72 Hours in Cedar follows a former police officer whose teenage daughter’s disappearance exposes buried secrets, unresolved relationships, and a dangerous past. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?

Cedar started off wanting to be a survivor story with a strong Katniss Everdeen-style teen heroine. As I started building her family, I found myself writing her father as a troubled cop who I had written years earlier in a political thriller. It made perfect sense that Ruth would be that way because she was a product of his history. Everything clicked into place from there.

How did you approach building a story around such a tightly compressed timeline?

I have a background in television, so even when I’m writing long form I’m always sort of thinking about ’this would be five minutes of on-screen performance time’. And I’m a huge fan of 24, so it was really fun to try creating that same urgency with this ensemble cast and all its overlapping action scenes.

What do you hope readers understand about the pressures teenagers face when trying to gain independence?

I mean, we’ve all been there, right? Maybe not with this much repressed trauma and secrecy, but wondering how to step out from under the expectations of others (and particularly parents) is rather universal to the human experience. I think the interesting question here becomes: is it easier to make that transition slowly, as most of us do, or rip the band-aid off with a cataclysmic event like Ruth and Eric do?

What was the most rewarding part of writing 72 Hours in Cedar?

At the time I started Cedar, I hadn’t written in years, so finding that part of me again really reignited that passion and my commitment to the ritual of creating and telling stories. It brought me back ’to myself’ so to speak.
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