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Ball State employee publishes novel while balancing work and fantasy

By Eric Jacobs, IPR News | Published on in Arts and Culture, Ball State, Local News
(Photos: sarahhollowell.com)

Until an author is published, they can’t reap the financial benefits of their book being sold.  Many balance a full-time job and a writing career.  That’s been the life of a Ball State University employee who recently published a young adult fantasy novel.  As IPR’s Eric Jacobs reports, she says she’s writing what she loves and adding characters that are forgotten in the genre.

 

Sarah Hollowell is the Administrative Coordinator of Ball State’s Department of Educational Leadership.  How does she manage a full time job and a dream in the writing industry?

“Very carefully,” she laughs.  “I write a lot at night before bed, and then I do my day job stuff.”

Hollowell’s debut book, A Dark and Starless Forest, is a tale about children who go missing in the dark forest – and the growing darkness in characters themselves.  Many young adult novels, like Hollowell’s, talk about navigating the world as a teenager.

“I love writing about teenagers, because teenagers feel such big immediate emotions and they are so frequently told that those emotions don’t matter, and they’re just a phase. But I don’t think that that’s true. So, I like to write books for them to display all these big, beautiful emotions they have.  And also, I am trying to write a book that high school me needed to see.”

Hollowell refers to herself as fat and says her main character is also a fat girl.  At a Ball State reading this week, Hollowell read a passage about her narrator’s struggle with self-identity. She says she wishes there were more fat main characters in books she read in high school.

“Honestly, if I can just make one fat teenager feel like ‘Oh my God, I can have adventures! I can be magic!’ then I’ll be good, I’ll be happy.”