I’m about to do my first TikTok live. Eek!. Of course by the time you are reading this, it will be in your past, but currently it is still in my future. In my script, I am supposed to talk about what inspired my story. And for some reason, I really hate that question, because it’s hard for me to point to one thing and say, “Yep. That was my story.”

   I guess the first inspiration was that I wanted a girl to go back into the past, but not to another century necessarily, but rather to a time that her parents would have been roughly her age. I didn’t want her to interact with her parents; that was too enclosed. So, instead, I had her meet a boy (enter the romance part of the book).

   But if I had her meet a boy, it would leave me with two dilemmas. One, if she returned to the future, he would be forty-something. Two, if she brought him with her to the future, then I would lose the trope that he had to wait for her. So, that left me with the need to create a species of people that played outside some of humanity’s rules.

   The characters themselves took over from there, and they told their stories. If you think I had a say in what happened from there, you would be wrong. I would want to steer the ship, so to speak, in one direction, and they were not having it. So, I let them take the story. 

   What I ended up doing was research. I spent time researching how governments work (because the new species had to have some sort of legal system). I researched vampires and immortals but quickly decided that I wanted my immortals to have their own trope (but I did include a fictional explanation for the legendary vampire stories in North America). I researched time eras in history to get a feel for their culture, the slang, the clothing, etc. 

    I wanted the characters to operate in a world that if you just believed in the fantasy, it could be true. So, I had to make the places real—the schools real—the places they visited real. I wanted it to be so real that if a reader from one of the towns I used picked up the book, they would feel like they had found their home in the pages of the story.