Hi, this is Vivi Owens, and you're listening to the award-winning podcast. Moms don't have time to read books. And speaking of books, I have two of my own books coming out this spring and summer. Princess Charming is a picture book, which debuts on April 19th. And Bookends, a memoir of love, loss, and literature comes out on July 1st, and it is truly a labor of love. I hope you'll pre-order, order, and join me on tour as I go across the country.

You can find out more at zibbyowens.com or bookendsmemoir.com.

And you can follow me on Instagram at Zibby Owens because I always post about everything.

Enjoy the show.

Emily Wiberley and Austin Sigamund Broca are co-authors of the roughest draft.

They met and fell in love in high school.

Austin went on to graduate from Harvard while Emily graduated from Princeton.

Together, they are the authors of several novels about romance for teens and adults. Now married, they live in Los Angeles, where they continue to take daily inspiration from their own love story. Welcome, Austin and Emily. Thank you so much for coming on moms. Don't have time to read books to discuss the roughest draft. Thanks for having us. Thank you so much for having us. So introduce yourselves, obviously, one of you as a man and a woman. But just in case, introduce yourselves and we'll jump right into it. I'm Emily Wiberley. And I'm Austin Sigmund Broca. And how did you two pair up? Why did you decide to write this book? What are we doing here? Tell me the whole story.

Yes, absolutely. I mean, this book is a long time coming. This is the culmination of a long journey.

We've been writing together for six, seven years, you know, which is most of our adult lives.

It started with Emily. Yes, I mean, we should say that we are married and we have been together since we were in high school. So we met sometime sometime in middle school or high school. It's unclear.

And we've been dating since we were 17. Yep. And then we went to college and I decided I wanted to write. And then one day I, you know,

I was always kind of bouncing ideas up of Austin and we were brainstorming with him. And one day,

I was like, why don't you just take a look at this and add to it? And then that is how the

partnership began. And I was, I was thrilled to join on. I've always loved, you know,

story and books and literature as well. And it was always a real point of mutual interest for us.

You know, as a couple, there are things you talk about more than others. You've got to have some

mutual interest, some things in common. And we loved reading, writing, story, breaking down

movies, TV, whatever we were reading. And so the jump

to applying those conversations to things we were working on ourselves felt very natural. So our

writing partnership began there and kind of took off, inspired by perhaps our own high school romance.

We started in the young adult space and have written there for some time. And the roughest draft was our jump to adult romance, which I think was inspired, you know, as much by the market and by this idea we were really excited to have as by the fact that we ourselves are growing up in a phrase and wanted to work with characters who were dealing with some of the logistical and existential

...