About eight years ago, an eleven-year-old girl was immersed in a children’s favorite: Harry Potter. Her favorite place to read? A leather couch in the living room. It was a reading place she shared with her younger sister, Nicole. She read aloud to her sister, who had her own stories to share. Only Nicole’s stories were from no fiction book. Her imagination wove adventures from the heart and inspired the elder sister to try her hand at a few tales of her own.
The sisters shared a love of fantasy. Dragons, aliens, mystical artifacts played with their minds. So the eleven year old plopped down at her computer, fingers at the keys, and created a series of short stories for herself and her sister. One tale followed another, but every story plunged the sisters into the adventures of a girl who discovered a magical pocket watch that teleported her to alien planets.
It wasn’t long before the story was complete and gathering dust on a lonely shelf. Perhaps it would have stayed that way forever, but fate in the form of a seventh grade language arts teacher intervened. One day the students received an assignment: compose a story, type it up, print it out, and bring it to class. Make it two pages. Maybe three, if you’re particularly daring. And the elder sister came up with a devious plot.
She would bring the series of short stories to class.
Brushing off her dust collection, she came to class the following day with a fifty-page manuscript in hand. Incredulous but equally impressed, her teacher suggested a ‘novel’ concept: getting published.
This is how my adventure began.
Describing a teen author of three novels with a fourth in the works might encourage words like “fate” and “talent” to be tossed around. Negative on both counts, Captain. Like everything else it takes time to get good at (music, sports, guzzling a Coke bottle without coming up for air), writing takes practice and perseverance. Day in and day out. Email after story after poem.
Nah. Scratch the “poem” thing. I’ll be the first to admit I can’t write a poem to save my life. That’s where my now thirteen-year-old sister comes in. Nicole chants poems in her sleep. Her acrostic poem picture book, Ronnie and BB, even won the Georgia Author of the Year Award.
Talk about a way with rhyme and reason.
But I’m trying to learn. Working on making each word in each line of each stanza count. Because after self-publishing my very first book, The Pocket Watch, I discovered you can’t be quick to the finish with anything. Old lesson: slow and steady. I was determined to write another novel. A refreshing plunge into realistic fiction with maybe just a hint of magic thrown in for flavor. Because unlike Nicole, I like my ice cream as ice cream and not a speck of white under a pound of pepper. Quite a true story from a birthday party a few years back . . .
Anyway, that’s why my next novel, eventually titled Dream Saver, explored my own life. Many of the characters were inspired from the real lives of my friends. Inspiration lives in everything we do. Everything we touch. We see. We experience. Parallel to a very real struggle, Dream Saver follows the quest of teenager Taylor Creekmore as she battles against all odds to save a loved one.
To publish my second book, I decided to find a traditional publisher. So I scoured the Internet to learn more about the publishing business. Scrolled through listings of publishers and literary agents interested in my genre. Wrote and printed dozens of query letters and mailed them out. Two hundred and fifty rejections and many months later, I breathed a sigh of resignation and accepted my fate: failure.
But Nicole was not ready to see me give up. She convinced me to press on and never lose hope. Resolved in a new direction, I read about a national short story contest with a recently founded publishing company. Entering on Nicole’s encouragement, I won first place and asked the publisher to take a look at Dream Saver. The publisher read the book, enjoyed the story, and decided to publish the novel. The novel was a success and sold over 45,000 copies.
Yet another lesson: 45,000 copies sold but primarily not through bookstores. Brick and mortar and online stores are great, but publicizing your work means getting your books into the hands of readers. Marketing for me meant connecting with my community. To this day, I regularly visit elementary and middle schools to share my experiences as a teen published author. I also lead writer’s workshops at libraries to help and encourage others to set out on their own publishing quests.
Ah. Speaking of quests, my passion for writing at fourteen, the year Dream Saver was published, was only beginning to flame. It had been four years since I wrote my first book, so I went back to read it. Then I stared at the pages for a good long while. And decided I could do better. For through the story fascinated me, I wanted to go deeper into the adventures of the girl and her pocket watch. One of the highlights of my life so far? Highlighting The Pocket Watch in a Microsoft Word document and hitting delete. And starting over again.
