After a career writing about other people’s work, Emma Rosenblum finds herself in the interview chair as a first-time novelist. Rosenblum, chief content officer at Bustle Digital Group, which oversees Nylon, Bustle, Elite Daily and other media brands, has released „Bad Summer People,” about a collection of wealthy New Yorkers who summer and fill their days on Fire Island. The usual rumors – until a dead body is found.
Rosenblum, who grew up living in New York and spending summers on Fire Island all her life, had easy access to the raw material and „had a lot of experience with the rich communities in this place,” she says. During the pandemic, ”The White Lotus” quickly absorbed people and tied the popularity of the HBO show in time.
„I looked at it and said, 'This is really fun. It’s really frothy. It’s clear that people are responding to the idea of watching a kind of rich train wreck,'” Rosenblum says. „I said, 'I know these people. I can write something the same way.’
Emma Rosenblum
„Bad Summer People” began two summers ago, when Rosenblum and her family spent the summer on Fire Island, the first time she returned for a full summer as an adult. Working from her parents’ home there, she found herself wanting to fill the time between Zoom meetings with something creative.
„My job now is more administrative. I oversee our editorial and creative and fashion teams, but I’m not really in the creative nitty-gritty like I used to be,” she says. „I was a teacher at various places, so I decided to try fiction. I said, 'Why not? Sounds easier than non-fiction.
Following the ancient wisdom of writing what you know, Fire returns to the beach community of Fire Island, where he has been for years.
„It’s a closed, funny, isolated, beautiful community. I did a little research and there weren’t any books set there. I thought, 'OK, let’s do a murder mystery here,'” she says. “I started with that idea and went from there, I wrote a chapter and was like, ‘I can write this.’ It just kept going.
He finished the book in less than four months, and the TV rights were sold before it even hit the shelves last week. Throughout the process of bringing the book to life, Rosenblum says the demands of her day job kept her from getting too wrapped up in the book’s journey.
Emma Rosenblum’s „Bad Summer People.”
Courtesy of Flatiron Books
„Because I have a day job, the real serious thing I focus on during the day is that I don’t necessarily push the process the way novelists do,” he says. „I remember when I got the call that Flatiron was going to make an offer, I was in the middle of something at Bustle. We were doing some restructuring and I said to my agent, 'Okay, but I’m on the call.'” , was like, 'This is the call people have been waiting their whole lives for’.
Her background as a journalist came in handy in other ways, too: having written numerous celebrity profiles, writing fiction suddenly „felt like a better version of the interview you do every day, and somebody says they’re a perfect kicker — because in real life, that doesn’t necessarily happen, but in fiction it can, ” he says.
“However, the speed at which I write. I’m always on a deadline, and if you have a deadline, you have to meet it in the media. I think people, especially novelists, can go on forever without ending. I finished it and said, 'Okay, it’s done. Send it.”