1--What is the title of your latest release?
TIME AFTER TIME
2--What’s the “elevator pitch” for your new book?
It’s a super romantic, slow-burn love story about two young women, an old Victorian house, a green glass stone buried in the front sidewalk, and a mysterious past that unites them all. It’s told in two timelines, a hundred years apart, with dual POVs (Libby and Tish), and a third-person POV that tells the story of Elizabeth and Patricia from the past. It’s a story for anyone who loves romance, for anyone who believes in everlasting love, found family, forgiveness, and taking chances.
3--How did you decide where your book was going to take place?
The story is set in a fictional Northeastern town. I needed a small town that could be close enough to drive to the city but still be its own separate place, and a setting that would have autumn weather in late September and snow on New Year’s Eve.
4--Would you hang out with your protagonist in real life?
Yes! I love Libby and Tish! They are younger than I am, though, so they’d probably shoo me off. Ideally, I’d be hanging with Joe at his junkyard, or with Hasina and Paps at their house. I have a soul-deep affinity for the elderly and for children. We all start life as one and (if we’re lucky) we become the other.
So as much as I love teenagers and young adults, in real life you will usually find me hanging with the babies and the old folks. There’s something so vulnerable about people who are at the beginning of their lives, or at the end. I’m a natural protector, a real mother-bear, so I’m always drawn to the most vulnerable among us.
5--What are three words that describe your protagonist?
The story is a bit of a two-hander between both Libby and Tish. Libby is courageous, impulsive, and determined. Tish is loyal, steadfast, and brave (although it takes her a while to realize it).
6--What’s something you learned while writing this book?
I’d say the main thing I learned while writing this book is how to write a book! There was a learning curve, I’m not gonna lie. I knew I could do it, that wasn’t the issue. Stories and characters and plot come fairly easily to me, but my brain is trained, as a screenwriter, to avoid any superfluous action, prose, or dialogue. My other books, Five Feet Apart and All This Time, were based on my screenplays, adapted into novel form (it’s usually vice versa). In screenplays, we try to keep it tight. Every page costs a lot of money to shoot, so there’s not much time to linger on things that might be interesting but don’t move the story forward. Books are a whole ‘nother animal. The linger is real. I was always reminding myself (or being reminded) that I didn’t have to rush, that I had as much time as I needed or wanted to let a moment play. Once that clicked, I was all good.
7--Do you edit as you draft or wait until you are totally done?
Oh, boy. Not only do I edit as I go, but I re-read from page one every day, editing all the way (again and again), so by the time I get to where I left off, I’m able to flow and the new pages come. It doesn’t take as long as you might imagine because in the constant re-reading and editing, I’m thinking ahead, putting together pieces of what’s to come and tinkering with things I may have missed. The time I would have spent staring at my cursor and waiting for the next page to come is instead spent working, and in the work, my mind is free to scout ahead to find where the story goes next. Once I get to those new pages, they’re already half-formed in my mind, so they practically write themselves. By the time my first draft is turned in, my editor is looking at a draft that’s been edited dozens and dozens of times by me. I don’t deny it’s a bit obsessive, but the pages have to be exactly the way I want them to be, or I can’t sleep. Literally. And every morning, I start over again.
8--What’s your favorite foodie indulgence?
The ‘good’ me says a sumptuous lobster bisque with crusty French bread. The ‘real’ me says that gross squeeze cheese from a can. “Made with real cheese” my ass. It’s all chemicals and thoroughly disgusting so I almost never let myself have it. But I want it ALL the time.
9--Describe your writing space/office.
I write wherever I happen to land. Sometimes I’ll start at my kitchen table, then I’ll go out onto the back porch and work some there, then I might come back to the table, or move to the sofa in the den. Never, though, do actually I write in my office. Funny, that.
10--Who is an author you admire?
See #11 and add to those the Brontë sisters. Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë is one of my all-time favorite books, still to this day. You’ll see its influence all over Time After Time. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë are close runners-up. And for someone more current, Kazuo Ishiguro. The word brilliant doesn’t do him justice. His insight into humanity is profound. Everyone should read Never Let Me Go.
11--Is there a book that changed your life?
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck. I don’t know if it was because I was raised by a depression-era grandmother who knew too well the hardships of that time, but that book settled somewhere deep inside of me and it still sits there, always reminding me to be thankful for every blessing I have in this life. Another touchstone book for me is The Alchemist by Paolo Coehlo. I read it, without fail, every two years and every single time I feel like I’m reading a different book. The story seems to grow as I grow. It reveals new secrets and lessons right when I need them; never too early, never too late. Probably the most impactful, though, was One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez. It’s an absolute masterpiece and it showed me that magical realism isn’t only for fairy tales. I would also include his Love In The Time of Cholera and Chronicle of a Death Foretold. If it were up to me, there would be a statue of Márquez in every library in the world. Full stop. No question.
12--Tell us about when you got “the call.” (when you found out your book was going to be published)/Or, for indie authors, when you decided to self-publish.
