Haley Grace McCormick says she made her dad read her novel's spicy chapter out loud

The pipeline from BookTok creator to published author usually involves a few predictable milestones. You get an agent. You draft a trope-heavy romance. You film yourself crying over a box of advance copies. Haley Grace McCormick hit all those marks for her debut novel, The Enemy of Time. Then she added a new one. She handed a newly drafted smut chapter to her father and made him read it out loud.

McCormick is severely dyslexic. She relies on audio processing to edit her work, which means her parents usually act as her human screen readers. That system works perfectly for standard dialogue. It works less well when your publisher decides your manuscript needs a sudden injection of adult romance.

Late in the publishing process, McCormick retreated to her bedroom, surrounded herself with romance novels, and panicked her way through a love scene. Then she handed the blind copy to her dad.

He starts reading it out loud. He goes, ‘Am I Is is this Is this what we’re Oh. I need the wine.’

It is a spectacular image. A father blindly stumbling into a smut scene written by his twenty-something daughter, powering through it over a glass of Cabernet for the sake of neurodivergent editing.

A heartbroken rewrite

The rest of the novel was just as chaotic. The book relies heavily on shifting timelines and a devastating plot twist involving a dead friend. McCormick famously plotted the original draft by taping index cards to her kitchen floor and eating takeout for a week. But the emotional core of the novel required a real-life disaster.

While writing the first draft at twenty-one, McCormick fell in love. By the second draft, they had broken up. She suddenly understood what it meant to let someone go, and she realized her fictional characters were behaving like plastic dolls. The heartbreak forced a massive structural edit.

So I I tore out major sections of it to rewrite so that way again it would connect back to readers and they’d be like, ‘Oh, I went through that. Oh, I felt that.’

She gutted the middle of the book. She rebuilt the characters around her own fresh grief. It is the kind of brutal artistic choice that makes a debut novel actually resonate with an audience, rather than just coasting on a BookTok trend.

The mandated happily ever after

Internet book culture demands tears, but it also demands closure. The original ending was a hard stop on a tragic realization. Early readers revolted. They needed to know the surviving characters were going to be okay.

Something is off for the readers, there’s something missing. They need something more and I want to give that. That at the end of the day I write so that a reader can enjoy it, you know, and if if something’s not connecting then that means I haven’t finished my job.

McCormick went back and appended a short epilogue to give the audience a lifeline. It was a pragmatic choice. She understands that commercial fiction is a service industry. You have to give the reader what they came for.

She is currently drafting a psychological thriller mapped onto the plot of Shutter Island and Titanic. Will her father have to read the murder scenes out loud over a bottle of wine? We can only hope.