As I say in all my book talks, I wrote my dream book, one that I would want to read. I did this by thinking about the components of other books I loved and combined them into one. For me, it was time-travel, magic, mystery, and history. I molded those four things together to create the Stone of Discedo. The Stone of Discedo is a time-traveling stone that allows the user to change anything in their own life if they first fix three terrible events in history. I used the stone to build up the plot from there and just let the story go where it wanted to go.

Unlike what I was taught in school, I did not do an intricate outline or a BMME planning. I let the story flow more naturally and had fun with it. Once I finished, I worked on the next book. In sixth grade, I rewrote One Chance on my computer and made a lot of changes. Once seventh grade began, I decided to re-write it again. The re-writing and editing process changed a lot but the basic plot remained the same as One Chance grew into the true dream book I had in mind when I started.

I wrote my first story in first grade about a girl who could become invisible. You might think I wrote this because I wanted to become invisible. Actually, it was quite the opposite. I’ve always been the person in class who likes to talk (but not out of turn) and answer questions. I wrote the story because it was fun to imagine what another person’s life might be like. There’s mirrors (writing that stems or reflects the self) and windows (writing that lets you see into others). I started with writing window stories.

When I was in 5^th grade, things changed. I was on crutches and in a wheelchair for a while. I missed out on some of my favorite things, like playing basketball. In October of that year, I got appendicitis and had to have emergency surgery. The worse part about that year, though, was the discovery of a life-threatening peanut allergy that spun my world into a danger zone. My life was in the hands of the people around me, people who couldn’t understand or just didn’t care.

I started writing to escape. I wrote mirror stories and window stories, both for the freedom of it. 5^th grade was when I started the first draft of my novel, One Chance, and I’ve kept writing novels ever since.

It’s really easy to get lost in the same world over and over. So I did, and that’s how I got my series.