12-year-old author publishes first chapter book

WASILLA - What does a self-professed "nerd" and "weirdo" do for fun on a blustery Saturday afternoon? If you're 12-year-old Lauren DW Luchsinger Fox, you spend it signing copies of your newly published chapter book.

"Chaderick: Not a Vampire. Not a Zombie. Not a Superhero" chronicles the somewhat awkward adventures of a normal boy trying to fit in among a town full of superheroes.

A creation of the Twindly Bridge Charter School seventh-grader, Chaderick is "kind of a technology nerd and he's in this place where there's a bunch of superheroes," Luschsinger Fox said. "And, he decides he wants to become like them to be accepted. He fails at it, kind of. He just wants to belong to this group. In the end, he realizes that's not really who he is."

Seeing the results of about a year of work is a good lesson for Lauren, said her mother, Dana Luchsinger, who's also an author.

"She's been writing since she was in second grade, and I have suffered through many 100-page-long going nowhere (efforts)," said Dana, who gave her daughter advice and constructive feedback. "She tells me I made her cry at one point, because she thought they were perfect."

Lauren said she loves that her mother gives honest assessments of her writing and can talk to her like an editor would. That her mom thinks her latest work is worthy of publishing is a great compliment, she said.

"Chaderick" is published by Crecer Publications, which Lauren said is a business owned by her family.

"But my mom would not let me publish something that was not up to her standards," she said. "And that's good."

Lauren said she also learned something very important about writing while working with her mother - it's good when a story has a plot.

"It is very important, as it turns out," she said. "Some of my writing, I look back at it and ... sometimes I'm like, ‘Wow! I did this!' Then sometimes I'm like, "Wow, I did this?'"

Dana said the penny dropped on Lauren's desire to be a writer when she taught a fiction-writing workshop at her school.

"That was when Lauren had this ah-ha moment and realized she needed a plot," Dana said. "So, she got an idea and started writing, and within a few weeks she came up with 20 pages that had a climax and an ending."

The protagonist, Chaderick, was stuck in Hero Town surrounded by superheroes, like Superman and Spider-Man, Dana said.

"I had to tell her she would get sued if she used already copyrighted characters," her mother said with a chuckle. So, the final version includes characters like Super Dan and Pyroman.

But having a plot was just one challenge, Dana said.

At one point, Lauren also had trouble deciding how to end her stories.

"One of the most painful ones was - she's going to hate me for telling this - it was a mystery involving twins and one of them got kidnapped," Dana said. "We stalled there for, like, 80 pages. She just couldn't decide how she wanted it to end. So, one day she had a brainstorm and put something like, ‘and then she woke up.'"

Besides writing, Lauren runs cross-country and track for Colony Middle School and also enjoys ice skating. She likes reading chapter books herself, reality television and also reading the classics. She just started William Shakespeare's "Twelfth Night."

Lauren understands being a literary person isn't exactly the "cool" thing for most 12-year-olds, but she's fine with it.

"For some people, writing's not their thing, and I understand that," she said. "But if you find something that you really enjoy writing about, then it becomes a lot funner. If all you've ever written is essays, then you probably won't like writing, because nobody likes writing essays."

It's also inspiring having a mother who understands writing, Lauren said, adding she remembers the first time she ever saw one of her mother's books in print.

"I thought it was really cool," she said, "but I was like, ‘mom, there aren't enough pictures.' I love my mom. She's brutally honest. She doesn't believe in telling you you're better than you are."

She saw the first finished copies of "Chaderick" last month and vividly remembers the feeling of seeing the finished book.

"The first time I got a copy of the book, I was like, ‘whoa!' It was intense," she said. "It's really cool, exciting."

It's all about keeping with it, Lauren said.

"I had a lot of failures," she said. "Never-ending stories, ones without plots, just bad stories nobody actually wanted to read."

That's OK, Lauren said.

"My friends just kind of acknowledge that I'm a nerd and a weirdo, and I am," she said. "But I rock the weirdo."

Contact Greg Johnson at greg.johnson@frontiersman.com or 352-2269.