Gas! Gas! Gas!: Candice Jalili
The successful and hilarious magazine writer and book author debuts her very first fiction novel, "Finding Famous," nationwide today.
If you’ve ever cackled out loud while reading an article about sex, dating, existing in this ridiculous world we live in, or iconic early-2000s pop nostalgia, check the byline. Is it Candice Jalili?
A successful magazine writer and book author, Candice has her very first fiction book, Finding Famous: A Mashad Family Novel, debuting nationwide today! Here, Candice explains why bringing this story, dubbed as “The Princess Diaries meets The Kardashians,” to life is such a huge milestone and a culmination of several dreams come true.
It's good to catch up because it's been so freaking long since we used to work together at Elite Daily.
Yes, one of my favorite editors I ever had.
Wow, thank you. You were one of the best writers I ever had. You were always so funny, you always had the best story pitches, which is why, when I got to Cosmo I was like, I need Candice to write for me. So, can you walk us through what your career has looked like since your Elite Daily days?
Yeah, I'm technically still at Elite Daily; I'm full-time as the manager of the Snapchat channel, but since you and I were working together, Elite Daily was purchased by Bustle and I was furloughed to the part-time team, which wound up being a huge blessing in disguise because that's when I was able to start freelancing because I didn't have a non-compete anymore.
You were at Cosmo and were really good to me and got me on board there and I had lots of other freelance opportunities—The Cut being one of them. I just started reaching out and introducing myself and getting more and more clips and bylines and cementing myself in the space of sex and dating.
I was still the Senior Sex & Dating writer at Elite Daily, working part-time, and in doing so, I knew I wanted to write a book. My ultimate goal was to be an author and I knew that my first book should be a dating book. That would be my way to get an agent.
I thought a lot about what my message would be: What could I be bringing to the table that's different from everything that's out there? I thought of the concept for Just Send The Text: An Expert’s Guide to Letting Go of the Stress and Anxiety of Modern Dating, which was originally called Date Like He's Obsessed With You, and the whole idea was an anti to the normal (I think The Shift by Tinks is kind of a similar vibe, but when it was written, I don't think there was anything else like it really out there). The message was “Be yourself and that's enough to meet your person.”
I got a great agent, Amy, and wrote the book, and it was so much fun to work on. I loved it and I still love that book, but I think the ultimate dream for me was to always do fiction. So, slowly but surely, I started working on my manuscript for Finding Famous, which is now coming out July 30.
It’s really my dream book. I grew up reading YA books like Click and The A-List. This was my version of that and I spent a lot of time working on it. I got a two-book deal with Disney, which is so exciting. I have a great editor there, Rebecca, who's been so helpful.
I also started doing some ghostwriting on the side. It’s been really fun and a different kind of challenge for me to transition from freelancing for magazines. I'll do a story here and there, but more of my freelance work now is ghostwriting. That's my career at a glance.
Amazing! I often find that people have questions about getting into the book industry. Like, “How do I even get an editor or go about that process?” Did you find that to be easy or did you really need to hustle to make those connections?
Whenever someone wants to write a book, I'm so happy to talk to them because it's such a weirdly opaque process. You have to read Reader's Digest blogs and stuff to figure out what you're supposed to do. You can’t apply on LinkedIn like it's a normal job—it's just really complicated. So, you do have to be a little business-minded and strategic about it.
For me, I knew my highest chance of getting an agent would be if I leaned into what I had at that point, which were bylines from different publications. If you want to do non-fiction, I think that’s the best way to build your own platform and have a voice out there.
For fiction, I think it's different. You don't get paid until you get a book deal, so you have to write an entire manuscript first and have the bandwidth to do that. You can write a proposal with a few sample chapters, which is what I did, and I actually found an agent relatively quickly. But, I know that's not the experience for everyone and I was really lucky in the sense that I had a lot of people help me with my proposal and things like that, but I didn't know anyone in the industry. I cold-reached out to people and got three offers. I had someone give me advice to go with a younger agent who's hungrier—I had one who was around the same age as me and I was into the idea of us coming up together. She's proven to be a really fantastic agent. I really love her and she was at a great agency, too.
It's a very mysterious process, so it's good to learn that you did the outreach.
I will say I think there are a lot more resources these days. I volunteer with Girls Write Now and my mentee is in the process of querying. There are also different websites that help you, but when I was doing it, I felt like there was literally nothing and you just had to reach out to people.
