M O R E   B O O K S !

All of the other books I've written on this account (so far) branch off of The Search for Lily Myers in one way or another, so this feels like an appropriate place to explain how they all fit together if anyone is curious! If you'd rather, you can also skip ahead to the Q&A about this book at the bottom.

(Yes, I was really extra enough to make a whole diagram about how my books are connected. Someone take Canva away from me.)

☞ The Way We Learned to Love  is told from Lily and Liam's POVs for the seven years leading up to this book. It could be read first, but that would spoil a lot of elements of Lily, Liam, Henry, and Natasha's backstories that Amelia learned about in this novel. I wrote it with the understanding that it would serve as a follow-up story, so I think a lot of the fun and nuances get lost if you don't already know just how much the characters are going to have to change by the end of the book.

☞ The Dream Before the Dark  takes place in 1992 and tells the story of how Henry's parents met. It works completely fine as a stand-alone and doesn't need to be read in any specific order in relation to my other books. It's shorter than all the others but might be my favorite one that I've written so far—and definitely influenced the role I gave Rob and Jen in this rewrite!

☞ The Imitation Game  begins two months after the events of The Search for Lily Myers. It contains a couple of very broad spoilers but features a mostly different cast of characters than any of my other books. That being said, a certain Natasha might be an important side character in that story, so definitely check it out if you liked her in this book!

☞ Imitation Game Spin-Off  will be coming in 2023 and take place 10 years after the events of The Imitation Game. As of the time of writing this note, I haven't even started drafting it and only just recently came up with a title, but it will stand independently of The Search for Lily Myers other than mentions of what Natasha (and maybe even Henry and Amelia) has been up to during all that time.

Q & A

Q: What inspired the birth of this story? 

A:  I'm trying so hard to remember how the idea first popped into my head, but April 2020 feels like a loooong time ago. Because it was around the start of Covid and the entire world basically felt like it was shut down, I was spending a lot of time sitting around inside and just letting my thoughts roam all over the place as a form of escapism. I'd gone to Italy on a short-term study abroad trip in May 2019 and by April 2020 it felt like we were living in a completely different world, so I was definitely holding onto those happy memories and sort of reliving them through my writing as much as I could. I think incorporating mental health was also definitely linked to how challenging the spring and summer of 2020 were for me, but I've also just always been around those types of conversations because my dad's a therapist.

Q: What were the easiest and hardest things about the rewrite?

A: Knowing these characters so well before I even started the first chapter was definitely an advantage and a challenge simultaneously. There was a lot less to figure out in that regard, but I also had to make sure I didn't assume the reader would know just as much about their motivations as I already did and then accidentally skip over important character development. Having a first draft and already knowing which parts didn't work the first time definitely helped me feel confident about the choices I was making, but rewriting a fifty-chapter book from scratch was still pretty exhausting. The first draft was in first person and I moved it to the third person this time around, so it was a total redo.

Q: Favorite chapter to write? Hardest one?

A: Honestly, the entire book was so much fun because I was taking this thing I'd already written two years ago and finding brand new perspectives to approach it from. My understanding of all of the characters was completely different after having written 2 prequel books and because of that, a lot of the choices I made about how they behaved and what they believed were a lot more intentional this time around instead of happenstance. The most exciting aspect for me was probably getting to surprise readers with events that didn't happen in the first version—the most obvious example being the end of Chapter 39 where Amelia realizes the meaning of Lily's letters. Colton's character as a whole had to be a lot more evil this time which was difficult but also really exciting to write because he got to be way more connected to the main thread of the story than he was in the first draft. I struggle with writing dialogue, so any dialogue-heavy chapters tend to be the hardest for me to write.

Q: Why did you change the mystery so much from the first draft?

A:  A few reasons! Those of you who read the first draft will know that the original cause of Lily's disappearance was that she ran off while experiencing hallucinations and delusions from the mental condition that she has, schizoaffective disorder. I explored her and Liam's mental health a lot in The Way We Learned to Love and once I'd written that book, the original Lily Myers ending felt like an erasure of all the progress they had just made as individuals and as a couple. It honestly just didn't work anymore and I wanted to introduce something even more heartbreaking and completely out of their control. I realized that bringing Colton into the Lily mystery could be a really interesting way to tie her and Amelia's stories together and force them both to reframe the abuse they endured in much more nuanced ways than anything else I had come up with in the first draft. I also just wanted the mystery subplot to be more pronounced overall in this rewrite as I think it was something I shied away from too much the first time around and then felt disappointed with afterward.

