Solitaire

Yeah.

I wanted to start off today with where your journey started with Solitaire and Tori Spring in particular.

Tori was canonically confirmed to be asexual in the Heartstopper Forever film.

When you first wrote her character in Solitaire, you weren't aware of asexuality at the time, but yet you still wrote about her story with such asexual theming.

Is there any chance that we could possibly be seeing either a sequel to Solitaire or even an adaptation so we get to see her living her life in her full asexual

lori yeah i mean i don't currently have any plans for writing any sort of sequel to solitaire or or doing an adaptation i always say never say never you know things could happen i could suddenly get an idea in the future um but even if that doesn't happen i think i'll definitely be writing more about aromantic and asexual characters in the future because there's so little out there still and I would just love to be able to contribute to what is out there and yeah there's so much to write about that hasn't been written about yet.

I mean when I was in the lobby earlier and you walked past I was literally nose deep in Loveless at the time yet again because that's my favorite of all of your A stories because it was truly scarily biblically accurate to my life so yeah thank you for really representing the girls lying about having their first kiss when they're 18.

four of those

This is a novella.

Remember, the world of Heartstopper began in novel form in Solitaire, but that's Tori's story, and we're gonna touch on that after season two of Young Royals.

So in some ways it's like going back to the roots of Heartstopper, but in other ways it's very different from, yeah, those main books of Heartstopper.

What were your immediate thoughts? How did you find it reading a Heartstopper story in a novella format compared to the TV show that we've been used to watching or the graphic novels that we've read before?

Remember, Oliver is Charlie and Tori's younger brother.

So let's get into Tori's section.

There are loads of things that we learn about Tori here that- I'm sure people who have already read Solitaire know very well, but as we are kind of following the story in its chronological sequence, we haven't discovered these things about Tori yet.

So things about the fact that she has an internet addiction, which is alluded to.