Taylor Hutton, STRIKE AND BURN
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[0:45]Taylor Hutton is the author of Strike and Burn.
[0:48]Taylor Hutton is actually the pseudonym of a pair of writer friends, one of whom has
[0:52]twice been a finalist for the National Book Award, and the other who is a New York Times
[0:57]best-selling author, and Edgar Award finalist.
[1:00]Between the two of them, they have written over 40 books.
[1:03]When they are not passing, their latest sexy thriller back and forth on Google Doc, they
[1:07]are browsing bookstores, sending each other ridiculous memes, walking their dogs,
[1:12]Trudy and Potato, around their Los Angeles neighborhood, and making their children cringe
[1:16]with their TikTok videos.
[1:17]Welcome, ladies!
[1:18]We're talking about Strike and Burn today.
[1:21]The pen name, Taylor Hutton, but tell everybody who you really are.
[1:25]Dada.
[1:26]I have written a bunch of books for adults and young adults and middle grade, but this
[1:30]is my first jointly written novel and my first foray into Dark Romance.
[1:35]I'm Adele Griffin, and this is also my first foray into Dark Romance, though I also
[1:41]have written a bunch of books for middle grade and young adult and adult.
[1:47]We are mirrors.
[1:48]Yes.
[1:49]Kind of like the identical twins in the books, right?
[1:52]There you go.
[1:54]Both sides of the story.
[1:55]I'm a lot here.
[1:58]Okay, so first of all, how did the two of you team up?
[2:03]I saw that you dedicated this to Sarah Landowski, who is like, why am I even doing this podcast
[2:08]and who I love in a door?
[2:09]That's amazing.
[2:10]Did she pair you up?
[2:11]That's how you did the book?
[2:12]What happened?
[2:13]Sort of.
[2:14]So funny, Sarah is the starting point of so many creative, amazing productions in the
[2:20]world.
[2:21]Yeah, so she set us up as friends, not as co-writers.
[2:24]She's in Julie to sort of help me as I moved into LA, world as a mom, Julie had all the info.
[2:34]And so Sarah was like, this is your person.
[2:36]She is going to ease your transition from Brooklyn to living here.
[2:43]And that was true.
[2:44]Yeah.
[2:45]It was funny, Sarah had a very different conversation with me about me and Adele.
[2:49]Her conversation was Adele's moving to LA.
[2:52]You both are very deeply weird, but in different ways.
[2:56]But you will appreciate that deep weirdness about each other and understand that deep
[3:00]weirdness and you are going to love each other.
[3:02]And she was 100% right.
[3:03]100% right.
[3:04]Okay.
[3:05]It was like love at first sight.
[3:06]And then we started writing together, but not writing the same book together, just like
[3:11]getting together to write.
[3:12]And then one day we started chatting about a book idea and we did not know it would actually
[3:17]become a book.
[3:18]It was sort of, you know, writers just throw out ideas and chat about them and just have
[3:22]fun chasing down that rabbit hole.
[3:24]It was like building a recipe that we didn't know what it would taste like.
[3:27]We were like, what if, yeah, and it wrote this in, and we had no rules.
[3:32]It was just fun.
[3:35]And that was the first rule of it was one hour a day, pass it back and forth on our shared
[3:40]Google Doc untitled romance or whatever.
[3:44]We had decided to call it and you could work for an hour after your real work, sort
[3:51]of like Cinderella.
[3:52]After you really work.
[3:53]It's awesome.
[3:54]Oh, absolutely.
[3:55]Magic slippers.
[3:56]Just an hour.
[3:57]I found myself at 2 a.m. looking on my phone.
[3:59]I had put the Google doc into my phone so I could see if Julie had written anything new
[4:05]in the day I began to look so forward to what had happened in our book while I was
[4:12]while I was gone.
[4:13]That's so cool.
[4:14]What a fun way to do a project.
