C: Welcome back to Not Now, I’m Reading, your one-stop shop for all things genre. My name is Chelsea.
K: And I’m Kay.
C: And today friends we are so thrilled to have another author interview!
K: What what!
C: Yay! Same old song and dance. The tired refrain of the wheels of capitalism. Kay had to go work at her big girl day job and unfortunately was not able to be there for our interview.
K: Lame. Someday I will be here for an interview. [Laughs]
C: One of these days. Big goals. Kay here for an interview not working at her day job. But I was so excited to sit down and have a chance to talk with Anna Zabo who wrote a pair of really, really awesome rocker romances, the third of which they are currently drafting. We had a lot of fun talking about their writing history and queer romance and this new kind of spate of rock star romances that’s getting ready to come out, so. That will be the bulk of our content today, but as is always the case we wanted to bring you guys a quick couple of recs so I will go ahead and get started. So the first thing I wanna talk about is the pro pub book I just finished. It’s Wild Beauty by Anna-Marie McLemore. This is a book that I picked up for Latinx Book Bingo, which is a challenge running from, by the time you hear this, it’ll only be running another couple of weeks because it runs until October 15. We’ll make sure to link to the bingo board down below. I really like bingo board challenges. They give me just enough structure to make a nice TBR while still allowing me to swap stuff in and out.
K: I’m really glad everyone like those. They’re not compelling for me at all, but everyone seems to enjoy them and I’m glad people have fun.
C: I’ve kind of been missing doing reading challenges lately, but get very abrasive to the idea of a restrictive TBR so the bingo board is a good balance.
K: That would just make me anxious, frankly.
C: I understand that.
[Kay laughs]
C: I came up with three or four things and I don’t entirely remember this one I either picked it for SFF book or queer book and I don’t remember which one cause it’s both.
K: Either way!
C: Super great. It’s a piece of really really really beautiful magical realism about the Nomeolvides sisters. There are five of them. They all live on La Pradera. La Pradera is a house that their family has lived on for a very long time. All of the Nomeolvides women are cursed. Every generation is born with five Nomeolvides girls and any person that they fall in love with disappears like literally like evaporates into thin air.
K: Very Practical Magic.
C: Very Practical Magic, very magical realism. Each girl is named after, well, most of them are named after flowers. Our main character Estrella her name means star. But each of them has the power to grow flowers, either the flower of their namesake, she has sisters named Dahlia and Azalea and Kaya and traditional flowers and in her case she grows a variety of flowers which are star shaped navy blue flowers and so it’s the story of the one girl that all five sisters fall in love with and the wish that they make to keep her safe and in return the land kind of gives them back this boy. It’s very magical realism but I loved it, it’s beautiful, it strikes that really great balance of magical realism’s beautiful language with still keeping the plot moving along and I just really really adored it I loved it I’m trying not to just go read all the rest of Anna-Marie McLemore’s books cause they’re really great but I’m trying to stick to this bingo challenge thing. And if I go read all of her other books that’s never gonna happen but they are on the top of my list for when the challenge wraps up. But that’s Wild Beauty by Anna-Marie McLemore.
K: Okay, this one is a little bit of a two-fer just because if you have somehow missed this wonderful little romcom called To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, get yourself to a Netflix account immediately and watch yourself To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before.
C: It’s so good.
K: It’s really precious. This actual rec though is just a very short fic in this fandom. It’s called Test Run by pathstotread. It’s only 1500 words and it’s just Kitty and Peter bro fic. And there’s lots of feels and they’re so cute. There are technically spoilers through the final book of the trilogy, just cause the author stuck with book canon for where everyone’s going to be at this point in time cause it takes place when the older characters are in college. But. I mean. You’re fine.
C: It’s fine just go read it guys.
K: It’s super adorable. So again, that’s Test Run by pathstotread.
C: Okay, and then the next one I have to talk about is a piece of fic. Guys, it’s almost hockey season. We’ve talked about it before. I just finished relistening to And Never Been Kissed.
K: Is it just new sevenfists fic?
C: Shut up!
[Laughter]
C: Of course it is! I got all nervous for a second that is was going to be what you’re reccing. Usually, friends, we clear picks with each other beforehand so that doesn’t happen, but we are recording this one like
K: Really on the fly. [Laughs]
C: Lightning right on the fly.
K: Before the kiddo comes home from the grandparents’ house.
C: So this is In Xanadu. [Sings] Dreams come true. By sevenfists. This is a piece of Sid/Geno hockey RPF that is basically just a really great and really kind of long character study of Geno. It is basically the story of Geno and how he goes from playing for the local team in Magnitka to playing for the Penguins in the NHL. It follows his contract woes and his early seasons and all of those things. It actually is a really great pairing to And Never Been Kissed cause it follows similar timelines but in that one we are pretty much entirely with Sid and in this one we’re entirely with Geno. Obviously they’re not like a complete overlap, but it’s kind of a fun from dual perspectives the timing worked out. I just really love this. I love Geno. There is. I’m normally a Sid. Sid the Kid.
[Kay laughs]
C: I love him. You don’t get a Funko Pop hockey player cause you don’t love everything.
