Printing the first draft of my middle-grade book made me realize I am closer than I thought to keeping an old promise.

I knew the draft was 20,600 words.

I did not know it would feel that heavy.

On the screen, it was still a file. A project. A draft. A thing I had been building in small pieces for six weeks while regular life kept happening around it.

But when I picked up the printed pages, it felt different.

Exciting.

Scary.

Thicker than I expected.

More real than I was ready for.

I have known I was a writer for a long time. That part has never really surprised me. Words have always been where I go to sort myself out, make meaning, tell the truth, and turn the mess of life into something another person might be able to hold.

But writing a book was different.

Being a writer was something I knew.

Being an author was something I told myself I might do someday.

Someday when I had more time. More quiet. More energy. More confidence. Someday when life settled down enough for a whole book to fit inside it.

The problem is, life has never really settled down like that.

And still, somehow, the pages are here.

I come from book people.

Not published-author people. Not literary-world people. Not people with agents and launch parties and embossed hardcovers stacked on a table.

Book people.

Readers. Poetry lovers. Library people. Bedtime chapter people. People who understood that books were not just things you owned. They were places you went. They were ways to think, ways to feel, ways to become someone slightly different than you were before you opened the cover.

My grandma, my dad’s mom, loved poetry. She loved to read. And for as long as I can remember, she told us kids that one of us needed to become an author.

She wanted to be one herself.

She told us she did not have the talent.

So her kids needed to do it.

Then her kids did not write books either, so the dream passed down one more row.

To us.

I do not remember one dramatic moment where she placed a hand on my shoulder and assigned me the family literary destiny. It was not like that. It was more ordinary, which somehow made it stick harder.

It was repeated.

One of you needs to be an author.

One of you needs to write books.

Somebody in this family needs to do it.

And I was already the kid who loved words. I was already the kid who loved reading. I was already the kid who felt something spark when language landed just right.

So somewhere along the way, I thought, maybe it can be me.

Maybe I can be the one.

I did not understand what I was promising.

Kids rarely do.

I thought wanting it was the same thing as knowing how to do it. I thought loving books meant someday a book would come pouring out of me whole, polished, and ready.

That is not how it works.

At least not for me.

I have started big stories before. Massive ones. Complicated ones. The kind with too many threads, too many details, too much world, too many directions to get lost in. I would try to write a novel and end up tangled in my own ideas.

Dialogue would bog me down.

The size of the thing would overwhelm me.

The story would grow too large for the container I had built, and eventually I would stop. Not because I did not care. Not because I did not have ideas. But because I could not find my way through them.

So I wrote other things.

Essays, blog posts, captions, pitches, fragments, reflections, pieces of truth, pieces of memory, pieces of myself.

I became a writer in public long before I became brave enough to believe I could be an author.

And maybe that is why this stack of pages feels heavier than paper.

Because it is not only 20,600 words.

It is six weeks of staying inside one story.

It is one girl. One farm. One pair of fairy goggles. One world I did not abandon when it got hard.

It is proof that I can sustain something longer than a single essay. I can return to the same world day after day. I can build a chapter, then another, then another. I can keep the thread in my hands.

The book is called Rae of Sunny Day Farm and the Fairy Goggles.

Rae is named after my Rae.

And Sunny Day Farm has roots in something she used to say when she was little.

She would come running into my room in the morning and say, “Good morning, Mommy. It’s sunny day!”

Not “a sunny day.”

Sunny day.

Like sunshine was not just weather. Like it was a whole announcement. Like the day itself had arrived carrying light in both hands.

That phrase stayed with me.

Years later, it became the name of a farm.

Then the farm became a world.

Then the world became a book draft sitting in my hands.

The Rae in the story is not exactly my Rae.

My Rae loves fashion and art. She has always had her own kind of sparkle, her own eye for style, her own way of making the world more expressive.

Book Rae is different.

Book Rae wants to fix things.

She wants to understand why something is broken and what can be done about it. She is not a magical girl waiting to be chosen. She is a problem-solver trying to make sense of what everyone else keeps walking past.

She is neurodivergent-coded because my family is neurodivergent. Because I know what it means to notice what other people miss. To feel overwhelmed by what other people walk past. To see systems, patterns, mismatches, and hidden pressure points before anyone else knows something is wrong.

That is part of the story’s magic.

The fairy goggles show systems through blue lines only certain wearers can see. Not everyone can use them the same way. They work for someone already inclined to see the world that way. Someone who can feel both worlds overlapping on the farm. Someone who notices the shimmer between what is visible and what is underneath.

When Rae looks through the goggles, she does not just see sparkle.

She sees how things connect.

She sees where something is blocked. Where something is pulling wrong. Where old damage is still affecting new growth. Where the farm is trying to speak through patterns nobody else has learned how to read.

But the magic does not fix everything.

The fairy goggles help Rae see what is broken.

They show her hidden systems. Buried problems. Places where something has been tangled, blocked, neglected, or misunderstood.

But the goggles do not repair the farm for her.

There is no wand wave. No instant sparkle solution. No magical shortcut that cleans up years of damage without anyone having to kneel in the dirt and pay attention.

The magic helps her see.

Rae still has to be the fix.

That matters to me.

Maybe because I am tired of stories where healing looks instant. Maybe because I am tired of real life pretending that awareness is the same thing as repair. Maybe because I know what it is to finally see what is wrong and still have to do the slow, unglamorous work of tending it.

Maybe because, in some way, I needed to write a story where the magic gave the girl sight, but the girl still had to trust herself enough to act.

Before I could hold that story in my hands, though, I had to fight the printer.

Which also felt about right.

