Zibby interviews Lori Gold about ROMANTIC FRICTION, an irreverent, hilarious, raucous romp through the publishing world. They dive into the behind-the-scenes realities of publishing, the anxiety and ambition that fuel the writing life, and the looming impact of AI on creativity. Lori shares the inspiration behind this story, which traces a bestselling romance author’s battle against an AI-generated rival, and opens up about her unexpected path from journalist to novelist. Finally, she shares what she’s working on next!

Transcript:

Zibby: Welcome, Lori. Thanks for coming on to talk about Romantic Friction, a novel. Congratulations. 

Lori: Thank you. Thank you for having me. 

Zibby: Oh my gosh. I really enjoyed this book. It is the best behind the scenes in publishing.

The voice is so funny. It literally you pack in every paragraph has like another 12 things about the publishing world and the author life that you just somehow I'm like, I can't even miss a sentence because everything is so on target and so funny. I don't know. Congratulations. 

Lori: Thank you.

I'm glad you found it funny because I love writing with humor and I love making myself laugh, but you never know if other people are gonna find it funny too. 

Zibby: I found it really funny. Okay, tell listeners what romantic friction is about. 

Lori: Okay, so it is about a bestselling romantic author named Sophie Wild, and she is at the height of her career when she discovers that another author has used AI to write in her style, and instead of that author in the book being canceled, as we might expect.

In this unexpected world. Fans embrace it and she's called innovative in the press and social media is trending. All about this author and probably the worst insult, insult to Sophie who has worked so hard to get where she is in her career is that the other author is invited to the largest romance readers convention in the country.

Something that Sophie didn't get invited to for years. And so Sophie is understandably a little livid, a little take us a front to this, and she bands together with her fellow authors at that convention to try to take this AI author down any way they can, which will involve committing a felony. 

Zibby: As one does.

It's the author world, right? 

Lori: Yes. 

Zibby: So there are so many different themes when to be a leading author and to maintain that sort of mantle. It's not always as easy as it seems. Talk a little bit about how you portray this. Through your character and that even the most successful authors, let's just say this is Ill Hildebrand, or something like that.

Like even the most successful in your book right, have this underlying fear that at any moment it could all just stop. 

Lori: Yeah. And I think that's very realistic for how we all feel as writers. And I, no matter the level you're at, there's always another level to get to. And I think it's hard to, wrap your head around that.

For me, even when I was looking for an agent and first starting out, it's I'll just be happy with the deal. I'll just be happy with this. The book is also about. Being ambitious and not apologizing for being ambitious. And I think that's a part of the writer experience and struggle because you're looking to improve.

You're looking to improve your deals, your readership, the craft of writing, which I think Sophie, wants to improve upon as well. And so I really wanted to be both transparent and encouraging at the same time when I'm talking about this author world and this experience. But for someone like Sophie, she starts out, hybrid authors doing self-publishing and traditional publishing right now are becoming much more commonplace than it was even when I started out 10 years ago.

And she feels like she has really paid her dues to figure out how does this industry work? 'cause that's part of this process. How do editors work? How do publishing houses work? How do I self-publish, getting cover designers and getting it up online and doing all of the production for it. There is so much to learn at every stage. And Sophie feels like she's done it all. She's gone from self-publishing to the traditional publishing world and she has found success. But even there, you're only as good as your last book. And right now if you say something that you don't intend or you know is taken the wrong way, you can be taken down.

No. Sophie says something not so great in the book has this viral rant, and that's part of why she gets some of this backlash. But there's always this fear that your readers could go away, and when you work so hard for something that's devastating, and so I wanted to portray that at every level. Writers feel this fear of what's going to happen, but I also think a fear of, are we good enough?

We think, even if you have a lot of readers I was just listening to another author who, Victoria Aard, who's a friend of mine, and she was a huge romantic author moving into the adult space and she was just saying, I send my book to my agent and she comes back and says, it's great.

And I'm like, but really, we just have trouble believing that. And I think that so much of that is swirling around in our heads as writers. 

Zibby: I feel as a group authors. Have to be sensitive, right? You have to pick up on so much to be able to write about it in a relatable way, and it often comes with anxiety, and I feel like as a group then to have everything be put so much in numbers and sales and rankings and whatever, it's actually like the worst mix of industry with creators that there could be.

Lori: Yeah. I say this I do some teaching and book coaching, and I say this all the time, that if you're gonna pursue publication in any form, you have to be as arrogant as you are. Insecure. Because I think you have to be so arrogant to think out of all the wonderful books out there.

