"I've had this terrible idea and I need you to talk me out of it!" Jodi McAlister recalls telling her friends at the outset of her fiction writing career.
Now, the Melburnian has just released the third instalment of her Bachelor-esque modern romance trilogy, Marry Me, Juliet. Three books in as many years.
With the popularity of romance and the rise of #BookTok, many readers from Gen Z and up are looking for something light to take their minds off things.
That was certainly the case for McAlister, who was inspired to write the first book in the series, 2022's Here for the Right Reasons, by a Friday night Zoom session with her friends during one of Melbourne's relentless lockdowns.
Despite McAlister's protestation, her friends did not talk her out of it.
"They said, 'You are the perfect person to write this.'"
She is the perfect person to write her Aussie lockdown-set dating show triptych because she's spent the better part of her academic career — she's currently a senior lecturer in writing, literature and culture at Deakin University — writing about reality dating shows and romance tropes.
"The overarching question of my academic career is, what are the stories we tell about love and what do they do to the way we think about love?"
And her friends appeared to be right — she "binge-wrote" the first draft of Here for the Right Reasons in three weeks.
"That is not normally the way I write. I'm very disciplined [and] I usually write for a couple of hours in the morning and then I do my day job," she says.
"[It] says something about what happened to all of our brains during lockdown!"
Let's meet the contestants
Here for the Right Reasons centres on Cece James, a broke student who tries out for dating reality TV show Marry Me, Juliet for all the wrong reasons (making some money after losing her job in the pandemic).
Unfortunately, she's eliminated on the first night, but stage-four COVID-19 restrictions means she can't leave, and then she accidentally falls in love with her season's Romeo, Dylan Jayasinghe Mellor. Oops.
Book two, Can I Steal You for a Second? (are you sensing a theme here with these reality TV catchphrase titles?), tells the story of the very same season of Marry Me, Juliet, but from the perspective of side contestant Amanda Mitchell.
She actually makes it quite far into the competition for Romeo's unrequited affections, all the while pining for the frontrunner, a statuesque COVID nurse also named Dylan!
Lest you thought McAlister was done with the rehashing, the third and, at the time of writing, final book in the series, Not Here to Make Friends, follows villain-cum-fan favourite Lily — that's Lily Fireball, thank you very much! — and her clandestine relationship with producer Murray O'Connell, the seeds for which McAlister planted way back in book one.
"So we get someone who is sheltered from the narrative, someone who is part of the narrative, and someone who is creating the narrative," she says.
"I love that layering effect."
Readers were initially disappointed when they found out the second book wasn't about Lily, "but then they got really into [the premise of] contestant on contestant".
McAlister certainly saved the best for last, despite the arduous editing process that took Not Here to Make Friends from Murray's singular perspective to the dual perspective of both Murray and Lily.
What's next for Jodi?
Although McAlister sets up for a potential fourth book in the series, which would be set during the filming of Wherefore Art Thou, Romeo (The Bachelorette, basically), she has not yet signed a deal for more Marry Me, Juliets.
Instead, her next book will feature some tertiary characters from Murray's life, set in another world McAlister knows well: academia.
She's not entirely done with reality TV though. McAlister has a selection of catchphrases as titles ready if she were ever to do a Love Island satire: Eggs in One Basket; My Type on Paper; It Is What It Is.
"I have such an ear for reality TV cliches because my brain has been… poisoned," she laughs.
"Don't play a drinking game with them, because you will die."
On the day we spoke, McAlister had just published an article in The Conversation about virginity in The Bachelor — the subject of her PhD. Will she ever fictionalise her research on virginity and reality TV?
"It would be a very logical thing for me to do in my career, but it's not going to be next and it's not going to be soon," she says.
One thing's for sure: McAlister's not planning on giving up one for the other.
"I'm a better author for being an academic, and I'm a better academic for being an author."
Not Here to Make Friends is out now.