Outdoor romance novelist Stacy Gold gave up her day job at a mountain biking nonprofit to chase her dream of writing steamy romance novels. Writing novels that take place in the great outdoors gives Stacy a lot of material to work with: interesting plot points, beautiful scenery, and plenty of opportunity to crank up the tension.
Outdoor romance novelist Stacy Gold gave up her day job at a mountain biking nonprofit to write steamy romance novels. Her characters are strong, adventurous women - and the men who can’t resist them. Stacy has released four award-winning books, including her newest novel Wild at Heart, with more on the way. Writing romance novels that take place in the great outdoors gives Stacy a lot of material to work with: interesting plot points, beautiful scenery, and plenty of opportunity to crank up the tension.
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Shelby Stanger:
Have you ever watched the sunset with your crush or packed a picnic for a date at the park? Sometimes nature can be pretty romantic. You've heard me talk about how I met Johnny while surfing and how I also love to race him while running. I always say a little competition and most of all, some adventure keeps a relationship exciting. Author Stacy Gold agrees. Stacy is an outdoor romance novelist, who knows there's nothing sexier than spotting a shooting star with your partner in the wild. I'm Shelby Stanger, a hopeless romantic, and this is Wild Ideas Worth Living, an REI Co-op Studio's production.
Shelby Stanger:
Ever since she was a kid growing up in Atlanta, Georgia, Stacy Gold loved being out in nature. She spent her summer days outside tramping in the woods and wading in creeks. Her family wasn't outdoorsy, so Stacy joined a Girl Scouts troupe that took her camping twice a year. Those camping trips were just the beginning of her adventures. Now she writes romantic romps set in the great outdoors.
Shelby Stanger:
A note that if there are kids around, you may want to wait to listen to this one. There's some adult language and plenty of innuendo. Stacy Gold, welcome to Wild Ideas Worth Living.
Stacy Gold:
Oh, thank you so much for having me. I'm thrilled to be here.
Shelby Stanger:
I've never read a romance book set in the wild. I've actually never read romance novels, so there you go. I have a lot of living to do in my life, but I read Wild at Heart. It's really hard to make me blush. I have a very inappropriate 13-year-old sense of humor,, and I turned bright red and started laughing out loud, so congratulations. And it's a page turner.
Stacy Gold:
Oh, thank you. Thank you. Both of those things are such high praise. I love to make people blush and laugh out loud.
Shelby Stanger:
There's a scene where there's people let's just say making out in the wild and there's shooting stars going by. I've had an experience where I was on a boat trip, and I've told the story about the boat trip, but what I didn't tell was that there was a captain on the boat that happened to be my age. I just wasn't thinking about men.
Shelby Stanger:
I was there to write a story about these surfers surfing big waves in Indonesia, and by day four, after watching him get barreled and filet our fish every day for dinner, he took me to the bow of the ship and there was shooting stars. There was a meteor shower. I'd never seen anything like that. It was a really romantic, fun evening I'll never forget. And there's a scene in your book that reminded me of it, so nice work.
Stacy Gold:
Thank you. Thank you. I think a lot of us outdoorsy folks, if we haven't had a romantic moment during a meteor shower, we've watched the meteor shower and thought, oh, this would be so romantic with somebody else.
Shelby Stanger:
How did you one day get this wild idea to just be like, "I'm going to be the one who writes a romance novel set in the outdoors"?
Stacy Gold:
I am a lifelong outdoors person. I got my first job as a whitewater raft guide back in the late '80s and discovered the whole world of being a seasonal outdoor guide and moved out to Colorado and started ski bumming in the winter and got a job with the forest service. I was a back country ranger, I was a naturalist, I was a river ranger, all kinds of things over the years. Once I discovered whitewater rafting, I was like, "Oh, I just need to center my whole life around outdoor adventure. This is where I'm my best self and my happiest version of myself."
Stacy Gold:
I had actually not read a romance novel since I was about 16 years old until like 10 years ago. I had ended up having my own marketing and copywriting firm for almost 15 years, and I wrote a lot for the outdoor industry. I wrote for other people as well because if someone wanted to pay me, well, I'd write it.
Stacy Gold:
After 15 years, I was pretty fried and decided to close my business and all of a sudden had time to read fiction again, because I am one of those readers that once I get into a good book, I just put my whole world on hold until the book is done. But as a business owner, that wasn't happening. So I just quit reading novels.
Stacy Gold:
So when I closed my business, I happened to be at the bookstore and they had a sale table out front, and I randomly picked up a contemporary romance novel and loved it. And I was like, "Oh my God, this is so cool. This is women who have their own businesses and are feminist and don't necessarily need some guy to swoop in." But there's still always that bit of that in most modern romance novels no matter what. But at least the woman was able to stand on her own two feet and it had on page sex that was great. And the woman was having good sex. I thought, these are so much fun.
