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First Draft Episode #323: Christine Riccio
September 16, 2021
Christine Riccio, New York Times bestselling author of Again, But Better and Better Together and creative force behind PolandBananasBooks, her BookTube channel with more than 400,000 subscribers, and co-host of Booksplosion, the largest book club on YouTube.
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Welcome to First Draft with me, Sarah Enni. This week, I'm talking to Christine Riccio, New York Times bestselling author of Again, But Better and Better Together. She's also the creative force behind PolandBananasBooks, her BookTube channel, which has more than 400,000 subscribers. And Christine is the co-host of Booksplosion, the largest YA book club on YouTube.
I really enjoyed this conversation with Christine. I loved what she had to say about her journey to finding a book loving community on the internet, on the really tricky navigation from internet creator to author in her own right, on discovering therapy post-debut, and on writing about dark subjects with a light tone, that's trickier than it seems.
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Okay. Now please sit back, relax and enjoy my conversation with Christine Riccio.
Sarah Enni: Hi, Christine, how are you doing this morning?
Christine Riccio: Hi, I'm good. How are you doing?
Sarah Enni: I'm doing so well. I am so excited to talk today. We got to talk for the Track Changes mini-series, where you shared a lot of your perspective on book marketing and talking about how people can interact with bookstagrammers and booktubers and what that experience is like.
But today we get to talk about you as an author, which I am so excited about. We're gonna talk about Better Together and Again, But Better. But first I love to get a little bit more background and bio on my guests. So we're gonna go way back and I'd love to hear about where you were born and raised.
Christine Riccio: I was born in New Jersey, in Livingston, New Jersey, just a random town. So I'm a Jersey girl and I guess my accent has kind of waned living in California for the last, almost eight years.
Sarah Enni: I'm really interested in how reading and writing was a part of growing up for you. But also I know that you went to college and focused on screenwriting. So I'd love to hear about how that was part of your creative process as a young person.
Christine Riccio: Yes, so reading and writing was my escape from the family drama in my life and none of my family read and no one understood me. I just felt really isolated in that way, because reading was so uncool in the time of growing up in like the nineties and early two thousands. I was that nerd girl who was reading during study hall or lunch.
And writing was always so much fun. At sleepovers, my best friend and I, we'd always write a story together. It's so weird now looking back at it, but it'd be like, "1:00 AM it's time to write our story," in third and fourth grade. So yeah, reading and writing was just always this really, really fun escape for me. And I never thought of it as something that I could ever possibly do as a job because of how the people around me saw it as something silly and something that I should kind of put aside to do other things.
And it wasn't until I was in high school and I was trying to figure out what I'm gonna do, because everyone's like, "What are you gonna do? What are you gonna do?" And I'm like, "I have no idea." I realized that film is something that I can do. It's something you can major in. And so once I applied to major in film and then got to college, I realized my favorite part of this process is the writing part where I'm alone.
Cause you try all the different classes. You have to take the basic classes in every kind of facet of film. And the production part really stressed me out being around so many people and like, "Oh my gosh, what if I let them down and I make one mistake and I ruin everything?"
So I started cornering myself into this screenwriting area and taking more of those classes. And I had such a great time. They were my favorite classes. Whenever I could take a writing class, like in high school they had one creative writing elective, and it was the best. And at that time I just didn't believe that I had the capacity to write an entire book. I mean, now it sounds silly, but back then I was just like, "I'll never be able to write an entire book."
Because my whole childhood, I was completely obsessed with Harry Potter. And it was very intimidating to think that that was what a book was, you know? You had to create an entire universe and think of all these intricacies of the universe and I just felt very intimidated by that. When I went into college I was like, "Well, I can write a script. I can handle that many pages."
Sarah Enni: I want to talk about your college experience, just in that I know it was so pivotal for your debut novel. So I'd just love to hear about studying screenwriting, getting your feet wet creatively with that kind of writing. And also what that experience was like for you that obviously led later to your debut book.
Christine Riccio: The screenwriting were the classes in college that I had the most fun in. But most of my college experience, like the whole first two-and-a-half years, I felt very alone and very isolated. I only had acquaintances and I felt like I had nobody that I could just depend on while I was there. You know, you don't have a person you feel lost.
So the screenwriting classes, I took the majority of them in my last two years because you have to take all your foundation classes first. So I was just starting to get into that world in my junior year more intensely. I could take cooler, more focused screenwriting classes. But my study abroad experience is what really kick-started the idea for Again, But Better because I didn't realize at the time that I was so unhappy. It really takes time away from it, to realize how unhappy you were in the moment, but like how alone and unhappy I was.
And then when I did study abroad, it kind of turned everything around for me because I was so afraid to do anything and then I pushed myself to go to this other country. And I went being like, "Okay, you have to make friends here. So you have to talk to people." And I'm not good at that, I'm very introverted. And I always had a hard time putting myself out there and making friends. I would always just choose to be like, "I'll just stay here with my book and it'll be fine."
But there comes a point where it's like, "This isn't working for you." Like, "You've gone nowhere. You don't have any close friends." It was just very sad. So I went to London. And I applied to the program because all of my acquaintances that I did have, were going abroad. And I was like, "I'm not gonna know anybody. So I have to try and do something different."