That was only a few years ago, so it seems it’s improved a lot since then. Alright, so tell us about Finding Famous, because the plot sounds so cool! It's a mix of Princess Diaries and The Kardashians. Tell us how you thought of the premise.
Actually, Alexia [LaFata, our colleague at Elite Daily] and I would always gChat a lot throughout the day and we'd bounce book and plot ideas off of each other. I said, “What if a normal girl found out she had the equivalent of the Kardashians as a biological family?” Alexia was like, “ I actually think that could really be something.”
A lot of people have given me advice that you have to love an idea enough to want to stick with it for five years. I thought this was fun enough that I could enjoy punching around with it for a few years. I started writing one version that just wasn't really working and I realized that the characters weren't quite right. So, I actually re-read The Princess Diaries, which is one of my favorite books, and Mia Thermopolis had such a voice. You could really feel her energy and her character and she was so quirky, and I said this is what this book is missing: A character who's really a character.
At first, Josie (the main character) was a more cynical, hates everything type of person. Now, she’s incredibly optimistic and a sweetheart, but she's really awkward and has her quirks and doesn't fit in this world at all. Having someone who comes in a little more open-hearted wrote better for me.
“It's really a story of Keeping Up with the Kardashians meets The Princess Diaries. On her 18th birthday, Josie finds out that her biological father was the equivalent of reality TV royalty like the Kardashians, but times a million. She has to do a season of the reality show in order to get her inheritance, which she needs to cover her own college tuition and bail her stepdad out of debt. She very reluctantly agrees to meet them and then goes on the show and her life is flipped upside down. It has all these fun elements and it's really funny and enjoyable, but there's a lot of depth to it too.”
I'm Persian, so a lot of the Iranian American diaspora is in there, but not in your face. The story isn’t about them being Persian, but it's there. Plus, there are elements of grief: she's dealing with the loss of her mom and now reconnecting with this new family.
It sounds so good! I can’t wait to get my copy. Do you have anything planned for the launch?
July 30, Books of Wonder in NYC is having an event. Alexia is going to moderate it. Then I’m gonna do a little after-party with my friends and family.
Is book two part of the same series?
Yes, and what’s been so fun for me with this book is there's a real cast of characters. The next book is going to be from Josie’s sister's point of view. It's less of a sequel and more of a companion book. This sister is Josie's age (they're both 18), but where Josie grew up in this lower-middle class family, public school, awkward girl phase, her sister Mona is essentially Miley Cyrus Bangers era meets Paris Hilton in 2002. She's just really advanced and has the world at her fingertips. Everybody follows her and loves her and she's gonna enter a love triangle with the president's son and a surfer.
So did you already write book two or where are you in the process?
The first draft is written and we're doing edits and it'll come out in 2025.
Wow, that's incredible! A milestone checked off, I'm so proud of you.
Thank you. I am really, really, really, excited. It’s the book I would have wanted to read as a 13-year-old, so it's just really exciting to have written it. I'm trying to live in that and not be too focused on any other outcomes—just enjoy it.
To say that that was your goal all along and then reach it as quickly as you did is remarkable. So, what does your writing process look like? Got any quirks or rituals?
I'm psycho about my writing schedule because I'm often balancing book writing with my full-time job, and, at any given moment, I'm also writing a book for someone else as a ghostwriter. I have to be really strict with my time. A lot of my writing happens on the weekends.
My friend recently sent me an article that I thought was so true: It said you only get four hours of good work in you, especially if you're in a creative field.
I do think that's right, but I still have to block out six hours—it takes me about two hours to write a chapter, and then I dilly-dally or take a break or go down a Google rabbit hole.
Especially with these books, I go down pop culture rabbit holes in doing research. I spent hours trying to find pictures of the inside of Bird Street Club in LA because I want to do a scene there, but with tight security there's literally no photos. But, I do think that pays off; it makes a difference if you can get those details in there.
In terms of my writing process, I reserve Saturdays. I used to do Saturday and Sunday but I feel you need one day to turn your brain off—especially for something that's more creative. Summer Fridays are great because I'll spend half my Friday writing, then Saturday, and if I want to go out and have a couple drinks with my friends, I can do that and not be stressed that I have to work the next day.
If I get edits or if I have a due date coming up for a draft, I'll look at my map and work backwards. I'll block off all the weekends when I can't work. I give myself weekly due dates, “Chapters four and five are due by this Monday.” I'm really strict about sticking to those deadlines; I feel they're really important and I do well under that kind of structured pressure.