Stacy Gold:
I started reading them kind of voraciously, and I was talking about one to my husband one day and he said, "You know, should write one of those." I laughed and laughed. I'm like, "A, I don't write fiction. B, romance? Me? Eh."
Shelby Stanger:
Stacy's being humble. Adventure laced romance is something she's more than familiar with. Stacy met her husband when she was working at an outdoor gear store in Jackson, Wyoming. The two spent a few days kayaking together and fell in love. Stacy's husband has always encouraged her to push herself both athletically and creatively. Like she said, he was the one who suggested that she'd try writing romance.
Shelby Stanger:
Of course, Stacy's books were going to be different from the ones she picked up at her local bookstore. They'd feature badass women finding men who love them because they're badass, not in spite of it, and they'd be set out in nature where Stacy had developed so much confidence working as a ranger, a naturalist, and even as a whitewater rafting guide.
Shelby Stanger:
You started working the outdoor industry in college, right? You became a whitewater rafting guide at 19.
Stacy Gold:
Yes, actually I was 18 when I got the job. It was super random. I had just started at Georgia State University and they had a great outdoor rec program, so I started doing trips with them. I was over in that area a lot. I wanted an outdoor job for the summer. I was thinking I would probably end up doing landscaping just because I had seen that they would hire women for that. I wanted something physical, I wanted something outdoors. And I saw a sign hanging up that said, "Raft guides wanted. No experience necessary." I had never ever been rafting, but I kind of had an idea of what it might be. I knew-
Shelby Stanger:
That's gutsy. I like it.
Stacy Gold:
It was one of those things that it wasn't even gutsy, it was just total ignorance. No idea what I was getting into.
Shelby Stanger:
You were 18. Good for you.
Stacy Gold:
Right. I was 18. It sounded fun. The company that was hiring did a weekend hiring camp where they brought all these trainees out and put us in boats and had us try a little guiding. This was the first time I've ever even been down a river. I am so clueless. I look back now and I remember everybody hoisting the raft onto their shoulders and me looking over going, "Oh my God, am I supposed to be doing that? Wait, I didn't even know that's the next step."
Stacy Gold:
I absolutely loved being on the river. That just felt so good to me. Of course at the time I was also tiny. At the end of it, the head boatman looked at me and said, "We're not going to hire you because you're clearly afraid to get your hair wet or break your nails and you just need to go back to the shopping mall."
Stacy Gold:
Now, mind you, I grew up working in my father's animal hospital cleaning kennels, hefting 35 pound bags of dog food. That was so not me. They just looked at me on the surface, and then I was quite lost because I'd never been rafting. I did not know what was happening. But the minute he said that, there was a part of me that really developed around the age of 16 that was, if you tell me I can't do it, I will prove you wrong.
Stacy Gold:
So it worked out. I was back at school down in the student center, and another guy that I kind of knew peripherally who guided for the same company on a different river saw me and said, "Hey, did you get hired?" And I said, "No, I didn't." And he said, "Well, why don't you come over to the outpost on the other river? We're still needing guides over there."
Shelby Stanger:
Amazing.
Stacy Gold:
And I said, "Okay, great."
Shelby Stanger:
Were there other women, or were you one of a few or only?
Stacy Gold:
I think on the river at that time it felt like, I believe there was somewhere between 500 and 700 guides total. That was on the Ocoee River. I'm guessing that there were maybe 10 or 15 women total-
Shelby Stanger:
Wow.
Stacy Gold:
... back then.
Shelby Stanger:
Yeah, you were definitely a trailblazer.
Stacy Gold:
Yeah, it was pretty crazy. I definitely didn't know what I was getting myself into, but of course that exposed me to the whole seasonal lifestyle of being in the outdoors. And I met people who traveled to Australia in the winter to keep guiding, and I met people who went to Colorado in the winter and skied instead. I just thought, oh, well this is perfectly suited for me. I need to be a seasonal worker for a while.
Stacy Gold:
I was already trying to get my degree in outdoor rec, but the outdoor rec degree at Georgia State was more about planning parties for senior homes. Of course, I wanted an outdoor rec degree. I told my parents I needed to transfer to Colorado State to get a degree in resource management, and that was it.
Shelby Stanger:
Wow, what a great story, Stacy. And thank you. I had one female surf instructor when I was a little girl. It was so important for me to see someone who looked like me in the wild. If she hadn't paved that path, maybe I don't know if I would've ever found surfing.
