the 21st century.

Jan Moran: Yes. I grew up reading a lot of Jackie Collins and Danielle Steele, you know, airplane reads.

Jenny Wheeler: Shirley Conran.

Jan Moran: Yes. It was great fun, but I think some of it really touched my heart. Barbara Taylor Bradford, A Woman of Substance, remains one of my all-time favorite books. That heroine Emma Harte is determined and will stop at nothing.

Jenny Wheeler: What was the book you first published? Where did you begin with your publishing journey?

Jan Moran: It came out first as Scent of Triumph although the original name was The Perfumer, and I’ve recently gone back to that. I’ll explain that in a minute, but this particular book was born – as I mentioned, I spent quite a few years in the beauty business and I wrote a book called Fabulous Fragrances years ago, back in the nineties. That book paved the way for this technology that I created for the beauty industry.

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In the course of that, I was researching all these old brands that are still with us today, many of them – Chanel, Estee Lauder, Helena Rubinstein. How did they get their start? These weren’t big brands at the time, these were started by women and they were started at a time when there weren’t many women in the industry.

I was fascinated too with the World War II period and what happened to the couture industry in Paris. At the time most of them closed their doors and we all know now that Chanel closed her atelier and moved into the Ritz. There are books about that, and she does make a cameo appearance in The Perfumer.

But I was fascinated by a particular woman, Germaine Cellier. She was a perfumer. Remember at that time, in the forties, it was a man’s world in perfumery, and it was very rare for women to be perfumers. But she was, and she created perfumes for a couturier, Robert Piguet.

I forget the name of it, but he was the head of the professional society at that time during World War II and he stayed in business and was trying to keep jobs in Paris during the war – all the seamstresses and the lacemakers and the bead work – all of those people employed.

The Nazis were trying to move the couture industry to Berlin, which is still a fashion center, but they succeeded in keeping many of their people in Paris.

Anyway, I was fascinated by all of this. Cellier’s perfumes are still around today – Fracas from 1948, Bandit from 1944, from the height of the war. I was really inspired by this and I said my heroine has got to be a French perfumer and it’s got to be during World War II.

I had some personal knowledge of what people had gone through during the war, through my family, and so I thought, this is the book. Even though I had written a couple of others, I felt that was the one that would have a chance.

And it did. A senior editor at St. Martin’s Press acquired it and then it went on to be published in many languages as well. That was truly a book of my heart that was probably 15 years in the making.

After that they acquired another book, The Winemakers, set in California in the Napa Valley during the 1950s. Another very strong female protagonist, and those books were absolute joys to write.

Jenny Wheeler: So you started out in the standalone historicals and then graduated to the series a little later.

Jan Moran: Yes, I did.

Jenny Wheeler: We’d better move on to talking a little about your wider career, rather than focusing just on the books themselves. Is there one thing you feel you’ve done more than any other that you’d see as the secret of your success and your longevity as a writer?

Jan Moran: The main thing is, I never stopped. I persevered. Even as an adult, having manuscripts I would send out and pitch over and over again. Each time I did, I learned something from it. Scent of Triumph/The Perfumer was 15 years in the making, but at the beginning of that time, it was nowhere near publication, so each time I submitted it, I learned something about the craft.

I continued going to writers’ conferences, getting to know other writers. It truly is a craft. It took a long time for me to reach publication, but I wasn’t ready in my own life. We each follow a different path. So I wouldn’t change a thing.

Jenny Wheeler: You’re republishing that book, aren’t you?

Jan Moran: Yes. In the early part of this year, I noticed that it had fallen out of paperback and hardcover publication. This is a note to writers that when I went into those contracts, I had a very good agent and there was a clause put in there that the rights would revert to me if sales of the print versions fell below a certain level.

So I exercised that and I brought those back, because by then I felt very confident in the reader base I had developed and I knew there was still a market for it. People were reaching out to me all the time, asking where they could find it in print.

I said, I think I can manage that, and so I brought those back and they’ve sold more this Fall than they had for the last couple of years with St. Martin’s Press.

I love St. Martin’s – I had an excellent editor there, but we can do more now. I’m really a hybrid author. I still have a publisher in Germany, Random House Goldmann, but I keep those domestic rights and I’m able to publish those myself. Then happily, The Winemakers has been optioned for a television series now.

Jenny Wheeler: Oh, cool. That period, particularly Paris in the Second World War – there are lots of people doing stories based around that setting of the fashion industry and they are all great to read, so I think the time is probably even riper for that book now than it was when you first published it, handled right.

Jan Moran: Very true. In fact, when I first began pitching that book, it was before the huge popularity in recent years of World War II sagas, and I remember one of the first agents I approached said, that’s a dead period in history, no one reads World War II sagas, there’s no market for it. Of course, trends change.

As a writer, it’s important to be on top of those trends but also to write the books you feel you’re meant to write. But a professional writer, yes, we do pay attention to things like that.

Jenny Wheeler: Yes. Turning to Jan as reader. This is The Joys of Binge Reading, and we like to cater for people who enjoy genre fiction and to introduce them to new authors they might not have heard of. I imagine you have in the past been a binge reader, even if you don’t have much time to binge read now, so who do you like to read? Who have you liked to read in the past, and can you recommend some favorites?

Jan Moran: As a child, I was an avid reader but I was truly a serious reader. I remember there was a series called The Happy Holisters about an American family. I had an indulgent grandmother and I think I must have had 20 or 30 of these books.

They went on and on and I loved being in that world. So, yes, I was an early series and binge reader. Today – I’ve mentioned Barbara Taylor Bradford, I love her series. Elin Hilderbrand for women’s beach fiction. I’ve read her Winter series and the Paradise series. Those are excellent.

Other readers – I admire Allison Pataki who has written a couple of books, not exactly series, but they are in a way, The Accidental Empress and Sisi, both about Sisi. For historical Gill Paul, Lauren Willig, Kate Quinn of course. Fiona Davis writes very stylish 1950s books, a lot of them set in New York, fifties and sixties. Very interesting.

(Gill Paul and Fiona Davis can both be found on the Joys of Binge Reading:

Fiona at Big Apple Drama, and Gill most recently at Jackie & Maria – Love and Betrayal)

Then there are some other independent authors, very top selling. Pamela Kelley, Rachel Hanna, Kay Correll women’s fiction series. I really enjoy those books and I enjoy working with them too. They are friends and we have a great deal of fun together.

Jenny Wheeler: That’s fantastic. Fiona Davis has been on the show. Her books are great.

Circling around, because we are starting to run out of time together, at this stage, if you were doing it all again, is there anything you would change, and if there is, what would it be?

Jan Moran: Looking back over life, like anyone I’ve had a lot of challenges, but honestly, I don’t think I would change a thing because every challenge I’ve learned something, I’ve learned and grown, and I wouldn’t be the woman I am today had I not had those challenges.

I could say, I wish I had published earlier in life, I wish I had as many books out as – pick someone – Danielle Steele, but we all have our own journey and as long as I am reaching readers and hearing from them. I love to hear from readers.

I get the sweetest stories from people who have said that their books have helped them during particularly difficult times. Especially this year more than ever. I have a Facebook readers group and a newsletter that goes out and I share bits and pieces of my personal life or recipes – my basil recipe, I had a fabulous crop this season, basil and tomatoes. I love to interact with readers, and I feel like this is our world, our thing that we’ve created, and I love that.

Jenny Wheeler: What does your next 12 months look like? Were you badly impacted by the pandemic and how are you placed for the next 12 months in terms of the projects you’ve got on?

Jan Moran: Knock on wood, my family has been healthy and those friends and extended family members who have gone through COVID have come out fine. I’m so thankful. I am sheltering in place quite a bit, I’m not getting out much, but then I was always a fan of home delivery groceries and so I have been staying at home.

I have been writing an awful lot. This has been a very productive year. Coming up is Hepburn’s Necklace, we are on the eve of that now. I’m very excited to share that.

Then I have the Coral Café coming out in the Summer Beach world, and Seabreeze Wedding – not telling who’s getting married, or if they are, but we’ll see what happens. Then I have some other plans for another historical and possibly another series but all of that’s still in development at this point. And another Christmas book for sure.

Jenny Wheeler: That’s wonderful. Do you write through a series and then go on to the next series or do you jump them around a bit?

Jan Moran: Good question. Typically, I will write start to finish. However, with the Summer Beach series, I started at the Seabreeze Inn and then I jumped over to Coral Cottage and now I’ve jumped back. It’s all in the same world, but typically when I write, whether it’s a series or a book, I’ll go start to finish.

That’s how I write my novels. I don’t bother with editing. I’ll turn around and get that at the end, but the most important thing to me is get the story down.

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I do love to research so sometimes it’s a little hard to get started – to know when to stop researching and when to start the story, but once I do, I don’t look back.

Jenny Wheeler: You mentioned that you love to have interaction with your readers, and we will put all those links to the places where readers can find you in the show notes for this episode, but to quickly recap, where can people find you if they are now desperate to see your books online?

Jan Moran: I’m at janmoran.com. I am on Facebook as Jan Moran author or Jan Moran books, and I have a Facebook group as well that you can tap on the door and I’ll let you in. I have a newsletter that goes out monthly – just once a month generally, and I invite everyone in. You’ll find me a little bit too on Twitter or Instagram. I keep up a bit there. I’ll check in.

I love to hear from people, and I invite everyone over for a cup of tea or a cocktail and we’ll watch the sunset together and share a good story.

Jenny Wheeler: I noticed on the Seabreeze book you referred to watching the sunset go down and the green flash. I thought that was wonderful because I used to live on a West Coast beach in New Zealand and we used to sit on the beach and watch for the green flash.

Jan Moran: I think that’s universal. We laugh about it and I have included that in a couple of books. You know the name comes from a friend from New Zealand. She was known for her Seabreeze cocktails, which is ruby red grapefruit, cranberry juice and vodka. She used to throw these cocktail parties at sunset and serve Seabreezes.

We’ve been friends for decades now, and we’ve laughed about that a lot, so when I was thinking about the name for the book, it naturally came to me that this would be the Seabreeze. I have a recipe in the back of the book as well, tried and tested many times.

Jenny Wheeler: Sounds like something we should try for Christmas.

Jan Moran: I think so.

Jenny Wheeler: Wonderful talking Jan. Thank you so much.

Jan Moran: Thank you, Jenny. It’s been such a pleasure and I can’t wait for your next book.

Jenny Wheeler: That’s sweet of you. Yes, it’s a labor of love. It sure is.

If you enjoyed Jan Moran’s heartwarming women’s fiction you may also enjoy Gill Paul – Jackie and Maria Love & Betrayal or Fiona Davis – Big Apple Drama

Leeanna Morgan is a USA Today best-selling author of Montana sweet romance, with over a million downloads of her books and a following on BookBub of more than 53,000. This former librarian runs her highly successful – and lucrative – book business from her peaceful home in Wellington, New Zealand.

