Speaker 1: Hey, fucker's what up? It's Christina Hutchinson and Karin Fisher.
Speaker 1: You're about to listen to a clip from Guys We Fuck,
Speaker 1: the anti slut shaming podcast. We are interviewing h debut
Speaker 1: romance novelist uh Laurena Acardo this week. Her book Wildlove
Speaker 1: debuts hits the charts this week, and we just dive
Speaker 1: into this whole world that we don't know anything about.
Speaker 1: What is a romance novel? What are the rules of
Speaker 1: the world? How fucking explicit can you get on these pages?
Speaker 1: What's going on? Are there lgbt Q romance novels? How
Speaker 1: do you get into this world? Is it corny? Is
Speaker 1: it cool? Is it make you horny? When you're writing
Speaker 1: such an interesting conversation? And if you want to hear
Speaker 1: the whole thing, you're gonna head over to Luminary Podcasts
Speaker 1: dot com slash GWF, where you can get a subscription
Speaker 1: for as low as to a month when you sign
Speaker 1: up for the annual plan. I am not one of
Speaker 1: those people who grew up like picking romance novels off
Speaker 1: my mom's book show and you know, reading them at
Speaker 1: a way to early age. I got a job as
Speaker 1: a marketing associate for a book publisher. I had long
Speaker 1: worked in illustrated books, and one day they were like,
Speaker 1: you're going to start being a publicist for our romance line,
Speaker 1: and I was like, I don't know anything about okay.
Speaker 1: So I didn't know a lot about romance when I started,
Speaker 1: and I had to start reading, and I was surprised.
Speaker 1: I had sort of had all the preconceptions that a
Speaker 1: lot of people have about romance and found that there's
Speaker 1: some incredible writing. So it just let conceptions just corny hack.
Speaker 1: I don't it's that it's a female focused genre. So
Speaker 1: the idea is that because it's focused on love and
Speaker 1: it has a happily ever after, that it's cheesy for corney,
Speaker 1: or because there's graphic descriptions of sex, that it's trashy um.
Speaker 1: And you know, we don't talk about most other dia
Speaker 1: that way. We don't talk about movies with sex and
Speaker 1: them is trashy. If it's there for entertainment value, then
Speaker 1: we don't tend to talk about it that way. So
Speaker 1: and I had sort of had some of those before
Speaker 1: I started reading it, and then I, for lack of
Speaker 1: a better term, fell in love with the genre and
Speaker 1: It really changed my mind, and I had to start
Speaker 1: promoting it, so I really had to believe in it.
Speaker 1: And then I realized I'd been writing love stories my
Speaker 1: whole life. I'd always love to write that I love
Speaker 1: when she first start writing when I was really young.
Speaker 1: And do you guys know what fan fiction is? Oh
Speaker 1: my god? Okay wait, Elizabeth Fisher, Now okay, I don't
Speaker 1: fan fiction, but this is resonates with me so deeply
Speaker 1: because my mom is a huge Dawson's Creek fan. Sorry, Mom,
Speaker 1: I'm blowing up your spot in a big way right now. Ever,
Speaker 1: but she used to spend like hours reading like Pac
Speaker 1: Joey unfiction online and like for any TV show, there
Speaker 1: is fan fiction, there's fan fiction for Everything's like a
Speaker 1: spec script, except you're not trying a writing job. We're
Speaker 1: just you're doing it because you love. But it's not
Speaker 1: in script format. It's in like a book format. Because
Speaker 1: I think even like some like comedian, I want to say, like,
Speaker 1: I mean, there's probably fan fiction about like comedians. We know, yes,
Speaker 1: a person who writes it is doing it just because
Speaker 1: they love it, so it's probably good. It's literally people
Speaker 1: who love whatever this piece of media is so much
Speaker 1: they can't stand to see an end, or they hated
Speaker 1: like there's a lot of Buffy fan fiction where the
Speaker 1: fans hated the how they ended Buffy, so they rewrite
Speaker 1: their own endings. So when I was young, I loved
Speaker 1: boy bands and which one favorite, Yes, I loved hands
Speaker 1: I started writing these, like what was the fan stories
Speaker 1: about Handy? It was always me, It's always you, really,
Speaker 1: you know, anybody else making out with all three of
Speaker 1: those make your dreams come true? And actually, that's exactly
Speaker 1: right how you want the story to end. And so
Speaker 1: it eventually, you know, evolved into actual fiction where I
Speaker 1: was making up all of the characters. But I realized
Speaker 1: that I'd been writing romance stories for a really long
Speaker 1: time since I was probably twelve or thirteen, since we
Speaker 1: got a family computer. So by the time I was
Speaker 1: an adult, it was something that I did as a hobby.