[4:17]I mean, and you can tell when you read something, when authors are enjoying writing it,
[4:21]right?
[4:22]There's just something intangible, but like something with the lightness or the energy,
[4:26]even in a dark romance, when like people are enjoying it versus like slogging out sentences
[4:32]that don't even need to be there.
[4:33]Yeah, exactly.
[4:34]Because we've been there too.
[4:36]Yeah, absolutely.
[4:37]And I think that's actually where this book came from is that we were there.
[4:41]I think both of us were starting to feel like our real work felt like work and one of
[4:44]the best parts of being a writer is that work doesn't feel like work, right?
[4:48]And so I think we were both like, we need a hobby.
[4:51]Like we need something fun to do.
[4:53]And since neither of us are people who could play pickleball, it's fun for the co-coordination
[4:58]for us.
[4:59]This felt like, you know, a great, just fun outlet.
[5:03]The fact that it became a book is sort of just gravy because it was more about the curious
[5:08]exercise, I think, than the actual book itself.
[5:11]Yeah.
[5:12]And I feel like that's the magic alchemy that makes it really fun.
[5:15]Like the book itself is fun because of it.
[5:17]So did each of you then write a chapter, essentially you're like a short, not even a
[5:21]chapter?
[5:22]No.
[5:23]We don't even know.
[5:24]The joke is we don't tailor hut and wrote the book because I'll go back through it and
[5:28]have no idea who wrote what?
[5:31]I mean, it's being such a blend of we have a joke that we're the mom of tailor hut
[5:37]and because she's this young, free spirited, dark romance writing also has a pseudonym
[5:44]doing her own thing.
[5:45]And then we're kind of looking at pages going, whoa, that's, that's a lot of, yeah,
[5:50]a lot of it.
[5:51]Wait, couldn't this tailor?
[5:53]So did you feel like you used the pseudonym to give you the freedom to just write sort
[5:57]out of character in a way or like, did you consider using your real names?
[6:01]We never considered using our real names, mostly because I don't think we feel like we
[6:04]wrote it.
[6:05]I mean, I feel exactly the same way.
[6:06]I mean, when I was working on it, I always felt like I was writing for an audience of
[6:10]one, which is a Dell.
[6:12]And I think Dell felt the same way.
[6:13]Like we were writing to each other, purely for each other's entertainment.
[6:16]And this one is great.
[6:17]It really was like eighth grade passing the notebook back and forth.
[6:21]And so when it came time to actually like when we actually were like, whoa, we did write
[6:25]a book.
[6:27]And it happens to be in a business that we're already in.
[6:30]Yes.
[6:31]It happens to be funny.
[6:33]My hobby is actually my job.
[6:35]We wanted a name that felt really separate from us.
[6:41]We toyed with a pseudonym that was connected.
[6:44]That was, was AJ Windsor.
[6:46]So a Dal and Julie Windsor, which is a street that a Dal used to live on where most of the
[6:50]book was written.
[6:51]And then we felt like first of all, it felt a little royal, but also felt connected to
[6:54]us.
[6:55]Now Taylor is not at all connected to who we are as people.
[6:58]I mean, dark romance is also not connected to who we are as people.
[7:02]I love it.
[7:03]We'd love to writing it.
[7:04]But you know, knowing us, the last thing you'd think we'd write is dark romance.
[7:08]Like we should be writing cozy coffee shop, mystery, set on a rainy day and the second chance
[7:14]loves.
[7:15]Second chance love in Northern Ireland.
[7:16]You know, that kind of thing.
[7:17]Why?
[7:18]Why didn't we do that?
[7:19]We still don't know why we didn't do that.
[7:21]So Taylor had to be someone so different from us.
[7:24]And so it was, Taylor Swift was in her, you know, era's tour and she was everywhere.
[7:29]And we felt like we wanted the badass powerhouse of Taylor.
[7:33]And then like the old school glamour of having love it.
[7:36]Wow.
