Olive Wilson’s plan? To publish a trilogy of novels, all before her junior year in high school

Navigating the teen years, particularly in the Trump/Instagram/Adderall era, is a tough business. And even though 16-year-old Olive D. Wilson can’t claim to have discovered a panacea for the treacherous years of adolescence, what she has discovered is certainly working for her.

The Santa Cruz High School student recently self-published her second novel, “A Faded Line of Friends and Fiends,” in the wake of her first novel, “A Life of Morals and Murder,” published when she was 15, in the summer between her freshman and sophomore years. 

Both books are what Wilson calls “dark fantasy.” But her burgeoning writing career grew out of something all too real for contemporary teens, the pressure to succeed.

At her former school, San Lorenzo Valley High, Wilson was a star basketball player, even playing varsity as a first-year student. She loved basketball, but the competitive pressures she was receiving took a toll on her mental health. 

“I had a lot of complicated emotions that I didn’t know how to process,” she said. “So what I did was, I just wrote them all out. It was kind of a journaling thing. I would have these characters in my head and I wrote them down on a piece of paper. Really, just something I did for my mental health. Then, one day, I wound up with a 400-page manuscript.”

The story of both novels — the second is a sequel to the first — has nothing to do with basketball. It is instead, she said, an allegory of the pressures of being an overachiever. It’s about a quartet of talented but troubled teens in a dystopian landscape fighting against a powerful but malign political dynasty.

“I wanted to stay away from the sports spectrum,” she said. “I did fantasy, because that’s what I’m going to write [in a future career]. But the sports element is there in that all of my four main characters have a lot of pressure on them to perform well. And, under this extreme pressure, they all come together and realize that the way they’re being treated is not OK, and they sort of rise against it.”

Finishing a novel is certainly an accomplishment, but doing the work to convert it into an actual book was another mountain to climb from a young woman still two years shy of graduating from high school. She recruited a tight circle of friends whom she could trust as first readers. After that round of feedback and revisions, she had to find a professional editor. Once she had a finished manuscript, then she had to figure out a way to publish.

“The hardest part for me was finding where to self-publish, and if I could actually do it as a teenager,” she said of her first book which was released last summer. “Because there are a lot of scams out there in the self-publishing world and I had to work very hard to avoid them. When it came to my publishing date, I don’t think I slept for a couple of days because it was so nerve-wracking.”

As challenging as the process was, Wilson made the decision to do it all over again because “I was not done with these characters.”

The books are written from four perspectives, each character a young person caught in a bind in a family or clan situation that ultimately brings them all together to fight tyranny. 

“There are four countries,” she said, “and they all rely on each other because they are each a wasteland when it comes to resources.” So, the countries must rely on trade routes for their mutual benefit, but those trade routes are controlled by one man named the Emperor. 

“I had to read a lot about how trade groups work, and I read a lot of history and other novels like ‘The Poppy War’ [by R.F. Kuang]. You have to pay attention to history to figure out how they did things.”

Writing and publishing a single novel is one thing, but a trilogy? That’s what is on Wilson’s mind. In fact, she’s deep into the writing of the third part in her saga, which she expects to publish this summer. 

After that, she said, she’s going to pivot and write a book about basketball — all before high school graduation. Then it’s off to college, where she plans to major in creative writing and minor in marketing — to market her writing, of course.

“I want to do this the rest of my life,” she said. “I’d like to be a full-time author. My current plan is to keep writing, keep getting better.”

The books of Olive D. Wilson are available at Bookshop Santa Cruz or other online retailers. 

Have something to say? Lookout welcomes letters to the editor, within our policies, from readers. Guidelines here.