Speaker 1: I would sit down at my computer and like crank
Speaker 1: out a thousand words about two people who fell in
Speaker 1: love and all types of scenarios. So when I started
Speaker 1: reading romance as a romance publicist, I thought I should
Speaker 1: try and do this, like I should try and finish
Speaker 1: something like start to finish, I should start with one
Speaker 1: story I feel really strongly about and write it from
Speaker 1: top to bottom. And it was a terrible draft. It
Speaker 1: was like just awful, you know, as first drafts tend
Speaker 1: to be. And then like you thought it was Flordia,
Speaker 1: other people think it was I think you had it.
Speaker 1: The first version of whatever I sent to a writer friend.
Speaker 1: She was like, okay, you you can't do this, Like,
Speaker 1: you can't do this, You can't do there are a
Speaker 1: lot of um there are just a lot of facets
Speaker 1: of romance that don't fly within the genre, like it
Speaker 1: has to have a happily ever after, I was wondering
Speaker 1: about that. All my stories do, but it has to
Speaker 1: Who made that rule, says says the customers exactly. Okay, yeah,
Speaker 1: I imagine it doesn't sell if it has a bad
Speaker 1: ending or they want their money back if it has
Speaker 1: a bad ending, because you don't know until you get there. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and you it doesn't happen so much in traditional publishing
Speaker 1: because they won't publish. Traditional publishers won't publish a book
Speaker 1: that's marketed as romance without a happy ending. If you
Speaker 1: were to submit something as a romance novel, they would
Speaker 1: tell you like, well, obviously you have to X the end.
Speaker 1: So industry of novels has to have a happy ending.
Speaker 1: In that funny that we always think about pop culture.
Speaker 1: We always talk about pop culture influences our early ideas
Speaker 1: of what is love and how should it go and
Speaker 1: what is acceptable? One it is unacceptable. It also means
Speaker 1: like romance novels are the ultimate safe space for love
Speaker 1: because it's always going to work out. God, That's that's
Speaker 1: I'm saying. But that's when you talk about criticisms of
Speaker 1: the genre. That's a huge one is that people say
Speaker 1: it's so it's fantasy, like this would never happen in
Speaker 1: real life, because oh, it's a guaranteed happy ending. And
Speaker 1: but a lot of people who are in the industry
Speaker 1: would say, what's wrong with getting your happy ending? What's
Speaker 1: with things working out? What's wrong with like people drifting
Speaker 1: apart and coming back together? What's wrong with a woman
Speaker 1: being satisfied? Like there's everything right with all that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And like consent is huge right now, Like they're romance
Speaker 1: genre absolutely like doubled down on making sure that every
Speaker 1: sex scene includes some sort of consent. I was like,
Speaker 1: consent for love, How do you get consent to love,
Speaker 1: that's your next book. Consent to love anything? Actually? Um, yeah,
Speaker 1: as far as like the sex goes, like there has
Speaker 1: to be some verbal or there has to be some
Speaker 1: form of consent. Like it sums up up. She checked
Speaker 1: yes on the handwritten letter. Yes, that's cute. That's so cute.
