Last month, author, businesswoman, HerCanberra contributor and all round wonder woman Emma Grey published her latest novel, Unrequited. Described as ‘unputdownable’, the young adult romance captures every teen girl’s boy-band fantasies in an entertaining and authentic read.

Emma’s Facebook followers were part of the writing journey, and watched in some kind of awe as the book seemed to write itself at great speed. I caught up with her to find out how Unrequited went from idea to reality.

When did you first imagine Kat and her story?

My teenage daughters and I were on the Hume Highway between Sydney and Canberra, near Goulburn. We were on our way home from the One Direction concert in October last year, and my 13-year-old was distraught that it was over.

I’d been a boy-band fan since the 80s, and had already had fleeting thoughts about writing a story about an ‘ordinary’ girl meeting a singer, but it was on this drive, with music blaring and the kids “fangirling” that it occurred to me that it would be way more interesting if the main character wasn’t a fan… I could hardly get home to Canberra fast enough to start writing it.

Did you plan the story with the ending before you started writing? Or did it develop as you went along?

Other than ‘girl meets boy band that she loathes’, I had nothing when I started. No idea. This sounds weird, but the characters seemed to tell me the story and all I did was type it up for them. It felt like I was about a sentence behind them, just trying to get down the gist of what was happening.

A few paragraphs of Chapter 1, med student, Joel Isaacson, invited himself aboard the train Kat was on, and into the storyline. This was never going to be a love triangle, but he just appeared, so what can you do? And I love him!

Where do you write?

In a tiny study CLUTTERED with my 3-year-old’s mess. Toys, colouring-in paper, apple cores, drink bottles, school permission notes, dead iPods … I’m too embarrassed to post a photo. Seriously, it’s chaos!

How do you find the time?!!

There’s a business to run here, and two teenagers and a three-year-old, and ageing parents who do a combination of help me and need help, so the novel-writing has to be squashed into nooks and crannies of time.

I started the NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) challenge last November and committed to writing a LOT (over 1000 words per day). That was going well, then our ceiling pipes burst and the house flooded and nobody had proper beds for a month and the house was in uproar, so the rest of the book was written in twenty-minute sittings waiting for kids to be ready to leave for the school run, or during Octonauts.

In the final stretch, on the three days when my son is in childcare each week, I made a promise to write FIRST, for two hours, no matter what else I had to do. A lot of it was also written at night, once everyone else was asleep, and I’d escape into Kat’s world between 10pm and 1am.

Were you inspired by any of the people in your life in building any of your characters? 

Yes. I wrote this for my younger daughter who is a big boy-band fan. Kat is really a mix of my older daughter and my step-daughter, with their love of vintage fashion and the stepping back from mass-culture.

There is one character in the book who is 100% authentic, including her name. She’s based on one of my daughter’s friends, who needed a lift because she was fighting for her life while I wrote this book.

How has writing your second book ‘Unrequited’ been different to writing your first book? 

This one was pure fantasy and I just loved the escape.

My first book was ‘chaotic mum memoir’ and was really written as a form of therapy. It was also written via weekly emails to friends, then turned into a book later.

Why did you choose to self-publish Unrequited?

I’d been published by a commercial publisher before. This time, I wanted more control over the process from cover design through to marketing. I also felt that the book’s time is ‘now’ – the cultural references are very current – and self-publishing was faster (it can take months from acceptance of a manuscript to publication with a commercial publisher). Time will tell if I made the right decision! (It certainly caused a few headaches in the initial stages.)

Please tell me there will be a sequel?! You know I want Kat to bring back girl power-bands (AKA Spice Girls)!!

Ha! Love it! No, I think the story ends exactly where it should. Having said that, I just ordered a book about how to turn your book into a screenplay (totally getting ahead of myself, like Kat does, but how cool would that be?), and I have some pretty exciting ideas about running a song-writing competition for young musicians to set the book’s songs to music, and offering a Kat Hartland Songwriting Scholarship, and doing a musical one day… so hopefully ‘The End’ is just the beginning for Kat.

What’s next for you? 

It’s back to high school again for another teen novel. A parallel universe story: Switched.