That research occupied most of 2013. I’m not a physicist, nor a mathematician—I never even went to college—so I had to put in a lot of work to reach the level of understanding I wanted. Why go to such lengths? Because, as magic is to fantasy, science is to, well, science fiction. It sets the rules to your story, defines what is or isn’t possible. And although I envisioned To Sleep as a love letter to the genre, I wanted to avoid certain technical conventions that would undermine the setting. Mainly, I wanted a way for ships to travel FTL that didn’t allow for time travel, and that didn’t blatantly contradict physics as we know it. (I was okay with bending a few rules here and there, but outright breakage didn’t sit right with me.)

Of course, all the world-building in the universe doesn’t matter if the story itself isn’t sound. And that, I’m afraid, is where I met my greatest difficulty.

For various personal reasons, writing the first draft of To Sleep took until January of 2016. Three(ish) years of hard, hard work. Upon finishing, my first reader, my one and only sister, Angela, informed me that the book just. didn’t. work. Upon reading the manuscript myself, I realized she was, unfortunately, correct.

The year 2017 passed in a frenzy of rewrites. None of which fixed the underlying issues. The rewrites were, to put it metaphorically, like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, which did nothing to change the fact that the ship’s structural integrity was compromised.

The problem was this: after working on the Inheritance Cycle for so long, my plotting skills had gotten rusty from disuse. The problem-solving muscles I had built while developing the story for Eragon and sequels had atrophied in the decade since. And, I won’t lie, after the success of the Inheritance Cycle, I had, perhaps, been a bit cocky when starting To Sleep. “Well if I could do that, surely this won’t be a problem.”

Ha! Life, fate, the gods—call it what you will, but reality has a way of humbling us all.

The situation came to a head at the end of 2017 when my agent, Simon, and then-editor, Michelle, gently informed me that the rewrites just weren’t cutting it.

At that moment, I nearly gave up. After so much work and time invested, to be back at nearly square one was … demoralizing. But if I have a defining trait, it’s determination. I really hate to give up on a project, even when common sense tells me otherwise.

So in November 2017, I stopped rearranging the deck chairs and, instead, went back to the basic blueprint of the story. And I questioned everything. In a week and a half, I wrote (by hand) over two hundred pages of notes dissecting character, motivation, meaning, symbology, technology … You name it, I looked at it.