Goodreads asked Jill C. Baker:

Where did you get the idea for your most recent book?

Jill C. Baker RE: ABSENT I came across synesthesia a while ago, and was so taken by the idea of people seeing words as colors (or shapes as flavors, or emotions as sounds), that I wrote a blog about it, describing brightly colored photos as they might taste. A few years later, when writing an article about an accomplished family, the father advised me that I might see his daughter's name spelled two different ways. Why? Because she had synesthesia and the color palette of her birth name was irritating--so they had legally changed it. At that point, I knew synesthesia could become a fascinating hook for a book.

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