Episode 159: Gwenda Bond
In Episode 159, “Gwenda Bond,” Flourish and Elizabeth interview Gwenda Bond, author of many novels, including Lois Lane: Fallout, Stranger Things: Suspicious Minds, and (just released!) Not Your Average Hot Guy. Topics covered include the differences between writing licensed novels, fanfiction, and original fiction, the way social media impacts the relationships between authors and audiences, and why, despite a recent boom in rom-com novels, Hollywood seems so uninterested in the form these days.
Show Notes
[00:00:00] As always, our intro music is “Awel” by stefsax, used under a CC BY 3.0 license.
[00:00:30] Gwenda’s just-launched book is Not Your Average Hot Guy. Find her other books at her website.
[00:01:18] By “IP,” we mean licensed stories—stories based on pre-existing intellectual property that’s still under copyright. Novelizations count as IP, and so do tie-in novels that are written to connect with a particular season of a TV show or film release, but so do novels like Gwenda’s Lois Lane books that aren’t specifically occasioned by anything. One of Gwenda’s agents, Kate McKean, wrote a great newsletter on the subject!
[00:01:39] The newsletter Flourish is referring to is “Hollywood & Spine” by Mike Duquette.
[00:03:25] Our interstitial music here and throughout is “Credit Roll” by Lee Rosevere, used under a CC BY 3.0 license.
[00:13:58] Elizabeth Hand wrote tie-in novels for 12 Monkeys and the Halle Berry Catwoman. Mind blown!!
[00:17:56] Alas, the struggle of all IP writers: although Gwenda’s book answered the question of who Eleven’s biological father is, the internet is still speculating about it. Still, you heard it here first: the Duffers signed off on the book, so presumably it’s canonical!
[00:27:55] Gwenda’s Uncanny Magazine article about writing IP—and comparing the process to writing fanfic or original fiction—is “Toy Stories.”
[00:47:11] We spoke to Nichole Perkins in Episode 157.
[00:52:21] The finest in seminarian fashion.
Transcript
[Intro music]
Flourish Klink: Hi, Elizabeth!
Elizabeth Minkel: Hi, Flourish!
FK: And welcome to Fansplaining, the podcast by, for, and about fandom!
ELM: This is episode #159, “Gwenda Bond.”
FK: Oh, I am so excited to get to talk to her!
ELM: OK, so Gwenda is a writer. She is, ah, someone who I interviewed on a panel earlier this summer, and so I really wanted to get her on the podcast because she was a delight to interview. So, her book that is coming out right now—I think today, actually, or yesterday?
FK: Yeah! It’s—it’s gonna be today.
ELM: Yeah. It’s called Not Your Average Hot Guy, and it is a like, paranormal rom-com. Paranormal?
FK: Uh… Fantasy, I think is how she describes it.
ELM: Fantasy rom-com, and it’s great, and we will put a link in the show notes. So, that isn’t necessarily the most fannish part about her background. [FK laughs] What I really wanted to have her on to talk about is her work in IP.
FK: Yeah, now you know that I am extremely obsessed with IP, or, as normal people call them, tie-in novels! [laughs]
ELM: I didn’t know you were obsessed. I mean, I guess—I guess I knew, I mean you’re obsessed with Star Trek ones. I didn’t know you were obsessed with like, the concept of—
FK: I have a lot of other ones. You know, one of my friends, I’ll link it here, actually, like it’s a—yeah. Like, tie-in novels, also, um, novelizations? One of my friends has a newsletter entirely about novelizations that I think is one of the greatest newsletters out there.
ELM: OK, so a novelization is when the movie or show already exists, and someone makes a novel version of the plot in that movie, right?
FK: Right, and then IP or tie-in novels are when someone writes their own story set in the same world, and those two things sometimes like—like the line is sometimes blurry between those two things.
ELM: Right. And so what I’m most interested in is thinking about IP side by side with thinking about fanfiction.
FK: Yeah, for sure.
ELM: And, you know, how like, functionally they might be doing a very similar thing, but—and that “functionally” isn’t even the right word. Like, on, you know, at first glance, they’d be doing a similar thing—
FK: Mm-hmm.
ELM: —but with the actual context and the execution, they might be totally different, and that’s super interesting to me.
FK: To me too.
ELM: Just to me!
FK: [laughs] It’s yours. You’re like, “It’s mine! You can’t have it!” [laughs]
ELM: It’s mine. I find it interesting.
FK: [laughs]
ELM: No, I—I do, I will concede that I think you are more interested in the actual tie-in media world than me.
FK: Yeah, well, I mean, you know—
ELM: I’m interested in it conceptually, and you actually read tie-in novels a lot.
FK: I do. I’m looking at like, a shelf full of them right now.
ELM: All right. Anyway, that’s an aside to explain what that is. But Gwenda has written for a couple different properties. One is she wrote several Lois Lane books, and the other one is she wrote in the Stranger Things world. And so, those are interesting because those are very fannish properties.
FK: Mm-hmm. And different, I feel like.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: Really, not like, totally unrelated, but I feel like their fandoms are quite different, so.
ELM: Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, I already got kind of a sneak peek when I interviewed her about how she feels about some of these things [FK laughs], but I’m excited to talk to her with you!
FK: Me too. OK, should we call her?
ELM: Let’s do it!
[Interstitial music]
FK: All right, it’s time to welcome Gwenda to the podcast! Hey, Gwenda!
Gwenda Bond: Hey! So glad to be here.
ELM: So excited to have you on. I’m excited to see you again!
GB: Yeah, same!
ELM: [laughs] All right, well I always ask this first question, I’m going to ask the first question I always ask, which is [FK laughs] can you talk a little bit about your background and like, especially the way that connects to fandom? I know that you are a fan, but that’s also brought you to like, a fandom-adjacent career path, working on IP and stuff like that. So I’m just wondering if you can kind of like, talk about your origin story a bit.
GB: So, it’s strange, because yes, we first met when we were doing a panel on fandom, and I originally had identified myself as not really part of a fandom. But then as we started talking, and things like LiveJournal came up, and [FK laughs] I was thinking about the origins of fandom more holistically, I guess, than we tend to these days, when you’re sort of—I think a lot of times, people shorthand, and it’s tied to a specific TV property or fanfic fandom, and so those kinds of things, I have written for audiences of, but haven’t really been part of that community.