And I want to look back at my college years and be like, "That was the best time ever." Like everyone always told me growing up, "You're gonna love college. It's gonna be the best four years of your life." And I was there being like, "This is terrible! I don't talk to anyone!" I was in a dorm apartment alone because my roommates had gone on to room in a double by themselves, cause in a quad and then a triple.
So I was just like, "I'm not even living with someone." So that's when I actually got more into reading, not like I wasn't reading before, but I got into it intensely. I was reading books every two days. And I was making videos about all those books and that's how my YouTube channel really got started. You have to be super lonely and have a lot of time on your hands with no friends to talk to, to really fall into the YouTube hole.
And I'm really grateful for that in the long run, because it again, changed the course of my entire life. And then I went abroad and that's when I started being able to post weekly on my YouTube channel because I felt like I had something to talk about that was interesting. It was really a time where my YouTube channel started moving.
Again, I made friends and we traveled. We did like the college travel thing where you go on the weekend and you stay in a hostel and you see all this different stuff. It was amazing. And then I came home feeling like, "I can do anything by myself."
And having that confidence allows you to do so many different things. It just opens up so many doors. I, all of a sudden, was like, "Okay, I'll go to this YouTube convention on the other side of the country by myself. I'll talk to someone in a chat room and we'll room together." My whole worldview flipped around in the best way. And my senior year of college was the best year ever cause I had these really great friends and I ended up rooming with one of them and just had the best time.
Sarah Enni: I love it. Let's talk about the evolution of Poland Writing Books, er...
Christine Riccio: PolandBananasBooks. It's an annoying name, I'm sorry.
Sarah Enni: No, that's okay. I want to talk about the rise of PolandBananasBooks and then come back to, Again, But Better because I love to hear about how the writing process impacted the channel and all that kind of stuff. But can you give us a little bit of the origin story of your book specific channel and how it grew and evolved over time?
Christine Riccio: So I am Booktuber originally. And my regular YouTube channel started because I wanted to get into film, and I wanted to practice editing and making videos. And I was making little music videos, but of course I was reading tons of books and I was like, "Oh my God, I have nobody to talk about these with, I really want to find some reader friends. Maybe I can find them on the internet." So I was like, "Maybe I'll start making videos talking about the books I read."
I posted my first video talking to the camera and it was about books and I felt so awkward. And I posted on my regular channel where I usually posted music videos. And I was like, "Hi! This is my first B-log. I don't know if you're gonna like this but I like books." I started posting those in-between music video stuff.
And then I created the second channel, PolandBananasBooks, so I wouldn't have to worry about people who are there for my music videos and unsubscribing because of the books. And I would sporadically post on that book channel until I graduated in 2012. And I was working an internship where I did the phones and there wasn't much for me to do in between phone calls. So I had my iPad propped up against the computer and I would read. I would finish a book every two days and I would go home and record a video and post it.
And that's when that channel really started to flourish because I was reading at least two books a week. You really have to be posting, at that time, really consistently for your channel to start moving. And then eventually I balanced both channels, the music videos turned into a comedy channel, and the comedy channel and the book channel, for like two years until the book channel surpassed the comedy channel.
It's really hard to balance two YouTube channels. And at a certain point I just had to start using the book channel and I'd post anything on there. But again, it opened this huge community of people who loved reading into my world, and it changed my life for the better, in so many ways. I always knew I wanted to be a writer, but when you graduate college and you're like, "I want to write a book." You can't just do that because you need to make money.
And there's no guarantee that your book's gonna go anywhere. And since my YouTube was growing at the time I graduated, I was like, "Okay, let me try to turn this into my job. And then maybe I can do that while I write. And then I will have some sort of platform to share what I make."
Sarah Enni: I really admire how entrepreneurial you've been with your channel and how you have sort of professionalized it and really were at the forefront of working with publishers and showing publishing how YouTube could be a good place for books and a great community for readers. I would love to just hear a little bit about that.
We talked about it a bit when we spoke for Track Changes, but not all of that got to make it to the episode. So I'd love to hear you talk about the origin of you being like, "Listen publishing, get on this train." I'd love to just hear about how you developed that. And it really became something that you were committed to and working on full-time for many years.
Christine Riccio: I was watching all these other YouTubers, those up-and-coming YouTubers, work with different companies. And specifically, there was this Ford Fiesta campaign at the time, which I've now learned was like one of the most successful, first influencer campaigns. So one of my viewers, I was talking to her, and she said that they talked about it in her marketing class about how successful it was.
And I was like, "That's so insane to me, cause they never shared that with us." So I applied to be a Ford Fiesta agent at the time. And what you do is, they give you a car for a year and they pay for the gas and you make a video featuring their car, or using one of their prompts, every month. So I was doing that. I had watched people do that.
They had done one round of it before me and there was other sponsorships starting to happen and I was like, "Wait a minute. I'm always making videos of books. I love reading. I should be working with the publishing industry." Like, "They should utilize us to help get the word out about new books that we'll like, and our audience will like."