[7:37]Well, I mean, you realize that to people who are not writers, the idea that like you didn't
[7:41]write the book might not make sense.
[7:43]But I totally get what you're talking about, like it's such a freedom creativity.
[7:49]You can't explain it and especially collaborative creativity.
[7:54]Like what does that even mean?
[7:55]Where does that come from?
[7:56]How do you do it?
[7:57]So I appreciate the efforts to describe, but it's intangible.
[8:01]It's like one of those things.
[8:03]So I get it.
[8:04]I don't know if you feel this way.
[8:05]I don't know if you ever talked about this, but whenever my books come out, I feel like
[8:09]it's like my kid going off the college and I they're on their own now, not that when
[8:12]my kids go off the college, they'll be on their own.
[8:14]But you know what I mean?
[8:15]The idea that it no longer belongs to me.
[8:17]It's part of the world and the world has to receive it on its own two feet, et cetera.
[8:22]With this book, it's like five steps further where it's not only like it stands on its
[8:26]own, but it's like, I wonder who wrote this?
[8:29]It's the strangest separation between us and the book.
[8:33]Adele and I often fight will like read a not fight fight, but will like read a path passage
[8:37]and I'll be like, oh, Adele, that was totally you and she'd be like, no, that was you.
[8:41]And then we truly don't know who wrote it and we're like, oh Taylor, well, let's talk
[8:46]about the book itself.
[8:48]And by the way, the writing is great.
[8:50]It's propulsive and accessible and page churning and all the good things that you want
[8:56]out of writing like did not want to put it down like really great.
[9:00]A little funny right like and yet talking about really tough subjects as well.
[9:05]I mean, you're talking about like you open in the morgue and there's, you know, family
[9:10]violence and really tough scenes with their dad and you know, I mean, it's it's not
[9:16]light and fluffy all the time there's it's and I guess that's why you keep calling it
[9:20]dark romance.
[9:21]But talk about that, where did it and even just the whole premise of having an abusive
[9:28]relationship and always feeling scared and not knowing and even after maybe I won't give
[9:35]anything away, but even after things happen is the fear ever gone.
[9:41]And what does that mean?
[9:42]I mean, these are this is heavy.
[9:44]Yeah.
[9:45]Well, Julie was the one who kind of wanted to get into the, you know, she wrote just sort
[9:51]of the first piece of the backstory, you know, it just sort of arrived, Taylor.
[9:57]And I really connected to the way she had.
[10:00]been thinking of this backstory that sort of, you know,
[10:02]layered into the book because suddenly
[10:06]this over-the-top story had a real little, you know,
[10:11]family there and a real history and a sort of a why.
[10:15]Why had this all happened?
[10:16]And it was, I think, a great way of anchoring
[10:19]with that writing, something that made sense to us,
[10:23]both having been young adult, middle grade,
[10:26]writing a lot of young characters, the young family feels,
[10:31]you know, really synergized to the big book,
[10:36]but also felt like, oh, this is a great jumping off place.
[10:40]In my head, it felt great because suddenly
[10:43]these characters who I don't know,
[10:45]I would have completely related to,
[10:47]started to make sense as real characters in a book.
[10:50]And I think that was, it was a really smart call
[10:53]because it was sort of more how we both wrote,
[10:57]you know, that backstory feels, you know,
[10:59]it's really emotional, but it has more nuance
[11:03]than this front story that's kind of, you know,
[11:06]moving things forward, snapping things along.
[11:09]So I think it was helpful.
[11:11]Yeah, and I think it's our natural organic writing place
[11:14]for both of us.
[11:15]Dark romance is not, but sort of layered characters
[11:18]who make sense within this sort of larger fantastical world.
[11:22]I think we needed that grounding to understand them
[11:25]and accept them.
[11:25]I think there were two sort of motivations.
[11:27]I think that was sort of the writing motivation.