Hi there, I’m your host Jenny Wheeler and today on The Joys of Binge Reading Leeanna talks about what’s possible in this new world of indie publishing, global reach and the struggle with an international pandemic.

Leeanna’s got lots of First in Series free books on her website. You will find the links for that in the show notes for this episode, so if you are interested in her sweet romance, take a look.  You’ll find some places to start that won’t cost you a cent.

Before we get to Leeanna, just a reminder. You can support the show on Patreon for as little as a cup of coffee a month, and get exclusive bonus content, including five quickfire getting-to-know-you questions with your favorite authors. Check it out at www.patreon.com/thejoysofbingereading/ and join us today.

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

Where to find Leeanna Morgan: 

Website: https://www.leeannamorgan.com/free-ebooks.html

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Leeanna-Morgan-220562971470830/

Bookbub: https://www.bookbub.com/authors/leeanna-morgan

Leeanna’s free books: https://www.bookbub.com/authors/leeanna-morgan

What follows is a “near as” transcript of our conversation, not word for word but pretty close to it, with links to important mentions.

But now, here’s Leeanna.

Jenny Wheeler: Hello there, Leeanna, and welcome to the show. It’s great to have you with us.

Leeanna Morgan: Thanks, Jenny. It’s awesome to be here and thank you for the invitation.

Jenny Wheeler: We’ve known each other for years through the New Zealand Romance Writers, and I’ve always been a great admirer of the way you work. You, like me, are a Kiwi, you live in Wellington, New Zealand, but you’ve developed a huge following in the U S. Tell us how you got embarked on this amazing adventure. What was it that kick-started you?

Leeanna Morgan: Of all things, Jenny, it was turning 40. I decided that the last 10 years between 30 and 40 had gone so fast that it felt as if I blinked and missed the whole ten years. I decided I wasn’t going to let that happen in the next 10 years, before I turned 50. So I thought of one thing I wanted to do, to feel as though I’d achieved something in that ten years. I decided to write a book and that’s how it all started.

I wrote one book and I really quite enjoyed it, so then I wrote a second one and I just kept going from there. By the time I turned 50, I had about 20-ish books I’d published. That’s how it started.

Jenny Wheeler: My gosh, you make it sound so easy. You have been remarkably productive. As you mentioned, all those books have got different settings and different series, but your genre and tone is very consistent.

It’s sweet, small town romance with real life emotion and pain that usually – almost always anyway – finds a happy resolution. That would be fair to say, I think. When you started out, was indie publishing a thing, because you are now indie published aren’t you?

Leeanna Morgan: That’s right and have been from the beginning, apart from a little foray into the world of literary agents.  I enjoy indie publishing and it’s been amazing for me.

Jenny Wheeler: You certainly have got it tagged in terms of how to proceed. We will get into that a bit later, but we’re delighted that we’ve got your Christmas series, the number one book in your Santa’s Secret Helpers series in our giveaway this month, The Twelve Days of Christmas giveaway.

That one is called Christmas on Main Street but you’re about to publish number five in that series, Endless Love. That’s an idea of the way you work – you have quite a few books in the series and you publish them pretty close together. What kind of planning goes into making that all happen?

Leeanna Morgan: It’s quite interesting because usually I plan a series two series before it’s actually published. I start introducing characters who are going to be in a series, probably a year to a year and a half before the reader has their individual story.

Planning a series is all about creating vivid characters that readers can connect with and giving readers a little snippet of those people until it’s their time.

For Santa’s Secret Helpers, all of the characters in those books have appeared in the previous series, which is the Sapphire Bay series.

Both those series are set in Sapphire Bay which is a fictional small town on the shore of Flathead Lake in Montana. The next series I’m about to write, readers are very familiar with one of the main characters in that series already. Mabel has been in the last twelve books I wrote, so she’s a familiar character and that will inspire readers to pick up that series and keep going.

Jenny Wheeler: It seems remarkably prescient to me because you started this, you say a year ago, but the world has changed so much over 2020. This book has a church at the center of it, a pastor who’s offering support and comfort to people who are going through hard times, helping with housing, with childcare, with all sorts of needs in the community, and it’s got a real resonance for people with the things they’ve had to endure this year.

I imagine you’ve picked up a lot of interest for those books, because of that.

Leeanna Morgan: I think they have, because they talk about people being kind to each other and helping each other and that’s resonated with people. But that theme carries through in my other series as well.

In The Bridesmaids Club, I’ve got four friends who start up a business called The Bridesmaids Club and they receive donated wedding dresses and bridesmaids’ dresses from people all around America and they give them to people who can’t afford their own wedding dresses or bridesmaid dresses.

That whole theme of unconditional love and helping people – I like that, it really makes my heart beat fast. And I think it does for a lot of people. We’ve all been in situations where something has been a little bit unachievable and all it takes is a smile from someone or a helping hand and it can make the world of difference. That’s what my characters do.

In the Sapphire Bay series the big thing is a tiny home village and the pastor of the Connect Church, John, is building 25 tiny homes with the help of the community that can house people who possibly wouldn’t have the ability to rent a property.

They might have some issues they’re dealing with in their life, and so the community is making houses for these people.

Santa’s Secret Helpers is all about Christmas wishes and the church is organizing fundraisers to raise money for people who have had other anonymous people say they need something special. They are raising money to do that. It’s all about giving back.

Jenny Wheeler: It’s idealistic, it’s optimistic, it’s positive, and some people might say it’s a little bit naïve and it’s definitely different from literary fiction where they tend to take rather dark, self-involved, pretty depressing themes often. Do you feel that you get a bit of kickback from people who say, life isn’t like that?

Leeanna Morgan: No. Because some of my books deal with quite interesting themes. I have had main characters who have had dementia, but of course a cure is found. The thing with life is that nothing is ever impossible.

If someone had said a hundred years ago that you could operate on someone and have no problems with bugs, or if someone had said in the 1970s or 80s that there was going to be some medication for AIDS or HIV, they would have been seen as dreaming.

But unless you start somewhere and try and make a difference, everything will stay the same. With my books, I try and take an issue someone has, or different issues, and find a solution for it. (Safe Haven, Book #1 in The Protectors series.)

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If that means inventing a therapeutic herbal remedy that will help someone, then that’s what I do. And who knows? In another 50 years’ time, it might have been something sitting under our noses that could cure Alzheimer’s. There is a lot of research that goes into making these assumptions, like for the Alzheimer’s thing, I looked up turmeric and all the different herbs that can help with inflammation and memory and other symptoms of dementia.

I try and base what I’m suggesting on some kind of plausible reality and I think that’s what people enjoy, because they’ll go on the internet and look it up and think, ah, that’s where she saw that.

Jenny Wheeler: That’s wonderful. Obviously, your readers love that optimism and positivity. It’s something they come back for over and over again.

Leeanna Morgan: I do. I think it makes them feel good because they feel as though they are part of this caring community. In fact, I had an email from someone yesterday in New Zealand and she said that she laughed when she saw a reference to New Zealand in a book.

She thought maybe it was just a one-off and then she read another two or three of my books and realized that I put little snippets of New Zealand inside my books.

She said, I hope all the small towns in New Zealand, I wish they were like that because that’s so positive and so caring. I told her, they are, they’re out there, you’ve just got to look for them.

Jenny Wheeler: That’s great. You have cleverly adjusted your books to the feedback you’ve got. You mentioned your first series was Montana Brides, and it was set in Bozeman, Montana. I’m curious. We’ve learned that you were a Wellington librarian who decided you wanted to write a book. It’s then a very big jump to deciding, oh, I’ll set it in Montana. How did that happen?

Leeanna Morgan: It was really interesting. In a lot of ways my dad subconsciously played a part in this because dad loved listening to country music. When all the kids in school were listening to ABBA and Meatloaf, I was listening to Dolly Parton and John Denver. He loved Westerns, anything to do with the Wild West and cowboys.

When I started writing my first book, Gracie in Forever Dreams is a New Zealander, because people said write about what you know. I knew about New Zealand, so that was good. And she needed to go somewhere to find her birth father, because we’d already had a conversation about what she needed to do in the story.

I had a Google map of the States because I knew she wanted to go to the United States, and that’s probably my cowboy dad coming out in me, and so I looked and Montana just flashed in front of my eyes. I did a close-up of Montana and Bozeman winked at me as if to say, this is where you need to come.

I thought, okay, we’ll have a look at Bozeman, so I went online, and Bozeman is a fantastic place for a writer to set books. It’s got a huge IT industry, a physics and science industry, Montana State University is in Bozeman. It’s got a huge arts and culture scene.

The community is so environmentally aware and really push sustainability. They’ve been doing that for decades, which flies in the face of some other areas that just don’t seem to care. They also have an amazing ability to have that urban and rural intersection in life. I thought, this is a pretty amazing place, I’m going to write my books and set them in Bozeman. That’s where we ended up.

Jenny Wheeler: You did visit Bozeman yourself, but it was some time after your first Bozeman books had been published. Tell us about what that visit meant to you.

Leeanna Morgan: I loved it. I went with mum, and it was about four years after I’d written the first book in the Montana Brides series. It was like stepping into your imagination. Everything I had seen on YouTube or rancher’s wives’ blogs or any information or pictures I’d been able to find on the internet – it was almost like it came to life..

I remember walking into a building with mum and saying, I’ve been here before, and she said, no, you haven’t. I said, I have. It felt like one of those déja vu moments, and I realized that I’d set one of my books in this bookstore, but I turned the building into a fashion boutique.

It had a beautiful mezzanine floor and a pressed tin ceiling. There were floor to ceiling books in the shop and it was absolutely amazing, but in my store there were beautiful gowns and dresses and the upstairs was where the fashion designer would create these gorgeous designs.

I walked around the store with my mouth open. It was just amazing. It was really, really good.

Jenny Wheeler: All your books are linked in some way and some characters may appear in more than one book. The Christmas books for example, are set in Sapphire Bay, which you’ve already mentioned, and you’ve got two other series which tap into popular romance tropes.

You’ve got the Emerald Lake Billionaires and The Protectors, which is more of a security strong man series. They are very different worlds from the ranch and cowboy locations of Montana Brides, but you manage to bring them all together. That takes some very clever planning, I would think.

Leeanna Morgan: In the Emerald Lake Billionaires series, my billionaires are really nice guys. They are the type of men you would love to meet. They’ve got lots of money and are not shy of spending it, especially on the woman they love.

They live in Emerald Lake, this beautiful lake probably half an hour out of Bozeman. It’s not real, it’s all in my fictional area, and there are four properties around the Lake which belong to each of the four heroes in my four book series. I tied that series with the others by looking at what jobs they do.

