Alexis Hall Interview: Love, Loot, and ‘Looking for Group’

Alexis Hall is a prolific author, dabbling in a multitude of genres, eras, and tones throughout his eclectic career while delivering heartfelt LGBTQ+ stories. Having risen to a new type of fame with the release of his rom-com, Boyfriend Material, he’s since delivered a plethora of engaging new titles while simultaneously opening the door to a rich back catalog.

Some of which, such as the Spires series (including Glitterland, For Real, Pansies, and Waiting for the Flood) have received new, updated reprints. The re-releases offer updated covers and bonus material for both new and returning fans. Now, before the release of his latest in the Winner Bakes All series, Audrey Lane Stirs the Pot in December and the original Moby Dick retelling Hell’s Heart in 2026, comes the re-release of the New Adult novel, Looking for Group. The book follows Drew, a “right type of nerd” who, while playing the biggest MMORPG called Heroes of Legend, ends up falling for another player.

Alexis Hall delivers introspective and thoughtful escapism.

Alexis Hall’s writing is so magnetic because it manages to marry this lovely, accessible yet rich prose with deeply developed characters and dense ensembles who build out any of his existing worlds. There’s levity in his work – there are few authors who make me laugh out loud quite as much. But he doesn’t eschew depth.

A love letter to MMORPGs that validates the necessity of virtual spaces and the variety of people who engage with them, Looking For Group is yet another instance where Hall fully immerses us into both the particularities of this world and the boundless ways in which we connect to one another.

We spoke to Hall about the inspiration behind Looking for Group, the necessity for virtual spaces, and how to write funny dialogue.

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Could you talk a little bit about what first inspired Looking for Group?

So, to dig deep, deep into the weeds on this one, at the time, my then-publisher was looking for books to take to an LGBTQ+ gaming convention, which I think was called GaymerCon. It was also kind of inspired by the popular-at-the-time Felicia Day web series The Guild.

I think it was also sort of, if you like, negatively inspired by a lot of the discourse around MMORPGs at the time. Pretty much whenever you saw any description of gaming back in the day, it was in the context of “WHAT IS THIS SAD FREAK LOSER THING THAT THESE SAD FREAK LOSERS DO AND WHO ARE THE SAD FREAK LOSERS WHO DO IT.” So I wanted to write a book about gamers that at once rejected but also to some extent confronted that perception. There’s a reason that Drew has “not like other gamers” as a core part of his self-identity.

When writing, is it often a character that comes first? Or is it a specific idea or setting that inspires you?

I’m not sure it’s so much a first thing as it is a…concurrent-yet-iterative thing. I’m aware that a lot of authors will have these very memorable, very impactful stories where they’re like “and then I saw this person in a dream,” but I’ve never been like that. So for me it always starts with something perilously close to an elevator pitch or a post-it-note summary (“write something set in an MMORPG”). From there it goes to who the characters might be in broad terms (“what sort of person would be in a love story set in an MMORPG”) and then that loops back to the concept (“what sort of MMORPG-based story best suits this kind of person”) and so on and so on. I guess it’s sort of the ouroboros approach to book planning.

What was it about interactive, virtual gaming that you found interesting as a setting for a romance?

Partly, it’s just that I tend to think more or less anything is interesting as a setting for a romance. It’s sort of an occupational hazard of being a writer that anything even remotely notable gets put in your “possible thing to write a book about” box, whether that’s a person with a mildly unusual job, a particular sphere that people interact in, or a video game. I’m also just a total nerd who loves video games.

The book understands the connective nature of forming relationships through online spaces. What interested you in that perspective, and how important do you think it is to highlight it?

I’m always a bit uncomfortable with questions like “how important do you think X is” because my inner Brit is terrified of sounding like I remotely think I or my work are in any way important. But I do think that virtual spaces have become more and more a part of how we live our lives over the oh-my-god-is-it-an-actual-decade since LFG first came out, and I do think we’re often quite bad at interrogating them.

I will say that in some ways it’s been really interesting to go back and look at what features of online interactions have changed radically since the early 2010s and which have stayed oddly the same. At the time I wrote the book, the whole idea of dating somebody you met (dun dun dunnn!) on the internet was this huge, weird, scary thing. Whereas now, we live in a world where everybody had to spend two years interacting exclusively via Zoom, and dating apps are generally the default way for people to meet people.

And also, social media companies kind of run the universe now, so there’s that.

Were there any new challenges to writing Looking for Group that you hadn’t faced in any of your previous writing?

On the one hand, it was a full decade ago, so I can’t entirely remember. On the other hand…yeah, a lot of the book is set in a video game, and half the dialogue is chat logs. Although honestly (and maybe this is just rose-tinted hindsight or whatever), I don’t remember that actually being too much of a challenge. It’s different, but I’m always firmly of the opinion that the bits of writing that are most difficult are the bits that are most boring.

The example I always give for the bit of writing I find hardest is “getting a character go from the door to the window”, because you need to convey “X walked from the door to the window” in a way that isn’t totally prosaic but also isn’t totally intrusive and also isn’t clunky and also isn’t going to introduce echoes or repetitions that make other bits sound clunky.