However, [laughs] I am a deep science fiction/fantasy nerd, [FK laughs] in that I’ve been around the field for most of my adult life now, know a ton of people in it, know all the history of who got into it in whoever’s LiveJournal comments 10 years ago [all laugh] and it became very clear to me that I actually, yes, absolutely, that’s a fandom. And I think publishing in general, I tend to remember a lot of the beefs and the gossip for many years [all laugh] because I wrote for Publishers Weekly for a long time, so yes, I’ve always been into super pop culture stuff, and I’m a deep nerd about things like, screwball comedies of the 1930s and ’40s that we perhaps don’t think of as fandoms, but they totally have fandoms! Everything has a fandom. Uh, stage magic and all that stuff, but…
I grew up in a small town in eastern Kentucky, and books were always my escape, and I had access to the school library year-round, because my parents were both principals, which is how I got all of my authority issues [FK & ELM laugh] instilled very early. And uh, I grew up literally in the middle of nowhere. Like, one of the poorest counties in the country, and was just very lucky to be embraced by some people as mentors and friends, who were slightly older than me, most of whom I’m still friends with today, in the science fiction world, and we were all just very steeped in it, at that point.
And you know, a lot of those same people I have had a weekly Zoom with every Friday since the pandemic started. We’re kind of scattered all around, in sort of our little science fiction/fantasy—although some of them are fancier now, [FK & ELM laugh] or would probably be identified as literary. I still think of them as fandom geeks. Like Karen Joy Fowler and Kelly Link. They’ll always be fandom geeks to me. [laughter]
ELM: I really like that you named names at the end there, thank you very much. [laughter]
GB: Oh, I’ll name more!
FK: You gonna name names?
GB: I’ll name all—I think they’re all in the acknowledgments of my next book anyway, so. [laughs]
ELM: That’s really funny. So like, how did you come into writing, then? You had this initial love of books, but like, how did you cross into actually, you know, making that your full-time job?
GB: So, it’s a long journey for me. I was not one of those wonder babies [FK laughs] other than finding my community, and knowing that I wanted to write. So, I was one of those obnoxious kids who declared at age five, “I’m gonna be a writer,” and would sit and make loops on paper, trying to make words and then make my parents look at the paper to see if I’d made words.
FK: Oh my God, you decided that you were going to be a writer before you knew how to write?
ELM: That’s amazing.
GB: I just really loved books and stories, and also I would memorize books, or I would make up stories based on the pictures, before I could read [FK laughs] and I got in big trouble in kindergarten—this is sort of, this is my origin story [ELM laughs] is pretending that I was reading a book out loud to my kindergarten class, and my kindergarten teacher telling me that that was not what happened and calling me out for not being able to read—
ELM: Amazing.
GB: —and me countering that maybe she didn’t know how to read. [laughs]
ELM: Wow. [all laugh]
FK: I can also see authority issues!
ELM: Yes!
GB: Proving that I’ve always been the same, and so she called my dad to like, come talk to me. [laughs] Yeah. So, I wanted to write forever. Wrote a lot of bad political poetry in high school.
ELM: [whispering] Yes.
GB: I went to our state Governor’s School for the Arts, where I wrote a political poem that ended with the phrase, “and blow the whole goddamn thing up,” while the First Lady was in the audience. [laughs]
ELM: All right!
GB: [laughs] Yes. I feel like I was kind of being used as a patsy there, but I willingly volunteered. [FK & ELM laugh] And then I started writing basically thinly veiled Poppy Z. Brite fanfic in college [FK & ELM laugh] and then I took a screenwriting class, taught by a journalism professor, and I also always loved movies, and I really loved his teaching style. So I started writing screenplays, and I did that while having a day job in politics, out of college for a few years, and then discovered YA in the early aughts. So even though all my friends were prose writers, for the most part, I thought of myself as a screenwriter until I discovered YA, and then I was like, “I need to go to grad school, rather than just making my friends teach me how to write fiction,” [FK laughs] which was a foolish mistake. [all laugh] I loved my grad program, but like, the first thing you should decide when you want to write novels is not, “I’m going to go into a tremendous amount of debt to go get a degree,” but I did, and it worked out pretty well I guess. [laughs]
I basically had to unlearn—because of course scripts are everything is external, and books are all about the internal journey. That’s the thing that they can do that no other form of art can do in the same way, show you the inside of a person’s head. I had to just learn how to do that, which I did in my grad program. I got my graduate degree and started writing young adult novels. I got an agent with the one that I wrote in grad school, but it took us four books before I actually sold the book, and then I had a full-time day job in state government here the entire—for 17 years, and went full-time in 2015.
FK: [laughs] But did you know—I mean, because you write original stuff, but you also do a lot of stuff that ties into existing pop culture things...
GB: Mm-hmm.
FK: Like, how did you get into that? Did you—I know lots of people who envision that, and lots of people who would never envision that, right? [laughter] Like where were you with that?
GB: I was in the obnoxious place of—we went on a retreat, several of my agent’s clients, to a beach house, and I remember saying to her very clearly, “I’m just gonna focus on my own stuff. I’m not interested in doing work for hire.” And then about two weeks later, she called me on the phone, while I was at lunch at my day job, and she said, “How serious were you when you said that? Because these people really want you to write a book about Lois Lane [laughter] and I’ve tried to give them another client, but they really are set on you.” And I was like, “Yeah, no, that was total bullshit.” [all laugh] For the right project, for Lois Lane, absolutely! Because I was a journalism major in college, because I thought that’s how writers made money, and my day job in government was working with reporters, [FK laughs] so it just felt like meant to be—
ELM: Yeah.
GB: —from the get-go. So, I never envisioned doing it, and was super lucky. And my experience has not been like anyone else that I know. I didn’t have to audition, I was basically a baby writer. I had published one book that had not done that well and had a couple more on the way, and for whatever reason they were like, “We can afford her, [all laugh] and we think this kid’s going places.” And so, yeah, I was just really lucky to get that gig, and it did open up a lot of opportunities for me. It taught me a lot about storytelling, because I had to learn how to outline, and it was just a real gift. Like, I love those characters, and so it was just a joy. And I think that was kind of what set me on the path to the things I’m writing now, which are books that I hope are fun and bring other people joy, in the same way that those books did to me.
ELM: I have a lot of questions.
GB: OK!
ELM: So I think that you may be our first guest that has written IP. Flourish, do you know if that’s right?
FK: IP novels, yeah.
ELM: Yeah. Yeah?
FK: I think that’s true.
