Junior Spartan Marie Sayler is currently writing a novel. Her working title is “When You Wish Upon a Star” and she’s been working on it since she was only 13 years old, although she just picked it back up again after awhile last spring.
Having the passion to be a writer since she was young, Sayler’s excited to finally fulfill her dream. As a child, she penned random short stories that are no longer to be found, but it gave her the passion for writing that hasn’t diminished. She continues to work on her novel, having already finished the entire first draft, she is currently in the editing stage.
The plot focuses on two main characters, and bounces back and forth between their points of view each chapter. The first is London, your average seventeen-year-old troublemaking human girl. Reeling from the death of her best friend Kaya, she is clinging to the two things that still connect them. The tradition of wishing for “an adventure”, vague as that is, on a star every night and her ongoing investigation into the circumstances really surrounding Kaya’s death. Aris is your average sixteen-year-old Angelanian government agent assigned to fulfilling London’s wish. With one strike already against him, he must do this mission perfectly or lose his job with a spectacular amount of disgrace. What neither of them knows is that they’re not exactly strangers. Two years ago, on the night Kaya was exposed to fatal levels of radiation and Aris failed his first mission, the two were much closer than either of them knew.
Sayler didn’t come up with this idea completely on her own. Genius struck unexpectedly one night years ago.
“I saw a Welcome to Nightingale tweet that went along the lines of ‘thank you for making a wish. An agent has been assigned and it will be fulfilled shortly,’ and I was like, ‘That. That’s a thought,’” said Sayler.
She went with it, using NaNoWriMo.org to help track her progress. NaNoWriMo is a website designed to help provide a community to writers working on the often intimidating novel. It allows you to set milestones and offers help to writers. Sayler agrees that time management is a difficult yet important concept in writing a novel, and appreciates the goal-setting focus of NaNoWriMo that helps keep her on track.
Sayler’s next step is not yet determined, as she’s currently going with the flow and putting her energy into direct work on the book. She doesn’t know what the future holds for her novel, although she’s considering both traditional and self-publishing. When the time comes to begin the publishing process, she’ll weigh her options.
While many current stories being published focus on romance or end up with romantic aspects, Sayler sees this as an opportunity to write something that breaks this pattern. Sayler wanted this to be a story of friendship, something that she thinks is underdone in the book world.
“I wanted to write a book where friendship is the love that saves the world. In media, friendships are really undervalued. There is so much you can do with friendship relationships, because there’s so much that hasn’t yet been done,” commented Sayler.
Her advice to anyone who wants to write is to simply do that, write.
“Write what you want to read. If you want to read a certain type of story and it doesn’t exist, be the one who writes it!”