Despite what many may say or believe, ideas don’t just pop into a writer’s head from out of nowhere. Writers are inspired by a great number of things, big and small, and when those disparate elements align at just the right moment – BOOM! – it’s like the Big Bang of inspiration or something. The idea hits and suddenly you’re like, “Whoa!”
For me, the idea of writing GUESTLIST actually came together very slowly. In the mid-aughts, I was very heavy in the Miami Beach nightlife scene. By day, I worked in operations and marketing for an entertainment company that owned and operated two of South Beach’s hottest nightclubs; by night, I hosted and managed parties at other venues as a side hustle. It was an interesting position in which to find myself because I found myself on both ends of the spectrum (the corporate end and the entrepreneurial end) and I dealt with two separate crowds within the same industry: the hip-hop/urban contingent and the electronic dance music group. Or, to put it even more bluntly, the Black crowd and the white crowd. Hey, that’s what it was.
