Goodreads asked Cheryl King:

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

Cheryl King A few years ago, I read an article about train-hopping during the Great Depression, and I found it fascinating. Then, I recently was participating in a flash fiction writing contest where writers are given a specific genre in which to write. Before receiving my assignment, I started to think about which genre would be the most challenging for me, and I decided on historical fiction. So I thought, "What would I write if I received historical fiction as my assigned genre?" I thought back to that train-hopping article and began forming this idea of a teen girl train-hopping to find work during the Great Depression. I never received historical fiction as my genre for the contest, but the story idea kept nagging at me anyway, so I practically wrote the 1,000-word flash fiction pieces in my head over the next few months and then was compelled to type it up and expand it into a 67,000-ish-word novel.

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