Laura Kamoie hit No 1 in the Amazon best seller charts with her latest historical novel My Dear Hamilton on the week we talked – evidence of the success she and co-author Stephanie Dray are enjoying with their novel about Eliza Hamilton, wife of Founding Father Alexander Hamilton. Hi there, I’m your host Jenny Wheeler, and in today’s Binge Reading episode, Laura talks of the joy she gets in unearthing women’s stories from obscurity and her other career – writing raunchy romance. And we’ve got three paper back copies of My Dear Hamilton to give away as a President’s Day special. Wife, warrior and widow, Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton was forced to assume all these roles in her quest for a more perfect union . . . Offer closes February 29, 2020. Enter HERE or the Binge Reading Facebook page. Six things you’ll learn from this Joys of Binge Reading episode: How Laura came to rescuing Founding Mothers from obscurity The extraordinary brain trauma which began it all Her ‘other life’ as romance writer Laura Kaye The lure of the supernatural A productive partnership with co-author Stephanie Dray The fallibility of historic icons (like Thomas Jefferson) Where to find Laura Kamoie/ Laura Kaye: Website: https://www.laurakamoie.com/ or https://laurakayeauthor.com/ Facebook: @laurakamoieauthor OR @LauraKayeWrites Twitter: @laurakayeauthor Pinterest: laurakayeauthor.com Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/laurakayeauthor/ What follows is a “near as” transcript of our conversation, not word for word but pretty close to it, with links to important mentions. Jenny Wheeler: But now here’s Laura. Hello there, Laura, and welcome to the show. It’s great to have you with us. Laura Kamoie: Hi. Thank you. I’m very pleased to be here and excited to chat with you. Laura Kamoie – best-selling author of early America – and writing romance as Laura Kaye Jenny Wheeler: Thank you. Look, you’re a best selling author in two very different genres, urban romance and historical fiction. We’re going to be mainly focusing on the historical fiction today, but which came first? The romance or the history? Laura Kamoie: Well, there are two ways to answer that question. I have been interested in history since I was a teenager, and so I actually went to university and graduate school for history and have a PhD in history and was a professor at the university when I started writing. That’s part of the reason why, when I did begin writing fiction, I. wrote romance first, because history was my day job. So I was writing romance fiction for several years while I was still working full time as a university historian. At one point there came a time where I really just finally needed to make a choice between the two because my romance career had taken off. After I retired from teaching, that was when I decided that I also wanted to try writing historical fiction because history had been such a big part of my life that I didn’t really want to leave that behind. Historical fiction gave me a way of keeping a foot in that world. America’s First Daughter – the hidden story of Patsy Jefferson, President’s daughter, revealed…. Jenny Wheeler: Sure, and with the fiction, you obviously had a very good career as a professor. What was the spark that made you feel, I still want something else? To say to yourself, I want to be able to do fiction. Was there a Once Upon A Time moment that was a catalyst for that? Laura Kamoie: For the historical fiction? Jenny Wheeler: No, for the romance, when you first got started. Laura Kamoie: So I have a funny story about how I started writing fiction, and that is that in 2008, I had a traumatic brain injury and as part of recovering from that injury, I had this very strong and new creative urge. I started writing my first novel, which was a paranormal romance, and I started taking guitar lessons. Luckily I was a lot better at one of those things than the other. I have a very nice guitar that I don’t really know how to play. So I started writing and I started with paranormal romance first because I grew up in a family that really believed in the supernatural. It was not unusual for me and my family to sit around my grandmother’s kitchen tables on Friday night, with everybody sharing whatever new ghost story had happened in their respective houses. I had a love for all things supernatural and could not get my hands on enough of those kinds of stories growing up. So it wasn’t a surprise to me at all that I would start with something that had always been part of my life, and write a paranormal story. Laura Kaye’s Hearts in Darkness – best-selling romance which came out of brain trauma Jenny Wheeler: It’s amazing. It’s wonderful that something so positive could come out of what could have been a very negative experience. Laura Kamoie: Yes, absolutely. It was a definite silver lining kind of experience. I feel after I started writing that both the