all the What is Love? trivia and behind-the-scenes gossip you never asked for

First things first: you're getting this email because you signed up for my newsletter. If this was a grave error and you did not want to hear my bad jokes or occasionally receive a 100% scientifically inaccurate forecast about your life from beyond the rainbow bridge, you can unsubscribe by clicking the link at the bottom of this email. 

Happy July!

I posted on Threads that mayo-based salads are an abomination and I’m getting ratioed like a DJ Khaled did that one time he claimed that real men don’t eat p*ssy. Let this be a lesson to you all: mayonnaise salads are America’s p*ssy-eating. Don’t disrespect the craft.

In today’s newsletter, I’m coming at you with absolutely no exciting news. Instead, I offer pure fluff: life updates of no import and a list of Easter Eggs/Trivia for What is Love?

Also, this is my first newsletter in substack, because I’m finally popular enough that Wix wanted to charge me a monthly subscription fee for a newsletter I barely send out quarterly. No, thank you!

Besides that, not a lot of action on the home front. I planted a lot of zucchini and tomatoes so for like three weeks in August I'm going to be the queen of Mediterranean pasta salad.

And I'm making it my personal mission to get deer crossing signs installed by my house because I'm too emotionally attached to wild animals and this is the one small action I can take to make me feel like I have control over bad things happening in the world. I email my Congresswoman every other week to ask that she support an immediate ceasefire in Palestine but I no longer get her amazingly vague canned responses (or any response), which I assume means she's treasuring every email close to her heart and she's definitely taking action any day now. I mean, 37k people (half of whom are women & children) have been killed already and close to 1mm people are at risk of starvation and disease but sure, take your sweet sweet time.

Anyway, I got a response about the deer crossing sign within hours, so take heart, local deer! I will save you!

Oh yeah, and I finally unlocked the infamous bear scene in BG3. This will be my default reaction photo to everything from now on.

Writing Updates

I’m putting finishing touches on my book proposal for Sibylle’s (Midnight Duet) book (a Casper the Friendly Ghost retelling). Don’t get too excited yet because lots of books that go on submission don’t get contracts. But let’s hope it does! Sibylle is such a little weirdo and I love her.

In other thrilling “this will never come to fruition but it’s fun to pretend” news, I got to see a very aspirational pitch deck for a movie version of What is Love? from an up-and-coming rom-com director who expressed interest in the project. Like most things in Hollywood, this is all sweet talk and hot air rizz balloons; we’re miles and eons away from an actual option, which would require a movie studio to cough up cold hard cash to “call dibs” on the project, and like 90% of options expire without ever getting made into movies! I’m only telling you all this because it’s fun for me to see my book through someone else’s eyes. (What I’m saying is: I want to see all your fancasts/moodboards!)

Midnight Duet earned out, 1.5 years after its release! That means that I’ve sold enough books that I can start earning royalties now. That’s really rad, because it means people are still talking about and recommending Midnight Duet. And maybe people who’ve read What is Love? and liked it are going back and reading my other books, too! 

I promised myself I wouldn’t do events this year so I would have more time for writing, but I lied a little:

•  I went to Spring Fling in Chicago in April, where I sang karaoke with Jen Levine, Alicia Thompson, Elle Beauregard, and my Phantom duet partner Jo Segura. 

• I did a quick signing at Meet Cute Bookstore in San Diego--and they still have a few signed copies left if you want one! I got to hang out with some of my fave readers (ilu Andi, Stephanie, Rachael & Kelly)!!

  

• While I was in San Diego I also did lunch with Susan Lee and got high at the zoo with Nellie Wilson. I was so blazed off my ass that I on sight spent $30 on a red panda tye-dye t-shirt. No regrets. Here’s the link if you want this amazing t-shirt. I get compliments whenever I wear it, which is all the time.

• Then I had the pleasure of doing my first event at local mega-indie Powell’s Books as Ella Dawson’s conversation partner for her bisexual “millennial-core” adult romance But How Are You, Really?

  

• I also got to hang out with Christina Lauren when they came to do a signing at my local Barnes & Noble in Hillsboro for their new release Tangled Up in You, a Tangled retelling! (I mean, no one comes out to Beaverton, except maybe KT Hoffman, whose debut The Prospects about a hot trans baseball player is set in Beaverton). 

  

I have one more upcoming event, but it’s for a good cause. I’m teaching a class for Writers with ADHD on July 28th at 2:30p PST for the Contemporary Romance Writer’s online conference (contemporaryromancewritingconference.org). It’s the same class I taught at Spring Fling, so if you missed it then it’s not too late to sign up for this one! Admission gets you into ALL 25+ classes that weekend, and it’s all online so you can access it from anywhere.