Mine's gonna find a home and mine's gonna find readers. But at the same time, if you don't have a little of this. Worry and self-doubt and that anxiety and that I think that pushes you to do your best. If you don't bring that to your projects, then all you have is the arrogance, right? All you have is something that you know is pushing, but maybe isn't the best craft that it can be as a book.

So I think the anxiety in the self-doubt gives you better books. True, but it certainly doesn't make it necessarily an enjoyable process all the time. 

Zibby: Wait, take us back about what happened 10 years ago. How did you become an author? Gimme the whole story. Sure. Okay. And even before that, like what were you doing?

Lori: So I was a journalism major before that and in college and I worked on my high school newspaper, my college newspaper, and that's where my first career was. I would say writing is my second career that I came to. My first book was published about 10 years ago, and it probably started writing about three years before that.

So I wasn't one of these authors who wanted to write. Since they were a kid and since they could hold a crayon, I was always very much into the world of English and, books and readers. I was a huge reader. My mom would take me to the library three times a week and I would have this stack of books like this.

She got so tired of taking me continuously that she would just hand me the biggest books we had in the house. Which were seemingly always Stephen King. So I was probably like 10 years old, like reading these scary Stephen King books, which is probably why I'm such a scaredy cat today to like horror movies and things.

But, so I was always in the world of English and language and reading and all of that. But I don't know if it didn't occur to me that being an author was a career I went the more practical route, and that's probably part of my personality if I'm going to write. I'll be a journalist. I can do that kind of writing, nonfiction writing.

And so that's where the first half of my career took me. Working for some magazines and newspapers. I got into technical editing because I live in the Boston area and there's a lot of tech editing up here. It really wasn't what I wanted to do. It wasn't the type of writing or editing I was all that interested in.

And so at some point I, I took a pause and my husband said, why don't you try to write something creatively? And I was like, really? I've never taken a creative writing class. Ever. I was like, how do I do this? But of course there's a little of that arrogance that comes in, right? Because I was like, oh yeah, I could just 

Zibby: sit down and write a book that just totally, by the way, put me to shame, right?

That you were just like, I think I'll pick this up. Just why not? I'm gonna take one class and write this great novel. But anyway,.. 

Lori: I ate a lot of crow because it was not that easy. Three years later I had the equivalent of a manuscript. It was over 200,000 words, which is like Game of Thrones length.

Zibby: Yes. It's four books. 

Lori: It's four books. It was contemporary women's fiction. I was like, I had no idea what I was doing and so I had to take a step back and really figure out what is it that I'm doing and I read a lot of craft books. I took some classes and you know that book. I got into a form that was.

Queryable I could query with it. I didn't wind up getting an agent with it, but that agent said, if you write something else, come back to me. And I was writing something else and that book was becoming gin, which became my first published novel, which is a YA novel. And so when I finished that and I had learned a lot more about writing and I had hired editors and I had, really tried to train myself of what is this I'm doing?

Then I was able to get a that same agent actually became my agent. And then becoming Jane was my first book in 2015. 

Zibby: Wow. And then what? 

Lori: And then I stayed in the wire world for three more books. I, so I had a total of four young adult novels. And then I knew I wanted to transition into this upmarket book, club fiction, but I got diverted on the way because I saw the.

Play Hamilton and I fell in love with it. And there is a song in Hamilton called Dear Theo Doja. And it's about Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton talking about their children and the fathers. They wanna be in this country, they're passing on to them. And as I sat in that theater, I immediately thought of this Romeo and Juliette.

Tale between the daughter of Ber and the son of Alexander Hamilton. And so that sent me off on it's my only true passion project as a writer. I will say, I came home from the play, I did research and I wrote historical, this historical fiction novel, which I love reading, but I never thought I would write as a writer.

And it's a hard process to write historical fiction. So I wrote that. I got it published. I'm super proud of it. But then I went back to this world. Of where I thought I was going to go after the YA novels, which was book club fiction and that's, how romantic fiction came to be.

Zibby: Oh my gosh. Not to put you on the spot, but have you read my novel Blank? Because I tried to do something similar-ish. 

Lori: Yes. 

Zibby: The unmasking of the industry, so to speak. 

Lori: Yes, definitely. 

Yes. I love what you do with that.

Zibby: I feel like there aren't enough. Books like that, take the industry and poke fun, but also unmask because I am routinely shocked, even now, even as a publisher and all this, like I learn stuff every day about how things are actually working.

That as a reader, I had literally no idea and didn't care. 

Lori: Absolutely. I think we don't have any idea what goes on behind the scenes and maybe some of that's purposeful. And I understand now why you don't know everything as a author, right? 