ELM: Sorry, to—
FK: At least, certainly the first person we’ve talked to—
ELM: Yes. The first person who—
FK: —about writing IP novels. Sorry previous guests if any of you have done it. [ELM laughs] We didn’t talk to you about that.
ELM: Great! Right, right, right. So, I think that, um, a lot of our listeners would probably appreciate understanding a little bit more about this world. Like, you mentioned in passing just now the idea of auditioning. Right? Like so—
FK: Or the fact that you have to outline. Like how does this even work?
ELM: Yeah, like, we’ve got a lot of questions, like if you could talk a little bit about that—
GB: Yeah yeah yeah!
ELM: Because I think that’d be pretty interesting for folks.
GB: So, it’s wildly different. There’s a spectrum across which—and I have got to admit right here that I have been incredibly lucky not to have to jump through the hoops that many people I know have had to jump through. And I’m pretty picky about what kind of IP I do. I would not want it to be a bad match, because I do have a lot of respect for fans. So, I’ve been asked to do some things—“Minecraft” comes to mind—which I’m like, “I don’t know what that is?” [all laugh] I mean, I do now, and every time I’ve ever said that in front of a YA audience, some boy will shoot his hand up and be like, “I can teach you!” [FK & ELM laugh] but I’m like, I’m probably not the person if I’m having to Google what it is [laughs] you know, who’s really gonna bring the fans a story that they love, or enjoy doing it myself.
Maybe I’m wrong about that, but I always just feel like, I do think there’s been a shift, and it’s much more acceptable, and expected for authors to do this kind of work now. And I feel—like, I think about people who did it back in the day and have had to treat it like a dirty little secret almost. Like Elizabeth Hand, who’s a literal genius, I doubt she ever got interviewed about her IP books [FK & ELM laugh] outside of extreme circumstances, but probably should have been. And I really only want to do IP that I can treat with the same dedication that I would do for a story of my own.
So, the Lois Lane books, as I said, my agent was basically, I was courted for the first one with the possibility of it being a series. I was not asked to audition, which frankly blows my mind. [laughs] I wasn’t even asked to pitch a concept. I was simply told I would have almost no time [all laugh] and—
FK: Well, there’s your reason! [all laugh]
GB: Yeah, I was simply told I’d have almost no time to do it, which is very common with IP. Then, once we signed the contract, I did do an outline and pitch a take, and they had given me a few ideas of what ballpark they wanted it in, and luckily, we were all pretty much on the same page the whole time. It was the first time I ever did a chapter-by-chapter outline of something. Uh, and I think it’s very important to be able to do that for IP, because you don’t want anyone to be surprised when you turn it in, right? [ELM laughs] You want to know what you’re doing.
I do think that with IP—and I try to do this with my original work now, but it’s something I learned from IP—it’s almost like having a target to hit. I’m a big believer, because of my work in IP, that parameters and boundaries and borders are actually things that enable you to do creative work. Like, just telling people that they can do whatever they want is a nightmare scenario. [all laugh] So, the more decisions you can make, in some ways, the easier it is to figure out what the story is, to focus, because you can rule out certain things that aren’t gonna feel right.
Like, there’s certain things that just aren’t gonna work in a Superman/Lois Lane story, and so those are things you can set to the side and think about, “Well, what are the best versions of this?” I think that’s always the important starting point for me with an IP is, “What are like, the core things without which a story in that universe no longer feels like a story in that universe?” Those to me are the things that fans are upset—and rightfully feel that the person doesn’t understand the property—when you jettison them with no reason. Not saying you could never jettison them, but I think it has to have a clear reason. But I personally would never do that. [FK & ELM laugh]
So anyway, I thought I was writing one book, and I got to write three, which was amazing. I would write more tomorrow if they asked me to. And then for Stranger Things, the editor had asked me previously if I was interested in a property that I didn’t know anything about and said no, and then they came to me, and I remember being in kind of a panic point, because I had become full-time, and it’s a strange thing to leave a 17-year day job, and um, you know—
ELM: In the government! Like, that’s the most day job—
GB: In the government! [ELM laughs] And sort of be on the whims of “Well, can I really make this work?” And I have to shout out here to Subterranean Press, who gave me a part-time job doing social media from home, because I had done other work with them, and had basically become my family, and really like, made it work during those lean years. But I was basically in this situation where it was like, “Am I going to have to start applying for jobs again?” [FK & ELM laugh] And all of a sudden, we got an inquiry that was like, “Would Gwenda be interested in writing this first Stranger Things book? It would be about Eleven’s mom, and if she is, we just want to know before we take her name to Netflix.” And I was like, “Hell yes.” [all laugh]
That show basically is all of my own DNA from growing up. Like, all of the same influences I feel like I share with the Duffers. And I went back and watched, ah, what little there is of Eleven’s mom, and it’s, you know—she’s actually someone who just is a fighter. Like, in every single small instance you see her, even when she’s practically catatonic, she’s fighting to connect to her daughter and communicate with her. I just thought, this would be fascinating, and I had really wanted to do a girl gang book. So again, I’m always looking for, “What’s the thing that I can bring to this that is different, but is in the same family of the feeling of the show?” Like a friend group, but let’s make it more female-centric, and let’s introduce a queer character, uh, which I didn’t realize the show would do so soon and was delighted when they did, and set it historically and make it pretty much about that period.
That’s really how it’s worked for me. I’ve never had to sample. I’ve just had to show up with good ideas and be willing to be flexible and work out what is good with everyone. But I’ve also had a tremendous amount of freedom. I mean, I was allowed to decide who Eleven’s father was. You know, they were like, just pitch something. Like, you know [FK & ELM laugh] as long as he’s out of the picture by the time the show starts, it’s all good.
FK: Wow.
GB: [laughs]
ELM: I’m sure they wouldn’t have accepted any man…
GB: [laughs] Probably not, probably not. [ELM laughs] But no, they were great. They were really great to work with. And again, it was a super unusual situation, in that, because of various things about the way it worked out, our consultant on the show was in the writers’ room, and it was while they were shooting that season, and so he was able to literally go get direct answers from the Duffers on whether they were OK with solutions to certain issues, which is like, “How do you get the Upside Down in a book before the Upside Down exists?” Well, you have a character who can glimpse the future. You know? [laughter] And it’s like, let’s make sure we’re not going to do that on the show, right?
ELM: Yeah.
GB: So yeah, that was a very unusual and really great experience. Yeah.
FK: That’s a really cool setup, because all the times that, you know, I have worked with IP novels and things like this in the past, that has not always been the case.
GB: Absolutely not!