[11:30]I mean, just as us as writers, it just is how it sort of unfolded,
[11:33]but in terms of the characterization in the novel itself,
[11:37]we knew we were writing about two very broken people
[11:40]and their brokenness complementing each other
[11:43]and the sentence that comes from someone seeing your brokenness
[11:45]and loving you not only in spite of it, but because of it.
[11:48]And so we wanted to create these backstories
[11:50]that made that make sense.
[11:52]Adele and I talked a lot about this concept
[11:55]of tromanticie, which I think a del coin.
[11:58]I love that.
[11:59]That is good.
[12:00]And we don't mean fantasy as in, you know,
[12:02]dragons, forthwing fantasy.
[12:04]We mean fantasy as an aspirational, you know,
[12:07]the striking antihero billionaire who comes in
[12:11]and sort of rescues her while she rescues him.
[12:13]Like the fantastical elements.
[12:15]Wait, what about, what about Trump come?
[12:17]Is that a thing?
[12:18]Trump works too.
[12:20]Oh, I love that.
[12:22]But I feel like our book is less common more wrong,
[12:25]but I want to write a Trump now.
[12:27]Right?
[12:28]I feel like, all right, I'm going to write it down.
[12:30]I just like to say for the record,
[12:32]I coined that on this call.
[12:33]There it is.
[12:34]Time stamp.
[12:35]I think it's going to be a Google Doc later
[12:37]because you have so much free time.
[12:42]Honestly, that's it.
[12:42]No, but that sounds like fun.
[12:44]You know, when you, well, anyway,
[12:46]in fact, that's factored process.
[12:47]I'm a total Trump come coming to your inbox later.
[12:50]I didn't see some of the how the magic happens.
[12:52]Like, okay, actually the title could actually just be Trump come.
[12:55]Oh, my God.
[12:56]Yes.
[12:57]This is why you're a publisher.
[13:02]It's a really good idea.
[13:03]Seriously, you're packaging this right now right?
[13:04]Yes, I am.
[13:05]Yes, I am.
[13:06]I'm writing it down in a sticky for the wall of ideas to come.
[13:09]But the idea for us with command to see was using the fantastical elements
[13:15]or this propulsive, juicy love story to allow people
[13:19]to process trauma.
[13:20]I think people see themselves in these characters
[13:23]and then get to go on this journey where they find love,
[13:26]where they deal with their trauma in ways they probably
[13:28]can't in real life.
[13:29]And hopefully the ideas that this sort of escape is kind of healing.
[13:34]Yeah.
[13:34]Well, what do you, what do you do with all the loss?
[13:38]Right?
[13:38]The backstory there is so much loss already when Taylor meets,
[13:43]you know, when she goes off on her journey, right?
[13:46]She's lost her brother and her parents and now her sister, right?
[13:51]And then she's like, I know I should be like on the app stating,
[13:54]but like who is this guy and all of that.
[13:57]But like to take all of that with you and then to be in the room.
[14:02]And I know this is just one scene and, you know, whatever.
[14:05]But how do you, how do you even like put one step ahead of each other?
[14:10]Because she seems fairly like together.
[14:13]Like she's, she's doing things.
[14:15]She's, she's functioning.
[14:17]I mean, all of that, which is impressive in a way,
[14:20]not to judge responses to loss and trauma.
[14:23]But there's so much trauma in the world right now
[14:25]and is Taylor a model for how to get through?
[14:28]What can we take from her to help everybody who is going through a trauma or a loss?
[14:33]Well, I think Julie had a thing.
[14:35]She said, you know, you can always turn everything up to 11 in this book
[14:39]because then you're sort of like safely in the world of something that isn't quite,
[14:44]you know, it's like reality plus anchor there.
[14:48]And then for somebody who is sort of able to read and absorb these big things,
[14:55]it also feels like you're almost safely in the fantasy of the book.
[15:00]You know, it's almost, it's meaningful to feel like, wow, this is so amplified
[15:06]that I can find my own thing.
