My Life with the Walter Boys

It was published back in October of 2025 by Liz Young, and it has a title that sounds, um, deceptively simple.

It's called Who Does Jackie End Up With in My Life with the Walter Boys books?

Which sounds like your standard, you know, YA romance stuff.

Right.

You have Amazon Prime Video cornering the market with, uh, The Summer I Turned Pretty, where a protagonist named Belly is agonizing over two brothers.

Right.

And then Netflix counters with their own heavy hitter, My Life with the Walter Boys.

It feels like we're watching this massive A/B test for romance and viewer retention just playing out in real time.

Yeah, not Lars.

I watched that movie when I was doing Walter Boys, and it's a movie about how filmmaking will ruin your life.

And I'm like, yeah, it does.

You're right.

Peaches Girls,

Walter Boys! Oh, guys, the new season is so good.

Still Team Alex.

I still do watch, like...

I hate it so much.

Just saw it in the Walter Boys.

So then Olive is like, oh, my God, I'm so sad.

She goes to Arne and Arne is like, I knew you were fake dating.

Yes.

It explicitly notes that Prime Video views this adaptation in the vein of massive Netflix hits like "My Life with the Walter Boys" and "Ransom Canyon."

Which was huge.

Huge.

And I've even experienced this with my own process.

There's been a big difference between how My Life as the Walter Boys was made and how Shepard Chronicles has been developed, even though they were both worked on by the same production company.

With that being said, this is how my process worked for the Walter Boys.

I optioned the rights to a small company, a small production company called iGeneration in 2017.

And for those of you who don't know what an auction is, it's basically an author renting out the exclusive rights for a producer, a production company, a director, et cetera, for them to try and adapt their book.

And I would say about 60 to 70% of the time, if I said, hey, I don't know if this is going to work because of X, Y, Z, they would listen to me.

And that doesn't necessarily mean that they changed it back to how it was in the book, but they would listen to my advice and adapt from there.

So for example, Jacqueline Howard, the main character in My Life and the Walter Boys.

That's the second piece of negative feedback that I want to address.

I've had people saying, I still don't understand what The Walter Boys is.

You guys didn't recap it well.

You didn't recap it well.

Maybe if you had a business that you were passionate about, you would know what it takes to run a business, but you don't.

But you don't.

You haven't put in the hours with the Walter boys.

You don't understand how nothing happens on that show, even though it's somehow 30, 45 minute episodes.