Zibby: Yes. 

Lori: But I think even, published authors are surprised at some of the things that are in my book, in your book, in all of these books.

And what I wanted to do with this was show the behind the scenes. So somebody in one of the reviews, they called it equal Parts Mystery Satire and industry Roast. 

Zibby: Yes. 

Lori: And I was like that's that's what it is. So I wanted to do that behind the scenes, but I did wanna involve this little bit of who done it caper, feel to it, to, appeal to readers who, their readers who love this behind the scenes stuff.

But I wanted there to be enough. For everybody, so you don't have to just wanna read behind the scenes of publishing. 

Zibby: No, I didn't mean to. 

Lori: Your book talks so much about, motherhood and balancing all of that. There's a lot for everybody and I think that's important to weave into these stories that might feel without that too much just about what it's like to be an author.

Zibby: Right? No, and I didn't mean to overemphasize that piece of it. It's more than that, but that is part of it. Yeah. I also found this whole AI. Subplot. So interesting. 'cause I like everybody, I'm thinking now so much about Ai. Recently someone just sent me like a pitch that they could translate my podcast into all these other languages and they sent me my voice reading it in all these other languages and I was so freaked out, like it sounds just like me.

Lori: Yeah. 

Zibby: So the fact that. It's that easy to just take a voice, take a writing style. What if someone could just write like you? What makes us who we are our brains? Seriously? Just that, it opens all these questions. What do you think about it? 

Lori: So I think that is so interesting because a lot of, when I did some research about AI and it's always constantly changing, right?

But one of the things that someone said that I think is very interesting is what makes something created by a human or not? And is it the intention? So if the intention comes from a human, is the resulting body of work piece of entertainment. Still, can we still call it created by a human or is it created by AI or by a computer?

So if the intention comes from that human, does that change things? I don't know. I think these are a lot of the conversations that we need to be having that I start to bring up in, in ai. Even when you think of the world of like movies and CGI coming into do explosions or to do creatures that don't exist or even, animation or humans that, they're doing these movies that are taking a human and they're doing the movements, but it's actually animated well is that the artist, is that the, a actor or actress, or is that, the AI or the computer creating something? We're in such this complex world, and I think we have been for a while, and we haven't really understood that. Even spell check is a form of Ai. Even when you start typing a name in your email, like in the 2 cent and like you, you start typing ZI and it pops up Zibby from your contacts.

That's a form of ai. All of these things have been around us. And now the spotlight is on them because technology's improving to do so much more than those sorts of tasks. And I think it's in, in coming into the creative world of writing in a way it hasn't before that it maybe has in, movies or that kind of form of entertainment.

So I think I have a lot of feelings about it. What I think is. The technology is continuing to get better and better, and when I first started to do the research for romantic friction, it wasn't there yet, I played with it, try to write a scene. It couldn't do it. It didn't feel like a human.

It's getting better and it's continually getting better. I really have no doubt that at some point it will be able to write a novel that feels like a novel, like you said, about, it could take your voice and sound like your voice. I do think it's going to happen, and I think if we put our heads in the sand and ignore it.

Writers are gonna be left behind. And I feel like what we need to do, and what I hope to do with romantic friction is to start these conversations between writers, publishers, readers, especially readers. Because ultimately, as I say in the book, books may be art, but publishing is a business.

And readers are the consumers. So they're going to be the ones who decide, the marketplace is gonna decide. Do they wanna write, read a book that's written by Ai? If they do they want it labeled as such? So they can be very clear in making a choice of what it is. It is the future that's coming and I think if we ignore it, we're gonna be, going down a tough road.

I think we need to have these conversations and start setting the parameters because it's here and people will use it as much as we say you shouldn't, or it's unfair or not, it's going to happen. So I think bringing light to it and having these conversations where we get to dictate where that goes is important and is or important to do it as early as we can. 

Zibby: I wonder though, if, and of course this goes to the economics of the industry as well, but if there's an option where readers create their own content in one second and they say. Hey, chat GPT, or hey Siri write me a novel in the voice of, let's just go back to Ellen Hildebrand write me another novel in the voice of Ellen Hildebrand, set in Nantucket about a married couple and the Beach Boy or whatever.

And in one second, and maybe it's not as good, right? 'cause of course it can't be. But let's just say it's pretty good and it's free, right? And then you're reading a novel written just for you, right? This blows my mind. Yeah, because not like authors should be immune. Every job is about to be eliminated, essentially.

