The idea for this book came from the past, actually.
I was writing a completely different book that was set at fictional Flounder Bay Upper School and included a guitar-playing girl named Lara. It also involved lots of time travel, the back-and-forth kind that I’m pretty sure only advanced physicists can write about without turning their brains into mush. I am not an advanced physicist, so the book got out of hand early on, and my brain got very mushy. I put it (the book, not my brain) aside, thinking I might come back to it later, when my brain had solidified a bit.
This never happened. Then, one day as I was cleaning up my computer files, I accidentally deleted the file for that book. Not the partial kind of deletion where you can still find it in the trash. The permanent kind where you have to be an advanced computer scientist to get it back. I am not an advanced computer scientist, so it was gone. And I wasn’t very upset about it, which is a good indication that I was never going to get back to working on it anyway.
Instead, I started a new book set at Flounder Bay Upper School where the time-travel element only went one way – the characters could peek at the future, but nothing they did could change what they saw. Although it would change their actual futures. So it’s still complicated! But not advanced-physicist complicated.
And that’s the story of how Welcome to Dweeb Club rose like a bedraggled phoenix from the ashes of a book I gave up on and then accidentally deleted. There are many morals to this story, and you are welcome to any of them that work for you.