K: He’s sitting here watching us right now.
C: Him and Jareth the Goblin King.
K: So beautiful.
C: So brand. But it was just really nice. A really good character study. Sevenfists did such amazing research and thorough job.
K: Longtime favorite writer of both of ours. Yeah.
C: Longtime great fandom writer. Absolutely fantastic. So if you are a hockey fan. If you’ve read And Never Been Kissed and are kinda wondering what was going on with baby Geno while all of this was happening, definitely recommend picking up In Xanadu. It’s a little bit of a chunker, it’s just under 74k so it’ll last you a while friends but it’s a good one.
K: I haven’t actually read this one yet cause I saw that word count and was like nope. There are eight other things I have to read right now. [Laughs]
C: I got so excited.
K: I didn’t even link you to that one cause I knew you’d see it and you’d already be there. [Laughs]
C: Dude, oh man so fast I broke my phone, friends. It’s a good thing fanfiction is free.
K: God bless fanfic writers.
C: I’m really leaning into the hockey this year, friends. That was an off air conversation Kay and I had. I’m just leaning into the things that bring me joy and not thinking too hard.
K: Anything that brings us joy is a thing I’m not going to examine too closely. Let people be happy.
C: Guys, I took the week of Twitter and it was actually super nice.
K: It’s gonna be the Community gif where everything’s on fire.
C: It’s always gonna be that, yeah.
K: That happens any time you stay outta stuff for a couple of days. By the way, guys, if either of us is ever on a social media break, feel free to reach out to the other one. Cause neither of us, we’re never gonna have ’em at the same time. Not solely for this reason, but kind of for this reason. [Laughs]
C: I miss knowing what’s up. Cause I honestly really don’t…I have a very vague. I get my podcasts and listen to them so I get a couple of vague days later knowledge of what’s happening, but when you kinda hone your whole life to feed to you through Twitter?
K: I dunno what year is it what’s going on?
C: Been a nice bubble I’ve been floating around in.
K: And now I’m gonna give you my second rec because who knows when this kid is coming home.
C: You haven’t done that? Oh my god, sorry friend.
[Laughter]
C: I was just chatting away cause I was under the impression we’d both gone!
K: This one was posted for Pod_Together 2018. Which, if you have not checked out the stuff from that collection yet, do. If you are not a podfic person, I’m not generally a podfic person, that’s totally fine. They have, that’s the thing.
C: That’s the point of pod together.
K: There’s the story and there’s the podfic so you can find whichever is your jam or both. This one is called If I Were You. The podfic is narrated by dapatty and it’s written by kellifer_fic, who’s one of my forever faves. This is a Teen Wolf Sterek fic and I’m just.
[Chelsea laughs]
K: The tags on this are primo. It’s bodyswap, Derek Hale is bad at feelings.
[Chelsea laughs]
K: There are more.
C: But those are really the only ones you need.
K: The summary on this one is: “I’m sorry but I think this occasion calls for freaking out,” Stiles says, throwing his hands up between them. Or, more accurately, throwing Allison’s hands up, which are attached to Allison’s arms, which are attached to Allison’s everything else that he is apparently now residing in like he’s involved in some weird, person-shaped Airbnb.
[Laughter]
K: It’s so good. It’s just over 5700 words. Again, that’s If I Were You by kellifer_fic and narrated by dapatty. And definitely check out the Pod_Together 2018. We will have links obviously in the show notes.
C: Alright, friends, and with that we are gonna go ahead and get into our interview.
[Funin’ and Sunin’ by Kevin MacLeod]
C: Welcome back, listeners, to our wonderful interview today with Anna Zabo. I am so excited to be sitting down with them. Anna, do you wanna go ahead and introduce yourself?
A: Hi, I’m Anna Zabo and I’m a queer author of queer romances.
C: Yay! We love queer romances here. We love queer stories of all types here at NNIR so I was so excited to have Anna’s publisher reach out to me and see if I wanted to go ahead and sit down today with them and chat. We’re going to be talking a little bit about their upcoming book, which you will be able to buy by the time this airs. It will be coming out the Monday before so you’ll be able to preorder it. All the links will be in the show notes as always. If you’re listening after the original airdate, it should already be on sale. Go pick up Counterpoint, it’s fantastic. Go pick up Syncopation. It’s the first book in the series if you haven’t read it yet. Do you wanna tell us a little bit about Twisted Wishes?
A: Well, Twisted Wishes, it’s a series of rock star romances. And the first book, Syncopation, has been out for a while now. And that was kind of a…enemies to friends to lovers book and it features Ray, who’s the lead singer, and Zavier, who becomes the band’s drummer. He’s not originally the band’s drummer. They had a falling out with their original drummer and Zavier comes in and kind of saves the day, there. But they, Ray and Zavier have a past history cause they were in high school together. And Ray had asked Zavier to be part of his garage band back in high school and Zavier’s two years older. He was a senior and he was off to Juilliard and so he was like I’m not dealing with this kid and his rock band, but he always kind of admired the hubris of that and kept track of Ray and the band. So he sort of jumped at the chance to, you know, join the band and it’s sort of this…has a lot of sexual tension.
