So This Is Just a Test is a book I co-wrote with Madelyn Rosenberg. We met in writers group — well, we met at SCBWI, which is a society of children’s book writers and illustrators, and then we ended up in the same writers group, and we’re around the same age. Our kids are around the same age, and we were always hanging out, and finally said one day, you know, “Hey, Madelyn, why don’t we get paid to hang out? And let’s write about kinda what we know.”
So we both grew up during the ’80s, and we both had the experience of being onlys, you know, being, you know, at least one of a — only one of a few Asian kids growing up in Northern Virginia. Madelyn was, you know, one of the few Jewish kids growing up in Blacksburg, and so we kinda combined all those experiences to create David Da-Wei Horowitz growing up in the ’80s.
It’s such a solitary endeavor to write, and then, you know, when you kind of run out of an idea or you feel like, okay, you know, I’ve kind of written what I’m gonna write, and I don’t know what to do next, and then I could just, you know, click send and shoot it over to Madelyn, and then, you know, get something back and be like, oh, okay, now it’s longer, and, you know, based on what she’s written I have a new idea. So it was almost like sending a writing prompt back and forth.