So Penguin, I think, reached out to me at the end of 2013. And so I was like, "Oh my gosh, Penguin wants to talk to me. I'm gonna put together a presentation about BookTube to pitch this." As people who can help them promote their books and collaborate in a way that maybe you could make it so that this channel becomes a job. Because obviously publishing is the industry to collaborate with. I can't just get random sponsorships for the book channel like I was watching other vloggers do.
So I put together a whole PowerPoint and then I reached out to three other publishing companies. I went in for meetings with them and talked to them about BookTube and how they can collaborate with us. And Booksplosion had our first sponsored book-of-the-month, I think, in May of 2014.
And then from there I've been part of Booksplosion, which is the book club that I co-host with Katytastic and Jesse the Reader. And we collaborate with publishing companies all the time. It's really great. It's really fun for us. We get to talk about a book together, which it gets harder and harder as you get older, to read with your friends. And so it's so much fun to be able to do that and to be able to collaborate with publishers.
Sarah Enni: You have done all this work to grow this massive following, you are at, I think, nearly half-a-million followers on your personal channel. And you had always been thinking that you would do it as a way to platform your own writing. Were you writing during that time, or what brought you back to it? How was your creative expression in that way, a part of your life then?
Christine Riccio: Well, um, I feel like there's so much in that question.
Sarah Enni: I know, there really was. Sorry.
Christine Riccio: So, I was writing comedy sketches and stuff during that time, like from 2011 where I really started building YouTube and then to 2014, where I finally felt like I had built this into a job. And so though it wasn't like I was never writing, I was just writing short, comedic bits.
Then I was creating those videos and those videos take a lot of creative energy. Now I can't do that because I'm putting all my energy into writing my book and working on other writing projects. All my creative energy was going into those comedy videos back then, or just going into maintaining Booksplosion.
And in the beginning, you have to do so much upkeep all the time. And now we've built a foundation there and it's just more casual. But back then, everything I had was going into Booksplosion and making sure the videos go up on a timely manner. Now I've had to loosen the reins on myself in that direction and just let myself do the writing.
But once I felt like I had built YouTube into a job at like the end of 2014, no, it was the end of 2015. Sorry, I'm off my timeline. End of 2015, that's when I started. 2016 was when I wrote Again, But Better.
Sarah Enni: Actually, before we get into a little bit more about Again, But Better, would you mind giving us the pitch for that book?
Christine Riccio: So Again, But Better is about a 20-year-old girl that feels like she's done college wrong. She's got really good grades, but she went to college and picked the major that her parents wanted her to pick. She devoted all her time to her studies, she went home on the weekends because she didn't really have friends at school. And so she didn't get any of the college experience and she's determined to do college again, but better.
And the way that she's gonna do that is sign up for this study abroad program in London and just have a fresh start in a new place and have adventures and make friends and encounter romance, hopefully, because she's had none of that.
She's pre-med and her parents are so excited about her being a doctor, but she actually signs up for a creative writing program and internship in London and does not tell her parents, because she knows that they would not let her do it, but she needs to. It's something that she needs to do. And it's the first rebellious thing she's ever done.
And it'll eventually come to bite her in the ass, but she's gonna have a really fun adventure. And it's, it's a romcom coming-of age-story. It's super light-hearted and really fun. I don't want to say like, "Millennial follow your dreams," sort of themed. But I think that's a really strong theme coming through.
Sarah Enni: Thank you. That's kind of setting the stage for talking about this book, which was obviously really personal. In some of your videos where you talk about your writing experience, you did say that the writing of Again, But Better, was therapeutic and kind of a cathartic experience for you.
I'd love to just hear about the actual writing experience and also how you decided to portray that on your channel and let your viewers in on what you were doing.
Christine Riccio: So I had a writing series, I mean, I still do it, but not as consistently as for Again, But Better. I would make videos every two weeks about where I am in the writing process. And the actual writing of the first draft of Again, But Better was so much fun. I was just having the time of my life doing this story and it's a wish fulfillment story so those are so fun.
And it was so cathartic to go back to that time where I felt like, knowing that so many of the people were in the same boat, like I've met so many young women who have talked to me and been in the same boat. And so I started to go back and put into words the advice that I'd been trying to give out. To put that down and go back and kind of re-experience this really fun, amazing pivotal lifetime was so much fun.
It was so nostalgic and it was nice to get those feelings cemented into writing so I would never forget them. Because even now, I don't think I'd be able to write Again, But Better the same way as I did when I was 25, because I still had all those feelings, so fresh. And now I've gone through more life experiences and it's just faded a bit. It's not as bubbly in me. I was able to slip right back into my 20-year-old mindset and get all that down.
Sarah Enni: As far as sharing yourself as a writer on your channel, cause I know when we spoke before you were talking about that being a real time, when you had to sort of step away from the schedule that had existed for YouTube.
So I'd just love to hear about that side of it. Looking at your schedule, really making sure you had time to do what you needed to do. And also maybe rethinking your relationship to number of videos. I mean, that's just a real process when it's your job to think about how to change that.
Christine Riccio: Yeah. I was posting three videos a week at that time before I started writing. And then in 2016 I was like, "Okay, you're allowed to post one video a week."
Sarah Enni: That's significant.