[Laughter]
C: It’s so good.
A: And the first two books have kink, so they do have some BDSM elements.
C: Does that mean that maybe the third one will not as much?
A: Not as much. It’s one of the things I’ve been pondering as I’ve been writing the third book is how much do….it doesn’t feel like. The second book is about Dom, “Domino” Dominic.
C: All of the above.
A: He is the guitarist for the group and he has a bit of a secret identity.
C: It was very Clark Kent, Batman glasses no glasses sort of thing.
A: Kinda like that, yeah. He has horrible stage fright. He has always had horrible strange fright so he created this outlandish persona to slip into to go onstage and play and he can, you know, play amazing guitar while Domino, but he is actually kind of a nerdy bookworm in real life.
C: Listeners will know unfortunately my other beloved cohost Kay has to work today. She has pesky day jobs that keep her from doing fun things like this, but I got like five pages into Counterpoint and I sat her down and was like Kay. Anna has opened up my brain and rooted around in my id and pulled out this bowtie wearing book loving twink and the redhead library owner that he falls in love with.
[Laughter]
C: My entire body was on fire for this whole book. Dominic and Domino and Adrian. It’s so good guys. It’s so good.
A: He falls for a man he meets while out to dinner. Just a chance meeting.
C: There was one recurring question. We’re gonna take a little sidebar go a little off the rails here.
A: Okay.
C: Lemon meringue pie, specifically. Cause I read this book shortly after I read For Real by Alexis Hall which also has lemon meringue pie in it?
A: Yeah, I forgot about For Real having lemon meringue pie.
C: I’m wondering if there’s just something about lemon specifically?
A: The reason it was lemon meringue pie in my book is cause it’s my actual favorite pie.
C: Well, same!
A: Lemon is one of my favorite flavors. It’s just yeah. I could do without chocolate, but if I had to give up lemon I’d probably cry.
C: Wow, okay.
A: I have an unnatural love for lemon, probably, and it sneaks into this book. The little things you take out of your own personality and stuff into characters. So it’s sort of like, I dunno, an Easter egg about myself, I suppose? I think that’s another thing about Counterpoint. There’s a lot of food in Counterpoint. Not so much food in Syncopation, but there’s definitely food as pleasure and food as almost foreplay in Counterpoint.
C: A lot of lushness in Counterpoint. A lot of talk of the clothes they’re wearing and the art and media they’re consuming and food. It feels very rich. Guys, there’s a library. They fuck in a library and it’s so good and I know everyone who’s listening who’s a fellow reader is just like I pinged, you pinged, it works guys. Because so many different selling points. It’s so fantastic. But I wanted to get back to what you were talking about a little earlier with the kink aspect and some of the D/S, BDSM stuff that comes in cause there’s an interesting kind of thread that weaves specifically through Counterpoint about Adrian kind of being worried if he’s doing it right or if they’re following the ‘rules’ when it comes to dominance and submission. And he meets with a friend of his who’s a mentor and talks it out. And I think that’s an interesting idea that I think you also played with in Syncopation. That idea that strict definitions or even a binary within a kink community can chafe against people or make them stop and think about things and I wanted to hear you talk about that a little bit.
A: I think that comes from probably BDSM romances sometimes the doms, the dominants are just too perfect, you know? They never have any doubts and they always know exactly what to do and everybody’s different and you know. I mean. In Syncopation? How old is Zavier? He’s not that old. He’s still in his twenties. He’s cocky and cock sure and the whole, you know. But there’s a certain part of him that realizes that he doesn’t know everything, you know? He’s also self-aware enough that so I kinda wanted to play around with that self-awareness of not always knowing exactly what to do even if you are a dominant? And with Adrian, you know, this is the first time he’s encountered somebody who is not really in the scene, not really in the community. So doesn’t know exactly how to approach that and the way that Dominic kind of submits to him is almost, you know, natural. It’s not, you know, a ‘this is a scene and this happens’ type of thing, you know? And I think he was a little weirded out about that because he hadn’t encountered that before and I wanted to play with that. What happens when you don’t encounter something? And to put it into people’s minds that it’s okay that you don’t know everything.
C: Yeah!
A: The whole dominant as a mind reader trope is annoying to me.
C: No one can be expected to be a mind reader. Although I have read many of those BDSM doms who seem to be…almost preternatural sometimes in their ability to do that. [Laughs]
A: Yeah. I read one where it was actually that the dom was a mind reader, actually telepathic a little bit, and I was like this is not a contemporary then. But they just kind of like this little, you know, one sentence thing and I’m like that’s cheating!
C: You can’t just do that!
A: That’s completely cheating, you know?
C: Come on, now.
A: And I think it’s okay! It’s okay to negotiate. It’s okay to talk about things. I think it’s important.
