On today’s episode of “Daily Variety” podcast, writer and showrunner Justin Halpern speaks with Variety’s Michael Schneider about the road to writing his first novel “Get Lost,” which will be released next month by Hachette’s Cardinal imprint. Halpern also updates Schneider on a few TV development projects, including the status of high school memoir “I Suck at Girls” at Netflix and the upcoming season of ABC’s “Abbott Elementary,” on which he is an executive producer.

“I started writing [‘Get Lost’] during the WGA strike because I wasn’t going to write anything for TV or movies,” Halpern tells Schneider, who is Variety‘s executive editor of TV. “So I was walking the strike line every single day, and I kind of got the idea for it. And over the many, many hours we were on strike, I would think about it and then I’d go home and write it. So I wrote about a third or maybe even half of it during the strike, and then took me about two and a half years to finish the rest of it.”

Halpern and his longtime writing partner Patrick Schumacker are executive producers and co-showrunners of “Abbott Elementary” alongside creator Quinta Brunson. Halpern and Schumacker are also shepherding the series adaptation of Halpern’s 2012 high school memoir “I Suck at Girls” at Netflix.

Working for Netflix means that “I Suck at Girls” can have a harder edge than the numerous shows that Halpern and Schumacker have produced for broadcast networks over the years.

“It’s very R-rated, hard and funny, but it’s set in a high school world. My partner Patrick Schumacher and I like to write hard, funny stuff that has, at the end of the day, a lot of emotional components to it. So I hope it kind of rides those two lines,” Halpern says.

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