I bought that printer two years ago.

Two years ago.

I got it out of the box, tried to connect it through Bluetooth, got frustrated, and quit.

That was the whole story.

The printer won.

For two years, it sat there like a very expensive box of good intentions.

This spring, I finally bought a cable so I could connect it directly to my laptop, because apparently some dreams do not need better technology. They need a cord.

Yesterday, I used it to scan some of my artwork.

Today, I decided to print my book draft.

The first pages skipped about every sixth line.

Of course they did.

So there I was, trying to move an old dream into the physical world by Googling printer settings, running test pages, and cleaning the printhead twice.

It was not poetic.

It was annoying.

But eventually, the pages started printing the way they were supposed to.

I think I did it.

That was the first feeling. Not some giant cinematic moment. Not swelling music. Not me standing in golden light while the universe applauded.

Just me, sitting there with my laptop and my stubborn printer, thinking, I think I did it.

Then I printed the whole thing.

Chapter by chapter.

One stack at a time.

I printed it because I needed to hold it. Because screens make drafts feel temporary. Paper makes them accountable.

A file can hide.

A stack of pages cannot.

A printed draft can be read out loud. Written on. Marked up. Passed across a table. Handed to someone who will see what you missed.

That is both the point and the terrifying part.

Because now other people can read it.

Rae will read it.

My dad will read it.

Other family who want to read it will read it.

Some of Rae’s friends may read it too.

Part of me is excited.

Part of me is scared they will not find it unique enough. Or interesting enough. Or that what felt meaningful in my head will not land the way I hoped when someone else holds it.

I think that is the fear every artist knows.

That the thing you made will not be received as the thing you meant.

That the story you built with care will arrive in someone else’s hands and become smaller, flatter, less alive than it was inside you.

But that is also the risk of making anything real.

At some point, the work has to leave the safe room of your own imagination.

At some point, it has to be read.

At some point, someone else has to tell you where they got confused, where they wanted more, where the rhythm dragged, where the heart came through.

That is what this copy is for.

It is not the final version.

It is not polished.

It is not ready to become anything fancy yet.

I need feedback. I need line edits. I need to make sure it says everything I want it to say. I need to outline the next couple of books so this one belongs to a larger world and not just a single burst of inspiration.

But unfinished does not mean imaginary.

That is the part I keep coming back to.

For a long time, “book author” lived in the someday part of my mind.

Someday I would write a book.

Someday I would keep that promise.

Someday I would become the person my grandma believed one of us could be.

But someday has a way of staying clean because nothing has touched it yet.

Someday has no printer problems.

No weak chapters.

No awkward dialogue.

No feedback.

No line edits.

No fear that maybe the story is not as good as you hoped.

Someday is safe because it is still theoretical.

This stack of pages is not theoretical.

It has problems.

It has weight.

It has margins.

It has places that will need crossed out, rewritten, expanded, tightened, and questioned.

It can disappoint me.

It can be improved.

It can become something better.

That is what makes it real.

There is grief tucked into this milestone too.

My grandma will not read this book.

The woman who kept telling us one of her grandkids needed to become an author will not hold these pages in her hands.

My mom will not read it either.

And that one aches in its own way.

My mom was a reader too. She was my teacher when I was homeschooled. She was a librarian at our church. Her life was wrapped around books in all these quiet, practical ways.

She would have been excited to read this.

She would have wanted to help me make it better.

She would have supported it.

I know that.

I wish I could hand it to her.

I wish I could hear what my grandma would say.

Not because either one of them would have made this draft perfect. Because they would have understood why it mattered.

So I am carrying joy and ache at the same time.

That feels right for a milestone like this.

Most meaningful things seem to arrive with both.

My dad is still here to read it, and that matters to me more than I can probably say without crying.

He read to us when we were kids. The Happy Hollisters. The Hardy Boys. Sometimes The Boxcar Children.

I can still picture him sitting on the top step in the hallway outside our bedroom doors, reading while we were tucked into our beds, asking for just one more chapter.

That is one of the places my love of story came from.

The hallway. The bedrooms. The sound of my dad’s voice. The ache of wanting one more chapter before sleep.

So yes, I want his opinion.

Not only because he is my dad.

Because he reads. Because he knows stories. Because he was there at the beginning of mine.

I need him to tell me the truth, even if proud dad mode makes that hard.

I need him to help me make it better.

That is what all of this is now.

Not a finished dream.

A living draft.

A promise with pencil marks.

A stack of pages carrying my grandma’s hope, my mom’s absence, my dad’s bedtime chapters, my daughter’s childhood phrase, and my own stubborn need to make something that did not disappear when life got hard.

When Rae saw the printed draft, she said, “That’s a lot of papers.”

And it is.

It is a lot of papers.

It is also a lot of hours.

A lot of small returns.

A lot of choosing the next chapter instead of abandoning the whole thing because I could not see the end yet.

I texted my brother that I had printed it, and he said, “Congrats, that has to feel good.”

It did.

It does.

Not because the book is done.

Because I am closer than I realized.

Printing this draft made me realize I am closer to book one than I thought.

I can actually do this.

I can actually write the story.

I can actually build the world.

I can actually revise it, shape it, let other people touch it, and keep going.

There is no magic fix for this part either.

No shortcut.

No glowing doorway where I step through and become an author without fear, effort, feedback, or revision.

There is only the work.

One scene, then another.

One chapter, then another.

One test page, then another.

One old promise still sitting in my chest, asking if I meant it.

Today, I held 20,600 words in my hands.

It is not finished.

But it is real.

And for the first time, being an author does not feel like someday.

It feels like something I am already becoming.