By comparison, writing dialogues in which characters were communicating half in text and half in voice, and often having both public-facing and private conversations all at once, was pretty straightforward. If nothing else, it’s all dialogue (albeit nonstandard dialogue), and I often find dialogue a lot easier to work with anyway.

I’ve only played one MMO (World of Warcraft) before, but I can understand how the genre would be conducive to world-building. Was there ever another genre or a specific game that you think you’d be interested in writing about?

A few actually. For a while, I kicked around the idea of doing something set in the world of competitive card gaming, either for a digital-only game (Totally Not Hearthstone) or a paper-first game (Totally Not Magic The Gathering), but I ran up against the tiny issue that I don’t actually know very much about those worlds.

The one I’d really like to do, either as a soft-sequel to LFG or just as a down-the-line maybe-some-day project, is one set in a tabletop RPG. Back when I wrote LFG tabletop roleplaying was if anything even more of an obscure niche hobby than MMORPGs but obviously since then there’s been Stranger Things and Critical Role and the D&D boom (I’m not even sure if 5th edition was out when I was working on LFG) so it might actually make a lot more sense to a modern audience.

What was the most crucial element to you when creating Drew and Kit as characters?

I think, like the what-comes-first question, there’s an extent to which this one doesn’t have a single answer. But if I had to boil it down to a single core element, I think what I’d say is that I knew I wanted to write a gaming romance where the gaming wasn’t peripheral. It was as much at the heart of the romantic dynamic as “grumpy sunshine” or “he’s a rake, she’s a governess”.

So, in a way, what was most important to nail down was the core issue of how Drew and Kit interact with games, and what that implies about them as people, how that translates to their outside-the-game life. Basically, Drew is what the Magic community would call a Spike (he views gaming as about demonstrating mastery), while Kit is more of a Timmy/Johnny (he’s about self-expression and personal experiences). And their entire dynamic kind of grows out of that.

You’ve had younger, teenage characters before, but Looking for Group exists in the New Adult genre. You write such an array of characters and genres, was there a specific reason why you wanted to tell this story through this age group?

Embarrassingly, I’m not totally sure I remember. I think a big part of it is just that it was the early 2010s, and I’m not sure the world was ready at that time for a gamer character who was over 22. The overwhelming image of gamers back then was summed up by that one bit from this 2000s procedural show Life where a drug dealer has hidden their drug files (I don’t know either) inside a copy of Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones and they have to enlist somebody’s teenage kid to get to “level 10” in order to unlock them.

Given that the book was already asking the non-gaming side of its audience to accept a ton of new concepts and vocabulary (the glossary was a late addition requested by the publisher), asking them also to accept that no, actually, some gamers really are adults with jobs might have just been too much of a leap at the time.

On top of that, there were also some practical considerations; the protagonists had to be people who had enough free time to be heavily involved in MMO raiding, and had to be at a stage in life where they’d be cool with meeting up with somebody they met playing a video game on the internet. At the time, all that skewed younger to me.

Plus, there’s the fact that, on a meta level, the whole RPG arc is kind of about exploration, personal growth, and discovery, which kind of makes it a good thematic fit for a story about that stage of life specifically.

Or something. As I say, it was a long time ago.

Similar to the re-releases of the Spires series – how is it, or, instead, how has it been watching a book written years prior gain new life and fans?

It’s been great. Weird, but great. I’m not sure I can say much more than that.

You’ve mentioned the idea of Looking For Group being about finding a community. Can you discuss that aspect and the importance of allowing that community to be a gaming community? I feel like how we talk about gaming has changed, possibly since COVID. Because for a while, it was one of the most immediate ways we could hang out with people virtually (the Animal Crossing phase).

I agree attitudes to gaming have changed a lot, partly thanks to COVID, partly because we’re well into the era where millennials and even older GenZ-ers are the grownups with jobs. So, continuing to pretend, as a culture, that the only people who know what a Mario is are slacker teens living in their parents’ basements is getting increasingly untenable.

At the time, though, there was honestly a lot of scaremongering about online interactions in general and gaming in particular. Which, in retrospect, wasn’t at all the sort of thing we should have been worried about (see above re: social media companies rule the universe now).

One of the things I was very conscious of at the time I was working on LFG, to the extent that it’s addressed explicitly in the text of the book, is that there was a lot of talk about “gaming addiction.” And don’t get me wrong, addictive behaviors are a real thing and gaming often is set up to exploit people with addictive personalities (see loot boxes.) But, at the time there was a tendency to label any way of interacting with video games that wasn’t culturally normalized as “addiction”, which I think was genuinely harmful.

I’m a big believer in the death of the author and I don’t like to tell people how to interpret my books, but one of the things I do find genuinely strange about reactions to LFG is how many people seem to genuinely think that Kit has an issue with gaming addiction when, from my perspective, the point is that he kind of doesn’t, it’s just that his friends and his hobbies are all accessed through a virtual space.

