Introducing “Emily,” Emily’s Version

Hello Everyone,

I’m delighted to announce that the new, updated version of my first book, now titled Emily: Diary of a Sick Girl, is available for pre-order!

I’ll be sending copies out December 9, so please get your pre-order in if you want to have it by Christmas!

Cover art by Jiayi (Serena) Ma. Design by Gabrielle M.

“Emily” is a story about me, taken from the pages of my diary and my blog when I was seventeen and eighteen. I was sick with West Nile Virus, I was afraid I’d always be to sick to go on the wonderful adventures I dreamed of, and moths were the bane of my existence.

About a year into my sickness, I found out that a medium-sized publishing company called HCI Books, who was most famous for their Chicken Soup for the Soul series, wanted to publish a series of books written by teenage girls for teenage girls.

I sent in some writing samples and was chosen as one of the first three authors in the new Louder than Words series.

I spent a month or two compiling my blog posts and diary entries into a book, and adding supplementary entries to fill in the gaps. Then the book went through a few rounds of editing and came out in August of 2009.

Here’s a picture of me the first time I saw my book in a Barnes & Noble.

Now, one thing you may notice about the above picture is that the girl holding the book and the girl on the cover of the book are not the same girl.

The truth is, although the inside words of the book were all mine, I had almost no say in how it was packaged. I emailed my editor and asked if they could please keep in mind that I’m Mennonite, and said that if my grandma saw a girl on the cover with short hair and pants she’d be offended. Ha.

My editor said she’d bring up this issue with the cover team. That was the beginning and end of my input into the matter.

Did I like the original cover?

Well, it wasn’t the worst cover ever. Sure, the girl on the front didn’t exactly look Mennonite, but since she was lying down I could forgive the tank top and lack of head covering, as I may have looked similar while lying in bed.

My biggest gripe with the cover was that it wasn’t me. Every time I did book events, people would walk up, pick up the book, look at the photo, look at me, and ask, “is that you?”

And I always had to say, “nope, just a random cover model.”

I also came to feel, over the years, that the cover didn’t accurately represent what was actually inside the book.

Somewhere on YouTube there’s a video of a woman reviewing my book, who was very disappointed that she didn’t learn much of anything about West Nile Virus from it. Watching the video, I felt a sense of frustration, because I, also, don’t know much of anything about West Nile Virus. I brought this up to my mom, and she said that she, too, didn’t know much of anything about West Nile Virus. No one seemed to know much about it at the time except that it was in my system and I was very sick.

The thing that always confused me the most about my illness was that when I read about West Nile on Wikipedia, it said that the “severe” cases can last up to a couple of weeks and require hospitalization.

This was not at all like my experience of suffering for over a year but never being close to needing to go to the hospital.

I actually received a lot of clarity, though, when Covid hit. In some people, Covid lasted for a couple of weeks and required hospitalization. Others suffered months or even years with “long Covid” that didn’t require hospitalization but was just never ending low-energy misery.

It made me wonder if “long West Nile” was a thing, and while Googling “long West Nile” didn’t give me any definitive answers, I did discover that depression is a very common long-term symptom of West Nile, and suddenly my mental health meltdown of 2010 made so much more sense.

But all that to say:

The original cover looked like it was a book about a very sad, moody girl who had West Nile.

The real book was about a creative, quirky girl who kept a detailed diary through her frustrating journey of never ending sickness.

My writing skills were growing and developing so much in my late teens and early 20s that I began, only a few years after the book was published, to feel a little bit embarrassed by it. It was a book written by a teenager, and it sounded like a book written by a teenager.

But every now and then, teenage girls would reach out to me. They would say that they, too, were sick, and didn’t know when they would get better. They read my book, and were so happy that someone else understood what they were going through.

And I decided that this was the true purpose of my book: to tell sick people, especially sick teenage girls, “you are not alone.”

***

Right now, one of the most famous singers in the world, Taylor Swift, is in the process of re-recording her old albums. Every time she releases a re-recorded version, she keeps the same album name but adds the words “Taylor’s Version.” The re-recorded albums contain new artwork and extra songs that were left off the original albums.

Through this process, the public has come to understand something about the arts. Someone may seem like they’ve “made it,” but they might have actually signed a pretty bad deal.

In Taylor Swift’s case, she had limited control over the product she put out, because although she owned her songs (since she wrote them), the record label actually owned the recordings.