[15:08]But you know, I'm experiencing something, but look over here at her,
[15:12]look over here at this.
[15:14]And it's like you're sort of rowing your little boat through their story
[15:18]in some ways that can make a reading feel a little bit sort of safer.
[15:24]Yeah.
[15:25]It's true. Like the idea that we could have had her, you know, appearance
[15:29]and just use for which would have been a devastating loss.
[15:32]Right.
[15:32]Yeah, but that would have been a seven.
[15:34]And we were, we were aiming for 11.
[15:36]And I think there is this sort of comfort in reading someone's story,
[15:39]which is just so devastating.
[15:42]Yeah.
[15:42]That provides, you know, it sounds bizarre that the harshness of it provides comfort,
[15:46]but I think it might.
[15:47]Mm-hmm.
[15:48]It's like Jane Eyre.
[15:50]Yeah.
[15:51]It is.
[15:52]It's not quite.
[15:53]Jane Eyre.
[15:54]I remember reading Jane Eyre.
[15:57]Yeah.
[15:58]When I got to the part about the cat.
[16:02]Oh, my God.
[16:03]Like, I was like, stop.
[16:06]I'm really telling about that.
[16:09]Okay.
[16:10]So it's a really good question because that was one of those scenes where we.
[16:14]Okay.
[16:15]So we said we're going to turn it up to 11.
[16:16]And we had a rule that there was no, no such thing as too far.
[16:19]We can go as which.
[16:20]And with every single scene we actually did sit and every almost every line,
[16:25]we discussed like how can we push this further?
[16:28]Right.
[16:28]If it was a sad scene, how can we make this sadder?
[16:30]If it was an emotional scene, how can we make them feel more heightened or more passionate?
[16:34]If it was a sexy scene, how can we make this sexier?
[16:36]Right.
[16:37]Everything was turned.
[16:38]The dial was turned as high as it would go with the cat.
[16:41]We turned it really high and it was the only time where we're like, let's turn this back
[16:46]just.
[16:47]If you can imagine, we turned it down.
[16:50]We had spatch cocked the cat.
[16:52]Oh, stuff.
[16:54]And had the bad guy Troy deliver the carcass of the cat on a platter for her to eat with it's spatch cocked.
[17:04]And almost goes to a place where.
[17:08]It's just far.
[17:10]Yeah.
[17:11]It was far as opposed to too far.
[17:13]It's supposed to enjoying the 11 that was first.
[17:16]And we were like, okay, yes, there's some can't be elements, but this is this is true camp and that's not what we're doing.
[17:21]so we had a, we had a dial that back.
[17:23]I can't remember who was responsible for the spatch cocked cat.
[17:27]It's just the event.
[17:28]Yeah.
[17:29]And I'm a suspect might be me.
[17:32]I don't know.
[17:34]I also love just her abundant curiosity when she starts getting into, you know, this guy, right?
[17:42]And starts working there and all that.
[17:44]And yet just like what is his life?
[17:46]Like what it's like that when you can't stop thinking about somebody and you just need to
[17:50]know a little bit more and a little bit more and all of that.
[17:53]Like that's hard to convey in a book.
[17:56]Right.
[17:57]I think it mirrored our own curiosity.
[17:59]Like this book.
[18:00]We both approached with just pure joy and curiosity.
[18:04]Like we just wanted to know more and more and more.
[18:06]I want to know more and more about what Adele was thinking and what she was going to relax.
[18:09]And I think hopefully she felt the same way.
[18:11]And I totally agree with that.
[18:13]And I think there is also something really interesting about sort of in the profile of
[18:17]Taylor Hutton.
[18:18]Taylor Hutton is young.
[18:19]So, you know, she's not someone who's been saying, take out the trash.
[18:23]You know, like with her, Taylor is young.
[18:26]And the character is young.
[18:28]And so the romance had to be that kind of, I can't get this guy out of my mind.
