 Well, I've been writing since I was five years old, swooning around my parents' typewriter. So I think I always knew I was going to write a book at some point. But in terms of this book in particular, I actually used to live in Atlanta before starting this project and moving to Tulsa to work on it. But when I was living in Atlanta, I actually was having lunch with a friend one day several years ago, and the film 12 Years a Slave came up. My friend had never seen it, and he was telling me he didn't really want to see it because he was tired of only seeing black folks being brutalized in these historical depictions.