C: That’s the other thing about this book is, it’s set up in book one that obviously Dominic has created the persona for himself for stage fright kinda reasons, but it’s not explored as fully until Counterpoint, his book, obviously, but I just thought that the way that the layers of that mental illness were pulled back from this thing that’s very much so on the surface and w ay to regain privacy and fight the stage fright to overcome roots deeply embedded in anxiety and a couple different instances of minor and a major panic attack that I thought hit really close to home and were incredibly accurate and I really liked seeing the various ways people in Dom’s life treat him and handle his anxiety and panic attacks. As a mental illness sufferer and I know a lot of our listeners are as well, that’s always really nice to see portrayed on the page.
A: Yeah, some of that comes again from my own experience since I have anxiety. I don’t have the same kind of panic attacks as Dom has, but yeah. Some of that, a lot of that was pulled out of me as well. My editor actually made me make it a little stronger, you know, in some ways. Cause she’s like yeah, I know this is. This is real, but it needs to be a little bit more real and I’m like oh god don’t make me do this. It was hard. That was probably one of the harder scenes to write. And any time he was sort of having that feeling cause it does bring up those emotions in you and yeah. So. I was trying trying to look back on your own panic and panic attacks and your own anxiety. It did bring it up a bit and it was sort of you know you eat some chocolate and curl up with the kitty.
C: So, we’ve talked around the book a little bit, cause it’s the second book and everyone should immediately go out and purchase Syncopation and preorder Counterpoint like right now. Pause. Go. Stop. Come back we’ll be here. I wanted to talk a little bit about kind of your history as a romance reader or reader in general. Or writer. The big things you can remember or some of the first things you can remember kinda pulling you in.
A: Gosh, I’ve been reading forever. My family’s a big bunch of readers. So yeah, I mean, as long as I could remember going to the library and taking out books we were a big library family. Stacks of books. But it was everybody. Mom and Dad and my brother. Books everywhere all the time. I was actually mainly a fantasy and science fiction reader for a very long time. That sort of was what got me into writing was that I wanted to…It’s kind of a cliché when people say books saved their lives, but books saved my life. It gave me a reason to get up in the morning when I was going through the horrendous trials and tribulations of junior high school and high school.
C: [Shudders] Oh god, worst.
A: Teen years that are the worst. So I wanted to give back that kind of experience that I was getting and I had always made up stories in my head and it didn’t really occur to me that I could write them down until, and this was in high school, two friends of mine were tandem writing what we would now call fanfic. But this was the late 80s so there were, I mean the internet existed, but it didn’t exist for us, right? Spiral bound notebooks and handwriting stuff and passing things around.
C: What were they writing?
A: They were writing, and this is kind of ridiculous, fun. They were writing sort of a crossover between the old Dungeons and Dragons cartoon and Duran Duran.
C: That’s so fantastic. My barista’s dad is the voice of the blond big hero guy in the old Dungeons and Dragons cartoon from the 80s. Such a delightful mashup of things.
A: And it was just a lot of fun and you know I sort of was reading these things and I said to her I have all these ideas in my head. I should write them down! And she said, ‘Well, why don’t you?’ and I literally did not have a good answer for her so I, and my handwriting is crap. My handwriting is still crap, it was crap back then, but my father had his work had gotten him a PC. So I started writing this fantasy novel. It actually was, and I finished it, it was actually more of a novella, 25,000 words long, which is a lot when you’re writing in 11th grade. I’d write out, write a bit out, then I’d print it out on you know the dot matrix printer with tractor fee and I’d three hole punch it and stick it in a binder and give it to my friend and it was passed around school and given back to me. So it was like writing original fiction on AO3 just very analog. It was an original story, but it had a lot of…it was derivative. Sort of derivative of the stuff I was reading at the time. Which was a lot of Anne McCaffrey and not just her Dragonriders stuff, but her sort of sort of science fantasy where you had a planet and there was magic but there were also humans in spacecraft and things like that. So it was a sort of mashup of that and that’s sort of basically how I started writing and my whole life kinda took a left-hand turn at that point. Cause I just decided I really wanted to do writing for a living and like originally I’d been thinking biology or something. And so I went to college for writing. And then, I actually do have a degree in creative writing. And then promptly graduated and realized a degree in creative writing doesn’t get you a job very well and you still have to eat. Luckily my mom’s an artist and the thing that she told me when I said hey I wanna do creative writing, I wanna change my major to creative writing, she said okay. Get a skill that you can get a job with.
C: Sound advice, mom.
A: I worked as a computer help desk person. I went to Carnegie Mellon which is a very high tech school even back then. So I was working in the computer labs and doing a lot of help desk stuff and that sort of taught me technical writing. So I ended up going into technical writing and that’s been my day job. And I kinda stopped writing for a while while I figured out how to live as an adult.
C: How do you grown up? [Laughs]
A: I don’t know. I god, my twenties were horrible, I was so happy to hit my thirties, cause there’s just so much…that’s when I really started getting the anxiety. There was so much anxiety of how am I gonna pay my bills? What does my bank account look like? Where am I gonna live? I ended up renting an apartment with a friend of mine and it kind of it’s an area of Pittsburgh now that’s really nice and back then it wasn’t so nice. And literally came home to police outside my apartment because the guy on the first floor had been cleaning his gun and it had gone off and the bullet went through my bedroom. So yeah. There was stuff with that my parents were like years later and I said this happened and moms like what?! And it didn’t occur to me then to tell her cause she would only have worried and what could they have done? Any event, life eventually settled down. I had a good steady job. I was making decent money I could do things like afford to buy a car instead of riding public transportation and you know. Things got better. And I got antsy about the writing again. And found NaNoWriMo.