Because at age fifteen, I decided to transform my original novel into a trilogy, The Galacteran Legacy. The first book in the new series is Galaxy Watch, which tells the story of ordinary Earth girl Nicole Sky who never dreams that the golden pocket watch she discovers one summer day will change her life forever. Only when Nicole—by no coincidence also the name of my sister—finds herself on a hostile alien planet and in the midst of a war does she realize Earth has a deadline.
And so we come to the interesting bit. How does a girl fresh out of high school and heading into college become Editor-in-Chief of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Futuristic at a traditional publishing company?
Here’s a secret: Writing involves rewriting. A ton of it. My third novel was typed up in a year. That means two years of throwing out chunks of manuscript and even rewriting the whole thing from scratch twice. You get real good real quick at editing that way (minor grammar issues intended). And when I saw FutureWord Publishing advertising for a science-fiction editor in May 2009, I submitted an application. Only it wasn’t one involving essays and a resume. They were primarily interested in how potential editors corrected five sample pages with known errors. And guess who caught them all.
Truth be told, they were pretty shocked when I admitted to being a teen without a college degree (yet). But here’s the second secret: After editing my own novels, I become a freelance editor on Guru.com. By the time I applied for a professional editing position, I had already edited seventeen novels by other author. All were books that later found homes in publishing companies.
Moral of the story? Thomas Edison had it right on the money when he said “Success is 10 percent inspiration and 90 percent perspiration.” Working hard and always dreaming of a brighter future will open doors to opportunity. Just keep looking for those portals.
Signing off,
~Michelle Iz . . . oh! Hang on. I knew I’d forget something. As a special bonus, included below is the opening of that novel in the works I mentioned earlier. It’s a tale of racing and romance set in a futuristic world. Enjoy and feel free to leave comments and questions!
Nowsigning off,
~Michelle Izmaylov
Chapter One
Speed. In Detroit Ƶ, it’s every child’s primal instinct. Because if you’re racing and feel in control, you’re just not going fast enough. Though with fifty miles to go and the brakes giving out, stomping down the gas might not be one of my better ideas.
As I take a turn, I stamp on the pedal anyway.
Inside my car, the temperature easily tops 100 degrees. The earlier lead car was collected in a tangle of steel and tires ten minutes back. The current lead’s only ahead by a few seconds. As long as I don’t blow a tire, I might just stand a chance.
One more lap. Thirty more miles. The lead stops to refuel, and I get ahead by fifteen seconds. I check the rearview mirror, but there’s only his car in pursuit. The other racers are somewhere behind us in the underground tunnels.
Ten miles to the finish, I take a turn too fast and grind against the wall. Sparks spray from the tires. A side-view mirror is mangled into shreds. I swerve back on course, but I’ve lost my advantage. My car shudders as I’m bumped from behind. The other driver tries to pass me, but I slam sideways into him and lock us both into a slide towards the steel tunnel wall.
Two other racers have now caught up, but our struggling cars are hidden behind a turn. They stampede into us at they take the corner. One flips over my car and smashes into the windshield. I stomp the pedals to escape from the growing pile of cars. Naturally, I only succeed in feeding the fire that’s started on my car.
Flames lick up from my engine. The smell of thick smoke and burning wires is suffocating. Another car runs into us and flips over, going at least 200 miles an hour upside down before smashing into the opposing wall.
Another car suddenly blasts into mine. It rams in my rear and sends me spinning across the track. Now my car’s not much but a hunk of metal scattered with ugly dents. But I’m free, out of the pile of cars. And I’m back on course again.
I rumble across the track. One foot’s mashing the gas while the other’s busy stamping on the growing flames on the floor and dashboard. A turn grows in the distance. I stop stepping on the fire long enough to hit the brake and send my car into a slide around the corner.
The finish line’s a long stretch of road ahead. I gun towards it at 150 miles per hour as flames curl up towards the steering wheel. And my pants are seriously about to catch fire.
The second I cross the finish in the lead, I trample the brake and leap out, making a run for it. Flowers catch fire as they rain over my car, which has come to a rest in victory lane. I run, eyes closed, absorbing the glory. My hands are shaking with exhaustion, but I’ve won. I’ve won.
I wish.
( I would like to make it clear that while Michelle wrote this I had to do some cutting and pasting to post this article. This may have caused some errors in the format. If you find one then please do not assume it is Michelle's fault, just blame me.) Michael R. Henson
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