30 of the Best What is Love? Trivia and Easter Eggs

Recently, I auctioned off an annotated copy of WIL for the Gaza Evacuation Fund* Book Auction. As I was going through my annotations, I wrote down all the best Easter Eggs and Trivia so that I could share them with all of you. Just for funsies.

FYI: these are not in any logical order. Also, they contain tons of spoilers! 

1. Dr. Loretta Love taps the top of players podiums to show her approval, which is something Alex Trebek used to do. She also sits on a stool instead of stands, which Alex did towards the end. (In recent years, Jeopardy! has been way more accommodating for people with disabilities; some contestants have also been allowed to sit due to medical reasons, and as a girl with an autoimmune disease that makes it uncomfortable for me to stand for long periods of time, I really appreciate that!)

2. The Answers! announcer’s name is Gilbert Johnson, which is an unsubtle nod to Johnny Gilbert, the legendary Jeopardy! announcer who has been with the show since day one.

3. Hercules knew to sabotage the buzzer on the first podium because that one is always reserved for returning champ or highest ranked player in each matchup, just like on Jeopardy! 

4. In the scene where Maxine and Hercules have a sass-off in the smoking area, Jay James asks for a pic with Hercules to send to "my Chrissy”--but it’s actually a sly way of referring to Christopher Wray, head of the FBI

5. The “map scene” is an homage to the blackboard scene in The Luckiest Lady in London by Sherry Thomas, which is one of my all-time favorites

6. Teddy is a wine guy. In the beginning scenes, Maxine calls him out for always drinking the same Bourdeaux. This is partially because I decided French wine was a snobby beverage choice, but also partially because I wanted to later reference the wine Bill and Frank drink in the most romantic episode of The Last of Us (Louis Jadot Beaujolais-Villages)

7. Most of the other players’ names in the Answers! tournament are anagrams or coy allusions to real J! Players from the 2023 TOC or Masters tournament. For example, Trey Sambu = Sam Butrey. Tom Damiota = Matt Amodio. Matt Cricket = Mattea Roach. But there are some exceptions–William Broad is just Billy Idol’s real name. 

8. The Ultimate tournament (and $2mm cash prize) is sponsored by a fictional health insurance company called Mediana, because I wanted to poke fun at how much profit health insurance companies make since they can afford to sponsor the most random shit. Later that year, Moda Health actually did sponsor a J! Tournament. So I basically predicted the future???

9. Circle of Fate = Wheel of Fortune, which shares a neighboring soundstage with J!

10. Dr. Loretta Love was basically inspired by Barbara Howard (Sheryl Lee Ralph) from Abbott Elementary (which I was watching while I wrote WIL), with a little Lady Danbury from Bridgerton mixed in, and a dash of Alex Trebek for seasoning.

11. Paul is one of the contestant coordinators on the Answers! set. To show different facets of their personalities, I had Maxine introduce him by remembering where Paul went on his recent honeymoon, but Teddy introduces him by remembering that Paul’s cat is named Mama Mia-ow–because Maxine is interested in exotic travel locales, and Teddy is interested in cats. 

12. In one scene, I wrote that Maxine's correct answer rate is 61% which is way too low! This was actually a typo–it was supposed to be 91%, but I didn’t catch it in copyedits. Oops. So far, only one reviewer has called me out on it. 

13. Hercules wears a wine-hued turtleneck–just like "Sean Connery" in SNL Jeopardy!

14. Hercules’ McKnight Academies were inspired partially by the charter school plotline in Abbot Elementary and partially by the Lori Loughlin college admissions bribery scandal. (Whenever I’m working on a book, it tends to absorb influences from whatever media I’m watching!)

15. "Nobody tells Maxine what to do" is reference to one of my favorite underrated shows with an unlikable heroine, You’re the Worst (it’s a romance with an HEA–I highly recommend it!)

16. Tarrah Prince’s character is a tribute to two of my close friends, who I sort of combined into one person. Tarrah’s character ended up evolving and not really 100% reflecting the personalities of either friend, but it’s the tribute that counts! 

17. There’s a scene in the beginning of WIL where Teddy and Maxine are in a rideshare from the airport and Teddy won’t let Maxine get coffee. I had to add that scene in revisions when all my beta-readers told me that Maxine was too mean to Teddy, so I wanted to try and make him “meaner” so their dynamic felt more equal. And what could possibly be meaner than denying a woman with ADHD her morning caffeine?! It’s honestly a hate crime. Directly to jail. 

18. I spent way too long outlining Teddy and Maxine’s individual trivia strengths and weaknesses. But I wanted to define specific reoccurring ones that would come up throughout the storyline for the sake of both realism and comedy. Teddy's weakness is Latin/romance languages and Maxine's is Rivers, both of which were the categories that lost them their final games when they beat each other.

