A novel idea
Ramah teen working on second and third fantasy novels

Seventeen-year-old Shelbi Johnston is the author of a fantasy novel. The Ramah High School junior started the book when she was 13. — © 2009 Gallup Independent / Brian Leddy

Copyright © 2009
Gallup Independent
By Elizabeth Hardin-Burrola
Staff writer

RAMAH — According to her father, Shelbi Johnston has been “burning up paper” since she was a little girl.

Apparently some things don’t change. Johnston may have spent much of her early childhood writing and drawing, but now she’s spending much of her teen years writing, typing and publishing.

Johnston, 17, a junior at Ramah High School, self-published her first fantasy novel in October 2008 through Amazon.com’s publishing subsidiary Create Space. Now she’s halfway through a sequel and has almost completed writing a third book — another fantasy tale that she would like to pitch to a literary agent.

Johnston and her father, Robert, said during a recent after-school interview. Johnston admitted that during the last four years she has spent much of her time in school writing her three novels. She gets her class work done early, she explained, and then pulls out her writing notebook — a notebook that she’s been told to put away more than a few times by a few teachers. She spends part of her evenings typing what she wrote in longhand during the day.

A fan of successful women authors like J.K. Rowling, Mercedes Lackey, and Anne McCaffrey, Johnston might be following in the footsteps of McCaffrey, who claims she wrote her first novel while in Latin class.

Robert Johnston, clearly proud of his daughter’s accomplishments, said he and his wife, Mely, haven’t been too concerned about Shelbi’s time-consuming writing habits. She keeps up with her school work, he said, and she continues to make good grades. However, they were a bit surprised when they first learned all that in-school writing was turning into a huge novel. “We thought it was just another short story she was writing,” he admitted.

Johnston’s novel, “Fey,” is a professional looking 623-page fantasy mystery featuring a human main character named Constantine, a trio of gremlins, a deadly force, and the mysterious Fey. The book contains a language index for Italian, Irish Gaelic, and Nepali expressions; a pronunciation key for character and place names in the fantasy world of Tiron; and two maps of Tiron that were designed by an artist from Malaysia that Johnston commissioned online. Johnston created her own abstract cover art on a computer.

Johnston said most fantasy novelists make up languages for their characters to speak, but she thought it would be more interesting to have her characters — some with origins in mythological stories — speak real languages from the cultures that inspired them. Johnston said she got the book’s Italian expressions from an Italian substitute teacher, the Irish Gaelic from an online friend, and the Nepali from a teacher who has a friend from Nepal.

“Fey” took three years to complete, Johnston explained, 18 months to write and another 18 months to edit and prepare for publishing. It can be purchased on Amazon.com for $14.99. In addition, Johnston said she is planning to donate a couple of copies to Gallup’s public library.

On the book’s dedication page, Johnston humorously writes, “Hmm ... who should I blame this on?” Other than her sixth-grade teacher who encouraged her to write, and her family who kept her stocked up with writing supplies, Johnston lays some of the “blame” on her group of friends who read her weekly installments of “Fey” and offered their responses and suggestions about the book’s developing plot and characters. Good friend Kaity Bloomfield was her most ardent reader. “She read it like she was a real fan,” Johnston said.

With the feedback from her friends, Johnston said she rewrote “Fey” three times before she was satisfied with the book. She intentionally left some of the novel’s mysteries unsolved at its conclusion to create a literary springboard for a sequel. Johnston said she’s halfway finished writing the second book.

“I’m not sure at this point how many books there will be,” said Johnston, who admitted she didn’t have a clear plot planned out when she began writing “Fey.”

A complicating factor for a possible “Fey” series is that Johnston is working on another fantasy novel, “Hex,” that is not connected to the other two books. Johnston said she would like to see this third novel, already 48 chapters long, entered into a number of writing contests and possibly be marketed by a professional literary agent.

In spite of all this time invested, Johnston said she’s not sure writing will ever be anything more than a hobby.

She’s currently searching for a college to attend — with the long-term career goal of becoming a dentist. In the meantime, she’d like school officials at Ramah to establish a girls’ wrestling team so she can take a little break from writing by trying out the sport of wrestling her senior year.