injury and the writing changed things about my brain. And then there was just no going back after that. Jenny Wheeler: Oh, that’s wonderful. That’s wonderful. Well, on the historical side, you’ve now had two best-selling books. Both of them focused on famous American figures, Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton, and the women in those men’s lives. We know a lot about the men, but we knew very little about the women. And I guess from that focus, you’ve got an interest in women who’ve maybe had a hidden role in public life. Do you think that’s true to say? Laura Kamoie: Yes, for sure. I think the things that drew us to both to Patsy Jefferson, who was Thomas Jefferson’s eldest daughter, and to Betsy Schuyler, who was Alexander Hamilton’s wife, is that their stories were really untold. They were unsung heroines in their more famous male relative’s lives. And the more that we looked at the research for both Patsy and Eliza’s stories, we saw that their roles were central to the success that their male relatives had. Their roles made their father and husband’s successes and accomplishments possible. And they additionally played a more central role to those men’s lives than I think that they had ever been given any kind of credit for. And so, I definitely have a very big interest in telling those great untold stories. And I think that there are lots of them. There are lots of them for women in history. There are lots of them for people of color in history. Sometimes you’ll hear people say, “Oh, well, you know. These other people, they didn’t really play big roles,” or “society kept them from playing big roles.” But when you really dig into it, you know, people were people and you can find these great untold stories for all kinds of figures in the past. And so I feel very passionate about that. Jenny Wheeler: Yes, that’s fabulous. And I noticed that My Dear Hamilton was Number One on Amazon this week, which is a fantastic achievement. Congratulations on that. So how did Eliza come to your notice? Laura Kamoie: So, My Dear Hamilton was the second of these books. We had started with America’s First Daughter, which was the Jefferson book. And when Stephanie Dray, my coauthor and I first came up with the idea for America’s First Daughter, it was something that we had never before done. As we were working on it, we didn’t know if this would be just this one. If it was to be a fantastic experiment in this one book, or if we would ever do any more. But by the time we got to the end of America’s First Daughter, we knew we wanted to do it again. And so we had already been thinking about who are the other great Founding Mothers that we maybe would want to write a book about? And Eliza was on the short list of possible next heroines, in part because Patsy Jefferson was a Founding Mother of the South, so we wanted to try to choose a Founding Mother that might have a substantially different kind of experience in that time period. And so someone who was from the North might offer a different kind of perspective on the Revolutionary Era. So she was already on our short list for that reason. We also thought that Eliza might make an interesting character for a novel because there’s not a lot of primary source material by and about her that has survived. It’s harder to write nonfiction when you don’t have lots of original source material, which is why to this day, there still isn’t a full biography about Eliza Hamilton. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VhinPd5RRJw&list=PLV78EPlNCZ5B1vHkRicCAdpbDqZ1DpLgM Hamilton soundtrack – Millions of views But novelists can take more dramatic license, and so that put her on her list as well. And then I saw the Hamilton musical in it’s opening week on Broadway back in 2015. At the time, Stephanie wasn’t able to go to the show with me. I went with a different friend and at the intermission I turned to that friend and I said, “Eliza is going to be the next book,” because already I could see the way in which her contribution to his life was really not being told in the musical, which makes sense because the musical was about Alexander, not Eliza, but I was already intrigued by the story that might be possible to be told through her perspective. (See Eliza Hamilton Deserves a Musical of her Own – Smithsonian magazine.) Jenny Wheeler: Yes, that’s right. It’s great that you’ve introduced the fact that it is a co- authored book. How did that collaboration come together that you and Stephanie initially decided to work together? Laura Kamoie: Stephanie and I had been friends – probably been friends for about a decade. We first met one another through our memberships in the Maryland Romance Writers writing group. We were at a romance conference together, and I was telling Stephanie about some of the final classes that I taught while I was still teaching, which were two small senior seminars on Thomas Jefferson. I found out