When I got the call that Putnam/Penguin wanted to publish Time After Time, I was over the moon. I couldn’t ask for a better team, for a better editor, for a better experience. I have never had so much freedom as a writer. It’s been exhilarating, for sure.
13--What’s your favorite genre to read?
I don’t have a favorite genre. It’s all about the characters for me. Who are they? Do I care what happens to them? Do I want to go on a British airplane full of kids trying to escape the ravages of WWII that ends up shot down and crashed on a deserted island? Will I choose to spend my time trapped in the backseat of a broken-down Ford Pinto with my young son with no food or water or way to communicate, boiling in the summer heat while a rabid St. Bernard prowls the outside, foaming at the mouth and waiting to attack? Or will I decide to follow the story of a young woman who knows she will never have children or grow old, who knows that her body only exists to provide donor organs, one at a time, until she dies as a result? These are all equally compelling stories to me. If the characters are there, I don’t care where they take me. I’ll go anywhere, anytime, in any genre.
14--What’s your favorite movie?
I have several, all to fit my different moods and tastes. THE NOTEBOOK obviously, one of the best bookto-movie adaptations ever. HOUSE OF THE SPIRITS (another brilliant adaptation). LA CONFIDENTIAL (yet another adaptation). EX-MACHINA (finally, an original IP!), and NOCTURAL ANIMALS (adaptation). Put MOULIN ROUGE and THE ORPHANAGE in there, too. MATILDA, the 1996 version; another adaptation. I just love it. And a 1996 movie called PONETTE. It’s a French film about a five-year-old girl who loses her mother in a car crash and learns to come to terms with the fact that she’ll never see her again. It’s one of those movies that makes me wish with everything inside me that magic could be real, that we could force reality to bend to our will, just for a moment, just to feel the embrace of a lost loved one. That movie breaks me open every time.
15--What is your favorite season?
Autumn is easily my favorite season. Sweaters. Scarves. Boots. Colorful falling leaves and Thanksgiving.
16--How do you like to celebrate your birthday?
Small, small, small. I don’t love big parties unless they’re for someone else. I tend to make a lot of separate birthday plans over my birthday month, with small two-or-three person groups. I want to spend time real quality time with everyone, and I find that I just can’t do that if too many of my friends are all together at the same time. It short-circuits my settings until I’m a stress ball, stuck in the kitchen because I don’t know what else to do with myself except get out of the way. It stresses me out just thinking about it.
17--What’s a recent tv show/movie/book/podcast you highly recommend?
Everyone’s probably already seen it, but Baby Reindeer was so wrenching. My podcast recs would likely bore you to tears. I listen to NPR. Pod Save America. Jon Stewart. Industry insider podcasts like The Ankler Podcast and Retake with John Horn.
18--What’s your favorite type of cuisine?
Seafood (see lobster bisque) and Indian. A good aloo gobi, medium spicy, is one of my favorite comfort foods in the all the world. Right up there with chicken and dumplings.
19--What do you do when you have free time?
When I have what?
20--What can readers expect from you next?
What you can expect next from me is a movie! Right now, I’m busy writing the screenplay for the remake to A WALK TO REMEMBER, based on the Nicholas Sparks novel and the 1997 movie of the same name.
I’m also kicking around some new book ideas, so stay tuned. They’re coming!
A YA sapphic romance from the screenwriter and coauthor of the #1 New York Times bestselling novel and film Five Feet Apart.
Libby has always been inexplicably drawn to the old Victorian house on Mulberry Lane. So much so that when she sees a For Sale sign go up in the front yard, Libby uses all the money her grandmother left her to pay for college to buy the house instead, determined to fix it up herself—even though she knows her parents will be furious.
Tish, a brash, broke fellow student, doesn’t need much to get by. She can fix almost anything, so she makes do by building sets for the theater department and working odd jobs at the nearby salvage yard. Tish passes by the house one day and is mysteriously compelled to knock on the door. Libby offers her a room in exchange for her help with repairing the old house, and as they begin to work together, the two young women quickly find themselves growing closer.
Soon after moving in, Libby discovers a journal written by a young woman, Elizabeth, who lived in the house a century earlier and was deeply in love with her personal maid, Patricia. As Elizabeth’s journal entries delve deeper into her secret affair with Patricia—a love that was forbidden and dangerous in their time—Libby can’t help but notice uncanny similarities between that young couple and Tish and herself.
Have she and Tish lived this life before? And is this their chance to get it right?
Young Adult | Romance Historical [Penguin Young Readers Group, On Sale: May 20, 2025, Hardcover / e-Book , ISBN: 9780593533826 / eISBN: 9780593533840]
Mikki Daughtry graduated from Brenau University, where she studied theatre arts. She is a screenwriter and novelist living in Los Angeles and is one of the authors of the New York Times #1 bestseller Five Feet Apart and All This Time.When she’s not writing, she is watching old black and white movies, listening to Doris Day on repeat, or reading ancient Greek plays. The classics. Always.
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