Christine Riccio: It is. And I think I was still probably posting two videos a week for a while until I went on submission and the book kind of started with the publishing deadline. That's when it really started to get hard to balance YouTube and writing. And I really had to be like, "Okay, you want to be a writer. So you have to put this aside." But YouTube feels like this responsibility that I don't want to let go, but I have to put it more on the back burner. I have to be okay with it, even though I spent so much time building it.
Sarah Enni: Right, and part of the reason why I'm asking is because this is really significant. I'm aware that, especially at that time, I think the algorithm is different now, or the incentives are different, I'm not sure you can tell me. But at that time you were going down to one video a week is gonna significantly impact your channel and could put, to some extent, at risk what you just spent that much time building. So that is a real thing.
Christine Riccio: Yes, and honestly, it's unhealthy how focused I was on that algorithm. And still feel, from time-to-time, I just get really caught up in how it's not working for me because I'm not actively posting and not actively concentrating on meeting its needs. But I have other things going for me career-wise that I want to focus on and I have to just be okay with that. And that's one of the hardest things.
I'm very, very competitive with myself. I hate seeing any numbers slip but I'm like, "Okay, but you're putting a lot of effort into something else that's going to propel you in a different direction that you want to go in. So calm the heck down." But it's sad.
Sarah Enni: Well, it is sad. It's a shift, right? And, I mean, obviously these questions are coming from a place where I relate to this and I've been thinking a lot about it. And the way that I was thinking about it recently, because we can talk about 2020 in a minute, but that most intense pandemic year I was posting so many podcasts and doing Track Changes and all these things. And I was just running myself ragged doing it.
It was obviously a way for me to be distracted from all the horrible things that were happening, so it served its purpose. But at some point this year, I started to have to think like, "What looks sustainable for the podcast? What is a number of episodes a month that allow you to still have time to have friends? Write a book? Etcetera." And that was a real difficult negotiation internally.
Christine Riccio: Yes it totally is, because you worked so hard on your podcast. You don't want to do anything to pull away from it, to possibly hurt how it's going. And it's the same with the YouTube channel. And I kind of made my peace with it. It's been like a three year process. I still hate that I can't post every week, though. I don't like it.
I remember the first week I didn't post that week, I felt nauseous. I was like, "Oh my god, what is wrong with you? You're letting down yourself more than anyone else." Cause from like 2011 through the end of 2015, I posted every single Tuesday, like at least Tuesday. And to let that go it's just like, "You did this for years. How could you let it go?"
Sarah Enni: It's a big shift. It's a life shift, right? It's a new phase.
Christine Riccio: But again, you want to have it there because you know that this audience supports you and you want to keep them aware of you. You wanna be in their radar so that when you have your new book, they know about it.
Sarah Enni: Well, thank you for sharing that. Cause I know that's kind of a niche set of issues too, but I very much relate to them. And I think people who are trying to create platforms to share their work and to let people into their process, will relate to that.
Sarah Enni: But I do really want to talk about Again, But Better in writing it and releasing it. We talked about how writing was really cathartic and you're passionate about it. What was the process of debuting like?
Christine Riccio: I always describe it as like Taylor Swift's 22, it's miserable and magical at the same time. It was obviously a dream come true. And the tour was just meeting all these readers and viewers who have been watching for so long, was so wonderful and something I will never forget. And I am just so grateful that I debuted in 2019. I feel just so sad for anyone releasing in 20 20. Oh my gosh.
But also, I had built my following on YouTube and there's such a stigma against just bloggers in general. I feel it's just like, "Oh, you do nothing and you get money for it." And it's like, "No, I have devoted so much time to this. I tried really hard to get to here." So there was just a lot of commentary being thrown at me that I wasn't ready for because I had looked at the book community as such a safe space for so long.
And it just became a space that I had to separate myself from. I can't sit in there and consume that content so much. I have to step out and take a little dip and leave. I can't be in there all the time, even BookTalk, now, I can't sit in there. It makes me anxious because my books are involved sometimes and I can't be in there for that. It's not healthy.
Sarah Enni: This is what we're talking about, again. And that's part of why I wanted to spend so much time talking about you as a creator of a platform for readers, and people who are engaging with books, is that then the transition to being a creator is not easy. People have a very strange double standard about that kind of thing.
And I know you encountered some of that as did Sasha Alsberg (New York Times bestselling co-author with Lindsay Cummings of Zenith: The Androma Saga series. Listen to their First Draft interview here. And creator of YouTube channel abookutopia) and these other people who came from the YouTube world, and actually did it. Which you would think would be an unmitigated success that everyone would be celebrating, but you go outside of the box that people have put you in and are punished for that.
Christine Riccio: People want to be able to categorize you as YouTuber and like, "That's it!" But if you look at YouTubers, people who started when I started, were like 19, 20 years old. So they wanted to do something and YouTube wasn't a known job. They had other dreams. And to want to box them into this internet job, that they obviously didn't even know it was gonna be a thing, for the rest of their lives it's sort of ridiculous when you think of it in those terms.
And there's this idea that because you're a YouTuber, you obviously can't do anything else, like you obviously aren't good at anything else and everything you do outside of that is crap. And it's so frustrating because there's so many people that went into Again, But Better, and I know because they told me, they wanted to scrutinize it in a way that you wouldn't do when you just pick up a book.