that she was really interested in the Founding Fathers and we got to talking about Thomas Jefferson and how it’s hard to make an original contribution on someone about whom so much has been written. But we realized as we were talking, that his daughters were an exception to that. We were really excited about that idea, and we went back to her hotel room at that conference and started researching his daughters, to find that very little had been written on them, especially about his oldest daughter who was really his lifelong companion. We became really excited about the kind of story we might be able to tell about Jefferson and his home of Monticello if we told it through his daughter’s eyes. So that night we probably stayed up until three or four o’clock in the morning because we were so excited and energized by this idea. We agreed that night that we were going to write a novel about Patsy and that we were going to do it together. We did that with some fair degree of hubris, I would say, since never before had either of us co-written a novel, so it all could have gone disastrously. But it ended up being such a dynamic experience. So often we were just on the same page that it ended up being a really fruitful experience that we wanted to do again. So, that’s how we, ended up coming together as coauthors. Jenny Wheeler: And could you just explain a little bit about your working method? I mean, the book is seamless. You can’t tell where one of you starts and the other finishes, if you know what I mean. It’s very smoothly in one voice, but how do you get it to be like that? Laura Kamoie: That’s our favorite compliment. Thank you for that, because of course, there couldn’t be more than one voice sound in the book, because it’s Patsy’s book and it’s Eliza’s book. What we did, and we used a couple of different methods, just depending on what else might have been going on in our writing schedules, but we started out on America’s First Daughter. She would draft Chapter One. I would draft Chapter Two, and then we would trade them and we would edit freely with “track changes” on so that we could see what each other had done. And then when we got them back, we would go through the changes and we would accept them. And I would say the vast majority of the time, we probably accepted, you know, 90% of what the other person had done. Then when we maybe had things that we disagreed about, we would often just talk it out. Proud co-authors – Laura Kamoie and Stephanie Dray She would talk about what she was trying to achieve and the way she had done it. And I would do the same. And through that conversation, we would often come up with a third solution that was so much better than what either of us had done on our own. Jenny Wheeler: That’s great. Laura Kamoie: Yes, so it was something like that. Sometimes she would draft long chunks or I would draft a long chunk and then the other person would do all the revision work. And then when we got to things like our editor’s comments and copy edits where we could really only be on one computer because you can only have one version of those documents, we would often get together at a coffee shop and sit on the same side of a booth with one laptop between us and both of us taking turns writing as we talked out different solutions to those editing problems. By the end, I would say that there was really no page of either book that we both didn’t work on. And I think that that was the process that allowed us to create a reading experience that makes it sound like there’s just one unified voice. Jenny Wheeler: And I guess you must to have started out with quite a detailed breakdown of the chapters – of what the chapter was going to cover – so that you each knew what you expected to be writing. Laura Kamoie: That’s right. And I think the fact that we had both worked on plotting out the book and figuring out what scenes and chapters might need to be in the book helped us get to the point where we could have a unified vision before we even started writing. Jenny Wheeler: Yes. It’s interesting that Jefferson appears in both books in different ways. Obviously he’s much more prominent in America’s First Daughter. As a contemporary reader, you have slightly mixed feelings about him because my feeling about Jefferson, before I read America’s First Daughter, I hadn’t ever studied American history at uni. I did a history degree, but we mainly focused on English history – so my Jefferson was this kind of Mount Olympus figure…. like a Moses, untouchable – and America’s First Daughter made him a lot more of a vulnerable, fallible human being. Also the way that he basically almost unthinkingly took advantage of both Sally and Patsy as support people in his life, which I suppose is something that era obviously just took for granted, made you feel a little bit mixed about him. And then when you get the version of Jefferson in Hamilton, you get an even more