The hero in the first book of that series, John Fletcher, owns and started a big high-end security company called Fletcher Security. The people he’s employed as bodyguards – they transport high value items around the States – form the heroes or heroines in other books in The Protector series.

So even The Protector series has more of a caring side to it, rather than a straight alpha male type. The title of the series, The Protectors, isn’t so much about protecting things and properties as far as the security company goes. The heroes and heroines of those stories become their own protectors.

The hero in the first book is called Tank, and he is the protector of a woman he is sent to find. One of the books is about a woman called Sam and she works for Fletcher Security. She’s a real IT wiz. She’s sent to protect a computer programmer some people are looking for. So it’s each of the characters becoming a protector, rather than the alpha male interpretation it could be.

Jenny Wheeler: Yes. There are six books in the Sapphire Bay series and now you’re doing Return to Sapphire Bay. It did spark in my mind the thought that it might have been something readers had asked for – a return by popular demand. Was it anything like that?

Leeanna Morgan: No. The whole premise of Return to Sapphire Bay is more about four daughters of a woman my readers have met, she has been in the last twelve books. Her four daughters return to Sapphire Bay after the death of their grandmother. It’s their return, rather than coming back to a town we haven’t been in for a while, because that is also set in Sapphire Bay.

I’m looking forward to writing that series. I’ve got some wonderful characters and some really good storylines. I’m really excited about that.

Jenny Wheeler: How far are you with that at the moment? Have you got any covers created?

Leeanna Morgan: Yes. I always have my cover designer, Steven Novak from Novak Illustration design my covers with me, probably about a year before the first one comes out, so those covers are all done for those four books in that series. The blurbs are all done, and the pre-orders are all out.

I know what’s going to happen in each book and so do my readers. They pre-order the books and I publish a book every three months. It means that my readers, from when they read the first one, from when that’s available, will only have another 9-12 months to get the whole series.

Jenny Wheeler: That is an amazing production line you’ve got going there and takes a remarkable amount of foresight. I think you must have a very good sense of intuition because a lot of this must be driven on a sense of intuition. Do you ask every character in your books what they want to do or what they want to achieve? Do you take that sort of approach?

Leeanna Morgan: I do, but that all happens way before. Because I’m planning in advance and because I’m wiggling characters into my books as little cameo roles who are going to appear later, I know, and my readers already know, what those people want.

They don’t know specifically why, but they know what they want and what they’re doing in their lives. By having the blurbs done a year in advance, I’ve already thought about that in my headers. I’m writing the blurb – what do my hero and heroine do, when do they meet, what’s stopping them from getting together. It’s that type of thing I need to know.

If I’m going to have a character who is going to be cantankerous and a bit mean and nasty, they can’t be cantankerous and mean and nasty when they first appear and then suddenly turn out really nice by the time their book comes up.

There has to be something that’s irritating them beyond anything, and my readers have to know that.

They have to know that beneath that irritation or standoffishness or shyness or that overworking philosophy in life – there has got to be a reason for it. They want to know as much as the next person what that reason is, so they will buy the book to find out what makes that person tick.

Jenny Wheeler: You are creating a whole society, aren’t you? I’ve seen it suggested that your work is similar to Robyn Carr and the Virgin River series, which has become a very popular TV show. You’re creating a whole society, a fictional world. It’s quite encompassing, isn’t it?

Leeanna Morgan: It is. You need to have believable characters and small-town life is fun to write. I like imagining myself standing on the shore of Flathead Lake. For me, as a writer, it gives me as much enjoyment as my readers get. I think because New Zealand is so beautiful, you can appreciate that synergy between Montana and New Zealand. But it is important to keep everything flowing as far as the series go, and to keep those characters fresh and engaging.

Jenny Wheeler: How did you decide on Flathead Lake?

Leeanna Morgan: When I was still working at the library, we were negotiating a very large contract with a company in America for buying our books. We’d set up a nationwide consortium so that all the libraries pitched in and we got better discounts on our books.

The gentleman we were talking to was the Chief Executive of a big company in the States who provide books to libraries. He was telling me one day that he used to go to Flathead Lake to go fishing. There’s a place called Whitefish, and he used to go there all the time and it was absolutely beautiful. When he came to New Zealand to meet us, he loved New Zealand because he said it was very similar in parts to Montana.

I think that was in the back of my mind when I was looking at a new location for a series, because we’d stayed in Bozeman for about fifteen books and I wanted a fresh look. I probably will go back to Bozeman at some stage, but I’m enjoying Sapphire Bay at the moment. I thought of Flathead Lake and I went and had a look again on Google and looked at the map and then I looked at YouTube and at some videos and I thought, we could make something of this.

But this time I created an imaginary small town, because a lot of the towns around Flathead Lake are incredibly small and I needed a town slightly bigger than that, that wasn’t a city, but was still a reasonable size. That’s why we came up with Sapphire Bay.

Jenny Wheeler: Moving away from talking about the books particularly and turning to your wider career, you’ve referred to the experience you had prior to writing as a librarian, and you rose to a very high level in the library system. It was a lot more than putting books on shelves. Tell us about your previous work before you decided you wanted to be a writer.

Leeanna Morgan: Putting the books on the shelves is really important actually. As a librarian, helping the customers and putting books on the shelves is why I started. I used to always think the fairies used to come in at night and put the books on the shelves but when I became a librarian, that’s what I did.

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When I left the library where I was in Kapiti Coast, I was the Libraries and Arts Manager. I had about 46 staff and I managed four libraries. It was a big job and I really enjoyed it, but I must say the best part of it was helping the customers. And as you rise in an organization and hierarchy, sometimes you miss that connection with the community, and that’s what I really loved.

So a lot of the time, the community would find me downstairs, putting books on shelves. I couldn’t do it all the time, but when I could I’d nip down and do that and then help with inquiries because that’s why I became a librarian in the first place. I think if you lose sight of your community and what’s important to your community, then you’re not doing your job.

That probably ties in with my books. I try and figure out what’s important to that community, and what’s important to that community is important to the people. My stories have to reflect that and what my characters do reflects that. My readers love it because they can see similarities with some amazing things that are happening in their communities and it makes them feel good. So it’s a win-win situation.

Jenny Wheeler: Looking over your career, is there one thing you’ve done more than any other that you would credit as being the secret of your success?

Leeanna Morgan: There are probably two things. The first thing would be to set a realistic goal of what you want to achieve when you first start writing. Some people might want to write a family history and the only people who are going to read it are their family. So they’re very happy, doing what they’re doing.

For me, when I wrote Forever Dreams, it was to write a book that one person apart from my mum would read and enjoy. I thought that was an achievable goal. That goal has changed over the years, but I always try and keep things realistic because you don’t want to set yourself up to fail. Writing is not easy, and it takes a community to support you with family and friends. You can’t do it on your own. So that’s important.

The other thing I did really well is, before I even started writing Forever Dreams, I had a clear idea of the market, and I didn’t reinvent the wheel. I didn’t try to do things differently than what was working well.

I’ll give you an example. When I started writing Forever Dreams, I really enjoyed that, so I wrote another book. Then I thought, I’m writing a series. I looked at what some really good authors were doing who were selling a lot of books and had really good reputations.

I looked at what they did for their marketing – how they structured their series, the markets they were tapping into, the audience they were tapping into, the themes they were using and looking at what resonated with the readers.

That’s when I started putting my business hat on. My business hat didn’t kick in for probably 12 to 18 months after I wrote my first book. That’s when I started thinking about the long-term impact of the series. It’s important to think about that.

Jenny Wheeler: You mentioned to me, off-air, that you slightly changed the heat level of your romances from when you began. Tell us a little bit about that as well.

Leeanna Morgan: When I wrote Forever Dreams, when I first started writing, self-publishing was seen as something you did if you couldn’t get a traditional contract. So I wrote Forever Dreams for Harlequin because at that stage, they were the main publisher of romance novels.

There were set criteria in those books that you had to have. In the particular line I was looking at, they expected one or two love scenes, a set limit on words, and lots of other things. Those expectations I followed through into Forever Dreams, because that was the book I submitted to Harlequin to see if they wanted to accept – well, my agent did in the end.

When I wrote those books, I always had in my head the expectation that I needed to have a love scene or two. Then as I was writing – I think I got to about book four in that series – I suddenly realized it was nonsense. I didn’t have to have love scenes in the books. I had to have love and emotion and respect and intimacy, but my characters didn’t need to make love. So I started changing the way I wrote.

Jenny Wheeler:  You yourself are quite a romantic in your personal life. I seem to recall hearing about a trip you and your husband made to the States to renew your wedding vows. Tell us about that.

Leeanna Morgan: We had a wonderful time, Jenny. Tim and I were celebrating our 25th wedding anniversary and we decided to go to Las Vegas and, as part of another small trip we were doing, renew our wedding vows with Elvis. We were serenaded by this amazing man who impersonated Elvis, and we had a big limousine ride. It was fantastic. Our daughter was our flower girl, and our son was our best man and mum was there to walk me down the aisle. It was absolutely wonderful.

Jenny Wheeler: Fantastic. I think there’s a link back to your first book, isn’t there? Didn’t one of your characters get married at Las Vegas?

Leeanna Morgan: She did. Gracie got married at Las Vegas. It was like a full circle of life, a coming around point, and it felt wonderful to do that. When I’d written that scene in Forever Dreams, it was just imagination and, again, doing a bit of research on the internet. But to do that ourselves, it was just magic, it was wonderful. Although her circumstances weren’t quite the same as ours, so it’s quite interesting.

Jenny Wheeler: Did you find your research was pretty accurate when you went through it yourself?

Leeanna Morgan: It was, but I liked our Elvis better. He was amazing. He had the wiggle on his hips. Really good.

Jenny Wheeler: Turning to Leeanna as reader, because this is The Joys of Binge Reading and we like to give people some recommendations for books they might not have discovered yet. I imagine you are a big reader, being a librarian at one stage of your life. Tell us about your favorite reads and if you’ve got something you’d like to recommend to readers and listeners.

Leeanna Morgan: I like reading lots of books and I read a lot more when I was a librarian, but my favorite books – anything by Nora Roberts or Janet Chapman I adore. Also, a gentleman called Matthew Reilly. He writes kind of James Bond on steroid books.

The book I really, really enjoy and I always go back to, is a book called Where the Heart Is by Billie Letts. It’s about a 17-year-old girl called Novalee Nation who hates the number seven, because it’s really bad luck for her.

She’s seven months pregnant and her boyfriend leaves her in the parking lot of a Walmart store in the States. It’s about her survival and the friends she makes in the small town and the characters.  Billie wrote everything so vividly. You could imagine yourself being in Novalee’s shoes and going through everything she went through. That would be my absolute favorite pick for everyone to read.

Jenny Wheeler: It’s funny, I’ve got a book like that. I picked it up when I was coming home from university on the bus in one of those country cafes with one spinning book stand.