Stacy Gold:
Yeah, it makes such a difference to see someone else. I was so glad that I knew three of the women guides on the Ocoee too that worked at my outpost. Another woman who had been guiding for years and was amazing and everyone looked up to her and she was teeny tiny, made me look big. So seeing this one woman who was tiny and who was just crushing it really helped.
Stacy Gold:
But I also did get a lot of enjoyment, especially once I got to be a better guide. There was one rapid where you could knock your front left person out pretty much every time if you knew how to hit it. So if I had a troublesome guy in the boat, before that rapid, I'd be like, "Hey, would you mind moving to the front left? I want to shift the weight around a little bit." And then I'd knock them out and be the one to pull them back in. It's amazing how differently they looked at me after I was their savior.
Shelby Stanger:
I only laugh because I've had one student in the past who was kind of a pain in the butt and I think I just purposely... It was a kid. I just pushed him into a wave where he pearled. And so then he paid attention after that. It's amazing what happens when someone gets a dose of their own medicine in the outdoors. They get really humbled.
Stacy Gold:
That's part of why I was like, oh my gosh, I should set my romance novels in the outdoors. I just think that it's fascinating to put two people who are just getting to know each other into the outdoors where you're your realest self out there.
Shelby Stanger:
Writing novels that take place outdoors gives Stacy a lot of material to work with: interesting plot points, beautiful scenery, and plenty of opportunity to crank up the tension. Just think about how many things can go wrong when you're out in the wild. For Stacy's strong female leads, those moments of pressure and vulnerability are the perfect place to add a little romance to the mix. When we come back, Stacy reads us an excerpt from her latest book Wild at Heart, and she tells us about her writing process.
Shelby Stanger:
As an outdoors woman herself, author Stacy Gold writes books about independent women who fall in love and lust in the great outdoors. Stacy's debut novella Just Friends came out in 2017. It's the first in a trilogy set at a fictional ski resort. Her latest book, Wild at Heart, is about two backpackers who meet on the Pacific Crest Trail in Washington. Stacy, do you think you could read us a little excerpt from Wild at Heart?
Stacy Gold:
Yeah, absolutely. I'd love to. I'm actually going to read a bit of the scene where the two main characters Jules and Evan meet. Jules is a small business owner. She's super burnt out. She's also an avid backpacker. And she's had a really bad string of luck dating, and she wants a big reset. So this is what Jules has decided to do. She's decided I'm taking a yearlong vow of celibacy. I'm kicking it off with five weeks hiking my favorite stretches of the Pacific Crest Trail in Washington.
Stacy Gold:
Evan is from a wealthy family in Boston. He just recently lost his job as a financial analyst and he's kind of come to the realization that he's really depressed and does not like his life and where it's going at all. He's just broken up with his fiance as well, and he thinks to himself, the last time I was happy was camping with scouts as a kid. And he thinks, I'll just go speed hike a section of the PCT for a week in Washington. Two people who are on the surface really different, but who are actually really similar and they're both out there trying to figure themselves out. This is how the two of them meet.
Stacy Gold:
"Lights out surrounded by sighing forest and tapping raindrops sleep sucked me in the way it had every night so far. No dreams, just thick, heavy, total relaxation. My eyes snapped open for no apparent reason. I held my breath listening through the rain drumming my tent.
Stacy Gold:
"A man's voice rang out from feet away, the tone somewhere between exasperated and hopeless, 'Seriously?' Nylon rustled and shifted outside my tent. I exhaled. What kind of dumbass tries to set up a tent in the dark in this weather? 'Effing godammit.' This time his voice hit a note somewhere between pissed and despondent. The guy wasn't setting up his tent, he was in a full fledged mixed martial arts fight with it.
Stacy Gold:
"Scrabbling for my headlamp, I unzipped my tent and aimed the beam across the small clearing. Raindrops formed silver lines obscuring my view. My light caught a bit of reflective material and a bare leg and what looked like a pile of fabric thrown over a boulder, but had to be a rain fly tossed over the A-hole who woke me up.
Stacy Gold:
"'Um, hello? What the F are you doing out there?' My breath hung like a ghost in the beam of light. 'Oh, nothing. Just trying to get some shut eye except my tent just broke, it's pouring rain, and I'm soaking wet.' 'Why exactly are you setting up in the middle of the night in a rainstorm?' 'Because I need somewhere dry to sleep.'
Stacy Gold:
"The pile of nylon shifted and settled and the bare leg disappeared. 'You're going to go hypothermic dress like that.' 'Tell me something I don't know.' The rain pounded down. I clicked off my headlamp and sat in the dry comfort of my tent staring out into the dark wet night.
