The Story of The Otherfolk, and an Official Announcement

It’s February 26th, 2025, and there are 25 days until my first book, The Otherfolk, is available for purchase. I’m finally ready to tell the world about it.

I started The Otherfolk on March 23rd, 2022. It was exactly like every other story I’ve started – I had an idea (shoutout to The Princess Bride for giving me the tiny inspiration that started it all!) and shared the document with all my friends. I wrote a few chapters and then it started to slow down. It got boring.

And here’s where my first huge thanks comes in. When I abandoned the very first manuscript, my best friend Lena Sabaka said, “Hey. You’ve gotten far with this one, and you’re not leaving us hanging.” It’s all thanks to her that I went any further with it at all.

Finally, it was done. I was immensely proud of myself – 121 pages of writing. But it would clearly need some editing. So I made a copy of the draft and started editing.

I finished going through draft 1.4 when I realized —

I was twelve years old when I wrote the book.

And it was pretty bad.

All my friends will assure you it isn’t as bad as I make it out to be. Maybe they’re right, but either way, it wasn’t good.

So I did the hardest thing I could think of – I started over and rewrote the manuscript from the beginning.

The way I remember it, it was August of ‘23 (or somewhere around there) that I finished rewriting the entire thing. And this draft (1.5.6) was no less than 253 pages long.

I knew I wanted to publish it – it was way more than any old story at this point. But even though it was much better than the first draft, it still needed some heavy editing. So I did what any completely broke 13-year-old author would have done – I crowdsourced money from my friends and ordered three spiral-bound editing copies of the manuscript – one for me, one for Lena and Noel Sabaka, and one for Talitha Hirst.

Meet my best friends – and very favorite editors.

At first, the editing process was all good fun, with mug brownies and lemonade and sleepovers and find-and-replace. I made a loose schedule that seemed easy, and I set the date – I was going to publish on March 23rd, 2025, three years to the day after I’d created the very first document.

Sometime mid-summer I realized that we weren’t getting anything done. We couldn’t get together in person, so we’d just stopped. But the date marched ever closer.

We didn’t have time.

Here’s where another name comes in. Ethan Peterson – the secretary of my school’s Creative Writing and Illustration Club (I am the president). He wanted me to make it a trilogy. I told him that was impossible – the second book I was planning didn’t even have enough content to live up to the first one’s quality and length. No way I could drag it on for two entire books. And just like that, the solution presented itself. It wasn’t that I needed to make the second one longer – I needed to make the first one shorter. I needed to divide it into two parts. That made the first book 130 pages. So we continued, with less work to get done but a much better understanding of how much we needed to do it.

Lena and Noel and Talitha deserve the world for what they did for me. It was hard. We’d be up until midnight on Zoom calls, working through difficult chapters. I thought we’d never get it done. My grandmother connected me to a friend of hers, a professional editor, who offered to do final edits for free. I made the commitment to send her the book by January 2nd.

I’ve talked about how late we stayed up and how hard editing was and how much I wanted to quit and thought I couldn’t do it. But don’t be discouraged by how horrible I make it sound. As hard as it was… it was also so fun. The jokes we made and the fun we had make me want to do it all over again. (That said, I’m so glad it’s done – and almost ready to do it again for Book 2.)

Finally, two or three days past January 2nd, I sent the book to my professional editor.

It must’ve only been two weeks before I got the annotated draft in the mail. And that process took me until Wednesday, February 12th.

Finally, editing was done, and it was time to do the publishing stuff.

Someday soon I’ll write a post about the rollercoaster of the self-publishing process. But I got it done – and as we speak, the first ever copy of The Otherfolk (the proofing copy) is on the way to my house.

Now, for the stats:

When: March 23rd, 2025

Where: Everywhere, soon enough!

How: Paperback and eBook

Official Synopsis:

When Princess Anna Carillo and her best friend Peter decide to run away from the castle, they know it's risky. The east side of the island has always been off-limits, and they've never found out why. But they never thought they would find a whole other world full of mythical creatures and magical plants. As enemies arise, tragedies strike, and mysteries unfold, Anna becomes more and more unsure of whom can she trust. What more does she not know about the island - and what other lies is she being told?

More announcements will follow – I’ve still got some surprises up my sleeve! Stay tuned!