It was called By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept. It was by Elizabeth Smart, who I’d never heard of before but discovered later was a well-known poet and it was a so-called fictional story, although it was actually based on her own life I discovered years later.

A young woman in exactly that situation as well, left by her boyfriend pregnant. And it resonates, I think, even being in a slightly older age group, speaking for myself, because when I was younger it was still a very difficult thing, if you became pregnant without having a husband at your side. Those books do seem to resonate, don’t they?

Leeanna Morgan: They do. There is something that pulls at the heartstrings. This book has actually been made into a movie, years and years ago. It was a good movie, but the book was so much better. It was so vivid and the characters – I suppose, because you’re using your own imagination instead of watching someone else’s imagination unfold. It’s a beautiful book.

Jenny Wheeler: We are coming to the end of our time together so circling around and looking back over this amazing career you’ve had – it’s only part of your life, but it’s been a remarkable part of your life – at this stage, if you were doing it all over again, is there anything you would change about it and if so, what would that be?

Leeanna Morgan: I don’t think there’s anything I would change too drastically. I think I made some good decisions before I started writing. There are two things I would do. One is I would have joined the self-publishing world a lot earlier.

I left it until 2014. In the early days of self-publishing, around 2011, there were far less authors, so you had a much easier way of bringing your books to the reader’s attention and building a lovely readership. Now it’s a lot more difficult, it’s still not impossible by any means.

The second thing I would do, if anyone is listening, that you can put into action now, would be to start your newsletter as soon as you think you will be writing a book.

Make a website. There are some wonderful free website templates like Wix or Weebly. They don’t cost anything and you can start encouraging people and building interest in what you’re writing by having a newsletter on there that people can join. You can start sending people little snippets of what you’re doing.

That’s really important as you grow your career, to be able to have that contact with readers without having to go through retail groups or other promotion companies to let them know what’s happening.

Jenny Wheeler: Do you mind me asking, how many people do you have on your newsletter list now?

Leeanna Morgan: I’ve got about 10,500. I don’t actively grow that now, I just let it grow spontaneously. That’s a good number. A lot of authors have much more than that, but that works for me at this stage.

Jenny Wheeler: For out and out fans, which is what you’re supposedly looking for, that’s a very nice number to base a career on. I see you’ve also got 53,000 or more BookBub followers, which is a huge fan base you’re providing entertainment for.

Leeanna Morgan: I really don’t know how it happened, but the numbers keep ticking over. I think that’s the power of BookBub – they can reach so many readers and people enjoy what I’m writing. It’s wonderful to have a company like BookBub who keep in contact with those followers and let them know when new books are out or when there’s a sale on one of your books.

Jenny Wheeler: It’s certainly validation for what you’re doing. What is next for Leeanna the writer? What projects have you got under development for the next 12 or 18 months?

Leeanna Morgan: My next series is called Return to Sapphire Bay, which we touched on. That’s probably the next 10 months of my life, back in Sapphire Bay. The following series is also going to be set in Sapphire Bay and they are about some little cottages that a group of people are going to renovate.

I’m really looking forward to writing those. That will be most of 2021 and 2022 sorted out. I don’t want to look too far afield because I might have a brainwave in between those two and do something completely different in 2023.

Jenny Wheeler: I guess from what you’ve said that the 2021 one would already have the covers and blurbs done.

Leeanna Morgan: Yes, they’re all done and all available for pre-orders. I’m looking forward to writing them. There are some wonderful storylines and some heartwarming, emotional scenes that I can see in my head already for each of the books.

They are about four sisters who return to Sapphire Bay and the sisters are as different as chalk and cheese. It’s going to be an interesting journey, the next 12 months.

Jenny Wheeler: That’s great. You sound as if you’ve got a great relationship with your readers. How do they find you online and where are you most active?

Leeanna Morgan: The easiest place to find me is via my website. Readers can go to Leeanna Morgan.com and I’ve got all my contact details there as well as some of the free books that are available. Or you can go to my Facebook page and the link is there as well, on my website. I’m happy to receive emails. I love hearing from everyone, so feel free to contact me.

Jenny Wheeler: I’m sure people have heard what a friendly, approachable person you are, and you will have lots of them getting in touch.

Leeanna Morgan: That would be wonderful.

Jenny Wheeler: Thanks so much for your time today, Leeanna. It’s been great talking to you.

Leeanna Morgan: You’re very welcome, Jenny.

If you like Leeanna’s sweet small town romance you might also enjoy Australian author Alissa Callen’s uplifting country town romance – some set in Australia and some – like Leeanna’s books – in Montana.

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Mimi Matthews has enjoyed best-selling success in Victorian fiction and non-fiction, with romances that ask thoughtful social questions as well as entertain. And her playful animal tales in The Pug Who Bit Napoleon, a not-so-romantic interaction that took place on his wedding night, is one of dozens of amusing animal stories from the 18th and 19th centuries

Hi there, I’m your host Jenny Wheeler, and today  Mimi talks about her latest book, Gentleman Jim, a rollicking romantic Regency, and tells what it was like to get her first publishing deal when she was still a relatively young teenager.

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

Where to find Mimi Matthews: 

Website: https://www.mimimatthews.com/

Facebook: @MimiMatthewsAuthor

Twitter: @MimiMatthewsEsq

BookBub: https://www.bookbub.com/profile/mimi-matthews

Goodreads:

https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/16948224.Mimi_Matthews

Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.nz/MimiMatthewsEsq/

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 Wheeler: But now here’s Mimi. Hello there, Mimi and welcome to the show. It’s great to have you with us.

Mimi Matthews: Hi Jenny. I’m so glad to be here. Thanks for having me.

Jenny Wheeler: Beginning at the beginning – it’s a very predictable question with this show now because it’s one I ask every one of our guests but I think people always want to know the answer – was there a Once Upon a Time moment when you decided that you just had to write fiction and if so, what was the catalyst for it?

Mimi Matthews: I would have to say, always being when I was little, really creative – like some little kids when they play with their toys or their dolls and thinking up stories and little scenes for them to act out.

My mom encouraged me to write it down, once I was able to actually be writing. This would have been at elementary school and I kept doing it. No one ever told me you can’t do that, you’re not old enough, you don’t know enough, so I felt really comfortable writing out my ideas and little bits of a dialogue.

Eventually, by the time I was 13, I had written a book. It’s not a masterpiece, but it was good enough that I was able to send it out on submission. Then when I was 18, I got an agent. I think a lot of it had to do with being young and a little bit of a dreamer and no one ever saying, you can’t write these down, you can’t make stories. So I did, and it ended up becoming books.

Jenny Wheeler: It’s quite remarkable that at such a young age you were able to do that.

Mimi Matthews: I never even realized when I was doing it, because I had always been doing it. It was nothing highbrow or technical. I didn’t have a ton of skill at plotting things out or character development or pace. I didn’t know anything about those things, but I really enjoyed doing it. I was shy and it gave me a way to express myself.

It was very immersive, so it was almost like reading a book, the way you get immersed when you’re reading, but I was able to create the stories myself. It definitely filled a need for me when I was little.

Jenny Wheeler: Now you’ve become a bestselling writer of Victorian fiction and nonfiction and you have lots of books out now. We will refer to some of the ones you’ve previously published, but the latest one out this month is a standalone Victorian romance called Gentleman Jim. At the heart of this story, there’s a hidden identity story about a stable boy who is not what he seems.

We won’t tell the listeners anything more than that because we don’t want to spoil the story for them. This hidden identity thing is a common trope in Victorian literature, but you’ve made it into a really interesting story. Is that part of the attraction for you – to have those family secrets?

Mimi Matthews: Gentleman Jim is set right at the end of the Regency. I feel the novels of that era were a little bit more adventurous.

Novels set in the Georgian era, before it became more constrained in the Victorian era, were allowed to be – I don’t want to say a little crazier, but more exciting things happen, like an adventure and hidden identities and duels and things I normally would not put in one of my other romances because they’re a little bit quieter, maybe a little more thoughtful.

Gentleman Jim was something I started really early when I came back to writing, around 2013, 2014. After the first 30,000 words I set it aside because I had another project that I did instead. I came back to it, I worked on it a lot during the pandemic, the beginning of the quarantine.

I think the feeling of being so stifled and indoors and everything so quiet inspired me to write something that was a little bit more adventurous than I would normally do because it filled a need to explore something a lot more exciting.

The time period allowed for it, especially I was inspired by novels that had similar themes, like the Count of Monte Cristo and The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, which is an earlier novel but had similar ideas of hidden identities. You don’t know who someone was or their full story, and the way things come about, and justice is finally done. I really enjoyed writing it.

Jenny Wheeler: You mention that word ‘justice’ and there is a revenge element in that story too – quite a potent part in that story, more than one character is intent on some sort of revenge. It seems to me in a number of your books that the idea of getting justice, whether it’s by legal or illegal means, is quite important. Would you say that’s right?

Mimi Matthews: I think so. I love to see, if somebody has done something wrong and I mean a serious wrong, for them to get their comeuppance. Unfortunately, in real life that probably doesn’t happen as often as we would like, where bad people have to pay a price for being bad or being evil.

Fiction fills a need. Especially lately I find I’m reading a lot of mysteries and things where at the end the bad person is arrested and goes to jail, because it feels like right now, seeing bad people getting justice is really satisfying.

Jenny Wheeler: We won’t expand that into what’s been happening in America right now.

Mimi Matthews: Probably not a good idea.

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Jenny Wheeler: Keeping ourselves to the Victorian period, most of your work has been in the Victorians. I wondered what attraction there was for you in that particular period.

Mimi Matthews: It has. Gentleman Jim is my tenth novel and of those ten, only two of them were Regency. All the rest are Victorian. I am mainly drawn to it because it’s a period where there was a lot of change happening. Not just in the world of science and invention and women’s rights and animal welfare – people were becoming more sensitive to the plight of animals – just a greater understanding of the world.

Also the social mobility, people who were working class and maybe able to make more money and able to ascend to another class, which is very interesting to me. I feel to a degree it’s really relatable because we live in a world now where there’s a lot of change all the time, new inventions, new technologies, changing things in how we deal with the world, how we see the world, and it can be unsettling to some people.

Exploring those characters, how they adapt to change, whether they embrace it or whether they become very rigid and unwilling to change – that’s something I find interesting.

Jenny Wheeler: Also in our time of Me Too I think we’ve all become much more aware of women in that period, how they were almost powerless to deal with men around them if those men had ill intentions towards them. I’m thinking of the book before Gentleman Jim called Fair as a Star, and your heroine Beryl looks like she’s got the perfect life, betrothed to a wealthy Sir Henry, but it isn’t as wonderful as it looks.