Stacy Gold:
"The chances of my random neighbor getting any shut eye out there were pretty much nil. Ditto the chances of me sleeping through the night with his periodic shifting and cussing. The chances of him getting hypothermia dressed like that in 45 degree rain on the other hand were pretty damn high.
Stacy Gold:
"I clicked on my headlamp. Something told me I would regret my next words, but I didn't want his death on my conscience. 'You can't stay out there all night like that. My tent isn't big, but I can make room for you if you want.'"
Shelby Stanger:
Okay. I want to talk to you a little bit more about your writing process. Did you ever take a writing class or go to school for it? Or how did you learn to write fiction?
Stacy Gold:
Well, obviously I had a lot of background in writing non-fiction, so that was really helpful because at least I knew how to write well. But then I studied a lot. That very first book that I started writing for fun, it was a piece of hot garbage. But during that process I got a critique partner who worked with me. I went to lots of conferences, took loads of workshops, love reading craft books. In fact, every time I finish writing a draft, I read a craft book.
Shelby Stanger:
How much of the story do you know is actually going to happen before you write it?
Stacy Gold:
Not a whole lot. I usually write like a three to five paragraph synopsis of the story and then I start writing. I had the idea for the meet-cute in this book with him freezing in the rain. From that, that actually made me go, "Oh my god, this is so funny, and I love the way this flips the script on who's got the power and the knowledge and who's rescuing who." But it all just kind of came as I was writing.
Shelby Stanger:
Talk to me about how you come up with your characters and take inspiration from your own life.
Stacy Gold:
Well, I can definitely say that all of my characters have a little bit of me in them, but they also have bits and pieces of lots of my friends. And then actually the biggest piece of the work I do before I start writing a book is in fact figuring out my characters.
Stacy Gold:
I have a spreadsheet with more than 60 different specifics listed in it that I go through and fill out. It's everything from their physical appearance to the type of family they grew up in, the number of siblings, are they rich or poor? Did they go to college? What do they do for a living? What kind of car did they drive? What color is their tent? All kinds of different details.
Stacy Gold:
By the time I'm done doing that, I have a pretty good sense of who these characters are as people if they were real people in the real world. If I just know who these characters are, I can set them in really difficult situations that I know will push their buttons and then just kind of let it play out on its own.
Shelby Stanger:
Stacy's characters usually start off headstrong, heartbroken, or carrying romantic baggage. They often feel unlovable or incapable of love. Over the course of the story, Stacy brings them to a place where they can fall in love with someone who likes them, respects them, and supports them in their adventures.
Shelby Stanger:
You do a lot of kayaking and biking and other sports with your husband. What have you learned about adventuring with a partner?
Stacy Gold:
I've so fallen in love with adventuring with a partner. One of our early big adventures, we own a '78 VW bus, so it's been with us since the beginning.
Shelby Stanger:
Amazing.
Stacy Gold:
When we'd been dating about a year, we loaded up the bus and did a three and a half month road trip all over the United States kayaking. We were with a group of people, but it was kind of a amorphous group. At one point, it was just the two of us for a couple weeks. We were up in Washington state. Huge snow year, so there was a massive runoff going on. And the area we were in, the river was so high, we didn't feel confident running it with just the two of us because if something had gone wrong, rescue was going to be impossible.
Stacy Gold:
There was all this snow still up in the North Cascades and I said, "Why don't we see if we can rent some kind of skis and we'll go ski touring?" This is the guy who couldn't even snowplow. And he said, "Okay, sure." We found some lightweight cross country gear, went up into North Cascades Park. I totally came up with this plan to bushwhack up this ridge because it looked cool. We ended up in some steep terrain and had to do some negotiating. And he went in a tree well. There was some excitement and whatnot, but we got out and it was all fine and good.
Stacy Gold:
He did not have one negative word to say after all of that. I just thought, this man just completely followed me on this adventure that he knew nothing about and he was totally cool with it. Totally had a great attitude. I could keep doing this with him.
Stacy Gold:
Of course now after doing our adventures together for so long, we know each other's strengths and weaknesses. We know which pieces and parts each other does best. And it's so lovely to move through the natural world with him now.
Shelby Stanger:
But what about adventuring solo, which you've done a lot of, what can that teach us?
Stacy Gold:
I think for me, what it really taught me is that I am perfectly capable and competent and happy on my own. I feel like these days so often I hear people say they don't like to be alone. They don't like to be where it's quiet. They've always got a TV on or the radio going or a podcast or they're reading or the internet, something.