You don't go into it being like, "This person's a YouTuber, let's see how bad this is." Sort of a thing. If you go and do something with that mindset, it's so negative, you're gonna find stuff to tear apart. And I don't know what the think when people are like, "Oh my god, I thought this was gonna be terrible, but it was so great. I had such a fun time reading it." I'm like, "Okay, can you not tag me in that? It's not a compliment."
Sarah Enni: Right, right. Like, "That's not hitting the way you think it's hitting." I would love to hear about transitioning out. Again, But Better comes out and you sort of begin to look forward and start writing and thinking about the next book. Did you change anything about your life or relationship to the internet in order to keep doing what you wanted to do?
Christine Riccio: So I started going to therapy cause I was so anxious. I got really sick. Like physically, I was making myself sick all the time. So therapy has been so helpful.
Sarah Enni: I'm very pro therapy. I'm very happy to hear that.
Christine Riccio: Yes. And again, I can't live in the booktube world as much. I had to separate from that and go elsewhere for entertainment or to feel a community. I just can't be in there. I have to look outward in my physical world more. And going into Better Together, writing that book, I was going through this massive anxiety wave.
I had set these deadlines for myself because I knew I had this big official book deadline. For the first draft on like Again, But Better, I had all the time in the world for the first draft. And I didn't hit any of them because I was so crippled by all this. I got a lot of positivity, but it's the negativity that was on me all the time. I woke up thinking about it.
It just really took a toll, especially because I thought that this place was a safe place and it just felt like they turned on me when the book came out. I was like, "Oh, I thought we were all friends." And I just didn't know how that was going to be.
And again, until more Booktube people make the transition to different jobs, I feel like it will become less of a thing. But since it's new, people obviously are going to have a problem with it, that's just the way things work.
Sarah Enni: Right. You were on the forefront of people sort of branching out and doing different things.
Christine Riccio: I mean, it's gonna happen more and more. YouTube now started in 2005, so many people who were youths on that space are becoming adults and going into different jobs.
Sarah Enni: And that's also something that every creative, I don't know I mean, we're sort of in the middle of having this conversation in YA, specifically right now, as well. About what does it mean to be on social media all the time? And is that really good for your creativity and for the brain space that you need as a creative? Room to just think and to ideate, that's not exactly aligned with being on Twitter all day.
So that's very relatable. But let's talk about Better Together. In a minute I'll have you pitch the book formally, but I'd love to hear about when Again, But Better came out, did you already know what was coming next or what was the origin story of Better Together?
Christine Riccio: So in January of 2019, Again, But Better came out in May, I started thinking like, "What was my second book going to be?" And I knew that I really didn't want to write about divorce, but I wanted to write about characters who are around and living through their parent's really messy divorce and how that has affected their entire worldview.
Because I was living through that, since I was like 21, my parents have been in this terrible divorce. So that's something that I wanted to write about. Cause again, the cathartic experience you get when writing is like nothing else, it really helps you process things, and also relate to, and find people who are going through the same thing and make them feel less alone.
So I was like, "How do I do that in a fun way?" And I was re-watching - I don't know if I re-watched The Parent Trap (movie - 1961 and movie - 1998), or if that just popped into my head. I think it was just like thinking about divorce. And I was like, "Oh yeah, wait, The Parent Trap parents are divorced." And we don't even talk about the fact that they're divorced. And they just kind of decided to take a kid and leave the other kid with the other parent and never interact with them. That's so strange!
Sarah Enni: It's so wild.
Christine Riccio: It's so weird and pretty dark in the parental way, like that's a weird decision that you don't want to talk to your other kid for the rest of their life. And so I wanted to run with that idea and have like, "What if the girls were young women? And what if they didn't meet until they were young adults? And how would that change things?"
Sarah Enni: It might be a little repetitive, but I'm gonna ask you to do the formal pitch. Cause you just did a great job of kind of laying out what happens in the book. But if you have the elevator pitch hit us with it.
Christine Riccio: I mean, I kind of went through the elevator pitch. But basically it's these two young women they're going through their quarter-life crisis, which is like a thing now. But it wasn't really a thing when our parents were growing up. Like my mom was married by 22.
Sarah Enni: Yeah, they like literally have kids in the house by that age.
Christine Riccio: So it's that time like right after high school, or right after college, when you are so confused with what you're gonna do with your life. And maybe you thought you were gonna go down one path, but it's not working. This existential dread is with you every day about your future. And both of these young women are in that life period. And they've both been very affected by their parents' relationship, or lack thereof.
They're both encountering romance. And one of the sisters is super cynical about the whole idea of romance because of the way her dad has lived throughout her life. The other sister is just harboring a lot of anger. And she has grown up prepping to be a ballerina and she just had this career changing injury where she can't go back to dance, and she just feels like she's falling into a black hole because that's all she knows.
Her mother is a professional dancer and she always wanted to be just like her, and her whole identity has been thrown up in the air. They both end up at this retreat, this yoga retreat, it's called Rediscover Yourself, very on the nose. They run into each other there and things unravel from there. They obviously decide to switch places and it's a fun time.