On my desk, I always have my planner with my to-do list. I have all these Lisa Frank notebooks that get me in the zone because they remind me of the time when I was reading YA books. I put all my notes in there randomly. I mean, this one has my very first ideas for Josie for Finding Famous in here. I was trying to map out the plot here, the main beats. I'm a big hand writer, I feel a lot of writers are.
Even though I have terrible handwriting, yes, I'd rather write it down than type it out. Lisa Frank is such a vibe! I freaking love that.
It just makes me happy and it sets the tone! A Lisa Frank notebook and a fun pen color are two weird things that I love. I fill out my desk calendar with my bright pink pen because it sparks joy.
I was telling someone this recently: I've written non-fiction before, which you would theoretically think is more vulnerable because it's from you (especially a dating book, I was writing about being rejected and I had people from college texting me being like, “Wait, were you talking about so-and-so?” And it’s mortifying). But, I find fiction to be so much more vulnerable because so much of it is inspired by just my heart and my personal life and my friendships and my familial relationships, my culture, my heritage, and pop culture.
One of the best pieces of feedback I've gotten—and I know you're not supposed to, but I read what people are saying on GoodReads—is on the friendships or sisterly relationships or familial relationships really ringing true or resonating deeply with them. I think it’s the best praise I could get because so much of the book was inspired by my own friendships that I forged at that time who are still my very best friends to this day. I think it's such a powerful thing to have close friends and I come from such a strong family—full of extra-great men, too, but it's a very female-centric family. I’ve been surrounded by these strong women and I wanted to write a book about a family full of strong Persian American women and it's really exciting to have that.
It's great to be able to fuse your personal friendships and family dynamics into fiction and have readers connect with it. Writing fiction, to me, feels so daunting to just create something out of nothing. Or, the dialogue! It's so different from interviewing someone for a magazine story where you’re already working with the facts and people are providing you with the narrative. You’re creating all the puzzle pieces and then piecing them together. I guess you find that easy?
Oh no, it's hard! It’s hard because even once you have the idea, you're like okay, now I have to actually map it out into a full chapter-by-chapter story.
I was really struggling with the second book’s outline. I wound up taking index cards and I wrote all the different beats I wanted. My editor was really helpful in breaking down, “This is what needs to happen in act one, act two, and act three.” I do really well with structure, so plot-wise, it helped me set up each act and build the complex picture.
What would your advice be to anyone who wants to mimic your awesome career path?
I think my two pieces of advice would be: one, go for it and dare yourself to dream. I always think of Mindy Kaling's book, Why Not Me?, it's literally sitting right next to me now. Like, “Why not you? Why not try?” That’s the attitude I've always had for putting myself out there: applying to Cosmo for an internship and then Elite Daily for my full-time job. All these moments of just saying, “Why can't it be me if it can be anybody?”
Granted, obviously, I have a lot of privileges and things that I should acknowledge that have helped me get into this industry. But once you're in there, it really has to be that betting on yourself attitude and trying not to get too down on yourself.
Don't be too sensitive when it comes to notes and feedback; I think that can really stop people. It can feel personal and really daunting, yes, but it doesn't mean you have to stop. You can keep going.
Second, you have to be really structured, organized, and hold yourself accountable. It’s not a job where you're gonna have a boss over your head—especially with books. It's such a slow-moving industry, nobody's really hassling you for anything, so you need to be self-motivated and self-disciplined.
I'm sure you have so many supportive people in your life, like your husband, who help make it easier.
I'm so, so lucky in that I have the most supportive family and friends, and the best husband who I've been in a relationship with for the past eight years. My parents are so supportive, and that's what I mean by privilege. I feel I have a lot of things going for me that allow me to have the confidence where it doesn't completely break me when setbacks happen. Also, having friends in the industry who are also writers is really helpful—they get it on a different level.
There’s this Devil Wears Prada misconception of people being really cutthroat and I actually feel I've made some of the best, most supportive friends throughout my career. I met Dani Kam at Cosmo interning and she put me in touch with someone who continued to give me ghostwriting work for years now. Alexia is one of my best friends to this day in terms of writing things. Kevin from Elite Daily is, too. The Writers Group you set me up with is one of my lifelines! That's what I mean, you've given me so much. And Gigi Engle was so nice and gave me her proposal for her book to help me structure my own. She helped me and I’m so grateful to her for that. There are a lot more people who are willing to help than I think the outside world would think.