Randee Dawn on The Inspiration for Tune in Tomorrow

Inspiration is a funny thing. It can come to us like a lightning bolt, through the lyrics of a song, or in the fog of a dream. Ask any writer where their stories come from and you’ll get a myriad of answers, and in that vein I created the WHAT (What the Hell Are you Thinking?) interview. 

Today’s guest for the WHAT is Randee Dawn, author of Tune in Tomorrow: The Curious, Calamitous, Cockamamie Story Of Starr Weatherby And The Greatest Mythic Reality Show Ever

Ideas for our books can come from just about anywhere, and sometimes even we can’t pinpoint exactly how or why. Did you have a specific origin point for your book?

Having worked at a soap opera magazine for many years, I’d toyed around with the idea of basing some kind of genre-based story at a soap – like a murder mystery. But I didn’t do much with it. Later on, I was asked to come up with some ideas for a text-based online game for Choice of Games, and one of the pitches was about an actress who comes onto a soap and finds all sorts of shenanigans and machinations backstage. That story didn’t pan out to be a game, but it did get me to outline the basics of Starr Weatherby’s tale – and I realized I could make it even more accessible and fun by making it based in a fantastic world where mythical creatures ran the show.

Once the original concept existed, how did you build a plot around it?

To me, it fell in place naturally. On the one hand, Tune in Tomorrow has some familiar tropes: The show veteran who worries about keeping her place, the hard-working underlings who know everything that’s going on, a show that’s teetering on cancellation, a scheming Lothario, a wide-eyed newcomer. But they all take unexpected turns when tossed into the stew of fantasy, where so many surprising things can go wrong. So the thread of the familiar led me into the story – Starr is hired, Starr has to fight to find her place on the show amid all the creatures and humans who might not want her there – but along the way the characters sent me in new directions thanks to their personalities and abilities. 

Have you ever had the plot firmly in place, only to find it changing as the story moved from your mind to paper?

Absolutely. I wanted it to be a funny book! The first draft or two I wrote were mildly amusing, but I needed to lean into the wackiness. I started looking at scenes and saying to myself, “That’s all nice and moves the plot and so forth, but how could it be wackier?” Then I took my own advice. I also had Starr falling into her romances earlier, but realized – with some beta reader help – that the true love affair she has is with the show, not one individual (or two individuals). That was a more interesting concept to develop, so I could pare down some of the overheated scenes and get to her finding out more about herself as she became part of the fabric of the show.

Do story ideas come to you often, or is fresh material hard to come by?

There is never a dearth of story ideas! It’s about how to implement the story idea. A great plot is one thing, but you have to start it, end it and populate it with fascinating characters people care about, or at least care about seeing how things end up for them. I have loads of ideas I only wish I had time to properly sit down and work through.

How do you choose which story to write next, if you’ve got more than one percolating?

Mostly it’s what interests me the most on any given day. Right now I’m in a strange place – a book out that could have a sequel (or at least a sequel set in the same world) or a new draft of a fresh novel I wrote during the pandemic. A lot will depend on how Tune in Tomorrow sells – if it does well and my publisher wants a follow-up, I’ll tackle that next (I have about five chapters already written). If not, I plan to go back to the other novel and see if that can get sent to my editor. So those are very practical reasons for deciding what comes next. I have a hard time deciding which I’d prefer right now!

I have 6 cats and a Dalmatian (seriously, check my Instagram feed) and I usually have at least one or two snuggling with me when I write. Do you have a writing buddy, or do you find it distracting?

Not really! I do have a wonderful Westie named Birdie, but she’s always been very low-energy and thanks to some arthritis she doesn’t really climb the stairs to my office much. She has been in my office while I’ve written in the past, but I’m pretty much a solo animal on my own, living in my head as I write.

Maryland-born Randee Dawn is now a Brooklyn-based entertainment journalist who scribbles about the glam world of entertainment by day, then spends her nights crafting wild worlds of fiction. She's a former editor at The Hollywood Reporter and Soap Opera Digest, and these days covers the wacky world of show business for Variety, The Los Angeles Times, Emmy Magazine and Today.com. Dawn's obsessive love of all things Law & Order led her to appear in one episode and later co-author The Law & Order SVU: Unofficial Companion. Her short fiction has appeared in numerous anthologies and online publications; she also dreams up trivia questions for BigBrain Games. Once a month she can be found hosting Rooftop Readings at Ample Hills Creamery in Brooklyn, and when not writing she's focused on her next travel destination, and hangs out with her wonderful, funny husband and fluffy Westie. She admits she reads way too many books and consumes far too many mangoes.

Claudia Lux on Getting Comfy In Hell

Wellness is trending. We know this, we see it all the time in our feeds: juice cleanses and yoga pants, keto recipes and tests to determine what kind of animal we should be sleeping like. Most recently, it seems to be the concept of “work/life balance.” Like most of the social-media-packaged “wellness” trends, this is a lot easier to achieve in theory (or on camera) than it is in practice, and often leaves us feeling crappy when we fail. Because what exactly does work/life balance mean? Is it about the time one spends at work versus the time one spends on the couch? (But what if a person works from their couch??) Is it about productivity, or sense of purpose, or simply getting through each day without fantasizing about driving off a bridge during the commute? For all the talk about the benefits of work/life balance, the barometer for success in this arena is suspiciously absent. I know I’ve found myself wishing for endless time, so I can buckle down and figure it out. 

But more time is not always the answer.

In my debut novel, Sign Here, Peyote Trip lives in Hell, literally, and spends his days working in the Deals Department, making deals in exchange for souls. He has nothing but time. But instead of giving him the breathing room to determine the best energy flow in his wall-to-wall carpeted (including the bathroom!) micro-studio, the endless time is his primary torment. Because truthfully, endless time—along with the lack of an exit—is terrifying. Even more so, in my opinion, than time running out. 

When I started writing, I knew I wanted Peyote’s endless Hell to be an office space. So many of us are accustomed to the low-grade hell that is a 9-5. We know the feeling of a meeting that goes on forever without accomplishing anything, a boss who doesn’t listen, a coworker who hits on everyone at the office Christmas party. A coffee machine that never works, the permanent funk of microwaved broccoli in the kitchen. But one thing I realized when I began crowd-sourcing hell details from the people around me, is the unifying power of humor. People got into it. I would start a conversation with a couple of friends and soon the whole bar or dog park would be a jumbled mess of stories and laughter and communal groans as strangers clambered to commiserate together. They were all talking about the ugliness that mars their lives, but the collective result was something beautiful. 

So I’ve come up with an answer to the questions generated by wellness posts and “should you sleep like a wolf or a dolphin?” tests. The questions I used to bury myself with as proof that I wasn’t balanced, and therefore broken. 

Ready? 

Tell other people about the shit that you hate. Listen to what they hate and agree with abundance. High five over it, send memes that capture it, joke about it. Revel in each other’s hells. Because all of it is life, even work. And being alive is something we have in common, but only for now. 

Even when it’s ugly, that’s pretty damn beautiful. 

Claudia Lux is a graduate of Sarah Lawrence College, and has a master’s in social work from the University of Texas at Austin. She lives and works in Boston, Massachusetts. Sign Here is her first novel.