Kristina asked Lauren James:

Hi, I just finished The Loneliest girl in the universe a couple of days ago and I really loved it! What inspired you to write it?

Lauren James Thank you very much! The nugget of an idea for this story first started with a question from some Physics coursework at university. The question was about special relativity, and went something like this:

An astronaut travels in a spaceship to a new planet. After a few years, a newer faster ship is developed and launched, which overtakes the first ship. How old are the two astronauts when they each arrive on the planet?

I started thinking about what it would be like to be that first astronaut, and dedicate years to travelling alone in space, only for your ship to be overtaken by a faster one before you even arrive. What would that feel like? What kind of relationship would you have with the person on the faster ship? From that, the story of Romy Silvers was born.

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