FK: A lot of the time it’s really, really not a situation where you get to talk to the people who originally came up with the thing. [laughs]
GB: No, no.
FK: I mean, sometimes—
GB: Yeah.
FK: Sometimes it’s very close.
GB: Yeah!
FK: But then other times it’s like, a million miles between you.
GB: I think it’s been pretty unusual, and I also am very much of the school of—this is gonna sound terrible, I’m very collaborative, actually. I do a lot of collaborative work too. I have a collaborative project right now with a couple of people that I did #Creators4Comics with. Kami Garcia and Sam Humphries, we’re writing a trilogy of novellas together, just because we like working together, and we’re like, “Let’s make an excuse to work together more!”
But when I’m doing IP, I’m very scared of executive ideas. [FK & ELM laugh] Like, I don’t want them to give them, because then I know that unlike writers, those people get really attached to their ideas, and even if they’re terrible, or you come up with something better—like for a writer, that’s our daily job! You know? Like, I had a good idea this morning. I had a better one at lunch. I’m gonna use the better one, and I’m not gonna look back! But like, you sometimes run into things where people will be like, [sad voice] “Where’s my idea?” Right? So I’ve always tried to guard against that by asking for as little input as possible. It’s like, “Tell me what’s wrong, and I will bring you a solution or three, [laughs] and we’ll see which ones you like best.” So far, it’s served me pretty well in not getting saddled with a terrible idea that I have to make work. [laughs]
ELM: Flourish, is this making you miss Hollywood?
GB: [laughs]
FK: No! It’s not! It’s—I’ll tell you what, it’s not.
[all laugh]
FK: I mean, particularly because I feel like I’m one of the people who would be like, the terrible idea provider. [ELM and GB laugh]
ELM: [imitating hypothetical Flourish] Where’s my thing? My concept?
GB: It’s OK if you provide an idea! It’s just not OK if you’re married to it. [all laugh] Like, I think of all the people who, you know, like, Neil Gaiman has talked about people who wanted to set Neverwhere in New York. [laughs]
ELM: Yeah.
GB: And they couldn’t understand why that—why isn’t this in New York? [all laugh] It’s like…no. [laughs]
FK: Cause it’s not!
GB: Down!
FK: Cause that’s not where they live!
GB: Bad! [all laugh]
ELM: That’s really funny.
GB: Time out for you! [laughs]
FK: Yeah, I was reading like a Madeleine L’Engle, you know, like one of her memoir-y kind of books—
GB: Mm-hmm.
FK: —and she was talking about how somebody was like, “So, why does this character die?” And she was like, “…cause he dies.” [all laugh] And they were like, “Well, but he’s a good person.” And she’s like, “I know! [all laugh] Sorry!”
GB: I was on a panel with Ursula Le Guin once, and some other people, at WisCon, which is a great feminist science fiction convention in Madison, and someone was talking about—someone asked a question in the audience about when your character takes over and starts doing things that you’d prefer that they didn’t, and one person gave kind of a thoughtful answer to that about how, “Well, usually I just go along with it.” And Ursula was like, “Uh, I go back to the point where they stopped doing what I wanted them to do, and I delete it from there [all laugh] and make them do what I want.” Which is such a boss answer! When you’re an actual genius, you can get away with that. [all laugh]
ELM: That’s really funny. Something in your very, very interesting answer—I mean, many things struck me. But one of the things that you said that I wanted to follow up on was talking about the things that the fans of these properties are looking for? And that’s like, you want to get to the heart of that and include some of these elements. But it sounds like, with both of these instances, you are the fan here. It’s not like you’re doing research into like, what the heart of a Lois Lane/Superman story is, right?
GB: For sure.
ELM: You have the instinct of that. Is that true?
GB: Yes.
ELM: Do you think it would be different if you were writing for something that you weren’t into, or would you not take that work if you weren’t into it?
GB: I definitely did more research on each of these things. Particularly for the Stranger Things book, I had to do a ton of historical research on the late 1960s, specifically the year that it’s set, and watched a ton of things, and also learned a lot more than anyone should know about MK-Ultra. In fact, one of the first things they sent me was a book called Phenomena about all of those research programs and the reality of them. I also listened to only music from 1969 while I was writing.
ELM: Yes. This is like me writing fanfiction, so. Except no one pays me.
GB: Yeah! I mean—but my biggest concern when I’m writing something like that, and when I’m writing something like Not Your Average Hot Guy, is to delight the reader. You know, I want to give a Lois and Clark fan—which I very much am a fan of those characters, I don’t know everything, like some people did. [FK laughs] And I did some research, but then, there’s usually a point that you know, “OK, now is the time to stop and proceed.” But it is true that I think I only agree to take on properties that I have some kind of connection to and feel like I understand on a deep level, and I’ve been very lucky, to be able to do that, and not have to be like, “What is a craft mine?” You know. But yeah, I think there’s always more to learn. But by the same token, so much of it still, again, it’s just whether you’re a good match for the material and can run with it and try to bring some new, fresh dimension to it hopefully, while also honoring what the thing is primarily.
ELM: But it’s interesting that you would compare it to writing your original work, because your readers are not going to have expectations about the characters in any of those books, right? You know what I mean?
GB: But they have expectations of—
ELM: Like readerly expectations, right?
GB: Yeah! I mean, if you look at a cover, and you read a synopsis of a book on the back, you know, you have an idea, and hopefully if the publisher has done a good job, it matches the book. Yeah, no, I’m very nervous about this book, actually. I wrote it mostly to delight myself. [FK laughs] But, you know, it also is very idiosyncratic, I did not know if there would be a market for it while I was writing it. I really did just start writing it, because I wanted to. I’ve always loved screwball rom-coms, and have always loved apocalyptic, occult storytelling, but also think it’s ridiculous. But I think your sense of humor is very personal, and so in some ways I feel much more vulnerable about this book, even though it is totally a rom, because I think there’s something about whether or not people grok your sense of humor that is uniquely vulnerability-inducing.
FK: It’s really interesting hearing you talk about the process of writing, because obviously you are a fan, and you’re writing stuff in contexts of things that you’re a fan of—
GB: Mm-hmm.
FK: —but you’re also so attentive to like, “Is there a market for this?” And how like, “What is expected in this thing?” And so forth. I’m curious, have you—I mean, you said you basically wrote some Poppy Z. Brite fanfic when you were in college. Have you written other fanfic? How would you compare the experiences? I know they’re so different, but how would you compare those experiences of writing those things? Because I feel like a lot of times, people unthinkingly compare tie-in novels to fanfic.