Stacy Gold:
And when you adventure alone, you take all that away. It has made me so at home with myself and so happy to be on my own. And it gave me the freedom to just do the adventures I wanted to do without having to wait to find somebody else who might want to do something that somewhat resembled what I had in my head. I've just done it.
Shelby Stanger:
You recently kayaked the Grand Canyon. That's so badass.
Stacy Gold:
Yeah, it was badass. Oh my gosh. It was so huge on so many levels that I didn't even expect. It was 14 kayakers. We all had everything in our boats. I was the only woman on the trip, which is pretty par for the course for me. But it was so wonderful to just be so completely disconnected from the modern world for two weeks and have it all just be about me in this physical space, in this overwhelming place that is just so huge it's incomprehensible.
Stacy Gold:
But everything about that trip, especially for the first four days was so overwhelming. I had no idea physically I could even do it, but I was like, I'm going for it because I'm not going to be in any better physical shape a year from now or two years from now. Putting it off isn't necessarily going to help. So I just went for it. But it was such a great reminder of what it feels like to be overwhelmed in the outdoors.
Stacy Gold:
On day two, I got stuck in a huge hole and was down in there surfing, and it was so big that all I could see was white. I was just thinking, well, I don't really know what's going to happen here. Random luck of the draw, my husband comes barreling in. Our boats are like 12 feet long way, weight easily 150 pounds with all the gear. I mean, it's like paddling a water logged tree down the river.
Stacy Gold:
My husband, he came over the lip of this hole and then sees me in the bottom. Of course the last thing you want is to be speared in the ribs by one of these. I mean, you'll break ribs, all kinds of bad things can happen. And somehow his boat scooped under mine and he managed to pull me out of the hole. He came out of the hole too and looks at me and he goes, "You look like you needed a hand." I just laughed. I was like, "Yes. Thank you so much."
Shelby Stanger:
What skills have the outdoors taught you that you think have just become pretty invaluable?
Stacy Gold:
Well, I think the biggest one, and this actually kind of goes back to something you said early on, the things that you do when you're doing these outdoor sports are so much more consequential than most of what we deal with on a day-to-day basis in life. For a lot of years I had a poster of this big waterfall up on my wall because I had actually run this waterfall in my kayak and it's the biggest single rapid I've ever been down. I have done it three times.
Stacy Gold:
When I met my husband, he started dragging me down all these crazy rivers. And my rule with him was I would only do Class V rapids if I knew that I could scout them and walk them if I didn't want to run it. This particular waterfall is on Tallulah Gorge. It's called Oceana Falls. It's down in Georgia. I forget the exact measurements, but it's about 60 feet of vertical, but it's not straight up and down. It's a big slide. However, two-thirds of the way down, there is this giant wall of rock that sticks up that you simply do not want to hit with your body or your boat because you will break things.
Stacy Gold:
We get to this rapid, and I'm scouting it and I'm thinking, there's no way I'm running this thing. So I'm like, all right, I'm going to walk. So I look at the people walking and some guy trips or stumbles, drops his boat, his boat slides down and ends up in the gnarly hydraulic hole at the bottom of this thing. The guy himself slides like halfway down before he catches himself again. And I was just like, okay, this is going to be more dangerous for me to walk down this thing. If I run it'll all be over in four seconds and I'll be at the bottom.
Stacy Gold:
So I ended up running it, utterly terrifying but thankfully the kind of rapid where you key off one thing right at the top and the very first move is super easy and then you're just sort of holding on for the ride. After doing that, I just felt like, okay, really bad bosses, annoying stuff, starting a business, moving, any of that, that's nothing I've run Oceana Falls. I mean, nothing else stacks up remotely to that kind of experience.
Stacy Gold:
It's just given me so much confidence and knowledge that you know what, I can do whatever I really want to and set my mind to, and I don't need to listen to anybody else.
Shelby Stanger:
Stacy Gold, thank you so much for coming on the show. I had a blast talking to you. You can follow Stacy's latest releases and adventures online at stacygold.com or on Instagram @authorstacygold. That's S-T-A-C-Y G-O-L-D.
Shelby Stanger:
Wild Ideas Worth Living is part of the REI Podcast Network. It's hosted by me, Shelby Stinger, and I'm actually on an adventure right now. I'm hiking in Mammoth Mountain with Johnny. I'm hoping we see some shooting stars. This show is written and edited by Annie Fassler and Sylvia Thomas of Puddle Creative. Our senior producer is Chelsea Davis and our associate producer is Jenny Barber. Our executive producers are Paolo Mottola and Joe Crosby.
Shelby Stanger:
As always, We appreciate when you follow the show, when you rate it, and when you review the show wherever you listen. And remember, some of the best adventures happen when you follow your wildest ideas.