Unboxing Your Creativity: A Story and a Gift

Please welcome back today’s guest: author Alison Hammer—who is half of the writing duo Ali Brady; the USA TODAY Bestselling author of romantic, heartwarming, funny novels including The Beach Trap, The Comeback Summer, Until Next Summer, and Battle of the Bookstores. Their books have been “best of summer” picks by The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Parade, and Katie Couric Media. Alison lives in Chicago and works as an advertising creative director. She is also the Founder and Co-President of The Artists Against Antisemitism, and the author of You and Me and Us and Little Pieces of Me.

The duo recently released a holiday novella—and Alison is here to share the story behind the story and tell us how letting go of the rules and trying something new was just the spark they needed.

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Creativity can come in many forms—including the way you tell and share a story.

This October, my co-author and I found ourselves faced with something we haven’t really had before: a break. Instead of rushing to start our next project after we turned our Summer 2025 book in, we had some time to think about what we wanted to do next and even (gasp!) try writing something just for the fun of it.

Like millions of other people, Bradeigh and I both loved the Netflix series NOBODY WANTS THIS. If you haven’t seen it, it’s about a hot rabbi (Adam Brody) who falls in love with “shiksa” – a non-Jewish woman (Kristin Bell).

This past year has been a difficult one for the Jewish community, so it was REALLY refreshing to see the general public get so excited about a Jewish story. (And yes, I know there has been some controversy around the depiction of Jewish women in that series…but that’s another topic for another day.)

While our Ali Brady books have always featured Jewish representation, the success of that show inspired us to try and think of a way we could tell a story that elevated the Jewish experience even more. Once we realized the first night of Hanukkah was on Christmas day for the first time in twenty years, a story was born.

A CREATIVE APPROACH TO WRITING

When Bradeigh and I are writing a full-length novel together, we usually spend a few weeks working on the plot and the characters, getting to know their personality and their story arc.  Then we take about five or six months to write the first draft.

For this story, we had about one month total to write, edit and publish it. Which meant we had to shake things up and rethink the way we “always” did things.

Instead of our usual few weeks, we spent an hour one evening brainstorming and coming up with the characters, a loose plot for the story and a title—ONE NIGHT, TWO HOLIDAYS—and then we started to write.

While we knew the general beats of the story, we didn’t have time to make our usual chapter-by-chapter outline. So Bradeigh had the idea to lean into the fun of it and treat the writing process like improv.

One of us would write a scene then post it in our shared doc. Then the other person would read the pages (we tried to keep them all under 1,000 words), then write the next scene before tossing it back. Some days, it felt like we were playing literary hot potato.

We kept with the rules of improv and tried to “yes and” things as they came to life. In one my chapters, I mentioned that Bradeigh’s character had one older sister. She later told me that she had pictured her character coming from a big family with a lot of siblings, but I had written it, so she went with it.

In one of Bradeigh’s chapters, she ended on a cliff hanger with the characters about to play a game of strip dreidel. I had thrown that idea out as a joke on our brainstorming session—but she wrote it in her chapter, so I had to draft the scene in mine. And I’m so glad she did because it ended up being one of my favorite scenes in the book.

A CREATIVE APPROACH FOR DELIVERY

Since there wasn’t time to publish this story traditionally (unless we wanted it to come out next holiday season), we also had to get creative with how we published the story.

At first, we were thinking about using the story as a free holiday gift to thank our readers. We’re fortunate to have a pretty substantial newsletter list, but we were so excited about this story that we wanted it to have a broader reach. Plus, we thought this would be a good way to introduce ourselves to new readers since we have been pivoting into a new genre—going from women’s fiction with elements of romance into pure romance.

Enter Substack. If you aren’t familiar with the platform, it’s a combination of a newsletter  service and social media platform, like a modern take on the old blogging platforms. It’s honestly pretty incredible.

People can sign up through Substack to receive emails like a normal newsletter, but the content also lives on a website where the same content looks more like a social media post. No matter how many subscribers you have, there is no cost for the author (unlike traditional newsletter platforms which can cost several hundred dollars a year.) Another big benefit is the ability for readers to engage with the author and each other via likes and comments on the post. There’s also an opportunity for discovery through the app/website so you can reach people who aren’t following you.

(It’s worth noting that another popular feature of the platform is to offer paid subscriptions where readers can pay a monthly or annual fee to access additional content—but we don’t have anything behind a paywall.)

Because of all this and more, Substack is the perfect platform to release a serial-style story, which is exactly what we did thanks to the great suggestion from one of our author friends.

We broke the story into eight parts (like the eight days of Hanukkah) and used our newsletter list to announce the story as a free holiday gift, which they could read for free on our Substack, where a new section would be shared each day.

To give the story additional reach (and potentially make back some of the money we were spending…) we decided to dip our toes into the self-publishing waters, releasing the novella in paperback and ebook. We put it on Kindle Unlimited, knowing how popular that is for romance readers.

And then the week of Thanksgiving, in what I thought was the longest of long shots, I reached out to Julia Whelan. In addition to being an amazing author and actor, Julia recently started her own audio book platform, Audiobrary, which fairly compensates both authors and narrators.

By some crazy stroke of luck—or maybe a Hanukkah miracle?—Julia loved the story and wanted to find a way to make it happen, even though there really wasn’t enough time. But she did it: and readers can now listen to Julia Whelan and Teddy Hamilton narrating the story on Audiobrary. A true “pinch-me” moment that will hopefully help introduce us to the fans of both narrators.

A CREATIVE WAY TO (HOPEFULLY) CONVERT NEW READERS

One of our biggest goals with this project—other than having a fun creative outlet—was to reach new romance readers and hopefully get them interested in our future (and past) Ali Brady books.

To help with that, our publisher gave us permission to include the first three chapters of our next book, BATTLE OF THE BOOKSTORES, as a sneak peek at the end of the novella. And at the end of that preview, we have the links right there for readers to pre-order.

It’s too soon to know if the novella will reach all the goals we set for it—but it already feels like it’s been a success:

• With less pressure, we were able to have more fun—and we did at every stage from writing the novella to engaging with everyone who read along as we posted the new chapters every day on Substack.
• ONE NIGHT, TWO HOLIDAYS was the #1 Bestseller in Jewish Holiday books before it was even released! (Fun fact, according to an Instagram poll, 80% of readers were waiting to binge the whole novella vs reading the daily posts.)
• We’ve gotten great feedback from Jewish readers who have loved seeing their own traditions reflected in a romance novel, and from non-Jewish readers who have enjoyed learning more about the story and traditions of Hanukkah.
• It’s been great having new news and new content to share with readers during the year-long wait between books.
• The fact that Julia Whelan is narrating something that we wrote, which has honestly been an author dream for us both.
• It felt really good to put ourselves out there and try something new, outside the constraints of traditional publishing.

Last but not least, writing and releasing ONE NIGHT, TWO HOLIDAYS the way we did was a wonderful reminder that creativity can come in many forms—and that sometimes, taking a step back and throwing all the old rules out can lead to something magical…

If you want to read the story for free, you can read it on the Ali Brady Substack or find the links to purchase a copy at www.alibradybooks.net/onth

Tell us in the comments if you’re one of the 80% of readers who would prefer to wait until a story is complete to binge it all, or if you would have fun with getting a few chapters each day. And if you have any questions about the process or what we did, feel free to ask them here!