C: Okayyy.
A: And wrote a book for NaNoWriMo and again, it was a fantasy. But it was sort of, it was one of these things where I’d been so rusty I was like oh god. I need crit partners. I need support people. I need, you know, to edit. I need help. I need help, here. And being sort of coming out of the fantasy, science fiction world, I went looking for that first. And there were things like Clarion Workshop and Odyssey Workshop which sound fantastic. If you can afford them. And the problem was not so much the money it was the time.
C: Yeah, it’s a long time to step away from life.
A: Six weeks long. And I was like I can’t do this and actually still eat. That whole having to eat and keep a roof over your head thing. And at this point I was still at a job where I’d get like maybe two weeks of vacation if I was lucky kinda thing and you didn’t get any sick days so. If you got sick there was your vacation, right? Anyways, from the Clarion stuff and looking around I discovered there was this Master’s program at Seton Hill University for writing popular fiction and you could get a graduate degree and I thought: you can get a graduate degree for writing a novel. You know? And I thought this was just the best thing ever. So I applied to the program and got in. Again, still writing fantasy, but the thing I discovered there were the romance writers. Because it was an all-genre, and specifically genre, so not literary fiction. Specifically how to write genre and specifically aimed at popular genre fiction. And it was specifically aimed at novel writing. Which is what I wanted to do. A whole lot of PhDs in creative writing because typically a PhD is a philosophy thing so its’ usually literature.
C: Research heavy literature stuff.
A: yeah, so I stepped into this program and discovered the romance writers. And oh my gosh. They were the most knowledgeable, best people. If you had a problem with characterization, they would whip out the information on any way you wanted to go about how to learn about characterization. And I heard, you know, first time I ever heard GMC, which is Goal, Motivation, Conflict. And that whole idea of internal and external GMC and goals and conflicts and what’s the internal conflict versus the external conflict and all this stuff. And I was like, where have these people been all my life? And I had had kind of a chip on my shoulder about romance. And that got knocked off really fast. Especially since, I had read some like in the 80s some Harlequins and things like that, and they were always sort of…some of them were good some of them were kind of oh my god. But you know, you do kind of end up with this chip sometimes on your shoulder about romance. And the thing that the program, the MFA program did, and it still does, is they everybody in the program, no matter where you are in your time in it, everybody reads one book, the same book, every semester. And it’s usually any genre. So when I started, the first genre we read was romance. And it was Bet Me by Jennifer Crusie.
C: Okay!
A: It’s kinda chick lit-y. This was 2008. So it would’ve been when chick lit was still kind of a thing.
C: Yeah.
A: But it’s essentially a humorous contemporary romance and I read it and I was blown away. Because here was a woman who was not waif like. She liked her doughnuts. There’s a whole donut thing in that book which I love. And she had agency and it was funny and I thought, ‘This is romance? Oh my goodness!’ And so that chip got knocked off my shoulder.
C: So once you had that chip knocked off did you know you wanted to write queer romance? Was there something at the point that you read a queer romance that you said wait a tick?
A: It was…some of the people in the program, actually, because one of the things you do is as part of it is when you graduate you do an essentially a thesis defense, but it’s really a thesis reading. So you read from your manuscript and then people ask you questions. And I think two of the manuscripts that I went to thesis readings for my first term there were gay romances. And I thought, ‘Wait, you can do that? And people will let you do that?’ Cause obviously I’d run across it in fanfic and in fandom in general and reading fantasy there’s always sort of this undercurrent of it with some of them queerness. So it was in my mind that it could be done, but in romance it felt new and inventive. And one of the instructors is a woman named Anne Harris who writes m/m as Jessica Freely. She hasn’t published anything recently, but she was pretty, has been pretty heavily published in the past. And again it was one of these things were again, ‘Wait, you can do that? And there are publishers who will publish it and people will buy it?’ So it’s sort of this shift in my head and I had already, I’d been writing a fantasy that had a pretty strong romantic subplot, but it wasn’t a romance cause the two characters end up to getting together at the end. Spoiler! There was also this sort of undercurrent of an m/m romance in it, too, that I didn’t realize until I was writing it that I was writing it. And I thought oh. Okay. So after I graduated, because I was so sick of the book I had been working on. I mean, I love it. But I’d been working on it for two and a half years. So I wanted and I had my degree and I was all done and I was like I wanna write something fun and frivolous and lighthearted. So I ended up writing this paranormal romance called Close Quarter. And it was not as lighthearted as I had intended. Because it’s sort of a romance, the premise is there’s a guy who’s lost his…he’s inherited a bunch of money because his mother has died and at the same time he found out the guy he thought was his father is not actually his father. But he can’t tell anyone, cause that’s sort of contingent on him getting the millions he now has. And he’s like 29 years old. He’s been a starving artist. He’s a sculptor living in a hovel in New York City because starving artist. And suddenly he’s thrust into like he has all this money and he’s fucked up in the head by all this. So he’s like I don’t wanna fly back to New York cause it’s been in the newspaper that he’s inherited this money and everybody now wants to be his best friend cause he’s got money. Like when you win the lottery?
