She began writing her first novel", In the Forests of the Night", under the working title "White Wine". On May 11, 1997, after her best friend, Jessica, had picked the William Blake poem, "The Tiger", the book's final title was derived. The first draft of the novel was completed in August of that year. During the writing process, Atwater-Rhodes suffered from a case of writer's block and a computer virus crashed her computer. Atwater-Rhodes spent the next four months revising the novel before she submitted the manuscript on December 31.