How do you face a career knowing success and failure each carries its own insecurities? How do you commit yourself wholly to another person instead of protecting your heart when circumstances have dealt you wounds you would rather hide? While of course a few of these questions were uniquely personal with our characters as co-authors, for the most part they’re ones our friends and peers are dealing with right now.

The Roughest Draft’s characters, instead, have made some hard choices, lived with them, and are now facing uncertainties we felt immediately. Writing YA, most of the questions our characters deal with are ones we’ve had years, even decades to consider from the vantage point of growing up. How did you experience the shift from YA to adult fiction?ĪUSTIN SIEGEMUND-BROKA: Writing our first novel for adults, we were suddenly writing characters who face exactly the same life questions, stresses, and joys we are. KATIE TAMOLA: You two are beloved, successful married authors. Shondaland spoke with authors and real-life married couple Emily Wibberley and Austin Siegemund-Broka about honeymoon jokes becoming book premises, love-story inspirations, how writing can be the soul of a person, and more. They hole up in a small Florida town, and the close proximity demands that the two have to confront everything: why their deep friendship imploded, why the idea of them ever being romantic makes them so uncomfortable and nervous, and whether they can achieve this lofty goal that they both have a lot riding on. While neither party is thrilled, they are both at their best as writers when they are together. Unfortunately for Katrina and Nathan, they must write one last book together to fulfill their joint contract.

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