This week YA Author Dan Solomon took over our Twitter as a part of our weekly Thursday Twitter Takeover. Dan Solomon is the author of The Fight for Midnight. (See YEM’s interview with Dan Solomon here.) See highlights from the takeover below.

Hi there! My name’s Dan Solomon. My debut YA novel, The Fight For Midnight, came out on Tuesday via @fluxbooks. Let me tell you a little about the book! pic.twitter.com/ohd9LEdvWq

— RINA stan (@YoungEntmag) June 23, 2023

It’s set at the Texas Capitol on June 25, 2013, which is the day a state senator named Wendy Davis conducted an all-day talking filibuster of the state’s extremely restrictive abortion bill. (that same bill would be wildly progressive in 2023 Texas, but we’ll save that for later)

— RINA stan (@YoungEntmag) June 23, 2023

Our protagonist is Alex, an Austin teen who gets invited to the Capitol by Cassie, his longtime crush. She’s Catholic and staunchly anti-abortion, there to protest the filibuster. He’s never given any thought to abortion before, but he shows up to hang out with her

— RINA stan (@YoungEntmag) June 23, 2023

When he gets there, he quickly realizes that everything going on in front of him—the politics, the clashing protesters, and the issue of abortion itself—is much more complicated than he assumed

— RINA stan (@YoungEntmag) June 23, 2023

When he runs into his ex-friend/current nemesis Shireen, who’s there to oppose the bill, all of the political stuff happening at the Capitol starts to feel to him like a chance to atone for some mistakes he made in his recent past—if he can figure out which side is right

— RINA stan (@YoungEntmag) June 23, 2023

So that’s the pitch for the book in four tweets. You may be wondering: Why did a dude who is never going to get pregnant write a book about a teenage boy, who could also never get pregnant, learning about abortion? That’s a question I’ve thought about a lot! And it has an answer:

— RINA stan (@YoungEntmag) June 23, 2023

Those of us who do not have uteruses, sadly, do not have the option of leaving the issue of abortion to be settled by those who do. That’s not a choice that guys like me—that is to say, men who believe abortion is a human right—made ourselves!

— RINA stan (@YoungEntmag) June 23, 2023

When you look at who is voting for and signing the majority of abortion laws in this country, it’s dudes dudes dudes, so many dudes. And if those guys are going to get involved, then those of us who believe in abortion rights can’t sit on the sidelines pic.twitter.com/mOZQoP1vs8

— RINA stan (@YoungEntmag) June 23, 2023

if we do, then that means the people whose rights we support are left on their own. we have to show up, because the men who want to restrict those rights are very active in finding ways to do that

— RINA stan (@YoungEntmag) June 23, 2023

In The Fight For Midnight, Alex picks this up through the course of the book intuitively, because he can see what’s happening on the floor of the Senate—most of the people who tried to stop the filibuster were men, which is glaringly obviously when it’s going on in front of you

— RINA stan (@YoungEntmag) June 23, 2023

Most teenage boys aren’t going to find themselves in the middle of a heated abortion protest on the floor of their state senate, though, so I wrote The Fight For Midnight in part to help make those things more clear to those readers

— RINA stan (@YoungEntmag) June 23, 2023

Another question you may have: What does this guy actually know about what the grassroots fight for abortion rights really looks like? One answer is that I was inspired to write The Fight For Midnight because I was there—on the day of the filibuster, and also before and after

— RINA stan (@YoungEntmag) June 23, 2023

The fight over abortion rights in Texas didn’t start with Wendy Davis putting on pink sneakers, and it didn’t end there, either. One of the key secondary characters in The Fight For Midnight is a grassroots organizer who’d been at the Capitol all summer long

— RINA stan (@YoungEntmag) June 23, 2023

(That character, Debbie, is fictional, but she’s inspired by a lot of people I knew, and met, over the course of the summer)

— RINA stan (@YoungEntmag) June 23, 2023

These were folks who rallied others to come out; who testified in committee hearings dressed in Mad Men attire (to depict the era the law would send us back to); whose activism gave Wendy Davis a chance to kill the bill the day of the filibuster

— RINA stan (@YoungEntmag) June 23, 2023

(some of those real people make brief cameos in the book—they, or the people who know them, are the only ones who are likely to pick up on it, but I wanted to give them a moment to see themselves on the page, if they happen to pick up a copy)

— RINA stan (@YoungEntmag) June 23, 2023

Before Wendy Davis, there was a “citizen’s filibuster” where ordinary Texans showed up to spend hours and hours and hours testifying, each individually in the three minute chunks they were granted, about why they opposed the bill that would restrict abortion access

— RINA stan (@YoungEntmag) June 23, 2023

That didn’t end up working—the committee chair declared the testimony “repetitive” and called it a night with hundreds left to speak (here’s a video I took of that when it happened). https://t.co/HWgy6V5R9r

— RINA stan (@YoungEntmag) June 23, 2023

But it did milk the clock long enough that the final vote came on the very last day of the session, when Wendy Davis could attempt to filibuster it by spending the entire day talking without yielding the floor. If she went until midnight, there’d be no bill

— RINA stan (@YoungEntmag) June 23, 2023

Her attempt got derailed too—read the book to learn exactly how and why—but what ultimately happened that night was that the final vote came up at 11:47pm, because of some shady business that happened on the senate floor. But that’s not all that happened!

— RINA stan (@YoungEntmag) June 23, 2023

The entire room—five hundred protesters—burst into spontaneous shouts and screams. It was the loudest I’ve ever heard other people be. And it was so loud that the votes couldn’t be tallied. The screams continued until 12:01. And then the bill was dead

— RINA stan (@YoungEntmag) June 23, 2023

Nothing ever really dies, and so the governor of Texas called another legislative session, with a month, rather than a few hours, for the bill to pass. I was there for those weeks, too

— RINA stan (@YoungEntmag) June 23, 2023

There was no filibuster that time, because the circumstances wouldn’t allow it. But the movement that came through the filibuster, and the energy that bubbled up from the Texas Capitol sub-basement all the way to the floor of the Senate, didn’t go away.

— RINA stan (@YoungEntmag) June 23, 2023

I wrote The Fight For Midnight because that energy was one of the most incredible things I’ve ever seen. I wanted to convey how it felt to see it happen to readers who may not remember it, and to remind those who were there how it felt. I hope you’ll give the book a read.

— RINA stan (@YoungEntmag) June 23, 2023