Premium ContentMouse over Home then click on Premium Content for information.It's an INCREDIBLE tale. Full of AMAZING twists and jaw-dropping WONDER.
An unusual girl with an UNCANNY brain. How does she do it? What will she do next? Is she man ...
Or MACHINE?
Shelly Li doesn't usually tell people that she has a book coming out. It's kind of hard to explain ...
That she, at 18, has a literary agent and a film agent and a book deal. That her science fiction stories are published all over. That while other people are doodling in class, she's writing her next novel. In longhand.
Sometimes all this success doesn't seem real even to Shelly herself.
She wonders if it's just “a fluke.” And she has this feeling that if she doesn't keep writing — if she doesn't keep moving forward faster than the speed of light — maybe all these opportunities will go away.
Shelly started writing science fiction by accident. (This is probably the only part of her career that will ever happen by accident; Shelly's all about “the plan.”)
She was 9 years old, and she had a teacher who wouldn't let her curse unless it was part of an “artistic expression.” Why did Shelly want to cuss so badly? What did she even have to curse about in the fourth grade?
Thinking about it makes her shake her head and roll her eyes. The first few years of grade school was rough, she says. She didn't fit in. She was too smart. And too ... different. She felt isolated. She felt like shocking people.
So Shelly wrote this short story with lots of curse words and dragons — and it worked; her teacher was shocked (she banned bad words even in the arts), and her parents were upset.
But they also saw some potential in the story. “You should keep writing,” her parents said.
Do you remember how much time you had as a kid? If you got an idea in your head, you had almost infinite time and energy to chase it. Maybe you read book after book about horses. Maybe you created your own superhero team and filled notebooks with drawings.
Shelly wrote.
In the eighth grade, she got an idea for a science fiction novel. “I think I was looking for something to do with my time.”
She was getting into Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury, and she had this idea about brain chips and identity swapping. She wrote 85,000 words in three months. (If you've ever written a book, or tried, you might need smelling salts after reading that sentence. Hang on to them. Shelly's story will just keep blowing your mind.)
Once she had a novel in hand, the next logical step, she thought, was not to show it to her friends or send it to her grandma — but to try to get it published.
“Nobody helped her,” said her mother, Silvia Zhu. “She got online.”
Shelly read that the first step in publishing was to get an agent. “I sent out query letter after query letter.” And like most first-time authors, she got lots of rejections.
But then, when she was 14 years old, she did get an agent. A real-live literary agent in New York City. Shelly thought she'd made it. In the eighth grade.
Three months after that, the agent let her go, something about not having enough resources.
“I was heartbroken. I ate lots of ice cream ... By the time she dumped me, I'd written a sequel, and I was ready to roll.”
Shelly wondered if maybe it was time to set writing aside and try something else. Instead she decided to try writing short stories. She started sending stories to her favorite magazines, Web sites and authors, and she always asked for advice. What can I do to get better? What can I do to move forward?
A few authors and editors took Shelly under their wings. They suggested that she attend some science fiction conventions. (Which is how Shelly found herself at 15 in a Canadian hotel, trying to make adult conversation with some of her heroes. “I grew up really, really fast,” she says — just in perspective and world view.)
Finally — finally meaning in the 10th grade — Shelly got her first short story, “Replacement,” published in Nature magazine. “It was really emo,” she says, and it established Shelly's dominant style, “literary fiction with robots.”
Once she was published in Nature, it was easier for her to get published other places — and easier to get agents' attention.
In 2009, a political thriller she wrote called “Bubble” caught the eye of film agent Patricia Burke. Though Burke's agency, Inkwell Management, passed on “Bubble,” they encouraged her to write a young adult book and eventually signed Shelly last year.
“I am awe struck ...” Burke said this week of her young client. “I think genius, which is so random and inexplicable, is like grass and concrete. No matter how thick the concrete, some green shoots are going to grow through and reach for the light. That's Shelly. She is an unstoppable force of nature.”
Last summer, Inkwell sold Shelly's first young adult novel — “Remember the Mutilated World,” now called “The Royal Hunter” — to Philomel Books, which is part of Penguin Group. (Full disclosure: I have a book being published by another part of Penguin, though that's not how I heard about Shelly.)
So now — well, in a year or so, after a bunch of editing — Shelly is going to have her very own book.
Of course, she's already written the next one. She tries to write 3,000 to 5,000 words every day.
Her mother continually worries that Shelly is working too hard.
“Sometimes she's up so late and her mind's so excited ... I have to say, ‘Go to sleep.'”
It can be even harder to get Shelly to go out with friends and have fun. When she does go out, she feels like she needs to stay up late and meet her word count.
She just has this need to keep writing.
“I feel like if I don't, I'm going to lose it.”
Contact the writer: 402-444-1149, rainbow.rowell@owh.com, twitter.com/rainbowrowell
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