Fated Mates - Romance Books for Novel People

WELCOME 2021!

As is customary on Fated Mates, we’re releasing a special New Year’s Eve episode that requires headphones if you’re in mixed company! We brought some of our most favorite people together for a very special crossover episode of Fated Mates and Andie J. Christopher’s Instagram TV Juggernaut: Drunk Romance History, during which we drink a delightful mix of alcohol and talk about a delightful mix of erotic romance by the queen of the quick and dirty novella—Jessa Kane.

We’re talking priests and daddy kink, mafia hitmen, billionaires, husky heroes, stepbrothers and what Joanna Shape refers to as the Kane-Trope-Wheel. Tracey Livesay has a mug with penises on it. Bring in 2021 right. (Also, if you, like Joanna and Jen have read all of the Jessa Kane’s, no worries! She released a new one today—BURLY—just in time for this episode! Shero!)

Head over to Andie’s IGTV channel for the video version.

Next week, we have a special guest episode, and in two weeks, our first read along of 2021, Alexis Hall’s For Real. Get it at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books, or Kobo.

Show Notes

One more chance for phone-banking is Monday 1/4/2021 at 5pm central.

Listen to last year's New Year's Eve epsiode on Pegging with special guest, Sierra Simone!

Have we mentioned Drunk Romance History on Andie's Instagram?

We are joined today by our friends: Andie Christopher, Alexis Daria, Adriana Herrera, LaQuette, Tracey Livesay, Nisha Sharma, and Joanna Shupe.

Get Tracey's penis mug here.

Normalize sex toys. Today's guests are big fans of LELO products and recommend: The Ora2, The Sona2, and The Gigi2.

We’re so thrilled to be talking morality chain romance! We’ve owed this episode to Katee Robert for nearly a year, and we have no excuses for how long this has taken, except that time in 2020 was a flat circle. Here, we get down to business—we tackle the definition of Morality Chain, and how it differs from Dark Romance, how it connects with mafia, criminals, pirates, highwaymen, and the original Alpha.

Check all your Content Warnings before you begin with these books!

S03.31: Morality Chain Romance Interstitial

Whether you're new to Fated Mates this month or have been with us for all three seasons, we adore you, and we're so grateful to have you. We hope you’re reading the best books this week.

Next week, we’re reading Alexis Daria’s You Had Me At Hola, one of our Best Books of 2020! Find it at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, or Apple Books.

Show Notes

One very important note: we highly recommend doing a thorough search for content warnings for all the books and movies we mention this week.

We love Katee Robert, who we had on as a guest for the menage interstitial. Katee bid on this item at Kennedy Ryan’s Lift 4 Autism auction. It happens every spring, so keep an eye on this page for the 2021 auction if you’d like to pick the topic for a future interstitial.

This week, Katee released Seducing My Guardian, the 4th book in her SUPER HOT Touch of Taboo series. If you'd like to read a morality chain romance written by Katee, we recommend The Bastard's Bargain.

“In springtime, the only pretty ring time” is from Shakespeare’s As You Like It. It's also possible Sarah knows it from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. She would like you to believe that it's from the former, but we'll leave you to draw your own conclusions. Either way, “If you liked it then you shoulda put a ring on it,” is from Beyonce.

As it turns out, Chicago is a great town for beach volleyball.

It’s hard not to talk about morality chain & dark romance together, but we think they are inverse tropes. The internet definition of Morality Chain is “is a character who is the reason another character is Good.” Jen and Sarah’s current definition is that in morality chain romance, the Love Interest pulls a hero towards humanity and goodness, while in dark romance, the love interest is pulled down into the hero’s lawless world.

Some examples in pop culture are Spike from Buffy and maybe Barney in How I Met Your Motherr. Also, check out a movie called The Professional, where a child (played by Natalie Portman!) befriends the assassin next door. The Jason Statham one with a kid is called Safe.

The Hero’s Journey is very common character archetype in literature and pop culture, but Sarah an...

It’s 2021, and we’re back on the reading train with one of Sarah’s favorite erotic romances ever, Alexis Hall’s For Real. We dig into sex on the page, how sex and identity work together to make an erotic romance an erotic romance, power dynamics, and the difference between fear & risk. Enjoy!

You still have time to buy the Fated Mates Best of 2020 Book Pack from our friends at Old Town Books in Alexandria Virginia, and get the seven traditionally published books on the list, a Fated Mates sticker and a candle from the bookstore! Order here!

Thank you, as always, for listening! If you are up for leaving a rating or review for the podcast on your podcasting app, we would be very grateful!