[18:36]Or ever, which feels more like a 25 year old author.
[18:40]In some ways, you know, that was the energy of the story.
[18:43]You know, think of Taylor at 3 a.m.
[18:46]Just like, I got to finish the scene.
[18:48]It's got me so nuts.
[18:51]And that was sort of us.
[18:52]We're racial for us who both of us.
[18:53]I mean, I spend a lot of time yelling at my husband about leaving his socks on the floor.
[18:56]Right.
[18:57]So, to be able to escape that and be Taylor and actually be, you know, over the top in love.
[19:03]And, you know, excited and curious about someone new and mysterious was just a delight.
[19:10]It was like a reconnection with our younger writing selves too, I think, which also felt sort of heady, you know, I think we got excited.
[19:21]And then we had Taylor could get excited.
[19:23]And then we were talking about something where you could get, you know, if you could really feel the zing.
[19:30]It's what's interesting, though, is we're both like super reliable hardcore worker industrious.
[19:37]The skaters.
[19:38]Listen, like we're just pretty type A. So we brought that type A industrious.
[19:43]And like we always felt like we need to be stewards of the book.
[19:45]And I think bringing that energy matched with the adventure of it all sort of work together to make a book actually happen.
[19:53]And if you only had that curious energy and didn't bring the sort of, I don't know, responsible mom part.
[20:00]like the bullet list. All new things we need to address on this book. Yes, you love.
[20:03]I did. I always made the lists. Have you started writing another one? Are you going to do another
[20:09]one? There's another one coming out next January. It's a wrong ready. Oh my gosh. It's called
[20:15]accent grind. It's a companion novel about two characters who are in striking burn and their story.
[20:21]Oh, yes. Another dark romance. Wow. Yes. He is like the funny accent. Doesn't he have an accent?
[20:28]Yes. Yes. He has a sexy Scottish accent. Sexy Scottish. Okay. Right. I made it down
[20:34]to all the brogue stuff. I'm like, I can't. When you say adult can do nice and like wobbling.
[20:41]Well, that's exciting. So you have another one, which is that's super clever. Love that
[20:46]continuation ish. And then what about your real work quote unquote? Do you have other books that
[20:52]you've written individually that are in the works or coming out? What's the status there?
[20:56]I have the fourth area, 51 files, which is my middle grade series. Great to 12-year-olds coming
[21:02]out this summer. Okay. As far from striking burn as you can get, I mean, it's like a silly
[21:10]area 51 alien farting fun kids, but like a true kids book. And I am also working on an adult novel
[21:18]that is just, you know, kicking my interests. I have an adult novel and just finished a first draft.
[21:27]So it's, you know, has to go live somewhere apart from me for a while while the dust settles on all
[21:34]that feeling, all that first draft feeling. But it is older characters. It's sort of a second chance
[21:40]romance. Oh, love it. Amazing. Awesome. Well, I'm so inspired by this project. It sounds so fun.
[21:50]I'm like, who can I write a book with for an hour a day and have as much fun as the two of you have?
[21:55]So and it came out great. And I'm just, you know, it's awesome. Creativity is like,
[22:04]what's that expression? Like capturing something in a bottle, like magic in a bottle, you know,
[22:07]it's like you kind of do something like that. Anyway, all of a sudden, yeah, it's like it's
[22:12]crazy, all of me. Yeah, crazy, all of a me. Yeah, or maybe the secrets just knowing Sarah and having
[22:17]Sarah, it's just, it is. And all of us. Sarah, what do I need? The magic Sarah want. I love it.
[22:24]Congratulations. And thanks so much for coming on. Thank you. Thank you. Okay. Okay. Finally. Okay.
[22:31]Thank you for listening to totally booked with Zibi formerly mom's don't have time to read books.
[22:36]If you loved the show, tell a friend, leave a review, follow me on Instagram at Zibi Owens,
[22:42]and spread the word. Thanks so much. Go and buy the books.