Messy
Now that Brooke Berlin's caught a taste of fame and her movie star father's attention, she wants to launch a blog that will position her as the ultimate Hollywood insider. But between schoolwork, party-planning committee meetings, and spa treatments, she hardly has the time to write it herselfÂ…
Enter Max McCormack, an aspiring author with a terrible after-school job pushing faux meat on the macrobiotic masses of La-La Land. Max reluctantly agrees to play Brooke's ghost-blogger for an impressive salary, and the site takes off, but how long can their lie last? In person, Brooke can't live up to the intellectual wit of openbrooke.com, and Max soon begins to resent hiding her genius behind a bandage-dress-wearing blonde. Can the girls work together to stay on top, or will the truth come out and ruin everything they've built?
Read our interview with Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan for Spoiled: http://www.girl.com.au/spoiled-interview
Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan are Los Angeles fashion writers and the founders of GoFugYourself.com, which draws an average of four million readers a month and has been called one of the "Most Powerful Blogs in the World" by InStyle UK, in addition to being ranked #13 on its list of the best online fashion blogs. GoFugYourself is also ranked #36 on Technorati's "100 Biggest Blogs". The blog has been included in top web lists for Time.com, Entertainment Weekly, The Sunday Times, and The Guardian, and has been featured in top US and international newspapers and magazines.
Heather and Jessica have appeared on the TV Guide Channel, E!, Oxygen, and the BBC. They have a large media presence in Australia, having been featured in Girlfriend magazine, The Canberra Times, Grazia Australia, and CLEO; over 160,000 Australians visit their site each month.
Messy
Allen and Unwin
Authors: Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan
ISBN: 9781742379760
Price: $16.99
Interview with Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan
Question: Who inspired the character of Max McCormack?
Heather Cocks: I like to think of her as everyone's ID.
Jessica Morgan: Max is the cranky misanthrope that lives within us all - everyone, after all, has times when they sort of feel like they hate everyone, and times when they feel left out. She does not suffer fools gladly.
Question: How did you find time to write Messy whilst still working on GoFugYourself?
Heather Cocks: It helped that we had written Spoiled under similar circumstances, so knowing we'd managed to pull it out of a hat once gave us confidence that we'd be able to do it again. The nice thing about our day job, too, is that we don't have to do it all during regular office hours. So although it makes for long days, we can spread out what we do and when we do it, and still be in the comfort of our own homes. We also had a very detailed outline so that Jessica and I could be working on chapters independently of each other, which sped up the process considerably because it meant neither of us was ever idle.
Jessica Morgan: Well, we basically just made time. Luckily, there are two of us, so when one of us needed the time to work on the book, the other could man the fort at the site. But there was a lot of late nights and weekends writing, that is for sure.
Question: openbrooke.com is currently under construction - will we see a site built on this domain?
Heather Cocks: We'd love to do something with it. Stay tuned...
Jessica Morgan: Wouldn't that be fun? I wish I had been organised enough to have made that happen. Although I'm sure Brooke Berlin herself had it percolating Under Construction for a VERY long time.
Question: How important was it to you, to have Messy as hilarious (if not more) as Spoiled?
Heather Cocks: We just would've hated to let anyone down who enjoyed the first one, and of course if anyone secretly hated the first one we'd love to win them over. All our site readers are so supportive, we don't ever want them to feel they wasted their money on us.
Jessica Morgan: Extremely important! I think every writer hopes that her most recent book is her best book - you always want to do better, funnier, more adept work.
Question: Will there be another book to follow on from Brooke Berlin's Messy adventure?
Heather Cocks: If you will it, perhaps it will come. So if there's demand, we'd lovingly supply.
Jessica Morgan: We don't know yet! We are working on a few other projects at the moment, so we'll see which one actually comes to fruition. Cross your fingers!