complex and conflicted idea of the man. So that’s quite an interesting journey to take if you read both books. Laura Kamoie: It really is. And we often joke that it was a good thing that we wrote America’s First Daughter first, because there’s no love lost from the Hamiltons toward Jefferson, so it might’ve been more difficult to go in the opposite direction. Thomas Jefferson – third President of the United States. The Founding Father as fallible father. But you’re exactly right about Thomas Jefferson. As a Founding Father, he seems to be this iconic figure and that’s part of what we thought would be really powerful. In America’s First Daughter we would be looking at him not as just a Founding Father, but as a father, and we would be looking at him through his daughter’s eyes, which means that sometimes she might idealize her father or she might make excuses for her father, but other times, as many kids are of their parents, she might be frustrated with her father, or she might think that he doesn’t understand or she might be upset with him. And all of that becomes true in America’s First Daughter. There are times between the time that his wife dies when Patsy is about 10, until they get to France, when she accompanies him, when he’s appointed as minister to France, when she’s about 13 or 14. there are a lot of times in there where he is not particularly likable. He is a grieving father. He was quite a depressed after his wife’s death. He may even have been suicidal, which is right out of the primary record, and he was not very emotionally available to his daughters. And so he does a number of quite unlikable things to Patsy in those early years that we struggled with as writers because we were writing a book about why and how this woman protected and defended her father’s legacy. You can’t have a wholly unlikable character to make that make sense to the reader. So that was our big challenge, how to navigate those times when Jefferson wasn’t the iconic voice of the revolution, but was instead a highly flawed father and human being. That took a lot of editing nuance because there were times where our editor thought you’ve made him too unlikable here. We have to balance reader’s expectations because Jefferson is a figure that most people have some opinion about. Sometimes those opinions are strongly positive and sometimes those opinions are strongly negative, but we knew that, especially in America, almost anybody who picked up our book was already gonna have a preconceived notion about what they thought about Thomas Jefferson. So we were trying to meet those expectations and in some cases maybe challenge those expectations. So that was a really interesting sort of part of dealing with Jefferson and in America’s First Daughter. Alexander Hamilton – Founding Father honey-trapped into the first political sex scandal Jenny Wheeler: And then with Eliza Hamilton, Alexander was probably the opposite almost. Until the Ron Chernow biography came out, in terms of American history, Hamilton had been lost a little bit, even though his achievements were substantial. He was brilliant, insecure, setting the foundation for the new democracy and the financial systems, but quixotic and risk taking in his own life. Laura Kamoie: Yes. You know, I think both of these Founding Fathers and probably any figure that you would want to read a book about, is characterized by that sort of complexity and contradiction, right? If somebody is perfect, they’re not interesting, and they’re probably not believable anyway because none of us are. I’ll talk more about Alexander Hamilton, but this question makes me think of one of the historians that we really most used and drew information from when writing America’s First Daughter. And this historian’s name is Annette Gordon-Reed who is a Harvard law professor, and she is also the reigning scholar on the Hemings family of enslaved people at Monticello. So Sally Hemings was part of this family, and Annette Gordon-Reed has done most of the research into the Hemings family at Monticello. Pulitzer Prize winning family history by Annette Gordon-Reed. And what she says about Jefferson is that he was neither an angel nor a demon. That he did vitally important things for the cause of humanity. But he did not do all the things that we wish he had done. Yes, and so that’s this idea of the complexity and the contradictions I think characterize both Jefferson and Hamilton. And you’re right, that Hamilton was, I think, an undervalued Founding Father before Chernow’s biography, certainly. And certainly before the musical Hamilton catapulted him into the popular culture of today. He is absolutely someone who was embodied by this same sort of ‘neither angel nor demon’ tag. He was absolutely intellectually brilliant. He could be socially quite charming, but he also could be socially quite immature and manipulative. And not always caring about people’s feelings. I