For a lot of your women, marriage is the only “career path” they have, especially for women of class. You introduce a lot of interesting questioning, in a quiet sort of way, around that idea. Even if it’s sympathetically treated, this is about the only option they have so a lot of them are forced into seeing it as a business decision, aren’t they?

Mimi Matthews: Right. Almost as a way of securing their future. Where am I going to be able to be taken care of, safe, provided for, grow old and not have to worry about, am I going to end up on the street if I can’t be a servant or have a career.

For women of a certain class, marriage was the most acceptable thing for them to do, especially in the 1860s which is usually when I set my novels, it’s on the cusp of more things happening. A few decades later, the suffragettes and women are pushing for more equal rights, but I like to write in the era that’s right before that happens, when women are beginning to feel the sting of the inequality. This isn’t fair, this isn’t what I want, I don’t want to settle for this, I’m unhappy.

In Beryl’s case, I wanted to have a character dealing with what is technically clinical depression. It is a physical thing, not just a state of mind for her which is how some of the people want her to deal with it. Why can’t you just be happy?

Why can’t you be positive or get your mind off things? Women’s issues, almost on any level, were so misunderstood back then, and I thought how wonderful it would be to have a hero who actually listened to her and understood her and accepted her – the dark parts and the light parts.

That’s what I was trying to do with Fair as a Star, and I think I did it, but you never know. It depends on which reader is reading it, I guess.

Jenny Wheeler: In the Parish Orphans of Devon series – you have the series of four books of young woman who had fallen on hard times because of their family circumstances and they are all desperately seeking to secure their futures.

In one of those books the woman is threatened with being put into a mental asylum because she isn’t being co-operative in the way the men would like her to, and I gather that was quite an industry, a scandal in some of those mid Victorian years, that they used mental health as a control mechanism.

Mimi Matthews:  Yes, in that period in the fifties and sixties, there were private asylums and it could be used as a mechanism to put somebody difficult away if you had enough money – somebody who was genuinely ill or somebody who just was difficult in some way or inconvenient.

That’s explored really well in Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White. I don’t know the exact publication date, it’s from the fifties, it was set not very much earlier than I set The Matrimonial Advertisement. The fear of knowing you were powerless in that way, that if you had a relation who could attest to you being unstable in some way.

When I was researching The Matrimonial Advertisement, one of the things I read was that it would only take two doctors attesting to it. That was enough, just two doctors. So if your relation hired two people who would write something out, it didn’t take very much because a woman a lot of times was in the power of male relations or her husband. It could be really scary, and certainly that’s a part of some Gothic novels that give it an extra creepy feeling.

Jenny Wheeler: I guess things like postnatal depression, or even what they called melancholia which was really a form of depression – you could be put in those places for that kind of thing. It didn’t have to be that you were acting all crazy or hearing voices in your head.

Mimi Matthews: Absolutely. In The Matrimonial Advertisement, the heroine Helena’s mother was put into an asylum for that very reason. She had postpartum depression that was very severe, and it wasn’t understood so she was put away and ended up dying where she had been put. So it’s become a great fear of the heroine when she’s threatened with the same thing. There is a reason she is so incredibly afraid of it happening.

Jenny Wheeler: Also, I find it quite fun, I don’t know enough about the Victorian era myself, but we have things like glass windows and the pouring of warm water and bathrooms and things. That’s all coming in in that period too, isn’t it?

Mimi Matthews: It depended on the house and how much money people had. Many of them still didn’t have indoor plumbing. Some places, if the person was wealthy enough to afford it, could have running water in the bathroom or could have a water closet so they wouldn’t have to use chamber pots, but there were still a lot of places that were very basic – having to heat the water in cans if you wanted to take a bath,  that sort of thing.

It’s an interesting dichotomy that there was so much still like that at the same time so much change was happening. It would take a while. I remember reading Agatha Christie’s autobiography and she was talking about in the early 1900s when they got their first water closet in their house.

What a momentous event it was, to finally have a bathroom. So it still took a long time from the fifties and sixties before some of the things that we enjoy became commonplace.

Jenny Wheeler: Yes. Turning to your non-fiction – you’ve got a lovely little book with a fantastic title about animals in the 18th and 19th century. It’s called The Pug Who Bit Napoleon. I gather there really was a little pug who bit Napoleon and didn’t just bite him any day of the week, but on his wedding night. Can you tell us about that book?

Mimi Matthews: That book arose because when I was first starting out, I had a book out on submission, and my agent encouraged me to start a blog. I didn’t know what I was going to blog about, but I wrote a lot about Victorian history and once a week I did a history of animals post, with stories like these that I had found researching. A lot of them are really funny, at least I thought they were funny.

I had been doing that for maybe a year and Pen and Sword Books in England approached me and asked if I might be interested in writing a few non-fiction books for them. They asked, do you have any ideas? The first thing I thought of was a collection of animal history stories. That ended up being The Pug. It was a collection of some new stories and some I had written a brief revision of, on my author blog when I was starting out.

Jenny Wheeler: There were quirky tales, not just of dogs but of cats and other animals as well. You’ve got chapters on Prince Albert’s favorite greyhound and a dog that the poet Byron had. Have you got a favorite amongst all those stories? There are lots of stories there.

Mimi Matthews: I like almost all of them. I felt most moved by the story of Prince Albert’s greyhound Eos because of something he says. After Eos died, he wrote about her death, and he said that she’d been his companion from the age of 14 to 25 and had therefore been a symbol of the best and fairest section of his life.

I don’t know if you’re an animal lover, but I’ve had those pets that are with you through, for me, college, Law School, various things that happen. When they die, you really feel it. They’ve been on the journey with you so long. I ended up dedicating The Pug Who Bit Napoleon to my dog, John. He had been my dog when I moved out of my parents’ house and when I bought my first place and went to college and Law School and up until I took the bar. He passed away after I took the bar exam and I felt that’s what he was – a symbol of the best and fairest section of my life. I find that incredibly moving, thinking about Eos, the greyhound.

Jenny Wheeler: You say on the back cover of that book that you have quite a menagerie at home, so it’s obvious you are an animal lover yourself.

Mimi Matthews: A huge animal lover. I would have more animals if I had a little farm, which is my lifelong dream. I don’t think it’s probably ever going to happen. It’s hard work to have a little farm, but I would have many more animals.

Jenny Wheeler: I see you’ve got an Andalusian dressage horse. Do you still take part in dressage?

Mimi Matthews: I don’t ride because I have a neck injury. After I had my first neck surgery I was able to ride again, but then when the disc fusion in my neck broke, I couldn’t ride anymore. He’s with my trainer – an amazing dressage rider.

She has the U S D F gold medal. She had one of the assistant trainers compete him for me for a while and it got to a point where I finally thought, why am I still making him do this? I think he did like the work, but he’s getting older and he’s ready to retire. So I retired him. He retired maybe three years ago, and he’s just enjoying life now, not having to work hard, getting fed a lot of carrots and hanging around.

Jenny Wheeler: Because we are approaching the festive season, I wanted to talk to you about your Victorian Christmas novella which people might be interested in looking up called A Holiday by Gaslight. Those themes we’ve talked about in your other books – marriage as a pathway in life and big social change –both feature in that book, don’t they? You manage to get Charles Darwin, Prince Albert and the invention of gaslight into the story.

Mimi Matthews: What was funny about that particular story is I had intended to have Charles Darwin in it and gas light being fitted out in a country home. I didn’t realize until I was already a chunk of the way into it that, oh, my gosh, the year that it is set in is the year Prince Albert died, the Christmas that he died. He died in December 1861 and my book is set Christmas 1861.

There was no way a family like that would have gathered and not mentioned that Prince Albert had just died, so I wove that into the story too. I love Christmas and Victorian Christmas and writing about all the things they got to do – the decorations and things. That was a lot of fun.

Jenny Wheeler: Is that the only Christmas one you’ve done?

Mimi Matthews: It is. I always mean to have more Christmas books come out and the problem is I am horrible at budgeting my time. It seems like I’m always working on other books, I have deadlines for other books and by the time Christmas comes around, other people are putting out their Christmas romances in September/ October, and I have nothing.

I aspire to become better at managing my writing time, but it’s difficult with having a neck injury. If I have a pain level one day, I may not be able to write at all, so I never can be like, okay, I’m going to write every day, this many words for this many months, and turn out this many books. It varies depending on what’s happening physically, which is unfortunate, but I feel lucky to write at all.

Jenny Wheeler: Turning away from the specific books and looking at your wider career, you have mentioned going to Law School and I think you have a very strong academic background. Can you tell us a bit about your life before you became a full-time writer and how did you move back into full-time writing from being involved in Law?

Mimi Matthews: I did write – not fiction – but I did write in college and Law School. Tons of papers and big research projects, and sometimes I was able to incorporate the Victorian era into it. When I was in Law School I did a really huge paper, or it seemed huge at the time, 30 or 40 pages on the British Courts of Chancery under the supervision of Geoffrey Hazard, who was a very famous law professor here.

I feel like I have been researching to write about the Victorian stuff for many, many years, even if I didn’t know I was going to put it into novels. Then after my injury, there was a period of time when I couldn’t work or do anything law related for the same reason. Initially it was too close to having the repair surgery they did on my neck, after it broke. But eventually it was too hard to predict what days would be good days and what days would be bad days.

So I fell back into writing, which was something I could do whenever, any time of day, when I felt up to it. Some days I could do more, some days I could do less. It was a natural progression. Then when my books started doing so well, which was around 2018, I could justify doing that and not have to worry about going back to anything related to the Law.

I think writing novels incorporates the things I loved most about the Law, which was the research and writing. The legal profession is a very writing-heavy profession, and this way I get to do the things I love most, while still having a career that accommodates my limitations because of my injury. It’s the best of both worlds.

Jenny Wheeler: Is there one thing you’ve done in your writing career more than any other that you’d credit as the secret of your success?

Mimi Matthews: I don’t know if it’s resulted in my success, but I always write what I want to write, the things that interest me, and I have been lucky in most cases that it interests other people too.

I don’t think you can stick with something if you don’t love doing it. Who knows if I would have stuck with it – even if books had been selling well – if I didn’t enjoy the writing process and the stories I was telling and the research I was doing. I’m not sure I would have stuck with it, because you have to love it. It’s a solitary profession, you’re alone, just you and your manuscript, and I feel like you really do have to love what you’re doing.

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Jenny Wheeler: Sure. Is there any best and worst advice for new writers starting out regardless of their age, people who aren’t so experienced at writing, that you think would be good to pass on? What were your own expectations when you started out, and did you find that you met them or were you rather bemused at the beginning about how things were going?

Mimi Matthews: I was agented so I did have somebody I could ask, but my agent was not a writer. There were many times at the beginning when I lamented that I didn’t have a mentor that I could say, am I doing this right? I don’t even mean the writing part, but all the things a writer is expected to do nowadays, like social media or when a book goes on sale and how you promote it. Just basic stuff. It’s not very intuitive, you just don’t really know what to do. So I wished I had a mentor.

