“I’ve always been into reading fan fiction, so that love was already there. When I first heard One Direction on the radio, I was like, that’s cute. But I went to watching YouTube videos of them, and after that there was no going back. Then my friend sent me a screenshot of them from Instagram, but in the bottom of the picture was part of a story. I was like, ‘What in the world is that?’ I looked into it, and the thing is called an Imagine. They’re mini-fan fictions. They’re not as popular anymore because most people just write fan fiction on Wattpad now. But I wrote this story called “Perfect” on Imagine. This was, like, 2012. It was, like, Harry met this fan at Starbucks, of course, in New York City, and they fell in love and they got married. They had two children by the time they were 19. It was so terrible. It ended up being, like, 2,000 Instagram photos with captions — a really long story. It was so fun, though. So then I just became obsessed with reading and writing fan fiction about One Direction.”“The problem with writing fan fiction is I don’t know Harry Styles at all. No matter how much fans want to think they know him, fans don’t know him. So I can’t really do much with it. In “Perfect,” he was just, like, this nice guy. You can’t do a lot of conflict when someone is the nicest person ever. So I was like, I could write a story and I could make him whatever I want. People do that. One of my favorite stories is called Dark and Dangerous Love , and it’s Harry and Zayn [Malik] and they’re vampires. I was like, I can have a college version. And the punk edits were like a thing then in the fandom at the time. Everyone was Photoshopping tattoos and piercings on all the guys before they even had any. It was crazy. So that’s what the inspiration was.”“I still get the best of both worlds. My publisher trusts me and knows that I know what my readers want because of the numbers. My editor is also not that traditional. They let me keep the work up for free, for example, which says a lot. In the beginning, most of the people reading it were One Direction fans. It felt like the fandom owned it. It didn’t feel like they were really my fans. Now they’re published, and I get messages like, ‘I never knew this was One Direction fan fiction.’ Or, ‘Why do these people keep putting [photos of] Harry Styles as Hardin?’”