Hi, Shaylee, welcome to watch your next podcast. Thank you very much. I'm happy to be here. So happy to have you here. Tell us a little bit about yourself. Yeah, of course. My name is Shaylee Thompson. I just released my debut novel, how to Kill a Guy in 10 Dates, which is a slasher rom-com. So I have always been a writer, but my day job for a very long time was a high school drama, English and literature teacher. Yeah. My, my debut novel came out early February and it follows Janie c Prescott, who is a film academic and cinephile who goes to a speed dating event with her roommate. And during the second last day of the night there's a blackout and when the lights come back on, her date has had its throat slit across the table, and then the novel unfolds into a slasher and a romcom. When everyone gets locked in the venue, there's a killer on the loose. But Jamie still has a bit of a connection with two of her dates from earlier in the evening. So we gotta talk about what was the process of writing this book? Because you have an extensive knowledge about slasher films, romcoms also balancing both PO lines that are, they're very genres, very defined by formulas and specific things, and in balancing both plot lines in a way that will make sense for a reader. Keep it all in one room, in one specific setting that creates this intensity of that storyline. Yeah, so like you said, I have always had a, I grew up in the nineties, so romcoms were very kind of foundational within my film education, I think. Mm-hmm. But came into Horrors and slash is a little bit later in the game. So I started getting into them in my twenties because of a really good friend of mine. She is a huge horror fan. And at the beginning of our friendship we started watching horror movies together. So I. Got into that a little bit later, but I loved them too. And so basically I was writing in a completely different genre. I had never written horror before. But then I saw a screenshot of a tweet that was complaining about how there was too many Christmas romcoms and not enough Halloween romcoms, and my brain just immediately went to horror romcom. I don't think that's what they were asking for. You go, that's how it was. And it was something that I set as a challenge for myself because I. They were too, kind of diametrically opposed to go together. I was like, how are you going to be able to do that, to have two people falling in love in a situation like this? And it was a little bit different to Dark Romance as well, where, the characters are kind of more I think maybe morally gray or morally black. So that kind of lends itself to that type of genre. So when I started writing, I didn't know how it was going to turn out. I was like, I just want to see if I can do it. But I pretty much got obsessed with this story and with combining those two genres and exactly like you said, they're one of the biggest criticisms for romcoms and slashes is that they are very formulaic. For someone whose career is literally deconstructing texts, it was kind of easy to have a look at those parts and then try to put them together like a jigsaw. So the writing itself, I would never say is easy, but trying to make those two genres work, I felt they, they actually lent themselves to each other very naturally. But I didn't, yeah, because I knew the rules of them, I felt pretty comfortable breaking. The, of those genre as well. So I think that probably helped is if it didn't work, if a particular trope didn't work,. Yeah, I was pretty comfortable with breaking those rules. And then, yeah, I didn't I pretty much just let this story flow and then if there were any kind of niggly bits of trying to put those genres together or something that didn't work, then I just went back in editing. A lot of the things were like editing Shay's problem and writing. Shaylee just got to do whatever she wanted. I love this idea of like really mashing and then breaking the rules. 'cause I think once you know the, like the formula, you're like, okay, how can I play with it and how can I take, compromise? And it's not a dark romance, but it's a perfect, I love that it was released during Valentine's Day because it's like the anti Valentine, book. But perfect. That was very purposeful decision too. Yeah.. Like we had that option of possibly releasing it the Halloween before. I am always going to be grateful for more time for editing and all of those sorts of things. But yeah, it just felt like a good Valentine's, anti Valentine's read to have as well. And then, I mean, you can pick it up later in the year this Halloween too. Yes it's an equal opportunity because we do have a friendship. We do have, roommate situation, two friends going to be dating, getting outta your comfort zone, which actually has that friendship account kind related. Yeah. And then trying to do, seeing yourself dating, in this era it's oh, maybe this is like not so right. And maybe, yes, he should be unli as part of the process. So let's talk about like your writing journey, because this is your ibut. I'm assuming you have been writing before, and this is just basically, this is a book that actually got your ibut, but it might not be the first book or the last book that you, your written. Yeah. So I've been writing for as long as I can remember. Since I was a child, this whole process has made my mom go and because she's like a big hoarder, go back and have a look through all my childhood albums, and she's found these writing samples that I did when I was like seven or eight. But not, so yeah, this is my debut novel, but it's not the first book I've ever written. This is probably more like the fourth or fifth. Book that I've written. And it's not even the book that I'm signed with my agent with either, which is, it's always the way, right. So I was kind of more within the contemporary romance, urban fantasy romcom kind of arena. I hadn't written horror before. I definitely hadn't written horror rocom before. And I. Signed with my agent for a different book, but one of the first conversations that we had was whether that book was a debut. And at the time I had already been writing how to Kill a Guy in 10 dates. So I pitched that to her and I was like, look I'm writing a slash a romcom and this is the concept. And I, we both felt that how the killer guy in 10 dates was more of a debut novel. Then the other novel that I had signed with we I still have complete intentions to to publish that as well. But it was the first in a series and, just with the way that the market was at that time, we were looking for something that was standalone and something that was going to be attention grabbing. Yeah, like I like I said, I've always been writing, but I kind of, got more serious about it. Like a lot of people did, I think during COVID where you had a bit of time to do some self-reflection and all of that. And that's when I started really editing heavily the, one of the novels that I'd been writing. I started going to more writing workshops, listening to podcasts about writing. Because even though I was an English and literature teacher it's two very different worlds basically. And I think writing and publishing are two very different worlds as well. So I just wanted to kind of get my head around that. And then, yeah, did more workshops, applied to different programs and just really tried to hone. Hone my writing process as well. 