Guest post written by Love Goes Viral authors Camille Stochitch & Alexander Berman
Camille Stochitch was born in Paris, France, and studied American literature at the Sorbonne University. She’s lived in Los Angeles for over ten years, where she works as a director and screenwriter. Alexander Berman is from Highland Park, Illinois. He studied filmmaking at Harvard University and now works as a screenwriter and director in Los Angeles where he lives with his wife, Camille Stochitch, and their two children. Love Goes Viral is their debut novel.
About Love Goes Viral: An aspiring pop star crafts a fake relationship with a small-town boy to rehab her image, until her ex and her real feelings get in the way in this sweeping romance perfect for fans of Lynn Painter. Out January 6th 2026.
The pitch was simple: “What if Grey’s Anatomy… but with teenagers?”
The show was Attaway General. Produced by BratTV — the studio that basically invented the “Influencer-to-Actor” pipeline — and distributed by Hulu, it followed a group of high school volunteers at a hospital. The catch? We were filming a medical drama in the middle of a global pandemic, but the script never mentioned the pandemic.
Even crazier was the cast. They were young stars flown out to Los Angeles from all over the country: the dancer from Florida, the prankster from Illinois, the sister of a TikTok icon from Connecticut. They were incredibly talented at content creation, but most had never acted in a scripted drama before. So, we weren’t just directing them; we were their acting coaches, their mentors, and their introduction to the grueling world of TV production. This surreal, high-pressure experience became the direct inspiration for our novel, Love Goes Viral that we wrote with Estelle Laure.
Here are the 5 things we learned about internet fame on set that we put into the book:
Nobody Actually Wants to Be an Influencer
None of the people we worked with set out to be internet famous for the sake of it. They all had specific artistic dreams: to be dancers, musicians, actors, or comedians. Going viral was just the accidental shortcut they took to get there.
To almost all of them, the constant posting sucked energy and time away from their actual craft, but they felt trapped by the algorithm. Because what’s the point of making art if no one sees it? That dilemma inspired our heroine, Love Thompson. Love lives in a trailer park that she longs to leave, and dance is her ticket out. She works at it until her toes are literally bloody. Going viral is the last thing she expects (or wants), but it becomes a shortcut to her deepest desires.
The “Viral Moment” is Never Just a Moment
Everyone on our set had “The Moment.” That split second that appears on millions of feeds at once. There is always something unexpected about it, like the girl who did a flip over her brother during a TikTok dance.
Our personal favorite was our friend Brenna who we met on set. At 15, she went viral for dancing to a Lady Gaga song in the background of a super-serious local newscast. This was the inspiration for Love’s viral moment in our novel. In the book, Love shoots to stardom when her best friend is pranked at graduation. To save her from humiliation, Love runs on stage and starts dirty dancing to distract the crowd (and grinds on her principal).
The secret, though, is that these “accidents” are actually the product of hard work. The girl who vaulted over her brother? She was an elite dancer posting five videos a day. Brenna? She is an infectiously happy person who brings dance into all sorts of inappropriate places constantly. The moments seem like luck, but they are actually inevitable.
The “Relationships” are All Fake
As you can guess, Grey’s Anatomy with teenagers had plenty of romantic drama on screen. What we didn’t expect was the drama off-screen. A week into filming, almost every fictional couple on the show became a real-life relationship. Every. Single. One.
At first, we thought it was just raging hormones and lockdown frustration. But when we saw these relationships meticulously documented online, we realized something else was going on. They weren’t faking love for clout. It’s just that for an influencer, there is no private space where real love lives. They have to document their lives constantly.
If love is supposed to be intimate and personal, can you experience real love if you’re always in the public eye? It’s not intentional fake dating; it’s unavoidable fake dating. In our book, Love experiences this with her rockstar crush, Damien. Her feelings are genuine, but every moment of their relationship is splashed onto Instagram. She has to ask herself: Does she really love him? Or does she love that people love that she loves him?
The Fear of Getting Canceled is Real
The cast whispered about one persistent anxiety on set, and it had nothing to do with the virus raging outside. It was cancel culture. In the “before times” of 2021, it was hard to know what would set off the internet horde. Demi Lovato had just been canceled for fighting with a frozen yogurt shop, so our cast was on high alert.
They had to walk a fine line: sell a fantasy of luxury and fun, but also tell their followers to “stay safe.” We remember one morning when this tension snapped. We arrived for our daily COVID testing only to realize half the cast was missing. The stragglers had been partying at a content house all night and showed up hungover and sick.
News of the “Pandemic Party” leaked online immediately. Accusations of privilege flew. The bad actors had to apologize, but so did the good actors who had followed the rules but were guilty by association. It was simpler to apologize for something you didn’t do than to try to reason with an anonymous mob. In our book, Love gets canceled for a scandal she didn’t cause. Her instinct is to fight, but she learns the hard truth: sometimes you have to change the narrative… by fake dating the boy next door.
Love, not Fame, is the Real Pursuit
There was one girl on set who was a joy to direct. She had never acted before (she went viral for her dance routines in Florida) but she took the work seriously. She was always on time, knew her lines, and had raw talent.
We told her she could have a real career in Hollywood if she stuck with it. She actually choked up. But can you guess what she did next? She got on a plane, moved back to Florida, and married her long-distance boyfriend. Today, her feed is filled with wedding photos and family trips.
Somewhere in this experience, she realized that the love of one person was worth more than the likes of millions of strangers. Our hero, Love Thompson, has to make the same choice.
Will she pick fame or a boy (and which one?!?) To find out, you’ll have to read the book!