19. Related to the above: Maxine mentions Rivers in Mali as something she doesn't know but later references Mansa Musa–a famous historical leader of Mali. The reason she knows Mansa Musa is because she plays Civilization 6, and he’s one of the leaders you can choose to play as. The reason she doesn’t know the river or city names in Mali is because she renames them all silly things like “Bootyopolis” and “Tittytopia,” which is also what I do when I play Civ 6. 

20. Each character has a thematic “motif” that relates to their Answers play style but also relates to their personal character arcs. Maxine’s motif is luck and Teddy’s is memory. Maxine relies on luck/probability to win but she also has a complicated relationship with luck because of her childhood spent in gambling establishments and the fact her mother died in a statistically improbable way (or an unlucky way). Teddy relies on memorizing rote facts to win, but he has to confront not only his father’s declining memory issues, but also his ingrained idea of how memorization works. When he learns Maxine doesn’t memorize things the way he does, he researches different teaching styles–thus, the memory palace he helps her build to learn river names. 

21. Maxine's mother is struck by lightning so whenever her mother's death is referenced I used clues like "shocking twist of luck" to hint at her cause of death, even though I don’t actually reveal it until the final chapter.

22. Maxine mentions she worked not only as a hair stylist, but also at a parfumerie. That’s why she recognizes Teddy’s hair product as smelling very specifically like vetiver, rosemary, citrus… which are the primary scent notes in Aveda shampoo (a shampoo I think smells really good but I could never afford because it’s like $30 a bottle!)

23. On pg. 28 Maxine lists former jobs: hairdresser, skydiving instructor, assistant at parfumerie, lifeguard, bespoke tailors assistant, haunted subway tour guide, Krav Maga stuntwoman, and ice cream blogger. All of these jobs except for lifeguard, subway tour guide, and ice cream blogger are later relevant to minor plot points.   

24. Dickens is mentioned several times, because Maxine hates him and thinks he needs to get an editor. Yet she references the Christmas Carol more than once ("faking a tiny Tim cough", "Fezziwig vibe"), which I’d hoped suggested that she secretly does love A Christmas Carol (despite having been raised Jewish). Who knows–maybe she’s like me and grew up loving the Muppet version! 

25. Factual Fanatics is the name of Maxine’s trivia team. It was actually meant to be a placeholder name until I could think of something funny, but I couldn’t think of anything else. (You have to understand that I wrote this whole book in 2 and a half months, and by the time I got to revisions, my brain was running on empty. There was simply no creativity left at the bottom of the barrel! 

26. Maxine's original Answers run is based on J! champ James Holzhauer’s own run and Teddy’s based on Ken Jennings’ run, though I changed their stats slightly so it wasn’t a direct rip-off (e.g. KJ won 74 games; Teddy won 76 games). 

27. All the trivia questions at the start of each chapter are meant to reference or foreshadow something that happens in that chapter. Some of them are very direct spoilers and others are more vague–not intentionally, but because it was really hard to write 36 trivia questions from scratch that also pertained to very specific things! 

28. Maxine's fave Mortal Kombat character is Princess Kitana, who is also my favorite character. My cat is named after her. I also chose Kitana for Maxine because she and Liu Kang (the character Teddy chooses to play as) have a bit of a rivals-to-lovers thing going on.

29. Teddy highlights his favorite things in his planner green which is Maxine’s favorite color. This is an homage to Sally Thorne’s The Hating Game, where the [SPOILER - highlight text to reveal] hero paints his walls robin’s egg blue because that’s the color of the heroine’s eyes. 

30. For the final tournament round, Maxine quotes, “One of us three will determine the outcome of this tournament. The fate of millions depends on us.” This is Raiden’s line to the Mortal Kombat kontestants in the amazingly camp 1995 movie adaptation. Though the word “millions” in this context just means the $2mm prize and not the actual millions of inter-realm subjects who would perish under Shang Tsung’s despotic rule. Anyway, everyone talks about how The Mummy is the OG bisexual awakening film and I think that's honestly an egregious insult to every single actor in Mortal Kombat, who gave this violent cheesefest their sluttiest BEST EFFORT a full four years earlier. Please see this 8 minute highlight reel for reference.

I hope you enjoyed these eggs! If you did and want to support me, please tell all your friends to buy Midnight Duet so I can get some royalty money to pay for a murder mystery wedding (or just like, my $750 teeth cleaning bill from the doggy dentist... for my dog, not for me).

Thank you and love you all!! Until next time, when I promise to have more exciting news. :)