C: Everybody coming out of the woodwork?
A: Yeah. And he’s been in the newspaper cause he got horrendously drunk and crashed a car and sort of dumb things. So he’s like I need to lay low for a while. So he ends up taking a transatlantic cruise to New York, so the Southampton to New York on the QE2 or I guess it’s Queen Mary now, type of cruise. And he literally runs into a guy who’s just spectacularly beautiful. And then weird things start to happen and it turns out the guy is not human at all. He’s fae. And they’re on a ship and there are also a bunch of vampires on the ship. And the fae is there to hunt the vampires and that’s, you know, it’s an erotic paranormal romance. My other books have sex in them but this one has a lot. It probably has the most. And it was originally published by Lucid, but I got my rights back and republished it. After that I was like, I forget exactly what happened after that, but it occurred to me that I wanted to try writing a contemporary romance because there’s, one of the great things about paranormal is that if you don’t know what to do you can always throw a monster at it. If the tension’s kinda lacking you can just kinda thing well, what would be the worst thing to happen right ow? The worst thing would be the vampires show up. It’s easy. Throw a monster at it. And the thing with straight up contemporary is all, well, you can to some extent throw monsters at it, cause you can make people monstrous.
C: Even then you have to craft that. There’s different from a literal monster MacGuffin at the door we have to take care of that.
A: So I think what fascinated me about, then I wrote the book that would become Takeover. I was trying to write a novella and I failed miserably.
[Chelsea laughs]
A: Between writing Close Quarter and Takeover I actually got a literary agent for a fantasy novel I had written, which still isn’t…it needs to be revised and the pacing is awful and I know what I need to do I just need the time to do it. And I still want to write fantasy novel ideas. I still want to sit down and write them sometimes. In the meantime I had written Takeover trying to write a novella and missing because I got to about 40,000 words and I said well, I have this thing, to my agent. And she said well send it over. And I said well it’s trying to be a novella. But it’s not a novella. So she gave me some ideas to bulk it out a bit and ended up selling it to Penguin Random House to Berkeley their Intermix line, their digital line. It was retitled Takeover. And so that was the first of the four office romances I wrote for Intermix. Which just got bigger and bigger as they, in size, Takeover’s the shortest. And again, some of that BDSM crept in there.
C: That pesky kink always creeping in.
A: and part of it was I wanted to do a little, it’s an employee-boss trope story and I wanted to flip that on the head a little bit and have the employee be the sort of more dominant one over the boss, you know? So that sorta happened there. And it’s basically, two guys hook up on a one night stand. The one guy, Michael, goes back to work and two weeks later the guy he slept with shows up as his new CEO.
C: That’s my favorite kind of trope, the ‘we one night standed and now have to be around each other’ kind of thing. That’s my favorite I guess meet-cute, meet-awkward? Whatever.
A: Meet-awkward, yeah. Oh crap. So suddenly they have to deal with that, you know. And so that was, that’s, hah. And then it was like a two book deal and I was like, well what the heck will I write for the second one? So Sam, the other character in Takeover, ends up founding his own company and that’s sort of the rest of the books around Sam, basically. But they’re, the first book is really Sam’s story with Michael. The second book is, again, kind of an enemies to lovers type thing. Where Justin, who’s this atypical MBA student working in the coffee shop below Sam’s company basically applies for a job with Sam and he looks like this punk kid. He’s older, but he looks like a punk kids. With the dyed hair and the fingernail polish, the black t-shirts and all that sort of stuff. And he rubs the company CFO, Eli, the wrong way. They cannot stand each other until they absolutely can stand each other. And that was a fun book to write and it just sort of goes on from there. But that was sort of my attempt at enemies, my first attempt at enemies to lovers. But then you know Syncopation and Counterpoint. And I’m working on the third Twisted Wishes book, which is Mish’s book. Mish is the bass guitarist. And it will be…
C: I’m so excited to find out more about Mish. I feel like for two books we know so little about. Which was obviously intentional, but I’m just so excited then to go and find out more.
A: She’s still kind of an enigma, for me too. So going through this book and figuring out who she is and how she got into the van and her backstory. And yeah. This is gonna be my first time writing, really, a woman as a point of view character. No, that’s not true. I did that in the fantasies, but still. The first time in a romance doing it. Cause all the other POVs have been male. Even in the, I did a polyamorous romance called Outside the Lines and the premise is that, it kind of, it’s part of an ongoing series called Bluewater Bay. So there’s this whole TV show in the background that’s sort of a supernatural type of TV show but with wolves. So there’s a whole lot of this campy TV type things and Hollywood invading a small Washington town. It’s a fun campy type of premise. But you have this married comic book shop owners who are a man and a woman, Lydia and Simon, who are polyamorous, and Simon meets Ian, who’s a miniature set designer. And they hit it off famously. But the point of view is just between Simon and Ian, even though Lydia’s a big part of it, too. The book would be a third longer if Lydia got her, actually probably longer than that cause Lydia has a lot of opinions. And I didn’t want it to be a huge, huge thing so that one’s also a fairly short…I tend to write long, so when I say fairly short it’s like 64,000 words as opposed to 100,000?
