For many aspiring authors, publishing a book can often fall under the timeline of “one day,” but for some students and faculty, “one day” came much sooner.
Natalie Black, biomedical sciences senior, published two books with her younger sister, the first when she was just a freshman in high school.
“My sister and I actually co-authored two novels,” Black said. “The first one is called Double Sided and we published that one when I was a freshman in high school … and the second book we published was a sequel to that and it was called The Third Side and that one was published two years later.”
Black said the initial idea for writing the novels came from her younger sister.
“My sister was actually the one who decided she wanted to write a novel, and my father told her it was silly to wait until she grew up and that she should just start now,” Black said. “So she asked me if I would help her because I was a little bit older and a little bit stronger as a writer at the time, and I said, ‘Sure.’”
While Black and her sister focused primarily on fiction novels, other authors channeled stories that resonated closer to home. Lino Anunciacion, English senior and published poetry author, said his inspiration comes from events that happened in his own life.
“While some of the poems are fictional a lot of them are based on things that have happened to me — traumatic things, good things, romantic things. I pretty much write as a cathartic means of expressing my own personal life story,” Anunciacion said. “Every collection I have is like a marker of my experience and my journey as a writer and as a human being.”
Anunciacion has had five of his poetry collections published. He said he would advise students hoping to be published to self-publish as soon as possible and build up their name and reputation.
“You find the poems that you want, you figure out the thematic connections and the messages that you want to put out there that a poetry collection could afford you that a single poem couldn’t,” Anunciacion said. “You collect those poems and put them in a Word document. I go through Createspace.com, a platform through Amazon that allows you to upload your manuscripts, you upload a book cover and they will print your books for you.”
Lowell Mick White, instructional assistant English professor and published author of three books, had a longer publishing experience for his first novel.
“My first novel took about three years to write and three years to find a publisher,” White said. “I kept sending it out and sending it out until somebody liked it. It’s a long process and some writers get depressed by it, by rejection… I knew it was a really good book and I had faith in it and eventually somebody understood what I was trying to do, but it took about three years and 60 rejections.”
White said his inspiration comes from the world around him.
“The story collections are set in Texas and are about people’s lives. Usually people have some sort of a problem that makes for a more interesting story,” White said. “[That Demon Life] is about a bunch of crazy people living in Austin and engaging in bad behavior a lot, and Professed is set in a large university in Austin that we don’t like at A&M and it [is about] people involved in the academic world, what they confront and how they live their lives.”
Brandon Larson, English senior and published author who wrote a fictional novel called The American Civil War of 2018 based on the political climate of 2011, said like White, the people and situations around him are his biggest inspiration.
“If I had to say anything I think what inspires me in my writing is the stories of people,” Larson said. “Everyone has a different story and a lot of times through my writing real people are expressed in my characters — their personalities, their traits, things that have happened to them. So that inspires me to tell people stories.”