Episode Details

Happy Valentine’s Day! ‘Tis the season for love, in reality and in fiction. This means we can enter “safe” and “family-friendly” territory, right? Well, in fact, romance tales raise all kinds of controversies and temptations. For example, a certain new movie sought to offer onscreen sensual content in a “redemptive” way. We’ve already talked about the problems with exploiting actors for visual stories. But what about sensual stuff on the page, not the screen? We have an inside agent in the romance industry, our previous guest Parker J. Cole, who’s able to explore both mail-order brides and monster myths. Today she rejoins Fantastical Truth to help us waltz right into these slippery issues of sensuality in stories.

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1. Johanna Frank’s novel The Gatekeeper’s Descendants
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Reintroducing Parker J. Cole

Parker J. Cole is an author, speaker, and radio show host with a fanatical obsession with the Lord, Star Trek, K-dramas, anime, romance books, old movies, speculative fiction, and knitting. An off-and-on Mountain Dew and marshmallows addict, she writes to fill the void the sugar left behind.

• ParkerJCole.com
• Parker’s articles at Lorehaven
• Pre-order A Match for Bernadette (releasing March 3)

Concession stand (Valentine’s Day edition)

• Yes. Zack and I are blokes. We’re going to be biased about romantic fiction.
• Still, this may give us advantage when speaking of written sensual scenes.
• Might some men have “natural immunity” to these scenes? (Stephen might.)
• This is a question we’re keeping in mind, again, sticking with generalities.
• Generalities are the name of the game when talking about sex differences.
• Some people over-generalize: “Men = visual, women = sensual”? Not always.
• Same with personality and even ethnic differences about “sensual