Like it's not like just because there's no preciousness to being an author or a creator or whatever, but just the fact that it could be become a reader. A reader like driven content source, the way we're all kind of making our own newspapers now and Apple News or whatever. That's cra it's, I don't know, just mind blowing. 

Lori: It's, it's wild. And I think what's interesting is, I think depending on, how old you are, how, where you are in your life, you think it's great. Somebody might hear what you just said and said, why wouldn't I wanna do that? But we as creators or we as people didn't grow up, with computer from the time we were born.

We feel differently, and I think that's what society is and that's how society changes because someone will grow up always being able to do that, right? They'll never know a time where they couldn't do that. So in this period where you're like I remember when we couldn't and I have strong feelings about that.

What do we do about that? And is it, I guess the question is it okay? Is it okay to ultimately do that? That gets into so many issues of yeah. Copyright work and all that. But to your point of you know that if they could do that, would they wanna read it? And I think it's so interesting because it makes me think of again, where we're not there yet in terms of writing that we are in, movies or tv.

You turn on Netflix and you can watch a thousand shows and you can binge a season 20 seasons of g Grey's Anatomy if you want, in a couple of weeks. We're so used to immediacy of content. 

Zibby: In fact, I have to say one of my kids has watched all of Grey's Anatomy. I'm just saying she's literally on like season 20 and I'm like, that is insane how much time you've spent on this versus say, school.

Right nuts. But anyway. Okay. Just saying. 

Lori: No, but but it's true. And like they're used to being able to do that. That's just it's what you can do. The world that you couldn't do that where you had to wait Thursday night er came on. That was like when.. 

Zibby: Exactly. I was so excited. I had to rush home to get there.

What, 10 o'clock or something? Nine o'clock. 

Lori: Yeah, exactly. So it's interesting to think about, if readers could get another L Gold book or another Zibby Owens book in a month rather than a year or two years. And it's pretty good. Do they want it and.. 

Zibby: Or in a second? In a second. It takes a second to do anything on ai.

It's do boom. Like here. It's like they don't have to wait for anything. 

Lori: Yeah. And then it just, it becomes an issue of. Do we, what do we value? Do we value just the entertainment or do we value the creator behind it? And again, I don't think we know the answers to these questions. They're the things we need to start talking about.

The questions here, they're being posed all the time. But I think, sometimes people have a knee-jerk reaction of everything's wrong, right? And everything is wrong. And I don't like approaching it that way either because in the whole world. If we, currently right now, it'd be nice to have, discussion and debate as opposed to such, divisiveness.

And I think that can filter down to everything. Even an issue like this. What are the pros and what are the cons? And why, would a reader want to do that or not do that? And is it okay or not? And I think, I just want to think about it more than, I think people just have that knee-jerk reaction of yes or no? And I wanna think about all the complexities involved, whether it's is it as entertaining? Are we taking away jobs and do I feel okay about that? All of these questions are stuff I just wish people would think about a little bit more. 

Zibby: Yeah, my gosh. 

Tell me more about your life when you're not writing.

Like obviously you're thinking about writing, but what is like a typical Lori Day, like you live in Boston, like what else? 

Lori: So I teach creative writing and I lead writing retreats and I do book coaching. And so that's the bulk of what I do when I'm not either writing or promoting a book. And I love having both pieces of that.

Sometimes it's hard to balance and talking to you about balancing things, and I know how many millions of things you do as a publisher and writer and leading retreats and all of that, but it's interesting to see, like you can, things can take over, right? So the writing can take over and then you don't do any of the other work or the book coaching and the teaching can take over and then all of sudden you realize you haven't written for a while.

So balancing those things is something that I really try hard to do, to have components of my day that are meeting with students. And mostly it's on online, on Zoom, and then dedicating time to writing. I'm really good about setting writing goals, so I figure out how long, and I've been doing this for a while now.

I, this is my sixth published novel. I'll have another coming with Harper Collins next year. But I have four or five other books that I've written that haven't sold. I'm probably up to 11 or 12 manuscripts now. And that's let me know what is my writing process, how am I most efficient and how long does it generally take me to research and then write a book.

And so I'm a big proponent of setting goals. So if I want this book done by September, what do I have to write every week to hit that goal? And then I can fill in with all of the other things. That I do with book coaching and write and teaching because I love doing those pieces, writing can be such a solitary job and if you just write, you miss that opportunity to connect with other writers, and so I love that about the other aspect of my job, and I learned from it. So much, being able to read someone's work instantly on a page and read five pages and give them meaningful critique very quickly.

