Tonight at 8pm EST I’m going to be on the BuzzFeed Books Instagram Live Q&A series — come through if you want to hear me yell about DON’T HATE THE PLAYER!
It’s New Release Tuesday! We caught up with Alexis Nedd (@alexisthenedd) to talk about her debut novel, Don’t Hate The Player, which is out today. Alexis is a Brooklyn-based pop culture “fanthropologist” who has only ever loved things in a big, obsessive way. As the Senior Entertainment Reporter at Mashable.com, she covers television, movies, and video games, focusing on sci-fi and fantasy universes like Game of Thrones and the MCU. When she’s not writing for money, Alexis is writing for no money on her socials, where her feeds consist of deep dives on weird history and analyzing pop culture as an artifact of society.
Don’t Hate The Player is a YA romance novel that follows two competitive eSports players as they navigate school, parents, and other IRL stuff, while preparing for their biggest (and only) tournament yet. As real life and online life collide, both find the boundaries between online and IRL slipping into each other.
Can you start by telling us a little bit about Don’t Hate The Player?
In one corner, we have Emilia Romero, a popular, high-achieving Puerto Rican girl who secretly plays Guardians League Online with the elite Team Fury. No one in her real life knows she games, and everything hinges on it staying that way. In the other corner is Jake Hooper, a quiet, detrimentally empathetic nerd who’s had a crush on Emilia for years. He plays GLO with Team Unity and thinks he’s otherwise invisible.
WhenGuardians League Online announces a huge tournament in their city, Jake is shocked to see Emilia competing. Jake is now the only person who knows her secret, and they have to work together to keep it…all while the tournament brings their teams closer and closer to an ultimate Fury vs. Unity showdown.
Outwardly, Jake is an awkward, suffering bundle of anxiety, quite successfully hiding his integrity and wit. What was enjoyable/difficult about writing a neurodivergent romantic lead?
I started working on DHTP around the same time I learned I had ADHD. Getting that diagnosis as an adult ushered in a really strange and painful period of reevaluating my childhood, knowing that I was neurodivergent and didn’t get the help I needed. I gave a lot of the traits I used to think made me “wrong” or “bad”—the anxiety, the spinning thoughts, the self-deprecating coping mechanisms—to Jake because writing them into a lovable character felt like correcting the narrative I had grown up writing about myself.
It was difficult to excavate all of that because that level of self-evaluation totally sucks and takes forever, but by the end, I could look at Jake and think, “if I can’t hate him for feeling this way, I have no business hating myself for having felt that way.”
DHTP comes alive in its use of online gaming maps and chatrooms. How did you approach getting those virtual places right?
I made my first internet friends when cameras on phones or laptops were still rare, so I got to know a lot of people through chatrooms and forums. People’s personalities, real or constructed, come off so strongly in those rapid-fire conversations. That solved one of the problems I knew I’d have coming into this book—how do I introduce the reader to a group of characters who aren’t going to show up until the end and make them seem like part of the story the whole time? Answer: Spy on their group chat.
It was so fun to play all five roles in those chapters and determine who uses acronyms or memes, who always punctuates, what their in-jokes say about them, and so on. Truly some of my favorite parts of DHTP are in those chats.
[Image Description: tweet from Alexis Nedd that says, fifty-five thousand works into my manuscript and I’ve just realized I have two separate characters named Matt. I’m keeping it there because seventy percent of men really are named Matt and I’m all about realism. End Image Description]
an errant google led me to a tumblr post of my own tweet YET AGAIN and I have good news: you can now Meet the Matts by pre-ordering my novel DON’T HATE THE PLAYER. One of the Matts goes by a non-Matt nickname but after this tweet popped off I wrote a bunch of Matt jokes into the back half of the book lol.
