A Goodreads user asked Kate Quinn:

Hi Kate!!!! Just wanted to tell you that I absolutely LOVE A Day of Fire! This collaborative work is really well done. And thanks to you, I'm now acquainted with more brilliant HF authors. :) I was wondering, how did you guys decide on the sequence of the story?

Kate Quinn Our main concern was avoiding the Groundhog Day effect: if every single story showed Vesuvius blowing its top, the reader would have eruption fatigue by story #3! So we divided the eruption timeline into slots: a few weeks before the eruption, a few days before, the morning of, the afternoon of, the final burial. Ben Kane wrote his story first thanks to a deadline gap, and once we had his in hand we saw how we could interweave our own characters through his. Four of us live in the same DC area - Stephanie, Sophie, Eliza, and me - and we got together at my house for an all-day plotting session: "Ok, your heroine can be her heroine's best friend, and your hero can bump into Ben's gladiator, and your heroine can give my hero a concussion . . . " Huge fun all around. Glad you're enjoying the book!

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