LHS Grad Publishes Seven Novels Jay Hobson Londonderry Times Tori Goggin, 18, a member of the Class of 2014 at Londonderry High School, has written seven novels from the time she was in the eighth grade until the end of her senior year, and all of them have been published on Amazon.
“I finished last summer,” she said Monday night, at the school’s Senior Projects Night. “I wasn’t sure how to get them published so this year when I signed up for the senior project, my mentor, Elizabeth Juster, did some writing too and she recommended to me self publishing and some web sites.” After some research on line, she found the website createspace.com, with free publishing.
She said there were paid options with the free site, such as professional cover design, but she opted for the “free stuff.”
Goggin said she worked every day to keep the story fresh in her mind.
The books are a series. “It was a book that was over 1,000 pages and I was able to break it up into sections that could each be a complete book,” she explained. “The first book in the series is called ‘Remember When,’ and is the story about Sailor, who is 16 and left with the task of raising her newborn sister while Michael works around the clock keeping his family off the streets. It’s a story that takes place in a future dystopian society.”
Tori’s mother, Leslie Goggin, said her daughter was always in her room. “The door was always closed and she was in there and we thought she was on Facebook or something,” she said. “I used to say to my husband that she was in her room way too much and I’d tell her she needed to get out and do something. She never told us what she was doing. She came to me this year and said, ‘Mom, I have to tell you something,’ and I thought it was going to be something bad. She showed me all these books – the manuscripts that she had drawn covers for and glued them in and drew illustrations.”
“Tori said that when she’s writing, she can see in her mind the characters,” her mother said. Tori said she hopes her books will eventually be published by a traditional company, but in the meantime she plans to attend Keene State College to study early childhood education. As she will need to have a double major, she said she’ll be choosing English to help her be a better writer.