think that’s what makes him an interesting character. And again, that we had to struggle in writing My Dear Hamilton with the fact that sometimes Alexander was hugely likable and sympathetic, and other times not so much. And I think that for both of the books, those character flaws are part of what makes the conflict and that drive. The drama of a good novel. Jenny Wheeler: That’s fantastic. The one that you’ve most recently published as another collaborative book with six other six authors altogether is Ribbons of Scarlet, Women of the French Revolution, and you each wrote an account of one woman and her contribution to the French revolution that may not have been recognized. And I think your chapter was about a beauty, who was a courtesan, a fashion plate and someone who you might automatically discount in terms of having any political or social importance beyond just being decorative. Tell us a little bit about that experience. Laura Kamoie: Yes, absolutely. So, Ribbons of Scarlet is what’s called a continuity novel. So there are these six parts of the novel that read the same way any novel would read, you know, consecutively, that furthers the story in each part. Part of the reason that we ended up creating this kind of a novel to talk about the women of the French revolution is because the French revolution is so complex and chronologically long and so many different women play important roles that we just couldn’t find one or two women who would allow us to really talk about the scope and breadth of the whole revolution. Ribbons of Scarlet – forgotten women of the French Revolution – a “continuity novel.” And so we pulled together a big list of important figures. And then we kept narrowing it down until we got it to these six that we felt would best allow us to cover the chronology, to cover the range of the politics, and the range of points of view from different classes of French society. Really who would just allow us to cover a broad range and still allow us to be using real women who really existed during the French revolution. My section of the novel is about a woman named Emilie de Sainte-Amaranthe, who was a young woman, just a young teenager when the book starts. When she is in her own point of view, in my part of the book, she’s 19 years old. She was known as the most beautiful girl in Paris, the daughter of a courtesan. Her mother ran the most elite and exclusive gambling parlor in Paris in the years before the French revolution. Emilie de Sainte-Amaranthe, Parisian beauty who’s story is told in Ribbons of Scarlet. And Emily helped her run that and was well known for her appearance at parties and her beautiful gowns and how beautiful she was. And so, yes, you would look at this girl, and you would think, well, what important role can she possibly have played? And there are a couple of answers to that. One is that Emily’s story offers the point of view of the vast majority of people in France who were just trying to survive during the French revolution. Her family leaned royalist, but they were not strict monarchists, and they had already had a number of enemies from more middle-class people who had not been able to come to the gambling parlor who were excluded during those years. And so they very quickly realized that they just needed to keep their heads down and try to ride it out. And so first they closed the gambling parlor and then they moved outside of the city of Paris and they’re just trying to lay low. And that kind of experience, I think is an important part of how a lot of people tried to survive the French revolution. So she allowed us to hint at that experience. But also, because they had been very exclusive at their gambling parlor and had had a lot of status and so forth before the revolution, they had enemies. And so they were quite frequently denounced to the revolutionary government. And they were on multiple occasions investigated to see if they were conspiring against the revolution and what have you. Ultimately they were arrested for doing just that, even though they were innocent of the charges. And so Emily’s plight and everything that happens to her after the arrest, all of it ends up bearing direct relationship to what happens at the end of the French revolution. I’m being vague there so as not to spoil the ending of the book, but her fate is intimately tied up with the end of the revolution. The fate of people like Robespierre, who was one of the sort of Jacobin rabble-rousers, made her story much more important to the French revolution. You might’ve thought a girl of her, character would have at first been irrelevant. Jenny Wheeler: Yes. So it very much fits the theme of all your other books in that respect of excavating a woman from anonymity and giving her more of a place in history. Laura Kamoie: Absolutely. And I think that another one of the characters really, speaks to that particular point. Her name was Louise