In The Forests of The Night - Writing Process

Writing Process

According to Atwater-Rhodes' official site, The Den of Shadows, In the Forests of the Night is one of seven novels that she had finished writing and is only the first she ever published. The inspiration for the novel came from an assignment she received in the seventh grade when her best friend Jessica had chosen "The Tyger" for the assignment. The character of Risika was taken from the brief mention in Atwater-Rhodes' unpublished novel, Red Wine. She bagan working on the novel in 1997, under the title White Wine, and during the writing process with the novel, two incidents had accord, Atwater-Rhodes began suffering from writer's block and then her computer crashed from a virus during the months of July and August.In the original manuscript the character of Ather was to play the main antagonist but after the loss of her computer and having to retype the manuscript it was changed to Aubrey, another character in the novel. She finished the novel in August of that year and spent the next four months revising the manuscript. She then sent the manuscript in on December 31, 1997. In mid-February 1998 she met her agent, Tom Hart, who later called her and informed her that Random House would publish the novel on her on her fourteenth birthday; however, the novel was pushed back and released a little over a year later in May 1999.