For that reason, if you can join a club, to be around other writers and learn about things like that, that would be good. As far as the writing itself, I would hesitate to give other writers advice except to say, be really hesitant to take advice from people about writing because it is a very personal thing. It’s your own voice.

There always is something to learn but if somebody tells you, you have to do this, you have to take this class, you have to have a MFA in order to write – I don’t think any of that is necessarily true.

I think for some writers starting out who are a little bit more uncertain, if somebody set up those barriers, they might decide, I don’t have that, I can’t do that so I’m not going to write at all. I don’t think they should be discouraged, because it is very personal and it’s your own voice and your own stories and I think the best way to become a better writer is just to keep writing.

Jenny Wheeler: Turning to Mimi as reader, because this is The Joys of Binge Reading and we like to try and recommend books to people that might be new discoveries for them that they’re going to feel, this is something I can’t put down. What are you reading at the moment, and who do you like to binge read?

Mimi Matthews: Right now I’ve been turning back to a lot of comfort reads. I think it’s as a result of the pandemic. Other friends I’ve talked to have been doing this too, rereading something you’ve already read, to give you comfort.

For that, I read a lot of Georgette Heyer’s regencies. She’s entertaining, she’s witty, her books are so much fun, she’s great to read one right after the other. The other one who is great for that is Agatha Christie. I’m a huge Agatha Christie fan, I have all her books in hardback, and I have read them all multiple times. I love Agatha Christie.

M.C. Beaton, who recently passed away – I think it was at the beginning of 2020, it might have been in 2019 – she writes detective stories. She has the Hamish Macbeth mysteries, and the Agatha Raisin mysteries. Same detectives in each book, a standalone mystery. Those are amazing. They are murder mysteries, but they’re great comfort reads – small villages or Hamish Macbeth is set in Scotland.

I wish I could say I’ve been reading more romance lately. I recently read an advance copy of a book by Harper St. George, The Heiress Gets A Duke, it was really good but it’s not going to be out for a while, not until January.  

The other one I read was The Light at Wyndcliff by Sarah Ladd. She writes sweet regencies, but they’re not trite sweet, there’s meat to them. Beautiful settings like in Cornwall, with the mist, almost a Gothic feel. I really enjoyed that.

Those are what I’ve been leaning toward lately – a lot of mysteries, a lot of comfort reads and some romances.

Jenny Wheeler: I’ve heard quite a few people say exactly the same thing about comfort reading. There’s definitely a trend where people want to give themselves a bit of a release somewhere, don’t they?

Mimi Matthews: Exactly. It’s been great revisiting favorite books and when enough time has passed and you do a reread, you notice things you didn’t notice the first time, so there’s always something new about it to enjoy.

Jenny Wheeler: Yes. We are coming to the end of our time together so circling around, looking back down the tunnel of time, at this stage in your career, if you were doing it all over again, what would you change, if anything?

Mimi Matthews: Sometimes I do wonder – if I had kept writing after I got my first agent, from when I was young, I was 18 – if I had kept writing then, what a career I would have now? But I have a feeling, being so young, that it might have fizzled out or maybe I wasn’t ready to commit to it.

I’m not sure, but I often wish I had stuck with it when I was younger and that it hadn’t taken me so long to come back to writing fiction, because there are so many years in between when I wasn’t writing. And I think, if only I kept at it, I’d have so many books now.

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But you never know. I feel like so much in writing and probably in anything, it’s just timing and sometimes things happen at the right time. I’m older now and maybe don’t have as much energy and I’m injured and all these other things, but I think the timing was right for it. I feel more invested in it. I enjoy it more and I have found people who enjoy reading it. That’s probably a non-answer.

Jenny Wheeler: No, I’ve heard other writers say similar things, but then they console themselves by saying, but I’ve had more life experience now, so I’ve got more experience to put into those books too.

Mimi Matthews: Definitely. I agree with that.

Jenny Wheeler: What is next for Mimi the writer? We’ve looked backwards. When we look forwards over the next 12 months, what projects have you got underway that you want to see finished, if you can?

Mimi Matthews: I signed in September a three-book deal with the Berkeley imprint at Penguin Random House for a new series. That’s really exciting, and the first book is due to them on January 1, so I’m working crazily trying to finish it.

It’s loosely connected to my Parish Orphan series. The hero of the new book, it’s called The Siren of Sussex, is the half-Indian habit maker, his name is Ahmed Malik, who was in my Parish Orphan series as a side character. He has become the hero, and I always knew he was going to be the hero.

I wouldn’t have had him making dresses if I didn’t eventually intend for him to be a fashion designing star of his own book. The heroine of the first book of the new series is a skilled equestrian who comes to London to find a husband and she meets Ahmed when he makes her habit – a dashing, fashionable, habit that catches everyone’s eye.

I feel super excited about it and also very stressed that it’s going to be good enough, but that’s going to keep me occupied. I have that book and then the next one due to them, and then the next one. Every six months. So I’ll be busy with those for a while, which is a little daunting, but I’m excited about it. I think it’s going to be a lot of fun.

Jenny Wheeler: It sounds like it. Mimi, where can readers and listeners find you online? Do you like to interact with your audience?

Mimi Matthews: I do. I’m mostly on Twitter. I check Twitter most days. I don’t know if I should give my address. It’s Mimi Matthews Esq because Esq was shorter than author. I’m on Facebook, I think that’s Mimi Matthews author, my author page.

I always respond to readers. Sometimes lately it’s taken me a little bit longer to respond to some of the emails I’ve been getting because I’ve been overwhelmed with deadlines, but I respond to everybody. Unless they send me something really angry and unkind, in which case, I don’t respond at all.

Jenny Wheeler: Probably wise. We publish show notes with every one of these episodes and we put links in the show notes in case people do want to follow up to make it easy for them to find you. We’re very happy to do that.

It’s been fantastic talking and I think these new books you’re doing for Berkeley sound like they’re going to be great.

Mimi Matthews: Thanks so much for having me, Jenny. It’s been great talking with you.

Jenny Wheeler: Thank you. Bye.

Mimi Matthews: Bye.

If you enjoyed Mimi and her historic take on romance you might also enjoy Sherry Thomas’s Lady Sherlock mysteries – Sherlock Holmes recast as a mysterious woman.

Thanks To Our Technical Support:

The Joys of Binge Reading podcast is put together with wonderful technical help from Dan Cotton at DC Audio Services. Dan is an experienced sound and video engineer who’s ready and available to help you with your next project… Seek him out at [email protected] or Phone + 64 – 21979539. He’s fast, takes pride in getting it right, and lovely to work with.

Our voice overs are done by Abe Raffills, and Abe’s another gem. He got 20 years of experience on both sides of the camera/microphone as a cameraman/director and also voice artist and television presenter. Abe’s vocal delivery is both light hearted and warm and he is super easy to work with no matter the job. You’ll find him at [email protected]

Rhys Bowen’s books sell in the millions around the world. She enjoys popular and critical acclaim for both her Royal Spyness mysteries and her bestselling historical fiction. But she says it’s the surprising, heart-warming feedback she gets from her readers that means the most to her.

Hi there, I’m your host Jenny Wheeler, and today Rhys talks about the unexpected rewards of being a top international author – the stories she hears of how her books have helped readers through the loneliness of pandemic lockdown and other dire emergencies. Like the woman in Texas who sat in her car watching flood waters destroy her house, listening to a Rhys Bowen audio book for comfort.

And on a personal note I can attest to Rhys’s kindness. We had done a whole 30 minutes of our interview before I noticed I’d failed to push “Record”. I fessed up and Rhys generously agreed to repeat the whole thing over again. And she even refused to accept some NZ wine as a overwhelmingly grateful thank you!

I’m delighted to say Rhys’s Royal Spyness book The Twelve Clues of Christmas is one of four Christmas books featured in our Twelve Days of Christmas Giveaway that starts this week.

Every week for the next four weeks we’ll be giving away our four book Holiday Reading Bundle as our Christmas gift to you for supporting us all year.

That’s four Holiday Book Bundles, each consisting of four books – two contemporary and two historical. If you enter once, you’ll be automatically entered for each of the four weeks so you have four chances to win!

Enter online at https://thejoysofbingereading.com/giveaway/ or on the Binge Reading Facebook page.

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

Where to find Rhys Bowen:

Website: https://rhysbowen.com/

Facebook: @RhysBowenAuthor

Instagram: @authorrhysbowen

Twitter:   @Rhysbowen

Email:   [email protected]

Bookbub: https://www.bookbub.com/authors/rhys-bowen

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/202867.Rhys_Bowen

What follows is a “near as” transcript of our conversation, not word for word but pretty close to it, with links to important mentions.

But now, here’s Rhys.

Jenny Wheeler: Hello there Rhys, and welcome to the show second time around. It’s so good of you to be here.

Rhys Bowen: Hi Jenny. Good to see you again.

Jenny Wheeler: Yes, it is again, because we spoke in May 2018 last, when you had a Royal Spyness story out about weddings.  You are still going strong on your Royal Spyness series. You’ve got The Late Mrs. Summers out this year as well as one of your new historical mystery, Above the Bay of Angels.

Tell me, how have you been faring during the pandemic?

Rhys Bowen: It’s been very scary here. You have been doing so well in New Zealand and I’m very envious of what you’ve been doing. Everybody seems to be on board and pulling together to bring this thing to an end, which we don’t have here. We have been very good about isolating and wearing masks and seeing people outside at distance only. I’ve been doing everything one is supposed to do, but it’s hard to be stuck at home most of the time. The other day my daughter said, I went to the store, and I said, store, what is this word? I do not know what it means.

Jenny Wheeler: Yes, perhaps to clarify for listeners, you are in California. You’re speaking from California, aren’t you?

Rhys Bowen: Yes, I am. California has been doing quite well, but the rest of the United States has been doing really horribly. We still have cases mounting all the time, which is very sad.

Jenny Wheeler: When we last talked, I referred to the wedding and we had a bit of a laugh because Meghan was about to marry Prince Harry at that time. We joked that your weddings book was likely to get a bit of a boost. Who could have seen that just two years later, they wouldn’t even be considered Royals any longer.

Rhys Bowen: It’s something I certainly didn’t see coming. Everybody was so excited when they married because everybody was saying, now we can relate to the Royals because she’s multicultural, she’s one of us, she’s fun.

Then suddenly everything went wrong, and I don’t really know what it was, whether she didn’t take into account what being a Royal meant, whether she liked the idea of being a Royal but then when the reality struck, she realized that she wouldn’t have one minute of freedom. Who knows? It’s very sad because I think he’s given up more than he ever intended to give up.