Something I’ve noticed throughout your series is how cooking for people and gaming (whether off-hand or otherwise) have come up in most of the modern set ones. Is there a reason those elements come up, or do you think it’s just natural for the world they’re set in?

I’m a simple person: I like gaming and I like food. The food stuff, in particular, I absolutely do think is just natural for any world where (checks notes) people eat things. The games stuff is more of a…personal quirk, I guess? I find play as a very broad concept valuable, and I think how people act in a play context, whether that’s gaming, board gaming, or just mucking about, can be really illustrative. And ultimately, illustrating how people interact with each other is kind of my job.

I recently read 10 Things That Never Happened and was continually laughing aloud. Do you think there’s a key ingredient to writing funny dialogue? And, on that note, are there any authors that you read when you need to laugh?

I don’t think I have a magic formula for writing funny dialogue, but in general, I think for all X, the key to being good at X is to take X seriously. And I do try to take humor seriously. There’s usually a point during the editing of a book where I’ll go through the entire thing as it currently exists and make notes for tweaks and changes, and while a lot of those tweaks and changes are things like “this comma looks like it’s in the wrong place” or “this needs a dialogue tag”, quite often the tweak will be something like “is there a joke here?” Quite often, you can look at the overall shape of a line and see that there’s a way it could be made funny, and it just becomes a matter of (and I’m aware I’m using this word a lot) iterating.

In terms of writers who make me laugh, I think I’m pretty basic. Terry Pratchett or PG Wodehouse can usually do the trick. Daniel M Lavery has been making me laugh since The Toast. And in the romance world, there’s always Lex Croucher. Their books aren’t necessarily always light, but they can be very, very funny. Or at least I think we share a similar goofy “grew upon BBC sitcoms” sense of humor.

Is there a game or piece of media you’re currently hooked on?

I’m not sure “hooked on” is the right term, but I got briefly obsessed with the old BBC Merlin series because I’d put it on in the background while I was doing other things. I’d never actually watched it all the way through before, and I was actually pleasantly surprised. Although my single biggest takeaway from the series is that it…kind of forgets to include the bit where Camelot is actually a nice place to live? One of the things that’s solidly cool about it is that it really does do a full Arthur-and-Merlin arc starting from the reign of Uther Pendragon (Tony Head, best thing in the show by miles) and ending with (spoilers for…mythology, I guess?) Arthur’s death at the hands of Mordred at the Battle of Camlann.

Except the thing is, the core dramatic tension of the show comes from the fact that Merlin has to pretend to be a bumbling servant so that he can guide Arthur to his destiny, even though magic is illegal in Camelot. And they can’t change that dynamic, which means magic has to remain illegal in Camelot even after Arthur becomes king. Which means that the entire premise of the show, that Merlin is going to guide Arthur into starting a new golden age where they don’t, y’know, literally burn people like him at the stake just for being who they are, never actually happens. And the show just kind of blanks this.

So yes, mildly obsessed in a very silly way.

You’ve had quite a lot of books come out that span different periods, styles, and genres. How has your writing process developed over time in tackling such a wide array of subjects?

Erratically. I’ve always been the sort of person to jump around between ideas, projects, and interests, so my very eclectic writing process has always really worked for me. I think a way to put it might be that I’ve always been very conscious that I’m the sort of person who will see a thing about a thing and then (as with the BBC Merlin) get very briefly obsessed with that thing for a period of a few months before moving on to something else. Which lines up fairly neatly with the time it takes to get a book written, as long as I can stay focused.

And of course I say “the sort of person” but I think probably that’s a fairly common sort of person; a whole lot of people took up chess as a result of The Queen’s Gambit. My working practice is similar, except instead of getting really into the idea of playing chess, I tend to get really into the idea of writing a book about somebody who plays chess. Which has the advantage of being (a) substantially easier than actually getting good at an extremely difficult game from scratch and (b) being my actual job.

In our interview three years ago, you mentioned wanting to write a book about “Moby Dick in space.” And, now, you have Hell’s Heart coming out next year. Do you recall if you’d already been working on the book? How long do you tend to sit with ideas before committing to them?

Wow, that is a deep cut (I suppose to be fair, it’s from your own website). Hell’s Heart wasn’t on the table at the time, although the core premise (it’s Moby Dick, but instead of hunting whales in the sea, they’re hunting space monsters in the skies of Jupiter) was already there.

Then a little while later (I want to say a year, might have been a bit less, might have been a bit more), my agent was talking to an editor and asked them the “what’s your dream project” question, to which this person came back with “Moby Dick as a romance” and my agent was all “well it’s funny you should mention that.”

I have paraphrased slightly. But only slightly.

I should stress that this is not at all a typical process, for me (or—I assume—for anybody, it was pretty random). I suppose it’s illustrative in a way, in that I do tend to have a bunch of ideas sitting around which I’ll often be able to pivot into when opportunities arise, but it’s very rare for something to line up quite as perfectly as it did with Hell’s Heart.

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Looking for Group is available now for purchase.