Fun Facts for “What to Do Outside Tremont”

Factoid One
This is the first time I’ve released two Cornwall series books back-to-back without releasing a Carlsbad book between them.

Factoid Two
Katelynn’s favorite video game, Pac-Man 256, is also my favorite video game. I play it on my iPad daily to unwind and am quite good at it.

Factoid Three
I originally had Katelynn and Tina saying “I love you” in Chapter 22, but after writing quite a tender scene, I immediately felt my instincts telling me that it was too soon in the book to do that, and so I changed the scene entirely.

Factoid Four
Katelynn’s car, the Vauxhall Corsa, is the same car one of my beta readers drives in England.

Factoid Five
The book Katelynn orders from Darcie, Bloom County, is one of my father’s favorite comic strips ever. He also has the complete set and I’ve even read them. It was a funny and very topical comic strip that pointed out a lot of foibles in the America of that time—many of which still exist in this era.

Factoid Six
This is the first book I’ve written in which it is explicitly stated that the main characters eventually have a child.

Factoid Seven
Tina’s hairstyle is modeled after one of my good friends here in Carlsbad. It’s kind of a shaggy graduated bob which, in my opinion, not a lot of women can pull off successfully. But she can because she has the right facial structure for it.
I’ve seen other women try to pull it off and I’ve wanted to tell them to go immediately to their hairstylist and get it changed.

Factoid Eight
The opening scene was inspired by a tweet I read on my timeline about someone seeing a guy playing a guitar and singing to a woman in the park. I then tried to imagine how such a scene could go wrong…not difficult considering a man was involved.

Factoid Nine
Like Katelynn and Tina, I also hate having a gift I brought opened in front of a crowd of people, like at a party. If I’m with someone individually, I’m fine, but at a party it always embarrasses me!

Factoid Ten
The McNair—the science vessel Tai will be rendezvousing with in order to return to her duties on Aquila Prime—is named after Ronald McNair, who died on the space shuttle Challenger. His story--which I learned watching a documentary on Netflix about the Challenger event--is really remarkable and inspiring.

Bonus Factoid
The planet Knaht, mentioned in the bonus epilogue, is just the word “thank” spelled backwards because I was too lazy to try to come up with a different name and my eyes happened to land on the word “thank” on one of my computer monitors. :-)