Sarah Enni: I love that. Not only are you writing your follow-up book, which is universally a difficult thing to do. As you mentioned, having deadlines, and being anxious, and not necessarily abiding by them. But you were also writing it largely during the pandemic, or a large chunk of the writing was happening while we were all experiencing this very anxious time. What was it like to write this book? That sounds like it was really intense.
Christine Riccio: So, like I said, I had made my own deadlines. The publishing deadline was May 1st and I was like, "You have that first draft done by January so that you can go through it again and hopefully be done with the second draft, or even be working on the third, by the time you hand it in to them."
And I had like 40,000 words at the end of January and 40,000 words by like February 14th. And I was like, "Okay, you have to finish your first draft by March."
Sarah Enni: And your first drafts are long.
Christine Riccio: They're too long. Yes, they're very long. And so I was like, "Okay, you have 13 days to write..." not a hundred, did I say a hundred-thousand words? I don't know. I gave myself a goal that was unbelievably a lot, I think I was trying to hit a hundred-thousand words. So I was like, "60,000 words in 13 days." And then I ended up blowing way past that. And I did like 80,000 words in 13 days.
And the draft that I handed in on May 1st was like 165,000 words. It was insanity. But it all blew out of me at once. And I thrive on that sort of like crunch time when I need to. And doing the vlog of it made it more fun. And I started the second draft, I think, like the second week of March or something.
And of course that's when the quarantine happened and I had stopped there because I was going in person. And during that whole month I got so incredibly anxious, and I didn't even realize it until it was pointed out to me, by someone in my life. And I was like, "Oh, I need to start doing virtual."
And still, I think we were all just obsessively checking the news. I had to put blocks on Twitter and stuff. But even then you need to know because we were so lost with, "What is this plague? And how is it affecting everyone?"
Sarah Enni: I just had a therapy session recently where I was going back to June, it was on my birthday and I was like, "A year ago, June, 2020. What was it like?" And I was like, "Nope, no, thanks. Do not want to revisit. It wasn't pleasant. Didn't enjoy."
What was it like to explore your own personal experience with divorce? What was it like to explore that through these characters?
Christine Riccio: It was so heavy for me at times, but it didn't come on the page. It wasn't like they were going through what I was thinking about, but when I would go through their intense parent scenes, it was like I was reliving all these other scenes that I had lived. And so it made those really hard. I would stop for a bit and I would be like, "I have to come back to this because this just feels like a lot."
But I kept thinking that it was gonna be like a lot to read. And then I was like, "No, this is just like..." And my friend who read it first, she was like, "Christine, this is really lighthearted and fun." I was like, "What are you talking about? I took forever to write this scene because it was so heavy." She was like, "No." I was like, "This is so much heavier than Again, But Better." And she was like, "No, I think this might have more hi-jinks."
So yeah, it was a weird experience in that regard too, because I felt like it was so dark and then it really wasn't. It obviously is a little darker because of the themes and the stuff that the characters are going through are heavier, but it's not anywhere near where I was worried it was going to feel like. Because I want my books to be fun escape. I want them to be, you know, stuff that makes you laugh and all that.
Sarah Enni: But I think it’s a good sign because your desire was to have it on the page as light-hearted so that your readers could kind of breeze through it in the way that you wanted them to have that reading experience, but you have to engage with that material in an honest way. And that is darker almost universally, I think, darker.
Christine Riccio: Oh, of course. It just wasn't dark to the point where you wanted to stop reading, or I wanted to stop writing, that's what I was worried about. Because I want the readers to feel things and I want them to relate and feel like their experiences are experienced by other people. I just didn't want them to be like, "This is so upsetting. Bye."
Sarah Enni: What was it like to do the two points-of-view? I was watching the vlogs of your writing process and saw the numbers and I was like, "Oh, but she's got two points-of-view." So in some way it must've felt like writing two books that were just happening simultaneously.
Christine Riccio: It did, that's why it was so long. I was like, "How do people write multiple points-of-view? I need to have full arcs for both of these women." I didn't want them to feel like I was slighting any of them. So I think it really is two books because they're not together for the majority. After the first act, they're having their own journeys and they have their own romance lines and they don't come back together until the end of the book.
And it was really hard at first, because I felt all this pressure to make sure that they were both so different. So when you read their chapters, you don't ever get confused. But once I learned who they were more, and got into the second act, it was just very fun to have their really different worldviews and to be in their different heads.
It just was taxing all the time. It was like, "Oh my God, this book is getting too long. It's gonna be too long. Oh my god, it's gonna be like 200,000 words." The whole time I was stressing about that. Cause I already knew that I wrote long. Now it's two characters. I think my editor was stressed about that.
Sarah Enni: But I'm the kind of person that looks at a book like this and I'm like, "Yes, I just want like 400 pages." So I was very excited about it.
Christine Riccio: I love that too, especially in a contemporary, cause you always want a little bit more in a contemporary.
Sarah Enni: I'd love to hear about how the release of this book was different. Not only from a standpoint of actually promoting it, because of course the world is different now than it was in 2019, but emotionally, psychologically, anxiety-wise. How has it been for you?
Christine Riccio: The quarantine played a big factor. At first, when January hit and I realized that it's probably gonna be a virtual release, I went through this whole mourning period, I was just so sad. I felt like it wasn't going to reach readers, and I wasn't going to be able to talk to people. It was such an amazing thrill to be able to go on tour and see people who had read the book and talk to them about it. And I was just so sad.
