Goodreads asked A.E. Pennymaker:

Where did you get the idea for your most recent book?

A.E. Pennymaker I don't actually know. I was sitting in a hospital waiting room in November, 2017, waiting for my mother to come out of an MRI scan.
That MRI would tell us whether my mother's cancer had metastasized or not. There is a whole host of emotions and thoughts that run over you when you're waiting for the end of that test, none of them pretty, with hope a poor, scraggly little thing that is all too easy to trample.
So I really, really needed a distraction, and I had brought my iPad. I just started writing. The scene started out with a single line that, in hindsight, hit everything on the head: "All is lost."
As I kept going, the speaker turned out to be a girl named Bren, writing to her aunt about losing everything in a fire. Bren was just sort of jumping off the page to say hello, so I kept writing after I got home. It would be a few days before we found out the results of the MRI, and it was a bit like standing under a falling anvil. What does one do while waiting for an anvil to drop? Something – anything – other than think about falling anvils.
Anyway, as one scene led to another, and doctors visits turned into chemotherapy treatments instead of a mastectomy, I finally decided I would actually start plotting something official. Now I've got a first and second book written, and I'm drafting the third.
After three years of fighting stage 4 cancer, my mom passed into the arms of her Savior at the beginning of 2020. This story was my momentary escape from saying a very long, slow, painful goodbye. It wasn't exactly a shelter from the storm, but it did give me a place to deal with things. A place to scream. A punching bag.
I would like to say Mom would have enjoyed Shadow Road if she read it. She might have. She would have been happier that I finished it, I think, and poked fun at some of my sillier typos.
So there it is. That was how Shadow Road started.

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