A few years ago, while browsing in a used bookstore, Hall found a copy of one of his early novels full of strange marginal notes and underlined passages and other cryptic messages. Fascinated by these weird hieroglyphics and unable to get them out of his mind, he used this as the basis for Rough Draft, a novel about a woman crime novelist who stumbles across a similar book and finds in those marginal notes what seems to be a direct message from the killer of her parents.