GB: They do.
FK: And I get the sense it’s real different.
GB: Yeah. It’s real different, actually. And I say that not because I feel like it is…I’m not trying to create a difference of quality between the two, because both of them obviously span like, the grunge on the bottom of your shoe [FK & ELM laugh] to the most beautiful exalted thing you’ve ever read, right? But one is written for money, and one is not. [FK laughs] And one is beholden to the approval of the owners of characters and one is not, and I mean that’s a—those are huge differences.
I wrote an essay about this for Uncanny Magazine where I talked about my approach to IP, and sort of talked about the differences between them and what makes each difficult—have a difficulty scale that’s different than the other. You know, I feel like writing good fanfiction requires a lot of things that writing good IP maybe doesn’t, to satisfy the audience. Or different audiences, even if they overlap.
I do tend to think about the reader, not so much when I’m writing, but when I’m conceptualizing a project. I guess I’ve always—because I’ve always been such a person steeped in story and other influences too, like music or movies, and I just am a very external-stimulus-craving soul, and always have been, you know? Like I just have many, many interests, and visual inputs and audio stuff that I think informs my work, I’ve always thought all art is a conversation, and that there’s not all these hard divisions between high and low and things that would make it much simpler.
The divisions that tend to I think actually exist are things like works written by more women largely being written off in certain ways. Like YA and romance, right? That’s a distinction that exists in the world. But high- and low-brow culture, whatever those things are, have always intermixed and intermingled and talked to each other. And so I guess I just—I mean, I think we’re all [laughs] we’re all just a big batch of influences, right? And the thing you bring as a storyteller is your ability to mix those things into something new through your particular lens on all of the things that you know and are into and have taken in. I mean, I think that’s—I’ve always been that kind of a magpie writer who mixes and mashes genres up, and sometimes it works? [all laugh] And sometimes it doesn’t! So, um, I don’t know!
Like, I never thought I would write rom-coms, but I’ve always loved rom-coms, and have bored many people to tears, talking about how science fiction/fantasy and romantic comedy goes so well together, because you can replicate all these divisions that used to be like, class and social status [FK laughs] and stuff. And then of course I was going to end up writing fantasy rom-com. Of course I was. [laughter] But I didn’t know that. Like, I had no clue. I’m basically just a very haphazard, go-where-my-whims-take-me sort of a person. [FK laughs]
ELM: You say that, but you seem extremely put together, actually.
GB: [laughs]
FK: I was gonna say, you really seem very, very put together.
ELM: Yeah. I don’t know if that’s right.
GB: It’s all a lie! [laughter] No, I mean I feel like I am, to extent, but—I mean I feel like I accept that about myself, right? I don’t try to fight against it anymore, for good or ill. [laughs]
FK: [laughs]
ELM: OK, so to shift gears slightly, I would love to talk to you—I mean, it’s not shifting that much, because we’re already talking about your audience and your readers, and how you’re thinking about them. But I would love to talk to you about... So, often on the podcast we talk about the fan-creator relationship and you are the creator here, and I’m wondering about how you think of your readers, and you’re very active on social media, and you know, you’ve been a full-time writer over the last like, you know, half a decade, which has been a time when this—no?
GB: No, I have! But—
ELM: Yeah!
GB: —just hearing you say it like this! [all laugh] Blows my mind!
ELM: Now it’s almost 2022, so like. [GB laughs] It’s really, these things are in the past, right? Like. [laughs] But yeah, it’s been a space that’s really evolved a lot for writers—social media, writers, and their readers. So I’m wondering what that looks like from your perspective. Very open-ended place to start that conversation, but.
GB: Yeah. I think I have less anxiety about social media than a lot of my friends do, and many of them have pulled back from various spaces, and I again have been lucky. I have not had to do that. Especially my friends that create for different properties, uh, in comics? I don’t know, man. The Lois Lane army is great. [FK & ELM laugh] Ah, the Stranger Things fans were also fabulous to me. I have been very lucky that I occasionally get hate, but it’s nothing like what obviously any woman of color or trans creator is gonna come across if they have any kind of visibility at all, so I’m very, very grateful for my privilege online.
Because I had a political day job for so long, I was never able to talk about politics openly, because I was a spokesperson, and that just wouldn’t have been OK, so I talked about books. And so, for me, social media was fun. It was a way that I kept in touch with my community, and it still remains that. If it wasn’t fun, I would pull back from it. And I don’t know how much I believe it sells books. But I do believe that it can be very rewarding to get to know the people who read your work, and I’ve made so many friends on social media, both among readers and other creators or people who go on to become creators.
I also feel like mentorship is a very important thing to me, and both of my agents, actually—that sounds like, so douchey to say, but. [laughs] Only for the last few months have I had two. [ELM laughs] One does my kids and YA, and one does my adult stuff, but it’s Jennifer Laughran, @literaticat, and Kate McKean, and both of them go out of their way to provide information to aspiring writers and writers who already sold about the business. I think that’s one of the things that drew me to them. You know, I’ve cofounded this nonprofit here in town, Lexington Writer’s Room, so that writers who are either professionals or want to be professionals, or want to have some professional goal, have a place where they can have a community, and have a professional workspace and support system. And so, I think that that’s part of it?
And yes, of course it’s expected, and I also feel like it’s part of my job to use the platform that I have to amplify the good work that the people at my publisher are doing. You know, I feel like we forget about all the behind-the-scenes work that goes into launching any book, especially during the pandemic. I really felt super grateful to the publicists, the marketing team, my editors, and everybody, just for keeping their eye on the ball and being engaged, because it’s a lot! [laughs] And I would not at all feel like it would—you know, I’ve had teams engaged to varying levels, I’ve been, again, pretty lucky. But I really love working with book people, and I feel especially like this team’s just done a great job in a very difficult circumstance. I mean, I feel like it’s all holistic, right?
ELM: Sure.
GB: And if you’re bad at it, and it makes you anxious, and you don’t like it, then pick one thing. And if you have to pick one thing, have it be a newsletter— [FK laughs]
ELM: Can you get away with that?
GB: —and a website.
ELM: Yeah.
GB: And have a website. [laughs]
ELM: It does seem like this is my, um—so a little context, I wrote my master’s dissertation on the book industry and book fandom—
GB: Fascinating.