Next week, we’re returning to Curvy Girls for an interstitial, and then we’re headed on to Naima Simone’s Blackout Billionaires series! In order, the books are: The Billionaire's Bargain, Black Tie Billionaire, and Blame It on the Billionaire. Find them at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, or Apple Books.

Show Notes

• We won Georgia, but then white supremacist terrorists attacked the Capitol. If you want to talk to your kids, here are some suggestions from Facing History and Ourselves, this is a resource for teachers but I think any parent with tweens and teens will find it helpful. If you have little kids, Jen’s friend Elisa is a children’s librarian and recommend the books When a Bully is President and What We Believe: A Black Lives Matter Principles Activity Book.
• Answering machines don’t exist anymore. (Well, they probably do, but no one we know uses them.)
• For Real won the 2016 RITA for Best Erotic romance, and Alexis Hall wrote a blog entry about it.
• Fear vs. Risk, the short version. Or maybe you want to read whole book about fear, called Nerve by Eva Holland. Jen knows Eva from another online space, but they've never met in person.
• Bluebeard’s attic had some things Jen had to google.
• Eric Selinger is a romance guy, but also a poetry guy at DePaul. Jen took a workshop with Eric a million years ago (before she started doing romance stuff), and the guy who said “poetry is a laboratory for sentences” was poet Baron Wormser, author of the best book Jen’s ever read about teaching a...

Book 4 is here and so are ghosts! We’re talking Dark Needs at Night's Edge, starring Conrad (the most tortured of the Wroth vampire brothers) and Néomi (the ghost trapped in the house where he’s held hostage while he dries out). We’ll cover heroines with agency, menstrual cycles, virgin heroes and the importance of family. Also, Jen is on about the moon again.

Don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast in your favorite podcasting platform — and while you’re there, please leave us a like or a review.

Our next read (in two weeks) will be Dark Desires After Dusk — the beginning of the Rage-Demonarchy duology, featuring Cadeon Woede, who is forced to choose between familial loyalty and his human (or is she?!) fated mate, brilliant mathematician, Holly.

Get ready for the read along at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books or your local indie. Also, the Audible versions of IAD are on sale right now -- and WORTH EVERY PENNY! Listen on Audio!

Show Notes

Ghosts are a human problem and preoccupation.

According to the Washington Post, "nearly half of the women who were murdered during the past decade were killed by a current or former intimate partner." Huge content warnings for everything in this article.

The Flame and the Flower, Shanna, and some of Sarah's thoughts about rape in romance.

We talk about Id a lot on Fated Mates, and we use it as a shorthand for our most primal, deep-rooted desires.

"All happy families resemble one another; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way" is the famous first line of Anna Karenina. This New York Times article about the many Tolstoy translations is fascinating.

Kresley Cole isn't the only one to use the menstrual cycle as a symbol; but others wonder why menstruation is almost always absent from fiction.

A crescent moon (or "sliver moon" as Neomi calls it) is never up at midnight. Literally never.

Jen rants a lot about first person narration a lot on Twitter, but it's super OTT, so just read this thread about first person narration that was started by Rebekah Weatherspoon.

Shortly after they recoreded this episode, Jonathan Franzen stanned for third person narration and Jen realized she's just a handmaiden to the patriarchy.

Jen strongly recommends Heavy: An American Memoir by Kiese Laymon. She saw Kiese Laymon being interviewed by Lolly Bowean at the Chicago H...

Back in July we had a very fun crossover episode with Erin and Clayton of Learning the Tropes. It was a delight and you should absolutely listen to it. During the event, we received so many questions from listeners that we didn’t have enough time to answer them all...so here we are, answering them! We talk about the kinds of romances we love, Normal People, morality chain and villains turned heroes, COVID and Romance Novels, Ted Lasso, and romance main character names.

And, of course, we talk about our mutual adoration for Lisa Kleypas, which is extremely timely, as next week, on February 4th, we will be celebrating Derek Craven Day 2021! So look for a very special episode on Thursday instead of Wednesday next week...and if you want to be a part of it, visit fatedmates.net and take our “Would Derek Craven?” poll (questions change every day until the 4th!).

After that, we’re back to our regularly scheduled programming with Naima Simone’s Blackout Billionaires series (With a little Derek Craven Day excitement in there, too!) In order, the books are: The Billionaire's Bargain, Black Tie Billionaire, and Blame it on the Billionaire. Find them at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, or Apple Books.

Show Notes

Sarah and Jen both adore Blackwing Pencils, but Sarah has really achieved new heights of nerd with her Carl CC-2000 Custom hand crank pencil sharpener.

Tessa Bailey is a Fated Mates favorite, and has a new, very charming book out this week called The Sweetest Fix. You should read it.

Stay tuned for more show notes later in the week.