He was not the heir, he was the spare, as they say, but it meant a lot to him, his army connections and his military connections and all all the charities he did connected with the military. He has had to give all those up. I don’t know if he’s regretting it now. I don’t know what she wanted either, whether she just wanted the fame.

It’s kind of hard because I know someone who was connected to her before and knew her quite well and she was lovely according to them, so I can’t really judge. But I feel sorry for them now, because they are stuck in LA in a life they probably don’t want.

Jenny Wheeler: We have talked about the Royal Spyness mysteries and they are very relevant to this conversation, because your heroine Georgiana is a penniless aristocrat who’s 35th in line for the throne of England, but she’s also flat broke and struggling to survive in the Great Depression.

The books poke gentle fun at the British class system and the way the upper classes govern. How did you find Georgiana? How did she come together, and was she the first thing you ever wrote?

Rhys Bowen: She came really because I had been doing two other series, Constable Evans series set in Wales, contemporary, and then I did the Molly Murphy series, which is about a young Irish immigrant in New York at the turn of the 20th century. But my publisher kept saying to me, we can’t really break you out unless you write us a big, dark standalone novel.

I kept thinking, what’s a standalone novel? Child molesters, serial killers. Then I thought, wait, do I want to spend six months in darkness with these people? No, I don’t. What would be the silliest, most unlikely sleuth I could come up with?

Then I thought, how about if she was royal? She’s royal, but she’s penniless and it has to be the 1930s because what a fun time that was – poised between two World Wars with Mrs. Simpson and the Prince of Wales and Noel Coward and Hitler – all these extreme and wonderful stories to tell. I sat down and started writing almost stream of consciousness, in Georgiana’s own voice.

I sent it off to my agent and she said, this is such fun, we have to do this. We sent it off to my editor who went no, no, this wasn’t what we wanted at all. So my agent sent it out to bids elsewhere and it was bought by somebody else and it started doing really well. The first publisher had to grudgingly say, well, in that ‘other’ series.

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It’s been delightful for me to see it doing so well because I was right to start with, and it’s a lot of fun to write them because they’re funny and they’re poking gentle fun at the British class system and so they are very therapeutic to write, especially in tough times like this.

Jenny Wheeler: Did you stay with that second publisher or do you now have two publishers?

Rhys Bowen: I actually now have three publishers. The first one has done the Molly Murphy series up to now, and I may be going back to Molly fairly soon. Penguin does the Royal Spyness series, but then my standalones are done with Lake Union, which is Amazon’s big book publishing house. So I’ve got three different publishers, which is very nice because they all have to work hard to please me because I’ve got three of them.

Jenny Wheeler: That’s a great place to be in. We were talking about Georgiana. You have quite an insight into the way the upper class system works in Britain, because you have family connections that go way back. Tell us a little bit about how your insight in that area might have developed.

Rhys Bowen: My husband’s family is upper-class and has several royal connections way back. They used to own the stately home called Sutton Place, and still have a couple of lovely houses. I live in California, so when I’m over there, I think I’m very good as an observer.

If I lived in England, I might take all this for granted, but I love listening to them talk and someone will say, do remember that joke we used to play on the butler, and I scribble it down in my little notebook.

I notice that there is still this class feeling in England. Someone will say, I met this man the other day who does so and so, and immediately someone else will say, where did he go to school? That’s exactly putting him in a box. If he went to the right school you can talk to him, if he didn’t, you can’t talk to him. It seems very silly to me living in California, but that’s still how it is in England.

And with William and Kate, before they became engaged, they broke it off because her mother was deemed too common because she used the word ‘toilet’ instead of ‘lavatory’. It was huge in England. They had these huge newspaper headlines saying ‘Toiletgate’ and it almost broke them up. Luckily, they got back together again, but it just goes to show you, it’s very important in England.

John’s family still has the cousins with silly nicknames. He really does have a cousin called ‘Fig,’ another one called ‘Dude’ and a very distinguished older lady called ‘Puff’. It’s quite fun when I’m over there and someone says, this is Puff coming over and they take it for granted. It seems really funny to me. I enjoy putting these things in books.

Jenny Wheeler: It’s a little bit like Downton Abbey, isn’t it. Why do you think that period and the class system is so popular with the ordinary folk?

Rhys Bowen:  I think because it’s something we can’t have. Downton Abbey, the lovely costumes and the fact that the servants do everything for you in a hundred bedrooms, it’s almost like waking up and finding you turned into Cinderella or something. It’s so different from our life that you think it must be very glamorous.

I think it’s the same with the Royals. We are fascinated with the Royals because their life is almost a fairytale compared with ours.

Especially in America – New Zealand’s got a queen, you’re lucky, but in America, we don’t have Royals, so I think we waste an awful lot of energy on pomp and circumstance because we love that. I think in our hearts we’d really love a Royal too. We are fascinated with it.

Jenny Wheeler: When you said that, I jokingly thought, you’ve got Kim Kardashian.

Rhys Bowen: We also have Mr. Trump, who’d like to be a crown something.

Jenny Wheeler: That’s right. In more recent years, you’ve turned your hand to doing standalone historicals, and you’ve had tremendous success with those – both sales-wise and with critical acclaim, but mainly they have been World War I and World War II period. The newest one, called Above the Bay of Angels, is another international bestseller and it’s going back to Queen Victoria’s time. Tell us why you chose to give the World War period a rest and go back a couple of generations.

Rhys Bowen: I didn’t intend to write about Queen Victoria. I like writing both World War I and World War II. You’ve got this heightened emotion, heightened danger, and of course, terrible tragedies and great bravery. You’ve got all the makings of so many good stories.

But I was in Nice on vacation once and we were up on a hill and we saw this beautiful white building up there. There was a gardener, working in the garden and I said to him, is this a hotel? He said, no madam, it used to be a hotel, but now it’s apartments. He said, it was a hotel that was built for your queen. I said, oh, Queen Elizabeth? And he went, no madam, Queen Victoria.

I hadn’t known until then that Queen Victoria, in her later years, used to go there for her winters and spend three months or so in the South of France and they built this beautiful hotel for her. They gave her a whole wing to herself and she would come down from England on her private train, bringing everything with her – all her maids, her footmen, her ladies-in-waiting, all her own cooks and all her bedroom furniture, and added to this a regiment of Highland Pipers.

Then she would say, I don’t want anybody to know I’m the Queen and you are to call me Lady Balmoral. Well, of course, you come on your own train with a regiment of Highland Pipers – it’s probably a dead giveaway. I thought, this is very interesting and I started looking into it and I thought I’d really like to write about this.

Then something struck me, and I thought, this is someone who’s coming to a big, beautiful French hotel and she’s bringing her own cooks. What was she thinking of? Someone is going to make some boring English dish when she could have French cuisine. I started thinking some more and of course, the more I looked into it, I found there were scandals and there was an assassination attempt and things like that. I have to put all this into a book.

So I made my heroine a young girl of good family who has come down in the world and has become a cook for Queen Victoria and is taken to the South of France with her, where all these dangerous things happen. It was a really fun book to write. I had to go back to Nice, naturally, for a summer and do lots more research there, suffering for my craft every day when I tried out a new bistro.

Jenny Wheeler: That’s lovely and no less a novelist than Louise Penny has praised the book as being warm and gripping and full of mystery and excitement. I know that Louise is the most wonderful novelist herself, but I gather she is also a good friend.

Rhys Bowen: She is. She’s a very close friend of mine and we live very far apart. We keep in touch through email mostly, but we usually see each other in the summer in London. She rents a flat there and we go over and have a wonderful time where we laugh all the time. Of course, this year, that wasn’t possible. She went to London, but I didn’t. I’ve been stuck here.

Jenny Wheeler: Isabella in Above the Bay of Angels is a trainee chef and there is a lot of food in this book, as there is in your other books. There are details about the meals the Royals ate and what Queen Victoria’s particular likes and dislikes were. Was that fun to research and how did you go about that?

Rhys Bowen: I love writing about food, and I love researching food. People have said to me so often, are you a keen chef yourself? No. I’d love someone else to cook my meals. I’d actually like Mrs. Patmore from Downton Abbey to produce my meals for me. I do like to eat well, and I like good food.

For this book, I found the recipe book put out by one of Queen Victoria’s personal chefs, so I know exactly what she liked and what she ate for her meals. You would not believe some of the things she used to eat. There really was a blackbird pie with 4 and 20 blackbirds in it and things like that that you just wouldn’t think of. And so elaborate. I mean, just amazingly, awfully elaborate and awful in the true sense of the word too.

It was fun to research that, and to put it into the books.

Jenny Wheeler: I don’t suppose that book is online?

Rhys Bowen: It is. If you go under Queen Victoria, chef, and I can’t remember what it’s called, but it will come out. He’s got an Italian name, which will come to me in a minute. He was her favorite chef when Albert was still alive.

Jenny Wheeler: It’s amazing, isn’t it, what is online now. I did ask that because I thought it very likely could be.

A sub-theme of that book is also the way junior female staff had to fend off unwanted approaches from men of much higher status than them. I wondered about writing about that topic in a Me Too era when obviously, in their times, they regarded it as being one of the perils of the job. In this book you’re worried about Isabella. Is she going to lose her job by rejecting the approaches, or is she going to have to capitulate to keep her job? How did you handle that?

Rhys Bowen: In the era of the Me Too movement, this was a delicate thing to write about, but one that was very much on my mind – the fact that if you were a servant girl in those days, you had no power at all. If you didn’t comply, you’d lose your job and if you did comply and got pregnant, you’d be kicked out anyway. It was a very unfair situation, but it was one that girls faced all the time, especially the attractive girls. Obviously very repugnant to a lot of readers.

In my new Royal Spyness book, The Last Mrs. Summers, which is a complete spoof on Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, we have the same thing. We have a couple of occasions in which a man of higher status has taken advantage of a young girl, and my editor was very concerned about writing about this.

She said, I think you’re going to offend a lot of people. I said, well, it really happened. So she made me write a foreword in which I say, you will particularly find one of these characters really repugnant, but this was something that happened all the time. It was up to these girls to stick up for each other and try and be a safety net for each other at a really bad time. It is something now that we’re very aware of.

Jenny Wheeler: Yes but I think it’s good for people to realize what it used to be like too. It probably gives them a little bit more understanding about some of their own family history, if they have an appreciation, in some cases.

You’ve had an amazing career gathering both popular and critical acclaim. What is the thing in your career achievements that has given you the most satisfaction? I notice you’ve got 113,000 followers on BookBub, which is pretty remarkable, and In Farley Field, one of your recent historicals, gathered a whole sleuth of critical acclaim and awards. What’s the thing that’s given you the most satisfaction?

Rhys Bowen: First of all, I consider myself very lucky that I’ve been able to keep on writing as long as I have. So many people who were up-and-coming writers at the same time as me wrote really good books, got really good reviews, and suddenly their publisher decided they’d had enough and just dropped them and they went into oblivion.

