White County High School senior publishes first book

Editor’s note: Grace Edgewood is a writing alias for Allie Heady, White County High School senior who, after graduating in a few weeks, plans to pursue a career in library science in hopes to instill a love of reading in young minds.

My name is Grace Edgewood. For as long as I can remember, I have always found my escape in books.  I was never very athletic, so while my sister was at volleyball or basketball practice, I had my nose in a book.  In the words of J.K. Rowling, “Books are a uniquely portable source of magic,” and I wouldn’t be caught dead without a book in my bag.  Even as a child, I wanted to escape my approaching math test by jumping into Narnia.  Books allowed me to trade in my non-athletic, semi-smart self for a battle-wise princess in a foreign land or a seeker on the quidditch field.  All my life, I had been told how I had to do something:

The school bell rang at eight and three.

I was expected to do well. 

Math is important in the real world. 

All that stood between harsh reality and my childhood dreams, was paper and ink.  My stories gave me a chance to change that.  With a pen and a pad of paper, I could craft galaxies and bring worlds into existence.  I made friends and enemies.  I was taught the art of love and war.  I loved and lost.  With a wave, math could magically disappear.  My homework could do itself.  The summer break never ended.  The world gave me a place in line and told me to get along with society.  The realm of books handed me a sword and told me to get busy. I’ve always felt a bit out of place, like I was waiting for something amazing to happen, but it never did. My Hogwarts letter never came, my closet never opened into Narnia, I’ve never found a magical treehouse, and I’ve never been to Camp Half-Blood. As a child, I thirsted for knowledge and dove head- first into any book I could get my hands on. But like deer to a salt lick, I always came back into the real world, unsatisfied and thirsting for more. Then I discovered the pain and joy of writing. It was like my moment of excitement had finally come.

I could take my ideas and characters and put them down on paper. Suddenly the voices I had only ever heard in my head had shapes and moved beautifully about on the page. At first, I wrote myself into adventures I imagined I would lead some day. Then my stories progressed. I began writing for an audience that wasn’t just me. It started because of a conversation I had with my younger cousin. I was reading her a bedtime story, she was five at the time, when she asked me why the character in our story was so sad. I carefully explained that it was because his dad was away in a war. The strangest look settled on her face when she asked me what that was. How do you explain war to a five-year-old? The concept of devastation and pain is foreign. The idea that daddies leave and don’t come back, and that grampas outlive their sons is inconceivable to them. With tears in my eyes, I realized that her carefully guarded childhood was slipping away. One day, she would face the world and know exactly what a war was. The next time I sat down to write, she was at the front of my mind. So, I wrote a tale for her. A story of peace in the time of turmoil and growing through seasons of doubt. I read it to her a year later. Her mind was captivated by my story. My characters filled her drawing pad, and my dialogue filled her mouth.

From that moment on, I decided that I could never be an author that ended her stories with tragedy and death. While it might have worked for Shakespeare, I had an audience that was bright-eyed and tender-eared. I knew from personal experience that sometimes a story is the only thing keeping the monsters at bay. I vowed that even if my characters lost everything, I would show that hope always breaks through.

That’s when my new series was born.

The world had just shut down. Everyone was waiting with bated breath to see what was going to happen. School was canceled indefinitely. Church was online. My friends were only as close as their internet connection. The whole world was up in shambles and trying to find a way to survive, but all I knew was that for the first time ever, I had free rein to write. One night, I sat at the end of my bed and stared out the window for hours. That’s when Cole came. At first, I imagined him skipping down the barbed-wire fence, oblivious to my stare. The next night, I imagined he was beckoning me to join him in his adventures from the halo of a streetlamp. After that, my imagination was on fire with ideas. While listening to my English teacher lecture on Hamlet, I would be writing scenes and sketching faces. I came up with a road map for the entire series.