 Q: Which character do you relate to the most?

A: Definitely Amelia; a lot of her personality traits were at least loosely inspired by my own. Some of that was just for practicality—when I wrote the first draft back in 2020, I hadn't written in 3 years and wasn't great at developing characters and so I wanted my protagonist to be someone whose emotions and motivations I felt like I could tap into easily. I had just been sent home from college at the time because of Covid and was stuck living with my parents again and so I definitely channeled some of the frustrations I was feeling at that time into Amelia's tense relationship with her own parents. That was one of the areas I didn't delve into as much in this second draft simply because there wasn't time with everything else I was trying to include, and I knew from writing all of these other books that I was actually much more interested in exploring Henry's family.

Q: What character was the most difficult to write?

A: Probably Colton? The majority of the male characters in my books are love interests and thus precious little cinnamon rolls rather than villain characters, so writing him was definitely a challenge. Even though he was there in the first draft, he played a much bigger and darker role in this one. On the other hand, I'm extremely attached to Rob and Jen after writing The Dream Before the Dark, so it was difficult to resist the urge to include them in even more chapters than I did—there just wasn't time!

Q: If you could meet one of these characters in real life, who would it be and what would you do together?

A: I mean, of all the precious cinnamon rolls referenced in the previous answer, Henry might just be the most precious of them all. Perhaps I'd make him bake me some literal cinnamon rolls and then I could decorate them horribly like Amelia and the gingerbread men. 

Q: Which topic did you think it was necessary to shine a light on?

A: All of my books deal with mental health in some shape or form, whether that be anxiety, depression, abuse, grief, trauma...you get the idea. It has nothing to do with me wanting to write sad books or wanting to make some sort of sweeping statement about mental health, but it's part of the human experience and not something that I think is always represented very well on platforms like Wattpad. It can be very sensationalized and stigmatized, which was another reason why I moved away from the original reason for Lily's disappearance. I thought that Amelia and Lily being abused by the same person created more interesting and nuanced implications for how they and all of the other characters would respond to it once that was revealed. 

Q: Where did the poems used in the epigraphs come from?

A: Back when I was writing The Way We Learned to Love, I found a couple of poems by Nikita Gill that I thought would make perfect epigraphs for the 2 parts of that book. Once I decided that I wanted to break this rewrite into 3 parts and have an epigraph for each of them, it made sense to me to go back to the same author since the two books are so closely connected.

Q: I saw a lot of Taylor Swift references throughout the story, how did hearing x or y song/album (TS or not) impact the development of a certain scene, or just the writing in general?

A: I love this question! Long story short (heh), I just listen to a lot of TS while I'm writing my books. She uses such vivid and poetic imagery in her lyrics that they lend themselves extremely well to being chapter titles. The lyrical styles of folklore and evermore made it so easy to imagine her words applying to all sorts of different scenarios because she started telling these wonderfully compelling stories about characters that are distinctly not herself and thus leave so much room for imagination. I usually compile a bunch of chapter title ideas into a google doc and song lyrics are a great place to draw from for that. I wouldn't say that any songs or albums directly influenced a scene, but listening to music definitely gets my imagination going and allows me to more easily get into the right headspace to write whatever type of scene I'm working on.

Q: After the rewrite, how do you think your way of writing/storytelling has changed/evolved? 

A: I would say that the most notable changes in my writing happened not during the rewrite but in the time between the first draft and the rewrite. I didn't have the slightest idea how to plan a book when I was writing the first draft—I was completely winging everything. But with each book I've written, I've progressively improved at finding solutions to plot out the arc of the story in advance in a way that works for me, which in turn has allowed me to start using a lot more foreshadowing. I also definitely had no clue in the beginning how to effectively use side characters such as Natasha, but she ironically turned out to be the character that's shown up in the highest number of my stories (3 out of the 4). I'm still patting myself on the back for impulsively deciding during the first draft that her family was originally from New York (which went on to let her show up in The Imitation Game) and that she briefly dated Liam (her chapters in The Way We Learned to Love are some of my favorites out of the whole book). 

Lesson learned—sometimes winging things will still work out for you.

Thanks for reading this extremely long Q&A and feel free to drop any more questions you have in the comments section—I will do my best to answer them!