[Laughter]
A: Syncopation got outta hand.
C: Oh, but I love it I want more! I want the director’s cut. It’s so good.
A: The thing is, I didn’t cut anything. I actually added. 99,000 when I turned it in and it’s about 104,000. So it grew about 5,000 in edits. And I thought when I turned it in, I was like oh the editor will. It was my first time working with Mackenzie at Carina and I thought oh my god, she’s gonna make me cut so much of this cause it’s too long. And she’s like no, you need to add these scenes you just alluded to. Cause there are a couple of scenes I only alluded to.
C: Which ones?!
A: Oh gosh, one of them was where Ray borrows Dom’s acoustic guitar and is working through
C: That’s such a good scene! All of Twisted Wishes so far has done a good job of balancing that found family romance band stuff. All of those moving pieces.
A: I love found family. And I think, that sort of has happened with the Takeover books, too. I’ve been slowly expanding that with kinda little vignettes and stories I occasionally put out on the Takeover stuff and yeah. That, I love that feel of friends as family, you know? Found family. And these connections you can make. Especially if you don’t have that kind of actual family. You know?
C: Which I think, especially in the queer community, happens a lot. A lot of happening to make your own family.
A: And I think that’s important. And I love books with that theme, too.
C: Especially these ones. These guys. I love these guys so much. Oh, Anna, I just loved it. I’m like babbling incoherently now. Before I just completely lose it, what are you currently reading?
A: I’ve been reading a lot of romantic suspense, actually. And part of that was because I absolutely fell in love with Layla Reyne’s Agents Irish and Whiskey series.
C: Listeners will know, we did an interview with Layla a couple episodes back. We also love that series a lot.
A: And I, you know, I start talking with Layla and we occasionally do springs together and exchange manuscripts and things like that. But I couldn’t, after she gave me the second book, I was like I need the third.
C: They’re so good!
A: It oh, the second I love the second. But her Facebook group does a romantic suspense reading group. So every so often do a Facebook event and we’ve been reading. Right now, we’re finishing up, my Kindle is somewhere here, I’m finishing up The Wolf at the Door which is the first book of the Big Bad Wolf series and it’s by Charlie [Adhara], I can’t remember the last name now. But I’m sure you’ll look it up and put it in the show notes. It’s really good. It’s a paranormal romantic suspense.
C: Wow that’s a lot of Venn Diagram bubbles.
A: Werewolves exist and the main character, Cooper, is an agent for the BSI, which is the Bureau of Special Investigations, which is a branch of the FBI and they deal with.
C: Sounds made up. All government acronyms sound made up.
A: In this case they are made up because they’re a branch that has to do with anything to do with werewolves and werewolf crime and he’s partnered with a werewolf from the werewolf society overarching, I dunno, organization called the Trust. And it’s sort of this, you know, they’ve gone out to this small town where these murders are happening. So it’s just this really interesting romantic suspense, mystery, cause you don’t know well, who’s murdering these people? Nothing is clear-cut. You don’t know who’s on what side and there’s this tension building between these two agents. One of who is a werewolf. So Where Death Meets the Devil, which I read on the plane back from Europe and literally read the entire thing flying back from Europe.
C: Nice.
A: With a short break and then devoured all, like, I think there’s a free coda and then a novella had just come out. So I just devoured everything at once and am chomping at the bit for more. L.A. Witt and Cari Z.’s Suspicious Behavior [Bad Behavior] series. And I know both Laurie and Cari and I was actually in the room where it happened where they started co-writing this book at an RT. Because I was rooming with Laurie so that was neat to see. Yeah, that’s pretty much what I’ve been reading.
C: It’s always hard to remember. There’s eight million things, it seems like on the go at the same time.
A: Yeah. I read a lot. I’ve been listening to, I’ve been listening to audiobooks, but actually what I’ve been listening to is Layla’s Imperial Stout on audio. I like rereading on audiobooks.
C: The Imperial Stout ones are good, there’s some good accents in Layla’s books.
A: Tristan James does a great job. And then I read, or I listened to, and it’s the first time I’d listened to a book and hadn’t read it. Was One Giant Leap by Kay Simone. It’s narrated by Greg Trembley. And Greg does a fantastic job with voices and narration and I really enjoyed, I really enjoyed that book, but I think a lot part of it was because of Greg because he just does such a good job with the voices. And I, Greg is one of these people I’ve met in person, too, so it’s kind of a little weird to listen?
C: Yeah.
A: To him. Because his narration voice is pretty close to his, the in-between bits, not the actual character speaking, his narration voice is very much his voice. So it’s sort of like having your friend read a book to you. [Laughs]
C: But like a real dirty book.
