The Hot Guy

Anthony is the film editor and pop culture columnist at Forte magazine, the premier music and entertainment magazine for Ballarat, Bendigo, Castlemaine, Geelong, the Surf Coast and Warrnambool.

So clearly Forte was very interested in the fact Anthony has written a novel, and wanted to know the story behind it. Unfortunately for Anthony, Mel felt she also had to chip in – including about our private text messages at 4:20pm.

Read the interview here.

Mel co-hosts the fortnightly literary and culture podcast The Rereaders, and her other hosts, Sam Twyford-Moore and Dion Kagan, were very keen to have Anthony on the podcast to talk about The Hot Guy.

So we all squeezed into the tiny recording studio at Melbourne community radio station 3CR, for an in-depth conversation about co-authorship, male objectification, the absurdity of the workplace, the place of comedy and wish fulfilment within fiction, the IRL Hot Guy at Cinema Nova, and how we got that cover quote.

Click through to listen to the podcast.

Anthony and Mel are interviewed today at Flavorwire in the regular column ‘The Sweetest Debut’. This was a lot of fun as we belatedly realised we should have been giving ridiculous comedy answers to these author quizzes rather than serious answers about our craft. Oh well, better late than never.

Here, Anthony reveals why he writes in bed, and Mel has some harsh views about Wuthering Heights. Plus much more!

Click through to read what we said.

It’s Monday today, and if you were Adam, the protagonist of The Hot Guy, you’d probably be thinking about heading in for your shift at the Rafferty Cinema, where Monday is choc top making day.

But even if you don’t have to make choc tops today, here’s another treat for you: FilmInk, Australia’s premier online movie magazine, has published an exclusive extract from Chapter 6, in which Adam chats to his agent, Clive, about his filmmaking career – which is not really getting off the ground.

Click here to read it!

On Thursday 11 May, we officially launched The Hot Guy – at a cinema bar, of course! The venue was the Overlook Bar, next door to Melbourne’s iconic art deco cinema, the Astor Theatre.

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One of the reasons why we focused on the cartoonish, over-the-top effect Adam’s hotness has on women – and deliberately made women treat him as an object and chase him in a ridiculous way – is that we wanted to subvert the standard romance narrative that pairs an active seducer with a passive or even reluctant object of lust. Traditionally, a man’s role has been to actively seek sex and win women as prizes, while women are supposed to find pleasure in being looked at, chased and won.

A lot of recent pop culture has responded to the rise of feminism by gender-swapping that dynamic: straight women can now be more vocal about their sexual appetites, and famous men face more pressure to sculpt and display beautiful bodies.

But we wrote The Hot Guy from the perspective that objectification is wrong, whoever’s doing it. It diminishes both the person who’s being reduced to an object and the people doing the objectifying. So we wrote this opinion piece at Whimn, asking if it’s really that feminist to lust after hot guys.

Click through to read the article.

Anthony and Mel are doing a fair bit of publicity for The Hot Guy at the moment. Most recently, we chatted to Brooke Hunter at Girl.com.au about what inspired us to write the book, how we created our jokester heroine Cate, our writing process, and why we put in so many references to films and pop culture.

Click through to read what we said.