ELM: —on social media, but circa 2014. So part of this is me being like, “Here’s what I’ve observed,” since I had to like, write freaking thesis on it. [FK laughs] And it does seem to me, and I don’t know if you’ve found this to be true, that maybe around then, there was a kind of panicked sort of, “You need to be on all the things and do all the things,” and people were like, “What if I’m bad at social—I hate this!” Right? And they were like, “You have to!” and people were like, “But! I—I need the resources—I don’t even know how to do this.” And it seems like now, people have calmed down a little? About like, the necessity of—don’t be on there if you’re bad at it or you hate it, [FK laughs] because it doesn’t actually add anything. Do you feel like that’s fair?
GB: Ah, I think it depends on the genre.
ELM: Mmm. OK.
GB: I think it’s still important in YA. I think it’s very important in nonfiction. But for most adult genres? And romance, actually, I feel like that community’s pretty online. Or at least are engaged with their readers directly. But for people like—like, look up any mystery. Look up like, 10 mystery writers. Right? And you’ll be shocked. Like, the huge bestsellers who have books every year will have like, 3,000 followers. [FK laughs]
ELM: Yeah.
GB: So there are some genres where it just doesn’t matter, right?
ELM: Yeah.
GB: But like, nonfiction, they want to know you have a platform before they’re going to publish your book.
ELM: Sure.
GB: So I think it just depends, but I don’t think a lot of fiction publishers are making decisions based on platform, unless you’re somebody that’s coming from a YouTube channel or TikTok now, I suppose. There’s got a be a TikTok—
FK: So in other words, it can be a positive—
ELM: Those TikTok kids.
FK: —but it can’t be a negative, necessarily.
GB: Right! Yeah, I don’t think it’s gonna, yeah. I don’t think that it’s gonna work against you. And also I think there’s so much noise out there right now. It’s kind of terrifying for everyone, because the one good thing about having a direct relationship with some of your readers is at least you can reach them, right? If the shit hits the fan, and that’s why I say newsletter and website. I mean, we’ve all seen a lot in the last four or five years. [laugh]
ELM: [laughs] Yes. Well, all right, but this also reminds me of something that your initial answer in this brought up for me, is like, you have this direct connection to your readers. Do you find that changes you as a writer?
GB: No…I think what has changed me as a writer is paying more attention to what delights me when I read. Honestly, I worked in a heavy rotation of romance into my reading, which I read across a bunch of genres, but mostly YA, science fiction/fantasy and mystery thriller, with a little poetry in there.
ELM: I feel like you’re naming all the genres right now, so.
GB: I mean! I have a pretty broad range—
ELM: Yeah, you’re like, “Also science textbooks and, uh, pamphlets…”
GB: I rotate things. [laughter] I do like nonfiction [ELM laughs] but I mean, yes. Not being able to go in the library and browse and bring home a stack of the 20 books that looked interesting to me during the pandemic was a nightmare. [FK laughs]
ELM: Aw.
GB: Romance novels were the only thing that got me through it. But about 10, 11 years ago now, I was like, “I need to figure out what romance is about.” [FK laughs] Like, I just hadn’t read enough of it, you know? And it was right on the heels of everyone in science fiction/fantasy freaking out about urban fantasy and treating them like they were trash. And I read a bunch and was like, “These are fucking amazing!” [laughter] I figured it was the same with romance, and it was. So that has been a very heavy part of my rotation since, and, um, it’s weird because I don’t feel like I’m ever on-trend, or anything. But I do think there’s been a real renaissance of contemporary rom-coms in the last few years. I was certainly reading them and loving them and getting them from the library or the bookstore.
Reading romance, I feel like, is sort of a master class, once you find the authors that you like, in looking at, and learning the ways that you can make a reader just feel good about—joyous, right? [FK laughs] And I feel like there’s this real societal division that we have that like, things that are trudgy [FK laughs] or dark, are better somehow, right? Like, Batman in his worst incarnation is always gonna be better than Superman, and I’ve always been more of a Superman person.
I feel like, though, having a toe in so many literary worlds and writing about them, I always did feel a little bit of that anxiety of like, “Oh, I’m not literary, but I don’t really want to be?” [laughter] But also just embracing that I want to write books that give people joy has been a huge thing for me. And I think that’s where I think about readers, is like, thinking about, “What can I do that will delight the right person when I’m writing?” And often, by the same token, delight myself. I feel like that’s something that we’re just encouraged not to ever want to do or say we want to do. Like, when someone says my book is fun, I don’t take that as an insult, you know? Like, good! [laughs] That’s what I wanted, right? There’s enough of slog in this world. I hope it’s fun. And that’s not to say I won’t write something that’s not pure fun in the future, [FK laughs] but it will still be having fun.
ELM: You think, in your trudgy debut, people are gonna still have fun?
GB: [laughs] Trudge lit! [laughter] When trudge lit comes, I will be ready!
ELM: That is my new favorite term.
GB: It will be about a character based on Jonathan Franzen. [laughs]
ELM: Oh my God, oh my God.
FK: Oh, wow. [GB laughs] I don’t think J-Franz trudges. I think he walks in a very…
GB: Spritely?
ELM: I’ve seen him walk, so.
GB: He’s a bird-watcher. I bet he, um—
ELM: Yeah, so, he’s got a light step, cause he can’t startle the birds. [FK laughs] Exactly. Yeah.
GB: And maybe he’s doing little bird calls as he goes. [FK laughs]
ELM: Yes. [GB laughs] Yes, this is exactly right. Good. I like to think about Jonathan Franzen doing bird calls.
GB: See, this is the kind of thing I would put in a book. [laughter] There’s a moment where one of the characters pretends to be Robert Langdon. The inspiration for Robert Langdon. [FK laughs]
ELM: That’s really good.
GB: This is totally a thing that I would put in a book.
ELM: That’s really funny. [laughter] OK wait, all right. You—everything you say prompts like, nine questions in me. [GB laughs] So, once again, I have a follow-up question, which is you’re talking about how there’s like, a boom in rom-coms in books. What do you think is going on with film and television, like the dearth of—you know? Like, people complain about this all the time, right?
GB: Well, I mean I think it’s starting to change. There’s some things in development. In Bridgerton, interestingly, not as funny as the books. Those books are very funny, you know?
FK: They are.
GB: Like, Julia Quinn is really good at humor, and I don’t feel like there’s that much humor in the series, and I did miss that. But I do hope it will open some doors to some more adaptations.
ELM: Only adaptations, though? Like, I don’t know—
GB: Well, no—
ELM: Rom-coms used to be like, a thing, right?