Audu, and she was known as the queen of the market women. And she became one of the street fighters who was leading the Women’s March on Versailles. That was one of the opening shots of the French Revolution. She was actually one of the people who, sword in hand, broke into the palace and slaughtered many of the King’s guards and arrested the Royal family. Someone like Louise, because she was lower class, she was from the peasant class, is not someone who left a lot of primary source materials in her own hand. And so being able to tell her story as it was pieced together through other people’s recollections and to make sure that she would be remembered, and many people who were like her would be remembered, was an important part of what we wanted to Jenny Wheeler: That’s fantastic. But we starting to run out of time, so we’ll, talk a little bit now about your work as a romance writer. You write your romances under another author name, and they’re very different from the work that we’d be talking about. Tell us a little bit about those romances. They are urban gritty romances, and some paranormal romance, aren’t they? Laura Kamoie: So yes, I write under the name Laura Kay nd I chose that name because Kamoie is hard to pronounce and spell, but I ended up using it for the historicals anyway, since it’s what my nonfiction history is under. But as Laura Kay, I primarily these days, write contemporary and erotic romance and romantic suspense. My current series is called the Warrior Fight Club series, and it is about an MMA training club that uses fight training to help veterans deal with PTSD and transition to civilian life. The Warrior Fight Club series – a change of pace for author Laura Kamoie, writing as Laura Kaye. It’s based on a real-life organization that exists. And I was just really inspired when I found out about that organization. I thought it would make a really a great way to combine military romance with sports romance in a sexy and compelling way where you can really get to know this big brotherhood of characters. I hope to write more paranormal romance in the next year or two, so definitely stay tuned for that because it remains really one of my first loves as a reader and a writer. But yes, I’ve written the Harding series, which was military romantic suspense, the Raven Riders, which was contemporary romance about a motorcycle club with a protective mission. A lot of people know me for a book called Hearts In Darkness, which was the second romance novel that I published, which is about two strangers who meet while they’re trapped in a pitch black elevator. I love writing romance. It’s fun and I love the romance reader community and I just have a lot of fun doing it. Jenny Wheeler: That’s lovely. We’ll put links to all of those books in the podcast show notes that we run in association with the episodes, so people will be able to find those as well. Now turning to Laura as reader. We’ve called this The Joys of Binge Reading because we are focusing on the idea of people who like to have a series of books to read and of course, your romance fits beautifully into that. What do you like to binge read yourself and have you got any recommendation? Laura Kamoie: I read a lot of bits and pieces as I can fit reading it around whatever I’m writing. But I am an avid reader and I read lots of different things. I’m opening up my Kindle actually, so I can see what I’ve been reading most lately. I’ve been working on some books by Devney Perry. Devney Perry – The Outpost, part of the Jamison Valley romance series This book called The Outpost was just a fantastic forced proximity romance that I absolutely loved. I love anything by Tessa Bailey. Anything by Jennifer Probst or Jennifer L. Armentrout Somehow I was super late to Kay Bromberg’s Driven series and I just binge read all of her Driven series, which has also been the first book in that series has been made into a movie by Passion Flicks, which is the romance movie streaming service that started a couple of years ago. I’m on the historical side, one of my favorite recent reads was Kate Quinn’s, The Huntress. Kate Quinn’s The Huntress I also got to read an early copy of Stephanie Thornton’s And They Called It Camelot, which is about Jackie Kennedy. I can talk books all day. Those are definitely some of my recent favorites though. Jenny Wheeler: Oh, that’s great. We’ll include links to all of those authors as well so that people can follow up. We are starting to come to the end of our time together. So if we look back over your writing career and at this stage, if you were doing it all over again, is there anything you would change? Laura Kamoie: I guess I have two ways of answering this. On the one hand, I want to say no, because you know, you learn a lot from your mistakes and I think that mistakes are how you grow as a writer and a person. And so I would hesitate to get rid of those learning experiences. On the