Makena Sliver isn’t any normal student at SLOHS. She is a two-time, self-published author, writing by the name Lauren Silver. When Expressions heard of her accomplishments, Expressions decided to go out and ask her a few questions on how she managed to handle both school and being a self-published author.
Expressions: How do you motivate yourself to write?
Sophomore Makena Silver: Well, what I do is I read books or I watch a movie of a book. That always really inspires me to just come up with a theme or a subject to write about. For example, I like “The Notebook” by Nicholas Sparks.
Expressions: What does the publishing project look like?
Silver: So it took me about three months to figure out actually how to publish a book. There is a lot of organizations that you can join, but it costs five hundred to a thousand dollars to publish your book. But that’s like way too expensive and I’m broke, so no. What I had to do was self publish on Amazon and it is a lot more work because you have to revise it on your own, you don’t get an editor, but it’s free. What you do is you upload your transcript, upload the cover and it makes the books. It’s really cool.
Expressions: What is your book about?
Silver: The first one “a new chapter” is about a teenage romance, but more showing the family side of it. It’s about a young teenage girl who lost her mom at childbirth and so she’s never had a female figure. I use my own experience to kind of bring in the loss for her. [Next] she meets a guy, and she falls in love with him, but his ends up having a surprise, that I won’t spoil and he ends up having to choose between family and future, which I think is a really important decision for teenagers, especially people who decide they want to go to college for their significant other. So the book is about growing a sad person in a relationship, and not focusing just on a relationship, but focusing on your entire future as a whole. The second one is a collection of poetry.
Expressions: What kind of stuff do you put on your blog?
Silver: A lot of poetry, not really updates on my life, because I don’t have a life.
If you wish to buy her new book you can find it at:
