Haili Blassingame

And so we worked on that for years.

I rewrote it from scratch.

I always say that Cece's webinar on stakes, tensions, and conflicts actually totally changed the way I wrote the story.

And that was really fundamental in rewriting this book.

And so it was like 2024.

And I mean, the other big thing that happened was, remember how I said I had started it right before the pandemic?

And I was like, oh, I'll just set it when this is all over in 2024.

Yeah.

And of course it was the presidential election and I'm in DC.

And I was like, okay, you, you gotta talk about this.

Like you can't, if it's a realist novel, that wouldn't make sense.

And so I had to rewrite it to incorporate that.

And it was before Trump won.

So I was, I mean,

Thinking back, it was a totally crazy process.

So we basically wrote it as like, it might be alternative history, or it might be actually what happens.

But I knew that we had to put it on submission before the election.

Like, I just felt in my gut, like, we got to go out with this.

We went out.

like two weeks before the election or something.