Ilove romance novels , first and foremost, for the characters. Falling in love is one of the most healing and vulnerable experiences a person can have, and getting to follow two or more realistically rendered characters through that experience is my greatest literary pleasure. The characters, not the tropes or the premise or the plot, are where I start with my own work, and I fill in the rest from there.

I also love podcasts, believe it or not, for many of the same reasons. There are many different media through which I could get my cultural commentary, literary analysis or news. But what I keep coming back to is the medium where the hosts present their ideas or stories or research to us, longform, through our headphones. Where we can hear them laugh and banter and change intonation to

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