Are you a sports ball fan?! Do we have romances for you! We’ve got the brilliant Jenny Nordbak from The Wicked Wallflowers podcast back for a sports romance interstitial! Listen to us chat about why we love sports books, the alpha, competence porn and books by Kennedy Ryan, Tamsen Parker, and Naima Simone!

Next week, it’s (FOR REAL THIS TIME) MacRieve week with Sierra Simone! We’re so excited, and Sierra is the perfect guest for this sex-driven book! Get MacRieve at Amazon, B&N, Apple Books, Kobo, or from your local Indie.

Show Notes

• Welcome back to our guest Jenny Nordbak from the Wicked Wallflowers podcast!
• Everyone loves a trip to the hairdresser.
• Here's a list of the RITA finalists, and a link to Jen's new twitter account which tracks her reviews of the finalists.
• Author Bronwen Fleetwood crunched a bunch of RITA data from the past 20 years, which is how we know there are more winners named Susan (and Elizabeth, Barbara, Karen, Jennifer, Ann, Jill, Linda...) than WoC finalists.
• Famously, the Hugo Awards also struggled with recognizing the best books in their field.
• Here's what we are talking about when we talk about how PoC are underrepresented in publishing.
• Um, actully Sarah, Ulysses is a twitter thread.
• This week, Sarah told a pretty solid competence porn story about her neurosurgeon on Twitter.
• Kennedy Ryan has been on the Wicked Wallflowers podcast. Twice.
• Content warnings for Long Shot.
• Adriana Herrera, author and friend of the Pod, recently wrote a very important piece for the Smart Bitches about how to portray sexual assualt in romance.
• Why the Ray Rice elevator video is important.
• Jen's written about the whiteness of hockey romances for The Book Queen. Don't believe Jen? Back in 2012, commenter #11 left a plea for more hockey romances on this Smart Bitches post. I bet they are happy now.
• Susan Elizabeth Phillip's Chicago Stars series is a romance classic.
• There's no crying in baseball.
• Jen reviewed all of Tamsen Parker's Snow and Ice Games series.
• Olympics atheletes are busy, y'all.
• 6 Degrees of Kevin Bacon was an amusing 90s pop culture game.
• Tennyson is a romance heroine and a famous poet.
• Listen to Naima's interview on the Wicked Wallflowers.
• Fumbled is a new football romance by Alexa Martin, and it deals with CTE.
• Get ready for MacRieve.