Some way for them to escape the danger chasing them. In that moment between dream and awake, while my heart pounded and those characters were still real, I needed a solution to save them. Three girls were in extreme danger, and I woke up right before something bad happened.

The first incident was a dream I had one night. I was a freelance editor for about seven years before two key incidents started me on my writing journey. But I never lost my love of reading and words, enough that I studied editing in college. But every time I tried to write my own stories, I’d quit five pages in. Created shared emotions and safe places to experience new things. I believe words have the power to change people, because they changed me. Reading has always been a big part of my life. (Where the idea came from, path to publishing, etc.) Briefly take me through the story of how it came to be. The unknowns can be dark and scary, but escaping that, even for only as long as it takes to read a few hundred pages, makes a big difference.

The kind that could bring me comfort just by staring at it on my shelf. One with bent pages and a cracked spine and my name scrawled on the title page underneath the author’s. So I’m trying to write that kind of book-one I’d have cherished, and spent money to put a copy on my shelf so I didn’t have to keep checking it out from the library to re-read. You only get to be a teen once, and since then, I’ve read so many books that I wish I’d had when I was a teen. I remember setting goals and working hard to reach them, learning important lessons that I still use to this day. It’s such a short, fleeting time-only a few years-yet those years carry weight for the rest of your life. It’s when the future is most unclear, yet it’s also when you have the most options in front of you. When you’re a teen, the possibilities for your life, and even for who you are, are still unknown. I grew up reading all the time, but it’s different now than when I was younger. I believe strongly in the power of words to make the world a brighter, more hopeful place. Below is a complete transcript of her interview with Cracking the Cover. KayLynn Flanders is the author of Shielded.

Kaylynn flanders