other hand, I think that you do have mistakes that you don’t necessarily know you’re making as you’re making them. You only see them in retrospect and you think, Oh. Okay, well, I decided to do this particular series after that particular series. Maybe I should have continued doing more like the first thing and not sort of gone off in a different direction. And so I think that you can look at those decisions that you made after the fact, and look at how the market maybe is turning or changing and, and second guess yourself a little bit. But, you know, I think that those mistakes are just so important to helping you grow. And not just in the actual writing, but in the business of being a writer. I think that those are really important. Jenny Wheeler: Yes. I must say that I met you first last year at Romance Writers, New Zealand, where you were a guest speaker at the 2019 annual conference, you were fantastic at talking about that aspect of the business, of being a writer. You really struck me as someone who had “got all your ducks in a row” as far as the business side of your writing as well as the craft side. Laura Kamoie: Well, you know, I appreciate that. I’m glad it looks like I have all the ducks in a row. It doesn’t always feel like I have all the ducks in a row, and sometimes it feels more like, you know, a bunch of bunny rabbits or a little kitty cats who are all scattering off in different directions at the same time. And you’re just trying to catch them all as much as you can. . . Jenny Wheeler: A great image! So what’s next for Laura, the writer? As you look ahead into 2020, what have you got on your desk to look at? Laura Kamoie: So I am currently working on my first solo historical novel, which I’m hoping to go on submission with in April, maybe. I am shifting into the 20th century for that and hope to be able to share more about it before too long. Once I get those pages ready to go, I’ll be able to know exactly what more is going on, on the romance side in 2020. I have a book called Fighting the Fire that I am going to be coming out with, which is part of my Warrior Fight Club series. I got my rights back on a Vampire romance series that I put out back in 2013 and 14. So I’m going to be releasing those and it’s always fun to get to put together new covers for books. I’m working on that right now. Once I know whether or not I sell this historical novel, then I’ll know when I’m going to be launching my next romance series and I have two or three ideas for that and I can’t wait to get to play more with the new ideas. Jenny Wheeler: It’s fantastic. So nothing more with Stephanie on the calendar at the moment? Laura Kamoie: Not at the moment. She is working on a solo novel and I’m starting one. So as soon as we’re both on the other side of those solo projects, we’ll be coming back together with another Dray – Kamoie novel about another Founding Mother. Jenny Wheeler: Fantastic. Oh, that will be wonderful to look forward to. Now, I know that you’re very good at your social media, so tell me where can read readers find you online? Laura Kamoie: Absolutely. My websites are LauraKamoie.com or Laurakayeauthor.com and I am on a Facebook under both names. I am on Instagram under both names, and I am on Twitter as @LauraKayauthor, so we’d love to connect. Jenny Wheeler: That’s lovely. And we’ll make sure that all those links are there too. So if people want to just go to the website, there’ll be all of those there for them to click through on. That’s been wonderful, Laura, talking to you. I must say that I’m a genuine admirer. I feel a bit of a fan girl having had a chance to talk to you about your work, so all power your arm and look forward to the next Founding Mother. Laura Kamoie: Well, thank you so much. I appreciate your kind words and I really enjoyed our conversation. If you enjoyed Laura Kamoie you might also enjoy . . . Stephanie Barron’s That Churchill Woman – Sir Winston’s mother Stephanie Barron’s novel of Winston Churchill’s American mother Or Jonathan Putnam’s mysteries of American President Abe Lincoln. Jonathan Putnam’s Abe Lincoln mysteries: Faithful to the records. Thanks To Our Technical Support: The Joys of Binge Reading podcast is put together with wonderful technical help from Dan Cotton at DC Audio Services. Dan is an experienced sound and video engineer who’s ready and available to help you with your next project… Seek him out at [email protected] or Phone + 64 – 21979539. He’s fast, takes pride in getting it right, and lovely to work with. Our voice overs are done by Abe Raffills, and Abe’s another gem. He got 20 years of experience on both sides of the camera/microphone as a cameraman/director and also voice artist and television presenter. Abe’s vocal delivery is both light hearted and warm and he is super easy to work with no matter the job. You’ll find him at [email protected]

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