Q & A with Jessica Morgan and Heather Cocks

Jessica Morgan and Heather Cocks, authors of the fun and funny fashion blog Go Fug Yourself, are newly minted YA authors with their just-published first novel, Spoiled. It features Molly, the secret love child of offbeat superstar Brick Berlin. After her mother dies, Molly decides to move in with the man who, once – when a gossip magazine asked by her existence – mused, “Children, like protein shakes, are God’s greatest present.” Soon, she is sharing his Bel Air mansion – and a room with her scheming fame-hungry half-sister Brooke. Here, the authors tell Bookshelf how Spoiled came to be, and hint at what readers can expect in the book’s sequel.

How did the idea for Spoiled develop?

Heather Cocks: When our agent, Scott Hoffman from Folio, was shopping around a proposal for a book based on our blog, a lot of editors told him that if we wanted to try our hand at fiction, specifically a YA book, they would love to see how our voice translates. So, once we were done with The FUG Awards we sat down and were like, “Look, we should really make this happen. We shouldn’t lollygag and have our window close. While people are interested, let’s do something.”

Jessica Morgan: It kind of worked how I would imagine a lot of books do. It wasn’t like either of us had a giant brainwave in the shower or anything. We both sat down and figured out what kind of story we wanted to tell and we worked on trying to put this book together for a while. They always say the first draft is terrible and ours was really quite bad. I’m glad we managed to get a lot of that out of our system.

Cocks: I think it does a nice job bridging your Gossip Girl and your Sarah Dessen. There’s a lot of snark, but there’s a really nice heart beating through it. I think if you were one of our Web site readers, you might think that the whole book could be a snarkfest, but in fact we tried to make sure there were real undercurrents of feeling in there so that it gave people a little bit more to latch on to.

Spoiled has some pretty funny and outrageous parts, too. What are you most proud of?

Morgan: I really appreciate all the throwaway bits that I don’t know if other people notice. I like all the fake movie names we give to Brick’s films and all the crazy stuff we have happening in the background for Lust for Life, the soap opera in the book.

Cocks: I did have fun with all the little moments, too. One of my favorite jokes that no one has picked up on is that we named a character after Marty McFly’s girlfriend in Back to the Future. And that makes me giggle every time the characters say her name, because it’s like “Teehee, it’s Jennifer Parker!” Who in the world other than us is going to know that? Maybe nobody and that’s fine, but it cracks me up every time.

What can readers expect from the sequel?

Morgan: It is in the same world and has a lot of the same characters, but I don’t know if I would term it a traditional sequel. It’s more of a followup or a companion book. It’s called Messy and we don’t have a date for it, but it will be coming out sometime next year. It is in copyediting right now and I haven’t seen it in two months. At this moment I feel like, “What’s in that book?” The best way to explain it is that Brooke’s in it and there a lot more of Molly’s friend, Max. But Molly’s not so much of a headliner in this one.

Cocks: One of the marketing girls at Poppy, our publisher, is a genius and must have had a connection at OPI. She told them that the title on our cover is written in makeup and there’s a bottle of nail polish spilled across it, so what if we did a nail polish giveaway? Thankfully, the people at OPI are super cool and said, “Sure! Why don’t the authors pick three colors that represent the book and we’ll make sure they have enough to give to people who get their book signed.” So, we have a pink and blue, which match the makeup on the cover, and there’s a classic red called, “I’m Not Really a Waitress.” We sort of imagine that to be Brooke Berlin’s default color of choice for manicures and pedicures.

Any other fun marketing ideas?

Cocks: Macy’s pitched us the idea of doing an evening event at San Francisco’s Union Square store in a department called Bar III, which is a new clothing line that they’re starting. On June 16, they’re going to have cocktails and somebody from a nearby salon doing polish changes into our OPI colors. You get a free book if you spend $50 in the Bar III department and then you can come through and have it signed. We can chit chat and have a cocktail.

Now that you’re YA authors, what do you think about the controversy caused by the piece the Wall Street Journal published, about YA being too dark?

Morgan: I think YA has always been dark. There are a lot of dark books out there, but there are a lot of dark things that happen to people. Getting your knickers in a twist over this is kind of misplaced knicker-twisting. As far as I’m concerned, reading about terrible things that have happened is not going to make you do terrible things. It’s going to help you get through the terrible things that happen to you.

Cocks: When you’re a young adult, everything you feel is so magnified. You have high highs and low lows. Sometimes darker books that touch on those emotions appeal to teens because they feel like, “Oh, someone finally gets how deeply I feel.”

Spoiled by Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan. Little, Brown/Poppy, $17.99 June ISBN 978-0-316-09825-0