I’ve been lucky that I’ve managed to keep going. I’ve had good reviews all the time, I’ve won awards, my sales have been going up, so all of that is really nice.

One of the things that never crossed my mind earlier if you said to me, what’s a big satisfaction, is that I get letters all the time from someone who says, your book helped me through chemotherapy, your book helped me when my mother died. And this year I’ve had, your book has helped me to keep going when I’ve had to shelter in place by myself in this pandemic, your books have been a great solace to me. That feels wonderful.

There was one particular occasion that really touched me. A woman wrote to me and said, I want you to know that all night I’ve been listening to one of your Royal Spyness books in my car where I’m watching my house flooding. I wrote to her afterwards and said, did you lose everything?

She said, yes, I had your books before, but everything in the house has gone. And I said to her, when you’re settled in a new home, write and tell me, and I’ll send you a signed copy of each of the books. She did write and tell me later on and I sent her a signed copy of each of the books.

The year after that, I was on book tour and I was in Houston, Texas, and she came up to me and she said, I’m Laurel, and we hugged each other. That was an amazing moment. It never crosses your mind when you start to write. You think, I’m writing books that people will enjoy reading, but you don’t think, I’m writing books that actually might help people. That’s a really good feeling.

Jenny Wheeler: That’s lovely. For those who might like to discover Royal Spyness mysteries right now, you did do one that was a Christmas mystery which I gather is still very popular every Christmas. Tell us about that. Was it The Twelve Clues of Christmas?

Rhys Bowen: Yes, The Twelve Clues of Christmas. It’s a Lady Georgie book at a big country house and obviously it’s based on the twelve days of Christmas. It was fun to write, but really challenging, you know, how am I going to kill somebody with geese? Each day somebody dies in a way that ties in with the song, and you don’t realize this to start with. I want the reader to go, long before Georgie does, wait, isn’t this something to do with the twelve days of Christmas?

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It was a fun book to write and it’s been quite popular. Now I’ve been asked to write another Christmas book, so I’m just starting out writing that one too. The new one’s going to be called God Rest Ye Royal Gentlemen, which might indicate that there’s a few royal gentlemen who are going to come onto the pages of this book.

Jenny Wheeler: Perhaps some of them as dead bodies.

Rhys Bowen: Maybe, yes.

Jenny Wheeler: You are now splitting your time between California and Arizona, when you’re not traveling the world, doing your research. Tell us how you organize your life around those two points.

Rhys Bowen: We now go to Arizona in the winters, because the winters where I live in California, normally it’s quite wet and cold. I have friends who live in places like Minnesota who would laugh their heads off when I say it’s cold, but it’s cold for me, very similar to New Zealand temperatures, when it’s wet and dreary sometimes.

We bought a house in Arizona. We have a daughter in Arizona so it’s lovely to be close to those grandchildren because they’ve been growing up. We go there for the winter months, and one of the reasons I like going there is, my life isn’t quite as involved there, so I can have peace and quiet just to sit and write. And we live in a place that’s surrounded by mountains, so I have these lovely views out of the window, and we love walking in the lovely sunshine and fresh air every day. It’s a great escape in the winter.

Jenny Wheeler: Were you affected by the fires in California recently?

Rhys Bowen: The nearest fire was about 20 miles from us, so we weren’t in danger this time, but the air quality was awful. We had two days when you needed all the lights on at midday and the sky was bright orange. It was the most spooky thing you’ve ever seen. We couldn’t go outside for several days to do our walks because the air quality was in the dangerous level. Everything smelled of smoke.

Luckily, I was able to get an air purifier online for my bedroom, so I had that running day and night, but we have a daughter who lived within two miles of the fires. I was worried for her.

Jenny Wheeler: Terrible to have that poor air quality when COVID is around as well.

Rhys Bowen: Yes, absolutely.

Jenny Wheeler: Turning to Rhys as reader. We’re still The Joys of Binge Reading, we still like to recommend and introduce people to books they may not be aware of. Who are you reading at the moment and who would you recommend?

Rhys Bowen: The funny thing is that other writers I recommend are people who are my friends. I don’t know which came first, but Louise Penny is a very good friend, and her new book has just come out, All the Devils are Here. All her series with Gamache in Quebec are absolutely wonderful books.

My friend Deborah Crombie has a series set in England with a married couple of detectives in the police force and her latest one called A Bitter Feast was all about the Cotswolds and a wonderful restaurant there, so I really enjoyed vicariously visiting the Cotswolds in that.

The book I’ve just finished and enjoyed was called Paris is Always a Good Idea, and it’s a complete romp about a young woman who’s been a career woman and suddenly decides she’s given up her whole life for this career and goes off to rekindle the romances of her youth in Ireland, in Paris, in Italy. It’s very light, a lot of fun and just the sort of thing I can handle with this pandemic.

I don’t know about you in New Zealand, but here in America where the pandemic is so very frightening, we still have huge numbers and you worry about going out and the people who won’t wear masks and all this sort of thing. I find you’re keeping fear at bay a lot, which means I don’t want to tackle books I normally would, that have violence, that have too much darkness in them. I have to have something that’s light and cheerful at the moment because that’s all I can handle.

Jenny Wheeler: How do you set up your working day? What’s your working process? Do you have certain hours that you sit at your computer or how do you do that?

Rhys Bowen: I’m a professional writer. I write two books a year. I don’t have time to wait for the muse to flutter onto my shoulder. I’m quite a morning person. I wake up quite early and I read my emails and things. These days, my day has been eaten into because we’ve been taking two long walks.

We obviously can’t go out as much, so we have a morning walk and then I go down and do my writing. When I’m doing a first draft, I have given myself to write five pages a day, so I have to do that much. And that depends – sometimes I do that in two hours, sometimes it takes me three, four, five, but I will not let myself stop for the day until I’ve done my five pages.

I have to go all the way through until I finish the first draft and then I can go back and do polishing and editing and things. I don’t feel the pressure as much because I know I’ve got something down on paper. Then in the afternoon I find there’s a lot of secretarial work. Someone will want me to answer questions for a blog, someone will want me to set up this and that, so there are lots of these smaller things.

And I’m a member of a blog called Jungle Red Writers, which is a fabulous group of women and we have to write these blogs all the time, so there’s a lot of busy work as well as my writing work that I have to do every day.

Jenny Wheeler: Your five pages a day, how many words would that translate into?

Rhys Bowen: About 1500.

Jenny Wheeler: That’s great. What are your projects for the next 12 months? Tell us what you’re working on now.

Rhys Bowen: I’ve just finished a book that I absolutely loved writing. It’s set in Venice which is one of my favorite places, and it’s called The Venice Sketchbook. It’s another of these books like The Tuscan Child that I wrote, that is set in different time periods. T

his one’s set in three different time periods and it has to do with finding out about some person’s secret life that nobody has known about. It is the sort of book I love to read, where you’re going between two people’s stories and getting a little bit of one and then you get a little bit of the other and one furthers the other all the time.

They are really fun to write. The Venice Sketchbook comes out in April in America. I don’t know when it will come out with you, but if you can go on Amazon and see the cover, it has the best cover I’ve ever seen in my life. My goodness, if you saw this across an airport, you would rush and buy it because it’s such a gorgeous cover.

My second book for the year will be the new Royal Spyness I’m just starting to work on called God Rest Ye Royal Gentlemen. That will come out in time for Christmas in November, I believe.

Jenny Wheeler: You mentioned The Tuscan Child. That has had quite remarkable international success, hasn’t it?

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Rhys Bowen: This has been my best-selling book to date. I think it’s sold 750,000 copies in print, but that’s not counting the audio and also, in all these different languages. I get these covers from Bulgaria and Lithuania and all these places. You try and imagine people sitting and reading The Tuscan Child in the middle of Syria or somewhere or China. It’s quite amazing.

Jenny Wheeler: Yes, that is remarkable. Where can people find you online? You’ve got an international audience. How can they find you?

Rhys Bowen: The easiest way is to go to my website, which is www.rhysbowen.com.  There is a little button to click on to email Rhys, and you can also sign up for my newsletter that way, where you get news from me all the time. If you want to know my day to day news, like what I had for breakfast and all that thrilling stuff, how I do my laundry, go on to my Facebook page, which is facebook.com/RhysBowenAuthor.

I do post on that almost every day, sometimes quite trivial, sometimes quite thoughtful, but it’s my daily news and musings, I suppose. I’m also on Twitter and I’m on Instagram, both of which I haven’t quite seen the reason for, but my publishers tell me to do it, so I obey.

Jenny Wheeler: You post on Facebook quite regularly. That’s terrific.

Rhys Bowen: Yes, pretty much every day. And another thing – I’m talking about doing something good. I realized early during this pandemic that there were a lot of women who are my readers who are stuck sheltering in place, and they were on their own and they were lonely.

So I started doing an awful lot of very trivial discussions on my Facebook like, now it’s autumn I’m going to start to make soups. What’s your favorite soup to make? Then I get 200 replies in an hour. I make this, I make that. And, what’s your favorite comfort movie at the moment? People love to be part of that, so I’ve been doing that very regularly.

Jenny Wheeler: Sounds very canny. Your readers obviously feel close to you.

Rhys Bowen:  The people on Facebook really feel they’re my friends, which they are in a way, but if I wrote on Facebook, I cut my finger today, I can guarantee that in an hour I’ve got a dozen people volunteering to type my manuscripts for me.

Jenny Wheeler: That’s lovely. Rhys, thank you so much for your time. It’s been great to talk again and I look forward to these new books next year. The Venus Sketchbook sounds wonderful. We will wait for it with bated breath. Thank you so much.

Rhys Bowen: You’re very welcome. Thank you, Jenny. Bye.

(When I discovered I hadn’t recorded the first interview….)

Jenny Wheeler: I’m so sorry to have put you through that. Can I take your mailing address to get some New Zealand wine to you because I really would like to make sure I say thank you.

Rhys Bowen: Absolutely not necessary. By the time you paid for the postage on it – I would drink in your honor, but you don’t need to send it.

Jenny Wheeler: That’s sweet of you.

Rhys Bowen: These things happen. When I was in Australia, when I was getting married, I was living in Sydney and sharing a flat with a woman who was a premiere radio broadcaster for the ABC. I was working with the ABC at the time and she volunteered to record my whole wedding. At the end of the wedding she realized she hadn’t turned the recorder on. So that happened to her.

Jenny Wheeler: I don’t feel so bad now.

Rhys Bowen: Everybody made the joke that John had bribed her to not to turn it on, so we had no witness to the occasion.

Jenny Wheeler: Well, thank you so much, Rhys. The recording is still going, so we got that last little story, which is brilliant.

If you enjoy Rhys’ historical fiction you might also enjoy Fiona Valpy’s World War II French romance.

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