GB: —like new stuff, for sure. New stuff for sure.
FK: But then we get into the question of adaptations versus new stuff, and that’s like, a separate—particularly for movies—
GB: As someone who has a book going out to Hollywood people right now… [laugh]
ELM: You’re like, adaptations!
GB: I’d be ready for that adaptation! [laughter]
ELM: Sure, sure.
GB: And I had some conversations with people in Hollywood about this. I don’t necessarily agree with this take, but it seems to be that a lot of romance is perceived by Hollywood as samey. So I think they think they can just write a version of it, or…I think that the trick is getting someone who really believes that your book has a unique twist and can get producers to believe that, when of course we all know, again, it goes back to the perceptions of romance, right? People who read romance quickly discover that authors’ voices completely transform what might even be the same plot using the same tropes, and it’s all about that. Just like it is with anything. But a lot of people are very underread.
FK: There’s also a challenge, though, which is that if you are writing a script, where everything is external, and you don’t have the author’s voice with everything internal, then the romance novels do start to look the same. It’s hard to adapt that.
GB: It is hard to adapt that.
FK: It’s hard—it’s really hard to adapt.
ELM: Yeah, but I’m thinking about the golden age, when not just straight romance, but like, rom-coms, right? The classic era in the ’90s. Those scripts do not sound the same.
FK: Yes. That also has to do with—
ELM: Nora Ephron. That’s what it has to do with.
FK: Yeah… [ELM laughs] It has to do with that, but it also has to do with like, instead of—those were not generally adaptations.
GB: Right.
FK: And then this also has to do with the question of like, “Are you writing new things, or are you doing adaptations?”
ELM: I know! That’s why I brought up new things and not just adaptations. [laughs]
GB: But also, I think it has to do—I think we have a better shot now that there’s so many streaming platforms, and like, Jenny Han’s adaptation, for instance, To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before. That’s a great movie. Great book. You know, Dumplin’, but. There have been some really good ones. Always Be My Maybe was an original, right? Rom-com. That Netflix did, that was great. And I think that maybe those doors will open because, I mean, Flourish you know way more about this than me, but my perception is that making movies aimed at women were seen as date movies and were seen as mid-tier movies, just kind of like, the market for original scripts for those was just dried up after that period.
FK: The mid-tier, yeah. The middle has completely fallen out of the film market, and it’s only the cheapest stuff that you can make, which is not actually rom-coms—
GB: Yup.
FK: —it’s horror, and—
GB: Right.
FK: —the most expensive stuff that you can make.
ELM: What about a Hallmark movie? That’s not in the cheap bucket? Cause that’s romance! [laughs]
FK: One problem—the problem is, there’s plenty of Hallmark movies already out there being made, actually.
GB: Yeah.
FK: Hallmark makes tons of those movies. The problem is—
GB: Yeah.
ELM: Yes, I’ve seen.
FK: The problem is the quality issue. Right?
ELM: Sure.
FK: You know what I mean? Like, there is—you can make it for real cheap, but then you’ve got those actors…
ELM: Right.
FK: You know? [laughs]
GB: And also, as someone pointed out on Twitter, and I can’t remember who this was, but they were talking about the guy from Bridgerton, whose name I’m blanking on, the lead, uh, getting typecast…
FK: Regé-Jean Page?
GB: Yes! And they were talking about him getting pigeonholed as, you know, an eye candy lady man, and someone had taken all these other pictures of people that are some of the only legitimate stars we have left and pointed out that if women respond to you, it will make your career. Right? Like Brad Pitt in Thelma & Louise and Keanu in his early movies. [FK laughs] And you know, it was a pretty compelling argument. [laughs] And I do think, you know, that romantic comedies and also that weird—just like a weird flip side of that, in that, in the ’90s, the um, kind of—what do you call them? Like, psycho-thrillers. [laughs] You know what I mean.
FK: Yeah, yeah.
GB: Like your, um, Michael Douglas was in a lot of them.
ELM: Yeah, or like John Grisham adaptations, that kind of thing?
FK: Mmm.
GB: Yes.
FK: Oh man, John Grisham adaptations. Things I haven’t thought about in years!
ELM: Flourish, we literally talked about—
GB: Tom Cruise! Right. Yeah.
ELM: —John Grisham adaptations like, two episodes ago.
FK: Did we?
ELM: [laughing] I think we did!
FK: Oh. I’m a goldfish. [laughter]
GB: But yeah, like—I do think that, I think if you look at the bestseller list for the last few months, especially the paperback list, which is where most romances are, that TikTok has been driving, you know there have been four or five slots out of the 12 or 15, sometimes more, taken up by romance, genre romance. And so it’s hard for me to believe that won’t echo throughout the rest of culture.
ELM: You know, you got me wondering, do you know who wrote this thread that you really liked? Because it sounds like our last guest.
GB: I’ll have to go find it!
ELM: Nichole Perkins. It was literally her thesis. She was like—
GB: I can’t remember! It probably was. It was just something that floated by and I retweeted it—
ELM: I just think that would be like, [FK laughs] beautiful synchronicity, if that was who it was.
GB: It probably is! I’ll see if I can find it after, and I’ll—
ELM: Please do.
GB: I’ll email you.
ELM: Thank you. That’s really funny.
GB: I mean, I will say that one of the reasons I started reading romance in the first place is I was reporting for Publishers Weekly, and I wrote category features, where I interviewed people from all different kinds of genres...some more interesting than others. [FK laughs] And I did a couple of romance ones, and one thing that I noticed, that really made me want to read it, was how much the editors and publicists were fans of each other’s books, and would recommend things from other imprints, which was very unusual. So I do think that “Romancelandia,” as we often style ourselves on Twitter, is a fandom, and behaves as one for mostly good, and sometimes very dramatically, as all fandoms do.
FK: Sometimes very dramatically. [laughter]
GB: And rightly so! There’s a lot of growing pains within any kind of a fandom, legitimate ones, you know, as you confront issues of hierarchy and race and who’s invited in and who’s not. But I’m really happy to like, be able to write a book and I hope, you know, that some people in the fandom love it, because I love them. But I do feel that same kind of nervousness that I feel writing for any fandom, like Stranger Things or Lois Lane, like, “Oh God, are they gonna be like, ‘Poser! Get outta here! You did it wrong!’” [laughs] So I do still have that same anxiety, even though it’s an original piece.
ELM: Cool! Cool, glad you’re anxious.