I’d say a similar thing happened to me, albeit on a much, much smaller scale.

In most publishing deals, an author gets paid in “royalties”—that is, a small percentage of every book they sell. The publisher pays them an “advance,” which is a lump some of cash that’s an advance on their estimated future royalties. If their book does well, the author will start receiving royalty checks once the total amount of royalties earned exceeds the advance they’ve already been paid.

I did not get royalties. Instead, my book deal was this: I would write the book, and they would pay me a flat fee for writing it. Then, they would own the book, and all the money from book sales would go into their pockets.

Now, it ended up being a sort-of fair deal. I didn’t spend a lot of time writing the book, since it was mostly compiling, so the flat fee was enough to cover my time. I operated as an independent bookstore, buying boxes of 100 books at a time half off and re-selling at full price, and was able to earn money that way. But I got zero dollars from any book sold at a bookstore or on Amazon.

So it was a fair deal only because my book wasn’t that successful. But if it had become a mega-bestseller, all that mega-bestseller money would be in HCI’s pocket, and none of it in mine.

I don’t regret signing that book deal. If you’re a teenage girl and you get the chance to publish your work, you just sign the deal, right? That’s what Taylor Swift did, that’s what I did, that’s what a million other people do.

However.

The book is now mine, and I can publish it exactly as I want. And it is so satisfying.

***

I had no dramatic dispute with my publisher. I’d call them every few years and order another box of books, and that was the extent of our relationship.

But in late 2021, when I called to order another box, they told me my book was out of print.

First I asked if I could buy the rest of their inventory, but they said no. I guess that’s just not done. So then I asked how I could get the rights to my book back, and they said it should automatically revert back to me, but it might be a little complicated since my book was part of a series.

However, after a little back and forth, I got an official reversion of rights letter.

Then I began planning the re-release.

This time, on my own terms.

The main thing I wanted to change was the cover. I wanted something that would more accurately portray what was inside the book. And I absolutely did not want a stock photo of a random girl.

Logically, I should put a photo of me on the cover, right? But that proved challenging. For The Highway and Me I hired Janane Nguyen Photography to shoot the cover, but I can’t just jump back in time ten years and do a nice photo shoot, and I’m not about to slap a photo of 33-year-old Emily on 17-year-old Emily’s book.

After failing to find an adequate cover photo, I decided to get an illustrated cover, and hired Jiayi (Serena) Ma to draw it for me. With my favorite Gabrielle on graphic design, I was all set to release my version of Emily.

Frankly, I was never a huge fan of the title Emily, but I wanted to keep it to minimize confusion. However, I changed the tagline. Instead of Emily: My True Story of Chronic Illness and Missing Out on Life, I titled it Emily: Diary of a Sick Girl.

I didn’t want to edit the actual words, because I wanted the book to sound like it was truly written by a teenager. However, re-reading the book I felt a little bit like a celebrity whose old tweets resurface. Some of the things I wrote back then make me cringe now. I ended up changing my wording a couple of times, as well as fixing the occasional typo.

I also added a preface, where I explained the few changes I’d made, how the book came to be, and what I saw as the purpose of the book. Then I added an afterword where I told a little of what happened in the 10+ years following Emily‘s initial release.

Two sections were cut from the original Emily document at the last minute, and I added them back in to this version.

Finally, my favorite change is this: Back in August of 2007, I kept a hand-written diary, and, inspired by Jean Webster’s book Daddy Long Legs, I added funny little doodles and drawings to the text. Excerpts from that diary made it into the original Emily, sans drawings.

But in this edition, I added some of the drawings back in.

Warning: they are not good drawings. They never were supposed to be good drawings. They were supposed to be hilariously bad.

I am quite proud of the new edition of Emily, and I hope it can continue to bring joy to people, and empathy to any teenager out there who is struggling with chronic illness.

The plan was to get the book out by Christmas, but it’s a tight squeeze! If you want it by the holiday, preorder now, and I’ll ship the books out December 9.

Take care, and I hope you have a wonderful holiday season and a merry Christmas!

P.S. I realized, after I posted this, that I forgot to shout out my amazing editor, Debbie Reber. HCI hired Debbie to find the authors and guide us as we wrote our books, because as teenagers, we didn’t really know what we were doing. She called me weekly to discuss how the project was going and how to move forward, and without her mentorship and feedback, this book would never exist.

Love you Debbie, and I’ll forever appreciate your wisdom!