'cause I'm a natural, I just do these brain. Novel that I wrote that wasn't a starter novel. The ones that never see the light of day and probably are a copy of one of your favorite books. The first novel that I wrote that was kind of original and more my voice took me about 10 years to write, whereas how a killer guy in 10 dates took me. About four months, four to five months to write that first draft. Yeah. And that was just me becoming a bit more disciplined, really not editing as I go, just allowing the writing process to happen and then going back and editing, like separating those two processes. So I think getting to this point was almost like a. Three like four year journey because I started writing how to kill a guy in 10 days at the end of 2023. But now I am a full-time writer and I get to do this every day for a living. And I've got, yeah, so I get to work on different things. I'm currently editing my second book, which hopefully comes out next year. Yeah, so it was a bit of a rollercoaster, but it's always been writing and creativity has always been something that I have done. It's just the last few years where I was like, yeah, this is something that I want to do and put out into the world. Well, congratulations on becoming a full-time writer. That's amazing. Thank you so much. That's a big accomplishment and it's obviously it comes with its own purpose of having time and having energy, but at the same time, just working through it, which is its own challenges too, and I think time is the biggest resource. Yeah. Like time is the biggest luxury when you're a writer. Uninterrupted time that you can just like, just write and just like edit and everything allows you to play around with ideas and also being able to marinate those ideas. 'cause you, especially as a parent, you're trying to plug, trying to like work through the problems and work through the plot. And so having time to go for a walk or doing activities that are actually gonna get the mind marinating the idea. Yeah, that then you get to write it quickly on, you just have that, you have marinating that process for a while. Yeah, no, it's the Exactly, you're exactly right. It's the, obviously it's the time to write, but it's the time to think as well. Sometimes I'll just go for a drive and I'll just drive around all this other, just to get the brain thinking, and then I'm like, oh, yeah, I've got it. Drive home, start writing. Yeah. Yeah. It's a lot. I work in a field that need, that requires a lot of thinking. And so one of the things when COVID happens was we requested to work remotely, not because Sarah's expectation. It was like there's too many distractions in an office, and we needed that place to have space to think and space to figure out okay. Find the idea, I find the solution and it's a lot of, it's boring your mind, doing some repetitive tasks that allows you to figure out the problem to problem solve. Yeah. So I love this. I am excited for what More to come with you. Because I really love how to kill a guy in 10 days. Such a right. Look, I cannot wait. Everything is super secret about what my second book is at the moment. And I'm to blame for that. I'm like, nobody tell anyone until we're ready to go. But I can't wait. I can't wait to be able to tell people because I literally, like my publisher picked it up like on the title as well. So like I can't wait for the title itself to come out. Yes. So that people can see what it's, oh my gosh. Yeah. All right, so let's talk some book originations. Talk to us about what type of books do you tend to read? Oh, I'm like I said, I was an English and literature teacher, so my kind of spectrum of books is really very wide. I love reading romance. Obviously I love horror comedy, but I also love the classics. So I will read Jane Austen's Persuasion pretty much every year in July. So in, in Australia, July is winter. It's a bit cooler and colder, but for some reason every July I'm just like, boom, persuasion. I'm also getting in more to nonfiction. I just read screen with me by Eleanor Johnson, which is a critical analysis of. Horror films from the sixties and seventies through a feminist lens. And it was amazing. But my book recommendations that I chose was kind of something along the lines of how to kill a guy in 10 dates. So if people read that and they want something that is kind of similar but all of these books kind of came out before How to Kill a Guy, 10 Dates. So it's very likely that people have already read them. So my first recommendation is of course, butcher and Blackbird by Bryn Weaver. I loved reading that book through the lens of trying to pick up the Easter eggs and the references to some of the horror films that inspired the killers in there. That was really fun for me. As you can probably tell from how to kill a guy in 10 dates. I love meta. On that same kind of thread is the Final Girl support group by Grady Hendrix. I had such a fun time with that book. Grady Hendrix got me into horror comedy. And I just love that it in between the chapters, it's almost like an epistolic. Excerpts of movie reviews and articles and all different things like that. And again, the references to the classic slasher movies are just too good to pass up. And then finally, if you want kind of like a different genre, but you still want that meta aspect of it I have to recommend Long Live Evil by Sarah Reese Brennan. Where a, a woman is sucked into this fantasy series and becomes the villain within it and kind of has to use this kind of fragmented knowledge of the story to kind of go through that. And that came out I think about two years ago, and there's a sequel to that as well. Oh my gosh, those sounds so good. Yeah. And I have to give you a recommendation. I just finished this nonfiction, which is yes, if you like to screen movies, not your favorite movie. There's, it's kind like an oral history of. Screen movies how it actually shifted the horror. All the movies I think up to seven until the latest one that's coming out. So it's by Ashley Collins. The audiobook is excellent. Yeah. But it's a really good homage to those night slash roka, I know. Less summer. I will eat that up. Yes, definitely. Yes. Yeah. So you get a little bit of taste with that, a scream and what, why Scream worked and how they have revisited the franchise. Yeah. I really enjoyed that one. It's like one of the, so it's perfect for how to kill a guy in 10 dates. So Yes, definitely. It's a perfect, added onto. And Shaylee, tell us, we're gonna find you online. Yeah, of course. So I am most active on Instagram and in my Instagram profile is links to my website and everywhere that you can get my book. So you can find me at Shaylee writes. So at S-H-A-I-L-E-E writes. Yeah, so that's where I pop everything up and that's the best place to find me. Awesome. Thank you Shaylee for being the shower. Thank you so much for having me. Thanks for listening to the What three next. For more book lists, cozy reads and library tips, visit the what three Next block.com. Your next great read might be waiting there.