Check out the collection of past Words With (Author) Friends, wherein I g-chat with an author and you get to read over my shoulder, and order Lori’s witty new novel, out now.
Me: Hi, Lori!
Lori: Hi Andi!
How are you doing? Huge congrats on KISS, MARRY, KILL!
Thank you! I’m doing great! Entering a little downtime from all the book promo, which is much needed!
It’s always nice to exhale after the tornado!
Are you doing anything in particular to unwind?
It is. I do so much of my own promotion in marketing and pitching that I have to force myself to have a cut off and let it fly.
I had a manicure and pedicure this morning and I’m planned to binge some podcasts and substacks this week.
that sounds delightful! And yes, I know what you mean about forcing yourself to step away. It can be hard to know where that line is. (Which we’ll get into!)
To start, can you share with KISS, MARRY, KILL is about?
Yes, happy to! KISS, MARRY, KILL is a play on the well-known conversation game of the same name--though often the “non-clean” version of the name is used. In my novel, three best friends and co-founders of a health and wellness app play the game at their summer outing. Tensions are high among the three because their company is highly valued and about to go public on Wall Street. Each of the three women have a different feeling about this change to the company, and things are strained.
They play the game to ease tensions and remind themselves of their years of friendship. Yet, Mallory, always pushing the envelope, changes the rules. So instead of one person choosing who to kiss, marry, or kill out of three people--the way the game is normally played--each of the three women has to make a choice among everyone present at the summer outing. Aubrey chooses someone to kiss, Ilena, someone to marry, and Mallory someone to kill. Then they way up the next day in an alternate universe that mirrors their own where they are each living out the choice they made.
Such a fantastic hook! Where did the idea come from?
A TV show actually! Which I feel a little bad to say at a bookstore event...it was early 2020 and I was watching this teen drama called THE SOCIETY. I don’t know how long it lasted but it had this speculative element where the teens go on a field trip and come back to their town to find everyone has vanished---all their family, friends, teachers, no one is there. They can’t leave the town. Something happened to bounce them back in if they tried to cross town lines. So, they’re teens, they’re bored, and they play rounds of kiss, marry, kill.
Instantly the light bulb went off in my head: “That’s a great hook for a novel!” But because I like to push ideas to be as high concept as I can, I immediately said they wouldn’t play it the normal way. Hence the spinning of the rules. I wanted to go even further. I know from my previous years in publishing how much that hook matters. So I added the alternate universe. That’s a natural place for me to go since I love grounded speculative books and movies like time loops, time travel, the multiverse. I owe it all to the first of these for me, which was Sliding Doors.
So fun! I love Sliding Doors. And I really feel like grounded speculative and alternative realities in particular are having a moment. Was that lucky timing or do you think there’s a reason we’re reaching for those stories now?
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.