In April 2020, I began my series “We met in the Fog.” I wanted it to be reminiscent of Rick Riordan’s “Heroes of Olympus” series in the way it was set up. Each book tells the story of a character before a crucial moment in their life, when they meet their three other best friends. Each story ends with the line “We met in the fog,” where the series gets its name. Then the next book backs up and builds the next character. In the final installment, the four friends come together to fight a common evil: a rebel and former friend, who is symbolic for fear. I wrote all five books in the span of three months of quarantine. From there, I went back and rewrote each book with themes, symbolism, and motifs I’d learned from my own life and from the English class I had been half-heartedly listening to. I wanted to show this terrifying character to my young audience, because I know they will see their own fears reflected back in him. That is what makes the victory all so much sweeter. It isn’t my characters defeating each other, it is my readers conquering whatever fear holds them back.

The only problem was that I didn’t have much of an audience. I read my younger sister a chapter a night from my manuscript and got invaluable feedback, but I wasn’t getting anywhere with pushing it out into the world. Then, my mother introduced me to “Writer’s Digest”. I quickly found the page listing agents actively seeking writers. I scanned the list until I found an agent that was seeking middle-grade fantasy, which fit my book’s description. I crafted a query letter and sent her the required excerpt. A few months later, I got a reply - a resounding and stiff “no.” I queried for months and still didn’t get so much as a nibble. Then, the week before Halloween, I sent my last two query letters. Although I wasn’t supposed to email more than one agency at I time, I knew the choices of getting hired by one was slim. A few weeks before Christmas, I got a reply from one publishing company. I received a contract offer from Olympia Publishing, which was an answer to prayers. I ran upstairs to my mother and showed her the email. We triumphantly read through the fine print only to discover that it wasn’t quite the type of offer we were hoping for. After many prayers and hopeful emails, I turned down the contract offer.

Not long after, I was reintroduced to Kindle Direct Publishing. My mother had brought up the idea of publishing through KDP, but I had put it off, thinking self-published books were for badly written stories by nobodies that couldn’t find a job anywhere else. There I was a year later in that exact position. No agent or publishing company in their right mind would take a chance on a 16-year old’s first book. So, we made an account and began looking into cover art and professional editing. Every artist I queried was either too busy to accept my work, not interested, or just never answered my emails. Professional editing costs money, money I did not have as a high school student and brand-new author. So, I invested in Grammarly Premium and began working it myself. While on the hunt for a cover artist, my counselor, Stephanie Naaktgeboren, reached out. As a former English teacher and lover of literature, her fresh eyes on “Cole Magnus” were invaluable. I ended up doing the cover art myself on an iPad. I launched a website, graceedgewood.com, and it really began to seem like my life-long dream would come true. Then came the curveball of the KDP uploading process. The eBook came nearly a month before the paperback because of little roadblocks that popped up with the uploading process. After hours of editing and reformatting, “Cole” was ready to make the jump. I published the eBook on March 20th of 2022. The paperback came out April 10th of the same year.

I was 15 and a high school sophomore when I began writing the series, with no more than a dream of becoming a published author and a few characters in my mind. Now I am 17, I am graduating in less than a month, and I have a book out for the world to see. While writing “Cole,” I dreamed of being published but not what that implied. When I imagined the aftermath, I just thought it meant my manuscript wouldn’t be growing dusty in my Google Drive but on a shelf somewhere. I never imagined the outpouring of support I have received. Writing is a long and lonely career, filled with lots of late nights and self-inflicted deadlines. I felt so alone trying to push a world into existence two years ago, but now I have kids in my youth group who are just as excited as I am to see it go out into the world. I have been asked for autographs and am even doing a book signing at the local coffee shop, The Mad Raven, May 19 from 4 to 6 p.m. It all seems too good to be true. My pastor has a copy sitting on his shelf. My English teacher has a copy in his desk drawer. My younger cousin is reading it now. I get texts from old classmates, teachers, and friends telling me how excited they are for me. Since going live on Amazon, I have had other kids come and shyly tell me they are writers, too. For the first time ever, people don’t dodge the subject when I bring up that I write. I wish I could go back and tell elementary me that we are good at something and that we don’t have to demean our value because someone is better at something than I am. I wish I could tell younger me that all the tear-filled, dark nights, sitting alone in my bedroom, with no one but “Cole” as my company, turned into this. I am so grateful for my parents, who helped through the whole process, and for my sister, Abby, who is the strongest person I know.

--“Cole Magnus”  is primarily on Amazon but can also be found at Walmart.com and on the online Barnes and Noble store.