How We Met: A Guest Post by Rob Hart and Jeff Rake

Rob Hart (Assassins Anonymous) and Jeff Rake recount the road that led to Detour in an exclusive essay, down below.

JEFF

When I was first inspired to write the book series Detour, I didn’t even know it was a book. I thought it was a TV show.

Writing television was pretty much the only thing I’d done over my 25-year career. And when the story of Washington, DC police officer Ryan Crane and his fellow space shuttle crew fell into my head, I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

A multiverse, conspiracy-laden family drama about parents and kids, husbands and wives, billionaires, Saturn’s moon Titan, and the Thwaites glacier? There was a lot of fertile ground to cover here.

But you can imagine my surprise when I pitched the potential TV series to my agent and he said, “It sounds like a book. I think you should write the book. Maybe you’ll adapt your book into a TV show someday.”

Someday? I had no idea how to write a book! Maybe I could just read a book. But before I left the meeting, my agent said one more thing: “You could always partner with another author and write the book together.”

And that changed everything.

If someone offered me the opportunity to collaborate with a skilled veteran author, who could brainstorm with me and mentor me and teach me to write my book, I’d be a fool to turn that down. So I got wise and started searching for my new best friend.

Finding the author turned out to be the easy part. My agent and publisher sent me some books to read, including a cool-looking futurist thriller called The Warehouse by Rob Hart. It blew me away. So smart, so grounded, so unexpected. I loved it. Now I had to get to recruiting…

ROB

I got a call out of the blue from an old friend Angeline, who I met as an editor but had moved on to become a superstar agent. And she tells me that she’s got this client, and he did this TV show called Manifest, and he had a new project and needed a co-writer… and was I interested in reading the pitch?

Well, yeah. And it knocked my socks clean off. It was exactly the kind of thing I like to write: big-swing sci-fi with grounded, human characters. Which was a great start, but collaborating on a novel is intense; you’re talking months of work, stretching into years if you’re writing a series (and this was meant to be a series).

I’ve got some incredibly talented writer friends who I wouldn’t work with in a million years… because I value the survival our friendship. But I figured if this guy Jeff came out of the TV world, be was probably used to collaborating.   

So we hopped on a Zoom, and it was that thing where you start talking to a person and you feel like you’re known them for years.

We hit it off, and once we got the paperwork out of the way, we got to work. Lots of phone calls and Zoom, brainstorming ideas until it was time to write. At that point it was all Google Docs, taking turns laying down the story.

We didn’t even meet in person until the first draft of Detour was mostly done. He was in town for some family stuff and we popped into a coffee shop down in the Financial District.

But when it came time to visit Los Angeles for the first leg of our book tour? Jeff put me up in his home for four days. What started as a collaboration, it seems to me, is developing into a real friendship.

Which is good, because we’ve got more books on the way…

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Jeff Rake is creator and executive producer of the television shows Manifest, The Mysteries of Laura, Miss Match, and The $treet. Find him on social @reallyjeffrake.

Rob Hart is the author of novels like The Warehouse, The Paradox Hotel, and the Assassins Anonymous series. He’s also a writing mentor in Seton Hill’s Writing Popular Fiction MFA program. Find more at www.robwhart.com.