I wasn't going to get to give everyone hugs and I wasn't going to get to chat with everyone and all that. And then I kind of made my peace with it because, obviously, everyone else had been doing it and it had been going well and it should be fine.
But throughout the release week I was so much more stressed out. And the reasons kind of don't feel logical, because I just felt like I had no control over helping promote the book. And at the same time, I was like, "All you should be doing is promoting the book. So you have to do everything you possibly can online." And there's always something more you can do.
So you're always feeling like you're not doing enough but there's only so much you can do from your house alone. So I really didn't like it. I'm hoping that the next book can be in person. There's no release from that feeling because there's no time where you're with people. And even when you do your online events, it's so fun for an hour.
And then after that you're on this high, but there's no one to share it with. There's no people to talk to. You're just back in your apartment feeling like, "Oh my god, what do I have to do? Should I make another TikTok? Should I tweet another thing? Should I retweet like 50 other things?"
Sarah Enni: Right, there's this particular post-event energy that doesn't have anywhere to go.
Christine Riccio: And since you're not going anywhere, you have nothing to do but stare at the internet, or try to create more stuff to share about the book on the internet. You're just kind of stuck in this anxiety mindset. And I wasn't sick like I was with Again, But Better cause I can deal with the anxiety better because of all the therapy. That was great. But I just think, in general, I felt powerless and that's like one of my anxiety triggers.
Sarah Enni: Type A people being put in the position of not being able to control it. Not the most comfortable situation.
Christine Riccio: It's so hard to separate just the actual experience from the experience of quarantine because they're so tied together. So my mom came out to help me, which was really great cause I had the puppy and I didn't know how I was going to do all this with him around. And she was like my built-in puppy sitter at all times. And that was really nice.
And she made it more fun. If I didn't have her there, it would have been just like any other week. So more stressful. And it was nice to have like my family. I hadn't seen her since the beginning of the quarantine. So it was nice.
Sarah Enni: That's a good point. Like ways to still make it feel special and distinctive, even though we are forced to try to keep everyone safe. But you psychologically need to mark that time. Well, I'm glad that it was psychologically better for you. Again, couldn't be more of a fan of therapy, so I'm really glad that you had that going into this time. Cause it's very stressful.
I would love to hear about what you're working on next. And also, I don't know how many details you can share, but I would just love to hear what you think about your writing career. Books? Or maybe even more than books. What are you thinking about? What do you want to explore going forward?
Christine Riccio: I'm excited about book three. I'm going back to one point-of-view. I don't have to worry about the book being a hundred bajillion thousand words. Before this, I was like, "Maybe I'll do three." And then I wrote the second one and I was like, "No, you won't be able to give them the story that you want to." That's the thing, l want to give them all these full stories that are not rushed. I like to have really long talking scenes and I can't do that... add more points of view.
So I'm really excited to not have to worry so much about the stories being cut. I'm excited, she's like straight out of college and I feel like I can't really say anything.
Sarah Enni: That's okay. But it's a standalone, one point-of-view?
Christine Riccio: Yes, one point-of-view and it's really fun. I'm really excited about the pitch and the outline, but I can't share it cause it really gives away a lot of the plot. But I'm excited to talk about it when I can talk about it. It's something that I've wanted to write a story like this for a long time. So I think it'll be really fun to write. Just mapping it out, I was so excited like, "Oh my god, it's gonna be so fun to write."
And I'm gonna do some tropes that I haven't gotten to do which will be really fun. I haven't like gone forward with the first draft yet. I did the outline and I'm now working on a different writing project, which is a step away from this novel writing. But I can't talk about it yet either.
Sarah Enni: So that's why I was like, "Okay." I'm sure, without specifics, when you think about it, you've created this... and by the way, such an amazing achievement to create a YouTube channel that has so many followers. I don't think people understand how much time and dedication it takes to build something like that. And you've published two books. These are really, really big deal things.
So that's why I was just like, "Oh gosh, I wonder what she is thinking about?" Like diversifying. You're someone that has a lot of different interests and a lot of different ways you can express yourself. So without any specifics, what are you interested in exploring in your career as a writer?
Christine Riccio: Obviously I'm interested in exploring screenwriting. Obviously that's always been a thing that I want to do, so hopefully I'll explore that in the future. And yeah, I'm excited to see where the road takes me right now. I feel like I've transitioned more into the author title because I have the second book. People have accepted that more and I'm not as active on YouTube. So it just feels more like, "This is what she's doing."
Sarah Enni: I do want to ask that as a specific question. Cause I had the experience, and I shared this with you when we spoke before, but this didn't make episode. But when my first book came out, it was such a... my therapist and everyone told me like, "Don't expect it to solve your emotional life." And then it kind of did [both laugh].
It was just a validating experience in a way that I wasn't able to even anticipate. It was like, "Oh, I'm an author. This thing exists. It's real." And for you, I was thinking about how, because of the very specific nature of your debut, that people could, in a cruel way, write it off as a one-off. It clearly isn't any more.
