by Michelle Andreani

It’s been awhile since we’ve updated you on all things THE WAY BACK TO YOU. And so many things have happened! (That’s our excuse for being so bad at the updating. Things happening!) (We’re sorry.) But water under the bridge! We thought the funnest way to share what we’ve been up to is a photo timeline. So, please join us and here we go.

Sure, we wrote TWBTY on our computers, but so many thoughts, and starts, and details went into our character journals. Cloudy and Kyle really came to life in them. This is Mindi’s, packed full of Kyle Knowledge!

While we relied on the internet (and our new best friend, Google Maps, specifically) for research, sometimes we needed to take matters into our own hands. Literally. When I was having a tough time rewriting a scene set in Santa Monica, CA, I drew my own version in my journal. And it helped that scene a ton!  (Map not to scale.)

Writing and revising TWBTY was fun and lots of work and exciting and sometimes miserable. The misery was courtesy of this guy:

Then! Finally! In June 2015, our draft was complete. And a couple months later, it was copyediting time. At that point, TWBTY was still all electronic, and it looked like this:

November arrived sooner than expected, and along with it, pass pages! With those we were able to go through a hard copy of our story; one that was starting to look like a real book! And it required Post-Its. A lot of Post-Its.

AND THEN.

IT HAPPENED.

TWBTY GOT ONE STEP CLOSER TO A BOOK-BOOK.

ARCS!!!

PRETTY ARCS. *pets ARCs*

And that’s where we are with TWBTY. I told you a lot had happened! Now we’re gearing up to share Cloudy, Kyle, Arm, and co. with all of you.  We hope you’re ready to meet them after all this time. 🙂