Speaker 1: I'm that's really cute. Romance novel have to have sex. No,
Speaker 1: how about a finger? Yeah? Right? Um, there are different
Speaker 1: they called them heat levels, so love it's like there
Speaker 1: are how spiy is this? Um? There are closed door
Speaker 1: romance novels where there's absolutely no sex at all, like
Speaker 1: Hallmark movies, and Hallmark has a branch of book publishing,
Speaker 1: so I can't say all because I'm not acent. Sure,
Speaker 1: I think most Hallmark novels are closed doors. You'll never
Speaker 1: see them have any physical interaction outside of like a
Speaker 1: hug or a kiss. That's obviously not for children. Is
Speaker 1: with adults, they just don't Adults don't want to watch
Speaker 1: their brand. I mean, the Hallmark brand is like I
Speaker 1: mean there if you remember, like I think last Christmas
Speaker 1: Sason season, they had a commercial airing on the Hallmark
Speaker 1: Network that featured a lesbian couple, and people complained and
Speaker 1: got and like got it. Okay, So it's probably for conservatives,
Speaker 1: very conservative. I mean like it's like a Candice Cameron
Speaker 1: Burret is like, that's like, who's watching Hallmark? That's the
Speaker 1: dj Antanna very religious, Yeah, jesus. Oh and her brother
Speaker 1: Kirk Cameron's even moreover. Yeah, he's he has a network
Speaker 1: or whatever. They're a terrifying family. But the sounds like
Speaker 1: they market to that kind of people who only want
Speaker 1: to see them kiss once at the end. But I'd
Speaker 1: say nine, I camp I'm going to make this up.
Speaker 1: This is not a real fact. I'd say romance novels
Speaker 1: have some sort of sex in them. Mine is pretty explicit.
Speaker 1: I mean I want to read about That's why. That's
Speaker 1: the number one reason I would read one of these
Speaker 1: novels is for explicit sexy. You know. Yeah, I gotta
Speaker 1: pick some of them up because a lot of people
Speaker 1: have been telling me over the last year about erotica
Speaker 1: that you read like a literature, and I'm like, oh,
Speaker 1: that's there is like heat when you talk about heat levels.
Speaker 1: There is everything from closed Door Amish. Romance is really popular. Yeah,
Speaker 1: ironically my book has been marketed alongside. But I want
Speaker 1: to let people know, like these are very different, Like
Speaker 1: if you buy both of these, they're very different. Is
Speaker 1: the heat level like actually arked or would you have
Speaker 1: to look it up on it that way? You know,
Speaker 1: I don't actually know how you would know that except
Speaker 1: for that it's contemporary romance. You can sort of assume
Speaker 1: that most contemporary romance being put out there by a
Speaker 1: traditional publisher has has sex in it. So romance readers
Speaker 1: kind of know that, and they look for the books
Speaker 1: that are within their heat level. Like if I picked
Speaker 1: up a romance novel and there was no sex, I'd
Speaker 1: be disappointed. Like getting into you I a letter, I
Speaker 1: would say, yeah, so, and you know, and it's not
Speaker 1: just tossed in there so that there's something, you know,
Speaker 1: to get people to pick it up. It's it has
Speaker 1: to move the plot forward. It's just like every you know,
Speaker 1: it's just like movies and every other initiation. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: to a lot of people it's necessary to a romance.
Speaker 1: I mean, I don't know how Like the Whole Front
Speaker 1: movies to me, yeah exactly. I don't know. The Hallmark
Speaker 1: movies to me don't ring very true because it's two
Speaker 1: people falling in love and then suddenly they're engaged and
Speaker 1: they've never kissed. Oh it's which is such a stupid
Speaker 1: thing to promote to any person, Like, how do you
Speaker 1: know you're going to be a good couple if you
Speaker 1: don't fuck? We hope you enjoyed that excerpt with our
Speaker 1: guest Lauren A. Cardo, author of Wild Love, which is
Speaker 1: out now. Motherfucker's if you want to hear the entire
Speaker 1: interview and other full episodes of Guys We Fucked, and
Speaker 1: full episodes of other exclusive podcasts on Luminary, like The
Speaker 1: C Word and and other stuff. There's probably other podcasts,
Speaker 1: maybe Midnight Miracle. Oh I listened to that the other
Speaker 1: day is so fucking good. Head on over to Luminary
Speaker 1: Podcasts dot com, where if you sign up for a
Speaker 1: yearly plan, you get a subscription for as low as
Speaker 1: two dollars and cents a month.