A: This one was not, I mean, it had some steam, but it’s fairly low on the steam.
C: I just know a lot of my friends who can’t do a lot of romance in audio and especially if they know the narrator? It would’ve just like.
A: I can’t listen to my own books.
C: Oh, yeah. I don’t know if I could ever do that. That would be a little weird.
A: I have listened, cause Iggy Toma does the Takeover books. And I can listen to them up until the point where I get to the sex scenes and then it’s like nope! Click. Writing them is not hard, it’s like as I go further along in the process they get harder and harder to deal with. Writing them I have a lot of, I enjoy writing them. Editing’s fine. But by the time you’ve been through them a bunch of times and you have to actually pay attention to the words? When you’re editing and the repetitions and things? How many ways can you say thrust? You know?
C: yeah. [Laughs]
A: The embarrassment starts to set in and then to have…intellectual level I know when people are reading the books they read the sex scenes I’ve written. It’s another thing to have implicitly you know for a fact that this person has read your sex scene probably multiple times because they are reading it out loud and you’re like oh my god, what does he think of me? I don’t know how those guys, the audiobook people do it. It’s just amazing. I listen to it and it’s just completely different voices. The people who are really, really good, the character stuff.
C: It’s amazing.
A: Hats off to you audiobook narrators because wow.
C: A+ wow. Could not do it. Well you know, hats off to you, Anna. Thank you so much for coming and sitting down and talking with me today. I loved Syncopation. I loved Counterpoint. Listeners go pre-order or pick up both books in the Twisted Wishes trilogy, soon-to-be trilogy. Does book number three have a title?
A: The tentative title is Reverb. I don’t know if that’ll stick. We’ll see what Carina says. Cause all the books go through a titling process, so.
C: Well, keep an eye out for maybe Reverb, soon to be book number three. If people are looking for you or your internet home, where would be the best places to check out?
A: My website is AnnaZabo.com. I’m on twitter most often as @amergina. Which has a history I’m not gonna get into, but I’ve been amergina online since college, basically, so it’s one of these things I just can’t let go of. And actually I actually do own amergina.com now and it doesn’t redirect, but it does have links to my webpage. And I have a Facebook Page and Reader’s Group, which I think it’s Anna Zabo’s Den of Iniquity, which is kinda long to write, but.
C: But is fantastic.
A: But if you look, I think I’m pretty much one of the only Anna Zabo’s on Facebook.
C: And of course we will put all contact links in the show notes along with all of the wonderful recs and things that we’ve talked about today. Again, I want to thank Anna for sitting down. I want to thank Carina for reaching out and setting this up. I am very excited about all of our author interviews, but I was particularly jazzed to sit down and talk about this book.
A: You’re welcome!
[Funin’ and Sunin’ by Kevin MacLeod plays]
C: Alright, friends, thank you so much for tuning in to my interview with Anna. I had so much fun sitting down with them. Go out and pick up Syncopation now. If you’re listening to this interview the day it goes live, you have one more day to pre-order Counterpoint. If you’re listening to it after our premiere date?
K: It’s out!
C: It is! Go read it.
K: Borrow it from your library. Buy a copy.
C: Pick it up wherever you can find it. And next time, friends, cooler temps are not quite here, but we also don’t really give a shit and as is the spirit, we’ve already discussed, we’re gonna embrace the things we love.
K: Pumpkin spice bitches! [Laughs]
C: We have affectionately nicknamed the next episode our Pumpkin Spice Bitch episode because we be basic, we love pumpkin spice. It is our episode about all things autumnal. There are fics. Books. Some plays. Some movies. A whole grab bag of stuff. So make sure you guys check out the show notes for that one. Tune in in a couple of weeks.
K: So much spooky, delicious goodness.
C: Oh my god, you guys, it’s gonna be so good. I haven’t even edited that episode yet, but I’m really looking forward to it.
K: Put on your witches hats. Throw Practical Magic streaming on your devices. Just get ready.
C: Dude, I did a Practical Magic/Hocus Pocus double header the other day and it was a good choice.
K: Niceeee.
C: It was like 85 outside.
K: Hella jelly. Whatever, it’s freezing in here always.
C: I do keep my house rather chilly, friends. That is also a thing that happens. Alright. We’re not gonna devolve into any more discussion about the weather.
K: Lies!
[Laughter]
C: You guys can always come and find us in either of our two internet homes. nnirpodcast.wordpress.com, or patreon.com/nnirpodcast. You can find me back on Twitter @anoutlawlife.
K: And you can find me pretty much everywhere on the internet @kaytaylorrea.
C: And until next time, friends, take care of yourselves, take care of each other, and have happy reading. Bye.
K: Bye!
[Funin’ and Sunin’ by Kevin Macleod plays]
Outtakes:
[Kay snorts]
C: Just gonna Godzilla this thing right on over.
—
C: The first thing that…I just I’m not gonna do that. Sometimes I think if I start a sentence I can figure out where I’m going by the time I get to the end of it, but that’ snot a thing that’s gonna happen with this one.
[Laughter]
Not Now, I'm Reading 