Meredith Lavender has spent more than two decades working as a television writer. She served as Showrunner/Executive Producer on Max’s The Flight Attendant as well as an Executive Producer on Nashville (ABC), among other shows. Currently, she’s in development on multiple TV projects and adaptations. 

Kendall Shores spent years leading corporate communications for tech companies and nonprofit organizations, including Mailchimp and Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta. Now, she prefers writing the kinds of stories she used to daydream about between deadlines.  

Kendall and Meredith both live in Atlanta with their respective families. You can find them at: www.meredithandkendall.com; @meredithandkendall (IG); @meredithandkendallbooks (TikTok) 

Tell us about Perfect Life. What keeps drawing you to the Winter Park setting and what does this glittering social scene do to add to the suspense?

Having grown up in Winter Park, Kendall always wanted to write a book about the place she loves so much. Florida is an interesting setting, because of the ways wildness of the state and the gloss of wealth intersect there. The more we wrote in that world, one book definitely didn’t feel like enough.

As for building suspense, the glittering social scene backed by the fact that Winter Park is a close-knit community where everyone knows everyone creates a tangled web of who could know what at any given moment in time. And if they do know something… who they’re going to tell?

You come from very different professional backgrounds—television and corporate communications. How did you first approach co-authoring? What benefits did each of your backgrounds present?

We often talk in interviews about the fact that both television writing and corporate communications are highly collaborative environments. Each of us came to the table with years of experience of there being many ideas (and voices!) in the room on any given idea. We have found that the idea that we both lean-in on is often the right one.

What does your collaborative process look like? Has it changed with time?

It has definitely evolved over time. Each book sort of takes on a life of its own. Generally speaking, we follow the momentum of the story. We talk high-level about what we think the bigger moments of the story will be, and we take chapters that we each think we have a handle on and write the first draft and then trade back and forth for revisions.

What is the biggest advantage of writing with a partner that solo authors might not realize?

Because we pass chapters and manuscripts back and forth and edit each other, no one ever really reads a first-first draft. It’s also great when you’re stuck to have that person to call and figure out a different way through the story.

How is the publishing process different for co-authors than solo authors? Can you talk a little about getting an agent as a team?

We imagine in many ways the publishing process is largely the same, although neither of us has published solo yet. We had an incredibly fortunate path to finding our agent. Meredith is represented in television at Creative Artist Agency. Her agent Kevin Crotty read and loved Happy Wife and shared it with his colleague, (the great) Alexandra Machinist. While teams are not always commonplace in publishing, there are many teams in TV/film writing, so the agency is used to the idea of co-authors/co-writers.

In terms of creating plot twists, do you try to surprise each other in order to find a good thrill for readers?

Writing a novel collaboratively requires tremendous investment of time on the front end, so we can develop an outline to draft off of. Once we move from outline to drafting, we surprise each other with pitches of twists and turns, but that comes from collaboratively developing the story map, character summaries and character arcs over time.

What’s the most challenging part of co-authoring?

Two brains working at the same time on the same thing takes a lot of time and conversation, building and planning so that the story feels cohesive.

How does marketing your book as a team work?

We both cover really different ground. Having grown up in Winter Park before moving to Atlanta to work in corporate communications, Kendall’s background has been helpful to the marketing. We’ve been honored by the support of some of her former colleagues in the PR space, who’ve helped us prepare for some of the bigger interviews. Winter Park and Kendall’s relationships there have been so supportive of the book, which makes a huge difference. Meredith grew up in Chicago, went to school outside of Boston, and spent twenty years in Los Angeles creating communities in each of those places as well. Having both of us able to reach out to those communities has broadened our reach. We also each have personal socials as well as our shared one.

What are you working on next?

We are currently writing the 3rd book in the Winter Park series. You can look for it in the summer of 2027.

Perfect Life by Meredith Lavender and Kendall Shores

Five years after leaving her past behind to build a seemingly perfect life among Florida’s elite, former tech executive Este Walker finds her carefully crafted world shattered when a body turns up in her swimming pool. As a murder investigation forces long-buried secrets back into the light, Este must unravel a dangerous web of lies before the truth about what happened in California catches up with her. Perfect for fans of twisty domestic thrillers, Perfect Life explores the dark side of reinvention and the price of keeping the past hidden.

Buy the book now: Bookshop.org | Amazon