“Abby Offsides” Started as a Bedtime Story Anna McCallie Told Herself

London-based novelist Anna McCallie made her authorial debut on June 23 with “Abby Offsides,” a rom-com about a woman who abruptly ends her engagement, moves across the pond and falls in love with Lachlan Ramsay, a Scottish soccer star.

The novel, fit for the World Cup obsessed, is the latest book from Jenna Bush Hager’s imprint, Thousand Voices x Random House Publishing Group.

During the July 2 episode of “Open Book with Jenna,” McCallie told Jenna about the surprising origins of the tale.

“Abby Offsides” started as a story McCallie told in her head to fall asleep at night. The only issue is that Abby’s love story quickly started to keep McCallie up.

“I just thought to myself, ‘All right, I’m going to imagine a woman, and I’m going to just think about the mundane details of her life. What does her hair look like? What’s she wearing? What does her office look like?’ And try to have it be just exciting enough that it drowned out the other thoughts, but not so exciting that I was staying up thinking about her,” McCallie said.

It didn’t take long before that plan unraveled.

“Unfortunately, I failed, and she became too exciting, because night after night she ended up at a club with a man, and there was something wrong about it, and I just kept coming back to it,” the author told Jenna.

Then, McCallie decided to confide in a friend about her nightly issue.

“I was telling my friend how I’ve totally failed at this insomnia cure, and he was like, ‘Yeah, that’s because you’re writing a book.’ I just hadn’t even thought of turning it into a story. As soon as he said it, I just thought, ‘Oh my God, he’s right,’ and so I started writing it down,” she said.

Abby and Lachlan’s love story interfered with Jenna’s sleep schedule, too, she told McCallie.

“I remember where I was when I finished (‘Abby Offsides’), because I was in bed with my own husband, and I was like, ‘No more noise,’ because I was so invested in these characters,” Jenna said, laughing. “I think sometimes creating a world where people want to stay up late into night, ‘flashlight reading,’ is because you yourself were sort of not burdened by the story, but overcome with it.”

That “flashlight reading” is one of McCallie’s “favorite experiences as a reader,” she told Jenna. Having come up with the U.K. soccer romance herself, she didn’t get to have the same experience with the story, she said.

Still, McCallie said it’s exciting her first novel can do that for other readers.

“I’m so in the weeds that I don’t know what it was like to fall in love with Lachlan, because I was creating him,” she said. “I love the idea that people are up there turning pages way past their bedtime … it’s totally surreal that I have now created that experience for other people.”