Just the Highlights

Q and A

Here are my responses to the submitted questions! Thank you so much to everyone you submitted something, I loved answering your questions. And make sure to enter the one shot contest!

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Q: [Submitted by YaWeirdo] Did Nora actually die or did she run off to become a spy? I have seriously been contemplating this I thought it would be a huge plot twist that she would come back and be like bam and Jules and Eli would be like "ahh should we break up?"

A: Sadly, Nora actually did die. But I do love the idea of that plot twist. I might actually write a short story about that someday. Like a parody of that part of the novel. Hmm... I really do like that idea.

Q: [Submitted by broodingunicorn] How did the book or the idea of it start?

A: My junior year of high school, I was a TA (teacher's assistant) for the drama teacher. He was my absolute favorite teacher but this would (end up to be) his last year of teaching and he had become very depressed. As a result, he didn't do a lot of teaching which left me without much to do. I would work on homework when I had it but it was an hour every day and I had bad phone service so I needed something to do. I always typed down bits and pieces of conversations or descriptions in my phone when they came to me and with my free time I was able to expand on them. Pretty soon I was writing conversations and stuff for that purpose and I started thinking of the dialogue as dialogues between two specific people. I didn't have names for them yet but I imagined the girl as me and the boy as a kid I knew (he's an absolute horrible person but is sadly great other than that so it's easy for me to imagine him as different characters). Pretty soon, I had an idea of what I wanted the story to be about (which was the long story of two people's relationships). At the time I didn't know how I was going to format it, I knew I couldn't write it as a regular novel, but I knew that I had something I wanted to write. And that is how JTH was born.

Q: [Submitted by omgpenelope] Was Nora ever jealous when Julie came back into Eli's life (she seemed super cool with it but she knew when she met Eli he was in love with Julie)?

A: I think Nora was never a jealous person so she was naturally pretty okay with Julie showing up again. Maybe if Julie had shown up sooner or if she had seen firsthand what their relationship had been like (remember how many girls were scared off during in high school and college because they saw Eli and Julie together?), she would have been sort of jealous, but I don't think she was. By the time Julie had shown up Nora and Eli had had Ava and they had been married for a few years so Nora was pretty solid in her position that she was the one Eli was in love with. I think if Eli had given her a reason to worry, like a solid suspicious reason, she might have been upset but I don't think he ever gave her one. She respected that Eli and Julie had a history that she didn't understand but she also knew that she and Eli had a history Julie would never understand. The fact that she knew that kept her from being jealous, even if she had wanted to.

Q: [Submitted by omgpenelope] What exactly where the reactions of family and friends? I'm sure they knew it was coming, but was anybody's reaction unexpected?

A: I haven't really put much thought into people's reactions but I think that everyone was just sort of "so you guys finally got together." Maybe some people were surprised but I think the overall feeling was happiness and relief.

Q: [Submitted by omgpenelope, ByEmilyJason, indefinitelyamminco, and just_a_reader19] Did Eli and Julie have any more kids?