In her new romance ‘Happy Medium,’ Sarah Adler finds the perfect balance between reality and the supernatural plane

When it comes to romance novels, inspiration can be found in the most unlikely of places. Yes, they all feature swoon-worthy tales of earned, learned or undying affection, but it is the background noise that can take a story from good to great. Every author is different, pulling settings either from well-loved locations, the depths of their imagination or a mix of the two. However, no matter how the multitudes of worlds created by ink and paper come to be they all start somewhere. If you have read Sarah Adler's Happy Medium, you may think the idea sprung from the simple fact that the author believes in ghosts, but her sophomore novel is less an ode to her thoughts on the supernatural and more the result of a good-quality pun. Before she took pen to paper and wrote her latest book, she first tweeted the basic plot for a hypothetical work of fiction titled 'I ain't afraid of no goats.' Over time, the one-line joke became a full-fledged novel, set as one might expect on a haunted goat farm.