It's hard to do and it's a skill that I've learned and gotten better at as a instructor, but it makes my writing better. 'cause now I can assess my writing as quickly and in a way that I couldn't certainly when I was first starting out. So those are the other pieces of my day. And I try to integrate.

Beach walks when it's not raining, which it's been raining here in Boston a lot lately. So that's the other piece. But that also becomes writing time, right? Because you're thinking in your head as you're walking. 

Zibby: I saw somewhere that like an image of a brain when you're sitting down and then an image of a brain when you're walking and how everything is all lit up.

Lori: Oh, that's fascinating. 

Zibby: Yeah, it was somewhere on Instagram and I was like, oh God. I know. I need to walk more. I know. But anyway, what is your next book? You slipped that in there, what is it? 

Lori: Yeah. So I have another book with Harper Collins that'll come out in April of next year. We're working on the revisions now.

So I can't say too much about it, but it is still in this book Club Fiction World, and it looks at the same things that romantic friction does of ambition and female friendships, which is another big component of romantic friction. But it's a spin on a conversational game where three best friends and founders of a health and wellness app play this game at their summer outing, and it leads them down paths that they didn't expect.

Zibby: Interesting. 

Lori: Like speculative element to it, I will say. Huh. Love it. Very cool. What types of books do you like to read? So I mainly read book club fiction now with the occasional deviance too historical fiction. But I try to stay abreast of what's popular in the genre that I'm writing. So I read a lot of that.

I love Taylor Jenkins read, I love Liam Ardi and Sally Hepworth. I really love books with a little bit of humor, like Wedding People, especially that tackle like a difficult topic, but, use that humor in there.

I just actually finished, which I'd never read her before. Beatrice Williams, husbands and Lovers.

They came out last year and I loved it and I loved the mix of storylines between, present day and a couple of different past storylines, and then how they all come together at the end. I love those kind of merging together at the end of multiple characters and storylines. I think it maybe comes all the way back to when I read Stephen King as a kid 'cause those are huge, like ensemble like ca characters and cast and all the stories had to merge at the end. So maybe I still gravitate towards that 'cause it was my roots of reading. 

Zibby: Okay and this is totally invasive and you don't have to answer this and probably inappropriate, but you have this gorgeous mane of hair and yet you are letting it go naturally gray, and you happen to have one of these beautiful grays.

I don't know how you knew it would be beautiful because mine is not coming in beautiful. Tell me about that decision. 

Lori: Yeah, it was an easy decision 'cause the pandemic made it happen. So when the pandemic started, I had my hair like up to here. It was just a short, and it was like a layered bob and it had a lot going on.

It was one of those cuts where you had to go like every, four weeks you should, but I would leg it out to six weeks for it to really look. Really good. And I was getting it dyed. I've had gray hair since I was like you, early thirties. It was started coming in very, as young and so I was dying it for years and one, the texture was awful.

And the time takes to go into a salon to do that all the time, got like expensive and such a time suck and the pandemic hit. And you're inside. And I was like I have no one to cut my hair, so it's just gonna grow. And you go through this very awkward phase where you've got the hair with all these layers grow, it looks crazy.

And then the gray starts coming in. But I had highlights too. So it was like, it was totally like. Skunk light blonde down here. It was like it was a mess. And I just pushed through it and I got through the other side of the pandemic and all, it was mostly one color, so I cut it off so it looked one color, and I looked at the gray and I said, it's okay.

Like I think it's okay. And it was an interesting decision because. My mom always tells me, which I do remember this, when she started to go gray early as well. 'cause where I get it from, the snotty little kid said to her, mom, you have to dye your hair. You can't go around looking like that.

And I said, gosh, that was one of the meanest things I could've said to her. I did, I'm sorry mom, I said, it's okay and I'm just gonna go with it. And I'm not opposed to dying it. If at some point I don't like it anymore. But with the longer hair, it's. Sometimes it looks like highlights on Zoom.

It's okay. I'm going with it. 

Zibby: Yeah, it looks amazing. It looks amazing. 

Lori: Alright. It saves so much time. 

Zibby: I'm sure. I know. I'm like, this is a big time suck. Okay. Sorry for the superficial anyway. Romantic friction. Congratulations. So fun. So great. Such an unmasking of the industry mixed with fun plot and just like how do we get through life and how do we like just roll with it when things don't go our way and when the unexpected happens, and that is something that we all need to figure out how to do every single day. 

Lori: Yeah, still working on that. 

Zibby: Still working on that. Me too. Alright, Lori, thank you so much for coming on. 

Lori: Thank you, Zibby. 

Zibby: Okay, take care. 

Lori: Okay, bye bye.