GB: So, make of that what you will. [laughs]
ELM: I think that the takeaway here is, look at that—those were great successes, so this is gonna be a great success too.
FK: Yeah!
ELM: I think that you, uh, you are underselling yourself at every turn.
GB: Knock on wood. [laughter]
FK: I agree. [laughter] All right. Gwenda, thank you so much for coming and talking with us. This has been amazing.
GB: Aw, thank you guys! You’re delights, both of you.
ELM: And congratulations on the book.
GB: Aw, thank you!
ELM: I can’t wait for everyone to read it.
[Interstitial music]
FK: I feel like I say this at the end of every one of our interviews, but it’s pretty much always true, so I’m going to say it again: Gwenda is a delight!
ELM: Pretty much always true...
FK: Always true!
ELM: [laughs]
FK: Well, I’m not going to name any names.
ELM: Oh, man. Gwenda named names. Why won’t you name names?
FK: [laughs]
ELM: Those were like, the names of her friends. [laughs] Not the names—
FK: [laughs] Yeah, not the names—not the names of people they’ve—[laughter]
ELM: Uh, yes. Gwenda absolutely was a delight. That was such an interesting conversation, and it was really... I don’t know. I’m fascinated by—to hear, you know—I think we can study the structures and obviously, you know it from the inside, but it’s really interesting to hear about that kind of process piece of it, because I know people who write IP stuff, but they don’t like, detail how they do it. They just—
FK: Yeah.
ELM: —say it’s out now, and we should buy it, you know?
FK: [laughs] For sure. I mean, it was interesting for me also, because coming from like, a different role in that ecosystem? Like, it’s not like I sit down with IP people and talk to them about their process very much, you know, in my past life, right? [laughs]
ELM: Yeah.
FK: Obviously I would have contact with people, and like, we would discuss it and so forth, but that wasn’t the kind of role I was in. So it was cool to get to hear what that was like from that perspective.
ELM: Yeah, for sure. All right, well we will put links to everything in the show notes. I hope that people go out and buy or request Gwenda’s most recent book, Not Your Average Hot Guy, from their library.
FK: Indeed!
ELM: I said “buy” and then I had the whole thing about libraries in between. You could also buy the book.
FK: [laughs]
ELM: You could buy it or request it from your library, which would make the library buy the book, or just give it to you if they’ve already bought it.
FK: Oh my god, too much! You’ve got the picture.
ELM: Those are the two routes.
FK: OK, thank you for clarifying how books—
ELM: Two genders. Buy or library.
FK: Wow. OK, all right. Elizabeth, you’re getting kind of loony, but before we go we should talk about Patreon.
ELM: [muttering] Loony, Jesus Christ… You know that guy?
FK: Oh my God, Elizabeth! [laughter] All right! How we keep the podcast on the air…is by Patreon dot com slash Fansplaining. And that Patreon does a lot of stuff for us. One of the things that it’s doing now is it’s paying a transcriptionist—
ELM: Two!
FK: Actually, paying two transcriptionists to help us out, so thank you to all of our patrons, you are helping us make that transcript happen.
ELM: So, if you missed the last episode, we put up a call for transcriptionists. Flourish as, you may know from my cool Jesus Christ reference, [FK laughs] is now in priest school, to become a priest.
FK: [laughs] Priest school!
ELM: Yeah, I’m sure it’s what you all call it. It’s what the bishop calls it, anyway. And so, in the interest of Flourish having—needing a little more time free for school, we wanted to hire a couple of transcriptionists to do the episodes, and we got such an overwhelming response. We had way too many people. I don’t know, I hope in the future there’s some fannish transcription project, where I can say like, [FK laughs] I have this batch of really great candidates, who like, love fandom and have experience transcribing. So we really appreciate everyone who wrote in. Just wanted to say here that the position has been filled for now, just in case anyone was thinking of still writing in. But yeah, we really appreciate so much interest.
FK: Yeah, absolutely. So, if you wish to support this and everything else that we’re doing, Patreon dot com slash Fansplaining. There’s a bunch of different levels, and the levels have exciting stuff that you can get at each of them.
ELM: Stuff?
FK: For example, at $3 a month, you can get all of our special episodes, and there’s going to be some new ones fairly soon, because Elizabeth is obsessed with Succession, and we’re definitely gonna have to do a Succession episode.
ELM: Oh my God, this is—I’m literally, you can’t see my face, but it’s a surprised face! I didn’t know we were going to do another Succession episode.
FK: How did you not know this? You’re so obsessed. I have to indulge you in this.
ELM: Huh. All right, you say this, but you literally said you were gonna get HBO back to watch this, so…
FK: Yeah…I mean…you know, maybe some projection going on here. Anyway!
ELM: Wow. Flourish is like, kind of excited about the new season of Succession, seems like. [FK laughs] It’s sort of what it seems like.
FK: Anyway! [laughs] Anyway, also, at $5 a month, you get your name in the credits and a really cute little enamel pin, and at $10 a month, you get our Tiny Zine. So, if you have the money to support us monetarily, super appreciated and you get cool stuff.
ELM: But, if you do not have the cash right now, no worries at all. There are many other ways you can support us. One is by sharing the podcast and these transcripts that our transcriptionists are going to be hard at work typing away—
FK: Whoo!
ELM: Um, that really helps us get new listeners, new readers, more people in our ecosystem, as they say. I feel like I’m at work right now.
FK: Oh my God. [laughs]
ELM: And as the Fansplaining ecosystem—Universe? Media sphere? You’re making a very, very annoyed face. [FK laughs] I’m going to move on from that one. Also, you can be a part of this podcast by sending in your thoughts, questions, critiques, suggestions for episodes.
There’s a few ways to do that. The very best one is probably Fansplaining at gmail dot com. That’s just the space where you can write the most things. If you want to get your voice on the air, we would love to include voices that are not our own. Our voicemail: 1-401-526-FANS. You can leave a message on our website, Fansplaining dot com. You can leave a message on Tumblr. It’s Fansplaining dot Tumblr dot com. [laughs] Flourish is making this face like, “Oh my God, how many more things are there?” We are on Tumblr, Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. You can leave us messages in all those places, though Tumblr is really only the best place for that sort of thing...and I’m done, Flourish.
FK: Yeah! I think you are done. I think you did it. Congratulations!
ELM: [deep sigh] Thanks.
FK: All right. With that, I think it’s time to go. I’ll talk to you later, Elizabeth.
ELM: [laughs] OK, bye, Flourish.
FK: Bye.