Working: How a Romance Novelist Churns Out Seductive Stories

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4.2 • 2K Ratings

🗓️ 13 November 2022

⏱️ 46 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This week, host June Thomas talks to the prolific lesbian romance author Harper Bliss, who published nearly 40 novels in the past 10 years. In the interview, Harper describes her writing routine and explains how she’s been able to write and publish so many books. She also discusses the common themes in her books and why she chooses so many different international settings. After the interview, June and co-host Karen Han talk about Harper’s decision to self-publish and her ability to delegate certain tasks. In the exclusive Slate Plus segment, Harper explains why one of her past books featured a politician character and why she mostly avoids overtly political plots and characters these days. She also talks about her admiration for audiobook narrator and former Working guest Abby Craden. Send your questions about creativity and any other feedback to working@slate.com or give us a call at (304) 933-9675. Podcast production by Cameron Drews. If you enjoy this show, please consider signing up for Slate Plus. Slate Plus members get an ad-free experience across the network and exclusive content on many shows—you’ll also be supporting the work we do here on Working. Sign up now at slate.com/workingplus to help support our work. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:42.0	A romance does need to have basically the same things every time. Like I know by which chapter for instance my characters I have to have their first kiss.
1:03.0	I mean after 40 books I think I've pretty much internalized the structure.
1:12.0	Welcome back to working, I'm your host Karen Han.
1:15.0	And I'm your other host June Thomas.
1:18.0	Hi June, how are you?
1:20.0	I am fabulous thank you. I just had some objins and quichets.
1:23.0	There's some very romantic fruits which gets me into my next question.
1:28.0	How did you talk to this week? Wow.
1:30.0	The voice that we heard at the top of the show belongs to Harper Bliss. She is a really prolific author of romance novels whose work I've enjoyed.
1:41.0	And honestly this was just one of those cases where I just wanted to know how and why she did certain things, made certain choices.
1:51.0	You know why she writes books in series, why she puts so much focus on friendship as well as love stories and why they're so international.
2:00.0	And perhaps most of all how on earth is she so productive?
2:05.0	Well that is a lot to talk about so I'm very excited to hear your conversation but before we get to that what can we look forward to in the slight plus segment this week?
2:14.0	So in one of Harper's series one of the characters is a very senior politician.
2:21.0	And that job is presented in a pretty accurate way and I was really curious about how that came about.
2:29.0	And I also wanted to know what she thought of people like me who listen to the audio version rather than actually reading the book for ourselves.
2:39.0	Like does she think that people like me who listen to her books are cheating?
	...

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