So I wonder what that experience of having the second book and being like, "Ha-ha! I am doing this!" What was that feeling like?
Christine Riccio: It was really great to just hear people call me an author. Because a lot of times it would be like, "YouTuber who made a book". And when I talked to readers on one of the virtual events, you jump into chat rooms with everyone who's at the event thing. And a couple of girls were like, "Oh my god, you're my favorite author." And it was just kind of insane to me to hear that and very validating.
Because for so long it was like, "You're my favorite YouTuber. I love you and I love your videos." And I love that, obviously, but I want to be an author. And to be considered that, and called that, was just a very heartwarming experience. It's like, "Oh, it's happening! People are considering me an author."
Sarah Enni: This has been such a fun conversation. Thank you for going over so many different things with me. I love to wrap up with advice. So I'll do one as a marketing question and then one, let's start with the advice for people who write long, like yourself. I'm one of them. So this is a personal question.
But if you are someone who tends to write long, do you have advice for how to not necessarily stop doing that, but how to sort of embrace that, or think about that, cause it can be a little bit scary.
Christine Riccio: How long was your first draft for your first book?
Sarah Enni: Well, it's not as long as yours, but for a contemporary YA it was like 115 for a bit. I just got it down to more around a hundred. But at some point I was like, "I think just a lot happens in this book. I think it's just not gonna be [unintelligible].
Christine Riccio: I love writing long and just letting myself go in the first draft because even though it's stressful to cut it, eventually you will get it down. And now that I've done it, I believe that I will get it down. I mean, the second book, I got it down to 120 and that's what was published. And that's so long.
Sarah Enni: But that's pretty good from 160.
Christine Riccio: I mean, it was! I cut so much. But it was very stressful because they wanted it at a hundred thousand. And I was like, "Oh my gosh, I'm failing here." But for Again, But Better, I also had a draft that was 160 and I got it down to 110 and that was the final. So I know I can get it down.
And I also know that I learned so much about my character, by writing. In Better Together, I wrote all these flashback scenes that didn't need to be in the book, but in the first draft, they really helped me figure out where these characters are and how they react to things, and what their trauma comes from.
I think embrace the first draft and just write as much as you can and figure it out later. I think it's way better to have more than less. If you have a short draft, I don't know how people have short drafts, honestly! I don't get it! I can't figure it out. I really thought with the second book with the outline, I was like, "Oh yeah, I'm not gonna have that problem this time." Hello!
Sarah Enni: I just want to underline, I agree exactly with what you're saying. I just wrote long and I was like, "I just need to know. I need to know what happens." And whether or not the reader needs to know all this is for me to determine later. But for now it's like, "What's the backstory? What's their relationship? What kind of dialogue would they have with each other?" And then later you can just adjust.
Christine Riccio: Exactly.
Sarah Enni: Great, and then I would love just advice for someone who is looking to be the public face of their books. You and I both have done it in a little bit reverse order, but I still think we have a lot to say about what it means to be an effective marketer of your book, especially on the internet.
So I'd love any advice you have for someone who's looking at that for the first time.
Christine Riccio: That's a really good question. That's another big question because it is so hard to try to be creative and post stuff while you're writing the book. But I think once you have the book written and you're waiting for it to be published, that's the time to really start thinking about how you're gonna promote it and even creating content that you're gonna release closer to the book release and just have fun with it.
I wanted to start doing TikTok to help promote the book and just to get a following there because that's what's growing right now. And the night before the book came out, I learned this dance that I thought was really fun, and used that as a TikTok to like tell people what the book was about. It was really intense learning it, and to try to do in this short period of time, but also I'm so proud of that TikTok like, "I did it!"
I'm really excited about editing it because I got to edit a dance video, but it was for the book. Do stuff that makes you happy to promote the book. Start watching TikTok. That's another thing, I wasn't even watching them because I would get stuck in a whole bunch of TikToks for at least an hour. And I'm like, "I can't do this. I'll just get stuck in here." So I'd let myself have five minutes of TikTok and then go back to work.
But trying to make whatever your good at, or whatever you have fun doing, into a way to promote your book, in some sort of facet. There's some way that you can make it into a TikTok, or something, and have fun with what you're doing. You're excited about your book so people will see that.
Sarah Enni: Right, I love that. That's awesome advice. Well Christine, this has been so fun. Was there anything else you wanted to make sure we got to before we wrap up today?
Christine Riccio: No, I think we covered all the things. Thank you so much for having me. I'm sorry if I rambled weirdly about anything, it's been a long time since I've talked about the book now. I've been in a whirlwind of moving.
Sarah Enni: I know. I so appreciate it. Like I said, tangents are what we're all about here, so I appreciate it. And thank you for giving me so much time this morning. I really appreciate it.
Christine Riccio: Of course.
Thank you so much to Christine. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram @XtineMay and follow me on both @SarahEnni (Twitter and Instagram) and the show @FirstDraftPod (Twitter and Instagram).
by me, Sarah Enni. Today's episode was produced and sound designed by Callie Wright. The theme music is by Dan Bailey and the logo was designed by Collin Keith. Thanks to social media director, Jennifer Nkosi and transcriptionist-at-large Julie Anderson.
And as ever, thanks to you, twins swapped at birth, for listening.
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